Hubble Telescope sees spiral galaxy dancing through the Dorado constellation (image)

Samantha Mathewson
Wed, November 1, 2023 

A view of a spiral structure that has red specks, blue specks and a glowing yellowish core.

The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a new view of a spirited galaxy dancing among the stars.

NGC 1566, also called the "Spanish Dancer" galaxy, lies about 60 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Dorado. This new Hubble Telescope photo shows the galaxy face-on, capturing its gorgeous and grand design.

The galaxy has two distinct and graceful spiral arms that span over 100,000 light-years; each arc half-turns from start to finish, resembling a dancer’s moving form. The spiral arms are traced by bright blue star clusters, pinkish star-forming regions and swirling interstellar dust, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).


Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!


A view of a spiral structure that has red specks, blue specks and a glowing yellowish core.

A full view of the image at the top, of the Spanish Dancer galaxy. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Calzetti and the LEGUS team, R. Chandar

Observations suggest NGC 1566 is weakly-barred, making it an intermediate spiral galaxy. While the galaxy boasts a bright core, it lacks a distinct bar-shaped structure at its center.

NGC 1566 belongs to the Dorado galaxy group, which is a concentration of both spiral and elliptical galaxies bound together by gravity. The Dorado Group comprises an estimated 70 galaxies, making it much larger than the Local Group that houses our own Milky Way; the Local Group contains around 30 galaxies.

"[Galaxy] groups differ from galaxy clusters in size and mass: Galaxy clusters may contain hundreds of galaxies, whereas groups might contain several tens of galaxies," ESA officials said in the statement.

Galaxy clusters are the largest groupings of galaxies — and largest structures of any kind in the universe — to be held together by their own gravity. The Dorado Group approaches the size of a galaxy cluster, though there are differing opinions on the delineation between a galaxy group and cluster, according to the statement.

Members of the Dorado Group have changed over time as more sophisticated observation techniques enhance our view of the cosmos, adjusting our understanding of the relative sizes and proximities of galaxies along the same line of sight.

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"When working out members of a galaxy group, astronomers are not necessarily equipped with the knowledge of the size of the individual galaxies, and so have to work out whether galaxies really are relatively close together in space, or whether some of them are actually much closer or much further away," ESA officials said in the statement.

ESA released the new Hubble photo of NGC 1566 online on Oct. 30.

NASA's Lucy spacecraft successfully completes 1st flyby of asteroid 'Dinky'

Monisha Ravisetti
Wed, November 1, 2023 

A size comparison of Dinkinesh (shown in blue) and other main asteroid belt objects Bennu and (2867) Steins.


On Nov. 1, NASA confirmed its Lucy spacecraft successfully completed a flyby of asteroid Dinkinesh, a relatively small space rock located in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. This marks a milestone in Lucy's journey, as Dinkinesh, or 'Dinky,' is the first of 10 asteroids the probe will visit over the next 12 years.

"Based on the information received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health," NASA officials wrote in a blog post after the flyby occurred. "The team has commanded the spacecraft to start downlinking the data collected during the encounter."

In a nutshell, the Lucy mission is part of NASA's ambitious endeavor to unveil secrets of our solar system's past. Though Lucy will also be passing by a few relatively nearby asteroids like Dinky, the probe's main goal is to fly by a few more distant Trojan asteroids orbiting the sun alongside Jupiter like bundles of pebbles bound to the gravitational tides of a giant boulder. Scientists are interested in learning more about those Trojans because they're believed to be ancient relics of the solar system, like extra Lego bricks from the box that built the planets.

Related: NASA's LUCY mission snaps its asteroid targets for the 1st time

An illustration of NASA's Lucy spacecraft as it approaches the asteroid Dinkinesh.

An illustration of NASA's Lucy spacecraft as it approaches the asteroid Dinkinesh. (Image credit: Robert Lea/NASA)

Lucy's flyby of Dinkinesh can be thought of as a test-run in this regard, as many of the spacecraft's instruments have now been oiled while collecting data about this first asteroid encounter — including a color imager, high-resolution camera and infrared spectrometer.

According to the blog post, data from these tools will take about a week to be downlinked to Earth, and the team is "looking forward to seeing how the spacecraft performed during this first in-flight test of a high-speed asteroid encounter."

Related Stories:

— Meet Dinkinesh: Asteroid targeted by NASA's Lucy spacecraft gets a marvelous name

— The moon is enchanting in new photos from NASA's Lucy asteroid mission

— NASA's Lucy asteroid mission adds 10th space rock target

An animation showing two black and white images side-by-side. The right image has a yellow circle around the dot that is moving across the screen in both images.
The yellow circle represents Dinkinesh. This is a visual Lucy snagged of the asteroid far prior to the approach. (Image credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL)

Next, Lucy will head back to Earth for a gravity assist that'll help it zoom toward its second asteroid target: 52246 Donaldjohanson — named after co-discoverer of the Lucy fossil (representative of one the earliest human ancestors, for which the spacecraft is named), American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson. And if you were wondering, "Dinkinesh" is just another title for the Lucy fossil.

It also means "you are marvelous," as you are, Lucy.

What astronomers learned from a near-Earth asteroid they never saw coming

Briley Lewis
Wed, November 1, 2023 

Haleakalā, Hawaii, is the site of one of the four telescopes that make up the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System.

In the summer, astronomers spotted an airplane-sized asteroid—large enough to potentially destroy a city—on an almost-collision course with Earth. But no one saw the space rock until two days after it had zoomed past our planet.

This asteroid, named 2023 NT1, passed by us at only one-fourth of the distance from Earth to the moon. That’s far too close for comfort. Astronomers weren’t going to let this incident go without a post-mortem. They’ve recently dissected what went wrong and how we can better prepare to defend our planet from future impacts, in a new paper recently posted to the preprint server arXiv.

We know from history that asteroids can cause world-shattering events and extinctions—just look at what happened to the dinosaurs. The study team estimated that, if NT1 hit Earth, it could have the energy of anywhere from 4 to 80 intercontinental ballistic missiles. “2023 NT1 would have been much worse than the Chelyabinsk airburst,” says University of California, Santa Barbara astronomer Philip Lubin, a co-author on the new work, referring to the meteor that exploded over a Russian city in 2013. As devastating as that would be, it’s “not an existential threat like the 10-kilometer hit that killed our previous tenants,” he adds.

The asteroid-monitoring system ATLAS, the “Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System”—four telescopes in Hawaii, Chile, and South Africa—discovered NT1 after the rock flew by. ATLAS's entire purpose is to scour the skies for space rocks that might threaten Earth. So with this set of eyes on the sky, how did we miss it?

It turns out that Earth has what Brin Bailey, UC Santa Barbara astronomer and lead author on the paper, calls a “blindspot.” Any asteroid coming from the direction of the sun gets lost in the glare of our nearest star.” There’s another way for asteroids to sneak up on us, too: the smaller the asteroid, the harder it is for our telescopes to spot them, even when the rocks come from parts in the sky away from the sun.

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials]

“Currently, there is no planetary defense system which can mitigate short-warning threats,” Bailey says. “While NT1 has no chance of intercepting Earth in the future, it serves as a reminder that we do not have complete situational awareness of all potential threats in the solar system,” they add. That leads to Lesson #1: We simply need better detection methods for planetary defense.

If we can manage to detect an asteroid with a few years’ warning, we might be able to redirect it with the technology recently tested by NASA’s Double-Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.For a case with very little warning, such as NT1, though, we’d need a different approach—that’s Lesson #2. Bailey and colleagues propose a method they call “Pulverize It” (PI).

