Political shadows cast by the Antarctic curtain

Kobe University

 

image: 

To protect the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from melting, a gigantic underwater curtain has been proposed to be installed on the Antarctic seabed. However, the political ramifications of such a superproject urgently require careful consideration by scholars of international law to anticipate potential political fault lines for the Antarctic Treaty System that has preserved the seventh continent as a place for peaceful scientific exploration.

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Credit: SHIBATA Akiho

The scientific debate around the installation of a massive underwater curtain to protect Antarctic ice sheets from melting lacks its vital political perspective. A Kobe University research team argues that the serious questions around authority, sovereignty and security should be addressed proactively by the scientific community to avoid the protected seventh continent becoming the scene or object of international discord.

A January 2024 article in Nature put the spotlight on a bold idea originally proposed by Finnish researchers to save the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from melting, which is estimated to potentially raise global sea levels by up to 5 meters. The idea of installing an underground curtain 80 kilometers long and 100 meters high to prevent warm underground water from reaching the glaciers made an international splash, and “What had been a technical discussion among some scientists quickly became a social debate involving the general public,” says Kobe University international law researcher SHIBATA Akiho. In the scientific debate, however, the political aspect has either been completely ignored or dangerously downplayed, which runs the risk of kindling conflict around a project that is meant to protect humanity, in a setting that has been a model for peaceful international collaboration for over 60 years.

As experts on the international law that governs the Antarctic’s peaceful existence dedicated to scientific investigation, Shibata and a visiting scholar from the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Patrick FLAMM, scrambled to put together a careful analysis of the political repercussions of the global superproject. Shibata says, “We believe that it was important to publish a paper within one year of the original proposal, before the social debate takes on a life of its own.”

In a policy paper now published in the journal International Affairs, the Kobe University researcher points out consequences along three main themes: authority, sovereignty and security. Concerns about authority ask who is in a position to decide on the realization of such a project and what this means for the power balance in the body governing access to the Antarctic. Sovereignty concerns are centered around the implications for extant and dormant territorial claims. And questions around security consider how to practically safeguard a structure that would certainly be seen as planetary critical infrastructure. Shibata sums up, saying: “This paper sheds light on the political and legal ‘shadows’ hidden behind the exciting surface of science and technology. However, we believe that it is necessary for the members of society to make decisions on the development of these technologies based on a thorough understanding of such negative aspects.”

While the researchers write that “In the current climate, with growing international rivalry and great power strategic competition, it would be an extremely unlikely diplomatic achievement to secure the level of international cooperation … required for the proposed glacial geoengineering infrastructures,” they also point out a way forward by looking back. In the early 1980s, a smoldering conflict around guidelines for Antarctic mineral extraction got resolved by the 1991 “Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty,” which proactively prohibited mining in the Antarctic indefinitely. This solution set a precedent for the treaty parties to seek solutions that avoid international discord over the Antarctic.

The Kobe University law expert is careful to point out that prohibition is not the default solution, however. He explains: “Recently, momentum has gathered among natural scientists to examine such technologies more multilaterally from the viewpoint of whether they are appropriate in the first place. If in such a deeper scientific and technical discussion the argument is that there are social benefits that outweigh the governance risks we have presented, then again, we international political scientists and international legal scholars need to be involved in this discussion. Perhaps then the discussion will no longer be about protecting the key principles of the current Antarctic Treaty System while considering this technology but about modifying those key principles themselves.”

This research was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grant 21K18124) and the Kobe University Strategic International Collaborative Research Grant Type C. It was conducted in collaboration with a researcher from the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt.

Kobe University is a national university with roots dating back to the Kobe Commercial School founded in 1902. It is now one of Japan’s leading comprehensive research universities with nearly 16,000 students and nearly 1,700 faculty in 10 faculties and schools and 15 graduate schools. Combining the social and natural sciences to cultivate leaders with an interdisciplinary perspective, Kobe University creates knowledge and fosters innovation to address society’s challenges.

