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Monday, February 20, 2023

Warming seas are carving into glacier that could trigger sea level rise

New research provides a startling look at how warmer

oceans, driven by climate change, are gouging the

West Antarctic’s Thwaites Glacier

By Chris Mooney

Updated February 15, 2023

A robot called the Icefin operates under the sea ice near McMurdo Station, an Antarctic research station. (Schmidt-Lawrence/NASA PSTAR RISE UP)

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Rapidly warming oceans are cutting into the underside of the Earth’s widest glacier, startling new data and images show, leaving the ice more prone to fracturing and ultimately heightening the risk for major sea level rise.

Using an underwater robot at Thwaites Glacier, researchers have determined that warm water is getting channeled into crevasses in what the researchers called “terraces” — essentially, upside-down trenches — and carving out gaps under the ice. As the ice then flows toward the sea, these channels enlarge and become spots where the floating ice shelf can break apart and produce huge icebergs. If the remaining shelf is further undermined, Thwaites Glacier will flow into the ocean faster and boost global sea levels on a large scale.

A team deploys the Icefin at Thwaites Glacier in January 2020. (Andrew Mullen/International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration)

Underwater video taken of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica in January 2020 shows carvings of potential break points beneath the glacier. (Video: International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration)

The results from overlapping teams of more than two dozen scientists, published Wednesday in two papers in the journal Nature, reveal the extent to which human-caused warming could destabilize glaciers in West Antarctica that could ultimately raise global sea level by 10 feet if they disintegrate over the coming centuries.

Scientists with the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a historic scientific collaboration organized by the United States and the United Kingdom, arrived at one of the safest spots to land on the West Antarctic behemoth in 2019 and 2020, and used hot water to drill through nearly 2,000 feet of ice to the ocean below.

Here, in a region known as the eastern ice shelf, they deployed an ocean sensor at the base of the floating ice shelf and sent down an 11-foot-long pen-shaped robot called Icefin. The vessel collected data and images in an environment in which warm ocean water, in some places more than 2 degrees Celsius above the local freezing point, is weakening the glacier.

The biggest revelation was that the ice melt is very uneven, with relatively slow loss in flat areas on the underside of the glacier. But the warm water entering Thwaites Glacier’s crevasses poses a serious threat, according to Britney Schmidt, a Cornell University scientist who is the lead researcher behind Icefin and deployed it with a group of 12 other researchers who encamped on the ice.

“The warm water is getting into the weak spots of the glacier, and kind of making everything worse,” Schmidt said.

“It shouldn’t be like that,” Schmidt continued. “That’s not what the system would look like if it wasn’t being forced by climate change.”

The new observations emerge from what is the very definition of an extreme environment. In this part of Thwaites Glacier — perhaps its most stable region — 1,900-foot-thick ice lifts upward from the seafloor and spreads over the ocean. Where the ice first departs from the seafloor is called the “grounding line” — the three-dimensional intersection of ice, ocean and bedrock. Outward from there, the floating ice creates a dark cavity that warm seawater and some fish can enter — but that humans cannot.

The Icefin underwater robot was deployed beneath the Thwaites Glacier in Antartica in January 2020 to measure ice melt beneath the surface of the glacier. (Video: International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration)

That’s why the observations from Icefin — which scientists pulled back up the borehole after the experiments and can be deployed again — are so unprecedented and revealing. “That’s the first time we’ve had data from that kind of environment, for Thwaites or any other glacier,” Schmidt said.

They give breathtaking details of what it looks like beneath the glacier.

Near the grounding line, video from the robot shows an underside of the ice that is dark and grainy because seafloor mud and sediment is frozen into it. Further downstream, the robot observed sand and pebbles falling out of the ice as it melted.

Within the crevasses and terraces, the robot captured video of scalloped side walls that resemble a round coffered ceiling.

“The technical achievement of getting this amazing range of data in a very difficult environment, and getting out safely, is just wonderful,” said Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State who was not directly involved in the research.

The unique data and images come from what is arguably the most important ocean-facing glacier of them all — at least so far as humans are concerned.

The Icefin at Kamb Ice Stream after being pulled from the water. (Schmidt-Lawrence/NASA PSTAR RISE UP)

Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier in 2019. (Jeremy Harbeck/OIB/NASA)

Thwaites is some 80 miles across and is the exit point for an area of ice larger than Florida. It is, essentially, the heart of West Antarctica, so large that if lost, it could be replaced only by a new Thwaites Sea.