PI’s plan is exactly what it sounds like: break the asteroid into tiny pieces, small enough to burn up in the atmosphere or fall to the ground as much less dangerous little rocks. They’d do this by launching one or multiple rockets to send arrays of small impactors to space. The impactors—six-foot-long, six-inch-thick rods filled with explosives—would smash into the asteroid like buckshot, efficiently dismantling it. “Had we intercepted it [NT1] even one day prior to impact, we could have prevented any significant damage,” claims Lubin.

https://twitter.com/tony873004/status/1680662549791150080?

It sounds simple enough, but some astronomers aren’t quite convinced. “I think the PI method is impractical even though it does not violate the laws of physics,” says University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Ned Wright, who was not involved in the new work. “When a building is demolished by implosion using explosive charges, a weeks-long testing and planning phase is needed in order to place the charges in the right locations and set up the proper timing. The PI method seeks to do this measuring, planning, and placing the explosives all within a period of 1 minute or so just before the spacecraft hits the asteroid.”

[Related: NASA’s first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect]

Whether we use PI or another line of defense, it’s clear that we need to plan ahead. Not only is there the hazy threat of an asteroid coming out of nowhere, there are two specific, extremely risky events headed our way: asteroid Apophis’ near flyby in 2029, and close approaches from the even larger Bennu (recently sampled by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission) in 2054, 2060, and 2135.

“Humanity now possesses the technology to robustly detect and defend the planet if we choose to do so,” says Lubin. “And a variety of people are working hard to ensure we can.”


"Scary Barbie" Black Hole Slurps Up a Star Like Spaghetti

Cassidy Ward
Wed, November 1, 2023 

"Scary Barbie" Black Hole Slurps Up a Star Like Spaghetti


When Oppenheimer and Barbie hit theaters at the same time, there was little reason to think they would compete with one another. They are very different movies intended for divergent audiences and yet they found a sort of bizarre companionship in the theaters, becoming the unexpected double feature dubbed "Barbenheimer."

Now, it turns out, the two cultural touchstones might have more in common than we realized. Thanks to a transient space object – an object which changes on short timescales of seconds, weeks, or years, as opposed to millions or billions of years – known as ZTF20abrbeie and dubbed "Scary Barbie" by astronomers, we now know that Barbie is packing the sort of power Oppenheimer could only dream of in the far reaches of deep space.

Scary Barbie Black Hole’s Appetite Lights Up the Sky

The object – a black hole in the process of gobbling up a star – wasn’t noticed when it was first observed back in 2020, but it was assigned a random designation. The ZTF at the beginning of its name refers to the Zwicky Transient Facility which made the observation, and the mishmash of letters at the end stuck out to astronomers. When combined with the raw power astronomers found when they took a closer look, the Scary Barbie moniker was born. Analysis of Scary Barbie was posted to the ArXiv preprint server and accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

RELATED: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer Coming Home with 3 Hours of Bonus Features

“It's absurd. If you take a typical supernova and multiply it a thousand times, we're still not at how bright this is – and supernovas are among the most luminous objects in the sky. This is the most energetic phenomenon I have ever encountered,” said Danny Milisavljevic, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Purdue University’s College of Science, in a statement.

Despite the incredible energy on display, it wasn’t noticed at first because it’s far away and in a part of the sky that doesn’t get as much attention. It might have gone unnoticed a lot longer if not for a machine learning algorithm set loose on archival data. Researchers used the Recommender Engine For Intelligent Transient Tracking (REFITT) to do a first pass on the back catalog of astronomical observations and highlight candidate objects that look the most promising for additional analysis.

A black hole destroying a star.

A disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole in this illustration. The stream of gas stretching to the right is what remains of a star that was pulled apart by the black hole. A cloud of hot plasma (gas atoms with their electrons stripped away) above the black hole is known as a corona. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Once it was identified, the team was able to look for observations from other telescopes to start building a picture of what’s going on. When all the data came together, astronomers realized they were seeing a black hole rip a star to shreds.

“We think a very supermassive black hole pulled in a star and ripped it apart. The forces around a black hole, called tidal disruption, pull other objects apart in a process called ‘spaghettification.’ We think that’s what happened, but on extreme time scales: The most massive of black holes ripping apart a massive star. The duration is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, and it produced the most luminous transient in the universe,” said Bhagya Subrayan, one of the study’s authors.

RELATED: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer Overtakes Bohemian Rhapsody as Highest-Grossing Biopic Ever

In addition to being brighter and more energetic than any transient object ever before discovered, Scary Barbie has demonstrated unusual staying power. Most of its peers fade out over the course of weeks or months but Scary Barbie has been going strong for more than two years. However, astronomers say the actual unspooling of the unfortunate prey star likely happened on a much shorter timescale. It appears to have played out more slowly from our perspective because the light got stretched out on its way from there to here. When we try to watch cosmic home movies like this one, relativity has a tendency to play fast and loose with the frame rate.

The identification of Scary Barbie is only the latest in a growing list of wins for machine learning in astronomy. Algorithms are increasingly doing the legwork of tromping through the uncharted swamps of archival astronomical data and lighting waypoints for human scientists along the way. Scary Barbie might have languished in data limbo for decades yet if not for a digital mole scouting the way.

Relive one half of the theatrical powerhouse that was Barbenheimer with Oppenheimer’s at-home release November 24.

Rare type of space explosion could leave Earth uninhabitable for 'thousands of years'

Robert Lea
Wed, November 1, 2023 

An illustration of two colliding neutron stars, a tremendously powerful event that could spell doom for life on Earth.

Scientists have determined the possible effects of a neutron star collision happening near Earth, finding that these so-called kilonovas could be real killers that would doom humanity. But don't worry, the collision would have to be really close to wreak havoc on our world. Nonetheless, here's what would probably go down.

"We found that if a neutron star merger were to occur within around 36 light-years of Earth, the resulting radiation could cause an extinction-level event," Haille Perkins, team leader and a scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Space.com.

Neutron star clashes that create bursts of light, called kilonovas, are considered the most violent and powerful events in the known universe. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that neutron stars are the collapsed remnants of dead stars and are made of matter so dense a teaspoon of one brought to Earth would weigh about 10 million tons. That's equivalent to 350 Statues of Liberty balanced on a spoon.

Not only do these dead star mergers create blasts of gamma rays and showers of charged particles moving at near-light speeds , known as cosmic rays, but they also generate the only environments we know of turbulent enough to forge elements heavier than lead, like gold and platinum. These elements can't even be created at the incredible ultra-high temperatures and pressures found in the hearts of massive stars.

Further, neutron star mergers set the very fabric of space "ringing" with ripples called gravitational waves, which can be detected here on Earth — even after traveling across billions of light years.

"Neutron stars can exist in binary systems, and when they merge, they produce a rare but spectacular event," Perkins said.

The team's research was based on observations of the neutron star merger behind gravitational wave signal GW 170817, picked up by Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2017, and gamma-ray burst GRB 170817A.

Occurring about 130 million light-years away, this is the only neutron star merger thus far seen in electromagnetic radiation and heard in gravitational waves, making it a natural choice for investigating these powerful events.
A killer-nova?

An illustration of two colliding neutron stars, a tremendously powerful event that could spell doom for life on Earth.

Neutron star merger gamma rays are arguably the most obviously threatening aspect of these events. That's because this type of radiation carries enough energy to strip electrons from atoms, a process called ionization. And these ionizing blasts of radiation could easily destroy the Earth's ozone layer, resulting in our planet receiving lethal doses of ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

Perkins and her colleagues determined gamma rays coming from neutron star mergers — in twin narrow jets from either side of the merger — would pretty much roast any living thing that falls directly in their path for a distance of about 297 light-years. Fortunately, however, that effect has an extremely narrow range. In other words, it really would take a "direct hit" from a jet to give rise to such dramatic effects. But, there's another issue.

