It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, July 13, 2021
Venus’ Surface Tectonics is More Like Pack ice on Earth
Planets move in mysterious ways. Or at least their surfaces do. Earth famously has a system of tectonic plates that drives the movement of its crust. Those plate tectonics are ultimately driven by the flow of material in the mantle – the layer directly below the crust. Now, scientists have found a slightly different deformation mechanic on our nearest sister planet – Venus.
The research, carried out by Dr. Paul Byrne of North Carolina State University and his colleagues, used data from NASA’s Magellan spacecraft which visited Venus back in the 90s. While orbiting the planet, the probe collected a radar map of its surface, which is obscured by a thick atmosphere at wavelengths visible to the human eye.
One of the most famous pictures generated from Magellan’s trip to Venus was this one of Maat Mons. This NASA Magellan image was released on April 22, 1992. Credit – NASA
In part of that radar map, the researchers noticed something interesting – a series of blocks where the crust of the planet (known as the “lithosphere”) looked like it had moved. This finding flew in the face of the convention wisdom of Venus, which held that Venus’ lithosphere was immobile.
As any good scientist knows, if the data disproves an old theory, a new theory is required. So the team set out modeling the deformation to see if they could figure out what might have caused it. The answer appears to be that he deformation is caused by the slow movement of the planet’s interior.
UT video discussing the surface of Venus.
What’s more, the researchers also think the process that caused these deformations might still be ongoing. Venus famously has active volcanoes that are another way its surface deforms itself. These volcanoes form lava plains, which are relatively young in geological terms. Some of those lava plains had evidence of the deformation in Magellan’s data, implying that, even after having been recently resurfaced due to volcanic activity, Venus’ lithosphere is deformed again by its active interior.
That active interior causes deformations that interact similarly to ice sheets that are broken up and jostled on top of each other. Sometimes those create even small ice sheets or jagged patterns, and the patterns that result from that jostling look similar to what the researcher saw on the lava plains of Venus.
UT video discussing what caused Venus to end up in the hellish state it is in.
Luckily they won’t be the last ones to look – a group of three new missions will be visiting our sister planet in the coming decades. They will sport new and improved sensors, including one (VERITAS) whose primary mission is to accurately map the planet’s surface. It will undoubtedly see the formations that Magellan found, but maybe higher resolution data will lead yet more insights.
People are dying. Aquatic animals are baking in their shells. Fruit is being cooked on the tree. It’s time to act
In April, California Gov. Gavin Newsom held a news conference in the parched basin of Lake Mendocino, where he announced a drought emergency for Mendocino and Sonoma counties. On July 8, Newsom added nine more counties to the state’s emergency proclamation. Photograph: Kent Porter/AP
Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.
This spring, when I saw theshockingly lowwater of Lake Powell, I thought that maybe this summer would be a turning point. At least for the engineering that turned the southwest’s Colorado River into a sort of plumbing system for human use, with two huge dams that turned stretches of a mighty river into vast pools of stagnant water dubbed Lake Powell, on the eastern Utah/Arizona border, and Lake Mead, in southernmost Nevada. It’s been clear for years that the overconfident planners of the 1950s failed to anticipate that, while they tinkered with the river, industrial civilization was also tinkering with the systems that fed it.
The water they counted on is not there. Lake Powell is at about a third of its capacity this year, and thanks to a brutal drought there was no great spring runoff to replenish it. That’s if “drought” is even the right word for something that might be the new normal, not an exception. The US Bureau of Reclamation is overdue to make a declaration that there is not enough water for two huge desert reservoirs and likely give up on Powell to save Lake Mead.
I got to see the drought up close when I spent a week in June floating down the Green River, the Colorado River’s largest tributary. The skies of southern Utah were full of smoke from the Pack Creek wildfire that had been burning since June 9 near Moab, scorching thousands of acres of desert and forest and incinerating the ranch buildings and archives of the legendary river guide and environmentalist Ken Slight (fictionalized as Seldom Seen Slim in Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang), now 91. Climate chaos destroys the past as well as the future. As of July 6, the fire is still burning.
It wasn’t just the huge plume of smoke that filled us with dread about the adventure to come; the weather forecast of daily temperatures reaching 106 F made living out of doors for a week seem daunting. Water level in the river was far lower than normal and due to drop a lot more; the temperature on our rafts and kayaks just above the water was tolerable – but as soon as you walked any distance from the river’s edge, the heat came at you as though you’d opened an oven door.