Thwaites has been losing ice at an accelerating pace, based on data provided by Eric Rignot, one of the studies’ co-authors, at the University of California at Irvine.

The rate of loss overall since 1979 has been a little less than 20 billion tons per year, but that has increased to more than 40 billion tons since 2010, according to the data Rignot provided.

“This robot is getting to the hard places where we need to go to understand the future of the continent,” Rignot said. “We cannot understand what we cannot observe and measure.”

The terraced and scalloped features are generally not included in the simulations, or models, which attempt to forecast what the all-important Thwaites Glacier system will do in the future, the new research noted.

That’s critical because as the ice flows outward over the ocean — that is why this part of the glacier is called an ice shelf — crevasses that begin at the grounding line grow and develop over the course of this motion.

“This melting that starts right at the grounding line in crevasses is really important for what happens downstream,” Schmidt said. “Downstream, where it’s falling apart, these crevasses become these giant features.”

In the main trunk of Thwaites — where the seafloor is deeper and the glacier’s movement much faster, and which is difficult to safely reach — the floating ice shelf has largely collapsed. In the calmer eastern region, where the research took place, it is still intact but features large cracks.

In both regions, the grounding line of the glacier is retreating toward the center of Antarctica. And in both regions the glacier is out of balance, meaning it is getting thinner, and losing more ice to the ocean than is being replaced by flow from the inland parts of Antarctica.

A borehole drilling site on the Thwaites Glacier is seen in 2022. (Peter Davis/British Antarctic Survey)

When it comes to the Icefin robot, “my hope is that we will have a chance to take it to [the] main trunk of Thwaites, which is harder to get to, but also more important (deeper, warmer, moving faster, etc.),” Rignot said in an email. “These studies show it can be done and that we learn enormously from it.”

There was some good news in the research: In areas measured beneath Thwaites that were not characterized by crevasses and terraces, the melt rates were fairly slow. That’s because cold fresh meltwater created a protective layer that insulated the ice from the warmer water below — which could mix up into the crevasses but was thwarted in the more linear environment. Thus, nearly a third of melting occurred in the crevasses, the scientists calculated.

And the slower melt rate outside of them is not much consolation, considering that this slow rate may not be characteristic of the faster-changing part of Thwaites, and at any rate does not change the fact that the glacier is losing ice and retreating.

“What the results show is that you don’t need a large increase in melting to drive rapid retreat,” said Peter Davis, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey who led a second paper published with Schmidt’s by a largely overlapping team of scientists. “You just need to shift it out of equilibrium.”

Scientists consulted by The Washington Post had different readings of what the new research means for our overall understanding of what Thwaites Glacier will do to coastlines in our coming lifetimes.

For Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, the results from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration dampen somewhat the fear of catastrophic collapse of the glacier any time soon. It is retreating and that may not be stoppable, Scambos said, but the pace will still be manageable in coming decades.

“While we might see only a moderate add-on to sea level rise in the next 50 years, the processes are real, and the triggers for accelerating the collapse are bound to occur,” he said. “But we have also seen how to apply the brakes, what parts of the climate and ocean system are the main drivers, and what makes them drive. … We have some time to get this under control. Otherwise, the century of our grandchildren’s children will be very, very difficult.”

Alley, the glaciologist at Penn State, had a somewhat different overall outlook — that at least we are finally learning how these gigantic glaciers work.

“Overall, these papers don’t really change my level of worry about Thwaites collapse or not,” Alley said. “But the papers increase my optimism that we can make sense of this incredibly difficult and important system, and improve our ability to project what it may do in the future.”

EPA draft: US greenhouse gas emissions saw record single-year spike in 2021

BY ZACK BUDRYK - 02/15/23

A flare burns off methane and other hydrocarbons as oil pumpjacks operate in the Permian Basin in Midland, Texas, Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions rose 5.5 percent in 2021 from the previous year, an all-time year-over-year spike, but were still below 2019 levels, according to a draft Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report.

In the draft of its annual inventory, the agency found total emissions of 6,347.7 million metric tons in 2021, driven largely by increased auto emissions as driving rebounded in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fossil fuel combustion-related emissions increased 7 percent relative to the year before, while emissions from coal consumption rose 14.6 percent.

Emissions in 2021 mark a 2 percent decline from 1990, when the EPA began tracking them, and nearly 18 percent down from 2007, when they reached their recorded peak.

