In case you were wondering what the snow was like here in Colorado the other day…

[Click to ensnowflakenate.]

That’s an image taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite on February 5, 2012. I live in Boulder, to the northwest of Denver (which is labeled), right on the edge of the Rockies. We got well over 30 cm here locally, and it was deeper in other places. Typical of the area, though, the Sun was out the next day, and now our yard looks like a fairyland of sparkles.

It’s unusual to get a heavy snowfall like this in February (we do get big ones, but later in the year) and from what I’ve heard this was a record for a February. And not to overextend the post to climate change, but a) weather is not climate… unless you add time, and 2) contrary to any soundbite you might hear, snowstorms will actually become more common as the Earth warms. Warmer weather means more evaporation, so more moisture in the air. It’s still cold higher up in the atmosphere, and it’s still cold in the winter over land, so a warmer planet overall means more snow in some places. I’m not attributing this event to global warming, to be clear. But it’s the kind of thing we can expect in the coming years.

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC

- Snowpocalypse 2011 from space!
- Lovely, frigid ripples
- Icy swirls around a patient volcano

I love the idea of returning to the Moon, and the idea of going back there to stay I love even more. Having said that, I want to stress it must be done the right way. This has been back in the news lately because Newt Gingrich made a speech about it before his doomed Florida Republican presidential primary run.

What bugs me is that we’re talking about it in context of what Gingrich said; I’d rather we were talking about this on its own merits. There are reasons to go to the Moon, and reasons not to do it Newt’s way… all of which I went over in an interview on CBC radio’s Day 6 show with Brent Bambury that aired Saturday. The interview is archived on their site, and you can listen to it there. I was unusually lucid, IMO, and I think the points made were valid.

I was also interviewed on The Alonya Show, a TV news/opinion program on Russia TV:

[UPDATE: I also did an interview with Globo TV in Brazil that's online as well. The show is in Portugese, but I'm in English with subtitles.]

I want to add to what I said on these two shows. In all this discussion, I wasn’t thinking about the idea of fuel depots. Instead of lobbing big heavy payloads all the way to the Moon with gigantic Saturn V-like rockets, you use smaller rockets to loft tanks of propellant into Earth orbit. Then you can use that smaller rocket to lift the astronauts to orbit, meet up with the tanks, install them, and off to the Moon they go! I don’t know if this saves in money, since it means lots of launches, but it does mean you can get to the Moon without having a huge rocket — one that as yet does not exist.

Anyway, the point is: it’s not fantasy, it’s not (haha) moonbat stuff, and it’s not even science fiction.

Well, check that: it is science fiction. For now. But realistically, we can do this. We have the ability. All we need is the will to do it.

Over the course of several hundred years – most notably in the 17th and 18th centuries — winter temperatures in western Europe were much lower than normal. Glaciers came much farther south than they had before, and a famous painting shows people ice skating on the Thames river — which hasn’t been frozen since. The period is known as the Little Ice Age, and its cause has always been something of a mystery.

However, new research by scientists at the University of Colorado-Boulder (yay team!) may have pegged it: the LIA appears to have started abruptly in the late 13th century, between the years 1275 and 1300. Radiocarbon dating of plants from Baffin Island (north of the Hudson Bay in Canada) and sediment samples from a lake in Iceland indicate that there was a rapid onset of severe cooling at that time. It’s been thought that the cooling started around then, but it’s been hard to pin down until now.

More importantly, this narrows down the cause of the LIA: four tropical volcanoes erupted violently in that period. The ash would have darkened the atmosphere, letting slightly less sunlight down. Some of the gases emitted by volcanoes also cool the air. It seems clear these volcanoes are what triggered the Little Ice Age. But why did it last so long?

That may be due to what happened after the volcanoes erupted. Most likely, the warmer temperatures would have melted the north polar sea ice. This fresh water is less dense than salty water, so it would flow on top of the oceans, and wouldn’t have mixed well with the deeper water. This would have slowed the transport of heat from the equatorial waters back up north, cooling them further. That system is what maintained colder temperatures for so long. There were variations — the Ice Age was more of as series of pulses of temperature drops than one long period — but for centuries the heating of the Earth was disrupted in that region.

For a long time it’s been suspected that the Sun played a role here, too. During the period of 1645 to 1715 there were few or no sunspots, a time called the Maunder Minimum. Sunspots are dark, but they’re surrounded by a region, a rim, that emits strongly in the UV. These faculae, as they’re called, actually more than make up for the darker regions of the spots, so in reality sunspots add to the amount of light and heat the Earth receives, by a fraction of a percent. So an active Sun, it’s thought, may warm the Earth a teeny bit more.

(more…)

Because I was on the road Wednesday night, I missed the first few hours of reaction to Newt Gingrich’s speech in Florida, when he said he wants to have a permanent station on the Moon "by the end of my second term". It wasn’t until Thursday morning that I opened up my web browser and saw that every blog, every news site, everyone, was talking about it. I must have had dozens of tweets and emails telling me about it and asking my opinion.

