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spacetimewithstuartgary · 2 months ago

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Gemini North Captures Galactic Archipelago Entangled In a Web Of Dark Matter

One century after astronomers proved the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, enormous galaxy clusters are offering clues to today’s cosmic questions

100 years ago Edwin Hubble discovered decisive evidence that other galaxies existed far beyond the Milky Way. This image, captured by the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, features a portion of the enormous Perseus Cluster, showcasing its ‘island Universes’ in awe-inspiring detail. Observations of these objects continue to shed light not only on their individual characteristics, but also on cosmic mysteries such as dark matter.

Among the many views of the Universe that modern telescopes offer, some of the most breathtaking are images like this. Dotted with countless galaxies — each one of incomprehensible size — they make apparent the tremendous scale and richness of the cosmos. Taking center stage here, beguiling in its seeming simplicity, the elliptical galaxy NGC 1270 radiates an ethereal glow into the surrounding darkness. And although it may seem like an island adrift in the deep ocean of space, this object is part of something much larger than itself.

NGC 1270 is just one member of the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies that lies around 240 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. This image, taken with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory — supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab — captures a dazzling collection of galaxies in the central region of this enormous cluster.

Looking at such a diverse array, shown here in spectacular clarity, it’s astonishing to think that when NGC 1270 was first discovered in 1863 it was not widely accepted that other galaxies even existed. Many of the objects that are now known to be galaxies were initially described as nebulae, owing to their cloudy, amorphous appearance. The idea that they are entities of a similar size to our own Milky Way, or ‘island Universes’ as Immanuel Kant called them, was speculated on by several astronomers throughout history, but was not proven. Instead, many thought they were smaller objects on the outskirts of the Milky Way, which many believed to comprise most or all of the Universe.

The nature of these mysterious objects and the size of the Universe were the subjects of astronomy’s famous Great Debate, held in 1920 between astronomers Heber Curtis and Harlow Shapley. The debate remained unsettled until 1924 when Edwin Hubble, using the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, observed stars within some of the nebulae to calculate how far they were from Earth. The results were decisive; they were far beyond the Milky Way. Astronomers’ notion of the cosmos underwent a dramatic shift, now populated with innumerable strange, far-off galaxies as large and complex as our own.

As imaging techniques have improved, piercing ever more deeply into space, astronomers have been able to look closer and closer at these ‘island Universes’ to deduce what they might be like. For instance, researchers have observed powerful electromagnetic energy emanating from the heart of NGC 1270, suggesting that it harbors a frantically feeding supermassive black hole. This characteristic is seen in around 10% of galaxies and is detectable via the presence of an accretion disk — an intense vortex of matter swirling around and gradually being devoured by the central black hole.

It’s not only the individual galaxies that astronomers are interested in; hints at many ongoing mysteries lie in their relationship to and interactions with one another. For example, the fact that huge groups like the Perseus Cluster exist at all points to the presence of the enigmatic substance we call dark matter [1]. If there were no such invisible, gravitationally interactive material, then astronomers believe galaxies would be spread more or less evenly across space rather than collecting into densely populated clusters. Current theories suggest that an invisible web of dark matter draws galaxies together at the intersections between its colossal tendrils, where its gravitational pull is strongest.

Although dark matter is invoked to explain observed cosmic structures, the nature of the substance itself remains elusive. As we look at images like this one, and consider the strides made in our understanding over the past century, we can sense a tantalizing hint of just how much more might be discovered in the decades to come. Perhaps hidden in images like this are clues to the next big breakthrough. How much more will we know about our Universe in another century?

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[1] The discovery of dark matter in galaxies is in-part attributed to American astronomer Vera C. Rubin, who used the rotation of galaxies to infer the presence of an invisible, yet gravitationally interactive, material holding them together. She is also the name inspiration for NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently under construction in Chile, which will begin operations in 2025.

TOP IMAGE: NGC 1270 is just one member of the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies that lies around 240 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. This image, taken with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, which is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, captures a dazzling collection of galaxies in the central region of this enormous cluster. Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/ Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) Acknowledgements: PI: Jisu Kang (Seoul National University)

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#science #space #astronomy #physics #news #astrophysics #Youtube

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scifigeneration · 5 years ago

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Newest solar telescope produces first images

Just released first images from the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope reveal unprecedented detail of the sun's surface and preview the world-class products to come from this preeminent 4-meter solar telescope. NSF's Inouye Solar Telescope, on the summit of Haleakala, Maui, in Hawai'i, will enable a new era of solar science and a leap forward in understanding the sun and its impacts on our planet.

Activity on the sun, known as space weather, can affect systems on Earth. Magnetic eruptions on the sun can impact air travel, disrupt satellite communications and bring down power grids, causing long-lasting blackouts and disabling technologies such as GPS.

The first images from NSF's Inouye Solar Telescope show a close-up view of the sun's surface, which can provide important detail for scientists. The images show a pattern of turbulent "boiling" plasma that covers the entire sun. The cell-like structures -- each about the size of Texas -- are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface. That hot solar plasma rises in the bright centers of "cells," cools, then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection.

"Since NSF began work on this ground-based telescope, we have eagerly awaited the first images," said France Córdova, NSF director. "We can now share these images and videos, which are the most detailed of our sun to date. NSF's Inouye Solar Telescope will be able to map the magnetic fields within the sun's corona, where solar eruptions occur that can impact life on Earth. This telescope will improve our understanding of what drives space weather and ultimately help forecasters better predict solar storms."

Expanding knowledge

The sun is our nearest star -- a gigantic nuclear reactor that burns about 5 million tons of hydrogen fuel every second. It has been doing so for about 5 billion years and will continue for the other 4.5 billion years of its lifetime. All that energy radiates into space in every direction, and the tiny fraction that hits Earth makes life possible. In the 1950s, scientists figured out that a solar wind blows from the sun to the edges of the solar system. They also concluded for the first time that we live inside the atmosphere of this star. But many of the sun's most vital processes continue to confound scientists.

"On Earth, we can predict if it is going to rain pretty much anywhere in the world very accurately, and space weather just isn't there yet," said Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which manages the Inouye Solar Telescope. "Our predictions lag behind terrestrial weather by 50 years, if not more. What we need is to grasp the underlying physics behind space weather, and this starts at the sun, which is what the Inouye Solar Telescope will study over the next decades."

The motions of the sun's plasma constantly twist and tangle solar magnetic fields . Twisted magnetic fields can lead to solar storms that can negatively affect our technology-dependent modern lifestyles. During 2017's Hurricane Irma, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that a simultaneous space weather event brought down radio communications used by first responders, aviation and maritime channels for eight hours on the day the hurricane made landfall.

Finally resolving these tiny magnetic features is central to what makes the Inouye Solar Telescope unique. It can measure and characterize the sun's magnetic field in more detail than ever seen before and determine the causes of potentially harmful solar activity.

"It's all about the magnetic field," said Thomas Rimmele, director of the Inouye Solar Telescope. "To unravel the sun's biggest mysteries, we have to not only be able to clearly see these tiny structures from 93 million miles away but very precisely measure their magnetic field strength and direction near the surface and trace the field as it extends out into the million-degree corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun."

Better understanding the origins of potential disasters will enable governments and utilities to better prepare for inevitable future space weather events. It is expected that notification of potential impacts could occur earlier -- as much as 48 hours ahead of time instead of the current standard, which is about 48 minutes. This would allow more time to secure power grids and critical infrastructure and to put satellites into safe mode.

The engineering

To achieve the proposed science, this telescope required important new approaches to its construction and engineering. Built by NSF's National Solar Observatory and managed by AURA, the Inouye Solar Telescope combines a 13-foot (4-meter) mirror -- the world's largest for a solar telescope -- with unparalleled viewing conditions at the 10,000-foot Haleakala summit.

Focusing 13 kilowatts of solar power generates enormous amounts of heat -- heat that must be contained or removed. A specialized cooling system provides crucial heat protection for the telescope and its optics. More than seven miles of piping distribute coolant throughout the observatory, partially chilled by ice created on site during the night.