The EPA found that 2020 saw a record drop in emissions as economic activity largely halted during the initial wave of pandemic restrictions that began in the spring of that year, with emissions falling 8.9 percent.

Fossil fuel combustion comprised the vast majority of carbon dioxide emissions in 2021, at around 92.1 percent. Electric power demand also increased 2.1 percent from 2020 to 2021, for an overall emissions increase of 7.1 percent.

Despite the sharp increase compared to 2020, 2021 emissions from fossil fuel consumption were down 1.3 percent from 2019, part of a longer decline, while emissions from electric power were down 4 percent from 2019 to 2021, according to the EPA.

The EPA inventory also found that methane emissions comprised 11.5 percent of emissions in 2021. While methane emissions are less common than carbon dioxide and have a shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than other greenhouse gases, they trap more heat in the atmosphere.

Methane emissions, like those from carbon dioxide, have seen a longer-term decline, with emissions down 16.3 percent between 1990 and 2021, according to the EPA inventory.

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel will testify before Senate next month on Covid vaccine price hike

PUBLISHED WED, FEB 15 20232:
Spencer Kimball @SPENCEKIMBALL

KEY POINTS

Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate health committee, confirmed in a statement that Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel will testify on the company’s plans to increase the price of its Covid vaccine.

Sanders, in a letter to Bancel last month, slammed the proposed price hike for the vaccine as “outrageous” given that the vaccine was developed in cooperation with the National Institutes of Health using taxpayer money.

Moderna said Wednesday that it will offer the vaccine to the uninsured at no cost through a patient assistance program

Moderna CEO, Stephane Bancel attends 2019 Forbes Healthcare Summit at the Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 05, 2019 in New York City.
Steven Ferdman | Getty Images

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel will testify before the Senate health committee in March over the company’s price for its Covid-19 vaccine when the shots are sold on the private market.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the health panel, confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that Bancel would appear at a hearing titled: “Taxpayers Paid Billions For It: So Why Would Moderna Consider Quadrupling the Price of the COVID Vaccine?”

Bancel will testify at 10 a.m. ET on March 22.

The Moderna CEO stirred controversy last month when he said the company could increase the price of the shots to $110 to $130 a dose, significantly higher than the $26 the U.S. government pays for the omicron boosters. Sanders sent a letter to the CEO calling the proposed price hike “outrageous.”

Moderna, in a statement Wednesday, said it will provide the vaccines to the uninsured at no cost through a patient assistance program.

“For uninsured or underinsured people, Moderna’s patient assistance program will provide COVID-19 vaccines at no cost,” the company said.

Sanders, in a letter to Bancel last month, slammed the proposed price hike as “outrageous” because the vaccine was developed in cooperation with the National Institutes of Health using taxpayer money.

“I find your decision particularly offensive given the fact that the vaccine was jointly developed in partnership with scientists from the National Institutes of Health, a U.S. government agency that is funded by U.S. taxpayers,” Sanders wrote to Bancel.

Sanders said raising the vaccine price would have a negative effect on the budgets of Medicare and Medicaid and will increase private health insurance premiums, but he said the uninsured would feel the greatest impact.

“Perhaps most significantly, the quadrupling of prices will make the vaccine unavailable for millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans who will not be able to afford it,” Sanders said. “How many of these Americans will die from Covid-19 as a result of limited access to these lifesaving vaccines?”

Bancel sold more than $400 million in company stock from the start of the pandemic through March 2022. The Covid vaccine is currently Moderna’s only commercially available product.

The federal government has guaranteed free Covid vaccines for everyone in the country regardless of insurance status since the shots rolled out in December 2020. The vaccines will remain free for people who have Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance under the Affordable Care Act even after the federal Covid immunization program ends.

The U.S. still has 120 million omicron boosters that haven’t been used. The uninsured will continue to have access to these shots for free, but it’s unclear how long the supply will last.

When the federal supply runs out, uninsured adults may have to pay the full price for the shots. The White House has said it is developing plans to help.

There is a free federal vaccine program for children whose families or caretakers can’t afford the shots.

3D-printed organs may soon be a reality. ‘Looking ahead, we’ll not need donor hearts’

BYCAROLYN BARBER
February 15, 2023

Wake Forest scientists are 3D-printing tissues and mini-organs that mimic some of the functional properties of our own natural tissues.
COURTESY OF WFIRM

Last year, in San Antonio, Texas, Dr. Arturo Bonilla carefully implanted an outer ear on a 20-year-old woman born without one. The ear on the woman’s right side, had been constructed in the size and shape of her left.