So I found a video of the speech and watched it. The only reason I didn’t laugh out loud at the nonsense unfolding from Mr. Gingrich’s mouth was that I already had seen the reaction online.

In Discover Magazine’s Crux blog I wrote a dissection of his speech and why he’s so vastly and profoundly wrong: The Newt-onian Mechanics of Building a Permanent Moon Base. You’ll get all the details there of why I think Gingrich’s plan is the worst possible way to go about trying to go to the Moon: in a hurry, with the wrong source of funding, and maybe because there’s a threat from those dirty communists.

Don’t get me wrong: I want a Moon base. I’ve written about that many times here on the blog, and for my Geek-A-Week card I asked Len Peralta to draw me as Commander Koenig from "Space:1999", for criminy’s sake. I stand second to no one in advocating exploring space, and our own satellite in particular. But it has to be done right, and Gingrich’s plan would be the worst way to do it.

In the post for The Crux I was blunt, but held back my tongue a bit because that isn’t necessarily the venue for me to do otherwise. But here, on my blog, I’ll say this: Gingrich’s words were both transparent and hollow. I knew right away what he was claiming was simply not possible, either financially, technologically, or politically. Take your pick. And it was also clear to me that no matter how you slice it, NASA would get screwed royally if his Moon base plan were implemented, since it would mean billions of dollars moved away from NASA projects to finance this. I started digging deeper to see if my first reaction was wrong, and all I found showed I was righter than I first thought. Every way you try to do it, his plan would destroy NASA. And I’m not exaggerating; the amount of money we’re talking about taking away from NASA projects to fund a base his way would leave everything else in NASA facing cancellation. It’s really that simple.

I was actually pretty stunned that people in Florida would support this idea. Obviously, they would have a vested interest in hearing big ideas about space exploration, but with just a little thought it’s clear that while Gingrich’s idea may be big, it’s only because it’s been stretched out way larger than it can handle. Its density is zero.

On the surface, it seems like Gingrich is a friend of space and science, but don’t be fooled: he’s just as likely to pander to the antiscience base as any other candidate, and his history shows he will attack science when he gets the chance. So while you might be inclined to like the idea of a candidate talking about promoting space exploration under any circumstances, have a care. Because once you get beneath that surface, you might find there’s nothing there.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, caption added by me.

Just before Halloween last year, NASA launched into orbit the improbably named National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, which they thankfully shortened to NPP. In its low 800 km (500 mile) orbit it looks down at the Earth to investigate our environment. It only sees a portion of the Earth at any one time, but if you take observations taken during a single day — say, on January 4, 2012 — and stitch them all together, you get this magnificent shot:

[Click to engaiaenate, or download the Big McLarge Huge 8000 x 8000 pixel version.]

Man, the resolution is so high is like you’re actually there.

Oh wait.

In fact, the biggest version is 8000 pixels across, and the Earth is about 8000 miles wide, so the resolution is about a mile per pixel. We’re not seeing the entire hemisphere here, but the view is roughly 8000 km across (judging from the size of the US compared to the view). The big image is 8000 pixels wide, so the resolution of that mosaic is about 1 km/pixel. The Earth is big.

NPP was recently renamed Suomi NPP in honor of Verner Suomi, a pioneer in using satellites in meteorology. I like that we tend to name satellites and space probes after people whose work made those very missions possible, or for people we honor and respect (my favorite is still Sojourner, the Mars rover named after Sojourner Truth… with the bonus of the name being a pun).

Apropos of nothing, I’ll note the images making up this seamless mosaic were taken around the same time the Earth was at perihelion, when it was closest to the Sun in its orbit. There is nothing particularly important about that fact, but still… when I see pictures like this I think about how amazing our planet is, and how wonderfully well-adapted we are to it. Evolution is a stochastic process, a semi-random series of bumps and false starts that literally made us who were are today. But that doesn’t change the feeling of comfort I get when I see a picture of Earth, floating in space, sitting in the brightest and warmest sunlight of the year.

It’s home, and I’m glad we’re taking such a close look at it.

Around 04:00 UTC on Monday morning, January 23, 2012, the Sun let loose a pretty big flare and coronal mass ejection. Although there have been bigger events in recent months, this one happened to line up in such a way that the blast of subatomic particles unleashed headed straight for Earth. It’s causing what may be the biggest space weather event in the past several years for Earth: people at high latitudes can expect lots of bright and beautiful aurorae.

I’ll explain what all that is in a second, but first here’s a video of what this looked like from NASA’s SOHO satellite.

Wow! Make sure you set it to high def.

So what happened here? The sunspot cluster called Active Region 11402 happened.

Sunspots are regions where the magnetic field lines of the Sun get tangled up. A vast amount of energy is stored in these lines, and if they get squeezed too much, they can release that energy all at once. When this happens, we call it a solar flare, and it can be mind-numbing: yesterday’s flare exploded with the energy of hundreds of millions of nuclear bombs!