These jets are cocooned with gamma radiation in general, which would also affect the ozone layer of Earth if our planet was in their wider path — within about 13 light-years of them. This "off-axis" gamma-ray cocoon's ozone damage would also take 4 years to recover from. All in all, the gamma-ray cocoon strike would leave the Earth's surface exposed to harmful ultraviolet light for nearly half a decade.

Though gamma-ray effects of neutron star mergers are relatively short-lived, there is also another form of ionizing radiation these emissions give rise to, which is less energetic but longer-lasting.

When the jets of gamma rays hit gas and dust around stars, called the interstellar medium, this creates powerful X-ray emissions called the X-ray afterglow. Such X-ray emission lives longer than gamma-ray emissions and could also ionize the ozone layer, the team says. This, therefore, is arguably more lethal. Earth would need to be quite close to this afterglow before we have to be concerned about our fate, however — within a distance of 16.3 light years to be exact.

And we haven't gotten to the worst part yet.

The most threatening effect of the neutron star smash-up that the team discovered comes from those highly energetic charged particles, or cosmic rays, that spread away from the event's epicenter in the form of an expanding bubble. Were these cosmic rays to strike Earth, they would strip the ozone layer and leave the planet vulnerable to being blasted by ultraviolet rays for a period of thousands of years.

This would qualify as an extinction-level event, and Earth could be affected even if our planet were around 36 light-years away.

"The specific distance of safety and component that is most dangerous is uncertain as many of the effects depend on properties like viewing angle to the event, the energy of the blast, the mass of material ejected, and more," Perkins continued. "With the combination of parameters we select, it seems that the cosmic rays will be the most threatening."
Again, don't panic just yet!

Before lamenting that the end is nigh, it is worth weighing the apocalyptic picture painted by the impact of neutron star mergers against some other factors surrounding these events.

"Neutron star mergers are extremely rare but quite powerful, and this, combined with the relatively small range of lethality, means an extinction caused by a binary neutron star merger should not be a concern of the people on Earth," Perkins assured.

To get a picture of this rarity, throughout the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, scientists have thus far only found one potential kilonova progenitor system, CPD-29 2176, which is located about 11,400 light-years from Earth.

"There are several other more common events like solar flares, asteroid impacts, and supernova explosions that have a better chance of being harmful," Perkins continued.

She added that some of these other events have been associated with mass extinction events on Earth already, with the most striking example of this being the impact of a massive asteroid that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and three-quarters of life on Earth around 66 million years ago in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.

Where this research does have important connotations is in the search for life elsewhere in the universe, as it certainly gives us an idea of the systems that aren't likely to enjoy the conditions needed to support life. (Life as we know it, at least.)

"Their conclusion that kilonovas could have a similar lethality to supernovas, but are much less common, coincides with what I believe would be likely to be the case," Niels Bohr Institute Cosmic Dawn Center scientist Darach Watson, who also studies kilonovas and was not involved in this research, told Space.com. "So overall, this is likely to be more of a threat for planets in old galaxies where the star-formation has ended, not so much in the Milky Way."

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As for the team behind this research, Perkins explained that the next step is to observe more of these neutron star collision events.

"Currently, we only have one confirmed detection of a kilonova from a binary neutron star merger, so any more observations will constrain the unknowns," she concluded.

The team's research is published on the open-access paper repository arXiv.

World’s First Commercial Spaceplane Faces Crucial Test at NASA

Passant Rabie
Thu, November 2, 2023 

The spaceplane is being prepped so it can be shipped to a NASA facility in Ohio.

Dream Chaser, built by Sierra Space, is being prepped for transport to a NASA facility in Ohio, where it will undergo a series of tests to make sure the spaceplane can survive its heated reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. Starting these tests is crucial, demonstrating Dream Chaser’s readiness for flights and potentially transforming commercial space travel.

Sierra Space is hoping to see its spaceplane fly to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2024 as part of a contract with NASA. The first commercial spaceplane is currently at the company’s facility in Louisville, Colorado, and will soon make the roughly 60 mile (96 kilometer) journey to the Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, local media outlet Denver 7 reported.

Dream Chaser is designed to fly to low Earth orbit, carrying cargo and passengers on a smooth ride to pitstops such as the ISS. The spaceplane will launch from Earth atop a rocket, and is designed to survive atmospheric reentry and perform runway landings on the surface upon its return. Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser is designed with foldable wings that fully unfurl once the spaceplane is in flight, generating power through solar arrays. The spaceplane is also equipped with heat shield tiles to protect it from the high temperatures of atmospheric reentry.

Unlike Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceplane, Sierra Space designed Dream Chaser to reach orbit and stay there for six months. The U.S. Space Force has its own spaceplane, which wrapped up a mysterious two-and-a-half-year mission in low Earth orbit in November 2022.

The commercial spaceflight industry may not be too focused on spaceplanes as companies race to design fully reusable rockets, but spaceplanes do have an advantage of a smooth landing on their way back down to Earth. In terms of those exact advantages, spaceplanes offer safety, efficiency, operational flexibility, and potential for future commercial opportunities.

For its debut flight, Tenacity will ride atop United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. The spaceplane is scheduled for the rocket’s second mission, although Vulcan is yet to fly for the first time due to several delays. The spaceplane is tentatively slated for an April launch, but that still depends on the rocket’s first test flight.

In the future, Sierra Space also wants to launch crewed Dream Chaser missions to its own space station, as opposed to the Orbital Reef space station, which it is designing in collaboration with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin—a relationship that appears to be in doubt.
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Gizmodo

Dream Chaser Spaceplane Ready for NASA Tests
Victor Tangermann
Thu, November 2, 2023 a


Chase Dreams

Colorado-based space startup Sierra Space has made considerable progress on its Dream Chaser spaceplane, a sleek spacecraft designed to glide back to the ground after screaming through space.

As Ars Technica reports, the company is now adding the finishing touches to the craft, including a pressurized compartment that can house astronauts as they travel to the International Space Station.

But before it can do that, its big test — like SpaceX's Dragon capsule before it — will be to deliver cargo to the orbital outpost after launching on top of a rocket. Returning to Earth, it'll careen through the atmosphere before using its wings to safely make its way to a landing strip back on the ground.

All told, it's an exciting new chapter in the history of spaceflight that harkens back to the design of NASA's now long-retired Space Shuttle.
Plane Jane

Though it's making significant progress, Sierra still has plenty of work to do before it can send its Dream Chaser, dubbed "Tenacity," into orbit.

The plane will first be shipped to a NASA facility in Ohio to make sure it can survive the extreme conditions during launch and in outer space.

"We’re almost done with everything," Angie Wise, Sierra's chief safety officer, told Ars. "We’re finishing all the closeout panels. We’re essentially getting it ready for shipping."

"We’ve checked out the landing gear," she added. "We’re going to put everything back in, stow it, and then move it onto the (transport) fixture and get it out of here," referring to the company's headquarters outside of Denver, Colorado.

It may not be the only commercial spaceplane in the works, but unlike Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo spaceplane, Sierra is aiming for actual orbital capabilities. It's also considerably smaller than NASA's Space Shuttle, at roughly a quarter the size.

According to Ars, Dream Chaser is designed to deliver up to 12,000 pounds of cargo to the ISS. It can also jettison unwanted cargo at the end of its mission to have it burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.

But when we'll see the spacecraft actually launch into space remains to be seen. Only if it can survive a gauntlet of extreme temperatures inside a vacuum at NASA's Ohio test facilities will it be shipped out to the Space Coast for its maiden voyage.

Sierra is hoping to complete its first uncrewed test flight by April of next year. But that's an ambitious timeline, especially considering the rocket that will take it into orbit, United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, has yet to complete its own first test flight.

More on Sierra Space: Experimental Inflatable Space Station Segment Explodes Violently

Two supervolcanoes, a world apart, have the attention of scientists

Denise Chow
Updated Wed, November 1, 2023 

Two long-dormant “supervolcanoes” on two separate continents appear to be stirring to life. Well, maybe.