For Bonilla, a pediatric microtia surgeon (a doctor who treats birth defects of the ear) for more than 25 years and a recognized expert in the field, such a procedure would normally be routine. But this case had a twist: For the first time, the ear he was implanting was the product of a 3D bioprinter using the woman’s own cartilage cells.

The implant procedure, Bonilla told me, was “very uneventful.” It is a vast understatement, all things considered.

From the realm of near-fiction to the germ of an idea to actual science, 3D bioprinting is advancing across all aspects of medical research—and, now, practice. The pace is slow, and target dates for some of the most ambitious 3D plans are decades off. But progress is real.

“I think that in 10 years we will have organs for transplantation,” says professor Tal Dvir, director of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine at Tel Aviv University in Israel. “We will start with simple organs like skin and cartilage, but then we’ll move on to more complicated tissues—eventually the heart, liver, kidney.”

The future of 3D bioprinting

It sounds fantastical, but it’s already happening. Multilayered skin, bones, muscle structures, blood vessels, retinal tissue and even mini-organs all have been 3D printed. While none of the printed products are yet approved for human use, the race up the scientific timeline is breathtaking—and Bonilla’s ear procedure, the first 3D bioprint from live cells to be implanted in a human, marks a significant moment along that progression.

Researchers in Poland bioprinted a functional prototype of a pancreas in which stable blood flow was achieved in pigs during an observed two-week period, according to a 2022 abstract and Dr. Michal Wszola, creator of Bionic Pancreas. United Therapeutics Corporation has 3D printed a human lung scaffold with 4,000 kilometers of capillaries and 200 million alveoli (tiny air sacs) that are capable of oxygen exchange in animal models—a critical step toward creating tolerable, transplantable human lungs with the goal of being cleared for human trials within five years.

At Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, scientists have developed a mobile skin bioprinting system. In the not-too-distant future, they anticipate being able to roll the printer right to the bedside of a patient suffering from a non-healing wound, such as a burn, then scan and measure the wound area and 3D print skin, layer by layer, directly onto the wound surface. And they’ve gone deeper, 3D printing skeletal muscle constructs that have been shown to contract in rodents and regain more than 80% of previously lost muscular function in an anterior leg muscle within eight weeks.

Dvir’s own lab has produced a 3D-printed “rabbit-sized” heart, as he puts it, replete with cells, chambers, the major blood vessels and a heartbeat. Full scale human hearts, the professor notes, require the same basic technology, although the process of scaling up is vastly complicated. “We’re now working on the pacemaker cells, the atrial cells, the ventricular cells,” Dvir says. “But it looks good. I believe this is the future.”

How 3D bioprinting works

Multilayered skin, bones, muscle structures, blood vessels, retinal tissue and even mini-organs all have been 3D printed. None are approved for human use yet.
COURTESY OF WFIRM

The ability to 3D print human organs is an astounding notion. Nearly 106,000 Americans are currently on waiting lists for organ donations, and 17 die each day while waiting, according to the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. A 3D printing process that uses the patient’s own cells to grow organs would not only potentially curb that waiting list, but dramatically reduce the chances of organ rejection and likely eliminate the need for harmful life-long immunosuppressive medication.

“The ability to place different cell types in precise locations to build up a complex tissue, and the capability of integrating blood vessels that can deliver the necessary oxygen and nutrients to keep cells alive, are two (3D) techniques that are revolutionizing tissue engineering,” says Mark Skylar-Scott, an assistant professor in the Stanford University department of bioengineering. “The field has moved very quickly over the past two decades, from printed bladders to now highly cellular tissues with vessels that can be connected to a pump—and complex 3D models that resemble heart components with integrated heart cells.”

In 3D bioprinting, the name of the game is cells. The process begins by generating the cells that researchers want to bioprint, which are then instructed to become organ specific cell types. The cells are then rendered into a printable living ink, or bioink, that involves mixing them with materials like gelatin or alginate to give them a toothpaste-like consistency. Stanford’s lab is studying how stem cells might naturally form such a consistency if crammed together at high density, which could lead to 3D printed organs made strictly from a patient’s own cells.