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We saw an unusual amount of wildlife on the trip too – mustangs, bighorn sheep, a lean black bear and her two cubs pacing the river’s edge – but any sense of wonder was tempered by the likelihood that thirst had driven them down from the drought-scorched stretches beyond the river. We need a new word for that feeling for nature that is love and wonder mingled with dread and sorrow, for when we see those things that are still beautiful, still powerful, but struggling under the burden of our mistakes.
Then came the heat dome over the Northwest, a story that didn’t appear to make the top headlines of many media outlets as it was happening. Much of the early coverage showed people in fountains and sprinklers as though this was just another hot day, rather than something sending people to hospitals in droves, killing hundreds (and likely well over a thousand) in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, devastating wildlife, crops, and domestic animals, setting up the conditions for wildfires, and breaking infrastructure designed for the holocene, not the anthropocene. It signified something much larger even than a crisis impacting a vast expanse of the continent: increasingly wild variations from the norm with increasing devastation that can and will happen anywhere. It seemed to get less coverage than the collapse of part of a single building in Florida.
A building collapsing is an ideal specimen of news, sudden and specific in time and place, and in the case of this one on the Florida coast, easy for the media to cover as a spectacle with straightforward causes and consequences. A crisis spread across three states and two Canadian provinces, with many kinds of impact, including untallied deaths, was in many ways its antithesis. There was a case to be made that climate change – in the form of rising saltwater intrusion – was a factor in the Florida building’s collapse, but climate change was far more dramatically present in the Pacific Northwest’s heat records being broken day after day and the consequences of that heat. In Canada the previous highest temperature was broken by eight degrees Fahrenheit, a big lurch into the dangerous new conditions human beings have made, and then most of the town in which that record was set burned down.
Later news stories focused on one aspect or another of the heat dome. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the heat wave may have killed more than a billion seashore animals living on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Lightning strikes in BC, generated by the heat, soared to unprecedented levels – inciting, by one account, 136 forest fires. The heat wave cooked fruit on the trees. It was a catastrophe with many aspects and impacts, as diffuse as it was intense. The sheer scale and impact were underplayed, along with the implications.
Political turning points are as manmade as climate catastrophe: we could have chosen to make turning points out of the western wildfires of the past four years – notably the incineration of the town of Paradise and more than 130 of its residents in 2018, but also last year’s California wildfires that included five of the six largest fires in state history. It could include the deluge that soaked Detroit with more than six inches of rain in a few hours last month or the ice storm in Texas earlier this year or catastrophic flooding in Houston (with 40 inches of rain in three days) and Nebraska in 2019 or the point at which the once-mythical Northwest Passage became real because of summer ice melt in the Arctic or the 118-degree weather in Siberia this summer or the meltwater pouring off the Greenland ice sheet.
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A turning point is often something you individually or collectively choose, when you find the status quo unacceptable, when you turn yourself and your goals around. George Floyd’s murder was a turning point for racial justice in the US. Those who have been paying attention, those with expertise or imagination, found their turning points for the climate crisis years and decades back. For some it was Hurricane Sandy or their own home burning down or the permafrost of the far north turning to mush or the IPCC report in 2018 saying we had a decade to do what the planet needs of us. Greta Thunberg had her turning point, and so did the indigenous women leading the Line 3 pipeline protests.
Summarizing the leaked contents of a forthcoming IPCC report, the Agence France-Presse reports: “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions […] Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas – these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30. The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds…”
The phrase “the choices societies make” is a clear demand for a turning point, a turning away from fossil fuel and toward protection of the ecosystems that protect us.
Every week I temper the terrible news from catastrophes such as wildfires and from scientists measuring the chaos by trying to put them in the context of positive technological milestones and legislative shifts and their consequences. You could call each of them a turning point: The point last week at which Oregon passed the bill setting the most aggressive clean electricity standards in the US, 100% clean by 2040. The point at which Scotland began getting more electricity from renewables than it could use. The point at which New York State banned fracking. The Paris Climate Treaty in 2015. Of course, as with the climate itself, many of the changes were incremental: the stunning drop in cost and rise in efficiency of solar panels over the past four decades, the myriad solar and wind farms that have been installed worldwide.
The rise in public engagement with the climate crisis is harder to measure. It’s definitely growing, both as an increasingly powerful movement and as a matter of individual consciousness. Yet something about the scale and danger of the crisis still seems to challenge human psychology. Along with the fossil fuel industry, our own habits of mind are something we must overcome.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence
Is Duterte squandering The Hague victory to appease Beijing?
