Why do flocks of birds swoop and swirl together in the sky? A biologist explains the science of murmurations


Tom Langen, Professor of Biology, Clarkson University
Sun, April 2, 2023 

Murmurations can have as many as 750,000 birds flying in unison. mikedabell/iStock via Getty Images

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Why do flocks of birds swoop and swirl together in the sky? – Artie W., age 9, Astoria, New York

A shape-shifting flock of thousands of starlings, called a murmuration, is amazing to see. As many as 750,000 birds join together in flight. The birds spread out and come together. The flock splits apart and fuses together again. Murmurations constantly change direction, flying up a few hundred meters, then zooming down to almost crash to the ground. They look like swirling blobs, making teardrops, figure eights, columns and other shapes. A murmuration can move fast – starlings fly up to 50 miles per hour (80 kilometers per hour).

The European or common starling, like many birds, forms groups called flocks when foraging for food or migrating. But a murmuration is different. This special kind of flock is named for the sound of a low murmur it makes from thousands of wingbeats and soft flight calls.

Murmurations form about an hour before sunset in fall, winter and early spring, when the birds are near where they’ll sleep. After maybe 45 minutes of this spectacular aerial display, the birds all at once drop down into their roost for the night.
Why do starlings form murmurations?

Unlike the V formations of migrating geese, murmurations provide no aerodynamic advantage.

Scientists think a murmuration is a visual invitation to attract other starlings to join a group night roost. One theory is that spending the night together keeps the starlings warmer as they share their body heat. It might also reduce the chance an individual bird would be eaten overnight by a predator such as an owl or marten.

This dilution effect might be part of the reason murmurations happen: The more starlings in the flock, the lower the risk to any one bird of being the one that gets snagged by a predator. Predators are more likely to catch the nearest prey, so the swirling of a murmuration could happen as individual birds try to move toward the safer middle of the crowd. Scientists call this the selfish herd effect.

Of course, the more birds in a flock, the more eyes and ears to detect the predator before it’s too late.


And a gigantic mass of whirling, swirling birds can make it hard to focus on a single target. A falcon or hawk can get confused and distracted by tricky wave patterns in the murmuration’s movements. It also must be careful not to collide with the flock and get hurt.

Over 3,000 citizen scientist volunteers reported spotting murmurations in a recent study. A third of them saw a raptor attack the murmuration. That observation suggests that murmurations do form to help protect the birds from predators – but it’s also possible a huge murmuration would be what attracted a hawk, for instance, in the first place.
How do starlings coordinate their behavior?

Murmurations have no leader and follow no plan. Instead, scientists believe movements are coordinated by starlings observing what others around them are doing. Birds in the middle can see through the flock on all sides to its edge and beyond. Somehow they keep track of how the flock is moving as a whole and adjust accordingly.

To learn what’s happening inside murmurations, some researchers film them using many cameras at the same time. Then they use computer programs to track the movements of individual starlings and create 3D models of the flock.

Within the murmuration, individual birds aren’t tightly packed together.

  K C Bailey/iStock via Getty Images

The videos reveal that the birds are not as densely packed as they might appear from the ground; there is room to maneuver. Starlings are closer to their side neighbors than those in front or behind. Starlings on the edge frequently move deeper into the flock.

Mathematicians and computer scientists try to create virtual murmurations using rules that birds might follow in a flock – like moving in the same direction as their neighbor, staying close and not colliding. From these simulations, it seems that each bird must keep track of seven neighbors and adjust based on what they’re doing to keep the murmuration from falling apart in a chaotic mess. And they do all this while flying as fast as they can.

Large schools of fish can appear to behave like murmurations, as do groups of some swarming insects, including honeybees. All these synchronized movements can happen so fast within flocks, herds, swarms and schools that some scientists once thought it required animal ESP!

Biologists, mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists and engineers are all working to figure out how animals carry out these displays. Curiosity drives this research, of course. But it may also have practical applications too, like helping develop autonomous vehicles that can travel in tight formation and work in coordinated groups without colliding.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
It was written by: Tom Langen, Clarkson University.

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Sacramento homeless encampment wins a lease — and hopes to be a model for California

“We don’t need a nonprofit industrial complex coming in, charging $4,000 a night for a piece of asphalt to babysit people” 

Ariane Lange
Sat, April 1, 2023 

Residents at an encampment who successfully negotiated a formal lease with the city of Sacramento called on homeless people across the nation to follow their example at a Saturday news conference.

The new lease binds city officials to an agreement: The people in Camp Resolution cannot be moved from the parking lot until every resident has been placed into permanent, stable housing.

The lease comes after a drawn-out fight with city officials, who have tried to force the residents to move multiple times. Now, the women-led camp has won official approval to remain in the tight-knit community they’ve refused to leave for months.

The point, said resident Desiree Pryor, is “to help everybody within it, and to make this a global movement for every other city to follow along.”

Anthony Prince, the attorney for the California Homeless Union who represented the residents of Camp Resolution in negotiations with the city, spoke with the crowd gathered outside the camp about the terms of the contract: “You cannot take this down until such time as every single person in this camp is provided with individual, durable and permanent housing. And housing does not mean some shelter where there’s 1,000 people all congregating together. It does not mean a pop-up tent encampment; it does not mean a sidewalk; it does not mean a street corner. It means a durable place to live like a human being.”

Camp Resolution leaders Sharon Jones, left, and Joyce Williams, right, embrace after a press conference announcing a formal lease agreement between the city and the encampment on Colfax street in North Sacramento on Saturday, April 1, 2023.

The camp and this agreement with the city, Prince said, could be “a model, an example for homeless people across the United States of America.”

Although the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2018 that citing or moving homeless campers when there was no other place for them to go was a form of cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution, the city and the county have continued to force unhoused people to move under many circumstances.

Sacramento County as a whole has at least 7,000 more homeless people than it has shelter beds for them to sleep on. The contract gives these campers an added layer of protection.

The attorney emphasized that the residents set the terms of the lease: “The days are over when other parties are going to make decisions for the homeless.”