The bioink is loaded into syringes and squeezed out of a nozzle “like icing on a cake,” Skylar-Scott says. This is the actual 3D bioprinting process, and it typically involves laying down different cell types, each loaded into a different nozzle. (Dvir says the mini-heart took about four hours to print.) Once it is finished, the tissue is sometimes connected to a pump that drives oxygen and nutrients through it. Given time, the tissue develops on its own and increases in both maturity and function.

That general process, though dramatically oversimplified here, is what led to the production of the external part of the ear that Arturo Bonilla implanted in his patient in Texas. In most previous microtia surgeries, Bonilla would have carved a new ear out of cartilage taken from the patient’s ribs. Instead, a small biopsy was performed on the patient’s other ear and cartilage cells taken from the biopsy were grown into billions of cells, which were 3D-printed into the new implant.

“As with any study, there will likely be iterations in future patients in order to try to improve this technique,” Bonilla says. “We are unsure when this will be the mainstay treatment, but the future is very exciting.”

Advantages of 3D printing

3D bioprinting enables scientists to more precisely engineer tissues.
COURTESY OF WFIRM

Wake Forest scientists have been lab growing organs and tissues for years. They’ve used 3D printing to create in the laboratory essentially a mini-kidney and a mini-liver. The next challenge: larger, solid structures that more fully mimic organ function. “We are far from achieving this goal at organ scale,” says Jennifer Lewis, Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering, at Harvard University.

“We’ve been able to print flat structures like skin, tubular structures like blood vessels or hollow, non-tubular organs like a bladder,” says Anthony Atala, founding director of the Wake Forest Institute. The larger solid organs are different, Atala says, “because of the challenge with the vascularity or the nutrition. There’s so many cells per centimeter.”

In some ways with cell production, it’s a matter of quality. Scientists have been able to create a heart cell from stem cells, but not one that beats as strongly as your heart cells do. The same is true for liver cells (metabolism) and kidney cells (filtrate uptake). “In some ways,” Skyler-Scott says, “the 3D bioprinting field is waiting on the basic biologists to make their major breakthroughs.”

There’s also the issue of quantity. The creation of a heart would require “billions of cells – and you need different cells, even different cardiac cells,” says Tal Dvir. To make enough cells for a single organ, a facility would need a 10-liter stirred vat that might cost $5,000 per day to feed, for months on end according to Skyler-Scott. And the ultimate goal is thousands of organs a month, not one.

Beyond all that, there are the questions of how the tissue integrates into the body and how it is supported by the body, including complex networks of blood vessels, nerves and multiple cell types, says Dan Cohen, CEO and co-founder of 3D Bio Therapeutics. “It’s not to say it can’t be done,” says Cohen, who began working in the field of bioprinting 20 years ago, when it didn’t have a formal name. “I have a lot of hope for bioprinting and regenerative medicine more broadly.”

Even in the short term, progress is well marked. Researchers at Harvard, Lewis says, generated cardiac cells from human pluripotent stem cells, then seeded them on a bioengineered chip with integrated sensors that can track the beating tissue. This 3D-printed-heart-on-a-chip can be used to test various cardiac drugs for potentially toxic side effects and may alleviate the need for animal testing.(A similar ALS-on-a-chip technology is being used to screen for drug candidates and to better understand the underlying mechanisms of that disease.)

“The 3D printer gives you several advantages,” says Wake Forest’s Atala. “The first is scale-up, because instead of making these (tissues and organs) by hand one at a time, you can automate the printer to do it. The second thing is precision. We can more precisely locate the cells where they’re needed.”

There’s also the notion of lower overall cost, as 3D printing allows for that increased scale. There is what Atala calls “reproducibility,” a method of producing the same structure again and again. And in terms of organ transplant, a new organ made of a patient’s own cells makes rejection far less likely.

Most researchers put the idea of full-sized 3D-printed organ transplantation in humans at somewhere between 20 and 30 years away. “Eventually, looking ahead, we’ll not need donor hearts. We’ll not need livers,” Dvir says. “This is my opinion, and I’m optimistic, but I think that in less than 20 years we will have printed organs inside us.” That is science at work, not science fiction.

General Atomics signs 3D printing agreement with automotive-focused startup Divergent

For something like a small UAS, “instead of taking years to develop [a design] it takes months, and instead of taking weeks to manufacture by laying out carbon fiber, we take hours to assemble," Divergent CEO Kevin Czinger told Breaking Defense.