Experts say China’s gains in South China Sea ‘impossible’ to reverse while urging the Philippines to boost military capability and alliances. Chinese President Xi Jinping greets his Philippine counterpart Rodrigo Duterte during the latter's visit to Beijing in 2019 [File: Kenzaburo Fukuhara/AFP]
In the days leading up to the fifth anniversary on Monday of The Hague’s 2016 ruling that rejected China’s historical claim to most of the disputed South China Sea, the Philippines’ often abrasive Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr sounded celebratory, hailing the occasion as “a milestone in the corpus of international law”.
“The Philippines is proud to have contributed to the international rules-based order,” he said of Manila’s role in challenging Beijing before the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
In a dig at China, Locsin said that the decision “dashed among others a nine-dash line; and any expectation that possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
Locsin then cited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s videotaped message at the UN General Assembly, in which the Filipino leader said the case was now “beyond compromise and beyond the reach of passing governments to dilute, diminish or abandon”.
But since taking office in 2016, Duterte has usually been less assertive – failing to challenge China’s moves to expand its maritime dominance in the region despite the landmark victory – and foreign policy experts said his “defeatist rhetoric” has compromised the country’s integrity and diminished its legal standing.
“Manila certainly missed a chance to echo a consistent unified narrative on its claims … which Beijing saw as an opportunity to flex its muscles and build the largest coast guard and maritime militia for its strategic advantage,” said Chester Cabalza, president and founder of Manila-based think-tank International Development and Security Cooperation
“Instead, Filipinos heard defeatist rhetoric from the commander-in-chief as he kept mum on continuous Chinese incursions into the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ),” he told Al Jazeera.
Collin Koh, research fellow at Singapore’s Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, said the Duterte administration “squandered the opportunity” in emphasising the significance of the decision “whether it ought to be doing it alone or in concert with like-minded external parties” such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the United States.
The ruling also affirmed the Philippines’ jurisdiction over its exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which stretches 200 nautical miles (370km) from its coast. As such, China’s fishing activities and construction of artificial islands within that area were deemed an infringement of Philippine sovereign rights. The Philippines refers to that particular area as the West Philippine Sea.
Moreover, the court ruled that of all disputed South China Sea features – even those controlled by Beijing – none were considered “habitable” and able to sustain economic activity in its original form, and therefore were not entitled to an EEZ – thus clearly falling within Philippine EEZ.
Protesters descend on the Chinese consulate in Manila in 2019 to oppose the Asian superpower’s growing sway in the Philippines, and as tensions rise over Beijing’s presence in the disputed South China sea [File: Ted Aljibe/AFP]To commemorate the ruling this year, Philippine Senator Risa Hontiveros has proposed that the country declare July 12 as the National West Philippine Sea Victory Day.
In a statement sent to Al Jazeera, she said Duterte’s predecessor, Benigno Aquino III – who died last month – should also be commended for his decision to take on China and secure a “landmark legal victory”.
“Even when the Philippines was going against the Goliath that is China, he pursued the case merely on the principle that it was the right thing to do.”
Protests are also expected on Monday outside China’s diplomatic mission in Manila.
Campaigning for the presidency in 2016, Duterte charmed voters with his hardline stance on China. In one campaign swing, he promised to ride a jet ski in the South China Sea and challenge the Chinese incursion in Philippine waters. He said he always wanted to die a hero.
But as soon as he became president, Duterte started to backpedal on his promises, saying the Philippines cannot afford to take on China because a confrontation would only lead to bloodshed.
In a Talk to Al Jazeera interview in October 2016, Duterte also said that his jet ski remark was a “hyperbole” and that he did not even know how to swim. He later said it was all “a joke” to show his “bravado”, and that only “stupid” people would believe it.
In a stunning admission in June 2019, Duterte said he had reached a verbal agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2016 allowing China to fish within the Philippines’s EEZ, despite a constitutional mandate that the state must protect its marine wealth, including its EEZ, and “reserve its use and enjoyment exclusively to Filipino citizens”.
In recent months, Chinese vessels, believed to be manned by Chinese maritime militia personnel, were seen in the South China Sea within the Philippines’ EEZ [File: Philippine Coast Guard/Handout via Reuters]“It was a mutual agreement,” Duterte explained. “Let’s give way to each other. You fish there, I fish here.”