Non-binding agreements between Camp Resolution residents and the city have collapsed before. After an August 2021 plan identified the lot on the corner of Colfax Street and Arden Way as a fitting site for shelters and parking, Sacramento moved people off the lot and spent $617,000 to put up an iron fence and prepare the lot for city-sanctioned campers. Then, the city scrapped the plan, telling the residents they could not return.

Residents moved back in anyway, and put up a defiant sign: “$617,000 TAXPAYER DOLLARS FOR A PARKING LOT???”

After police ordered Camp Resolution out in November 2022, 60 people showed up at a City Council meeting to protest. In response, Sean Loloee, who represents the campers’ district, said the sweep was being postponed. In the four months since, the campers and the city hammered out this new deal.

THE POST MODERN STATE
“We don’t need a nonprofit industrial complex coming in, charging $4,000 a night for a piece of asphalt to babysit people,” Sacramento Homeless Union President Crystal Sanchez told reporters Saturday. “We need that funding put into the resources.”

MUTUAL AID SOLIDARITY
Residents told The Sacramento Bee that the self-governing encampment — which has no nonprofit or city agency overseeing it — is a more dignified alternative to the controlling and sometimes degrading policies in place at many homeless shelters.

“We’re grown,” Pryor said.

Though the news conference was celebratory, Twana James, a homeless person who lives nearby at a camp called Bannon Island, said she and her elderly neighbors had just received 48-hour eviction notices. Pryor said she hoped Camp Resolution’s progress would inspire similar deals elsewhere, but the fight wasn’t over.

Ancient leaves preserved under a mile of Greenland's ice – and lost in a freezer for years – hold lessons about climate change

Paul Bierman, Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment, Professor of Natural Resources, University of Vermont 

 Andrew Christ, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Geology, University of Vermont

Sun, April 2, 2023 

Remnants of ancient Greenland tundra were preserved in soil beneath the ice sheet. Andrew Christ and Dorothy Peteet, CC BY-ND

In 1963, inside a covert U.S. military base in northern Greenland, a team of scientists began drilling down through the Greenland ice sheet. Piece by piece, they extracted an ice core 4 inches across and nearly a mile long. At the very end, they pulled up something else – 12 feet of frozen soil.

The ice told a story of Earth’s climate history. The frozen soil was examined, set aside and then forgotten.

Half a century later, scientists rediscovered that soil in a Danish freezer. It is now revealing its secrets.

Using lab techniques unimaginable in the 1960s when the core was drilled, we and an international team of fellow scientists were able to show that Greenland’s massive ice sheet had melted to the ground there within the past million years. Radiocarbon dating shows that it would have happened more than 50,000 years ago. It most likely happened during times when the climate was warm and sea level was high, possibly 400,000 years ago.

And there was more. As we explored the soil under a microscope, we were stunned to discover the remnants of a tundra ecosystem – twigs, leaves and moss. We were looking at northern Greenland as it existed the last time the region was ice-free. Our peer-reviewed study was published on March 15, 2021 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Engineers pull up a section of the 4,560-foot-long ice core at Camp Century in the 1960s. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers


With no ice sheet, sunlight would have warmed the soil enough for tundra vegetation to cover the landscape. The oceans around the globe would have been more than 10 feet higher, and maybe even 20 feet. The land on which Boston, London and Shanghai sit today would have been under the ocean waves.

The ice core and the soil below are something of a Rosetta Stone for understanding how durable the Greenland ice sheet has been during past warm periods – and how quickly it might melt again as the climate heats up. Today, humans are warming Earth’s climate, and the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising quickly.
Secret military bases and Danish freezers

The story of the ice core begins during the Cold War with a military mission dubbed Project Iceworm. Starting around 1959, the U.S. Army hauled hundreds of soldiers, heavy equipment and even a nuclear reactor across the ice sheet in northwest Greenland and dug a base of tunnels inside the ice. They called it Camp Century.

It was part of a secret plan to hide nuclear weapons from the Soviets. The public knew it as an Arctic research laboratory. Walter Cronkite even paid a visit and filed a report.

Workers build the snow tunnels at the Camp Century research base in 1960. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Camp Century didn’t last long. The snow and ice began slowly crushing the buildings inside the tunnels below, forcing the military to abandon it in 1966. During its short life, however, scientists were able to extract the ice core and begin analyzing Greenland’s climate history. As ice builds up year by year, it captures layers of volcanic ash and changes in precipitation over time, and it traps air bubbles that reveal the past composition of the atmosphere.

One of the original scientists, glaciologist Chester Langway, kept the core and soil samples frozen at the University at Buffalo for years, then he shipped them to a Danish archive in the 1990s, where the soil was soon forgotten.

A few years ago, our Danish colleagues found the soil samples in a box of glass cookie jars with faded labels: “Camp Century Sub-Ice.”

Geomorphologist Paul Bierman (right) and geochemist Joerg Schaefer of Columbia University examine the jars holding Camp Century sediment for the first time. They were in a Danish freezer set at -17 F. Paul Bierman, CC BY-ND
A surprise under the microscope

On a hot July day in 2019, two samples of soil arrived at our lab at the University of Vermont frozen solid. We began the painstaking process of splitting the precious few ounces of frozen mud and sand for different analyses.

First, we photographed the layering in the soil before it was lost forever. Then we chiseled off small bits to examine under the microscope. We melted the rest and saved the ancient water.

Then came the biggest surprise. While we were washing the soil, we spotted something floating in the rinse water. Paul grabbed a pipette and some filter paper, Drew grabbed tweezers and turned on the microscope. We were absolutely stunned as we looked down the eyepiece.

Staring back at us were leaves, twigs and mosses. This wasn’t just soil. This was an ancient ecosystem perfectly preserved in Greenland’s natural deep freeze.

Glacial geomorphologist Andrew Christ (right), with geology student Landon Williamson, holds up the first fossil twig spotted as they washed a sediment sample from Camp Century. Paul Bierman, CC BY-ND
Dating million-year-old moss

How old were these plants?