By AARON MEHTA

on February 15, 2023

A General Atomics drone model at the AFA 2022 Air, Space and Cyber Conference. (Justin Katz/Breaking Defense)

WASHINGTON — Seeking cheaper, faster production for its unmanned vehicles, General Atomics plans to announce this week a new agreement with commercial automotive 3D printing firm Divergent Technologies, Breaking Defense has learned.

Divergent isn’t known in defense circles, but the company has made inroads in the commercial automotive industry. The startup has signed agreements with a number of car companies, and this year will have parts on the road in Aston Martin vehicles; it has gotten writeups in the New York Times and Forbes. Divergent founder Kevin Czinger has also launched his own line of 3D-printed supercars as a proof-of-concept. The company has raised roughly $700 million through series D funding.

Reached by phone today, Czinger confirmed the agreement with General Atomics. The goal, Czinger said, is for Divergent’s production process to take GA’s existing designs and use additive manufacturing to cut the process down dramatically in both time and cost.

“For example, their structure with fasteners is about 140 pieces for a small unmanned aerial system. We’re taking it down to four, by integrating different structures into the printed structure that we design, manufacture and assemble,” he said. “All of that is done in an automated way. “

For something like a small UAS, “instead of taking years to develop [a design], it takes months, and instead of taking weeks to manufacture by laying out carbon fiber, we take hours to assemble.”

While additive manufacturing is hardly a new technology, Czinger cites nearly 550 patented technologies as part of his technology stack, and claims the company’s production is “15-30 times faster than the fastest state of the art machine” available elsewhere.

Reached for comment, GA spokesman C. Mark Brinkley declined to discuss the Divergent agreement directly. But he did highlight the company’s September announcement of a new Additive Design and Manufacturing Center of Excellence as proof the company is a “disruptor” of traditional practices.

“We believe digital manufacturing and 3-D printing technologies can provide a revolutionary leap forward in next-generation UAS development, and produce fast, impressive results at the lowest cost,” Brinkley said in a statement. “Integrating best-in-class technologies into our process is critical to that effort, and we hope to make some announcements on partnerships in the very near future.”

Teaming with Divergent could have obvious benefits for GA, both as a way to drive down costs on existing systems and as it keeps pace with the global demand for unmanned aerial vehicles — including the upcoming competition for the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. The CCA effort, currently under development, is envisioned as a set of semi-autonomous, attritable drones designed to accompany next-generation fighter jets. The competition for those next-generation drones could begin in fiscal year 2024, Breaking Defense has reported.

In realistic terms, “attritable” means the system has to be cheap and easy to manufacture, because you expect to lose them during operations. While it’s unclear if CCA was a consideration in the partnership planning, if Czinger’s 3D printing can do what he claims, that would clearly fit the mold.

Another potential benefit, Czinger said, is his confidence that it would be easy to set up a Divergent printing system out in the field.

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It would take “weeks” to set up an assembly cell — a hexagonal structure about 22 meters wide — outside the US, which could then begin printing small UAV structures just about anywhere. While the payloads would still need to be assembled and loaded on by traditional methods, a field-production capability has long been the dream of 3D printing advocates. Czinger also pointed out that being downrange with such a setup means that military users could see how a UAV design was performing in the field, take that data in and quickly adjust the design as needed to counter enemy defensive systems.

Notably, Czinger said, he expects the defense and aerospace industry to become a “very significant market” for his company, which is part of the reason he recruited former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Peter Pace to sit on the company’s board.

GA is “the first [defense] company we started working with, they’re the furthest along and we do have a development partnership with them,” he said, “but they’re not the only aerospace/defense company that we’re working with.”

The East Palestine, Ohio, train wreck didn’t have to be this bad

The train derailment and chemical spill was the culmination of a long trend of cost-cutting in the rail industry.

By Umair Irfan Updated Feb 16, 2023

A Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this month, spilling toxic chemicals. Angelo Merendino/Getty Images

Umair Irfan is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, Covid-19, and energy policy. Irfan is also a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News.

In the two weeks since 38 train cars carrying hazardous chemicals including vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, there remain frustratingly few answers about exactly why it happened or what the long-term environmental impact will be.

Right now, the town’s 4,700 residents have been told that it’s safe to return home. However, they’re still wary, reporting sightings of dead fish in streams and dead chickens in backyard coops. One resident told the Washington Post this week that the air smells like nail polish remover and burning tires. On Thursday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine issued a formal request for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to send experts to East Palestine to advise and help residents sort through their health problems in the wake of the disaster.

