A Wobling in the moon's orbit could result in record flooding in the following 10 years

A map showing sea surface height anomalies in June 2021, with ares in red and orange representing sea levels 10 to 15 cm higher than normal. (Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory/ Joshua Stevens)

Climate change has already increased the frequency and severity of hurricanes and other extreme weather events around the world. — But there's a smaller, less splashy threat on the horizon that could wreak havoc on America's coasts. 

High-tide floods, also called "nuisance floods," occur in coastal areas when tides reach about 2 feet (0.6 meters) above the daily average high tide and begin to flood onto streets or seep through storm drains. True to their nickname, these floods are more of a nuisance than an outright calamity, inundating streets and homes, forcing businesses to close and causing cesspools to overflow — but the longer they last, the more damage they can do.

The U.S. experienced more than 600 of these floods in 2019, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But now, a new study led by NASA warns that nuisance floods will become a much more frequent occurrence in the U.S. as soon as the 2030s, with a majority of the U.S. coastline expected to see three to four times as many high-tide flood days each year for at least a decade.

The study, published June 21 in the journal Nature Climate Change, warns that these extra flood days won't be spread out evenly over the year, but are likely to cluster together over the span of just a few months; coastal areas that now face just two or three floods a month may soon face a dozen or more.

These prolonged coastal flood seasons will cause major disruptions to lives and livelihoods if communities don't start planning for them now, the researchers cautioned.

"It's the accumulated effect over time that will have an impact," lead study author Phil Thompson, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii, said in a statement. "If it floods 10 or 15 times a month, a business can't keep operating with its parking lot under water. People lose their jobs because they can't get to work. Seeping cesspools become a public health issue."

Several factors drive this predicted increase in flood days. 

For one, there's sea level rise. As global warming heats up the atmosphere, glacial ice is melting at a record pace, dumping enormous amounts of meltwater into the ocean. As a result, global average sea levels have risen about 8 to 9 inches (21 to 24 centimeters) since 1880, with about a third of that occurring in just the last 25 years, according to NOAA. By the year 2100, sea levels could rise anywhere from 12 inches (0.3 m) to 8.2 feet (2.5 m) above where they were in 2000, depending on how well humans restrict greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades.

While rising sea levels alone will increase the frequency of high-tide floods, they will have a little help from the cosmos — specifically, the moon.

The moon influences the tides, but the power of the moon's pull isn't equal from year to year; the moon actually has a "wobble" in its orbit, slightly altering its position relative to Earth on a rhythmic 18.6-year cycle. For half of the cycle, the moon suppresses tides on Earth, resulting in lower high tides and higher low tides. For the other half of the cycle, tides are amplified, with higher high tides and lower low tides, according to NASA.

We are currently in the tide-amplifying part of the cycle; the next tide-amplifying cycle begins in the mid-2030s; — and, by then, global sea levels will have risen enough to make those higher-than-normal high tides particularly troublesome, the researchers found. 

Through the combined effect of sea-level rise and the lunar cycle, high-tide flooding will increase rapidly across the entire U.S. coast, the team wrote. In a little more than a decade, high-tide flooding will transition "from a regional issue to a national issue with a majority of U.S. coastlines being affected," the authors wrote. Other elements of the climate cycle, like El Niño events, will cause these flood days to cluster in certain parts of the year, resulting in entire months of unrelenting coastal flooding.

Scary as this pattern sounds, it is also important to understand for planning purposes, the authors wrote.

"Understanding that all your events are clustered in a particular month, or you might have more severe flooding in the second half of a year than the first — that's useful information," study co-author Ben Hamlington of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in the statement.

Extreme weather events may get all the national media attention as they batter America's coasts, but high-tide flooding will soon be impossible to ignore. Best to start planning for it now, before it's too late, the authors concluded.

Extreme weather events may get all the national media attention as they batter America's coasts, but high-tide flooding will soon be impossible to ignore. Best to start planning for it now, before it's too late, the authors concluded.

NASA’s helicopter keeps flying on Mars

 

For NASA, taking some risk has paid off handsomely.

  

                        NASA's Mars helicopter has now completed nine flights.

On Monday, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter made its ninth and most ambitious flight yet.

This time, the space agency said, the tiny flier took to the skies for 166.4 seconds and reached a maximum speed of 5 m/s. This is equivalent to 10 mph, or a brisk run. During this flight, Ingenuity covered about 625 meters.

A little more than two months have passed since Ingenuity's first flight, on April 19 of this year. During that initial test, the helicopter hovered to about 3 meters above the ground before landing again. Since then, the engineering team behind the helicopter has pushed the vehicle higher, farther, and faster across the surface of Mars.

In flying farther and farther, Ingenuity is showing off some of the benefits of using powered flight to explore other worlds. The distance Ingenuity traveled during this single flight, NASA engineer Keri Bean noted, is about the same distance that the NASA's Spirit rover traveled during the entirety of its prime mission on the red planet.

 

 

For Monday's flight, NASA flew from the Perseverance rover and took a shortcut to reconnoiter the Séítah region, which interests scientists but is likely impassable to the rover due to its sandy ripples. In making this flight, the NASA Science Mission Directorate acknowledged it was taking a risk and might lose the helicopter as it was pushing the vehicle and its software past "safe" limits.

"We believe Ingenuity is ready for the challenge, based on the resilience and robustness demonstrated in our flights so far," NASA said. "Second, this high-risk, high-reward attempt fits perfectly within the goals of our current operational demonstration phase. A successful flight would be a powerful demonstration of the capability that an aerial vehicle, and only an aerial vehicle, can bring to bear in the context of Mars exploration."

