Massive crater discovered under Greenland for Apophis Day 2019

Stay tuned for this year's celebration of Apophis Day, when I observe the perils of space.  Asteroids!

When I promised my readers that in yesterday's NASA on returning to the Moon for Yuri's Night 2019, I had no idea what I would find.  What a little searching for videos about asteroid impacts posted since Apophis Day 2018 yielded was quite the surprise.  Science Magazine presents an overview of the discovery along with its implications in Massive crater under Greenland's ice points to climate-altering impact in the time of humans.

The 31-kilometer-wide Hiawatha crater may have formed as recently as 12,800 years ago when a 1.5-kilometer asteroid struck Earth.

NASA Goddard has more of the story behind the find as well as more details about the techniques used in Massive Crater Discovered Under Greenland Ice.

In a remote area of northwest Greenland, an international team of scientists has made a stunning discovery, buried beneath a kilometer of ice. It’s a meteor impact crater, 300 meters deep and bigger than Paris or the Beltway around Washington, DC. It is one of the 25 largest known impact craters on Earth, and the first found under any of our planet’s ice sheets. The researchers first spotted the crater in July 2015, while they were inspecting a new map of the topography beneath Greenland's ice sheet that used ice-penetrating radar data primarily from Operation IceBridge, an ongoing NASA airborne mission to track changes in polar ice, and earlier NASA airborne missions in Greenland.

I think this is quite the discovery, but it did not come as a complete surprise.  I wrote about the possibility six years ago in Hot (not): a cold blast from the past.

Ice core data supports ancient space impact idea
By Simon Redfern Reporter, BBC News
August 1, 2013

New data from Greenland ice cores suggest North America may have suffered a large cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago.

A layer of platinum is seen in ice of the same age as a known abrupt climate transition, US scientists report.

The climate flip has previously been linked to the demise of the North American "Clovis" people.

The data seem to back the idea that an impact tipped the climate into a colder phase, a point of current debate.

The tip back to a colder climate is not the issue.  In fact, it's a key point of "An Inconvenient Truth," which I'm showing to my Environmental Science class this week.  Here's the relevant question from the worksheet.

What is the likely effect of the melting of the Greenland ice cap on ocean circulation and global climate?

In the movie, the idea is that the release of meltwater from a large glacial lake diluted the Gulf Stream, causing the water to become less dense and unable to sink to the bottom of the ocean off Greenland, jamming up the global thermohaline circulation and sending the planet back into an ice age for another thousand years.  An analogous melt of water from the Greenland icecap, which is beginning to happen, would do much the same thing, slowing ocean circulation and cooling Europe.  Both of those are indeed taking place.

The effect of the proposed meteor impact would be that the explosion itself caused the flood and then added the cooling effects of all the dust from the impact on top of it.  That doesn't mean that the slowing of the Gulf Stream and cooling of the area around the North Atlantic isn't going to happen; it already is.  Instead, it means that the magnitude of the cooling that results won't be as big as happened 12,900 years ago.  That might actually be a good thing.

Another thing the impact would do would be to lessen the culpability of humans in the extinction of large mammals in North America and Europe at the time.  Humans definitely contributed, but a meteor impact would definitely shift some of the responsibility off of our ancestors.  It would also make the case for the deadliness of asteroid impacts, as if that wasn't already in the news.

It looks like the crater responsible for the layer of platinum may have been found.  Also, I just finished showing "An Inconvenient Truth" to my students this week.  What an interesting coincidence!

That's it for Apophis Day.  Stay tuned for the winners of the 2018 Coffee Party Entertainment Awards for movies.

The shutdown is disrupting American science

While Sears Holdings, JCPenney, and Macy's are contracting in the face of the Retail Apocalypse, the partial government shutdown over funding for Trump's border wall.  I could write a post for every day that it has lasted and not run out of bad things to say about it.  I'll start by sharing the following segment from PBS NewsHour, With the government shutdown, American scientific progress is disrupted.

