Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

Dome at NEEM on the Greenland Icecap- courtesy NEEM

While the lower 48 bakes this summer, a group of 30 researchers are drilling a big hole in the ice at the top of the world. It’s all in the name of science. The North Greenland Eemian ice core project is not the first ice core to be drilled through the Greenland icecap. It may be the most important though.

Rewriting Earth’s Climate History

Earlier cores have rewritten the climate text books. This core will likely do the same. Especially, if the group at NEEM are lucky enough to get a good core of ice from the Eemian.

The Eemian is the name for the warm period BEFORE the last ice age. Knowing how the climate behaved then, and in the transition to the ice last ice age, will tell us a lot about what we are facing in the future.

VOSTOK Ice Core showing the temperature over the last 500,000 years. The temperature data was derived using oxygen isotopes.

Playing With Fire and Ice

We are without doubt fiddling with the Earth’s thermostat. In spite of what you may think, the ice cores and sediment cores we have already tell us that our climate is not nearly as stable as written human history would indicate.

The last ten thousand years have been very unusual. The climate has been very benign and stable. Brian Fagan wrote a book about this period called “The Long Summer”.

Look at the data from previous ice cores. The Vostok ice core from Antarctica shows very well how stable the last 10,000 years have been and how unstable the previous 500,000 years before it were! The red line in the graphic shows a very stable climate for the past 10,000 years. Before that the climate is a roller coaster.

The Lines Go Up and Down Together For A Reason

You can also see how closely related to temperature the amount of carbon dioxide and methane (CH4) are. Both of these gases are called greenhouse gases and they act to magnify greatly any minor warming from changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun.

There is a growing acceptance among evolutionary biologists that the reason our African ancestors evolved much larger brains is climate related. The changing climate that kicked in about 3 million years ago forced it. NOVA did an especially interesting program on this in 2009.

Oxygen isotope record from two Greenland Ice Cores called GRIP and North GRIP. The stable climate called the Long summer is clearly visible from the left of the graph until about 10,000 ybp. The NEEM drill site is hoping to get higher resolution data back in the Eemian (115-130K ybp)

You might be wondering (and you should be) just how it is possible to tell what the temperature and levels of CO2 were in the atmosphere from an ice core? The answers lie in bubbles and isotopes.

The Technical Bit

The ice in these cores contain bubbles of gas that are filled with the air at around the time the snow fell. These bubbles actually disappear in the deeper core as the gas bubbles get merged into the ice. The gases are still detectable and readable though.

Oxygen comes in two main forms O18 has two extra neutrons but it's still Oxygen. Image from NASA. NASA has a detailed explanation of how this fact is used to measure temperatures thousands of years ago.

The temperature can be obtained by looking at the ratio of two types of Oxygen. Oxygen has 8 protons in each atom. That is why it’s called Oxygen. The oxygen we breath is actually O2 which is two atoms of Oxygen bonded together. O2 has 16 protons and 16 Neutrons. However, a very tiny percentage of oxygen that you breath has 2 extra neutrons.

This is not a big deal as your body thinks it is oxygen and it really is. It still has 16 protons and that’s all that counts. Atoms of the same element that have differing numbers of neutrons are called ISOTOPES. Oxygen has O16 and O18 isotopes.

O18 is 12.5% heavier than the usual O16 molecule. The heavier molecule falls out in rain or snow more quickly. How quickly is dependent on temperature and this means you can measure the ratio of O16 to O18 in the ice core and deduce the temperature of the ocean the snow evaporated from! Click the rotating molecules for a more detailed explanation.

Cocktail Party Advice From Dan

So, next time you hear someone say something like “How could they possibly know what the temperature was like 50,000 years ago”, you can tell them. If my experience is any guide, you will just get a mean look.

CFA lab at NEEM- image ctsy. NEEM

Continuous Flow Analyzer

At NEEM this year, they are using a device called a continuous flow analyzer to measure the properties of the ice core. This is very helpful. It lets them know in near real time about what the age of the ice they are pulling up from the drill is. Only a part of the ice core is used for this. Much of the core will be kept intact and used for research for many years.

Dave Jones, the President of Storm Center Communications, has asked me to go up to the ice sheet and help tell the story. Dave is a Meteorologist. Those of you in the Washington DC area may remember him from WRC – TV a few years back.  His company is heavily involved in showing real science to a wider world.

The folks at NEEM will reach bedrock in a week or so. There is rock beneath all that ice. Those rocks have not seen the light of day for well over 100,000 years and probably much longer.

I may get to see some of those rocks come into the sunshine of the 21st century in person. I will leave for NEEM Monday.

It should be quite an adventure, and I will take plenty of pictures.

Some amazing video from NASA today. It was from a camera on the solid rocket booster during the launch of Atlantis last week. I think the second clip here is the best. Watch the clock and notice how quickly the sky changes from the bright blue of a spring day in Florida to the black of space.

Less than two minutes.

The layer of air surrounding our planet is frightfully thin. Yet, it’s all that protects us from the harsh radiation and vacuum that is our universe.

Ok, I know I shot myself in the foot with that title.

Geek books! Run!