Over the last million years, Earth’s climate was punctuated by relatively short warm periods, typically lasting about 10,000 years, called interglacials, when there was less ice at the poles and sea level was higher. The Greenland ice sheet survived through all of human history during the Holocene, the present interglacial period of the last 12,000 years, and most of the interglacials in the last million years.

But our research shows that at least one of these interglacial periods was warm enough for a long enough period of time to melt large portions of the Greenland ice sheet, allowing a tundra ecosystem to emerge in northwestern Greenland.

We used two techniques to determine the age of the soil and the plants. First, we used clean room chemistry and a particle accelerator to count atoms that form in rocks and sediment when exposed to natural radiation that bombards Earth. Then, a colleague used an ultra-sensitive method for measuring light emitted from grains of sand to determine the last time they were exposed to sunlight.

Maps of Greenland show the speed of the ice sheet as it flows (left) and the landscape hidden beneath it (right). BedMachine v3; Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), CC BY-ND

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today is well beyond past levels determined from ice cores. On March 14, 2021, the CO2 level was about 417 ppm. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CC BY-ND

The million-year time frame is important. Previous work on another ice core, GISP2, extracted from central Greenland in the 1990s, showed that the ice had also been absent there within the last million years, perhaps about 400,000 years ago.
Lessons for a world facing rapid climate change

Losing the Greenland ice sheet would be catastrophic to humanity today. The melted ice would raise sea level by more than 20 feet. That would redraw coastlines worldwide.

About 40% of the global population lives within 60 miles of a coast, and 600 million people live within 30 feet of sea level. If warming continues, ice melt from Greenland and Antarctica will pour more water into the oceans. Communities will be forced to relocate, climate refugees will become more common, and costly infrastructure will be abandoned. Already, sea level rise has amplified flooding from coastal storms, causing hundreds of billions of dollars of damage every year.

Tundra near the Greenland ice sheet today. Is this what Camp Century looked like before the ice came back sometime in the last million years? Paul Bierman, CC BY-ND

The story of Camp Century spans two critical moments in modern history. An Arctic military base built in response to the existential threat of nuclear war inadvertently led us to discover another threat from ice cores – the threat of sea level rise from human-caused climate change. Now, its legacy is helping scientists understand how the Earth responds to a changing climate.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. 

It was written by: Andrew Christ, University of Vermont and Paul Bierman, University of Vermont.

Read more:

Shrinking glaciers have created a new normal for Greenland’s ice sheet – consistent ice loss for the foreseeable future


The Arctic hasn’t been this warm for 3 million years – and that foreshadows big changes for the rest of the planet


What is the cryosphere? Hint: It’s vital to farming, fishing and skiing

Andrew Christ receives funding from the Gund Institute for Environment and the National Science Foundation.

Paul Bierman receives funding from the US National Science Foundation and UVM Gund Institute for Environment.

Report by feds, anglers cites offshore wind impacts on fish


 

WAYNE PARRY
Fri, March 31, 2023 

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — A joint study by two federal government scientific agencies and the commercial fishing industry documents numerous impacts that offshore wind power projects have on fish and marine mammals, including noise, vibration, electromagnetic fields and heat transfer that could alter the marine environment.

It comes as the offshore wind industry is poised to grow rapidly on the U.S. East Coast, where it is facing growing opposition from those who blame it for killing whales — something numerous scientific agencies say is not true.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance issued their report Wednesday after a 2 1/2-year-long study of the impacts existing offshore wind projects have on fish and marine mammals.

The goal was to solidify existing knowledge of the impacts and call for further research in many areas.


NOAA and BOEM are among agencies that say there is no link between offshore wind preparation and whale deaths. Their co-authorship of a report detailing potential negative impacts on fish and marine mammals may intensify an already highly politicized controversy.

Asked Friday about the likelihood of this happening, NOAA spokesperson Lauren Gaches reiterated the agency's position that offshore wind is not causing the whale deaths, which remain under investigation.

“We will also continue to explore how sound, vessel, and other human activities in the marine environment impact whales and other marine mammals,” she said.

The fishing industry is concerned that fish near construction sites may be killed or chased away for prolonged periods even after the turbines are built, according to the report.

“Physical changes associated with (offshore wind) developments will affect the marine environment — and, subsequently, the species that live there — to varying degrees,” the report read. ”These include construction and operation noise and vibration, electromagnetic fields, and thermal radiation from cables, as well as secondary gear entanglement.

In an interview, Fiona Hogan, research director for the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, said: "We wanted to document what was known and not known. As far as we know, this is the first cooperatively developed report that cites all aspects of the potential interactions between fisheries and offshore wind.”

The alliance is a fishing industry group trying to improve the compatibility of offshore wind with fishing operations.

The American Clean Power Association, an offshore wind industry group, said Friday it was still studying the 388-page report.

Andy Lipsky, who oversees the wind energy team at NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center, is a co-author of the report. He said it helps the agencies define the type of monitoring required for long-term study of offshore wind's effects and points out "needed research on how offshore wind energy changes marine habitats and fisheries.”

Several concerns raised in the report mirror many of those raised by opponents of offshore wind, including those who blame preparation for offshore wind farms for killing whales along the East Coast. Since December, 30 whales have washed ashore there.

The report said offshore wind turbines can attract fish and marine life, but also repel them. The large underwater platforms are rapidly colonized by smaller marine life which in turn attracts larger predators to the area. Water cloudiness from turbine operations, noise, vibrations and electromagnetic fields could also make them leave the area.

Hogan said some disagreement remains on whether wind platforms will be a net attraction or deterrent to fish.

Regarding noise, the report said sounds emitted from pile-driving during construction “can be severe, resulting in mortality or injury of hearing tissues.” Noise levels from ongoing operation of the turbines once constructed “are not associated with direct physical injury, (but) long-term exposures may have negative effects on communication, foraging, and predator detection.”

In almost every instance, the report called for additional research. The study only dealt with fixed-location wind turbines; a second study will examine wind projects that float on the water's surface.

The $150,000 survey was funded by NOAA.