Even scientists who don’t work for the government, but receive federal money for research and grants, are among the hundreds of thousands of Americans affected by the government shutdown, now in its 19th day. That means important work and research may be put on hold, or even canceled. William Brangham talks to Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for details.

This is all awful, but the worst part is that we've seen this all before and knew exactly how it would play out for science.  Seeker/DNews uploaded The Impact of the Gov't Shutdown on Science in 2013 and it works almost as well for the current impasse.

A full government shutdown is in effect here in the US. And it's having a pretty significant impact in the science world. Trace details that impact, and explains its potentially long-lasting effects.

For good measure, I wrote about the effects of the 2013 shutdown on science, which was shorter than the current one, in Shutdown and science from campuses on the campaign trail and Daily Kos.  Almost all of that could be reused now.  So could Effects of the shutdown from local news, in which I wrote "one week of shutdown takes 0.1% off the GPD for a quarter."  That's still true and it could speed up the arrival of the next recession, which I predict will begin in the second half of this year.  Yikes!

ETA: As I was writing the above, DNews/Seeker uploaded a video updating the one I used from six years ago, How a Government Shutdown Screws Up Scientific Research.  Here it is.

Thousands of scientists were sent home on temporary non-paid leave, what does it mean for the research they had to leave behind?
...
Toll on Science and Research Mounts as Government Shutdown Continues
“A shutdown has these cascading effects on the scientific work of the organization,” said Daniel M. Ashe, a former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “They’re hard to foresee or predict right now, but they’re crippling, really, and they affect the organization not for three or four weeks, but for the rest of the year because of all of this complex orchestration of field work.””

Another Casualty of the Government Shutdown: Hurricane Preparedness
“EMC, the Environmental Modeling Center—they’re the main point of contact for improving the Hurricane Center models, and really the Weather Service model in general. And that organization is basically furloughed; there's very few staff working now. Every fiscal year they set out to improve [some] model, and they have timetables to meet. And now we’re in the third week here. Delays for a day or two—that can easily be absorbed. But the longer this goes on, the more likely it is to have negative consequences down the line.”

Government Shutdown Causes Slowdown In Scientific Research
“It does have a lingering impact because a lot of this work is work that's ongoing at such an incredible pace right now that interrupting that really sets a lot of that work back. And also, just recovering from the lost opportunities for people to get together, it's going to take some months to really be able to rebuild some of those opportunities in new and different ways.”

Almost perfect timing on Seeker's part.  As for the shutdown, the new video shows that it's even worse than I thought.

Examiner.com article on 2012 AAAS Fellows

In yesterday's Nablopomo post, I mentioned that all one has to do to see my entries about work was to look at the ones labeled with Examiner.com, among others.  The day before yesterday, I also wrote that I'd have more to say about my experiences with Examiner.com this month.  It's time to follow through with both promises with my first post since August as the Detroit Science News Examiner.  Election's over; time to write about science!

University of Michigan leads 2012 AAAS Fellows with nineteen

Nineteen University of Michigan faculty members have been elected AAAS Fellows for 2012, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced Friday.  This is  the most of any institution in the United States, the Columbus Dispatch confirmed a day in advance of the AAAS announcement.

The Columbus Dispatch also reported that The Ohio State University came in second with 18 new AAAS Fellows, followed by the University of California, Davis, and Vanderbilt University, which tied for third with 17 each.

The AAAS also recognized faculty at Michigan's two other major research universities.  Michigan State University gained four new Fellows, while Wayne State University now has three more, for a total of 26 new AAAS Fellows from the Great Lakes State.

In all, the names of 701 AAAS Fellows were released yesterday.  They are being honored for their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed to be distinguised either scientifically or socially.  They will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum to be held on February 16, 2013 during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts.

In case you're wondering, the professor whose photograph I used to illustrate my article was the only one I knew.  In fact, the term paper I wrote for his class eventually became the basis for my Ph.D. dissertation.  I consider singling him out among all the nineteen scientists to be a delayed thank you.