Kilimanjaro’s Shrinking Ice Fields

northern ice field

southern ice field

The views from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro—a 5,895-meter (19,341-foot) dormant stratovolcano in Tanzania—are as surreal as they are spectacular. After ascending through multiple ecosystems—including cropland, lush rainforest, alpine desert, and a virtual dead zone near the summit—climbers can find themselves peering down on a thick blanketof clouds below that seems to stretch endlessly in the distance.

But in the immediate foreground, ice dominates the view. Looking north, a shelf-like block of ice with a sharp vertical cliff sits on an otherwise featureless, sand-covered plateau. In the other direction, a second ice field spills off the edge of the plateau, down the mountain’s southern face.

Kimberly Casey, a glaciologist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was savoring the views from Kilimanjaro’s summit and caldera when she snapped these panoramic images of Kilimanjaro’s northern (middle) and southern (bottom) ice fields. The Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite acquired the top image, which shows some of the same ice fields from above on October 26, 2012.

Casey was taking part in a September 2012 research expedition to Kilimanjaro to study the ice at the summit. For scale, bright tents that were part of the scientists' base camp are visible in the lower left of the northern ice field image.

Despite Mount Kilimanjaro’s location in the tropics, the dry and cold air at the top of the mountain has sustained large quantities of ice for more than 10,000 years. At points, ice has completely surrounded the crater. Studies of ice core samples show that Kilimanjaro’s ice has persisted through multiple warm spells, droughts, and periods of abrupt climate change.

But trends beginning more than a century ago suggest Kilimanjaro’s peaks may soon be ice-free. Between 1912 and 2011, the mass of ice on the summit decreased by more than 85 percent. Researchers say it’s no longer a question of whether the ice will disappear but when. Estimates vary, but several scientists predict it will be gone by 2060.

Rising air temperatures due to global warming could be contributing to the ice loss, but a number of other factors are just as important, if not more so. An increasingly dry regional atmosphere, for example, is starving the mountain of the fresh snow needed to sustain the ice fields. Drier air is also reducing cloud cover and allowing more solar energy to warm the ice surfaces.

Casey and colleagues noticed yet another ominous sign during their 2012 expedition. The northern ice field, which had been developing a hole since the 1970s, has separated. “This was the first year that the northern ice field completely divided into two,” said Casey. “We were able to walk on land—or we could have even ridden a bicycle—directly throughthe rift.”

Qatar at Night

Night lights can reveal a lot about the distribution of people on the landscape, or “human geography.” In this astronaut photograph from the International Space Station (ISS), the lights of Qatar show informative demographic detail that is very difficult to discern in daylight images—especially in deserts, where even large cities can be hard to see.

The brightest group of lights at image center is the capital city, Doha, with the neighboring smaller ports of Ad-Dahira and Umm Sa’id to the north and south. (Note that north is to the left, due to the path of the ISS orbit.) Highways are clearly visible leading west from the capital to the Dukhan oil fields, to Saudi Arabia, and to the north of the country where—judging by the lack of night lights—the population is probably very low. The relatively minor coast road between the oil fields and the Saudi frontier also stands out.

Almost the entire island nation of Bahrain appears at lower left, with the capital city of Manama nearly as bright as the lights of Doha. The difference in light intensity reflects a difference in population; Doha has 1.45 million inhabitants, while the dense Manama metro area has a population of 1.2 million.

While some night views are informative about a landscape, they can also be difficult and confusing to locate. Astronauts learn to recognize where they are at night by flying over populated places repeatedly. Coastlines—one of their best geographic indicators—are generally lost to view because water surfaces and unpopulated land surfaces look the same without illumination such the full moon.

Thus, the thumb-shaped Qatari peninsula, so well-known in Middle Eastern geography, does not show up at all in this nighttime photograph. However, the low-light imaging bands of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the Suomi NPP satellite showed the Qatari peninsula and the long arm of the Gulf of Bahrain (lower image) on a moonlit night. The image was acquired during the early morning hours of September 30, 2012, two weeks before the astronaut photograph.

Hurricane Sandy Before and After Photos

Storm surge damage along the New Jersey and New York coastline 

Storm Surge: New Jersey and New York Coast 

The most damaging impact of Hurricane Sandy on the barrier islands of New York and New Jersey was storm surge and storm waves. A powerful surge up to ten feet high overran the barrier islands, washing away beaches, pushing buildings off of their foundations, knocking down trees, destroying utility service, ripping up roads and covering the islands with sand. 