___

Follow Wayne Parry on Twitter at www.twitter.com/WayneParryAC

Fishing boats sit at the dock in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J. on Sept. 11, 2019. A report issued March 29, 2023 by two federal marine science agencies and the commercial fishing industry highlighted several potential negative aspects of offshore wind energy development on the fishing industry and called for additional research. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry)

Iraqi federal and Kurdish officials reach oil export deal


This is a locator map for Iraq with its capital, Baghdad. (AP Photo) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

ABBY SEWELL and YASMINE MOSIMANN
Sun, April 2, 2023 

BEIRUT (AP) — Authorities in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region said Sunday they have reached a preliminary deal with the central government in Baghdad that will allow oil exports from the northern Kurdish region by way of Turkey to resume.

The central government's Ministry of Oil said in a statement that while a final agreement has not been reached yet, it “hopes to reach an agreement to resume oil exports soon.”

The ministry statement said that Baghdad “is keen to expedite the resumption of exports of the region’s oil through the Turkish port of Ceyhan."

Officials in Baghdad and Irbil, the seat of the Kurdish government, have long been at odds over oil revenues, a dispute that has been exacerbated by the lack of a federal law detailing the sharing of funds from oil and gas exports.


The announcement comes after an arbitration process by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) last sided with Iraq over a long-standing dispute over the independent export of oil by the Kurdish regional government.

Exports via a pipeline that goes through Iraq’s Fish Khabur border crossing to Turkey’s Ceyhan port will resume this week, according to Lawk Ghafuri, head of foreign media affairs for the Kurdish regional government.

Iraq filed for arbitration against Turkey in 2014 after the Kurdish region began exporting the resource without the consent of Baghdad through the neighboring country. Iraq argued that a 1973 agreement with Turkey requires all oil exports to go through Iraq’s state-owned oil marketing company, SOMO.

Iraqi officials announced on March 25 that the arbitration tribunal had ruled in its favor. Turkey’s Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources said in a statement that the arbitration ruling had thrown out four of Iraq’s five claims and upheld one.

In any case, the ruling halted oil exports from the Kurdish region by way of Ceyhan, which previously amounted to about half a million barrels per day. The stoppage, if prolonged, would have been a significant blow both to global oil supplies and to the Kurdish region’s budget.

Already in recent years the Kurdish government has frequently been late in paying public sector salaries, in part due to the ongoing dispute over oil and gas revenues, which has led to the central government withholding budget transfers to Irbil.

Ghafuri said Sunday that after “several meetings” between officials from Irbil and Baghdad, an initial agreement had been reached allowing exports to resume. The agreement will remain in effect until the long-delayed oil and gas law is passed by the Iraqi Parliament, he said.

Under the deal, oil will be exported jointly by SOMO and the Kurdish region’s Ministry of Natural Resources, with the revenues going to a financial account managed by the Kurdish government and monitored by the central government.

The central government’s Ministry of Oil said in its statement that “technical issues” remain to be resolved between Baghdad and Irbil.

The head of the parliamentary Oil, Gas and Natural Resources Committee, Haibet al-Halbousi, said Sunday in a statement that there is a “quasi-political consensus” to speed up passage of an oil and gas law and that the committee will be meeting with the heads of the various political blocs to reach a consensus. “The oil and gas law serves all Iraqis and not a specific party, because oil and mineral investments belong to all the people,” Halbousi said.

In a statement on the arbitration decision, Turkey’s Energy and Natural Resources Ministry on Tuesday stressed Ankara’s support for Iraq’s territorial integrity, the “political and economic stability of both Iraq and the region” and its efforts to support global oil markets.

“As always, Turkey is ready to fulfill the requirements of international law and to provide all types of contributions to the permanent settlement between the main parties to the dispute,” the statement added.

——-

Associated Press writer Andrew Wilks in Istanbul contributed to this report.

This Simple Math Problem Could Be the Key to Solving Our Climate Crisis

Bill McKibben
Sun, April 2, 2023 

Rolling-Stone-McKibben-Lead-Compressed-min - Credit: Illustration by Karlotta Freier

The climate crisis many things: a test of whether we can overcome the vast gulfs between the Global North and the Global South, a challenge to a political system geared toward short-term thinking, a lens that magnifies past injustice and future deprivation.

But it’s also, at heart, a math problem.

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And not even a very hard one, at least conceptually. The atmosphere can only hold so much carbon before it overheats the Earth. Think of it as a one-gallon bucket: If you put more than a gallon of water in it, it will overflow. So that would be dumb.

About a decade ago, I wrote an essay for this magazine that went quite viral, simply because it laid out the math of climate change as we understood it at the time. Scientists calculated that in order to have any real chance of meeting the climate goals the world had agreed on, our atmospheric bucket had space for about 585 gigatons more carbon dioxide. And new data showed that the fossil-fuel industry had in its reserves — the stuff it had told shareholders and banks it would dig up and burn — about 2,795 gigatons worth of CO2. Which is to say: five times too much.

From that math, you could derive a powerful result: The fossil-fuel industry was a rogue enterprise. If the various companies (and countries that operated like companies — think Saudi Arabia) carried out their stated business plan, there was no drama about the outcome: Earth as we had known it would no longer exist, and in its place would be something much hotter and more dangerous.

That remains true — truer, even. Mark Campanale, whose London-based NGO Carbon Tracker provided those numbers a decade ago, has kept an ongoing count, and here’s where we stand. The fossil-fuel industry has continued to explore and prospect, and now controls reserves of coal, gas, and oil that, if burned, would produce 3,700 gigatons of carbon dioxide. That’s 10 times the amount that scientists say would take us past the temperature targets set in the Paris Climate Agreement.

Another way of saying this: If we are to meet the climate targets set by scientists, we have to leave 90 percent of the fossil fuels we have discovered underground. And at current prices that means stranding about $100 trillion worth of assets in the soil. If you want to understand why the battle over climate progress is so fierce — why the fossil-fuel industry fights so hard, with all the political influence it can buy — remember that $100 trillion. That’s a lot of incentive.