The dome enclosing the telescope is covered by thin cooling plates that stabilize the temperature around the telescope, helped by shutters within the dome that provide shade and air circulation. The "heat-stop" (a high-tech, liquid-cooled, doughnut-shaped metal) blocks most of the sunlight's energy from the main mirror, allowing scientists to study specific regions of the sun with unparalleled clarity.

The telescope also uses state-of-the-art adaptive optics to compensate for blurring created by Earth's atmosphere. The design of the optics ("off-axis" mirror placement) reduces bright, scattered light for better viewing and is complemented by a cutting-edge system to precisely focus the telescope and eliminate distortions created by the Earth's atmosphere. This system is the most advanced solar application to date.

"With the largest aperture of any solar telescope, its unique design, and state-of-the-art instrumentation, the Inouye Solar Telescope -- for the first time -- will be able to perform the most challenging measurements of the sun," Rimmele said. "After more than 20 years of work by a large team devoted to designing and building a premier solar research observatory, we are close to the finish line. I'm extremely excited to be positioned to observe the first sunspots of the new solar cycle just now ramping up with this incredible telescope."

New era of solar astronomy

NSF's new ground-based Inouye Solar Telescope will work with space-based solar observation tools such as NASA's Parker Solar Probe (currently in orbit around the sun) and the European Space Agency/NASA Solar Orbiter (soon to be launched). The three solar observation initiatives will expand the frontiers of solar research and improve scientists' ability to predict space weather.

"It's an exciting time to be a solar physicist," said Valentin Pillet, director of NSF's National Solar Observatory. "The Inouye Solar Telescope will provide remote sensing of the outer layers of the sun and the magnetic processes that occur in them. These processes propagate into the solar system where the Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter missions will measure their consequences. Altogether, they constitute a genuinely multi-messenger undertaking to understand how stars and their planets are magnetically connected."

"These first images are just the beginning," said David Boboltz, a program director in NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences who oversees the facility's construction and operations. "Over the next six months, the Inouye telescope's team of scientists, engineers and technicians will continue testing and commissioning the telescope to make it ready for use by the international solar scientific community. The Inouye Solar Telescope will collect more information about our sun during the first 5 years of its lifetime than all the solar data gathered since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sun in 1612."

#science #science news #featured #astronomy #sol #space

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sciencespies · 4 years ago

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Biden administration proposes $24.5 billion budget for NASA in 2022

https://sciencespies.com/space/biden-administration-proposes-24-5-billion-budget-for-nasa-in-2022/

Biden administration proposes $24.5 billion budget for NASA in 2022

WASHINGTON — The White House released a first look at its budget proposal for fiscal year 2022 that includes an increase in funding for NASA, particularly Earth science and space technology programs.

The 58-page budget document, released April 9, outlines the Biden administration discretionary spending priorities. It provides only high-level details, though, with a full budget proposal expected later in the spring.

For NASA, the White House is proposing an overall budget of approximately $24.7 billion in fiscal year 2022, an increase of about 6.3% from the $23.271 billion the agency received in the final fiscal year 2021 omnibus spending bill.

The document does not provide a full breakout of NASA spending across its various programs, but does highlight increases in several areas. NASA’s Earth science program, which received $2 billion in 2021, would get $2.3 billion in 2022, a 15% increase. The funding, the document states, would be used to “initiate the next generation of Earth-observing satellites to study pressing climate science questions.”

NASA’s space technology program, which received $1.1 billion in 2021, would get $1.4 billion in 2022, a 27% increase. That funding “would enhance the capabilities and reduce the costs of the full range of NASA missions and provide new technologies to help the commercial space industry grow,” the budget document states. That includes support for what the White House called “novel early-stage space technology research that would support the development of clean energy.”

NASA’s human exploration program would get $6.9 billion in fiscal year 2022, up about 5% from the $6.56 billion in 2021. The document didn’t break out that spending among programs such as the Space Launch System, Orion and Human Landing System (HLS), but said it would support the Artemis program and “the development of capabilities for sustainable, long-duration human exploration beyond Earth, and eventually to Mars.”

The document offered no guidance on a schedule for the Artemis program, noting only that it included “a series of crewed exploration missions to the lunar surface and beyond.” The modest increase suggests that the administration doesn’t plan to ramp up spending on the HLS program as originally envisioned when the Trump administration set a goal of returning humans to the lunar surface by 2024.

The brief passage about NASA spending offered little else about funding levels and priorities the White House has for the agency. The document did note that the budget provides funding for a number of ongoing missions in development, including the Mars Sample Return program and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an astrophysics mission targeted for cancellation in several previous budget requests by the Trump administration. However, the document does not spell out funding levels for those projects.

The administration also proposed a $20 million increase for NASA’s education programs, formally known as STEM Engagement. That received $127 million in 2021, but had been proposed for cancellation in all four of the Trump administration’s budget proposals. Congress, in each case, rejected the proposal and funded NASA’s education efforts.

Elsewhere in the budget, the White House proposed increasing funding for weather satellite programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by $500 million, to $2 billion in fiscal year 2022. That funding would support what it described as “the next generation of satellites, incorporating a diverse array of new technologies, which would improve data for weather and climate forecasts and provide critical information to the public.”

The proposal does not spell out funding for smaller space-related offices, like the Office of Space Commerce in the Department of Commerce or the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. The document does note that the administration will offer funding to support improvements to management of the national airspace system, including integration of commercial space launches into it.

The National Science Foundation would get $10.2 billion in the proposed budget, a 20% increase from 2021. That would include funding to continue work on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, although the document does not mention how much funding would be provided for that or other astrophysics research.

#Space

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earthstory · 7 years ago

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Uncovering tsunami hazards

In 2011, the great Tohoku Earthquake struck Japan on a segment of a fault that a number of scientists had said could not generate great earthquakes and tsunami waves. At the time, scientists were just starting to revise those estimates, but it was too late. Seawalls in northern Japan were too small, water poured across farmlands and devastated a nuclear power plant along the coast.

The Tohoku quake showed scientists that great, tsunamigenic (causing tsunami waves) quakes can happen on faults where the hazard might not be fully recognized. There are major subduction zones around the world, particularly in the Pacific Ocean, and some areas of those faults had been thought to be unable to produce great earthquakes and tsunami. In light of the Tohoku quake, scientists are now looking again at those areas to see how the initial impressions hold up.

One new study looked at a section of the Aleutian subduction zone south of Alaska and asked that basic question – does this fault segment look more dangerous than we thought – and answered that question with “yes”.

The Shumagin Gap is a section of the Aleutian Subduction Zone below the Shumagin Islands. It is in-between sections of the megathrust fault that ruptured in earthquakes in 1938 and 1946, both of which are shown in orange on this map. This section of the fault was thought to be “creeping” – a state where a fault is moving slowly. It was thought that since this fault is creeping, that slow motion would relieve the stress in this area and prevent tsunamigenic earthquakes.

However, after Tohoku, a team of scientists led by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Anne Bécel reassessed this conclusion after collecting modern seismic data on the structure of this subduction zone. They found it had a number of similarities with the segment of the Tohoku fault that broke.

Both faults have thin wedges of sediment accumulated at their tip and only thin layers of sediment being pushed down between the upper and lower plates. That’s the start of a worrisome signal, but the seismic profiles found something else – a second fault as part of the structure, just like Tohoku.

After the 2011 quake it was discovered that there is a small second fault on the Japan-side of the trench. As the Pacific plate forces its way downwards, it drags a part of the Japanese coast down with it. When the megathrust ruptures, it releases the stress in the upper plate and that released stress snapped back along a small normal fault. That normal fault in the upper plate seems to be caused by motion during the great earthquakes, and finding a similar fault in this Alaskan seismic gap could mean that it too hosts regular great, tsunamigenic earthquakes.

There was some evidence that a much older earthquake, in 1788, might have moved into this zone, but since there were no marine geologists at the time its hard to say for certain how much of the fault ruptured in that quake. Adding in this new data, it now seems likely that this portion of the Aleutian subduction zone is a much greater tsunami hazard than was previously thought.

There are a number of other segments of creeping megathrust faults around the world. Few to none of them have been measured in the detail performed in this study. How many others might be hiding a similar tsunami risk?