In recent months, more than a thousand minor earthquakes have rattled the area around the Campi Flegrei volcano in southern Italy, stoking fears that it may soon erupt again after nearly five centuries. Some 6,000 miles away, scientists have for decades recorded similarly small earthquakes and instances of ground deformation at the Long Valley Caldera, a volcano in eastern California that sits adjacent to Mammoth Mountain.

But does all this seismic unrest really portend a volcanic eruption? It sort of depends on whom you ask.

Most experts say there is no immediate threat of an eruption at either Long Valley or Campi Flegrei. Both volcanoes are calderas — sprawling depressions created long ago by violent “super-eruptions” that essentially collapsed in on themselves — which are often more challenging to forecast compared to the large mountain-shaped features that people typically imagine when they think of volcanoes.

Seismic unrest can be a sign that a volcano is waking up, but the full story is much more complex.

Both Campi Flegrei and the Long Valley Caldera are known as supervolcanoes, a term used to describe a volcano that at one time has erupted more than 240 cubic miles of material. Michael Poland, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey and the scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, said that while Campi Flegrei and Long Valley are capable of huge explosions, the supervolcano moniker can be misleading.

“The first thing people think is that there’s going to be a civilization-ending eruption,” Poland said. “You can have an impactful explosion at these places, but the vast majority are smaller eruptions with less explosive lava flows.”

That hasn’t quieted concern in the communities that border the caldera systems. The Italian city of Naples and its surrounding towns are all in close proximity to Campi Flegrei, and local government officials have been planning how to evacuate tens of thousands of people from the area, if needed.

Italy: Solfatara di Pozzuoli (Vincenzo Izzo / Sipa USA via AP file)

The last time Campi Flegrei erupted was in 1538, and one of the system’s biggest explosions occurred around 39,000 years ago.

In September, the former head of the Vesuvius observatory at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology told Reuters that the earthquake swarms were causing ground uplift in the area, which could lead to structural damage in the port town of Pozzuoli, located roughly 20 miles outside of Naples.

Christopher Kilburn, a professor of volcanology and geophysical hazards at University College London, said the last period of seismic unrest at Campi Flegrei was in the 1980s. Kilburn said the ground in the town of Pozzuoli was lifted nearly 2 meters, or almost 6.5 feet, over two years.

Still, there was no big eruption.

Fast-forward to today, and Kilburn said there are some key differences with the seismic unrest that has been observed.

“The difference is that today, the uplift has been a bit more than 1 meter, but over 20 years, not two,” he said. “And so this whole uplift has lasted 10 times longer and it has been about 10 times slower.”

Still, Kilburn thinks the current activity at Campi Flegrei indicates that the structure of the volcano’s crust is changing. In a study published in June in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, Kilburn and his colleagues used a model to analyze the volcano’s behavior and found that the crust of Campi Flegrei is becoming weaker, making it more prone to rupturing.

But even if the crust reaches its breaking point, that wouldn't necessarily have catastrophic consequences, Kilburn said.

“If there’s a rupture, there is no guarantee that magma is going to erupt,” he said. “And that’s why with the observatory there, the official releases cover anything from just an increase in seismicity through to a small eruption, because we can’t really tell where we are in that just yet.”

Calderas are often difficult to study because they are vast depressions over top of huge magmatic systems. Campi Flegrei, for instance, stretches 7 to 9 miles across. The Long Valley Caldera in California is about 10 miles wide. And one of the most famous calderas in the world, at Yellowstone National Park, measures 30 miles by 45 miles, according to the U.S. National Park Service.

Coincidentally, the Long Valley Caldera also saw an uptick in earthquake activity in the 1980s and has been seismically stirring for decades, but scientists have been less concerned overall about a major eruption there in the foreseeable future. That's because there have been signs that the magma beneath it has been cooling.

Ettore Biondi, a research scientist in the division of geological and planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology, has tried to understand what has been unfolding in recent decades at the Long Valley Caldera.

Biondi and his colleagues published a study last month in the journal Science Advances detailing a novel way of gathering acoustic sensing data with fiber-optic cables to capture snapshots of what is happening beneath the caldera's surface.

An eruption cannot be ruled out completely, but the researchers found that a solid rock structure is actually covering the magma chamber at the Long Valley Caldera, which is likely preventing big eruptions from occurring.

“That doesn’t imply that you can’t have smaller eruptions, but from a supervolcanic eruption perspective, I think as of now we are on the safe side,” Biondi said.

He added that this method of gathering high-resolution underground images could be used at other volcano systems around the world, and particularly at ones that are not well understood. The results could help scientists better anticipate what is happening at volcanoes when they start to stir.

“For certain volcanoes, we know very well what’s going on,” Biondi said. “For other volcanoes, we have no idea.”

The inability to create reliable eruption forecasts owes largely to the fact that volcano systems are so varied. The way one volcano comes to life is not necessarily how others around the world signal an eruption is imminent.

“We have to spend a lot of time on the volcanic system, monitoring it to understand what’s normal at that volcano, and then be able to recognize when something becomes abnormal,” said Poland, of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Yellowstone, for instance, is hit by an average of around 2,000 earthquakes every year, and that seismic activity is not considered out of the ordinary, he said.

At places like Campi Flegrei and the Long Valley Caldera, scientists have been putting in the work to understand what all the rumblings and geological changes really mean.

“Volcanoes are sort of like people — they all have their own personality,” Poland said. “A big part of volcanology and monitoring active volcanoes is getting to understand the personality of the specific volcanoes that you’re interested in. And some volcanoes are noisier than others.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com




What’s going on with Italy’s supervolcano?
Rebecca Olds
Thu, November 2, 2023 

In this photo taken on April 30, 2016, a woman takes a close look at a steaming fumarola at the Solfatara crater bed, in the Phlegraean Fields near Naples, Italy. Phlegraean Fields — Campi Flegrei in Italian — are a sprawling constellation of ancient volcanic centers. 

| Frances D’Emilio, Associated Press

In recent months, people who live at the base of supervolcano Campi Flegrei in a town known as Pozzuoli near Naples, Italy, have been shaken by rumblings and the fear of a possible eruption.

Campi Flegrei’s caldera spans 12 to 15 kilometers (about 7.5 to 9 miles) across, making it the largest active caldera in Europe, according to a 2023 article published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

Campi Flegrei is about 28 miles away from Pompeii, where Mount Vesuvius famously erupted in 79 C.E.

Christopher Kilburn, author of a study on Campi Flegrei and professor of volcanology and geophysical hazards at University College London, told NBC News that research suggests that recent seismic activity is weakening the Earth’s crust and making it more prone to rupturing.

More than 2,500 earthquakes have trembled through the area since August and they continue this month, reported The Wall Street Journal.

A local fisherman told the Journal, “We’re used to it, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t afraid.”

The stirrings around Campi Flegrei have prompted Italian officials to come up with an evacuation plan if the volcano erupts, which residents say they know won’t work because of the cramped streets, per the Journal.

So the town’s 500,000 residents — and another 800,000 people who live nearby — are watching and waiting.

Related

Mount Vesuvius once coated this city in ashes. Now archaeologists are helping Pompeii rise
When did Campi Flegrei last erupt?

Campi Flegrei last erupted nearly 500 years ago in 1538, scientists say, after a previous dormant state of 3,000 years, per 2011 research published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

The last period of increased seismic activity was more recent — in the 1980s, Kilburn told NBC News.

How likely is Campi Flegrei to erupt?

Even with the recent earthquakes and the release of sulfuric gases that are common in Pozzuoli these days, Kilburn said that it doesn’t necessarily mean that Campi Flegrei will erupt, per NBC News.