On the face of it, then, we’re still losing this fight. But there are a few new numbers — wild cards, really — that could yet rewrite the end of this story. They cut both ways: Some of this math deepens our predicament, and some of it points toward a way out. They’re the new numbers of this past decade, and they’re big enough to stop and take notice.

$34 per Megawatt Hour

That’s the new figure from the investment bank Lazard for the average cost of utility-scale solar power. That is, if you have a bunch of solar panels in a field, that’s how much it costs to produce electricity from them. To understand why it’s a figure that could change the world, you need to know a couple of other things.

One, it’s far, far lower than it was a decade ago: The price of renewable energy has dropped as much as 90 percent since then.

And two, it’s lower than any other way of producing energy. The only thing that comes close is a wind turbine catching the breeze, which checks in at $39 per kilowatt hour. Running a gas-fired power plant, still the most common solution in America, runs you $59; a coal-fired power plant, in these calculations, produces power at $108 a megawatt hour; nuclear is more expensive yet. (Though there’s hope that new developments, like fusion, could eventually bring that total down. If we can get through the next few decades intact, innovation will give us lots more tools to work with.)

This is a seismic shift that could, in relatively short order, allow us to break the 700,000-years-long human habit of setting stuff on fire. We’re used to thinking of renewable clean energy as “alternative energy,” the Whole Foods of energy compared with the Piggly Wiggly of gas or coal: luxe, not mainstream. But that has shifted dramatically. And that’s an advantage that should continue to grow. A remarkable study from Oxford scientists published in 2021 makes clear that solar and wind power (and the batteries to store that power when the sun sets or the wind drops) are firmly set on what economists call “learning curves.” That is, the more you build them out, the better you get at doing it, and so the price drops. At the moment, when solar installations double, the price drops by a third.

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A learning curve is a remarkable thing — it tends to persist over time, which means the price of renewables should keep dropping. Some of that’s in the lab: Researchers keep finding new and more efficient ways to convert the sun’s rays into energy. Some of it’s up on the roof: If you have a hundred people putting up photovoltaic panels, they’ll figure out new workarounds. Some of it’s down at city hall, where the cost of -permits and so on should fall as regulators gain -experience with new tech. The power of that learning curve is so great that it tends to overwhelm all the obstacles that get in the way. A few years ago, for instance, some thought wind power would slow down because lightweight balsa wood was in short supply; it took a year for manufacturers to come up with synthetic foams to be used in the blades instead.

Not all power sources are on learning curves, -however. Fossil fuel was pretty cheap from the start, but it hasn’t gotten significantly cheaper. That’s because it’s less a technology than a commodity — and you have to work harder to find that commodity now that the easy stuff has been burned. The coal is farther back in the mine; the oil is down at the bottom of the ocean now, or under a polar ice cap. There’s hope — but no certainty yet — that nuclear power might get back on a learning curve, as we move from behemoth projects to “small modular reactors,” but at least for now atomic power comes at a premium.

So the price gap between fossil fuel and renewable energy should continue to widen. Indeed, the Oxford study says that the faster we convert to renewable -energy the more money we will save, simply because we’ll be able to stop burning -expensive hydrocarbons sooner. The savings could be in the tens of trillions of dollars, which sounds unlikely until you remember the other difference between the old and new technologies. With renewable energy, you still have to mine — cobalt or lithium or the like. But once you’ve mined it, you put it in a battery or a wind turbine, and it stays there for decades, doing its work. If you mine gas or coal, you set it on fire, and then you have to go get more. Forty percent of ship traffic is simply moving coal and gas and oil around so it can be burned. The sun and wind deliver energy for free.

So it makes sense

that the fossil-fuel industry hates renewable energy: If you prospered by making people pay you for energy, simply waiting for the sun to rise is the stupidest business model ever. And boy, has the industry ever prospered. As in:

$2.8 Billion

Last year, we were hit with a staggering number: $2.8 billion is how much profit the fossil-fuel industry has earned daily for the past 50 years. Which is a problem, because the people making that money have the motive and the means to try to keep it alive.

“It’s a huge amount of money,” Aviel Verbruggen, the academic who calculated that figure, points out. “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money. It protects [producers] from political interference that may limit their activities.”

You can see this happening at the highest levels — at last year’s global climate conference in Egypt, there were 636 fossil-fuel-connected people registered in attendance, dwarfing the delegations from almost every country. This year’s climate conference is scheduled for Abu Dhabi, and its chair is also the CEO of the national oil company. And you can see it at the most granular levels, too. Earlier this year a study was released showing that gas stoves cause hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood asthma in the U.S. alone — an unnecessary toll since cheap magnetic induction cooktops produce dinner without fumes. But within days of that study, it was reported that the natural-gas industry spent millions hiring “influencers” to say happy living demanded a blue flame.

That endless payoff can’t last forever — eventually the economics of renewable energy will prevail. Indeed, things have started to shift. The fossil-fuel sector underperformed for the past decade, until Putin’s war intervened and the price of oil spiked, and Exxon reported record profits. Any delay in the move away from fossil fuel is profitable to Big Oil, and damaging to the rest of us. So we must build movements to speed up that transition. Hence:

Six Million

​​That’s roughly the number of students worldwide who skipped school to go on “climate strike” in 2019, in what marked the height of the climate movement before the pandemic chased it indoors.

And those millions, in turn, stand for everyone who built the biggest global movement of the millennium over the past decade, coming together across nations to demand action on climate change. They were as important to climate progress as the engineers who dropped the price of renewables.

It began slowly (I helped found 350.org, the first attempt at a grassroots global climate movement, in 2008) but accelerated as people around the world joined in — most often the leaders were -indigenous activists and people already on the front lines of climate change, because they had the most at stake. Together, we fought pipelines and frack wells and coal ports, and built enough power that Barack Obama and other world leaders couldn’t come back from Paris empty-handed in 2015, unlike in 2009.

