The Morrison Planetarium’s monthly Earth Update, a monthly “Science Tonight, Live@630” presentation at NightLife, takes visitors on an immersive trip around the world examining current events on our blue planet—including climate, weather, seismic activity and more. The tour is created and navigated by Tim Horn, our producer of climate and earth science visualization and presented by our expert planetarium presenter, Josh Roberts.

We like to follow up with an article here, with a summary of the latest earthly news that we discussed in the dome.

This month, Josh and Tim started at the Sun.  On the last day of August, a coronal mass, a long filament of charged particles trapped in the Sun’s magnetosphere, was ejected into space at a speed of over 900 miles per second!  Luckily it didn’t travel directly toward Earth. Similar coronal mass ejections can head toward us, however, which makes them well worth studying.

Leaving the Sun, Josh and Tim returned to our planet, with images courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory.  This year, the National Climatic Data Center reported the hottest July on record in the contiguous United States.

Check out this natural-color image of Hurricane Isaac over Louisiana on August 29 from NASA’s Terra satellite.  Within several hours of this photo, the hurricane was downgraded to a tropical storm.  Issac claimed five lives, but the storm also brought beneficial rains to parts of the drought-stricken Midwest.

Speaking of drought… In July, the US Drought Monitor announced that over 53% of the country suffered in moderate drought or worse.

The remnants of Isaac eased the dryness dramatically in Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Louisiana, while rains also moistened states in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast.

But to the west, 100-degree-plus temperatures and a continued lack of precipitation pushed Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, Kansas and the Dakotas deeper into drought. Wyoming and Montana also got drier.

Looking at the western United States, we viewed another natural-color image showing several wildfires.  That image, from the Aqua satellite, was taken on August 12.

But it’s not all doom and gloom.  The recent earthquake in Costa Rica caused “remarkably little” damage. If you’ve visited the Academy’s new Earthquake exhibit and seen our planetarium show, you know that preparedness plays a key role in people’s and communities’ abilities to cope with an earthquake. And societies prepare for earthquakes by building resilient infrastructure.  Strict building codes, similar to those of California and Japan, helped Costa Rica stay intact, despite the 7.6 magnitude quake. The Boy Scouts were right,  “Be Prepared.”

Join us next month for more Earth Update!

Kathi Koontz is production coordinator for the Worldviews Network here at the Academy. She works with planetariums across the country to display immersive science visualizations on local environmental topics.  They partner with local non-profits and NGOs to share what they are doing and inspire action.

According to National Geographic, as of last week there were about 330 workers at the plant, working in fifteen-minute shifts to keep from getting sick. NPR reports that:

So far, at least 15 of these workers have been injured by explosions. An additional 17 have suffered what the Japanese government called “deposition of radioactive material” to their faces. Two are missing.

How much radiation are they being exposed to? It’s hard to say. But an article in Nature News identifies that:

The [Japanese] government has increased the allowable dose for workers from 100 milli­sieverts per year to 250 millisieverts per year — five times the annual allowable dose for US radiation workers — to allow emergency operations to continue. This dose is considered by the US National Institutes of Health as the lower limit for the first symptoms of radiation sickness.

Millisieverts are the standard by which radiation is measured. For reference, National Geographic shares that:

…the average person receives about one to two millisieverts a year from natural sources in their environments, and one chest x-ray yields about 0.2 millisievert.

As the viral, must-see Nuclear Boy, states on YouTube, these workers are really “stepping up to the plate.” (The YouTube video explains the disaster very clearly through a stinky metaphor, in which the Fukushima workers are doctors taking turns caring for Nuclear Boy. Watch it, if you haven’t.)

Not only are they risking their lives, in the process, they are making excellent, life-saving decisions. From Nature News:

And already it is clear that decisions made in the initial 24 hours by the handful of operators in the control room probably averted a much greater nuclear catastrophe than the one that now faces Japan.

Fukushima Unit I Visualization by Nesnad/Wikimedia

Of the six reactors at the power plant, only three were operating at the time of the earthquake, and all three—Units 1, 2 and 3—are experiencing problems.  The problems didn’t stem from the shaking, but rather from the lack of power and water needed to cool down the reactors.

All three are boiling water reactors, and NPR describes how they work:

The nuclear fuel heats water, generating steam that then turns a turbine to create electricity. The water is also used to keep the nuclear rods cool.

Heat has built up in the last few days, causing two problems—overheating the water and melting the nuclear rods.

When the water is over heated, hydrogen is stripped out of the water. But hydrogen is highly combustible—that’s what caused the explosions in Unit 1 on Saturday and Unit 3 today.

The nuclear rods are generally covered in water, but when that level subsides, meltdown can occur. Scientific American explains the process:

If the water descends below the level of the fuel, then the temperature starts going up and the cladding bursts, releasing a lot of fission products. And eventually the core just starts slumping and melting.

Nature’s The Great Beyond blog reports today that:

According to a report on NHK world, the fuel rods inside unit 2 were “fully exposed” meaning that there was no water left in the core to cool them. This makes it pretty likely that unit 2 has now suffered serious damage to the core.