---

Journal

International Affairs

DOI

10.1093/ia/iiae281 

Method of Research

Commentary/editorial

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

‘Ice sheet conservation’ and international discord: governing (potential) glacial geoengineering in the Antarctica

Article Publication Date

18-Nov-2024

"At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft

The H.P. Lovecraft Archive

https://www.hplovecraft.com › writings › texts › fiction

Aug 20, 2009 — I could not help feeling that they were evil things—mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That ...

SPACE

Interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck

Date: March 7, 2024

Source:  Johns Hopkins University

Summary:

Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road, new research shows. The findings raise doubts that materials pulled last year from the ocean are alien materials from that meteor, as was widely reported.

FULL STORY

Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road, new Johns Hopkins University-led research shows. The findings raise doubts that materials pulled last year from the ocean are alien materials from that meteor, as was widely reported.

"The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer," said Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led the research.

"It's really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something. But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we'd expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we'd expect from a meteor."

The team will present its findings March 12 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.

After a meteor entered Earth's atmosphere over the Western Pacific in January 2014, the event was linked to ground vibrations recorded at a seismic station in Papua New Guinea's Manus Island.

In 2023, materials at the bottom of the ocean near where the meteor fragments were thought to have fallen were identified as of "extraterrestrial technological" (alien) origin.

But according to Fernando, that supposition relies on misinterpreted data and the meteor actually entered the atmosphere somewhere else.

Fernando's team did not find evidence of seismic waves from the meteor.

"The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments," he said.

"Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place."

Using data from stations in Australia and Palau designed to detect sound waves from nuclear testing, Fernando's team identified a more likely location for the meteor, more than 100 miles from the area initially investigated.

They concluded the materials recovered from the ocean bottom were tiny, ordinary meteorites -- or particles produced from other meteorites hitting Earth's surface mixed with terrestrial contamination.

"Whatever was found on the sea floor is totally unrelated to this meteor, regardless of whether it was a natural space rock or a piece of alien spacecraft -- even though we strongly suspect that it wasn't aliens," Fernando added.

Fernando's team includes Constantinos Charalambous of Imperial College London; Steve Desch of Arizona State University; Alan Jackson of Towson University; Pierrick Mialle of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization; Eleanor K. Sansom of Curtin University; and Göran Ekström of Columbia University.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Johns Hopkins University. Original written by Roberto Molar Candanosa. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Cite This Page:MLA
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Johns Hopkins University. "Interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 7 March 2024. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240307165128.htm>.

This Galaxy Was Already Dead When the Universe Was Only 700 Million Years Old

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

― Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Nameless City

False-color JWST image of a small fraction of the GOODS South field, with the galaxy JADES-GS-z7-01-QU highlighted 

Credit: JADES Collaboration

POSTED ON MARCH 7, 2024 

BY CAROLYN COLLINS PETERSEN

When a galaxy runs out of gas and dust, the process of star birth stops. That takes billions of years. But, there’s a galaxy out there that was already dead when the Universe was only 700 billion years old. What happened to it?

That’s what an international team of astronomers wants to know. “The first few hundred million years of the Universe was a very active phase, with lots of gas clouds collapsing to form new stars,” said Tobias Looser from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. “Galaxies need a rich supply of gas to form new stars, and the early universe was like an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

So, when the galaxy JADES-GS-z7-01-QU showed up in a JWST observation, it didn’t exhibit much evidence of ongoing star formation. (JADES stands for JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey.) It’s in what astronomers refer to as a “quenched” state and looks like star formation started and quickly stopped. Figuring out why this happened to the young galaxy is an important step in cosmology. Why did it stop creating stars? And, were the factors that affect star formation the same then as they are today?

Composite image of the GOODS-South field where galaxy JADES-GS-z7-01-QU lies. This is part of a deep survey using two 8.2-meter telescopes. JWST later zeroed in on a small portion of this field.
(Credit : ESO/M Hayes)

When a Galaxy Stops Forming Stars

Star-formation quenching is something astronomers don’t expect to happen quickly. “It’s only later in the universe that we start to see galaxies stop forming stars, whether that’s due to a black hole or something else,” said Dr Francesco D’Eugenio, also from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology and a co-author with Looser on a recent paper about JADES-GS-z7-01-QU.