Young people were among the biggest leaders in the fight. You know Greta Thunberg, and you should. But she would be the first to say there are thousands of young leaders like her; in this country, they’ve included people like Varshini Prakash, whose advocacy of the Green New Deal through the Sunrise Movement helped transform U.S. politics. By 2020, thanks to a decade of mobilization, climate change broke through politically: Polls showed it near or at the top of Democratic-voter concerns. And so Biden named Prakash to a small team working on climate policy. Citizen pressure finally translated into legislative action when our first real climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August — 34 years and 45 days after climate scientist Jim Hansen first testified to Congress that global warming was underway. Which leads us to …

$369 Billion

That’s the floor on spending that Congress designated in the Inflation Reduction Act for energy transformation in our country — money that could accelerate the switch to a clean, electrified America and spur the same around the world.

The bill passed by the barest of margins — Kamala Harris broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate,

and no Republican in either chamber voted for the bill. And before he voted “aye,” West Virginia’s Joe Manchin (who has taken extraordinary amounts of fossil-fuel money) stripped the law of most of its teeth.

Still, it’s a serious pot of money. And it could grow larger — the spending is essentially uncapped, so if enough projects materialize that qualify under its rules, the total could end up closer to $800 billion. That money could underwrite the quick conversion of home after apartment after office: The consumer trinity of heat pump and induction cooktop and e-mobility is suddenly a real prospect. But there’s nothing automatic about it; it’s a lot of cash, but consider the challenge we still face: There are 140 million homes and apartments in America. Even finding enough electricians to do the work is hard. By some estimates, America needs a million more of them.

If it takes us 40 years to make this transition, the planet we run on clean energy will be a broken planet. The only question that really matters, then, is pace: Can we go fast enough to begin to catch up to physics? Which means that the key numbers may turn out to be things like …

121 Degrees

Which is how hot it got in Canada the summer before last, breaking the old national record by eight degrees as a “heat dome” settled across the north, a development so unsettling to scientists that it convinced some we had entered a new phase of the planet’s warming. This conviction was bolstered this summer when we saw similarly anomalous and even more deadly heat waves in China and the subcontinent. Or 780 percent, which is how much of the year’s average rainfall fell in parts of Pakistan over just a few weeks, a rainstorm so epic it melted away people’s earthen homes. Or $313 billion, which is how much economic damage climate-spawned disasters did last year. We live in a world where reason — including economic reason — dictates we move as fast as is possible toward clean energy. But inertia and vested interest provide friction that slows that transition. So the tie will be broken, or not, by something that can’t be quantified: a combination of fear, hope, moral indignation, and human solidarity that provides, or doesn’t, the political will to break this logjam. You can’t count on it — but if we push, it will count.

NASA's Apollo-era crawler, upgraded for Artemis, sets Guinness world record

Robert Z. Pearlman
Fri, March 31, 2023

A sign positioned near one of the giant tracks of NASA's Crawler-Transporter 2 identifies the Artemis-upgraded, Apollo-era vehicle as a Guinness World Record holder.

It has taken seven years (or 57, depending on how you count), but now it is official: one of NASA's Apollo-era rocket movers is the heaviest self-powered vehicle in the world.

Guinness World Records on Wednesday (March 29) presented the space agency with a certificate confirming that Crawler-Transporter 2 tipped the scale at 6.65 million pounds (3,106 tonnes), or about the same weight as 1,000 pickup trucks.

That is a record, said Guinness, but noted it was set during the last decade.

"The vehicle's weight was increased as part of a round of upgrades that were completed on 23 March 2016," read Guinness' website. "These upgrades, which included replacing the two massive locomotive engines that provide power to the four sets of caterpillar tracks and strengthening various other systems, brought the vehicle's overall weight up to what it is now."


Related: Meet NASA's huge Crawler-Transporter 2 rocket mover

Guinness World Records adjudicator Hannah Ortman reaches out to shake hands with Brett Raulerson, Jacobs TOSC Crawlers, Transporters and Structures group manager, left, and John Giles, NASA's Crawler Element Operations manager, at a ceremony at Kennedy Space Center on March 29, 2023.

In fact, both of NASA's crawler-transporters previously shared the record after they were built by the Marion Power Shovel Company in 1966. Originally designed to carry the Apollo Saturn V rockets and their mobile platforms as they moved from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to either launch pad 39A or 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the pair of giant tracked vehicles first weighed in around 5.95 million pounds (2,700 tonnes).

Even at 700,000 pounds (320 tonnes) lighter than Crawler-Transporter 2 weighs today, both movers were in a class of their own. Later-built, land-based vehicles were larger and more massive, but required external power sources to function. The NASA twins (sometimes referred to as "Hans" and "Franz" after a bodybuilder skit made popular by Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon on "Saturday Night Live") generated all their own power.

In 1973, the two crawlers were repurposed to support the smaller and lighter space shuttle. At the end of that 30-year program, Crawler-Transporter 2 was selected to carry the much larger Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its mobile launcher platform that are now part of NASA's moon-bound Artemis program.

"NASA's crawlers were incredible pieces of machinery when they were designed and built in the 1960s. And to think of the work they've accomplished for Apollo and shuttle and now Artemis throughout the last six decades makes them even more incredible," said John Giles, NASA's crawler element operations manager, in a statement released by NASA. "To have a Guinness Worlds Records title is icing on the cake for an extraordinary piece of equipment."

Guinness World Records officially designated NASA's Crawler Transporter 2 as the heaviest self-powered vehicle, weighing approximately 6.65 million pounds. At a March 29, 2023, ceremony at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Guinness World Records presented the certificate to teams with the Exploration Ground Systems Program and Kennedy leadership.More

Related stories:

— NASA's Artemis program: Everything you need to know

— Saturn V: The mighty U.S. moon rocket

— The 10 greatest images from NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission

The now-record-setting Crawler-Transporter 2 was most recently used to deliver NASA's Artemis 1 launch vehicle to the pad for the mission's November 2022 liftoff. The crawler will next be used to support Artemis 2, NASA's first mission to send astronauts to the moon in more than 50 years.

