Cosmic Log
WASHINGTON, D.C. — I didn’t invite Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt to get his views on climate change, but that’s the topic that created the most fireworks here today at the ScienceWriters 2018 conference.
The title of the session was “Apollo Plus 50,” and the focus was the past and the future of America’s space program in light of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon missions.
After seven years of preparation, two research vessels are heading out of Seattle to begin a 40-day voyage to track how tiny organisms in the ocean affect the world’s carbon balance — and it’s a bittersweet moment for one scientist who’s staying behind.
“People ask me, ‘Are you happy?’ ” Paula Bontempi, EXPORTS program scientist at NASA Headquarters, said today at Seattle’s Pier 91, hours before departure. “I don’t know. Are you happy when your kids go off to college?”
It’s graduation time for the EXPORTS oceanographic campaign, jointly funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation. EXPORTS stands for Export Processes in the Ocean from Remote Sensing, but the mission is really about two subjects that aren’t in the acronym: carbon and climate.
The principal focus of the sea survey is a class of near-microscopic plantlike creatures known as phytoplankton, and the slightly bigger creatures that eat them.
An analysis of satellite data collected since 1992 suggests that ocean-driven melting has led to a tripling in the rate of ice loss from West Antarctica, from 53 billion to 159 billion metric tons per year.
The study was conducted by a group of researchers as part of the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise, or IMBIE, and published today in the journal Nature.
Estimated annual ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula rose from 7 billion to 33 billion metric tons over the same 25-year period, due to ice shelf collapse.
East Antarctica’s ice sheet, however, is gaining mass at an average rate of 5 billion metric tons per year. The main factor behind that gain appears to be fluctuations in snowfall, researchers said.
The analysis suggests that 3 trillion tons’ worth of Antarctic ice losses have increased global sea levels by 7.6 mm (0.3 inches) since 1992, and that the increase is accelerating.
A newly released survey from Pew Research Center suggests that Americans still strongly support the space program, 60 years after NASA’s founding, but that they’re more interested in Earth science than exploration beyond Earth orbit.
That’s a turnabout from the broad strokes of White House policy, which has tried to downplay Earth observation and talk up the idea of sending Americans to the moon and Mars.
Despite that dissonance, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine welcomed the findings from Pew Research Center’s survey. When reporters told him that 63 percent said monitoring key parts of Earth’s climate system should be a top priority for NASA, Bridenstine reportedly answered, “Good.”
Researchers have untangled the mystery behind a die-off that felled hundreds of thousands of tough seabirds known as Cassin’s auklets in 2014 and early 2015.
It’s not a simple answer: The proximate cause was starvation, but in a study published by Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that the most likely root cause was an anomaly in Pacific Ocean circulation that came to be known as the Blob.
“This paper is super important for the scientific community because it nails the causality of a major die-off, which is rare,” senior author Julia Parrish, a marine scientist at the University of Washington and executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, said today in a news release.
A scientific team supported by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is reporting the successful deployment of a trio of undersea drones to monitor how climate change affects Antarctica’s ice sheets.
Now it’s up to the drones.
“We are so pleased with both the initial data collection and the unprecedented operational success of the mission thus far,” Spencer Reeder, director of climate and energy for Paul G. Allen Philanthropies, said in a news release. “It is hard to fathom that we have already witnessed multiple fully autonomous Seaglider forays of up to 140 kilometers round-trip under the ice shelf.”
The project is being conducted by researchers from the University of Washington and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, with almost $2 million in funding from Allen.
Thanks to Blue Origin, SpaceX and other space ventures, the skies could well be filled with rockets in years to come. But what will that do to the environment?
The short answer is, not that much right now. But as experts look to the years ahead, the answer gets as hazy as the air after a Falcon Heavy launch.
“Ten years ago, the amount of emissions was not great,” said Martin Ross, an engineer at the Aerospace Corp. whose research focuses on the effects of space systems on the stratosphere. “Today, the effect is still small, but it’s growing.”
Researchers from the University of Washington and Columbia University are getting ready for an unprecedented months-long campaign to study Antarctica’s ice shelves from the ocean below, with backing from billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen.
The results are expected to lead to a better understanding of how ice retreats, and how climate change could affect the loss of polar ice sheets and the resulting rise in sea levels.
It’s a high-risk mission — but in this case, robots, not humans, are taking the risk.
“All of these instruments could be lost underneath the ice shelf,” said Spencer Reeder, director of climate and energy for Paul G. Allen Philanthropies.
Reeder said that’s a big reason why Allen, one of Microsoft’s co-founders, is funding the expedition to the tune of just under $2 million. The risks are too high for the traditional funders of polar research, but Allen’s backing could help UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory prove that its devices can do the job.
Elevation readings captured by satellites confirm that glaciers in the western United States are fading away at a worrisome rate.
The fade-out isn’t a surprise, considering the rise in global mean temperatures that’s ascribed to climate change. The new twist has to do with how the measurements were made.
University of Washington researcher David Shean looked back at satellite readings that have been amassed in databases, plus fresh readings that are being taken by DigitalGlobe’s constellation of GeoEye and WorldView satellites.
An analysis of the data, facilitated with NASA’s Ames Stereo Pipeline software, produces a 3-D elevation model of mountainous terrain. The method supplements other techniques to estimate glacier size, including area measurements based on aerial imagery and depth measurements made using stakes in the snow.
The result is a year-by-year record tracing the ups and downs of a glacier.
Readings from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 have confirmed that the El Niño weather pattern of 2015-2016 was behind the biggest annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in millennia.
The OCO-2 satellite, launched in 2014, is designed to provide a detailed picture of how carbon is exchanged between air, land and sea.
OCO-2 data showed that 2015’s El Niño weather, created by warmer waters in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, led to hotter conditions in tropical regions of South America, Africa and Indonesia.
In South America, drought stressed out vegetation so much that less carbon dioxide was converted through photosynthesis into oxygen, researchers reported today in the journal Science.
In Africa, hotter-than-normal temperatures led to faster decomposition of dead trees and plants, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. And in Indonesia, dry conditions led to increased fires, which also released more carbon.