Star birth usually begins as clouds of gas coalesce together. Gas-rich regions, including galaxies, are prime spots for star-birth nurseries. JWST data about JADES-GS-z7-01-QU shows that this baby galaxy experienced a very intense period of star formation shortly after it began forming (after the Epoch of Reionization). For somewhere between 30 to 90 million years, it was ablaze with star formation. Then, suddenly, it stopped.

That’s not surprising—although astronomers aren’t sure why it stopped. Clearly, it ran out of gas. Maybe a supermassive black hole at its heart gobbled up much of the available “star stuff”. The black hole’s rapidly moving winds and jets could also have shoved a great deal of the star-birth material completely out of the galaxy. It’s also possible that the very rapid pace of star formation that JADES-GS-z7-01-QU experienced simply used up the supply. That’s not impossible, according to Looser. “Everything seems to happen faster and more dramatically in the early universe, and that might include galaxies moving from a star-forming phase to dormant or quenched,” he said.

Figuring out the Answer

It’s not clear from the current JWST data what happened to this little galaxy back at the dawn of time. Astronomers are still probing the data. “We’re not sure if any of those scenarios can explain what we’ve now seen with Webb,” said paper co-author Professor Roberto Maiolino. “Until now, to understand the early Universe, we’ve used models based on the modern universe. But now that we can see so much further back in time, and observe that the star formation was quenched so rapidly in this galaxy, models based on the modern universe may need to be revisited.”

The epoch of reionization was when light from the first stars could travel through the early Universe. At this time, galaxies began assembling, as did black holes. The young galaxy JADES-GS-z7-01-QU went through a star burst phase during this time, and then stopped forming stars. Credit: Paul Geil/Simon Mutch/The University of Melbourne

That means more observations using JWST. “We’re looking for other galaxies like this one in the early universe, which will help us place some constraints on how and why galaxies stop forming new stars,” said D’Eugenio. “It could be the case that galaxies in the early universe ‘die’ and then burst back to life – we’ll need more observations to help us figure that out.”

There’s one other possibility that astronomers will want to probe. JADES-GS-z7-01-QU looked dead at the time of its life when JWST observed it. But, it’s possible that the star-birth quenching was only a temporary thing. Maybe it was caused by periodic outflows of star-stuff material to interstellar space (driven by the black hole in the nucleus). Other galaxies have also been observed to be taking a star-birth break, but they’re much more massive than this one.

Perhaps JADES-GS-z7-01-QU started up the star-forming factory later in its history. In that case, it could well have grown much more massive in later epochs of cosmic history. And, this provides an intriguing idea: perhaps other “quenched” galaxies also took a break, then got a massive infusion of gas—perhaps through collisions with other galaxies—to create later generations of stars. Future JWST observations should uncover more of these galaxies and that should allow astronomers to study their quenched phases in more detail.

For More Information

Astronomers Spot Oldest ‘Dead’ Galaxy Yet Observed
A Recently Quenched Galaxy 700 Million Years After the Big Bang

AI makes a rendezvous in space

by Andrew Myers, Stanford University

Researchers from the Stanford Center for AEroSpace Autonomy Research (CAESAR) in 

the robotic testbed, which can simulate the movements of autonomous spacecraft. 

Credit: Andrew Brodhead

Space travel is complex, expensive, and risky. Great sums and valuable payloads are on the line every time one spacecraft docks with another. One slip and a billion-dollar mission could be lost. Aerospace engineers believe that autonomous control, like the sort guiding many cars down the road today, could vastly improve mission safety, but the complexity of the mathematics required for error-free certainty is beyond anything on-board computers can currently handle.

In a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference in March 2024 and published on the preprint server arXiv, a team of aerospace engineers at Stanford University reported using AI to speed the planning of optimal and safe trajectories between two or more docking spacecraft. They call it ART—the Autonomous Rendezvous Transformer—and they say it is the first step to an era of safer and trustworthy self-guided space travel.

Hail CAESAR

In autonomous control, the number of possible outcomes is massive. With no room for error, they are essentially open-ended.