Though other external-powered vehicles hold the record for sheer size, the crawler-transporters are still impressively large with a span about the same size as a baseball infield (131 feet long by 114 feet wide, or 40 by 35 meters) and a variable height that maxes out at 26 feet (8 m). Due to the extremely heavy weights the already heavy crawler carries, the 4.2-mile (6.8 kilometers) drive from the VAB to the pad takes anywhere from eight to 12 hours while traveling at approximately 1 mph (1.6 kph).

"Anyone with an interest in machinery can appreciate the engineering marvel that is the crawler transporter," said Shawn Quinn, NASA's exploration ground systems program manager.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2023 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

A Grain Glut Is Straining the Goodwill That Ukraine Badly Needs
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Piotr Skolimowski, Irina Vilcu and Megan Durisin
Sat, April 1, 2023
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(Bloomberg) -- Blocked border crossings, a minister pelted with eggs and overflowing silos — anger is mounting among farmers in eastern Europe who say a rush of grain from Ukraine threatens their businesses, and it’s steadily eroding political goodwill.

Poland and other neighboring states agreed to help get grain out of Ukraine and on to global markets after the Russian invasion blocked exports last year. Part of that supply is now piling up in eastern Europe, and it’s threatening local livelihoods.

The surplus has been created by infrastructure bottlenecks as well as farmers delaying selling last year’s produce. The hoard of grain is becoming a political issue as protests spill into the streets.

Local growers held on to their crop in anticipation of higher prices following the war. A broader global downturn has instead pushed prices down, leaving farmers in Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria facing lower revenue and struggling to empty their stockpiles before the new harvest starts in the summer.

Political leaders, who rushed to support Ukraine initially, are starting to complain.

“We must help Ukraine in the transport and sale of grain to countries outside the EU,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who four months ago was offering $20 million to help Ukraine export its grain to Africa, said in a Facebook post. “But this cannot be done at the expense of Polish farmers and local markets.”

The European Commission needs to limit the amount of Ukrainian supply entering the European Union because it is destabilizing local markets, he said.

The glut is very much a local one. Ukraine’s exports to global markets are still well below pre-war levels as a deal to get grain out of Black Sea ports remains tenuous.

Russia’s invasion triggered concerns about a worsening hunger crisis as food prices jumped to record levels with vast amounts of Ukraine’s grain and vegetable oil stranded. Governments were forced to jump in to keep supplies flowing, with eastern Europe emerging as a transit route. While some ports have reopened, the pace of shipments is restrained. Transport by rail, road and river remains crucial.

Imports into Poland rose to 2.45 million tons in 2022 from just about 100,000 tons in previous years, which turned into a massive undertaking for the rail network. Rolling stock had to be changed because tracks were different from those in Ukraine, holding up shipments. Priority on trains was also given to coal that Poland was forced to import after banning Russian supply.

Race Against Food Inflation Starts on Rusty Soviet Rail Tracks

Poland’s Agriculture Minister Henryk Kowalczyk told producers in June not to sell their grain because prices are unlikely to fall. But benchmark Chicago wheat futures have nearly halved from the records reached just after the outbreak of the war as huge harvests in other key shippers, like Russia and Australia, quelled fears about a supply shortfall.

Grain import demand is also easing in key regions like North Africa — one of the EU’s main wheat markets — as economies there falter, said Helene Duflot, wheat analyst at Strategie Grains.

On March 17, a group of farmers dressed in yellow vests and blowing whistles, mobbed Kowalczyk at an agriculture fair in Kielce in southern Poland. He was forced to flee the venue.

Five days later, the minister was heckled and pelted with eggs during a panel discussion with EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski in the town of Jasionka, a two-hour drive from the Ukraine border. Earlier this week, Kowalczyk agreed to an plan that includes at least 10 billion zloty ($2.3 billion) in aid and a pledge to boost the capacity of ports.

Farmers however aren’t letting up, promising to resume protests unless the situation improves over the next two to three weeks.

Political Fallout

The discontent may have political consequences. Poland and Slovakia face elections later this year and farmers are an important constituency. A former Slovak premier who rejects sanctions against Russia and weapons deliveries to Ukraine is leading in the polls. Bulgaria is in a similar situation, with polls due this weekend. Poland has accepted more than a million Ukrainian refugees and has been among the biggest contributors of military and humanitarian aid to Kyiv.

Romanian farmers traveled to Brussels on Wednesday to protest in front of the European Commission building, waving banners stating “Romanian Farmers Deserve Respect!” The country, one of the EU’s largest corn and wheat producers, has facilitated more than half of Ukraine’s grain exports by land since the start of the war.

Imports rose to 570,000 tons last year from close to zero, according to Razvan Filipescu, vice-president of the Association of Farmer Producers in the Dobrogea region.

President Klaus Iohannis said the bloc’s crisis fund of €56 million ($61 million) for farmers was insufficient, while also criticizing it for failing to factor in the “huge sacrifices” made by the Balkan nation.

In a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Bulgaria and the four EU states surrounding Ukraine pushed for the bloc to increase financial support to farmers, consider buying the surplus grain for humanitarian aid or even restrict imports from Ukraine.

Slovakia wants the EU to work with the UN’s World Food Programme to ensure Ukrainian grain is transported out of member states, according to a person familiar with the discussion, who asked not to be named because the talks are private.

Still, Ukrainian supply could also play a part in plugging any shortfalls in Europe. Drought across the EU last summer ravaged its domestic corn harvest, necessitating extra imports to fill the gap. Shipments though are likely to ease in the months ahead as the war hits harvests.

“The whole exports from Ukraine will decrease, including to the EU, that’s clear,” said Alex Lissitsa, chief executive officer of Ukrainian agribusiness IMC.

Concerns are also emerging that the grain transit agreement itself might be broken.

“Nobody oversees the gentleman’s agreement that Europe will be a transit territory for Ukraine’s grain to Africa,” said Emil Macho, chairman of the Slovak Agriculture and Food Chamber. “It’s not working, the grain is staying right here.”

Meanwhile, anger continues to spill over. In Bulgaria, grain producers blocked border crossings with neighboring Romania for three days, demanding compensations. Almost 80% of the 2022 sunflower crop remains unsold and farmers hold more than 3 million tons of wheat from last year, said Krasimir Avramov, founder of the country’s National Association of Grain Producers.

