December 2012 on EARTH Magazine

Energy Notes: August 2011-2012

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 16:59:53 -0400

Credit: The American Geosciences Institute

U.S. Oil & Petroleum Imports (millions of barrels per day)

Oil and petroleum imports data are preliminary numbers taken from the American Petroleum Institute’s Monthly Statistical Report. For more information visit www.api.org.

Mineral Resource of the Month: Soda Ash

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 16:10:47 -0400

Dennis S. Kostick, a mineral commodity specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey, compiled the following information on soda ash, one of the leading inorganic chemicals produced in the United States.

Six companies in the United States — four in Wyoming, one in California (shown below), and one in Colorado — produce soda ash. Credit: Bob Perry

Natural soda ash, sodium carbonate, is an alkali chemical refined from the mineral trona or from naturally occurring sodium carbonate-bearing brines. Synthetic soda ash is sodium carbonate that has been manufactured from one of several chemical processes. Whether natural or synthetic, soda ash is an essential raw material in the production of flat glass and fiberglass — both of which are used by the domestic automotive and construction industries. Soda ash is also used to produce chemicals, detergents and other important industrial products.

Travels in Geology: Exploring Vulcan's Playground: The Volcanoes of Southern Italy and the Aeolian Islands

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 12:35:11 -0400

The prospect of traveling to Italy might conjure romantic thoughts of stucco-covered villas surrounded by terraced vineyards, ancient visages carved in marble, fountains gurgling in cobblestone piazzas, and pasta smothered in tomato and basil. However, when I was asked to spend a semester teaching in northern Italy, these were not my first thoughts. As a geologist, I instead pondered the Dolomites in alpenglow, the exposure of the iridium-bearing Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (formerly known as the K/T) in Gubio, and the possibility of visiting some of Italy’s famous volcanoes — Mount Vesuvius and Mount Etna — to the south.

Getting There and Getting Around Sicily

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 12:26:57 -0400

Italy’s volcanoes are mostly in the south, so flying into Rome or Naples is probably easiest. Getting around Italy is also very easy, whether you take the train or rent a car.

To get to Sicily and Mount Etna, you can take a puddle-jumper flight from most airports in Italy into Palermo or Catania or take a ferry from several locations, including Naples and just outside of Rome. Getting around Sicily is a bit more difficult than the mainland, but relatively easy via bus or train, especially if you plan ahead and aren’t traveling on a major holiday when many stations shut down. Getting to more remote locations is easiest if you rent a car, but beware that driving on Sicily can be dangerous. If you book a volcano tour, such as through Volcano Trek or Volcano Discovery, your travel arrangements will be made for you.

Benchmarks: December 4, 1992: The Seattle Fault Zone is described

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 11:06:34 -0400

In 1992, researchers confirmed the existence of the Seattle Fault that runs through Seattle, Wash. They also confirmed several other faults that run beneath the city. Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Jeremy Edwards.

Since the early 1900s, scientists, boaters and residents have known that a ghostly, submerged forest of dead trees lurked just below the surface of Lake Washington, on Seattle’s eastern edge. The trees were mostly too deep to bother anyone until the Lake Washington Ship Canal opened in 1916, connecting the lake and Puget Sound and dropping the level of the lake three meters. Then the dead trees — many of which were still upright — became hazardous to boaters. In response, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blasted and chained down 186 trees in one submerged forest. Forty years later, when a diver visited a different underwater forest in 28 meters of water, he found himself in a dense grove of dead trees — predominately Douglas fir — the largest of which had a circumference of 9 meters.

Bare Earth Elements: A geo-themed pop quiz in honor of 12/12/12

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 17:48:48 -0500

These dome-shaped structures are formed by cyanobacteria. © Paul Harrison, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Who was this handsome, heavily armored fellow? Barnum Brown

**UPDATE** Answers listed below. Scroll down carefully if you'd still like to test yourself.

Two NASA spacecraft reveal ancient underground cracks from moon's formation

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:45:47 -0500

This graphic shows the density of the lunar highlands on the near and far sides of the moon as generated using gravity data from NASA's GRAIL mission and topography data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Red corresponds to higher than average densities and blue to lower than average densities; white corresponds to basalt.

SAN FRANCISCO: The face of the moon has always enchanted humankind, but new data from a NASA mission have given scientists a glimpse of what lies beneath the surface. A new, highly detailed map of the moon’s gravity has revealed evidence of underground cracks created by its hot, molten center as it came into shape billions of years ago, a team of scientists announced today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Satellites can detect underground nuclear explosions

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:15:52 -0500

SAN FRANCISCO: If you’re looking for hints of an underground nuclear explosion, the last place you might think to look is up. But it turns out that the sky is a great place to look for clues, because satellites provide scientists with a way to locate the waves that clandestine weapons tests emit into the upper atmosphere, scientists announced yesterday.

The long road to understanding our star

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 13:52:30 -0500

The earliest written records of sunspots date back to 165 B.C. in China, but human understanding of the sun didn’t begin making leaps forward until the early 1600s, shortly after the invention of the telescope. That’s when Galileo Galilei, Thomas Harriot and others began drawing sunspots in detail and tracking how they moved and changed.

Here comes the solar maximum: What we know - and don't know - about solar storms and their hazards

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 11:59:04 -0500

The creation of sunspots: Top: The sun experiences differential rotation; it rotates faster at the equator than at the poles. Middle: The sun's magnetic field lines become twisted as it rotates. Bottom: The twisted magnetic field lines burst through the surface of the photosphere. They suppress convection and inhibit heat flow, causing dark regions called sunspots. Kathleen Cantner, AGI

Solar structure. Kathleen Cantner, AGI

European Space Agency astronaut and flight engineer Andre Kuipers floats near a window aboard the International Space Station in January 2012. While Earth's atmosphere shields us from much of the hazardous radiation from solar flares, astronauts are protected only by the spacecraft or, if on a spacewalk, their spacesuits. NASA; photo by Will von Dauster

Sometime in the next few months — summer or fall of 2013, according to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center — the sun will reach the solar maximum, the peak of sunspot counts during its roughly 11-year cycle. Despite the sun’s seeming regularity, each solar cycle remains to some extent unpredictable. Although the average cycle lasts about 11 years, some are as long as 14 years or as brief as nine. Solar storms might be mild during a solar maximum or severe during a minimum.

Simple organic compounds detected by Curiosity on Mars

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 11:33:14 -0500

Too early to tell if findings are evidence of biological activity, scientists say

SAN FRANCISCO: The Curiosity rover has detected evidence of simple, chlorinated organic compounds in soil on Mars for the first time, project scientists announced Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The scientists characterized the finding as very exciting, but they stressed that the results do not provide “definitive” evidence of past or present life on Mars.

Highlights of 2012: Climate 2012 - A window into what to expect for 2013 and beyond?

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:20:01 -0500

The author, Kenneth Trenberth Carlyle Calvin, UCAR

This story was written in September and published in our December "Highlights of 2012" issue, which came out in November. Update below.

In summer, there is typically a strong inverse relationship between rainfall and temperature. If it is wet, it tends to be cool; if it is dry it tends to be hot. During the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, the air over much of the U.S. was incredibly dry, which led to many record high temperatures. Most of those temperatures have been eclipsed in recent years except for the July 1936 average temperature record. Now that too has been exceeded.

Highlights of 2012: Outlook on natural gas

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:05:09 -0500

Liquefied natural gas (LNG), shown here aboard the British Merchant LNG carrier, is growing in popularity. When gas prices were high and domestic supply low a few years ago, companies built LNG terminals in the U.S. to import the fuel. Now that prices are lower and domestic supply is higher, some LNG terminal operators are modifying their terminals for export, so that they can buy cheap natural gas in the U.S. and sell it at higher prices in the EU and Japan. ©BP p.l.c.

The U.S. energy consumption trends from 1800 to the present reveal that we have experienced several energy transitions. Although petroleum is dominant today, natural gas might be the dominant fuel within one to two decades. Michael E. Webber, data from EIA

Natural gas and petroleum prices have roughly tracked each other in the U.S. for decades, but price trends started to diverge in 2009. Today, petroleum costs between $16 and $20 per million British Thermal Units (MMBTU), and natural gas costs less than $3 per MMBTU. Michael E. Webber, data from EIA

The U.S. has an abundant supply of natural gas, thanks in part to technological developments that have allowed energy companies to extract natural gas from unconventional sources such as the Marcellus Formation. Chesapeake, courtesy of Statoil

Despite the perception that wind and natural gas are competitors, the truth is that wind and gas benefit one another because they mitigate each other's biggest challenges. The price stability of wind solves the volatility of natural gas. The performance reliability of natural gas solves the variability of wind. ©BP p.l.c.

U.S. biofuels mandates — that gasoline must come from a combination of petroleum and fuel from sources such as switchgrass and other energy grasses, like these grown by BP in Florida — essentially dictate a 0.9 percent annual decline in petroleum use between now and 2022. ©BP p.l.c.

Natural gas’s bright future in the United States

In the last year or more, you’ve probably heard quite a bit about “fracking” — hydraulic fracturing associated with oil and natural gas production from shale formations. Whether you think it’s a great new technology, or it’s going to ruin the environment, or your opinion falls somewhere in between, the reality is that it and other technological developments have likely forever changed the energy landscape. Thanks to these new developments, we now can affordably produce natural gas from rock formations that previously were inaccessible. And thanks to these developments, we now have more natural gas than ever before. The glut has decreased prices for at least a little while. If recent trends continue — namely if those prices stay low and various political, environmental and economic pressures to transition to a cleaner, domestic source of energy remain in place, it’s likely that over the next decade or two, natural gas will overtake petroleum to become the most popular primary energy source in the U.S.

Down to Earth With: Antarctic meteorite hunters

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:41:25 -0500

Dotted with snow dunes and nunatak mountain ranges, Antarctica’s glacial landscapes give the continent an otherworldly feel — but the scenery isn’t what’s truly alien. Antarctica is littered with meteorites, hundreds of thousands of which have been untouched since the moment of impact. For more than 35 years, the volunteer scientists of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program have been scouring the icy plains in search of meteorites from meteoroids, the moon and even Mars.

Increasing resilience: A national imperative

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:22:42 -0500

Superstorm Sandy floods Marblehead, Mass. A new report from the National Research Council suggests ways to increase our community resiliency to hazards such as storms. The Birkes, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

The author, Mary Lou Zoback Courtesy of Mary Lou Zoback

Over the past several years, the concept of resilience has increasingly captured public attention. Even fitness clubs are advertising resilience to get you in the best shape of your life — able to handle anything that comes your way. The same resiliency that helps individuals — being mentally, physically and financially prepared, and having a disaster-recovery plan — applies to communities and even to nations.

Sun provides water to the moon?

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 17:48:20 -0400

The moon passes in front of the sun. New research suggests solar wind may be responsible for water on the moon. NASA

Until recently, the consensus in the scientific community was that the moon was bone-dry. Scientists thought that the massive impact responsible for the moon’s creation would have driven away the hydrogen needed to form water. In the past four years, however, that view has melted away. The first suggestion of water was in 2008, when researchers identified the presence of water in volcanic lunar glass. In 2009, satellites orbiting high above the moon identified water on its surface. Also in 2009, in a moment of spectacular showmanship, NASA crashed a spacecraft into the south pole of the moon, liberating large quantities of water from ice. Determining the source of lunar water is the new frontier. Now, new research on microscopic grains of lunar glass suggests that much of the lunar surface is rich with water, and that the water comes from the sun.