This study was only possible because of the vessel Marcus G. Langseth owned and operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation. This resource could, with time and funding, investigate other potential sites in the U.S. for similar hazards, but that will take years and continued strong support of Earth Science research in the U.S. And that, of course, only covers the U.S., when there are similar trenches worldwide.

-JBB

Image source and original paper: http://go.nature.com/2hrUJ6g

Press version: http://bit.ly/2hrRgVl

#Geology #Research #Science #Alaska #Earthquake #Fault #tsunami #The earth story

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csnews · 7 years ago

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Trump’s America First Energy Plan Puts Foreign Companies First, Marine Species Last

John Dougherty - Sep. 28, 2017

Few days go by without President Trump touting his “America First” agenda, which includes his ambitions to dramatically ramp up offshore drilling for oil and natural gas.

There’s some irony, then, that the first beneficiaries of these initiatives could be mostly foreign-based companies that stand to reap millions of dollars in revenue from conducting oil and gas seismic surveys in the waters off the East Coast.

An investigation by The Revelator reveals that four of these seismic survey companies are based overseas. Only one is based in the United States. The surveys are highly speculative ventures, to be conducted in a region thought to hold relatively low oil and gas reserves and appear unlikely to proceed without significant upfront funding from oil companies.

Our investigation also shows that despite decades of research on the impact of noise on marine mammals and other wildlife, there has never been a robust, ecosystem-wide examination of its effects. This gap in the understanding of regional impacts of seismic surveys on an array of marine life is contributing to ongoing debate within the marine science community on their impacts on oceanic species.

The oil and gas industry and the federally funded National Science Foundation, along with Columbia University’s prestigious Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, say the seismic testing causes no lasting harm to marine life. But other marine biologists and environmentalists say there is increasing evidence showing that the surveys do cause significant harm and therefore should not be conducted in the Atlantic.

“The (industry) claims there is no demonstrated effect,” says Douglas Nowacek, associate professor of conservation technology at Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina. “But nobody has looked” thoroughly enough.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is currently reviewing the applications to conduct seismic surveys spanning 330,000 square miles of the Atlantic between New Jersey and Florida.

Trump issued an executive order this past April to open the mid- and south-Atlantic to potential oil and gas development. The order also directed the fisheries service to “expedite all stages” of seismic survey applications. Decisions on whether to proceed with oil and gas leasing in the Atlantic and to award seismic survey permits are expected later this year.

Seismic surveys use super-loud underwater blasts from powerful air guns to map the ocean floor in search of fossil fuels. The surveys are a crucial first step in determining whether there are sufficient oil and natural gas for energy companies to invest billions of dollars to develop offshore production platforms and onshore processing facilities. The sounds are roughly equivalent to a grenade blast and can be detected thousands of miles across the ocean.

The Trump administration’s plan to open the Atlantic for oil and gas exploration offers one of the largest seismic testing opportunities in the world. Offshore seismic surveys are conducted on a regular basis across the globe.

Applications to conduct these surveys have been submitted by Spectrum Geo and TGS, both headquartered in Norway; the French company CGG; and WesternGeco, a subsidiary of oil services giant Schlumberger that’s incorporated in the Caribbean island nation of Curaçao and has offices in Houston. The smallest of the five companies is Houston-based Ion Geophysical Corp.

Seismic survey cruises are generally required to have certified marine wildlife lookouts on watch and typically use “passive acoustic monitoring” systems to listen for marine mammal vocalizations. Seismic survey testing is stopped if marine mammals are detected nearby. But the monitoring is far from foolproof.

Conservation experts argue that more mitigation is needed to reduce the potential impacts of these studies that could harm not just wildlife but other industries, including commercial and sport fishing.

“Approving seismic blasting in the Atlantic would simply shift the conservation burden [for marine species] onto U.S. fisheries and others in this country, to profit what are mostly foreign companies,” Michael Jansy, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Marine Mammal Protection Project, tells The Revelator.

The Atlantic seismic surveys would come at a crucial time for the seismic survey industry, which has been battered by three years of low oil prices. The industry suffers from overcapacity, bankruptcies, layoffs, declining stock prices and years of financial losses that have slashed its market by 60 percent since 2012, according to the trade publication E&P Hart Energy.

Trump’s support of this industry also comes at a time when the United States is approaching record domestic oil production, with surging exports lead by steady productivity increases from fracking in the West Texas Permian basin, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Atlantic reserves, by comparison, aren’t necessarily attractive to oil companies. Pavel Molchanov, senior vice president and equity research analyst at Raymond James & Associates Inc., told E&E News in July that the Atlantic leases are unlikely to spur major new activity. “Industry does not want to drill in those places right now because prices are relatively weak,” he said.

It also seems unlikely that the debt-laden seismic survey companies will proceed with the very expensive surveys unless they receive some upfront prefunding from oil companies willing to purchase the survey data, The Revelator’s review of the five companies’ public financial reports show.

At least one of the companies confirms this to be true. “If we have customer support, we will move forward with a seismic data acquisition program,” Susan Ganz, a spokeswoman for WesternGeco, stated in an email to The Revelator.

Seismic surveys taken in the Atlantic between 1966 and 1988 indicate approximately 2.8 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil reserves exist, mostly in the mid-Atlantic. Only 2.4 billion barrels are considered economically recoverable at $100/barrel, nearly double the current price, according to a 2016 Bureau of Ocean Energy Management report. That’s just enough oil to meet current U.S. demand for about 120 days.

The industry is hopeful that these old estimates are incomplete. “Atlantic seismic survey data are needed to update resource estimates that are based on decades-old information,” a consortium of oil industry trade groups stated in an Aug. 17 filingto the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. “With new seismic data in hand, decisions informed by science can be made as to the true resource potential in these areas.”

The current proposed round of Atlantic seismic applications calls for two-dimensional (2D) testing. But if new prospects are discovered, additional seismic surveys using more advanced 3D and 4D technologies could be conducted, providing a four-dimensional view of the ocean floor, industry experts say.

Environmental groups question why it’s necessary to issue Atlantic seismic permits to all five companies, which will conduct surveys in overlapping areas and in some cases, at the same time. The companies will pay nothing to the federal government for the potential harm that could result to marine life.

To minimize the impact on species, environmentalists urge the sharing of survey data from a single company rather than allowing multiple companies to acquire data that would then be subsequently sold to oil and gas companies.

“Under the law, cumulative impacts (from seismic surveys) are not taken into account,” says Ingrid Biedron, a marine scientist with Oceana, an environmental group working to protect the world’s oceans.

Offshore seismic surveys use a series of air guns clustered in arrays and dragged underwater behind survey ships. The guns release compressed every 10 to 12 seconds, creating a sonic wave.

The testing continues 24 hours a day for months a time. The sound can travel several thousand miles through the ocean depending on water temperature, salinity and the ocean floor contour.

The sound waves are generally directed downward and bounce off subsurface geological formations. Hydrophones dragged behind the ship then receive the reflected sound. Sophisticated computer programs use the data to generate maps of the ocean floor, showing where potential oil and gas reserves may be located.

The government previously considered the impact on marine life as potentially consequential. President Obama last December permanently withdrew the north- and mid-Atlantic from offshore oil and gas development because of the high potential for environmental damage and low amount of estimated hydrocarbon resources. Trump’s April executive order partially reverses that decision.

Before that, in the wake of Obama’s decision, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management canceled six seismic survey applications. The agency’s then-director Abigail Ross Hopper stated this past January that the value of the potential information from “new air gun seismic surveys in the Atlantic does not outweigh the potential risks of those surveys’ acoustic pulse impacts on marine life.”

Oil-industry trade groups disagreed and stated in public comments filed in July with the National Marine Fisheries Service that “there has been no demonstration of any biologically significant negative impacts to marine life” from seismic surveys and that the proposed Atlantic surveys “will have no more than a negligible impact on marine mammal species” or on fisheries.

The oil industry’s contention that seismic testing causes negligible impact on marine life is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences. The science foundation owns the seismic survey research ship Marcus G.Langseth, operated by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Office of Marine Operations. The foundation provides about $10 million a year for offshore seismic survey research conducted by academic scientists across the country using the Langseth.