Well, this post is for my steady readers then

I’m finishing two of the best popular science (aka science for the masses) books I have read in quite awhile. I actually love reading these type of books, because a really good expert can make me understand something you already know in a much better way. Both of these books have done that and more.

The first one is by Dr. James Hansen. The title is “Storms Of My Grandchildren”

In case you do not know, he is the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences. NASA GISS is where NASA put the scientists who are too smart for NASA. That’s saying something.

It was James Hansen who told the world in the late 1980’s that climate change would overcome the natural day to day, and month to month fluctuations of our atmosphere,  and become very noticeable by the early 21st century.

He was dead on.

His book is a mix of very well explained climate science and the insider view of dealing with politicians from both sides of the political spectrum. The science interests me much more than the politics, but I am sure many others will feel just the opposite.

I always enjoy reading Hansen’s published papers. He has a distinctive down home style that one does not often see in the peer reviewed literature. Many papers are written such that only those who are working on a particular specific problem can casually read. Not Hansen’s. Anyone with a background in the field can see what he is getting at right away. I guess I’m saying that he doesn’t write between the lines!

It’s available for Kindle and iPad as well.

The other book is by my new favorite living Physicist. Brian Cox of the UK. I wrote a post about his fabulous series on the BBC last month called “Wonders of the Solar System“. It was, in my humble opinion, the first show on science that has  surpassed Car Sagan’s COSMOS.

His book is WHY E=M C (Square).

If you think relativity is to complex to understand, then try this book. Nothing more difficult than 8th grade algebra.

Really.

REALLY!

Here is a little teaser.

Let’s say you left Earth in a spacecraft and accelerated constantly at one g (One g is the gravity you feel on Earth) for ten years then turned around and decelerated at one g for ten years, and then came home to Earth the same way.  How long would you be gone?

40 years right??

To you yes.

When you got back to Earth it would be 59,000 years later here.

Humans one day WILL travel to the future. There is just no going back!

Brian Cox covers everything from Relativity to Feynman diagrams. If you couldn’t get through Stephen Hawking’s Brief History Of Time, then you should really try this. (I know physicists who could not get through Hawking’s book!)

You can read this book on your iPhone/iPad or Kindle too.

Later,
Dan

View of the Iceland ash cloud taken Saturday midday by NASA Terra Satellite. Click image for full res.

The winds aloft are blowing the ash mainly over the Atlantic today.

Wind flow at around 18,000 feet (500hpk) for Midnight Sunday. NOAA Numerical Weather model (GFS). (The red and blue shading is vorticity-weather geek stuff, just look at the black lines and my arrow toward the UK.)

Some of it is rotating around an upper level low and causing problems in Spain. The wind flow in the mid levels of the atmosphere will blow it more toward the UK and Europe starting late Sunday.  Heathrow and Gatwick could very well be affected.

The ash is up to around 5,000 meters today. Transatlantic flights can get above it. If it gets higher (above 30,000 feet), then more widespread disruptions are likely.

The same satellite also passed over the Gulf just before Noon. It got a great shot of the oil.

See below.

Oil slick is visible at the middle bottom of the pic. Click image for full resolution.

Late word tonight is that the attempt to put a cover over it has failed. Ice is forming in it.

This is probably from the sudden drop in pressure as the oil escapes the sea bed. The tremendous pressure differences between the sub surface and the sea bed are likely involved. The same differences in pressure from the sea floor to the surface will also make this EXTREMELY difficult.

You can demonstrate this to yourself by rapidly letting the air out of your car tires while holding onto the valve. Feel how cold it gets??

Dan

NASA MODIS Satellite pass over the Iceland Volcano today. Huge ash cloud visible but it is not being blown toward Europe (as of now at least). Click image for much higher resolution.

The upper level winds are not blowing the ash toward the UK today and that is very good news. If they were, there would be widespread cancellations of flights. The cloud is especially thick.

One way to see the ash is to use a little trick. By looking at the brightness (temp.) difference between two channels on the image, the ash shows up very well. This is an animated gif, and will take awhile to load.

The good news is that late today the eruption has become much quieter and the ash is not as high as earlier.

Geological experts in Iceland are reporting that there are no signs the eruption will end anytime soon.

Sensors on most of the weather satellites are not really designed to see the ash. There has been a lot of work recently to use the available sensors to see as much as possible. The best way to see it is to use LIDAR. This is a form of radar using lasers. The UK Met office has had considerable luck using this from the ground to look at the ash cloud over the UK.

This event and the oil slick in the Gulf highlight the incredible usefulness of using remote sensing instruments in orbit. They pay for themselves many times over. The USA and Europe have fallen behind in putting these sensors on orbital platforms.

The technology is there, we just need to use it.

Here below is the latest view of the oil slick in the Gulf. Keep in mind you are only seeing the heaviest patch of oil. It is much more widespread than it appears.

True colour image from NASA's Aqua satellite. The thickest oil shows up well. It now appears the oil slick has moved west of the mouth of the Mississippi. Click image for much bigger view.

The movement of both the ash and the oil are very dependent on the atmospheric winds. The winds may start blowing the ash back toward Europe next week. The oil is much more difficult to predict…

Dan