The images on this page demonstrate the impact of the surge and how dangerous it would be for anyone who decided to disobey evacuation orders. Humans can easily drown in a surge or die of hypothermia from wind chill. 

If you are in an area when a storm surge warning is issued please leave as soon as possible. Storm surge is usually the most deadly hurricane impact. The flood of water arrives so quickly that you can't get away. Water only two feet deep will drown most car engines and make it impossible for humans to run. 

Activity at Kizimen Volcano

Kizimen Volcano, which erupted for the first time in 81 years in December 2010, continues to emit gas and ash. TheModerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured these natural-color (top) and false-color (bottom) views of the eruption on November 1, 2012. Though the plume is difficult to detect in true color, it shows up clearly in false color because of the different combination of bands used to create the two images. In the false-color image, snow and ice appears bright red and vegetation looks green.

42-Foot High Tsunami Hit Geneva 1,500 Years Ago; Could Happen Again, Scientists Warn

 We usually associate tsunamis with beachside property and the seaboard, but what about the mountains? More importantly, how about the postcard-worthy Swiss Alps? It may come as a shocker, but it seems that a tsunami hit Geneva, Switzerland around 1,500 years ago inundating the shores with up to 42 feet of water.

Historical accounts have mentioned the tsunami before, but this is the first time scientists have turned up geological evidence to support the claim. The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, state that there is still a risk of this happening to inhabitants around Lake Geneva.

"It's certainly happened before and I think we can expect that it will probably happen again sometime," says one of the researchers, geologist Guy Simpson, from the University of Geneva.

Almost 200,000 people live in the city of Geneva, and somewhere around one million live around the shores of Lake Geneva. A tsunami with the magnitude of the 563 A.D. version would have devastating consequences on such a population density.

"Our numerical simulations with a shallow water model show that delta collapse in the lake generates a large tsunami at various locations along the shore, where a wave of 13 metres (42 feet) is observed after only 15 minutes, and at Geneva where a wave of eight metres (26 feet) arrives 70 minutes after the mass movement is initiated," said the researchers. 

The 563 A.D. tsunami is believed to have come from a rock slide three miles from where the River Rhone enters Lake Geneva in the east. 

The team of researchers used radar to find a pile of sediment that is six miles long, five miles wide, and 16 feet thick in the deepest part of Lake Geneva. The scientists dated the sediment to between 381 A.D. and 612 A.D. 

"Since the AD 563 event is the only significant natural event recorded in historical accounts within our calculated age interval, we consider our dating results to be a strong indication that the deposit is linked to the AD 563 rockfall and tsunami," wrote Katrina Kremer, according to the AFP.

In essence, it looks like nobody is really safe from Mother Nature, and towns and cities that live in a peaceful lull like some of those in the Alps should have emergency precautions at hand in case such a disasterous scenario occurs.
Read more at http://www.latinospost.com/articles/6284/20121031/42-foot-high-tsunami-hit-geneva-1.htm#El3mYU7ytTSMGedm.99 

Read more at http://www.latinospost.com/articles/6284/20121031/42-foot-high-tsunami-hit-geneva-1.htm#El3mYU7ytTSMGedm.99 

Asteroid Belts at Just the Right Place are Friendly to Life

This illustration shows our solar-system model: a Jupiter-size planet moves slightly inward but is just outside the asteroid belt. Image credit: NASA/ESA/STScI 

November 01, 2012

PASADENA, Calif. -- Solar systems with life-bearing planets may be rare if they are dependent on the presence of asteroid belts of just the right mass, according to a study by Rebecca Martin, a NASA Sagan Fellow from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and astronomer Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. 

They suggest that the size and location of an asteroid belt, shaped by the evolution of the sun's planet-forming disk and by the gravitational influence of a nearby giant Jupiter-like planet, may determine whether complex life will evolve on an Earth-like planet. 

This might sound surprising because asteroids are considered a nuisance due to their potential to impact Earth and trigger mass extinctions. But an emerging view proposes that asteroid collisions with planets may provide a boost to the birth and evolution of complex life. 

Asteroids may have delivered water and organic compounds to the early Earth. According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, occasional asteroid impacts might accelerate the rate of biological evolution by disrupting a planet's environment to the point where species must try new adaptation strategies. 

The astronomers based their conclusion on an analysis of theoretical models and archival observations, including infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. 

"Our study shows that only a tiny fraction of planetary systems observed to date seem to have giant planets in the right location to produce an asteroid belt of the appropriate size, offering the potential for life on a nearby rocky planet," said Martin, the study's lead author. "Our study suggests that our solar system may be rather special." 

The findings will appear today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. 

Martin and Livio suggest that the location of an asteroid belt relative to a Jupiter-like planet is not an accident. The asteroid belt in our solar system, located between Mars and Jupiter, is a region of millions of space rocks that sits near the "snow line," which marks the border of a cold region where volatile material such as water ice is far enough from the sun to remain intact. When Jupiter formed just beyond the snow line, its powerful gravity prevented nearby material inside its orbit from coalescing and building planets. 

Instead, Jupiter's influence caused the material to collide and break apart. These fragmented rocks settled into an asteroid belt around the sun.

"To have such ideal conditions you need a giant planet like Jupiter that is just outside the asteroid belt [and] that migrated a little bit, but not through the belt," Livio explained. "If a large planet like Jupiter migrates through the belt, it would scatter the material. If, on the other hand, a large planet did not migrate at all, that, too, is not good because the asteroid belt would be too massive. There would be so much bombardment from asteroids that life may never evolve." 

Using our solar system as a model, Martin and Livio proposed that asteroid belts in other solar systems would always be located approximately at the snow line. To test their proposal, Martin and Livio created models of planet-forming disks around young stars and calculated the location of the snow line in those disks based on the mass of the central star. 

They then looked at all the existing space-based infrared observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope of 90 stars having warm dust, which could indicate the presence of an asteroid belt-like structure. The temperature of the warm dust was consistent with that of the snow line. "The warm dust falls right onto our calculated snow lines, so the observations are consistent with our predictions," Martin said. 

The duo then studied observations of the 520 giant planets found outside our solar system. Only 19 of them reside outside the snow line. This suggests that most of the giant planets that may have formed outside the snowline have migrated too far inward to preserve the kind of slightly dispersed asteroid belt needed to foster enhanced evolution of life on an Earth-like planet near the belt. Apparently, less than four percent of the observed systems may actually harbor such a compact asteroid belt. 

"Based on our scenario, we should concentrate our efforts to look for complex life in systems that have a giant planet outside of the snow line," Livio said. 

The Sagan Fellowship Program is administered by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., whose purpose is to advance the scientific and technical goals of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. The Exoplanet Exploration Program is managed for NASA by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. 

More information about exoplanets and NASA's planet-finding program is at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov . 

JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. 

For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

A Changed Coastline in Jersey

View Image Comparison

On October 29, 2012, lives were changed forever along the shores of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and in the two dozen United States affected by what meteorologists are calling Superstorm Sandy. The landscape of the East Coast was also changed, though no geologist would ever use the word “forever” when referring to the shape of a barrier island.

The two aerial photographs above show a portion of the New Jersey coastal town of Mantoloking, just north of where Hurricane Sandy made landfall. The top photograph was taken by the Remote Sensing Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on October 31, 2012; the lower image was acquired by the same group on March 18, 2007. The images were acquired from an altitude of roughly 7,500 feet, using a Trimble Digital Sensor System.

The Mantoloking Bridge cost roughly $25 million when it was opened in 2005 to replace a bridge built in 1938. After Sandy passed through on October 29, 2012, the bridge was covered in water, sand, and debris from houses; county officials closed it because they considered it unstable.

On the barrier island, entire blocks of houses along Route 35 (also called Ocean Boulevard) were damaged or completely washed away by the storm surge and wind. Fires raged in the town from natural gas lines that had ruptured and ignited. A new inlet was cut across the island, connected the Atlantic Ocean and the Jones Tide Pond.

1.  References

2.   The Asbury Park Press (2012, October 29) Update: Floating homes close Mantoloking Bridge. Accessed November 2, 2012.

3.   NOAA National Geodetic Survey (2012) Hurricane Sandy Response Imagery. Accessed November 2, 2012.

4.   Point Pleasant Patch (2012, October 31) Mantoloking Bridge Considered Unstable; Fires Raging Nearby. Accessed November 2, 2012.

Aerial photography courtesy of the NOAA Remote Sensing Division. Caption by Mike Carlowicz.

Instrument: 

Aircraft Sensors - Camera