Weather on Uranus

Twenty-six years ago, when Voyager 2 took this image of Uranus, scientists were disappointed by the seemingly smooth surface of the distant planet. But earlier this week, astronomers displayed a wholly different picture (see right) of Uranus—sultry and stormy!

It took the Earth-based Keck Observatory to capture what Voyager 2 couldn’t, despite being only 50,000 miles from Uranus in 1986. Keck took sharp, high-resolution infrared images showing bizarre weather on the sideways planet.

The planet’s deep blue-green atmosphere is thick with hydrogen, helium and methane. Winds blow mainly east to west at speeds up to 560 miles per hour, in spite of the small amounts of energy available to drive them.

Scientists believe that the primary driving mechanism for these storms must be solar energy because there is no detectable internal energy source. “But the Sun is 900 times weaker there than on Earth because it is 30 times further from the Sun, so you don’t have the same intensity of solar energy driving the system,” says planetary scientist Larry Sromovsky. That might explain why storms on Uranus are much less violent than those on Earth.

Sromovsky and colleagues announced their findings this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences.

What were you thinking?

That’s what we would like to ask local Russ George. This week, several news outlets report how George dumped 100 tons of iron into the Pacific Ocean off the British Columbia coast illegally.

George has a history of geoengineering attempts like this one. This time a native Canadian group hired him to reduce carbon in the ocean to boost dwindling salmon populations. If you recall from a story we ran last summer about this technique, iron can feed algal blooms, which then sink to the ocean floor, sequestering carbon as they do.

But tampering with the ocean like this is obviously dangerous and highly regulated. According to the New York Times, George dumped ten times as much iron as the experiment mentioned in our story and violated two international agreements on geoengineering.

Tigers, Detroit and otherwise

Even before Detroit finished New York off in the American League Championship Series on Thursday, talks of trading Yankee star Alex Rodriguez were rampant.

His post-season performance was so bad, he was benched for the last two games. And we all know how much the Yanks like to win. But A-Rod’s contract looks to be a losing proposition for the team—even if they are able to unload him, they’ll likely have to pick-up part of his remaining salary. Which is huge, according to ESPN,

Rodriguez, who will turn 38 next July, is signed for the next five years and guaranteed another $114 million.

In addition, his contract includes a marketing agreement with the Yankees that could add as much as $30 million to the deal…

Such a waste. If you’ll remember, a couple of years ago we discussed how his large salary could help save wild tigers. Who could use his help right about now. The Guardian reports that an Indian court lifted a ban on tourism in tiger reserves this week. Officials are hoping tourists and the tiger habitats can co-exist. Hopefully they have more luck co-existing than A-Rod and the Yankees.

Image: Lawrence Sromovsky, Pat Fry, Heidi Hammel, Imke de Pater

It all has to do with an experiment in the Indian Ocean in 2004. Scientists dumped seven tonnes of iron into an eddy in the Southern Ocean. As expected, an algal bloom followed. Scientific American describes this well:

A hunger for iron rules the microscopic sea life of the Southern Ocean surrounding ice-covered Antarctica. Cut off from most continental dirt and dust, the plankton, diatoms and other life that make up the broad bottom of the food chain there can’t get enough iron to grow.

The bloom was dominated by diatoms like the one pictured above. This group of algae are known to form large, slimy aggregates (marine snot) with high sinking rates at the end of their blooms. Indeed, after about a month, over 50% of the bloom sank deeply into the ocean, taking carbon dioxide with it as it went.

Science News quotes Victor Smetacek, lead author in the study, as saying:

“Every one atom of iron removed 13,000 atoms of carbon” from the air.

While scientists suspected this, they were never able to prove it. This is likely what happened during past ice ages. The air was cooler and drier then and carried more iron-containing dust from the continents to the ocean—lavishly supplying marine phytoplankton and removing carbon, cooling the atmosphere.

Now scientists are wondering if we can cool our warming climate by simply adding iron to the ocean. National Geographic has more on this geoengineering fix and other extreme geoengineering ideas to fight global warming. If only we spent this much energy on stopping global warming…

Image: Marina Montresor, SZN, Alfred Wegener Institute

That was the headline James Fleming of Colby College wanted the press to use for a very heated press conference at the AAAS Meeting last Saturday.

The press conference brought together a diverse mix of scientists and researchers, including a science historian, a philosopher and an ethicist. And, as Dr. Fleming remarked, they certainly did not agree.

As the moderator of the conference said in his opening and indisputable statement, geoengineering is the altering of the Earth. At the meeting, three symposia addressed geoengineering as a response to another human activity—our altering the planet through global warming. The press conference combined aspects of the three different sessions.

Geoengineering can include carbon capture and sequestration, but the hot button issue at the conference and the one that many cannot agree on, including the experts Dr. Fleming referred to above, is the issue of solar radiation management. Much of the discussion centers on injecting sulfur into the stratosphere—also referred to as increasing stratospheric aerosols. This sounds pretty scary, but as Ken Caldeira mentioned, no climate intervention will be perfect, and it could be a bad thing compared to a worse situation, likening it to chemotherapy treatment for cancer. If you can save lives and reduce suffering, it may have to be a solution.

It has to be mentioned that this isn’t for the present climate crisis, but the future, as the climate is likely, under any IPCC scenario, to get worse. As Braden Allenby said, climate change is not a problem that can be fixed as long as we have seven billion people on the planet; it’s going to be a problem for a very long time. He went on to add that geoengineering, still very much in its infancy and currently only in the modeling and discussion levels, is a possible “response to the challenge ahead… a part of a portfolio of options.”

Philip Rasch of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is researching how sea salts could be used to brighten clouds, another solar radiation management possibility. This solution would be more regionalized and less global than the sulfate aerosols.

On Monday morning, a Royal Society study was to address the pros and cons of each of these.

Our own paleo-ecologist, Peter Roopnarine has these comments about geoengineering:

Personally, I am very skeptical of geoengineering for two reasons. First, although the caveat is usually presented that this is an option for the future, it is nevertheless viewed as mitigation in many quarters. This is particularly true of carbon sequestration. Our efforts right now should be placed on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Failure to do so will ultimately doom the current geoengineering proposals because they will be outstripped by the problem. Second, too many of the approaches are too simplistic. This is true of the other class of options, those of environmental manipulation. Here I include options such as solar shielding, cloud manipulation and ocean iron seeding. We have insufficient understanding of these processes on large spatial and temporal scales to predict all of the possible impacts. The systems are complicated and complex, and the models aren’t up to the job. Caldeira’s chemotherapy analogy is an interesting one; you literally kill a good deal of the body to solve one problem. But we’re talking about an entire planet here, and as complicated as the human body is, planet Earth is orders of magnitude more complicated.

Creative Commons image by Heikenwaelder Hugo