"Trajectory optimization is a very old topic. It has been around since the 1960s, but it is difficult when you try to match the performance requirements and rigid safety guarantees necessary for autonomous space travel within the parameters of traditional computational approaches," said Marco Pavone, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and co-director of the new Stanford Center for AEroSpace Autonomy Research (CAESAR).

"In space, for example, you have to deal with constraints that you typically do not have on the Earth, like, for example, pointing at the stars in order to maintain orientation. These translate to mathematical complexity."

"For autonomy to work without fail billions of miles away in space, we have to do it in a way that on-board computers can handle," added Simone D'Amico, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and fellow co-director of CAESAR. "AI is helping us manage the complexity and delivering the accuracy needed to ensure mission safety, in a computationally efficient way."

CAESAR is a collaboration between industry, academia, and government that brings together the expertise of Pavone's Autonomous Systems Lab and D'Amico's Space Rendezvous Lab. The Autonomous Systems Lab develops methodologies for the analysis, design, and control of autonomous systems—cars, aircraft, and of course, spacecraft.

The Space Rendezvous Lab performs fundamental and applied research to enable future distributed space systems whereby two or more spacecraft collaborate autonomously to accomplish objectives otherwise very difficult for a single system, including flying in formation, rendezvous and docking, swarm behaviors, constellations, and many others. The lab is planning a launch workshop for May 2024.

CAESAR researchers discuss the robotic free-flyer platform, which uses air bearings to 

hover on a granite table and simulate a frictionless zero gravity environment. 

Credit: Andrew Brodhead

A warm start

The Autonomous Rendezvous Transformer is a trajectory optimization framework that leverages the massive benefits of AI without compromising on the safety assurances needed for reliable deployment in space. At its core, ART involves integrating AI-based methods into the traditional pipeline for trajectory optimization, using AI to rapidly generate high-quality trajectory candidates as input for conventional trajectory optimization algorithms.

The researchers refer to the AI suggestions as a "warm start" to the optimization problem and show how this is crucial to obtain substantial computational speed-ups without compromising on safety.

"One of the big challenges in this field is that we have so far needed 'ground in the loop' approaches—you have to communicate things to the ground where supercomputers calculate the trajectories and then we upload commands back to the satellite," explains Tommaso Guffanti, a postdoctoral fellow in D'Amico's lab and first author of the paper introducing the Autonomous Rendezvous Transformer.

"And in this context, our paper is exciting, I think, for including artificial intelligence components in traditional guidance, navigation, and control pipeline to make these rendezvous smoother, faster, more fuel efficient, and safer."

Next frontiers

ART is not the first model to bring AI to the challenge of space flight, but in tests in a terrestrial lab setting, ART outperformed other machine learning-based architectures. Transformer models, like ART, are a subset of high-capacity neural network models that got their start with large language models, like those used by chatbots. The same AI architecture is extremely efficient in parsing, not just words, but many other types of data such as images, audio, and now, trajectories.

"Transformers can be applied to understand the current state of a spacecraft, its controls, and maneuvers that we wish to plan," Daniele Gammelli, a postdoctoral fellow in Pavone's lab, and also a co-author on the ART paper. "These large transformer models are extremely capable at generating high-quality sequences of data."

The next frontier in their research is to further develop ART and then test it in the realistic experimental environment made possible by CAESAR. If ART can pass CAESAR's high bar, the researchers can be confident that it's ready for testing in real-world scenarios in orbit.

"These are state-of-the-art approaches that need refinement," D'Amico says. "Our next step is to inject additional AI and machine learning elements to improve ART's current capability and to unlock new capabilities, but it will be a long journey before we can test the Autonomous Rendezvous Transformer in space itself."

More information: Tommaso Guffanti et al, Transformers for Trajectory Optimization with Application to Spacecraft Rendezvous, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2310.13831

Provided by Stanford University 

NASA tests autopilot sensors during simulations

Widespread solar storm struck spacecraft near the sun, Earth and even Mars

News
By Meredith Garofalo 

published about 12 hours ago


In 2021, a solar storm was recorded by multiple different spacecraft and the results tell quite the story.