The Langseth serves as the national seismic research facility for the U.S. academic research community. The ship’s seismic research “provides a view of the Earth’s interior that is unmatched in clarity, quality, and detail by any other method,” a brochure issued by the Lamont-Doherty observatory states. “As a result, a wide array of key Earth processes can now be studied in all three dimensions.”

The National Science Foundation and the observatory have repeatedly stated in seismic survey applications to the National Marine Fisheries Service that the tests do not cause lasting harm to marine life, a position the federal regulatory agency has generally echoed.

In an October 2015 draft environmental analysis for a proposed seismic survey in the south Atlantic, the observatory’s environmental consultant concluded that the 42-day survey using an array of 36 air guns with total discharge of 6,600 cubic inches would have little impact on marine mammals. The size of that air gun array is comparable to the ones used by the five companies seeking Atlantic permits.

“It is unlikely that the proposed survey would result in any cases of temporary or permanent hearing impairment, or any significant non-auditory physical or physiological effects,” stated the observatory report, which was prepared by an Ontario-based environmental research firm called LGL Ltd. “If marine mammals encounter the survey while it is underway, some behavioral disturbance could result, but this would be localized and short-term.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service published a comprehensive assessment of seismic surveys on marine life in April 2016. The report was in response to a request for a permit to conduct a 60-day seismic survey in the south Pacific.

The fisheries service “does not anticipate that serious injury or mortality would occur as a result of Lamont-Doherty’s proposed seismic survey in the southeast Pacific Ocean,” the report stated.

“Lamont-Doherty’s proposed activities are not likely to cause long-term behavioral disturbance, serious injury, or death, or other effects that would be expected to adversely affect reproduction or survival of any individuals.”

But ongoing scientific research — often conducted in controlled settings — is compiling an increasing body of evidence that seismic surveys have negative impacts on marine life, with a chorus of scientists issuing dire warnings.

“Opening the U.S. east coast to seismic air gun exploration poses an unacceptable risk of serious harm to marine life at the species and population levels, the full extent of which will not be understood until long after the harm occurs,” 75 marine biologists stated in a 2015 letter sent to President Obama.

Researchers in Australia announced earlier this year they found that the seismic blasts killed zooplankton, raising concerns about the impact on the basic component of the ocean nutrient cycle.

On a larger scale, the endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) is known to be sensitive to seismic generated noise and marine scientists fear any impact on its behavior — from decreased foraging to reproduction declines — could plunge the species toward extinction. The species experienced a spike of deaths reported earlier this year, primarily from entanglements with fishing gear, pushing the population below 500 whales.

The International Whaling Commission scientific committee concluded in 2005 that seismic surveys can cause “population level impacts.” The Convention on Biological Diversity stated in 2012 “there are increasing concerns about the long-term and cumulative of noise on marine biodiversity.”

A 2013 review on the impact of seismic air gun surveys on marine life found that “seismic air guns are the second highest contributor of human caused underwater noise in total energy output per year, following nuclear and other explosions.”

For years the government resisted even conducting significant studies on the possible impact of seismic surveys on marine mammals. It was only after environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, publishers of The Revelator, sued federal agencies that an Environmental Impact Statement on the impacts of seismic testing in the Gulf of Mexico was conducted.

That study clearly shows there are impacts. And in some cases, the study found, they can be severe. But the research was far from definitive and relied heavily on underwater robots to measure sound impacts. But the impact is harder to measure for marine mammals, which often have the ability to move away from loud sound sources, making it difficult to draw definitive conclusions.

Still, the report estimated that 31.9 million marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico could be “moderately” harassed by oil and gas seismic surveys over 10 years. That includes 8 out every 10 members of the Gulf’s endangered sperm whale population.

The report concluded, however, that “the best available information, while providing evidence for concern and a basis for continuing research, does not, at this time, provide grounds to conclude that these surveys would disrupt behavioral patterns with more than negligible population-level impacts” (chapter 4-57).

The Gulf of Mexico has been routinely subjected to seismic surveys for decades but without a comprehensive examination of its impacts in marine life.

“Nobody has studied whether seismic on the scale of the Gulf of Mexico impacts the populations of marine mammals, turtles, fish, whatever,” says Nowacek, who is among the world’s leading scientists studying the impact of sound on marine life and has testified before Congress.

The lack of definitive information on the impacts of seismic surveys on marine life has given industry an advantage when it comes to obtaining permission from the National Marine Fisheries Services to issue Incidental Harassment Authorization permits to conduct the surveys, experts say.

The permits allow seismic survey companies to “incidentally but not intentionally harass marine mammals.” The agency typically issues the permits with stipulations that “prescribe monitoring, reporting, and mitigation measures to minimize the impacts of the surveys to marine mammals.”

Marine scientists opposed to seismic testing say the industry and National Science Foundation’s position that seismic surveys cause no lasting damage to marine life is based on a faulty premise.

Nowacek says the standards should be revised by requiring applicants to prove that the testing causes no serious harm to marine life, rather than forcing environmental groups and university marine biologists with limited funding to conduct decades of research that, while showing negative impacts on individuals, remain inconclusive on an ecosystem level.

“You have some tool, some technique of sampling, and it’s a good tool for what it does,” Nowacek says. “But why is the burden of proof that somebody has to show that there is a severe negative impact instead of the other way around? We should be having a discussion about where the burden of proof lies.”

That discussion is not currently part of the seismic testing application process in the mid-Atlantic, nor is it expected to be.

#politics #conservation #cetaceans #whales #dolphins #environment #news

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rjzimmerman · 7 years ago

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Excerpt:

Few days go by without President Trump touting his “America First” agenda, which includes his ambitions to dramatically ramp up offshore drilling for oil and natural gas.

#trump #oil industry #oceans #offshore drilling #marine seismic blasting

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didanawisgi · 8 years ago

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Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Northwestern University has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun.

The finding, published Feb. 23, 2017 in the journal Nature, is important because it provides the first hard proof for what scientists call the “chaotic solar system,” a theory proposed in 1989 to account for small variations in the present conditions of the solar system. The variations, playing out over many millions of years, produce big changes in our planet’s climate — changes that can be reflected in the rocks that record Earth’s history.

Geoscience Professor Stephen Meyers. © GIGI COHEN

The discovery promises not only a better understanding of the mechanics of the solar system, but also a more precise measuring stick for geologic time. Moreover, it offers a better understanding of the link between orbital variations and climate change over geologic time scales.

Using evidence from alternating layers of limestone and shale laid down over millions of years in a shallow North American seaway at the time dinosaurs held sway on Earth, the team led by UW–Madison Professor of Geoscience Stephen Meyers and Northwestern University Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Brad Sageman discovered the 87 million-year-old signature of a “resonance transition” between Mars and Earth. A resonance transition is the consequence of the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory. It plays on the idea that small changes in the initial conditions of a nonlinear system can have large effects over time.

In the context of the solar system, the phenomenon occurs when two orbiting bodies periodically tug at one another, as occurs when a planet in its track around the sun passes in relative proximity to another planet in its own orbit. These small but regular ticks in a planet’s orbit can exert big changes on the location and orientation of a planet on its axis relative to the sun and, accordingly, change the amount of solar radiation a planet receives over a given area. Where and how much solar radiation a planet gets is a key driver of climate.

This animation shows a chaotic solar system and changing planetary orbits playing out over billions of years, illustrating the slight chance in the distant future of planetary collisions. Geologic evidence was recently found to confirm the idea that the planets in our solar system do not orbit the sun like clockwork in a quasiperiodic manner, as has been believed since the 18th century. Credit: Jacques Laskar

“The impact of astronomical cycles on climate can be quite large,” explains Meyers, noting as an example the pacing of the Earth’s ice ages, which have been reliably matched to periodic changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit, and the tilt of our planet on its axis. “Astronomical theory permits a very detailed evaluation of past climate events that may provide an analog for future climate.”

To find the signature of a resonance transition, Meyers, Sageman and UW–Madison graduate student Chao Ma, whose dissertation work this comprises, looked to the geologic record in what is known as the Niobrara Formation in Colorado. The formation was laid down layer by layer over tens of millions of years as sediment was deposited on the bottom of a vast seaway known as the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway. The shallow ocean stretched from what is now the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, separating the eastern and western portions of North America.