“If there’s a rupture, there is no guarantee that magma is going to erupt,” he said. “And that’s why with the observatory there, the official releases cover anything from just an increase in seismicity through to a small eruption because we can’t really tell where we are in that just yet.”

A geology professor at the University of Napes Federico II, Alessandro Iannace, told The Wall Street Journal that while the chances of a catastrophic eruption are low right now, they aren’t zero.

Related

Italy’s Stromboli volcano erupted — how many active volcanoes are left?
What happens if the Italian supervolcano erupts?

The main point of concern, Iannace explained to The Wall Street Journal, is the traffic jam that would occur during an evacuation.

“The difference is that in Yellowstone, if you think the eruption is coming, you can send the tourists home and close the park for four years,” Iannace told the Journal. “You can’t do that with Campi Flegrei. There are just too many people there.”
Are there supervolcanoes in the U.S.?

The caldera located in Yellowstone National Park is one of the most famous supervolcanos in the world. It’s significantly larger than the Campi Flegrei caldera, according to the U.S. National Park Service.

In addition to the one in Yellowstone, two other supervolcanos are found in the United States: Long Valley in eastern California and Valles Caldera in New Mexico, per the U.S. Geological Survey.

Related
Yellowstone may have already experienced its ‘largest and most cataclysmic event’

Residents on 'Edge' Facing 2.5K Earthquakes as Italian Supervolcano Rumbles: 'It's Nonstop'

David Chiu
Thu, November 2, 2023 


Italy has been preparing for a possible mass evacuation of tens of thousands of residents


GettyPozzuoli, the super active volcano of the Campi Flegrei. Italy's government has been preparing in the event of a mass evacuation due to volcanic activity in the Campi Flegrei area

Italy’s government has been preparing for a possible mass evacuation of tens of thousands of residents due to a supervolcano that has caused 2,500 earthquakes since September, several media outlets reported.

Residents in the city of Pozzuoli, which is outside of Naples, are concerned about the recent activity since they live in the volcanic area of Campi Flegrei. As reported by Reuters, a 4.2 magnitude earthquake occurred on Sept. 27 that, while it didn’t cause any major structural damage, provided the biggest tremor in the area in over four decades.

Related: Hawaii's Mauna Loa, the World's Largest Active Volcano, Is Erupting For First Time in 38 Years

"Even those small ones (quakes) make us afraid," resident Annamaria Scardi told Reuters. "We are worried because (we are supposed to) run away. But where do we go? Where? This is the situation. We're on edge."

“It’s nonstop earthquakes here,” said Luca Averna, per The Wall Street Journal. “We’re used to it, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t afraid.”

Related: 'Caring' Student, 21, Dies After Falling at Least 300 Feet While Climbing Ore. Volcano

As defined by the U.S. Geological Society, a supervolcano is defined as “a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI), meaning that at one point in time, it erupted more than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of material.” Relatedly, a “supereruption” is a term that describes VEI 8 eruptions. According to the agency, the largest eruption at Yellowstone occurred 2.1 million years ago with a volume of 2,450 cubic kilometers.

Italy’s official tourism website characterizes Campi Flegrei as a “dormant supervolcano, one of the few on the earth's surface.” And according to NBC News, Campi Flegrei's last eruption took place in 1538.

Related: Pilot Relives How He Escaped Volcano Eruption by Jumping Into Sea: ‘I Hit the Water, It Went Black’

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A phenomenon known as bradyseism has been attributed to the increase of recent earthquakes in the Campi Flegrei area, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Christopher Kilburn, a professor of volcanology and geophysical hazards at University College London, told NBC News that he thinks that the activity at Campi Flegrei is due to a change in the structure of the volcano’s crust. However, he said, “If there’s a rupture [in the crust], there is no guarantee that magma is going to erupt.”

Meanwhile, the Italian government reviewed the situation last month, per Reuters, and would call for an evacuation if officials feel that buildings could be prone to collapse. Nello Musumeci, a civil protection minister, said that any evacuation would take place only in the event of “extreme necessity,” The Guardian reported.

Pamphlets have also been distributed to locals in Pozzuoli on what to do in case of an eruption and its aftermath. However, as resident Claudio Correale told The Wall Street Journal: “Everybody here knows the evacuation plan is inadequate. But it’s probably not even necessary, because everybody will have left by the time the volcano erupts.”

Resident Vincenzo Russo told Reuters that the threat of eruption has divided his family in that he wants to stay while his wife and children are looking to move to another town. "When you sleep at night, the nightmare is always there. You forget the situation and you're on the couch, and then the tremor is there with you,” he said.

Pennsylvania court permanently blocks effort to make power plants pay for greenhouse gas emissions

MARC LEVY
Updated Wed, November 1, 2023 

The Conemaugh Generation Station emits steam in New Florence, Pa., Feb. 6, 2007. Pennsylvania cannot enforce a regulation to make power plant owners pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, a state court ruled Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023, dealing another setback to the centerpiece of former Gov. Tom Wolf's plan to fight global warming. (Todd Berkey/The Tribune-Democrat via AP, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)Mor

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania cannot enforce a regulation to make power plant owners pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, a state court ruled Wednesday, dealing another setback to the centerpiece of former Gov. Tom Wolf's plan to fight global warming.

The Commonwealth Court last year temporarily blocked Pennsylvania from becoming the first major fossil fuel-producing state to adopt a carbon-pricing program, and the new ruling makes that decision permanent.

The ruling is a victory for Republican lawmakers and coal-related interests that argued that the carbon-pricing plan amounted to a tax, and therefore would have required legislative approval. Wolf, a Democrat, had sought to get around legislative opposition by unconstitutionally imposing the requirement through a regulation, they said.

The court agreed in a 4-1 decision.

The regulation written by Wolf’s administration had authorized Pennsylvania to join the multistate Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which imposes a price and declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

It would be up to Wolf's successor, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, to decide whether to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court. Shapiro's administration had no comment Wednesday on whether it would appeal, and Shapiro himself hasn’t said publicly whether he would follow through on the plan to join the consortium, should the courts allow it.

Still, Shapiro is “focused on addressing climate change, reducing emissions, and protecting public health while creating jobs and protecting consumers,” Shapiro's administration said in a statement.

Republican lawmakers hailed the decision and urged Shapiro not to appeal it. Such a plan continues to have no chance of passing the state Legislature, where the Republican-controlled Senate has been protective of hometown coal and natural gas industries in the nation’s No. 2 gas state.

In a statement, Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, R-Indiana, said Pennsylvania lawmakers should now work to “foster greater energy independence, while ensuring the responsible development of our God-given natural resources.”

In the House, where Democrats hold a one-seat majority, neither a carbon-pricing plan, nor Shapiro’s most well-defined clean-energy goal — a pledge to ensure that Pennsylvania uses 30% of its electricity from renewable power sources by 2030 — have come up for a vote.

A coalition of environmental advocacy groups said there is no alternative climate plan waiting on Shapiro's desk and, in a statement, they urged Shapiro to appeal the decision to “demonstrate his commitment to protecting the climate, human health, and the economic future of Pennsylvanians.”

Critics had said the pricing plan would raise electricity bills, hurt in-state energy producers and drive new power generation to other states while doing little to fight climate change.

Opponents also included natural gas-related interests, industrial and commercial power users and labor unions whose members build and maintain pipelines, power plants and refineries.

Backers of the plan had called it the biggest step ever taken in Pennsylvania to fight climate change and said it would have generated hundreds of millions of dollars a year to promote climate-friendly energy sources and cut electricity bills through energy conservation programs.

The plan's supporters included environmental advocates as well as solar, wind and nuclear power producers.