Rail workers, government officials, and industry analysts have long warned that such disasters are an expected consequence of an industry that has aggressively cut costs, slashed its workforce, and resisted regulation for years.

On Thursday, another train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed outside Detroit, Michigan. So far, there is no sign of any chemical leaks.

The East Palestine rail disaster does have precedent. It’s not even the first vinyl chloride spill. In 2012, a train derailed and leaked 23,000 gallons of vinyl chloride into the creek in Paulsboro, New Jersey.

The critical questions now are why this type of spill happened again and what we can do to prevent the next one. There are plenty of technologies and strategies known to improve rail safety, but rail operators say they’re costly to implement. The worry is also whether there is any long-term danger to residents after the chemical clouds drift away.

What we know so far about the East Palestine train derailment and chemical spill

Thirty-eight cars derailed in the 141-car train, stretching two miles long and operated by Norfolk Southern. Several were carrying a variety of chemicals including vinyl chloride. The toxic chemical is shipped as a chilled liquid but quickly turns into an explosive gas at normal outdoor temperatures.

Two days after the accident, on February 5, Gov. DeWine warned that a catastrophic tanker failure “could cause an explosion with the potential of deadly shrapnel traveling up to a mile” as residents were told to evacuate.

To avert an explosion, responders decided to vent the vinyl chloride and burn it off. It produced a towering, pewter-colored column of smoke. The fumes wafted over the town’s 4,700 residents, situated almost directly between Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Residents felt the impacts firsthand, reporting headaches and nausea.

The Norfolk Southern train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, was carrying hazardous chemicals

It wasn’t until February 12 that the US Environmental Protection Agency posted a list of the chemicals leaked from the train. In addition to vinyl chloride, the train leaked butyl acrylate, a chemical that can contaminate water. Of the 20 total cars carrying known hazardous material, 11 were among the derailed.

The EPA this week have told residents that it’s safe to return, though the agency is still screening homes and monitoring air quality. The agency says it hasn’t detected any vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride byproducts from the spill.

On February 14, state and federal officials reported that a plume of butyl acrylate did reach the Ohio River, but that it doesn’t pose a hazard to drinking water. “The spill did flow to the Ohio River, but the Ohio River is very large and it’s a water body that’s able to dilute the pollutants pretty quickly,” said Tiffani Kavalec, the water division chief for the Ohio EPA, during a press conference on Wednesday.

During a press conference on Wednesday, DeWine noted that state officials were not informed ahead of time that the train was carrying hazardous chemicals. “This train apparently was not considered a high-hazardous material train, therefor the railroad was not required to notify anyone here in Ohio what was in the rail cars coming through our state,” he said.

Why derailments are always such train wrecks

The $80 billion US freight rail industry, spanning 140,000 route miles, is the largest in the world and, according to the US Department of Transportation, the most cost-efficient, with one of the lowest accident rates.

The expansive freight rail network runs through just about every part of the country, connecting coastal metropolises to small towns in the middle, hauling 28 percent of freight in the US.

One of the challenges in a train disaster is that so many different actors are involved with varying degrees of responsibilities. Trains and rails are owned by private companies, which are in charge of their own maintenance and inspections. That also means that a lot of information about their operations is not public. Since rail is considered to be a vital national industry, the federal government plays major roles in regulating it.

But the government’s oversight is split confusingly among several agencies:

The Surface Transportation Board, an independent federal agency, is in charge of rail network economics, including rate-setting and construction.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) under the Department of Transportation regulates rail safety.
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration under the Transportation Department specifically has oversight over dangerous chemicals transported via rail.
If those chemicals end up spilling, the EPA monitors contamination.
Agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration can also get involved to conduct threat assessments if spills occur near water.
And finally, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) conducts the accident investigation.

Yet when a train derails, it’s local responders who are the first to the scene. They often don’t have the training and equipment to deal with chemical spills and when derailments occur in remote areas, it can take agonizing days to get the right personnel and tools. All of this can create a lot of confusion and frustration in the wake of a train wreck, particularly if hazardous chemicals are involved.

That said, the freight rail industry has improved in safety over the years. While the 1980s saw years with more than 3,000 derailments, the DOT reported 1,044 train derailments in 2022.