That risk seems to have paid off handsomely. Not only does NASA have Ingenuity back safe and sound, scientists will be able to study images of a region they otherwise would have missed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMnOo2zcjXA

Dinosaurs may have lived in the Arctic yearlong

 

Dinosaurs may have lived in the Arctic yearlong

Alaska is known today for its brown and black bears, but about 70 million years ago, dinosaurs likely called the land home. A new study suggests at least half a dozen species, including some tyrannosaurs, lived in the Arctic year-round, The Guardian reports. Researchers found fossils of very young dinosaurs in northern Alaska, suggesting the creatures were permanent residents of the area and nested there, they write this week in Current Biology. Though dinosaur fossils have been found in the Arctic before, no one knew whether they lived there seasonally or full time. Scientists say the new study might answer that question—while raising a whole host of new ones, including how the dinosaurs were able to tolerate potentially brutal Arctic winters.

Threats, Scientist, Researchers and US Government

Dialogue without data is a waste of time. That’s what members of a new U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panel looking into the threat posed by other countries trying to steal federally funded research yesterday warned a panel of U.S. government watchdogs.

Members of the National Science, Technology, and Security Roundtable—formed last year to promote discussions among federal officials, academic leaders, and national security experts—complained that presentations from a trio of major research agencies lacked the baseline data needed to determine the scope of the problem and what the research community can do to minimize risks.

“I hope you can sense our frustration,” Maria Zuber, a co-chair of the roundtable and vice president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said at the end of a 2-hour online session. “It’s impossible for us to gain an understanding of the challenge we face with the information we are being given.”

Yesterday’s meeting, the third hosted by the roundtable, featured presentations from officials at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the parent agency of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who investigate all manner of waste, fraud, and abuse of federal funds. Their workloads have risen sharply in the past few years, they told the panel. And they said the rise has been driven by investigations of U.S. scientists alleged to have failed to disclose their ties to China’s foreign talent recruitment programs.

For example, NSF’s Inspector General Allison Lerner said allegations of foreign influence now make up more than 50% of the office’s overall portfolio. That compares with 7% in 2017, she said, before NSF took on its first case. Her 16-person investigations staff feels “overwhelmed,” she added. But Lerner repeatedly declined to say how many investigations her office is now conducting or how many involve foreign influence and emphasized that “our work remains invisible” until the U.S. government announces it has filed criminal or civil charges against an individual.

Her analysis didn’t satisfy roundtable co-chair John Gannon, a former senior government intelligence official. “Fifty percent of what?” he asked Lerner. “Is it a few bad apples or a major trend?”

Gannon had a similar response to a presentation by DOE’s head of investigations, Lewe Sessions. Sessions said his office has 35 active cases involving grantees who allegedly have undisclosed ties to foreign talent programs, including 24 researchers at U.S. universities. That represents a 200% increase “over previous years,” he noted. But Sessions couldn’t provide a more specific timeframe for the rise or characterize what share of his office’s total workload is taken up by such cases.

“What’s the overall population” of researchers involved? Gannon asked Sessions. “Without a baseline, I can’t grasp the scale of the problem.”

In an attempt to demonstrate the seriousness of the threat, Lerner offered an anonymous case study involving an undisclosed agreement between an NSF grantee and an institution affiliated with the Chinese government. The agreement, in Mandarin, contained provisions requiring the scientist to hire certain individuals, set targets for the number of publications and patents stemming from the research, and even described what topics should be pursued.

That agreement was news to NSF, she said, and represented deviations from accepted research practices that invalidated the terms of a grant that NSF had given the researcher. Lerner said the example demonstrated the need for university officials to track down and read such contracts signed by faculty members to ensure they don’t violate university or federal policies regarding conflicts of time commitments and ethical behavior.

But roundtable member Edward Bruce Held, a retired CIA agent and former head of DOE’s nuclear weapons labs, had a more basic question that went unanswered: “Is there any reason to believe that this contract is the norm?... I understand that such language is unacceptable, but does the [Chinese government] do this for a lot of people, or a just a few?”

The lack of baseline data also makes it hard for scientists to know whether recent steps taken to address the issue—such as having funding agencies clarify disclosure rules for scientists and universities and spend more time vetting international collaborations—are paying off, says Zuber, a planetary scientist and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. “Federal agencies and universities have been raising their game, but are we seeing any benefit?” Zuber asked. “If we want our faculty to do extra things and it’s not helping, then we have some serious explaining to do to our colleagues.”

Zuber noted that panel members understood that the investigators were “constrained” in how much information that they could release. “But we’re not going away,” she said. “We’ll keep asking these questions.”

Physicists take the most detailed image of atoms to date

 

Physicists just put Apple’s latest iPhone to shame, taking the most detailed image of atoms to date with a device that magnifies images 100 million times, Scientific American reports. The researchers, who set the record for the highest resolution microscope in 2018, outdid themselves with a study published last month. Using a method called electron ptychography, in which a beam of electrons is shot at an object and bounced off to create a scan that algorithms use to reverse engineer the above image, were used to visualize the sample. Previously, scientists could only use this method to image objects that were a few atoms thick. But the new study lays out a technique that can image samples 30 to 50 nanometers wide—a more than 10-fold increase in resolution, they report in Science. The breakthrough could help develop more efficient electronics and batteries, a process that requires visualizing components on the atomic level.