Young People Are Demanding an End to Oil and Gas Drilling, but the US and UK Aren’t Delivering

Zanagee Artis, Elijah McKenzie-Jackson
Thu, November 2, 2023 


UCG/Getty Images

The United States and the United Kingdom have long stood as central participants in the G7, NATO, and the United Nations. Both countries hold disproportionate power in the shaping of geopolitics, global energy policy, and humanity’s collective future on earth. But despite their grand governmental portfolios, the US and the UK are not producing the boldest, most progressive solutions to tackle the climate crisis and achieve environmental justice. People are now waking up to the ugly reality that de-growth can be elusive when the status quo benefits wealthy individuals and corporations.

In September, we took to the streets of New York City for the March to End Fossil Fuels. With around 75,000 people, from Alaska to the Amazon and more, we demanded that President Biden use his executive powers to stop federal approvals of fossil fuel projects, phase out fossil fuel production on public lands and waters, and provide a just transition to renewable energy.

For us, climate action is more than mobilizing our generation; it’s a wake-up call to everyone to say we need to address the roots of climate destruction — racism, capitalism, and colonialism — to make necessary changes for the future. And we need our leaders to listen.

After a harrowing summer of climate devastation, President Biden and UK  were among the leaders who chose not to attend the UN Climate Ambition Summit. Now they’re plowing forward with new offshore drilling projects, despite the climate fallout and mass opposition.

In 2020, President Biden vowed: “No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore.” But the Biden administration has just finalized its Five-Year Program for offshore drilling. The reduction in the number of lease sales from 11 to 3 in the final program is a testament to the climate movement’s pressure on the Biden administration; however, the program also opens vast swaths of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to new leases.

Scientists have repeatedly stated that we cannot develop any new fossil fuels infrastructure if we want to avoid irreversible and catastrophic climate change. This past spring, many expressed outrage for new fossil fuel projects when the approval of the ConocoPhillips Willow project in Alaska — the biggest fossil fuel development ever proposed on federal lands — ignited opposition from over 5.2 million people.

Investments from the Inflation Reduction Act are making major strides toward electrification and clean energy deployment, but we cannot achieve environmental justice without phasing out fossil fuels. Ahead of the Five-Year Program announcement, 204 organizations wrote to the Biden administration to call for a program with no new leases for oil and gas drilling. Members of Congress, led by Representatives Pallone and Grijalva, wrote a letter asking President Biden to do the same. At a time when the Gulf Coast is experiencing record-breaking ocean temperatures and unprecedented wildfires caused by climate change, we need to stop offshore drilling, not expand it.

Lease sales in the program would not yield new oil and gas after 2030, the year by which the administration has pledged to cut emissions by 50%. Meanwhile, the UK recently approved the Rosebank project, new offshore drilling in the largest undeveloped oil field in the North Sea, slated to extract oil until 2050. Such an extensive commitment to fossil fuel production, amid the global imperative for renewable energy alternatives, is reckless and dangerous. Adding fuel to the fire, Prime Minister Sunak’s government just announced a walk-back of some key domestic policies to meet the UK’s net-zero target for 2050.

Rosebank is a collaborative drilling project developed and operated by Equinor, Norway’s sovereign oil and gas company, which owns 80% of the project, and Ithaca Energy, which owns the remaining 20%. Resulting emissions from the combustion of oil and gas would be equivalent to the total annual CO2 emissions of the over 700 million people in the 28 nations with the lowest income globally. That is staggering, and it is past time for self-described “leading democracies” to choose climate and communities over industry.

The UK and US both possess an excess of fossil fuels: The UK exports 80% of oil and 61% of gas from the North Sea; the US is set to reach record production in 2023 and 2024 while becoming a net exporter. This reality makes clear that approvals for new fossil fuels do not contribute to reducing energy costs, bolstering energy independence, or supporting development in the Global South; instead, they deepen Western reliance on dirty energy. Not to mention, demand is slated to drop significantly in the US under new clean energy policies.

There is a disturbing discrepancy between what people are demanding and what our leaders are doing. It is a divide that extends beyond ideological differences, age, and background. It is reflected in the very system of Western society and politics. After years of talks about the climate crisis, we are ready for action. President Biden, Prime Minister Sunak, and leaders around the world must end the era of fossil fuels and usher in a transition to justly sourced renewable energy.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

World isn’t spending nearly enough money to prepare the most vulnerable countries for climate extremes, UN reports

Rachel Ramirez, CNN
Thu, November 2, 2023 

Measures to adapt to climate change in the developing world are slowing on all fronts even as the impacts of the crisis are accelerating, creating a widening gap that leaves billions of people increasingly vulnerable to extreme heat, worsening storms and sea level rise, a UN report published Thursday shows.

The estimated costs to fully prepare low-income nations for the worst effects of a rapidly heating planet are now 10 to 18 times greater than the amount of money that is currently flowing to these regions, according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s annual “adaptation gap” report. That’s a more than 50% larger gap than UNEP had estimated in its 2022 report.

The developed world agreed more than a decade ago to transfer at least $100 billion a year to developing countries to help both with their green transitions and efforts to adapt to the climate crisis. That pledge was reaffirmed in the 2015 Paris Agreement, but the target has never been met.

Poorer nations have also complained that too little of the $100 billion is devoted to so-called adaptation — preparing for the worsening harms of the climate crisis, including deadly heat, flooding, storms, wildfires and rising oceans.

The flow of adaptation finance declined by 15% to $21 billion in 2021 – the most recent year UNEP has data for – though its authors noted the Covid pandemic may have deflated climate finance spending that year. UNEP estimates the actual need is between $194 billion and $366 billion a year, and is projected to rise dramatically by 2050 as the planet warms.

“The urgency is becoming very clear,” Andrea Hinwood, UNEP’s chief scientist, told CNN. “The advice we have is that in the next eight years, we need to be working as hard and fast as we can to do as much as we can to prepare us for the out-years, where some of the challenges we’re facing are going to be harder.”

Unless the gap between what’s needed and what’s provided is closed, the world will more rapidly reach the threshold where people can no longer adapt to their changing climate, according to the report.

The aftermath of deadly flooding in Derna, Libya, on September 14. - Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters

The issue — as well as who should pay for the loss and damage created by the climate crisis — is expected to be a key sticking point in climate negotiations at the COP28 talks in Dubai this December.

“In the next talks, there has to be a discussion about some new goals for adaptation,” Hinwood said, “but also perhaps a renewed commitment in terms of the funding and the finance that should be flowing to adaptation in developing countries.”

Developed nations bear a greater historical responsibility for the human-induced climate crisis, but developing nations and small-island states are suffering the worst impacts.

A recent study showed that 55 of the world’s most vulnerable economies have already experienced losses and damages of more than $500 billion in the last two decades from the climate crisis.

“If we don’t fund adaptation, we then get ourselves into a situation where we can no longer adapt,” Hinwood said. “Developed countries who are still emitting greenhouse gases per capita levels that are massively more than developing countries need to show leadership here. Whatever efforts we put in place now will pay back down the track.”

The report shows that the world can still prevent the mounting economic toll climate disasters could bring. Every billion dollars invested in infrastructure to protect people from coastal flooding could save $14 billion in economic damages, according to the report. And for every $16 billion invested in agriculture each year, 78 million people could be alleviated from climate crisis related starvation or chronic hunger.

Global heating is accelerating, warns scientist who sounded climate alarm in the 80s

Oliver Milman

THE GUARDIAN
Wed, November 1, 2023 

Global heating is accelerating faster than is currently understood and will result in a key temperature threshold being breached as soon as this decade, according to research led by James Hansen, the US scientist who first alerted the world to the greenhouse effect.

The Earth’s climate is more sensitive to human-caused changes than scientists have realized until now, meaning that a “dangerous” burst of heating will be unleashed that will push the world to be 1.5C hotter than it was, on average, in pre-industrial times within the 2020s and 2C hotter by 2050, the paper published on Thursday predicts.