“The Niobrara Formation exhibits pronounced rhythmic rock layering due to changes in the relative abundance of clay and calcium carbonate,” notes Meyers, an authority on astrochronology, which utilizes astronomical cycles to measure geologic time. “The source of the clay (laid down as shale) is from weathering of the land surface and the influx of clay to the seaway via rivers. The source of the calcium carbonate (limestone) is the shells of organisms, mostly microscopic, that lived in the water column.”

The finding is important because it provides the first hard proof for the “chaotic solar system,” a theory proposed in 1989 to account for small variations in the present conditions of the solar system.

Meyers explains that while the link between climate change and sedimentation can be complex, the basic idea is simple: “Climate change influences the relative delivery of clay versus calcium carbonate, recording the astronomical signal in the process. For example, imagine a very warm and wet climate state that pumps clay into the seaway via rivers, producing a clay-rich rock or shale, alternating with a drier and cooler climate state which pumps less clay into the seaway and produces a calcium carbonate-rich rock or limestone.”

The new study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. It builds on a meticulous stratigraphic record and important astrochronologic studies of the Niobrara Formation, the latter conducted in the dissertation work of Robert Locklair, a former student of Sageman’s at Northwestern.

Dating of the Mars-Earth resonance transition found by Ma, Meyers and Sageman was confirmed by radioisotopic dating, a method for dating the absolute ages of rocks using known rates of radioactive decay of elements in the rocks. In recent years, major advances in the accuracy and precision of radioisotopic dating, devised by UW–Madison geoscience Professor Bradley Singer and others, have been introduced and contribute to the dating of the resonance transition.

“Other studies have suggested the presence of chaos based on geologic data. But this is the first unambiguous evidence …”

Stephen Meyers

The motions of the planets around the sun has been a subject of deep scientific interest since the advent of the heliocentric theory — the idea that the Earth and planets revolve around the sun — in the 16th century. From the 18th century, the dominant view of the solar system was that the planets orbited the sun like clockwork, having quasiperiodic and highly predictable orbits. In 1988, however, numerical calculations of the outer planets showed Pluto’s orbit to be “chaotic” and the idea of a chaotic solar system was proposed in 1989 by astronomer Jacques Laskar, now at the Paris Observatory.

Following Laskar’s proposal of a chaotic solar system, scientists have been looking in earnest for definitive evidence that would support the idea, says Meyers.

“Other studies have suggested the presence of chaos based on geologic data,” says Meyers. “But this is the first unambiguous evidence, made possible by the availability of high-quality, radioisotopic dates and the strong astronomical signal preserved in the rocks.”

- See more at: http://news.wisc.edu/from-rocks-in-colorado-evidence-of-a-chaotic-solar-system/#sthash.rw32GKSN.dpuf

#climate change #Astronomy #global warming #chaotic solar system

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mikemortgage · 6 years ago

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Warning system delays add to deaths in Indonesian tsunami

MAKASSAR, Indonesia — An early warning system that could have prevented some deaths in the tsunami that hit an Indonesian island on Friday has been stalled in the testing phase for years.

The high-tech system of seafloor sensors, data-laden sound waves and fiber-optic cable was meant to replace a system set up after an earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 250,000 people in the region in 2004. But inter-agency wrangling and delays in getting just 1 billion rupiah ($69,000) to complete the project means the system hasn’t moved beyond a prototype developed with $3 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

It is too late for central Sulawesi, where walls of water up to 6 metres (20 feet) high and a magnitude 7.5 earthquake killed at least 832 people in the cities of Palu and Donggala, tragically highlighting the weaknesses of the existing warning system and low public awareness about how to respond to warnings.

“To me this is a tragedy for science, even more so a tragedy for the Indonesian people as the residents of Sulawesi are discovering right now,” said Louise Comfort, a University of Pittsburgh expert in disaster management who has led the U.S. side of the project, which also involves engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Indonesian scientists and disaster experts.

“It’s a heartbreak to watch when there is a well-designed sensor network that could provide critical information,” she said.

After a 2004 tsunami killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries, more than half of them in the Indonesian province of Aceh, a concerted international effort was launched to improve tsunami warning capabilities, particularly in the Indian Ocean and for Indonesia, one of world’s most earthquake and tsunami-prone countries.

Part of that drive, using funding from Germany and elsewhere, included deploying a network of 22 buoys connected to seafloor sensors to transmit advance warnings.

A sizeable earthquake off Sumatra in 2016 that caused panic in the coastal city of Padang revealed that none of the buoys costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each were working. They’d been disabled by vandalism or theft or just stopped working due to a lack of funds for maintenance.

The backbone of Indonesia’s tsunami warning system today is a network of 134 tidal gauge stations augmented by land-based seismographs, sirens in about 55 locations and a system to disseminate warnings by text message.

When the 7.5 quake hit just after 6 p.m., the meteorology and geophysics agency issued a tsunami alert, warning of potential for waves of 0.5 to 3 metres. It ended the warning at 6.36 p.m. That drew harsh online criticism but the agency’s head said the warning was lifted after the tsunami hit. It’s unclear exactly what time tsunami waves rushed into the narrow bay that Palu is built around.

“The tide gauges are operating, but they are limited in providing any advance warning. None of the 22 buoys are functioning,” Comfort said. “In the Sulawesi incident, BMKG (the meteorology and geophysics agency) cancelled the tsunami warning too soon, because it did not have data from Palu. This is the data the tsunami detection system could provide,” she said.

Adam Switzer, a tsunami expert at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, said it’s a “little unfair” to say the agency got it wrong.

“What it shows is that the tsunami models we have now are too simplistic,” he said. “They don’t take into account multiple events, multiple quakes within a short period of time. They don’t take into account submarine landslides.”

Whatever system is in use, he said, the priority after an earthquake in a coastal area should be to get to higher ground and stay there for a couple of hours.

Power outages after the earthquake struck Friday meant that sirens meant to warn residents to evacuate did not work, said Harkunti P. Rahayu, an expert at the Institute of Technology in Bandung.

“Most people were shocked by the earthquake and did not pay any thought that a tsunami will come,” she said.

Experts say the prototype system deployed offshore from Padang — a city extremely vulnerable to tsunamis because it faces a major undersea fault overdue for a massive quake — can provide authoritative information about a tsunami threat within 1-3 minutes. That compares with 5-45 minutes from the now defunct buoys and the limited information provided by tidal gauges.

The system’s undersea seismometers and pressure sensors send data-laden sound waves to warm surface waters. From there they refract back into the depths, travelling 20-30 kilometres to the next node in the network and so on.

The Padang network’s final undersea point needs just a few more kilometres of fiber optic cable to connect it to a station on an offshore island where the cascades of data would be transmitted by satellite to the geophysics agency, which issues tsunami warnings, and to disaster officials.

The Associated Press first reported on the system in January 2017, when the project was awaiting Indonesian funding to lay the cables. Since then, agencies involved have suffered budget cuts and the project bounced back and forth between them.

A December 2017 quake off the coast of Java close to Jakarta re-ignited interest and the geophysics agency made getting funding a priority. In July, the Ministry of Finance in July approved funding to purchase and lay the cable.

But at an inter-agency meeting in September, the three major agencies involved failed to agree on their responsibilities and the project was “simply put on hold,” Comfort said.

Indonesian officials who’ve been supportive of the new early warning system did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Since the 2004 tsunami, the mantra among disaster officials in Indonesia has been that the earthquake is the tsunami warning and signal for immediate evacuation. Not everyone is convinced a tsunami detection system is essential.

“What Indonesian colleagues have commented upon is that people were confused about what to do with the alert information,” said Gavin Sullivan, a Coventry University psychologist who works with the Indonesian Resilience Initiative on a disaster preparation project for the Indonesian city of Bandung.

The fact that people were still milling around Palu’s shoreline when waves were visibly approaching shows the lessons of earlier disasters haven’t been absorbed.

“This points to the failing to do appropriate training and to develop trust so that people know exactly what to do when an alert is issued,” he said. “In our project in Bandung we’re finding a similar unwillingness to prepare for something that seems unlikely.”

——

Associated Press writer Margie Mason in Jakarta contributed.

from Financial Post https://ift.tt/2OWGxyx via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

#IFTTT #Financial Post

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sitting-on-me-bum · 2 years ago

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A blobfish, also known as a flathead sculpin (Psychrolutes phrictus), hovers in the caldera at Axial Seamount, approximately 300 miles off the Oregon coast. There are nine species of blobfish, all members of the Psychrolutes genus which live deep in the sea.

PHOTOGRAPH BY NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION-OCEAN OBSERVATORY INITIATIVE/UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON/CSSF

#national science foundation-ocean observatory initiative #university of washington #cssf #photographer #blobfish #flathead sculpin #psychrolutes phrictus #axial seamount #marine #fish #nature #national geographic

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punalavaflow · 6 years ago

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Researchers hope to learn more about quakes associated with Kilauea

Researchers from Rice University in Houston recently joined colleagues from Western Washington University and the University of Rhode Island in placing seismometers off the coast of Hawaii Island with the hopes of gaining new insight into the landscape under the ocean floor.

Julia Morgan, a professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, and student David Blank were awarded a National Science Foundation grant to join a team of researchers and seed the seafloor with a dozen seismic detectors off the southeastern coast of the Big Island.

These efforts came in the wake of a 6.9-magnitude earthquake that shook the island in May, shortly before the start of eruption activity in Kilauea volcano’s lower East Rift Zone.

Data will be collected until September, and the information is expected to provide “an extensive record of earthquakes and aftershocks associated with the eruption of the world’s most active volcano over two months,” according to Rice University.

Morgan’s interest in geologic structures, particularly relating to volcano deformation and faulting, led her to study the ocean bed off the Big Island’s coast for years, according to an announcement Monday from Rice University.

In a 2003 paper, Morgan and her colleagues used marine seismic reflection data to look inside Kilauea’s underwater slope for the boundaries of an active landslide, the Hilina Slump, as well as signs of previous avalanches.

The researchers determined that the Hilina Slump is restricted to the upper slopes of the volcano, and the lower slopes consist of a large pile of ancient avalanche debris that was pushed by Kilauea’s sliding, gravity-driven flank into a massive, mile-high bench about 15 miles offshore, according to the university. This outer bench currently buttresses the Hilina Slump, preventing it from breaking away from the volcano slopes.

“Remarkably, after this earthquake, all the boundaries of the slump also lit up with small earthquakes. These clearly occurred on a different fault than the main earthquake, suggesting that the slump crept downslope during or after that event,” Morgan said in the announcement.

While the risk of an imminent avalanche is slim, she said, the eruption, earthquake and aftershocks present an opportunity to get a better look at the island’s hidden terrain, the university announcement said. Every new quake that occurs along Kilauea’s rift zones and around the perimeter of the Hilina Slump and the bench helps the researchers understand the terrain.

Morgan said the U.S. Geological Survey, which operates the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, has a host of ground-based seismometers but none in the ocean. Monitors at sea will reveal quakes under the bench that are too small for land seismometers to sense.

The seismometers were placed around the Hilina Slump, close to shore where lava is entering the ocean, and on the outer bench in line with the initial quake.

“If this outer bench is experiencing earthquakes, we want to know what surfaces are experiencing them,” Morgan said. “Along the base? Within the bench? Some new fault that we didn’t know about? This data will provide us the ability to determine what structures, or faults, are actually slipping.”

The post Researchers hope to learn more about quakes associated with Kilauea appeared first on Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

from Hawaii News – Hawaii Tribune-Herald https://ift.tt/2uZjCd1

#Hawaii Tribune Herald

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mitchbattros · 7 years ago

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New Images Of Alaska Sub-Seafloor Suggest High Tsunami Danger

Scientists probing under the seafloor off Alaska have mapped a geologic structure that they say signals potential for a major tsunami in an area that normally would be considered benign. They say the feature closely resembles one that produced the 2011 Tohoku tsunami off Japan, killing some 20,000 people and melting down three nuclear reactors. Such structures may lurk unrecognized in other areas of the world, say the scientists. The findings will be published tomorrow in the print edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.

The discovery "suggests this part of Alaska is particularly prone to tsunami generation," said seismologist Anne Bécel of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who led the study. "The possibility that such features are widespread is of global significance." In addition to Alaska, she said, waves could hit more southerly North American coasts, Hawaii and other parts of the Pacific. Tsunamis can occur as giant plates of ocean crust dive under adjoining continental crust, a process called subduction. Some plates get stuck for decades or centuries and tension builds, until they suddenly slip by each other. This produces a big earthquake, and the ocean floor may jump up or down like a released spring. That motion transfers to the overlying water, creating a surface wave. The 2011 Japan tsunami was a surprise, because it came partly on a "creeping" segment of seafloor, where the plates move steadily, releasing tension in frequent small quakes that should prevent a big one from building. But researchers are now recognizing it may not always work that way. Off Japan, part of the leading edge of the overriding continental plate had become somewhat detached from the main mass. When a relatively modest quake dislodged this detached wedge, it jumped, unleashing a wave that topped 130 feet in places. The telltale sign of danger, in retrospect: a fault in the seafloor that demarcated the detached section's boundary landward of the "trench," the zone where the two plates initially meet. The fault had been known to exist, but no one had understood what it meant. The researchers in the new study have now mapped a similar system in the Shumagin Gap, a creeping subduction zone near the end of the Alaska Peninsula some 600 miles from Anchorage. The segment is part of a subduction arc spanning the peninsula and the Aleutian Islands. Sailing on a specially equipped research vessel, the scientists used relatively new technology to penetrate deep into the seafloor with powerful sound pulses. By reading the echoes, they created CAT-scan-like maps of both the surface and what is underneath. The newly mapped fault lies between the trench and the coast, stretching perhaps 90 miles underwater more or less parallel to land. On the seafloor, it is marked by scarps about 15 feet high, indicating that the floor has dropped one side and risen on the other. The fault extends down more than 20 miles, all the way to where the two plates are moving against each other. The team also analyzed small earthquakes in the region, and found a cluster of seismicity where the newly identified fault meets the plate boundary. This, they say, confirms that the fault may be active. Earthquake patterns also suggest that frictional properties on the seaward side of the fault differ from those on the landward side. These differences may have created the fault, slowly tearing the region off the main mass; or the fault may be the remains of a past sudden movement. Either way, it signals danger, said coauthor Donna Shillington, a Lamont-Doherty seismologist. "With that big fault there, that outer part of the plate could move independently and make a tsunami a lot more effective," said Shillington. "You get a lot more vertical motion if the part that moves is close to the seafloor surface." A rough analogy: imagine snapping off a small piece of a dinner plate, laying the two pieces together on a table and pounding the table from below; the smaller piece will probably jump higher than if the plate were whole, because there is less holding it down. Other parts of the Aleutian subduction zone are already known to be dangerous. A 1946 quake and tsunami originating further west killed more than 160 people, most in Hawaii. In 1964, an offshore quake killed around 140 people with landslides and tsunamis, mainly in Alaska; 19 people died in Oregon and California, and waves were detected as far off as Papua New Guinea and even Antarctica. In July 2017, an offshore quake near the western tip of the Aleutians triggered a Pacific-wide tsunami warning, but luckily it produced just a six-inch local wave. As for the Shumagin Gap, in 1788, Russian colonists then living on nearby Unga Island recorded a great quake and tsunami that wiped out coastal structures and killed many native Aleut people. The researchers say it may have originated at the Shumagin Gap, but there is no way to be sure. Rob Witter, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has scoured area coastlines for evidence of such a tsunami, but so far evidence has eluded him, he said. The potential danger "remains a puzzle here," he said. "We know so little about the hazards of subduction zones. Every little bit of new information we can glean about how they work is valuable, including the findings in this new paper." The authors say that apart from Japan, such a fault structure has been well documented only off Russia's Kuril Islands, east of the Aleutians. But, Shillington said, "We don't have images from many places. If we were to look around the world, we would probably see a lot more." John Miller, a retired USGS scientist who has studied the Aleutians, said that his own work suggests other segments of the arc have other threatening features that resemble both those in the Shumagin and off Japan. "The dangers of areas like these are just now being widely recognized," he said. Lamont seismologists have been studying earthquakes in the Aleutians since the 1960s, but early studies were conducted mainly on land. In the 1980s, the USGS collected the same type of data used in the new study, but seismic equipment now able to produce far more detailed images deep under the sea floor made this latest discovery possible, said Bécel. She and others conducted the imaging survey aboard the Marcus G. Langseth, the United States' flagship vessel for acoustic research. Owned by the U.S. National Science Foundation, it is operated by Lamont-Doherty on behalf the nation's universities and other research institutions. Click to Post

#New Images Of Alaska Sub-Seafloor Suggest High Tsunami Danger

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scifigeneration · 6 years ago

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Science gets shut down right along with the federal government

by Angela K. Wilson

Ongoing wildlife studies are one kind of federally funded research that’s sidelined during a shutdown. USFWS, CC BY

When the U.S. government shuts down, much of the science that it supports is not spared. And there is no magic light switch that can be flipped to reverse the impact.

For instance, large-scale instruments like NASA’s Stratoscopheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy – the “flying telescope” – have to stop operations. Eventually bringing such instrumentation back up to speed requires over a week. If the shutdown lingers, contingency funds provided to maintain large-scale instruments supported by agencies including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation will run out and operations will cease, adding to the list of closed facilities.

When I headed NSF’s Division of Chemistry from March 2016 to July 2018, I experienced firsthand two shutdowns like the one the country is weathering now. The 1,800 NSF staff would be sent home, without access to email and without even the option to work voluntarily, until eventually an end to the shutdown was negotiated. As we were unsure how long the shutdowns would run, a lot of time was spent developing contingency plans – and coordinating with many hundreds of researchers about them. Concerns about what will happen to researchers’ day-to-day projects are compounded by apprehension about interruptions to long-term funding.

What’s not happening?

Many federal agencies perform science. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health are less affected by the shutdown this time since they already have their budgets for fiscal year 2019. But agencies including the NSF, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Parks Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and NOAA have had to stop most work.

In some sensitive areas involving plants, animals, earth or space phenomena that are cyclical or seasonal, scientists may miss critical windows for research. If something happens only once a year and the moment is now – such as the pollination window for some drought-resistant plants – a researcher will miss out and must wait another year. Other data sets have long records of measurements that are taken daily or at other defined times. Now they’ll have holes in their data because federal workers can’t do their jobs during a shutdown.

Databases go dark. Many scientists and engineers across the country – indeed, across the globe – rely on the information in these databases, such as those offered by NIST, which is part of the Department of Commerce. When data can’t be accessed, projects are delayed.

Vital scientific meetings such as that of the American Meteorological Society and the American Astronomical Society which are heavily reliant upon the expertise of federal scientists have been affected by the shutdown, too. Federal scientists from the closed agencies cannot travel to conferences to learn about the most recent work in the fields, nor share their own findings.

And of course, federal scientists serve as journal editors, reviewers and collaborators on research projects. Their inability to work has an impact across the scientific community in moving science and technology forward for our nation.

Without a doubt, the government shutdown will delay, cancel or compress implementation timelines of initiatives to help drive development of new science and tech in the United States. This affects both U.S. research progress and the American STEM workforce. Missed (or delayed) opportunity costs are high, as some planned investments are in areas with fierce global competition and significant investments by other countries – think next-generation computers and communication – which are critical to the country’s national security.

Scientists are always hoping for a bigger piece of the federal budget. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Budget worries compound the shutdown’s effects

The shutdown is not just a long vacation. The amount of work that must be done at federal agencies isn’t reduced. In fact, while the employees are away, the work continues to build up.

For some divisions at the NSF, where I worked, the early part of the year is the peak period in terms of workload. Scientists submit around 40,000 research proposals annually, hoping to secure funding for their projects. The longer the shutdown, the more intense the workload will be once the government reopens, since decisions about the support of research still need to occur during the current fiscal year. Decisions – and projects – will be delayed.

It is important to note that the government shutdown is exacerbating the effect of mostly flat budgets (with the exception of the 2009 stimulus) that many federally funded scientific agencies have been dealing with for more than a decade.

Prior to the shutdown, contingencies were made to ensure that some of the scientific facilities have spending authority for at least a month or so of operations. But, if the shutdown continues, furloughs of facility staff may become necessary if the limits of obligated funding are reached.

And, with all of these negatives, for all of the agencies that are shut down, the biggest question is what will happen to their budgets. Here we are, four months into the fiscal year, and agencies do not know what will happen to them for what remains of FY 2019. It is difficult to plan, it is difficult to continue to function and it affects STEM workforce morale, retention and ability to attract quality personnel into vitally important scientific roles.

Now that we’re facing the longest government shutdown to date, national security, health and the economy continue to be jeopardized by STEM research that’s been slowed or stopped.

About The Author:

Angela K. Wilson is a Professor of Physical, Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at Michigan State University.

This article is republished from our content partners at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

#science #science news #featured #us government #us government shutdown

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sciencespies · 5 years ago

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Breakthrough Listen releases 2 petabytes of data from SETI survey of Milky Way

https://sciencespies.com/space/breakthrough-listen-releases-2-petabytes-of-data-from-seti-survey-of-milky-way/

Breakthrough Listen releases 2 petabytes of data from SETI survey of Milky Way

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The Breakthrough Listen Initiative today released data from the most comprehensive survey yet of radio emissions from the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy and the region around its central black hole, and it is inviting the public to search the data for signals from intelligent civilizations.

At a media briefing today in Seattle as part of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Breakthrough Listen principal investigator Andrew Siemion of the University of California, Berkeley, announced the release of nearly 2 petabytes of data, the second data dump from the four-year old search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). A petabyte of radio and optical telescope data was released last June, the largest release of SETI data in the history of the field.

The data, most of it fresh from the telescope prior to detailed study from astronomers, comes from a survey of the radio spectrum between 1 and 12 gigahertz (GHz). About half of the data comes via the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, which, because of its location in the Southern Hemisphere, is perfectly situated and instrumented to scan the entire galactic disk and galactic center. The telescope is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility, owned and managed by the country’s national science agency, CSIRO.

The remainder of the data was recorded by the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the world’s largest steerable radio dish, and an optical telescope called the Automated Planet Finder, built and operated by UC Berkeley and located at Lick Observatory outside San Jose, California.

“Since Breakthrough Listen’s initial data release last year, we have doubled what is available to the public,” said Breakthrough Listen’s lead system administrator, Matt Lebofsky. “It is our hope that these data sets will reveal something new and interesting, be it other intelligent life in the universe or an as-yet-undiscovered natural astronomical phenomenon.”

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the privately-funded SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, also announced today an agreement to collaborate on new systems to add SETI capabilities to radio telescopes operated by NRAO. The first project will develop a system to piggyback on the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico and provide data to state-of-the-art digital backend equipment built by the SETI Institute.

“The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA, permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky,” said Siemion, who, in addition to his UC Berkeley position, is the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute. “This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search.”

“As the VLA conducts its usual scientific observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we’re already collecting,” said NRAO Director Tony Beasley. “Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it.”

“For the whole of human history, we had a limited amount of data to search for life beyond Earth. So, all we could do was speculate. Now, as we are getting a lot of data, we can do real science and, with making this data available to general public, so can anyone who wants to know the answer to this deep question,” said Yuri Milner, the founder of Breakthrough Listen.

Earth transit zone survey

In releasing the new radio and optical data, Siemion highlighted a new analysis of a small subset of the data: radio emissions from 20 nearby stars that are aligned with the plane of Earth’s orbit such that an advanced civilization around those stars could see Earth pass in front of the sun (a “transit” like those focused on by NASA’s Kepler space telescope). Conducted by the Green Bank Telescope, the Earth transit zone survey observed in the radio frequency range between 4 and 8 gigahertz, the so-called C-band. The data were then analyzed by former UC Berkeley undergraduate Sofia Sheikh, now a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, who looked for bright emissions at a single radio wavelength or a narrow band around a single wavelength. She has submitted the paper to the Astrophysical Journal.

“This is a unique geometry,” Sheikh said. “It is how we discovered other exoplanets, so it kind of makes sense to extrapolate and say that that might be how other intelligent species find planets, as well. This region has been talked about before, but there has never been a targeted search of that region of the sky.”

While Sheikh and her team found no technosignatures of civilization, the analysis and other detailed studies the Breakthrough Listen group has conducted are gradually putting limits on the location and capabilities of advanced civilizations that may exist in our galaxy.

“We didn’t find any aliens, but we are setting very rigorous limits on the presence of a technologically capable species, with data for the first time in the part of the radio spectrum between 4 and 8 gigahertz,” Siemion said. “These results put another rung on the ladder for the next person who comes along and wants to improve on the experiment.”

Sheikh noted that her mentor, Jason Wright at Penn State, estimated that if the world’s oceans represented every place and wavelength we could search for intelligent signals, we have, to date, explored only a hot tub’s worth of it.

“My search was sensitive enough to see a transmitter basically the same as the strongest transmitters we have on Earth, because I looked at nearby targets on purpose,” Sheikh said. “So, we know that there isn’t anything as strong as our Arecibo telescope beaming something at us. Even though this is a very small project, we are starting to get at new frequencies and new areas of the sky.”

Beacons in the galactic center?

The so-far unanalyzed observations from the galactic disk and galactic center survey were a priority for Breakthrough Listen because of the higher likelihood of observing an artificial signal from that region of dense stars. If artificial transmitters are not common in the galaxy, then searching for a strong transmitter among the billions of stars in the disk of our galaxy is the best strategy, Simeon said.

On the other hand, putting a powerful, intergalactic transmitter in the core of our galaxy, perhaps powered by the 4 million-solar-mass black hole there, might not be beyond the capabilities of a very advanced civilization. Galactic centers may be so-called Schelling points: likely places for civilizations to meet up or place beacons, given that they cannot communicate among themselves to agree on a location.

“The galactic center is the subject of a very specific and concerted campaign with all of our facilities because we are in unanimous agreement that that region is the most interesting part of the Milky Way galaxy,” Siemion said. “If an advanced civilization anywhere in the Milky Way wanted to put a beacon somewhere, getting back to the Schelling point idea, the galactic center would be a good place to do it. It is extraordinarily energetic, so one could imagine that if an advanced civilization wanted to harness a lot of energy, they might somehow use the supermassive black hole that is at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.”

Visit from an interstellar comet

Breakthrough Listen also released observations of the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov, which had a close encounter with the sun in December and is now on its way out of the solar system. The group had earlier scanned the interstellar rock ‘Oumuamua, which passed through the center of our solar system in 2017. Neither exhibited technosignatures.

“If interstellar travel is possible, which we don’t know, and if other civilizations are out there, which we don’t know, and if they are motivated to build an interstellar probe, then some fraction greater than zero of the objects that are out there are artificial interstellar devices,” said Steve Croft, a research astronomer with the Berkeley SETI Research Center and Breakthrough Listen. “Just as we do with our measurements of transmitters on extrasolar planets, we want to put a limit on what that number is.”

Regardless of the kind of SETI search, Siemion said, Breakthrough Listen looks for electromagnetic radiation that is consistent with a signal that we know technology produces, or some anticipated signal that technology could produce, and inconsistent with the background noise from natural astrophysical events. This also requires eliminating signals from cellphones, satellites, GPS, internet, Wi-fi and myriad other human sources.

In Sheikh’s case, she turned the Green Bank telescope on each star for five minutes, pointed away for another five minutes and repeated that twice more. She then threw out any signal that didn’t disappear when the telescope pointed away from the star. Ultimately, she whittled an initial 1 million radio spikes down to a couple hundred, which she was able to eliminate as Earth-based human interference. The last four unexplained signals turned out to be from passing satellites.

Siemion emphasized that the Breakthrough Listen team intends to analyze all the data released to date and to do it systematically and often.

“Of all the observations we have done, probably 20% or 30% have been included in a data analysis paper,” Siemion said. “Our goal is not just to analyze it 100%, but 1000% or 2000%. We want to analyze it iteratively.”

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New technologies, strategies expanding search for extraterrestrial life

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mthrynn · 8 years ago

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President Trump’s proposed U.S. fiscal 2018 budget issued today sharply cuts science spending while bolstering military spending as he promised during the campaign. Among the big targets are National Institutes of Health ($6 billion cut from its $34 billion budget), the Department of Energy ($900 cut from DOE Office of Science and elimination of the $300 million Advanced Research Projects Agency), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (five percent cut) and Environmental Protection Agency ($2.6 billion cut or 31.4 percent of its budget).

Perhaps surprisingly, the National Science Foundation – a key funding source for HPC research and infrastructure – was not mentioned in the budget. Science was hardly the only target. The Trump budget closely adhered to the administration’s “America First” tenets slashing $10 billion from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Health and Human Services and Education are also targeted for cuts of 28.7 and 16.2 percent respectively.

One of the more thorough examinations of Trump’s proposed budget impact on science is presented in Science Magazine (NIH, DOE Office of Science face deep cuts in Trump’s first budget). The Wall Street Journal also offers a broad review of the full budget (Trump Budget Seeks Big Cuts to Environment, Arts, Foreign Aid) and noted the proposed budget faces bipartisan opposition and procedural hurdles:

“…Already, Republicans have voiced alarm over proposed funding cuts to foreign aid. In addition, Senate rules require 60 votes to advance the annual appropriations bills that set each department’s spending levels. Republicans control 52 Senate seats, meaning the new president will need support from Democrats to advance his domestic spending agenda.

“You don’t have 50 votes in the Senate for most of this, let alone 60,” said Steve Bell, a former GOP budget aide who is now a senior analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “There’s as much chance that this budget will pass as there is that I’m going to have a date with Elle Macpherson.”

A broad chorus of concern is emerging. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) posted its first take on President Trump’s budget. It cuts critical investment and eliminates vital programs, argues ITIF. The preliminary evidence suggests that the administration is taking its cues from a deeply flawed framework put forward by the Heritage Foundation.

Overall, ITIF says “The reality is that if the United States is going to successfully manage its growing financial problems and improve living standards for all Americans, it needs to increase its investment in the primary drivers of innovation, productivity, and competitiveness. The Trump budget goes in the opposite direction. If these cuts were to be enacted, they would signal the end of the American century as a global innovation leader.”

Two years ago, the National Strategic Computing Initiative (July 2015) was established by then President Obama’s executive order. It represents a grandly ambitious effort to nourish all facets of the HPC ecosystem in the U.S. That said, after initial fanfare, NSCI has seemed to languish although a major element – DOE’s Exascale Computing Program – continues marching forward. It’s not clear how the Trump Administration perceives NSCI and to a large degree no additional funding has been funneled into the program since its announcement.

The issuing of the budget closely follows the recent release and media coverage of a December 2016 DOE-NSA Technical Meeting report that declares underinvestment by the U.S. government in HPC and supercomputing puts U.S. computer technology leadership and national competitiveness at risk in the face of China’s steady ascent in HPC. (See HPCwire coverage, US Supercomputing Leaders Tackle the China Question)

The Department of Defense is one of the few winners in the proposed budget with a $53.2 billion jump (10 percent) in keeping with Trump campaign promises. At a top level, NASA is relatively unscathed but Science reports “At NASA, a roughly $100 million to cut to the agency’s earth sciences program would be mostly achieved by canceling four climate-related missions, according to sources. They are the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3; the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem program; the Deep Space Climate Observatory; and the CLARREO Pathfinder. Overall, NASA receives a 1% cut.”

Obviously, it remains early days for the budget battle. There have been suggestions that the proposed cuts, some especially deep, are part of a broad strategy by the Administration to settle for lesser cuts but stronger buy-in from Congress on other Trump policy initiatives.

Link to Science Magazine coverage: http://ift.tt/2mvHCix

Link to WSJ article: http://ift.tt/2mvmqcA

Link to Nature coverage: http://ift.tt/2mw4TQx

The post Trump Budget Targets NIH, DOE, and EPA; No Mention of NSF appeared first on HPCwire.

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