On April 17, 2021, one of the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft captured this view of a coronal mass ejection billowing away from the Sun (which is covered by the black disk at center to better see features around it).

 (Image credit: NASA/STEREO-A/COR2)

Space weather may seem like a tale from a galaxy far, far away — but when solar storms impact us on Earth, we're directly affected. These storms are what give rise to the Northern Lights, for instance. They can even lead to temporary disruptions in our communications systems and power grid. From these solar flares, we can learn so much — and a recent release from NASA shares how, back in 2021, one in particular had a brilliant story to go with it. As space agencies continue to send astronauts into our planet's orbit, and start planning for journeys even beyond, ways of monitoring solar storms and their impacts will become increasingly critical. These storms have the potential to harm humans, satellites and spacecraft; a release from 2023 by the European Space Agency discussed how, for the first time, such energetic particles were simultaneously observed on the surfaces of the Earth, moon and Mars after a solar outburst. This raised important concerns.

"Space radiation can create a real danger to our exploration throughout the Solar System," Colin Wilson, ExoMars TGO project scientist, shared in the ESA's release. "Measurements of high-level radiation events by robotic missions is critical to prepare for long-duration crewed missions."

In an era with a historic number of satellites and other instruments roaming through the great unknown, NASA's heliophysics missions use spacecraft to get a deeper understanding of space phenomena and tell the stories of what happens after solar events when particles are released into space. A recent article from NASA shares a perfect example of the efforts being made to study the impacts from solar storms originating from the light of all lights: The sun. This solar outburst happened on April 17, 2021, and although these storms are not uncommon, with this specific event, the storm was so widespread that six spacecraft at different locations and positions felt the blast.

Related: Powerful solar flare unleashes colossal plasma plume, sparks radio blackouts across South Pacific (video


High-speed protons and electrons, also known as solar energetic particles (SEPs), were observed by spacecraft not only between the sun and Earth, but as far away as between Earth and Mars!



On April 17, 2021, one of the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft captured this view of a coronal mass ejection billowing away from the Sun (which is covered by the black disk at center to better see features around it). (Image credit: NASA/STEREO-A/COR2)

According to NASA, this was the first time something like this has happened — we now have a whole different perspective on solar storms using data from multiple spacecraft versus a single one that can only provide a local insight.

Let's use a famous Marvel hero as an example: Thor creates a solar storm to wipe out a bunch of bad guys, generating lots of SEPs to send out into space. He knows, however, that there are enemies on all sides. So, he makes sure to create different balls of these SEPs that can go in all different directions, covering a much wider territory than a single beam can. With more "eyes" on a single event, we can better understand all of the different types of hazards that can come from one solar storm, which can sometimes pose a threat across a larger playing field.

"SEPs can harm our technology, such as satellites, and disrupt GPS," Nina Dresing of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Turku in Finland said in a statement. "Also, humans in space or even on airplanes on polar routes can suffer harmful radiation during strong SEP events."

Dresing and her team conducted further research from the event to learn where the SEPs came from, how the particles revved up to dangerous speeds, and when they made contact with each spacecraft. The conclusions were as follows (plotted on the diagram below.) The closest to the blast (which took the blunt of the blow) was the BepiColombo spacecraft, a joint mission of the European Space Agency and JAXA. BepiColombo is en route to Mercury. The second hardest hit by particles was NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which sits extremely close to the sun. That was followed by ESA's Solar Orbiter. Parker and the Solar Orbiter were on opposing sides of the flare when it happened.

A little closer to home, NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft, STEREO-A, the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and NASA's Wind spacecraft were hit by the event. Finally, the farthest away and final spacecraft to detect particles from the blast were Mars orbiters: NASA’s MAVEN and ESA's Mars Express.

This diagram shows the positions of individual spacecraft, as well as Earth and Mars, during the solar outburst on April 17, 2021. The Sun is at the center. The black arrow shows the direction of the initial solar flare. Several spacecraft detected solar energetic particles (SEPs) over 210 degrees around the Sun (blue shaded area). (Image credit: Solar-MACH)

By determining their differences in location from around the sun and noting how many electrons and protons were observed by each spacecraft, Dresing and her team were able to paint a much clearer picture of what happened from the solar ejection.