Related: ‘We are damned fools’: scientist who sounded climate alarm in 80s warns of worse to come

This alarming speed-up of global heating, which would mean the world breaches the internationally agreed 1.5C threshold set out in the Paris climate agreement far sooner than expected, risks a world “less tolerable to humanity, with greater climate extremes”, according to the study led by Hansen, the former Nasa scientist who issued a foundational warning about climate change to the US Congress back in the 1980s.

Hansen said there was a huge amount of global heating “in the pipeline” because of the continued burning of fossil fuels and Earth being “very sensitive” to the impacts of this – far more sensitive than the best estimates laid out by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“We would be damned fools and bad scientists if we didn’t expect an acceleration of global warming,” Hansen said. “We are beginning to suffer the effect of our Faustian bargain. That is why the rate of global warming is accelerating.”

The question of whether the rate of global heating is accelerating has been keenly debated among scientists this year amid months of record-breaking temperatures.

Hansen points to an imbalance between the energy coming in from the sun versus outgoing energy from the Earth that has “notably increased”, almost doubling over the past decade. This ramp-up, he cautioned, could result in disastrous sea level rise for the world’s coastal cities.

The new research, comprising peer-reviewed work of Hansen and more than a dozen other scientists, argues that this imbalance, the Earth’s greater climate sensitivity and a reduction in pollution from shipping, which has cut the amount of airborne sulphur particles that reflect incoming sunlight, are causing an escalation in global heating.

“We are in the early phase of a climate emergency,” the paper warns. “Such acceleration is dangerous in a climate system that is already far out of equilibrium. Reversing the trend is essential – we must cool the planet – for the sake of preserving shorelines and saving the world’s coastal cities.”

To deal with this crisis, Hansen and his colleagues advocate for a global carbon tax as well as, more controversially, efforts to intentionally spray sulphur into the atmosphere in order to deflect heat away from the planet and artificially lower the world’s temperature.

So-called “solar geoengineering” has been widely criticized for threatening potential knock-on harm to the environment, as well as over the risks of a whiplash heating effect should the injections of sulphur cease, but is backed by a minority of scientists who warn that the world is running out of time and options to avoid catastrophic temperature growth.

Hansen said that while cutting emissions should be the highest priority, “thanks to the slowness in developing adequate carbon-free energies and failure to put a price on carbon emissions, it is now unlikely that we can get there – a bright future for young people – from here without temporary help from solar radiation management”.

This year is almost certain to be the hottest ever reliably recorded, with temperatures in September described as “gobsmackingly bananas” by one climate researcher. A report this week found that the carbon budget to limit the world to 1.5C of heating is now nearly exhausted due to the continued burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

But while scientists are clear about this being part of an upward trend of global heating, there is as yet no agreement that this trend is accelerating.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that Hansen and his co-authors are “very much out of the mainstream” in identifying an acceleration in surface heating that has “continued at a remarkably constant rate for the past few decades”. Mann said that cuts to shipping emissions have only a tiny effect on the climate system and that calls for solar geoengineering are misguided and a “very slippery slope”.

Bärbel Hönisch, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University, said she had “some reservations” about the certainties expressed in Hansen’s research about the state of the Earth’s climate millions of years ago, which helps predict the consequences of warming today. “I’d be a little more reserved, but they may well be correct – it’s a nicely written paper,” she said. “It raises a lot of questions that will trigger a lot of research that will bring our understanding forward.”

Some other researchers are less skeptical of Hansen’s dire warning of supercharged global heating, highlighting his previous prescient warnings about the climate crisis that have largely played out due to decades of inaction to stem the use of fossil fuels.

“I think [Hansen’s] contention that the IPCC has underestimated climate sensitivity somewhat will prove to be correct,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project. “It’s hard to know what’s unlikely any more in terms of warming. No fossil fuel has declined in use yet globally, not even coal.

“I think Hansen’s pessimism is warranted. He stood up 35 years ago and sounded the alarm – and the world mostly ignored him, and all of us.”

Experts underestimate how fast Earth is warming, top climate scientist says in new study

Doyle Rice, USA TODAY
Updated Thu, November 2, 2023 

A woman is silhouetted against the setting sun as triple-digit heat indexes continued in the Midwest Sunday, Aug. 20, 2023, in Kansas City, Mo.

Legendary climate scientist James Hansen, in a new study published Thursday, predicts that the Earth's temperature rise will accelerate in the upcoming decades and will reach 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures by 2050. This is significantly more than the most common estimates from groups such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, typically considered the planet's gold standard for climate forecasts.

According to Hansen's new study, the revised prediction is due to previous underestimations of the effects of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere, along with the effects of aerosols, which have acted to mask some of global warming.

Although the IPCC and other experts acknowledge the impact that aerosols have on the climate system – for example, NASA says that "if not for aerosol pollution, Earth would be even warmer than it already is" – Hansen and his co-authors say that that impact is "underestimated."

Specifically, Hansen told USA TODAY that the study's main point is that the Earth's climate is "more sensitive" to both greenhouse gases and air pollution than the IPCC realized.

Why does 2 degrees matter?

According to NASA, a "2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a critical threshold above which dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change will occur."

Hansen and his co-authors write in the paper that "impacts on people and nature will accelerate" as global warming increases toward the 2-degree threshold.

Beyond the temperature increase, the risks of weather and climate catastrophes also rise, as heat waves and death from extreme weather dramatically increase, according to an earlier United Nations scientific report.

In the American West, extreme fire weather will likely be more intense and last longer, NASA reports.

Exceptionally warm weather moved into the upper Midwest on Aug. 22 as a pedestrian walks at sunset in Oconomowoc, Wis. Climate scientist James Hansen predicts that the Earth's temperature rise will accelerate in the upcoming decades.

Coastal cities threatened by sea level rise

NASA said that if warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius, more than 70% of Earth's coastlines will see sea level rise greater than 0.66 feet, "resulting in increased coastal flooding, beach erosion, salinization of water supplies and other impacts on humans and ecological systems."

We "must avoid 2 degrees global warming, which would otherwise result in the loss of our coastal cities near the end of this century," Hansen told USA TODAY.
Earth's climate 'more sensitive than usually assumed'

Using improved paleoclimate data, Hansen's new study finds that the Earth's climate "is more sensitive than usually assumed" to both carbon dioxide and aerosols.

The authors conclude that much of the expected greenhouse gas warming in the past century has been offset by the cooling effect of human-made aerosols – fine airborne particles found in air pollution. According to the study, aerosols have declined in amount since 2010 because of reduced air pollution in China and global restrictions on aerosol emissions from ships.

"This aerosol reduction is good for human health, as particulate air pollution kills several million people per year and adversely affects the health of many more people," Hansen said. "However, aerosol reduction is now beginning to unmask greenhouse gas warming that aerosol cooling hid."

The study authors term aerosol cooling a “Faustian bargain” because, as humanity eventually reduces air pollution, payment in the form of increased warming comes due.
What should we do?

The study recommends three actions humanity can undertake to avoid the 2-degree rise in global temperature:

(1) A global increasing price on greenhouse gas emissions accompanied by the development of abundant, affordable, dispatchable clean energy.

(2) East-West cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs.

(3) Conduct research and development for temporary actions to address Earth’s now enormous energy imbalance.

“We live on a planet with a climate characterized by delayed response, which is a recipe for intergenerational injustice,” Hansen concludes. “Young people need to understand this situation and the actions needed to assure a bright future for themselves and their children.”

The new study, "Global warming in the pipeline," appeared in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change, which is published by Oxford University Press.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Global warming to accelerate faster than expected, James Hansen says

The planet is heating up faster than predicted, says scientist who sounded climate alarm in the 1980s

Laura Paddison, CNN
Thu, November 2, 2023

The planet is on track to heat up at a much faster rate than scientists have previously predicted, meaning a key global warming threshold could be breached this decade, according to a new study co-authored by James Hansen — the US scientist widely credited with being the first to publicly sound the alarm on the climate crisis in the 1980s.