Seawater is being brought in to do the cooling work now, but it’s hard to judge how much damage has already been done. Again, from NPR:

There’s no way to know for sure that a partial meltdown has occurred, since you can’t get inside the steel reactor vessel, where the fuel is. But officials have found cesium-137 in the air. That’s evidence that radioactive fuel — which is supposed to be completely sealed in metal tubes inside the reactor — has been exposed to water or air. That suggests a fuel rod or rods have melted or have broken.

Radiation levels appear to be high in the area, but information seems to be limited, and perhaps is even being withheld, The Great Beyond reports. Recently touted as a future cleaner energy solution, what this all means for nuclear energy around the world seems to be on everyone’s minds today. From Science Daily:

Switzerland put on hold some approvals for nuclear power plants and Germany said it was scrapping a plan to extend the life of its nuclear power stations, raising questions over the future of the global nuclear industry. Taiwan’s state-run Taipower also said it was studying plans to cut nuclear power output.

(You can also read more about this debate in Reuters, the LA Times and reports of an online scare-hoax. The publicly owned television channel in Germany, Das Erste, also has a story on nuclear power plants on fault lines in California—particularly the Diablo Canyon Power Plant at Avila Beach.)

No doubt more information will come out as the day and week goes on—NPR and The Great Beyond seem to be great resources. Please share more resources or news below.

Image of Fukushima 1 reactor pre-explosion, KEI/Wikimedia

Up-to-date Information can be found here.

Videos, Animations and Images

In case you haven’t seen them—these are stunning and terrifying.

• -The devastating tsunami sweeping through the Miyagi Prefecture can be seen here and here.
• -Tokyo buildings swaying during the earthquake here.
• -A NOAA animation and image of the tsunami movement
• -Images and video of Santa Cruz harbor destruction.

Science Behind the Earthquake

Find out how earthquakes work from BoingBoing and how tsunamis are triggered far away from earthquake’s epicenter from Scientific American. The 80beats blog on Discover breaks down what happened and explains why it could have been worse. And the New York Times has an article about Japan’s strict building codes.

Tsunami in California

Why has Crescent City been so hard hit? Location, location, location, according to Time.

Supermoon?

The Daily Mail linked the full, close moon coming on March 19^th with this earthquake in tsunami. Baloney say scientists. Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted, “Interviewed often today. Press wants to blame Japanese quake on cosmos. The Moon is innocent. Blame plate tectonics. Period.”

More:

• -How you can help.
• -Subscribe to USGS Earthquake Notification Service
• -The latest on California State Park closures.
• -Earthquake blog from UC Davis.

Add to the list, please!

We’ll give you the same update here each month, in the same order Ryan does, starting and ending closest to our home city, San Francisco.

Where’s the Snow?
Some of us were looking forward to sledding down our great neighborhood hills… On February 23rd, the San Francisco Chronicle reported “there is a good chance for snow at sea level in San Francisco for the first time since February 1976, the National Weather Service opines.” But on February 25th, it declared a “love-hate relationship with weather predictions.”

But everyone else got snow, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory:

January 2011 was marked by a series of crippling snow storms across the United States. By January 12, about 71 percent of the country had snow on the ground, the fifth-largest snow cover extent in the last 45 years.

While the snow-pack in the Sierras has been good for California, other states are not so lucky:

With all the snow, it would be easy to think that the United States received plenty of winter moisture, but snow is deceptive… January 2011 was the ninth-driest January in the United States in 117 years. The southern half of the country was particularly hard hit. New Mexico experienced its driest January on record.

Expedition to the Philippines
We mentioned this in Earth Update last month, but head Academy researcher Terry Gosliner outlined his plans, hopes and dreams for the upcoming Hearst Expedition to the Philippines at Nightlife last night. Academy scientists, working with Filipino researchers, will explore three research arenas in the country: shallow-water reefs, deep-sea,  and terrestrial and freshwater. The expedition will take place from April 25th through June 10th– look for updates here.

Australia and New Zealand Updates
Australia, land of floods, droughts and cyclones. Tropical Cyclones Diane and Carlos both hovered off the coast of Western Australia last month and Atu approached the north island of New Zealand. (Click on the links for more stunning images from the Earth Observatory.)

The 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Christchurch last month was surprising in the amount of damage it amassed. From Earth Observatory:

Besides striking closer to a major population center, the 6.3-magnitude Christchurch earthquake had a depth of just 5 kilometers (3 miles). The New Zealand Herald reported that, whereas the Darfield quake [September 2010] happened in the early morning hours, the February 22 quake struck at the “worst possible time” of day—at the lunch hour when city streets were crowded with shoppers, diners, office workers, and school children. Moreover, some of the buildings that collapsed may have been weakened by the September 2010 quake.

It’s also possible that the quake could have been magnified by volcanic rock.

Let’s look to some beauty of the area. The image above is not a painting; it shows the annual summer phytoplankton bloom, taken February 10th.

Goodbye Glory
Ryan reported on the Glory satellite launch to his NightLife crowd last night. Sadly, only a few hours later, early this morning, the climate-data gathering spacecraft failed to separate from the Taurus XL rocket and plunged somewhere into the South Pacific. We saw this same thing only two years ago with the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite. You can read more here.

If you’re in the area, come visit the Academy for NightLife on April 7th for the next “Earth Update,” when Ryan and Tim will give you more of the latest news on Academy research and our home planet.

NASA image by Norman Kuring

Besides the 1960 and 2010 earthquakes there have been several other large quakes. Science News provides the reason:

Off the western coast of South America, the Nazca plate of Earth’s crust dives beneath the South American plate, pushing up the Andes and building up stress that gets relieved occasionally in powerful earthquakes.

In 1835, Charles Darwin was in the area and experienced a large magnitude-8.5 earthquake. Though there have been five other great earthquakes since then, none have ruptured in the same area that shook in 1835, a locality now known as the Darwin gap. Scientists, aware that the Darwin gap has been accumulating pressure for over 100 years, had been expecting a large quake in that gap.

But the 2010 quake was north of the Darwin gap. According to New Scientist, researchers studying the area after the recent quake

used tsunami, GPS and radar data to assess the amount of land movement during last year’s quake. By feeding this into a model, they were able to estimate the amount of slippage on the fault and the variation in the release and accumulation of stress along it.

And, the results were striking (from Scientific American):

When pressures build up enough, they snap and cause a quake. Some areas, deep below ground to the north of Concepcion, slipped almost 20 meters in the 2010 earthquake but the area of the “Darwin gap” barely moved.

So rather than relieving and reducing the possibility of another large earthquake in the area, this most recent quake may have increased the possibility of another magnitude-7 or -8 earthquake occurring in the near future. The researchers published their findings in this week’s Nature Geoscience:

…increased stress on the unbroken patch may in turn have increased the probability of another major to great earthquake there in the near future.

Image credit: R. Stein, Lorito et al/Nature Geoscience 2011

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

The devastating earthquake was unusual in some ways: scientists in the field found no evidence of surface rupture on the source Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, certain areas believed to be on solid ground were hit harder than expected, and the resulting tsunamis surprised geologists because the lateral motion of strike-slip faults rarely cause tsunamis.

The first paper shifts the fault, literally. USGS and NASA/JPL scientists, working with others, used a combination of seismological observations, geologic field data, and satellite geodetic measurements to analyze the earthquake source. Their finding? The large earthquake resulted not from the Enriquillo fault, as previously believed, but from slip on multiple faults—primarily a previously unknown, subsurface fault.

In addition, because the earthquake did not involve slip near Earth’s surface, the study suggests that it did not release all of the strain that has built up on faults in the area over the past two centuries, meaning that future surface-rupturing earthquakes in this region are likely.

The second paper looks at the localized damage of the earthquake. After the major event, USGS scientist Susan Hough and her team set out seismographs that recorded aftershocks. Those recordings revealed that ground motions were amplified by the relatively young and soft rocks that underlie the valley in which Port-au-Prince lies. The strongest observed amplifications occurred along a narrow, steep foothill ridge in the city. That means that topography influenced the severity of aftershocks, too.

From the New York Times:

Seismologists know that local geology can also affect the severity of an earthquake… Now [this] new study finds that in addition to the underlying geology, the geometry of local surface features contributed to the earthquake’s intensity as well.

The study suggests that topographic effects should be considered when detailed hazard zone maps are made for other regions.

From OurAmazingPlanet:

Pinning down how topography amplifies an earthquake’s energy — be it by steepness or width of a ridge, for example — will take longer, said the authors, but the initial findings could help guide the rebuilding effort.

Finally, the third paper finds that the tsunamis did not direct result directly from the quake, but most likely arose from underwater landslides triggered by the shaking. An article in National Geographic Daily News wonders what this could mean for our own earthquake-prone state. The good news is that, according to the article, “the risk of tsunamis… has already been included in California’s preparedness plans.”

The more we understand about the science of this terrible event, the better prepared we’ll be whenever and wherever it happens next.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/JAXA/METI

A study published online today in the Journal of Zoology reports that common toads may be able to detect impending seismic activity and alter their behavior from breeding to evacuation mode.

Researchers from The Open University studying toads about 46 miles from the epicenter of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake in Italy found that 96% percent of the males abandoned their breeding grounds five days before the earthquake hit. As soon as the earthquake was over, they returned. This behavior was viewed as unusual because breeding sites are male-dominated and the toads would normally remain from the point that breeding activity begins, to the completion of spawning.

This shift in the toads’ behavior coincided with disruptions in the uppermost layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, called the ionosphere, which was detected using very low frequency radio sounding.

In this case the cause of the ionosphere disruptions was not confirmed, but the release of radon gas or gravity waves prior to an earthquake have both been attributed to changes in atmospheric electric fields and currents.

While there have been many suspicions of animals sensing earthquakes, it’s been difficult to demonstrate. In this case, however, the researcher happened to be in the right place at the right time. Biologist and lead author of the study, Rachel Grant, was studying toads in that area for four years when the earthquake hit. Now she’s published ground-breaking research.

“Our study is one of the first to document animal behavior before, during, and after an earthquake. Our findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of an earthquake early warning system.”

Creative Commons image by WWalas