"Multiple sources are likely contributing to this event, explaining its wide distribution," Georgia de Nolfo, a team member and heliophysics research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement. "Also, it appears that, for this event, protons and electrons may come from different sources. This is not the first time that people have conjectured that electrons and protons have had different sources for their acceleration, this measurement was unique in that the multiple perspectives enabled scientists to separate the different processes better, to confirm that electrons and protons may originate from different processes."

As we know, this will not be the last time an event like this occurs, and the more research we can do, the better understanding we can have of what happens with space weather, and the more we can cautiously explore the final frontier. Future studies that stem from these results will cover a wider terrain of other phenomena; they'll be conducted by instruments including the Geospace Dynamics Constellation (GDC), SunRISE, PUNCH, and HelioSwarm.

The study was published last year in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

MISKATONIC U. CTHULHU STUDIES

Antarctic octopus DNA reveals ice sheet collapse closer than thought


Issam AHMED
Thu, 21 December 2023 

Today's ice sheet in Antarctic and that during the Last Interglacial when 

seaways allowed connections between octopus populations 

(Sophie STUBER)

Scientists investigating how Antarctica's ice sheets retreated in the deep past have turned to an innovative approach: studying the genes of octopuses that live in its chilly waters.

A new analysis published Thursday in Science finds that geographically-isolated populations of the eight-limbed sea creatures mated freely around 125,000 years ago, signaling an ice-free corridor during a period when global temperatures were similar to today.

The findings suggest the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is closer to collapse than previously thought, threatening 3.3-5 meters of long term sea level rise if the world is unable to hold human-caused warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius target of the Paris Agreement, said the authors.


Lead author Sally Lau of James Cook University in Australia told AFP that as an evolutionary biologist focused on marine invertebrates, "I understand and then apply DNA and biology as a proxy of changes to Antarctica in the past."

Turquet's octopus made an ideal candidate for studying WAIS, she said, because the species is found all around the continent and fundamental information about it has already been answered by science, such as its 12-year-lifespan, and the fact it emerged some four million years ago.

About half-a-foot (15 centimeters) long excluding the arms and weighing around 1.3 pounds (600 grams), they lay relatively few, but large eggs on the bottom of the seafloor. This means parents must put significant effort into ensuring their offspring hatch -- a lifestyle that prevents them traveling too far away.

They are also limited by circular sea currents, or gyres, in some of their modern habitats.

- 'Tipping point close' -

By sequencing the DNA across genomes of 96 samples that were generally collected inadvertently as fishing bycatch and then left in museum storage over the course of 33 years, Lau and colleagues found evidence of trans-West Antarctic seaways that once connected the Weddell, Amundsen and Ross seas.

The history of genetic mixing indicated WAIS collapsed at two separate points -- first in the mid-Pliocene, 3-3.5 million years ago, which scientists were already confident about, and the last time in a period called the Last Interglacial, a warm spell from 129,000 to 116,000 years ago.

"This was the last time the planet was around 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels," said Lau. Human activity, primarily burning fossil fuels, has so far raised global temperatures by 1.2C compared to the late 1700s.

There were a handful of studies prior to the new Science paper that also suggested WAIS collapsed some time in the past, but they were far from conclusive because of the comparatively lower resolution genetic and geological data.

"This study provides empirical evidence indicating that the WAIS collapsed when the global mean temperature was similar to that of today, suggesting that the tipping point of future WAIS collapse is close," the authors wrote.

Sea level rise of 3.3 meters would drastically alter the world map as we know it, submerging low-lying coastal areas everywhere.

Writing in an accompanying commentary piece, Andrea Dutton of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst described the new research as "pioneering," adding it posed intriguing questions about whether ancient history will be repeated.

They flagged however that several key questions remained unanswered -- such as whether the past ice sheet collapse was caused by rising temperatures alone, or whether other variables like changing ocean currents and complex interactions between ice and solid Earth were also at play.

It's also not clear whether the sea level rise would be drawn out over millennia or occur in more rapid jumps.

