Author: Scott K. Johnson

Enlarge / USGS map showing the epicenter of Saturday's earthquake (star) and contours of estimated shaking intensity. (credit: USGS)

Update: Saturday's earthquake was initially estimated at a magnitude 5.6, tying it with a 2011 earthquake near Prague for the largest seen in Oklahoma in recent years. After further analysis to compare the two events, the USGS has upped the estimated magnitude for Saturday's earthquake from 5.6 to 5.8. They also ended up revising the estimate for the 2011 earthquake upward to 5.7. In a press release, USGS geophysicist Gavin Hayes explained, “While the difference in size between the two events is less than 0.1 magnitude units, rounding magnitudes to one decimal place means that the magnitude of the Prague earthquake is Mw 5.7, and the Pawnee earthquake is Mw 5.8.”

So by a slim margin, the Pawnee earthquake sets a new record for Oklahoma—although the limited data recorded during earthquakes in 1952 and 1882 prevents precise estimates of their magnitude, which are believed to have been between 4.8 and 5.7.

Original story: Oklahoma has suddenly become a seismic state over the last decade, as an abundance of small earthquakes has accompanied the expanded use of deep injection wells. The wells are used to dispose of wastewater that would be expensive and difficult to treat. Instead, it gets pumped into salty aquifers that are already unsuitable sources of drinking water. Most of the wastewater is separated from oil and gas produced from wells in the region—some of which involve fracking, but many of which are older, “conventional” wells.

Enlarge / One set of the possible stromatolites—with two slices cut out by the researchers. (credit: Allen Nutman)

In the history of life on Earth, the first chapter is still the most incomplete—and any good epic needs its origin story. The problem with finding that story is preservation. The earliest lifeforms were microscopic sacks of organic chemistry, so finding evidence for them, as far as needles in haystacks go, is not exactly equivalent to spotting a six-foot Apatosaurus bone. To make matters worse, most of the haystack has been burned to a crisp by geology since then.

Fossil evidence goes back about 3.5 billion years, with controversial isotopic signs that might signify life about 3.8 billion years ago (or perhaps even earlier). At this age, you run out of rocks. Although the planet is about 4.5 billion years old, very few rocks have survived for more than 3.5 billion years. The ones that have look their age, metamorphosed so much over the eons that signs of life might have been erased.

Still, the quest to push back the earliest evidence for life goes on. New finds are subject to rigorous debate, and researchers have to work hard to figure out whether a physical process could be responsible for a feature that has the appearance of a fossil.

Enlarge / Bubble wrap isn't just for stress relief. (credit: George Ni)

To boil water using the Sun, we typically burn fossil fuels carrying several-hundred-million-year-old solar energy that was extracted from underground at great expense. It’s kind of Rube-Goldbergian. We’re fortunate that the Sun’s heat isn’t strong enough to boil the oceans (or us), but extracting the Sun’s energy at a significant scale is tricky.

The usual solution, as many magnifying-glass-toting children already know, is to concentrate sunlight and increase its intensity. Solar thermal plants, for example, use massive arrays of mirrors to focus sunlight and generate electricity. All that extra equipment gets pretty expensive—especially if you need the mirrors to track the Sun’s position across the sky.

So how do we engineer another way? In the past, researchers made clever designs to concentrate the heat generated by lower-intensity sunlight into small volumes of water. This heat consequently created higher localized temperatures. While they managed to boil water with this method, they weren’t able to ditch optical concentration completely.

Enlarge (credit: Scott K. Johnson)

It’s -30 degrees Celsius, even though the Sun hangs ceaselessly in the sky. Dressed in puffy, insulated suits and gloves thick enough to both hinder dexterity and preserve fingers, a team gamely tilts a drill barrel back to horizontal. With one smooth, firm motion, a two-meter-long cylinder of ice, bursting with history, is pushed free and slides down a temporary work bench.

Disturbed from its long slumber, this ice is destined for laboratories that will liberate whatever secrets it holds. There's only one catch: it’s critical that nothing melts until it travels most of the way around the world.

This is not a futuristic scene from Jupiter’s enigmatic moon Europa, rather it's a recent one from the closest thing you’ll find on Earth—the blank expanse of Antarctica’s interior. While this work was decidedly of this world, it would be extremely unfair to describe it as anything close to easy. Beyond allowing humans to work in the harsh Antarctic environment, how does ice buried by more than a kilometer of other ice at the South Pole end up in a lab 15,000 kilometers away in order to become scientific insight?

Enlarge (credit: USAF/Wikimedia)

If there’s a possibility worse than a full-scale exchange of nuclear weapons, maybe it’s a full-scale exchange of nuclear weapons launched because of a simple misunderstanding. In 1967, we may have come close to that scenario, but you can thank some meteorologists for the fact that it didn't come to pass.

In late May of 1967, an active spot on the Sun threw a remarkable storm our way, and it continued over several days. The spot released charged particles and serious bursts of radiation in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (among other things), disturbing the Earth’s ionosphere and magnetic field. All this resulted in disruptions to radio communications and radar systems for a few days—as well as Northern Lights seen as far south as New Mexico.

Critically, the early disruptions included NORAD’s newly built Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. The three high-latitude radar stations (in Alaska, Greenland, and the UK) pretty much went dark in the afternoon of May 23. As the Sun sank lower in the sky, these radar systems were pointed right at the source of the radio emissions just as they arrived. To US military leaders, it seemed an awful lot like jamming—Russia blinding the eyes watching for incoming nuclear weapons. Did that mean there were missiles or aircraft en route?

(credit: Scott K. Johnson)

Ice sheets are large and complex things. Figuring out how quickly—and where—they’ll melt as the world warms is a monumental task. We worry about some portions (like the vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet) collapsing entirely, but we know some other parts will be disappearing in the foreseeable future. Records from past periods of climate change are important guides here. What better way to figure out what will happen than to see what has happened before?

For the Greenland Ice Sheet, there has been some debate about how small it has gotten in past warm periods where we know sea level was higher than it is today. The problem is that Greenland's ice doesn’t go nearly so far back in time as Antarctica’s. Snowfall is greater here, and ice flows more quickly to the edges of the continent where it disappears from the pages of the history we read from ice cores. Few Greenland cores go back more than about 110,000 years, failing to tell us about the last interglacial warm period.

But at the bottom of a couple of ice cores from the thickest parts of the ice sheet, there is some messed up ice we know could be a lot older. Figuring out how old is another matter. Without an orderly stack of annual layers to count back through, there aren’t many reference points preserved in the ice. To make things worse, water can refreeze to the underside of glaciers, so it might not have even been glacial ice in the first place.

Last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the draft of a major report on the practice of hydraulic fracking—a technique to harvest oil and natural gas trapped within shale rocks. Although the report is only a draft, it was four years in the making and represents one of the first formal evaluations of fracking in the US as a whole.

In general, the EPA report is positive. While various problems with fracking are brought up, the report seems to suggest that the technique has no systemic issues. With proper caution, the evaluation says, it should be possible to frack while keeping water sources safe.

Or, to use the EPA's own words:

Balloons at an April rally opposing CSIRO cuts. (credit: Takver)

In February, the new leader of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) revealed a plan to lay off almost all of the agency’s climate scientists, along with an equal number of scientists from its Land and Water division. CSIRO CEO Larry Marshall framed the cuts as part of a significant change in mission, saying that the question of whether climate change is occurring “has been answered.” The mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, he said, should be the agency's focus.

The outcry was loud, particularly from climate scientists who recognized the value of the work that CSIRO had long been doing. As a result, Marshall has gradually conceded much of the planned reduction and decided to go ahead with a new climate research center in Tasmania that would house 40 current CSIRO scientists. With these changes, 35 of the agency’s 140 climate scientists will be losing their jobs.

Following on Australia’s July federal election, Greg Hunt became the new science minister. This week he announced plans to further limit the cuts to CSIRO’s climate science capacity—even if CSIRO will still be changing. According to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald, Hunt plans to direct CSIRO to add 15 new positions and AUD$37 million over 10 years to the (current) funding level.

(credit: Laura Bittner)

In the past, we’ve covered attempts by some political groups (or politicians) to access climate scientists’ e-mails. The idea is generally to trawl through them for anything that can be used to bolster the claim that climate science is somehow fraudulent—hypothetically vindicating those who have refused to acknowledge the scientific consensus for decades.

A long-time target of these activists has been researcher Michael Mann, whose work on tree ring climate records resulted in “the hockey stick,” a graph of the last millennium of climate history that shows rapid warming at the end of a gradual cooling trend. Although that record has been extended and replicated many times now, some still believe Mann must have somehow distorted the data to produce the appearance of sudden warming. As a result, Mann has been involved in court cases for years over demands for his e-mails from a conservative advocacy group and then Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. More recently, Mann has been involved in a countersuit against those who publicly accused him of fraud.

Well, having failed to get access to Mann’s e-mails through the Virginia courts, the same opposition group (now called the Energy & Environment Legal Institute) decided to go after one of Mann’s colleagues since he worked in a different state. The University of Arizona rebuffed a very broad 2011 Freedom of Information Act request for the e-mails of Malcolm Hughes, part of the “hockey stick” team, and James Overpeck, a coordinating lead author of the 2007 IPCC report’s chapter on paleoclimate.

(credit: Randy)

The capture of CO₂ from smokestacks could make an important contribution to limiting climate change, but there are two obstacles. One is that you have to store that CO₂ somewhere (like underground reservoirs). The other is that the capture process requires energy, so your power plant ends up producing less electricity per unit of fuel. That comes with a financial cost.

There are efforts afoot to overcome both of those hurdles, but there are also other possible approaches. One that sounds obvious and attractive is to turn that CO₂ into something useful and valuable, rather than just reservoir filler. The sticky wicket here is chemistry. Carbon dioxide is pretty stable, and turning it into something else can require a large energy input.

Cornell University’s Wajdi AlSadat and Lynden Archer, however, are playing with one possible process that could convert CO₂ into a commodity—and generate electricity while you’re at it.