In the paper, published Thursday in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change, Hansen and more than a dozen other scientists used a combination of paleoclimate data, including data from polar ice cores and tree rings, climate models and observational data, to conclude that the Earth is much more sensitive to climate change than previously understood.

“We are in the early phase of a climate emergency,” according to the report, which warns a surge of heat “already in the pipeline” will rapidly push global temperatures beyond what has been predicted, resulting in warming that exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in the 2020s, and above 2 degrees Celsius before 2050.

The findings add to a slew of recent research that concludes the world is hurtling toward 1.5 degrees, a threshold beyond which the impacts of climate change — including extreme heat, drought and floods — will become significantly harder for humans to adapt to.

“The 1.5-degree limit is deader than a doornail,” said Hansen on a call with reporters. “And the 2-degree limit can be rescued, only with the help of purposeful actions.”

Some other scientists, however, have cast doubt on the paper’s conclusions that climate change is accelerating faster than models predict.

Hansen, a director at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is a renowned climate scientist whose 1988 testimony to the US Senate first brought global attention to climate change.

He has previously warned that the Earth has an energy imbalance, as more energy comes in through sunlight than leaves through heat radiating into space.

The resulting excess heat is equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs a day, with most of the energy absorbed by the ocean, Hansen’s research found a decade ago.

US scientist James Hansen, pictured in 2013, is credited as the first to publicly raise the alarm about climate change in the 1980s. 

- CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images

In this recent paper, Hansen and his co-authors say the energy imbalance has now increased, in part because of successful efforts to tackle particle air pollution, especially in China and through global restrictions on shipping pollution. While this kind of pollution is a serious health hazard, it also has a cooling effect, as particles reflect sunlight away from the Earth.

The imbalance is set to cause accelerated global warming, bringing disastrous consequences, according to the paper, including rapid sea level rise and the potential shutdown of vital ocean currents within this century.

Hansen said he is particularly concerned about the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet and especially the Thwaites Glacier, which acts as a cork, holding back the ice on land and providing an important defense against catastrophic sea level rise.

But the warming is not necessarily locked in, according to the paper, which calls for “extraordinary actions.”

Measures it recommends include taxing carbon pollution, increasing nuclear power to “complement renewable energies” and strong action from developed countries to help developing countries move to low carbon energy. While the highest priority is to drastically reduce planet-heating pollution, this alone will not be enough, the report found.

“If we’re going to keep sea level close to where it is, we actually have to cool the planet,” said Hansen.

One way to do this, the report suggests, is solar geoengineering. This controversial technology aims to cool temperatures by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth, or allowing more heat to escape into space. That can be done through injecting aerosols into the atmosphere or spraying clouds with salt particles to make them more reflective, for example.

Critics warn of unforeseen consequences, including impacts on rainfall and monsoons, as well as “termination shock” if geoengineering were suddenly halted and pent-up warming released.

But Hansen said it should be considered. “Rather than describe those efforts as ‘threatening geoengineering,’ we have to recognize that we are geoengineering the planet right now,” he said, by burning large amounts of planet-heating fossil fuels.

The paper’s findings are alarming and come as the world is experiencing unprecedented heat. This year is on course to be the hottest on record, with every month from June onwards breaking records for the hottest such month.

But while science is clear that the rate of global warming is increasing, the idea that it is accelerating beyond what models predict is controversial.

The findings “are very much out of the mainstream,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

While the Earth’s surface and its oceans are warming, the data does not support claims that the rate is accelerating, he told CNN in an email. “As I like to say, the truth is bad enough!” Mann said. “There is no evidence that the models are under-predicting human-caused warming.”

He also cast doubt on the role of pollution reduction in warming trends, saying the total impact is very small, and warned that solar geoengineering is “unprecedented” and “potentially very dangerous.”

“Whether or not the 1.5 degrees Celsius target is reachable is a matter of policy, not climate physics, at this point,” Mann said.

But Hansen rejected criticisms of the research, saying it’s based on hard numbers and straightforward physics.

“This is not fringe, this is the correct physics and it is the real world,” he said, “and it sometimes takes the community a while to catch on.”

James Hansen study warns Earth warming faster than previously thought

Patrick Hilsman
Thu, November 2, 2023 

The Earth's temperature could be increasing faster than was previously understood, according to a new research paper from James Hansen, the scientist who played a major role in raising public awareness about climate change in the 1980s. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI


Nov. 2 (UPI) -- A new study led by James Hansen, a scientist responsible for raising public consciousness about climate change in the 1980s, suggests global temperatures are increasing faster than expected.

The study suggests global temperatures will reach a crucial 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the year 2050, faster than was previously expected by scientific consensus.

Hansen's study implies that the highly regarded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is often used as a reference point for climate study, underestimated the urgency of the impact of global climate change.

NASA estimates that a global increase of 2 degrees Celsius could cause major flooding along Earth's coastlines.

"Our principal motivation in this paper is concern that IPCC has underestimated climate sensitivity and understated the threat of large sea level rise and shutdown of ocean overturning circulations," Hansen's researchers said in the paper.

The paper suggests that reductions in certain kinds of pollution, notably sulfur-based pollutants that reflect sunlight, may have accelerated the heating of the Earth.

The researchers used data from ice core samples to evaluate past greenhouse gas quantities.

"Air bubbles in Antarctic ice cores -- trapped as snow piled up and compressed into ice -- preserve a record of long-lived GHGs for at least 800,000 years. Isotopic composition of the ice provides a measure of temperature in and near Antarctica," researchers said.

The paper advises that climate change is still mitigable.

"Warming in the pipeline need not appear. We can take actions that slow and reverse global warming; indeed, we suggest that such actions are needed to avoid disastrous consequences for humanity and nature," the researchers said.

The study suggests that while the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is crucial to combating climate change, it is insufficient without being paired with other actions.

"Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as practical has highest priority, but that policy alone is now inadequate and must be complemented by additional actions to affect Earth's energy balance," researchers said.


NASA scientist issues grim warning 35 years after his original prediction: ‘[W]e knew it was coming’
Stephen Proctor
Wed, November 1, 2023



James Hansen, who was a NASA climate scientist when he first warned the world that the planet was heating in 1988, is back with another stark warning — this time hoping for different results.

When Hansen appeared before the United States Senate in June of 1988, the world had just experienced the warmest first five months of any year in recorded history, The New York Times reported at the time.

Up until that time, scientists had been cautious about blaming the warming of the planet on pollutants put into the air by human activity. But Hansen told the committee that NASA was 99% certain that the warming trend was caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere.

Sadly, the problem has continuously gotten worse worldwide in the decades since. And Hansen has continued his fight to bring attention to the issue. In 2011, he was one of 140 people to be arrested while protesting the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

In a recent statement released by Hansen alongside two other scientists, Hansen predicted the warming of the planet to accelerate in the coming years, musing about a “new climate frontier.”

“There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts,” Hansen told the Guardian. “These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality — we knew it was coming.”

Speaking of the heat waves that have ravaged much of the Northern Hemisphere recently, Hansen told the Guardian he cannot help but feel “a sense of disappointment that we scientists did not communicate more clearly and that we did not elect leaders capable of a more intelligent response.”

Of the lack of response by humanity as a whole, Hansen added, “It means we are damned fools. We have to taste it to believe it.”

Though it’s been 35 years since Hansen first warned the world in Senate testimony about what we’re now seeing with our own eyes, there is reason for optimism.

The move away from dirty energy is kicking into high gear. Sales of electric cars continue to rise, with an expected growth of 35% from 2022 to 2023, electric boats with solar-powered charging stations are now available, and grassroots efforts to make renewable energy more widely available are underway.