In the image above, the sunspots are caught in mid-flare, seen in the far ultraviolet by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (it’s colored green to make it easier to see what’s what). We think of sunspots as being dark (see the image of AR 11402 below), but that’s only in visible light, the kind we see. In more energetic ultraviolet light, they are brilliant bright due to their magnetic activity.

A huge blast of subatomic particles was accelerated by the explosion. The first wave arrived within a few of hours of the light itself… meaning they were traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light!

But shortly after the flare there was a coronal mass ejection: a larger scale but somewhat less intense event. This also launches particles into space, and these are aimed right at us. The bulk of the particles are traveling at slower speeds — a mere 2200 km/sec, or 5 million miles per hour — and is expected to hit us at 14:00 UTC Tuesday morning or so. That’s basically now as I write this! Those particles interact with Earth’s magnetic field in a complicated process that sends them sleeting down into our atmosphere. We’re in no real danger from this, but the particles can strip the electrons off of atoms high in the air, and when the electrons recombine the atoms glow excite the electrons in atoms high in the air, and when the electrons give up that energy the atoms glow. That’s what causes the aurorae — the northern and southern lights.

If you live in high latitudes you might be able to see quite the display when it’s dark — people in eastern Europe and Asia are favored for this, since this happens after sunset there. But the storm is big enough and will probably last long enough that everyone should check after dark: look north if you live in the northern hemisphere and south if you’re south of the Equator. There’s no way in advance to know just how big this will be; it might fizzle, or it might be possible to see it farther away from the poles than usual. Can’t hurt to look! Also, Universe Today has been collecting pictures of aurorae from the solar blast earlier this week. No doubt they’ll have more from this one as well.

Although big, this flare was classified by NASA as being about M9 class — powerful, but not as energetic as an X class flare. One of those popped off last September, and shortly after that a smaller M flare erupted, which also triggered a gorgeous plasma fountain called a filament on the Sun’s surface.

As I said, we’re in no real danger here on Earth, and Universe Today has a good article describing why the astronauts are probably not in danger on the space station, either. Even if this were larger storm, the astronauts can take shelter in more well-protected parts of the station, too. Bigger storms can hurt us even on Earth by inducing huge currents in power lines which can overload the grid. That does happen — it happened in Quebec in March of 1989 — and it may very well happen again as the Sun gets more active over the next few years. [UPDATE: a ground current surge from today's event was reported in Norway.]

But we should be OK from this one. If you can, get outside and look for the aurorae! I’ve never seen a good one, and I’m still hoping this solar cycle will let me see my first.

Image credit: NASA/SOHO; NASA/SDO

Late in 2010, scientists participating in a NASA news conference dropped a bombshell: they had found evidence that bacteria in California’s Mono Lake were metabolizing arsenic and using it in their life processes.

This was huge news, since arsenic is toxic for carbon based life. If some forms of life evolved a way to process it, this would open up a whole new field of biochemistry!

However, almost immediately, the work came under attack. Biochemists accused the original team of not performing the research carefully (to put it delicately). Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was particularly critical. She decided, in fact, to try to verify the original work, and set out to do so openly, writing up her progress on her blog.

And now, according to an article on Scientific American, she can confidently provide a "clear refutation" of the arsenic uptake in the organisms:

Their most striking claim was that arsenic had been incorporated into the backbone of DNA, and what we can say is that there is no arsenic in the DNA at all.

That’s a pretty clear statement! The original team, lead by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, has responded, saying they need to see a fully peer-reviewed paper before making up their minds.

I’ll note that emotions have run fairly high throughout this saga. Dr. Wolfe-Simon got a lot of attention, positive and negative, and the negative was pretty charged. I’m not surprised by the reactions of either side of this issue.

In the interest of full disclosure, when the press conference was aired, I wrote a pretty straight interpretation of it. As I wrote in a followup post, I am not a microbiologist, and I trust NASA at some level. This event shook that trust quite a bit, and I am now far less likely to take a claim at face value, even when it comes from a source like NASA.

Science is a balance of trust versus skepticism, even at the best of times. An extra layer is added when the media become involved; that impartiality which is always precarious can be sorely tested by the chance at media exposure.

That includes my desire to write about something particularly cool, of course, as well as the more fundamental results obtained from the scientific research itself.

I’m glad this news has come out, and I’ll be curious to see what happens next. Dr. Redfield will need to submit her team’s work to the peer review process. Assuming it survives, I have little doubt we’ll be hearing from Wolfe-Simon again as well. In the Scientific American article, Dr. Redfield is quoted as saying, "We’ve done our part. This is a clean demonstration [that the original positive findings were incorrect], and I see no point in spending any more time on this."

That may be true for her and her team’s work, though I have a suspicion more work will have to be done either by her or other teams to categorically rule out the arsenic. But either way, what I can be certain of is that we are not done hearing about this story just yet.

Tip o’ the phosphorus backbone to Jeffrey Sullivan on Google+.