Wieslaw Gryn, 65, is growing corn, wheat, canola and beetroot on a 320-hectare (791-acre) family farm in Rogow in eastern Poland. He says grain prices are down 40% and he still has hundred of tons to sell.

“Each year around this time I would have some surplus. But I have never had such a huge surplus as right now,” Gryn said in an interview. “My business partners are delaying payments and I need the money because I should start to grow my grain right now.”

--With assistance from Slav Okov, Daniel Hornak and Natalia Ojewska.

Why did Biden auction off the Gulf of Mexico for oil drilling?

Devika Rao, Staff writer
Sun, April 2, 2023 

oil rig in gulf of mexico Getty Images / Danny Lehman

The Biden administration agreed to auction off oil and gas leases for over 73 million acres of federal water in the Gulf of Mexico. This decision comes just after President Biden approved the Willow Project in Alaska, oil company ConocoPhillips' multi-billion dollar oil drilling proposal. Why has the administration taken these steps? Here's everything you need to know:
Why was the auction approved?

During his campaign, Biden promised he would be "banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters," NPR writes. However, this has not come to fruition during his presidency.

Despite the implications for climate change, the auctioning of oil leases was actually a stipulation of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The lease requirement came from the compromise between Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and other Senate Democrats in order for the bill to get passed. The auction, called Lease Sale 259, was to be held "no later than March 30, 2023," and put up for sale an area the size of Italy for the purpose of oil drilling.

This is also not likely to be the last land lease for the purpose of drilling. In Manchin's IRA requirements, he also called for the sale of land in the Cook Inlet of Alaska along with the Gulf, according to CNN. That lease is likely to begin in Sept. 2023. The Gulf leasing comes just after Biden's approval of the Willow Project, another large-scale oil drilling scheme, despite heavy controversy and backlash. "My strong inclination was to disapprove of it across the board," Biden said following the project's approval. "But the advice I got from counsel was that if that were the case, we may very well lose in court."

An environmental analysis by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) found that the drilling from these leases could cause 21.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere. The United Nations has warned against raising average global temperatures by 1.5 degrees Celcius over pre-industrial levels and has identified fossil fuels as the most significant factor in raising emissions.
What are oil companies saying about it?

The oil companies have bid close to $264 million to secure rights to drill in the area. The sale also acts as a "first test of demand for investment" since Russia invaded Ukraine, straining oil and gas resources all over the world, per Reuters.

The oil and gas industry group National Ocean Industries Association called the sale "an opportunity to strengthen our national security interests and develop domestic energy supplies in the face of geopolitical uncertainty and tight global demand." The American Petroleum Institute (API) also celebrated the sale, calling it "a belated but positive step toward a more energy-secure future." It added, "it should not take an act of Congress to get us to this point," citing the growing demand for energy.

Bids in this auction were also up 38 percent compared to the last one which took place in 2017, The Associated Press writes. Chevron USA was the highest bidder, with $108 million in high bids for 75 tracts. BOEM has claimed, "Leases resulting from this sale will include stipulations to mitigate potential adverse effects on protected species and to avoid potential conflicts with other ocean uses in the region."
What are environmental groups saying about it?

Environmental groups have largely condemned the sale of the land.

"There's nothing in the IRA that required it to be so large," commented George Torgun, an attorney for the group Earthjustice. "If it goes forward as planned, it's double the size of Willow. It's going to lock in fossil fuel development in the Gulf for the next 50 years." Woody Martin of the Sierra Club shared a similar sentiment to NPR, saying, "The sanctioning of huge fossil fuel extraction commits the U.S. to long-term fossil fuel dependency," adding that it will lead to "disastrous consequences and enormous costs for the U.S. and global economies."

"Expanding dirty energy will worsen the climate crisis and new leasing for offshore oil and gas drilling must stop," said Diane Hoskins, Campaign Director for the group Oceana. "President Biden may claim his hands were tied on this sale because of the IRA's mandate, but he still has the opportunity to make good on his promise to end new oil and gas leasing in his Five-Year Plan."

Some of the groups have already filed a lawsuit against the Dept. of the Interior in an attempt to have the sales canceled, CNN continues. "It's out of step with what Biden himself has called the existential threat of climate change," Torgun explained.

1957 deadly Dallas, Texas tornado was the first to be quantifiably studied

Randi Mann
Sun, April 2, 2023 

1957 deadly Dallas, Texas tornado was the first to be quantifiably studied

This Day In Weather History is a daily podcast by Chris Mei from The Weather Network, featuring stories about people, communities and events and how weather impacted them.

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Sometimes, for This Day In Weather History articles, it's difficult to find photos. Not everyone has been ready with their smartphone over the past century. But, on Tuesday, April 2, 1957, a mammoth tornado found cameras.

Dallas, Texas tornado. Courtesy of NOAA

Between April 2-5, a tornado outbreak ravaged through the southern United States. In total, there were at least 72 tornadoes that hit states from Texas to Virginia, killing 21 people.


The most famous of those tornadoes was the one that spun through the densely populated Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area. That twister alone killed 10 people and injured at least 200.

Dallas, Texas tornado. Courtesy of NOAA

The tornado first touched down at around 4:30 p.m. in Dallas County. The F3 force of nature travelled northward for about 45 minutes, spanning 27.7 km.

As the tornado entered residential areas, it completely swept homes off of their foundation. It completely destroyed 131 homes and damaged an additional 398 homes.

The tornado's highest recorded wind speed was 282 km/h.

Dallas, Texas tornado. Courtesy of NOAA

Approximately 125 people photographed the tornado, so there was plenty of footage for scientists and meteorologists to study. And because it struck buildings, engineers were able to better understand the between wind speed and the impact on different types of buildings.

Because the event was so well documented and studied, it goes down in history as the first significant quantitative success for modern scientific research into tornadoes.

To learn more about this historic tornado, listen to today's episode of "This Day In Weather History."

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Thumbnail: "1957 Dallas multi-vortex 1 edited." Courtesy of Wikipedia