In several public remarks, Duterte has emphasised that better relations with China have brought economic dividends to the Philippines, through direct investments, financial assistance and loans
Salvador Panelo, who was Duterte’s spokesman at the time, defended the deal saying that while it was “verbal” it was still “valid and binding”.
But Panelo’s replacement, Harry Roque, said this April that there was “no truth” to the deal and that it was “quite simply conjecture”.
“No such treaty or agreement exists between the Philippines and China,” Roque said, explaining that even a fishing agreement “can only be done through a treaty” and in “written form”.
The “swarming incident” has since been repeated several times, prompting several diplomatic protests by Manila, which denounced Beijing’s “blatant disregard” of its commitment “to promote peace and stability in the region”.
In May, the presence of hundreds of Chinese vessels so exasperated Locsin, the Philippines’ top diplomat, that he fired an expletive-laden statement on social media.
“China, my friend, how politely can I put it? Let me see… O… GET THE F*** OUT,” Locsin wrote on Twitter.
According to reports, Manila has filed more than 120 diplomatic protests with China over incidents in the disputed waters since 2016.
In recent months, he has said that he wants to maintain friendly ties with China, citing Manila’s “debt of gratitude” for Beijing’s help in providing coronavirus vaccines. He has also banned his Cabinet from speaking about the South China Sea, after key security and diplomatic officials criticised China for the swarming.
But despite Duterte’s efforts to cosy up to Beijing, observers say China has only been further “emboldened”, and the growing tension has now left Manila with no choice but to step up its action to assert its rightful place in the South China Sea.
Cabalza, the security analyst based in Manila, said that now is not the time for the Duterte administration to be “flip-flopping on foreign policy”, urging a “more strategic” approach that balances the country’s economic and security interests.
“China’s art of war and deception should not be taken for granted.”
He urged the Philippines to “fast-track” its military modernisation programme “to increase its presence in the aerial and maritime domains” and halt the Chinese incursions.
“If Manila seriously considers balanced and fearless engagement with Beijing, it needs to capacitate on strengthening a robust national security infrastructure that deals with China’s grey zone strategy and massive disinformation,” he said, adding that Manila should also continue filing diplomatic protests every time an incursion happens.
South China Sea ‘fait accompli’
Koh, the foreign affairs analyst from Singapore’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, also noted how the Philippines has lagged over the years in “building up the stick” in terms of military capacity to carry out “more vigorously” maritime patrols within its EEZ.
That could have been partly addressed by Manila if Duterte had not gone out of his way to gradually undermine its decades-long alliance with the US, Koh said. Since the beginning of his presidency, Duterte has shown his disdain towards the US, even making the unsubstantiated claim that he could be a target of the CIA.
“The open expression of desire to prioritise ties with Beijing – even at the expense of the 2016 award, the lack of political will to maintain persistent maritime presence and the alliance relationship with the US would have had the combined effect of emboldening Beijing,” he explained to Al Jazeera.
With the progress China made in fortifying its artificial islands in the South China Sea, it will be “impossible to even envisage” that it would “willingly relinquish those possessions” within the Philippines’ EEZ, Koh said.
“There’s no way to reverse the fait accompli short of evicting the Chinese from those artificial outposts by use of force, which would mean war.”
Without resorting to armed conflict, it is still possible for the Philippines to assert its maritime sovereignty and rights by putting “a principled and consistent stance” on the issue, Koh added.
He says the Philippines should pursue daily maritime law enforcement actions and patrols of its EEZ.
“The recent Philippine Coast Guard challenge and dispersal of Chinese and other foreign fishing vessels in the Philippine EEZ, around Sabina Shoal and Marie Louise Bank, is a good example,” Koh said.
“These actions may not compel China to reverse its acts in the South China Sea, but at the very least may help deter Beijing from thinking of more drastic actions to further undermine the status quo.”
In May, Chinese vessels also left Sabina Shoal, after the Philippines issued a radio challenge.
Hontiveros, an opposition senator and critic of Duterte’s South China Sea policy said the radio challenges showed that “the Philippines can assert our ownership of the West Philippine Sea without resorting to war.”
As a middle power caught in the increasingly heated rivalry between China and the US, the lesson for Manila is to pursue an independent foreign policy, according to Cabalza, the foreign affairs expert who has also studied at the National Defence University in Beijing
“Manila should choose its own national interest. It takes courage to depend on its own capability and build it with a vision to protect the country’s own sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