But rail operators are also facing pressures to cut costs from investors and competition from trucking and shipping. One way railroads are saving money is by making trains longer, so fewer personnel are required per car. Between 2008 and 2019, train lengths increased by 25 percent, according to the Government Accountability Office. There are now regular trains stretching more than three miles, often driven by just two people. The Government Accountability Office noted that the Federal Railroad Administration has no limits set on train lengths.

“There are fewer derailments over time,” said Steven Ditmeyer, a former head of the office of research and development at the FRA. “The accidents that do occur, because of the longer trains, tend to be bigger accidents — more cars and more potential damage.”

Regulators have also found more violations of hazardous materials rules. USA Today reported that federal officials found 36 percent more violations on trains over the past five years compared to the five years prior.

Another issue is that populations are growing around rail corridors. People are drawn to those regions for the same reasons that rail is there in the first place: that’s where jobs and resources are. Communities have sprung up around once-isolated sections of rail, so when a car jumps its tracks, more people are in harm’s way and many may not realize it.

“They may not have been aware of that hazard and the way that hazard can affect them,” said David Bierling, a senior research scientist at Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

So when a train does derail, the train itself and the response to it can quickly become a tangled mess and catch many by surprise.

There are ways to prevent and reduce the impact of train disasters, but the industry says they’re expensive

It’s not certain why the Norfolk Southern train derailed near East Palestine, and the NTSB investigation could take years. However, the agency said there are signs that an overheated wheel bearing played a role.

“Surveillance video from a residence showed what appears to be a wheel bearing in the final stage of overheat failure moments before the derailment,” according to an NTSB statement. “The suspected overheated wheel bearing has been collected and will be examined by engineers from the NTSB Materials Laboratory in Washington, DC.”

There are ways to detect these problems in advance. Railroads have infrared sensors that can identify components that are starting to heat up, but these sensors can be upward of 20 miles apart while an overheated bearing can seize in two or three miles. A train conductor may not receive any warning.

According to Ditmeyer, one way to find these problems in advance is with acoustic detectors. Failing wheel bearings often start making a clicking noise, sometimes hundreds of miles before they start overheating, so acoustic detectors on tracks could buy operators a lot more lead time to address potential problems. Combined with radio tags on cars, the system can identify the exact car and axle that’s causing problems.

Better brakes are another important safety measure. A new generation of electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes for trains creates redundancy in the braking system and allows trains to apply brakes to all of their cars simultaneously. That means when a conductor slams the brakes, the cars don’t all run into each other. In a report last year, the FRA said that these brakes “improve both safety and braking performance of trains” but that train companies have been reluctant to invest in them due to cost.

The Obama administration created a requirement for ECP brakes at least on trains hauling flammable materials, but the Trump administration in 2018 revoked the requirement. “The Department’s analysis shows that the expected costs of requiring ECP brakes would be significantly higher than the expected benefits of the requirement,” according to a Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration statement.

Residents of East Palestine, Ohio, are concerned about the long term effects of chemical exposure.

Going back to shorter trains could also be beneficial, according to Ditmeyer. It would reduce internal forces and stresses within trains so derailments wouldn’t be as damaging. It would also effectively increase staffing per train car.

But the rail industry has been cutting its workforce for years despite turning record profits. Over the last six years, train companies cut 45,000 employees, 29 percent of their workforce. “In my view, all of this has directly contributed to where we are today — rail users experiencing serious deteriorations in rail service because, on too many parts of their networks, the railroads simply do not have a sufficient number of employees,” Martin Oberman, chair of the Surface Transportation Board, said in a statement last year.

In particular, the industry has relied on a system called precision-scheduled railroading that aggressively optimizes to run as much cargo with as few workers as possible. Rail workers don’t even get paid sick days. Congress last year had to intervene to avert a rail worker strike over poor staffing and sick leave.

Investor pressure to reduce spending can be more powerful than a locomotive, so it will take even stronger regulations and oversight to enact these safety measures and prevent such disasters in the future.

“There are things that could be done, the problem is they cost money to implement,” said Ditmeyer. “If railroads start shortening trains, Wall Street will punish them.”

Part of the problem is also psychological. Train wrecks grab a lot of attention, but it’s tough to convince local, state, and federal officials to have the resources in place before disasters unfold.

“It’s really hard to maintain that focus on preparedness,” Bierling said. “We cannot and should not be complacent.”

Update, February 16, 4:30 pm: This story was originally published on February 15 and has been updated to include news of Ohio seeking CDC assistance with the response to the East Palestine rail disaster.