But uncertainties such as these can't be an excuse for inaction against climate change "and this latest piece of evidence from octopus DNA stacks one more card on an already unstable house of cards," they wrote.

ia/md

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There Are Ghosts High Above Us, With Colors That Come From Space

Scientists captured new imagery of atmospheric phenomena that occur during some lightning storms, offering clues into how they form.

A jellyfish sprite, observed from a time-lapse video in 2019, about 50 miles above the Mediterranean Sea. Scientists disentangling the various wavelengths in the ghost above the jellyfish explained why some have a green hue (which are not visible to the naked eye)

.Credit...Oscar Van der Velde



By Robin George Andrews

NEW YORK TIMES
Dec. 12, 2023


In June 2019, scientists in Spain went searching for ghosts haunting the skies above the Mediterranean Sea. These green-hued wisps, dancing above pink-red, extremely high-altitude lightning during thunderstorms, had been discovered only in May that year. What were they? The only way to know was to capture one.

But that would prove to be a troublesome task. These ghosts are aptly named: they are difficult to see with the naked eye and appear for just a heartbeat dozens of miles above ground.

“Seeing a ghost is really difficult,” said María Passas-Varo, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain.

But on Sept. 21, 2019, they finally caught one with a specialized camera: a green spirit flickering at the crown of a jellyfish-shaped maelstrom of fuchsia lightning 50 miles above the sea. And after painstakingly disentangling the various wavelengths of light emitted by the ghost, the scientists unveiled its elemental makeup.

In a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, Dr. Passas-Varo and her colleagues revealed that the ghost’s pale emerald complexion came, in part, from excited oxygen, similar to the green glow of auroras; nitrogen plays a role, too.

But the main contributor was another element: iron. That was a surprise because the metal was ultimately being delivered from space.

Better understanding ghosts and other ephemeral lightning like entities can help scientists interpret the difficult-to-parse chemistry and physics of Earth’s upper atmosphere.

“There are layers of metals that dance” in and above thunderstorms, Dr. Passas-Varo said.

Ghosts are a type of transient luminous event, or T.L.E., which were first described by scientists in 1989. T.L.E.s can include blue jets, which fire upward from thunderstorm clouds, as well as crimson-tinged upper atmospheric lightning that can come in many shapes, like carrots and jellyfish, and is known as a sprite.

T.L.E.’s “are like fireworks,” Dr. Passas-Varo said. And little is definitively known about them — especially ghosts, the first of which was observed atop a sprite storm over Oklahoma in May 2019.

To capture their own ghost, her team pointed a spectrographic camera — one that can use light to ascertain chemistry — at the upper atmosphere from an observation post in Castellgalí, Spain. All they could do was wait for sprite thunderstorms to appear, cross their fingers and hope that at least one sprite would be briefly decorated with a ghost, and that their camera was pointed at the right place.

Eventually, they found one flitting about on a jellyfish sprite.

“It was a matter of luck,” Dr. Passas-Varo said.

This one was largely powered by extraterrestrial iron, not atmospheric oxygen. The camera also revealed the presence of nickel, sodium and silicon. The complex chemical soup responsible for this ghost even added a yellow-orange tinge to its green glow.

All of those elements often come from micrometeoroids and deep-space dust particles that are nearly constantly plunging into the upper atmosphere. That means that ghosts could effectively be seen as interplanetary visitors.

Still, some researchers said not too many conclusions should be drawn from the new paper’s findings.

“The metallic traces are interesting, but I’ll caution that this was only a single event,” said Chris Vagasky, a lightning researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the new work. To see if all ghosts are iron-fueled spooks, he added, “it would be nice to see the results from multiple ghosts.”

He has no doubt that the search for ghosts, and other T.L.E.s, will continue — largely because these phantoms are inherently beguiling.

“It’s really incredible to think that there is so much more occurring during a thunderstorm than what you can see or hear,” Dr. Vagasky said.

"The Colour out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft

The H.P. Lovecraft Archive

https://www.hplovecraft.com › writings › texts › fiction

Aug 20, 2009 — It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose ...