Arenal Volcano: Introduction

Arenal Volcano, the youngest stratovolcano in Costa Rica, is one of the most active volcanoes in that country
and in the world. It has been producing lava and pyroclastic flows almost continuously since 1968; this
activity has been both a hazard to people living near the volcano and a draw for thousands of tourists over
the years. Located on the eastern shore of Lake Arenal in northwestern Costa Rica, VolcanArenal was
thought to be extinct prior to the eruptions of 1968, although it is now known that eruptions have occurred
on and off for the last 7,000 years.

Arenal Volcano Geology and Hazards

Arenal is a young volcano at about 7,000 years old, and is still in the process of building its 1,670 m (5,479 foot) cone
by alternating periods of major explosive eruptions with lava flows that stabilize the loose material on its cone. Its rock
is mainly basalticandesite, and is erupted in the form of slow-moving lava flows, Strombolian and Vulcanian tephra, and
pyroclastic flows resulting from the collapse of lava flow fronts and Plinian eruption columns.

There are a number of hazards associated with Arenal. Because it experiences Strombolian and Vulcanian eruptions,
tephra (including ash, scoria and ballistic blocks) are often thrown from the active vents, and can be deadly if large
enough fragments strike people, animals or structures. Plinian eruption columns are even more dangerous, since they
can drop ash on local towns and produce pyroclastic flows that could travel beyond the flanks of the volcano into
populated areas. Pyroclastic activity caused some of the deaths in the 1968 eruption of Arenal, and the 40th
anniversary of this event was recently commemorated with parades and other events in towns around the base of the
volcano.

Arenal Volcano: Plate Tectonic Setting

The volcanic arc of Costa Rica, where Arenal is located, is a chain of mountains resulting from the subduction of the
Cocos tectonic plate under the Caribbean Plate. Costa Rica is part of the Central American isthmus, which connects
the North and South American continents Volcanoes are mostly confined to a NW-SE trending strip in the northern
part of Costa Rica because the Cocos plate subducts at a very steep angle there, and because the Cocos Ridge
disrupts normal subduction to the southeast. Arenal is located northwest of the Chato volcanic complex, which last
erupted about 4,000 years ago.
 What Meteorites
Mean for Science,
Culture, and Kitsch
We fear meteorites, we study them, and we collect anything hit by them.

Meteor Crater, in Arizona, shown here from the air, is the best preserved meteorite impact site on Earth.

 
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN ALVAREZ

By Simon Worrall, National Geographic 

PUBLISHED SUN DEC 27 07:00:00 EST 2015

Without meteorites, you probably wouldn’t be reading this. As writer Maria Golia
explains in her new book, Meteorite: Nature And Culture, meteorite
bombardments during Earth’s infancy may have delivered signature ingredients,
like amino acids, to the primordial soup, contributing to life as we know it.
Meteorites have helped us determine the age of the Earth, contributed to mass
extinctions, and even turned the things they struck into “impactifacts” prized
by collectors. Yet for centuries, their origins in outer space were denied because
they undermined the idea of an ordered universe—and were mostly witnessed by
illiterate peasants working in the fields.

Talking from her home in Cairo, the New Jersey-born author describes why it took
so long for meteorites to be accepted by scientists; why a punk musician became a
hard-core meteorite fan; and how a rust bucket car in Peekskill, New York, made its

owner rich when it was struck by a meteori

Meteorites like this one, estimated at Butterfield & Butterfield auction house at $200,000, can sometimes
fetch more per ounce than gold.

 
PHOTOGRAPH BY KIRK MCKOY, LOS ANGELES TIMES 

Most readers will be amazed, as I was, to learn from your book that “an
impact event with the energy of Hiroshima occurs around once a year.”
How much danger are we in?

This is a source of much controversy. We have to thank the atmosphere for our
existence because it is tremendously protective. It burns away many of the masses
that might fall to Earth as it’s spinning through space in what some people call a
cosmic shooting gallery.
How dangerous is it? Think about what happened in February 2013. NASA had
been tracking asteroids for some time but because there are billions of them
spinning in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, we don’t know exactly where
everything is. They track the ones that the earth might intercept, so-called “near
Earth objects.”

In February 2013, one was being closely watched, even though it was many
thousands of kilometres away, but close enough that it actually passed between
satellites orbiting Earth. On that same day, a fireball exploded over Siberia in a
place called Chelyabinsk, which caused quite a lot of damage but no one saw
coming. So, as much as we know, there’s only so much we canknow.
Volcanic eruptions: Properties of magma influence
forecasts

Date:

August 31, 2015

Source:

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen (LMU)

Summary:

Many volcanoes are located in densely settled areas. Every time one of these becomes
active, large populations are put at risk. Hence, one of the primary goals of the current
generation of volcanologists is to develop tools that can accurately predict when volcanoes
will erupt. In the case of an impending eruption, these tools are of key importance to those
charged with making decisions about what action to take and when.

Many volcanoes are located in densely settled areas. Every time

one of these becomes active, large populations are put at risk.
Hence, one of the primary goals of the current generation of
volcanologists is to develop tools that can accurately predict when
volcanoes will erupt. In the case of an impending eruption, these
tools are of key importance to those charged with making
decisions about what action to take and when. "However, the
tools available for predicting eruptions are still in their infancy. We
can't always successfully predict an eruption as we lack an
understanding of how the warning signs that signal a coming
catastrophe are generated, says Donald Dingwell, Director of the
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at LMU
Under Prof. Dingwell's supervision, a team of geophysicists has now simulated volcanic eruptions in
the laboratory, and asked how well current forecasting models succeed in predicting their properties.
"To this end, we have carefully monitored the behavior of samples of synthetic magmas under
pressure and recorded the micro-signals that herald their ultimate failure," says Jeremie Vasseur, a
PhD student in Dingwell's group and first author of the study. "Analyzing these precursory signals
and how they evolve is akin to analyzing the seismic signals prior to an eruption."

Vasseur and his colleagues found that the more heterogeneous the synthetic magma, the more
accurately one can predict its failure. Conversely, the forecast becomes progressively less precise
as the starting material becomes more homogeneous. The properties of the magma in real
volcanoes also vary widely, depending on the extent to which gas-bubbles and crystalline inclusions
are trapped in the otherwise homogeneous liquid. "Our results imply that the key to forecasting
eruptions lies in knowing just how heterogeneous the magma is," says Dingwell. "We will continue
our efforts to understand the behavior of magmas in the hope that a comprehensive forecasting tool
will someday be within our grasp, he adds.

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet

Muenchen (LMU). Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

This Week’s Night

Sky: Moon Eclipses
the Bright Star
Aldebaran
Sky-watchers can see the moon cover a star and look for a Mars,
Jupiter, and Venus in a diagonal line.
 At dawn Thursday, the full moon will have a super-close encounter with the bright orange star Aldebaran
in the constellation Taurus, the bull. Onlookers in Canada and northern U.S. will even get to see the bull’s
"eye" eclipsed by the moon.

 
ILLUSTRATION BY A. FAZEKAS, SKYSAFARI

By Andrew Fazekas, for National Geographic 

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 23, 2015

Bull and Moon. After nightfall on Wednesday, November 25, the full moon pays a
visit to the Taurus constellation.

All night, Earth’s lone natural satellite will appear nestled within the face of the bull
that is marked by the bright Hyades star cluster. This loose association of hundreds
of stars is distinctly V-shaped, with the bright orange-colored Aldebaran star
marking the mythical beast’s angry eye.

Estimated to be about 152 light-years from Earth, the Hyades cluster is among the
closest clusters to our solar system, making it also one of the most brilliant in our
skies.

This week, the moon will park itself within the Hyades star cluster, which marks the face of Taurus, the
bull constellation.
 

Bull’s-Eye Eclipse. The next morning, on Thursday, for lucky skywatchers in

Canada and the northern United States, the orange giant star Aldebaran will appear
to be covered by the moon starting at 5:49 a.m. EST. The star reappears at 6:32 a.m.
EST during the brightening dawn, about a half-hour before sunrise.

This stellar disappearing act is best seen with binoculars or a small telescope at a
high magnification. Making the view dramatic, Aldebaran appears distinctly orange
in color and is 68 light-years away, while our moon is a mere 1.23 light-seconds
distant.
Friday at dawn, look towards the east for a beautiful line-up of Jupiter, Mars and Venus. Venus, the
goddess of love, and striking blue Spica appear to sit only 5 degrees apart—about the width of your three
middle fingers held at arm’s length.

 
ILLUSTRATION BY A. FAZEKAS, SKYSAFARI

Venus and the Maiden. Look towards the east at dawn on Friday, November 27,
and check out a bright duo. The brightest star-like object in the morning sky, the
planet Venus, pairs up with brilliant blue Spica, which is the lead star in the
constellation Virgo, the maiden.  

Planet Lineup. A few mornings later, early risers on Sunday, November 29, will
notice that Venus is spaced equally in the sky with two other distinctly bright star-
like objects, the planets Mars and Jupiter. The planetary trio form a perfect
diagonal line.
This skychart shows the constellation Cancer, where the moon will be located Sunday night.  To the
moon’s lower left will be the Beehive star cluster, which is visible to the naked-eye and stunning through
small backyard telescopes.

Beehive Cluster. Late evening on Sunday, skywatchers using binoculars and

telescopes can spot the moon pointing the way to another bright open star cluster,
dubbed the Beehive.

Also known as Messier 44, this 300-star-strong grouping is located in the

constellation Cancer, the crab, and is 610 light-years away. At a magnitude of 3.9, it
is one of the brightest clusters visible to the naked eye. You can spot it even from
city suburbs when the sky is moonless. Sunday night, the moon will be only 8
degrees away from the Beehive—less than the width of your fist held at arm’s length.
Published: February 2015

Climate Change Economics

Treading Water
Florida’s bill is coming due, as the costs of climate change add up around the globe.
Adaptations will buy time, but can they save Miami?
By Laura Parker

Photographs by George Steinmetz

Frank Behrens, a gregarious pitchman for a Dutch development company that sees
profit, not loss, in climate change, cuts the engine on our 22-foot Hurricane runabout.
We drift through brackish water toward the middle of privately owned Maule Lake in
North Miami Beach.

It’s not quite paradise.

The lake, like so many others in Florida, began as a rock quarry. In the years since, it has served as a
venue for boat races, a swimming hole for manatees, and a set for the 1960s TV show Flipper. More
recently, as if to underscore the impermanence of South Florida’s geography, more than one
developer has toyed with partially filling in the lake to build condos. Behrens is promoting a floating
village with 29 private, artificial islands, each with a sleek, four-bedroom villa, a sandy beach, a pool,
palm trees, and a dock long enough to accommodate an 80-foot yacht. The price: $12.5 million
apiece.

Dutch Docklands, Behrens’s firm, has optioned the lake and is marketing the islands as a rich man’s
antidote to climate change. As for the risks from rising sea levels, well, that’s the beauty of floating
homes. The islands would be anchored to the lake bottom with a telescoping tether similar to those
that enable floating oil rigs to ride out the roughest hurricanes.

The floating-village plan is part of a frenetic building boom, fueled by wealthy South Americans and
Europeans buying with cash, that is transforming Miami’s skyline. From our boat we can see
construction cranes cluttering the sky along the barrier island of Sunny Isles, where crème de la
crème luxury is the hot trend. In a real estate market that celebrates opulence—the $560 million
Porsche Design Tower features glass-walled car elevators that stop at every apartment—it was
probably inevitable that the greatest threat to South Florida’s existence would be used as a
promotional strategy.

The Dutch project sounds like one more loopy development in a long history of loopy Florida
developments. But its climate-conscious design sets it apart from most of the surrounding high-rises,
which are going up with little consideration for the rising seas projected to frequently flood South
Florida in the coming decades and to submerge much of it by the end of the century.

These contradictory approaches—plunge ahead, even if only for one more mortgage cycle, or look
ahead, preparing for what’s coming—reflect a turning point in the discussion about climate change.
As warnings about global warming become more dire and the consequences increasingly evident,
more and more businesses, and local officials, are factoring climate change into their decisions about
the future. They’re focused less on reducing the carbon emissions that are warming the planet—that’s
for political leaders—and more on adapting to severe weather and flooding, which is already
occurring as seas rise. And in towns like Miami, where real estate development is an economic
engine, businesses are focused on how to keep that growth growing for as long as they can.

Behrens, who spent his boyhood in Aruba, moved to Miami a decade ago. He signed on with Dutch
Docklands in 2013, after it became clear that the region’s civic leaders were awakening to the depth
of their impending disaster.

The firm’s visionaries in Delft foster no illusion that their floating village could save South Florida.
It’s only one innovative water project among many in the Dutch tool kit that has preserved the low-
lying Netherlands since the Middle Ages. Still, Behrens says, the project’s value as a high-end venture
appeals to investors in a region that will have to be reimagined in the coming decades. And if the
floating village succeeds, a range of other possibilities opens up: floating communities with floating
parks and floating schools. A floating hospital. “You name it,” says the man whose company built a
floating prison outside Amsterdam.

“People only see the negative effects of flooding,” Behrens says, without a trace of irony. “We need to
show people there is a way to make money out of this. For the government, there are tax dollars. For
developers, their investment is secured for the next 50 years. There is a lot of money involved in this
climate change. It will be a whole new industry.”

Florida is a good place to see the costs—and potential profits—of climate change emerging into
sharper view. Many coastal places are at risk, but Florida is one of the most vulnerable. While
government leaders around the world, in Washington, and even in Florida’s statehouse in
Tallahassee dither over climate change, here on Florida’s southern tip more than a few civic leaders
are preparing. Florida’s future will be defined by a noisy, contentious public debate over taxes,
zoning, public works projects, and property rights—a debate forced by rising waters.

Along with rising seas, Florida will be battered in the coming decades by extreme weather—dry-
season drought and rainy-season deluges—the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment
predicts. Heat and drought threaten an agricultural industry that supplies the East Coast with winter
vegetables, and they could undermine the three mainstays of Florida farming—tomatoes, sugarcane,
and citrus. The rainy season will be stormier, with fiercer hurricanes and higher storm surges.

The most profound disruption will occur along the state’s 1,350 miles of coastline. Three-quarters of
Florida’s 18 million people live in coastal counties, which generate four-fifths of the economy.
Coastal development, including buildings, roads, and bridges, was valued in 2010 at two trillion
dollars. Already more than half the state’s 825 miles of sandy beaches are eroding.

Four southern counties—Monroe, Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach—are home to about one-
third of Florida’s population, and about 2.4 million people live less than four feet above the high-tide
line. The streets of Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, and Miami Beach often flood during the occasional
“king tides,” which are much higher than normal high tides.

The oceans could rise two feet by 2060, according to the National Climate Assessment, as their
waters warm and expand and as the Greenland and polar ice sheets melt. By 2100 seas could rise as
much as 6.6 feet. That would put much of Miami-Dade underwater. For every foot the seas rise, the
shoreline would move inland 500 to 2,000 feet.
A two-foot rise would be enough to strand the Miami-Dade County sewage-treatment plant on
Virginia Key and the nuclear power plant at Turkey Point, both on Biscayne Bay.

“At two feet they will be sitting out in the ocean,” says Hal Wanless, chairman of the University of
Miami’s geology department. “Most of the barrier islands will be uninhabitable. The airport is going
to have problems at four feet. We will not be able to keep freshwater above ocean levels, so we’re
going to have saltwater intrusion into our drinking-water supply. Everyone wants a nice happy
ending. But that’s not reality. We’re in for it. We have really done a job warming our ocean, and it’s
going to pay us back.”

Wanless, who is 72, didn’t think he’d witness the serious effects of climate change in his lifetime. For
three decades he was a lonely voice warning that the warming ocean could inundate South Florida.
In the 1980s he documented that barnacles were attaching themselves higher on bridge piers in
Coral Gables, where he lives, than they were in the 1940s. In recent years he analyzed the shrinking
glaciers in Greenland and concluded that the main scientific modeling used to calculate sea-level rise
hadn’t fully accounted for accelerating ice melt. Last year the United Nations’ Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change gave greater weight to ice-sheet melt in its calculations, raising its
projections for sea-level rise.

Florida’s long, low coastline may make it more vulnerable, but no region is immune. In 2012,
flooding, wildfires, drought, and storms around the country caused more than $110 billion in
damages, the second costliest year in U.S. history. In a foreshadowing of severe weather to come
globally, Typhoon Haiyan spiraled across Southeast Asia in 2013 and struck the Philippines, killing
6,200 people. That year also saw crop-destroying droughts on nearly every continent, most notably
in Africa and South Asia. The Brazilian Highlands, the center of South America’s monsoon region,
experienced the worst drought since 1979, prompting water rationing. Rapid glacial melting in the
Andes and Himalaya will exacerbate water shortages in Peru, India, and Nepal.

The coming decades, the World Bank predicts, will see political instability, food shortages, and
famine, leading to the displacement of millions of people. South Asia’s and Southeast Asia’s heavily
populated coasts, particularly those in Bangladesh and Vietnam, could be inundated. Worse, rising
seas could invade major river deltas, poisoning them with salt water and destroying some of the
world’s richest agricultural land. The Mekong River Delta in Vietnam, where 17 million people live
and half the country’s rice supply is grown, is already battling saltwater intrusion.
In South Florida civic leaders have begun to map out their future on their own. Little help has
come from the state legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, many of whom remain skeptical
of climate science. Rick Scott, the Republican governor, has mostly avoided the subject, repeatedly
declaring, “I’m not a scientist.” Last summer, after five of Florida’s top climate scientists, including
Wanless, briefed Scott, he thanked them and said nothing else.

The four southern counties have drafted a general to-do list that would “reengineer” the region, step-
by-step, through 2060. A detailed blueprint will be years in the making. But the approach is largely
familiar.

“We will do what we always have done,” says Joe Fleming, a Miami land-use attorney. “We will
dredge and prop everything up.”

Harvey Ruvin, a former county commissioner who headed a sea-level-rise task force for Miami-Dade
County, lays out the thinking so far: “The whole idea is to do this comprehensive capital plan that
would include all kinds of things—desalination plants, the lifting of roads, where to raise land, where
to create canals. Part of the future has to be raising some land at the expense of other land.”

Ruvin knows what he’s up against. Procrastination. Disputes over property rights. Long battles over
changing zoning and building codes to prohibit building in areas that can’t be protected. And he
doesn’t want to talk about the cost of all that reengineering. “I can’t even give you a real number.
Maybe $50 billion?” Ruvin muses, though he knows that’s low. He’s focused on how to pay for long-
term projects in a place that operates on capturing short-term gains. “How do you take this to the
voters for a bond issue when the county commissioners are afraid to increase property taxes a hair to
fund libraries?”

Now the Miami-Dade County Court clerk, Ruvin, at 77, is one of the region’s most skillful politicians.
He has tried to use the consequences of doing nothing on climate change to prod footdraggers. It’s
the same strategy used by Michael Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York City, and Henry Paulson,
a former U.S. Treasury secretary; in 2014 they assembled financial heavyweights to catalog the cost
of inaction on climate change in every region of the country.

Last year Ruvin invited two executives from Swiss Re, the global reinsurance giant, to brief his task
force about Florida’s precarious future. The hard-nosed number crunchers created a predictive
model that showed the region could expect annual losses from storm-related events to reach $33
billion by 2030, up from $17 billion in 2008. They also said those losses could be reduced by 40
percent if the region acted soon to protect vulnerable real estate. “These kinds of issues cannot just
be left for another 10, 20, or 30 years’ time,” says Mark Way, a sustainability specialist for Swiss Re.

Another factor, Way says, is that subsidized government insurance programs in Florida have skewed
the marketplace, leading to underpriced rates that don’t reflect the actual risks. “That has the net
effect of basically encouraging development directly or indirectly in areas that otherwise don’t make
any sense.”

Already civic leaders are fortifying seawalls and installing pumps. Later come more daunting
projects: moving utilities from the coasts and protecting high-value real estate—universities,
hospitals, airports, and tourist areas that drive Florida’s economy. Their watchwords are “protect,”
“accommodate,” and “retreat,” which sound a lot like a civil engineer’s version of the stages of grief.
But the group is an optimistic one.

“It doesn’t do any good to set your hair on fire for something that’s 70 years out,” says Kristin Jacobs,
a former Broward County commissioner and member of President Barack Obama’s climate change
task force who was elected to the Florida legislature last fall.

She puts her faith in technology. “If you look at settlement across the planet since time began, we
evolve to what we need,” she says. “Other countries, like Holland, have figured out a way to be
resilient. We are looking to be resilient.”

The Dutch have been trawling for business in coastal cities from Jakarta to San Francisco. They
established a beachhead in South Florida several years ago when Behrens founded a Dutch chamber
of commerce in Miami.

In the Netherlands, where two-thirds of the population lives at or below sea level, about 450
companies make water their business, accounting for about 4 percent of the economy. That’s on a
par with the auto industry in the United States.

Piet Dircke, whose firm, Arcadis, helped New Orleans design new levees after Hurricane Katrina,
made his fourth trip from Holland to Miami last summer to participate in a workshop with architects
and engineers. Dircke and representatives of four other Dutch firms drew beautiful sketches showing
adaptive designs for vulnerable areas.
“Our delta is one of the best places to invest your money,” he says. “Rotterdam is a showcase for the
world for being an adaptive city. Singapore, Copenhagen, Stockholm—these are all cities that
emphasize their water identity and make it a sales objective. Miami could become a water city.”

It will take technology not yet imagined to overcome the challenges posed by South Florida’s unusual
geology: the limestone bedrock that is both a blessing and a curse. Mined, limestone provides fill to
build roads and create what constitutes high ground. In its natural state, it’s a porous sponge. Water
runs through it. It can’t be plugged. Seawalls can be raised—as the city of Miami Beach has ordered.
But seawalls, no matter how high, can’t stop water that bubbles up from beneath.

Even the Dutch would have difficulty protecting the narrow, seven-mile barrier island that is Miami
Beach, a top tourist destination.

“Welcome to ground zero of ground zero,” says Bruce Mowry, the city engineer, when I meet him at
the corner of 20th Street and Purdy Avenue, one of the lowest points in Miami Beach. He’s basking
in the afterglow of success: $100 million and 20 new pumps kept the city mostly dry during the
October king tide. A year earlier a kayaker had paddled along Purdy—not exactly the kind of image
that attracts tourists.

The new pumps are part of a $300 million overhaul of the city’s antiquated storm drainage system.
With 80 new pumps, Mowry hopes to buy Miami Beach another two or three decades. By then,
according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the city could face 237 floods a year.

“Miami Beach will never not exist,” he says. “But it will exist in a different way. We may have floating
residential areas. We could have elevated roads built up on pilings. We could convert a
transportation corridor to water. People ask me, ‘Bruce, can this be done?’ I say, ‘It can be done, but
can you afford it?’ ”

The city has begun an experiment in elevating roads and sidewalks, starting with Purdy Avenue,
where a building with a café, liquor store, and dress shop flooded badly in 2013. The sidewalk and
street will be raised by two feet, which should keep water from sloshing into the shops. Two feet
won’t solve the problem. But with funding and community support uncertain, city officials decided to
start small. “Two feet buys the life of this building,” Mowry says. “You can’t come in and make radical
changes.”
If Miami has a future as one of the world’s water cities, it probably will look more like the Florida
Keys than Stockholm. And so I make the trip down the Overseas Highway to Key West, past houses
on stilts, marine-equipment shops, and pine trees dying from saltwater poisoning. Golf courses in
the Keys are now planted with salt-tolerant grass.

The islands are the exposed remnants of an ancient coral reef. Most are less than five feet above sea
level. Reefs can protect coastal regions from storm surges. If healthy, reefs can keep up with sea-level
rise, growing higher as the ocean rises. But much of the reef off Florida died in the late 1970s from
disease.

“When you dive on the reef today, it’s an absolute boneyard of dead coral,” says Chris Langdon, a
University of Miami oceanographer. Warmer, more acidic oceans are keeping the reef from
recovering. Langdon is working to identify a coral that can tolerate those conditions.

“One way to think of their economic value is to imagine if this job went to the Army Corps, and they
had to build a seawall 150 miles long, and every few years they had to build it a little higher,” he says.
“The reefs do that for free.”

The highway, also known as U.S. 1, strings together the island chain with 42 bridges. The population
in the Keys is limited to the number of people who can be evacuated by vehicle within 24 hours,
ahead of approaching hurricanes.

Chris Bergh of the Nature Conservancy joins me at Big Pine Key. He arrived in the Keys from
Pennsylvania as a toddler in the back of his parents’ 1973 Volkswagen bus and has no plans to move.
“I’ve got a six-year-old,” he says. “I expect I’ll live out my days here, and he will not. At some point an
economist is going to say, ‘Look, it’s going to cost one billion dollars to redo U.S. 1, and that’s only
going to buy us 20 more years.’ The question is, What will it cost us to buy time so we can keep on
keeping on?”

The end of the line is Key West, closer to Havana than to Miami. At City Hall we meet up with Don
Craig, a planner who’s worked for the city for more than two decades. The city has spent millions in
recent years to add pumps, construct a fire station at a higher elevation, and rebuild portions of the
seawall that nearly encircles the island. But options are limited.

Raising elevations on any large scale is out of reach. “We do not have a nearby source of fill
material,” he says. “We’re 118 miles from the major rock quarries.”
When Craig tells people that the Keys’ lifeline, the highway, will lie underwater someday, it elicits
four responses. “Some become fearful,” he says. “Some say, ‘Well, I’ll be dead, so I don’t care.’ Others
say, ‘There is not a consensus that this is going to happen, so why are you telling us this?’ The other
reaction is mute silence.”

Craig’s own response: migrate.

He knows something about that. “My parents were Okies,” he says. During the Dust Bowl years they
lost the family farm in Oklahoma and moved to California, where Craig was born. Some 2.5 million
people left the Great Plains in the 1930s to escape the largest man-made environmental catastrophe
in American history to date.

There’s something surreal about the pace of construction in a region that may be inundated by
2100. On an early morning flight over northwest Broward County, I watch a dredge scooping up fill
to form finger peninsulas on a man-made lake in a housing tract being built against the Everglades.
On a boat ride up the Miami River in downtown Miami, I pass a 1.25-acre parcel right on the river’s
edge that sold for $125 million last spring—a record price here. Nearby, the one-billion-dollar
Brickell City Centre, under construction on nine acres, is so enormous it has a cement plant on-site.
Across town a $600 million convention center with an 1,800-room hotel is planned.

The biggest economic challenge posed by climate change in South Florida may be one that business
leaders are loath to discuss—that fear of this slow-speed crisis could stall development.

“It’s almost like, ‘Shhhh. Don’t talk about it,’ and so it’s not real,” says Richard Grasso, an
environmental law professor at Fort Lauderdale’s Nova Southeastern University.

But privately, quietly, conversations are under way. Last fall executives from the region’s big banks,
insurers, and development companies convened an invitation-only roundtable in Miami with Lloyd’s
of London. One insurance executive told the group that homeowners in some vulnerable areas
already pay premiums that are higher than their mortgage payments.

“There was concern that rising insurance rates are not sustainable and people may be left with no
recourse but to leave Miami or go uninsured, which is not an option for those with mortgages,” says
Kerri Barsh, a Miami land-use attorney who represents Dutch Docklands. “If insurance costs
continue to spiral upward, they could have a negative cascading effect on the South Florida economy
and beyond.”
Unaffordable insurance could trigger an economic calamity that would make the 2008 housing-
market collapse here seem like an inconvenience. If homeowners couldn’t get insurance, bankers
would stop lending, which would create a shortage of cash, which would cause property values to
decline and the region’s economy to tank.

One way to keep the building boom going is for civic leaders to not look too far into the future. Thus
the four southern counties’ focus on 2060 instead of 2100. There’s a certain logic to that. The average
life span of most buildings is 50 years, and Miami, a mere 119 years old, is continuously rebuilding
itself.

“They don’t want to look beyond two feet of sea-level rise. This was a deliberate thing not to be too
scary,” Wanless says. “So there’s going to be a lot of throwing money in the ocean before we realize
it’s time to move on.”

Phil Stoddard, in his third term as mayor of South Miami, is one of the few politicians willing to talk
about when that time might come. He met me at his house, a one-story stucco bungalow with stone
floors (Flood Prep 101), solar panels on the roof, and a large pond that takes up most of the backyard,
where he and his wife swim with Lola the koi and an eight-year-old bass named Ackwards.

“I tell people to buy high, sell low,” he says drily, pausing to allow the joke to sink in.

Stoddard, also a biology professor at Florida International University in Miami, came up with his
own scenario, doodled during a long, dull meeting about climate change that dwelled on sea oats, a
native grass whose roots hold dunes in place. “I said to myself, We’re looking at something majorly
disastrous here—and we’re talking about sea oats?” he recalls.

He drew a graph with three lines that show population, property values, and sea level all rising. Then
abruptly, population growth and property values plummet.

“Something is going to upset the applecart,” he says. “A hurricane, a flood, another foot of sea rise,
the loss of freshwater. People are going to stop coming here and bail.”

He thinks a real estate sell-off is inevitable. Before that happens, he wants his constituents to be
informed. “People ask me this question, ‘I’m X years old. I have X amount of net worth in my house.
What should I do?’ I say, ‘If you need the value of that house to retire or to live on, then you want to
cash out at some point. It doesn’t have to be this year. But don’t wait 20 years.’ ”
Not long ago Stoddard attended a meeting where Wanless presented his analysis showing that the
accelerating disintegration of the ice sheets will lead to a more rapid rise of sea levels—faster and
higher than the federal government’s projections. That night, as Stoddard and his teenage daughter
walked on moonlit Miami Beach, he shared what he’d heard.

“She went silent, and then said to me, ‘I won’t be living here, will I?’ And I said, ‘No, you won’t.’ Kids
get it. Do you think we should tell their parents?”

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

A Blog by Nadia Drake

Oxygen Discovery Could
Complicate Search for Alien
Life
 POSTED WED, 10/28/2015

Scientists did not expect to find molecular oxygen at Comet 67P/Churyumov-

Gerasimenko.

ESA/ROSETTA/NAVCAM

The strange, duck-shaped comet that ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has been

orbiting for more than a year just got a bit stranger: Like plants on Earth, the
comet is blowing molecular oxygen, O2, into the space around it. Molecular
oxygen is thought to be rare in the cosmos – or at least exceptionally tricky to
detect.

“It is the most surprising discovery we have made so far,” says Rosetta team
member Kathrin Altwegg of the University of Bern. The team first spotted the
oxygen about a year ago and took its time ruling out sources other than the
comet itself. “The first time we saw it,” Altwegg says, “I think we all went a
little bit into denial because it is not expected to be found in a comet.”
Of course, molecular oxygen is common on Earth, having first been pumped
out in enormous quantities by photosynthetic blue-green algae about 2.5
billion years ago. Until now, though, astronomers have only spotted gaseous
O2 in a handful of other places, including two distant molecular clouds. The
new observations, reported today in Nature, not only force a reconsideration
of the very early solar system, they also throw a bit of a curveball at scientists
hoping to identify the signatures of life on other worlds.

“The finding is definitely a wake up call for exoplanets and the search for life,”
says Sara Seager of MIT. “O2 is the most prominent gas on our biosignature
gas list.”
 Volcanic Eruption
That Changed World
Marks 200th
Anniversary
The effects of Tambora's cataclysmic eruption were felt for years around
the Earth. 

The violent eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815 created a massive crater about 3.7 miles (six
kilometers) across and 3,600 feet deep (1,100 meters).

 
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY

By Jane J. Lee, National Geographic 

PUBLISHED APRIL 10, 2015

Two hundred years ago on April 10, the Indonesian volcano Tamboraerupted,
obliterating an entire tribe of people, cooling the Earth by several degrees, and
causing famines and disease outbreaks around the world.

It remains the largest eruption on historical record: larger than the 1883 eruption
of Krakatoa, and roughly 20 times bigger than Mount Vesuvius, which wiped the
Italian town of Pompeii off the map. If such a cataclysmic event happened now, the
results would be even messier, experts say.
"The consensus is that it would be absolutely devastating," says Gillen D'Arcy Wood,
an environmental historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our
transportation, food, and humanitarian infrastructure are much better now than
they were in the early 1800s, he says. "But we are also a planet of seven billion with
a highly complicated global food and trade network."
NG MAPS

Think of the disruptions to worldwide air travel when Iceland'sEyjafjallajökull

volcano erupted in 2010, Wood says. That was a small eruption compared to
Tambora.

Estimates of the death toll after the Tambora eruption range from 71,000 to
121,000. But the world is much more densely populated today, says Janine
Krippner, a volcanologist and doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh in
Pennsylvania. If something like Tambora blew its top now, a far greater number of
lives would be in danger, she says.

Blowing Hot and Going Cold

"There are about 1,500 potentially active volcanoes around the world in a [given]
year," Krippner says. And about 800 million people live within 62 miles (a hundred
kilometers) of one. That's a lot of people that could be in harm's way of an eruption.
Archaeologists recovered a nutcracker (top left), a teapot (top right), a tobacco box (bottom left), and a
silver ring (bottom right) from a town buried under ash and debris ejected during the Tambora eruption.

 
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DWI OBLO, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC INDONESIA

Many of the immediate deaths surrounding Tambora were caused by people getting
hit with pyroclastic flows—avalanches of superheated gas, ash, and debris. They
wiped out a tribe living as far as 16 miles (25 kilometers) away from the volcano.
The only evidence of their existence includes excavated artifacts, the skeletons of
two people turned to charcoal due to the intense heat, and a vanished language of
which we know only 48 words.

The resulting tsunamis, starvation, and diseases like typhus—the result of unending
rain, poor hygiene, and weakened bodies—took care of the rest of the worldwide
death toll.
 Half of Weather
Disasters Linked to
Climate Change
Human changes in climate played a role in 14 of 28 storms, droughts,
and other 2014 extreme weather events investigated by global -caused
scientists.

Members of an alpine club were caught in heavy snowfall in Nepal during an October, 2014 ascent from
Tilicho Lake to their base camp near Annapurna Massif. Snowstorms were more likely in Nepal last year
because of human-induced climate change, according to a global team of scientists.

 
PHOTOGRAPH BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

By Randy Lee Loftis, National Geographic 

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 05, 2015

From a deadly snowstorm in Nepal to a heat wave in Argentina that crashed power
supplies, at least 14 extreme weather events last year bore the fingerprints of
human-induced climate change, an international team of
scientists reported Thursday.

Researchers examined 28 weather extremes on all seven continents to see if they

were influenced by climate change or were just normal weather. Their conclusion:
Half of them showed some role of climate change.
“We hope that this will help people see how climate change is affecting their day-to-
day lives,” says lead editor Stephanie C. Herring of the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

This detective work hasn’t been possible until recently because science wasn’t up to
the task, leaving a gap in society’s ability to adapt to climate change linked to
greenhouse gases, which come from burning of fossil fuels and other human
activities.

We hope that this will help people see how

climate change is affecting their day-to-day
lives.
Stephanie C. Herring

NOAA

Although debate continues over accuracy and details, scientists now say their
improved modeling tools in recent years have made it easier to tease out climate
change effects from the seeming chaos of the weather.

Climate change plus local land use worsened prairie flooding in parts of Canada, according to a new
scientific report.  In this July, 2014 photo, the swollen Assiniboine River covers farmland in Manitoba,
Canada.

 
PHOTOGRAPH BY TIM SMITH, THE CANADIAN PRESS, ASSOCIATED PRESS
 The findings, by researchers from agencies and institutions in more than 20
countries, add to the list of extreme events in which climate change either played a
large or small role or set up conditions that made them more likely. Record heat
struck Europe, the Korean peninsula, northern China, and Australia – all with
climate-change signals, according to the peer-reviewed report, which appears in a
special issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Largest Object in
Asteroid Belt May
Have Come From
Elsewhere
Ammonia detected on Ceres’ surface suggests a cold birth beyond
Neptune’s orbit.

This image shows the northern terrain on the sunlit side of dwarf planet Ceres as seen by NASA's Dawn
spacecraft on April 14 and 15, 2015.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

By Michael Greshko and Nadia Drake, National Geographic 

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 10, 2015

New and controversial observations from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which has
orbited the dwarf planet Ceres since March, suggest the 4.6-billion-year-old body
may have been knocked into the main asteroid belt from the solar system’s chillier
outskirts.

Dawn’s discovery of ammoniated clays on the world’s surface—reported November

9 at the Division for Planetary Sciences annual meeting—points to this intriguing
scenario. Their presence indicates that Ceres was born somewhere beyond the orbit
of Neptune, where the sun’s weaker glare would not vaporize and scatter the
ammonia as the minerals formed. Then, sometime in the following 500 million
years, gravitational heave-hos may have thrown the dwarf planet inward, delivering
it to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

There is, of course, another possibility.

“Either Ceres formed farther out altogether and then was implanted in the main
belt,” says Simone Marchi of the Southwest Research Institute, “or it grew at its
current position with the contribution of outer solar system materials.”

The idea of Ceres as an inner solar system transplant isn’t a complete surprise. For
starters, Ceres doesn’t look like any of its neighboring space rocks: It’s round, it’s
the biggest thing in the belt by far, and it is much more watery than anything else
nearby. It’s more like a warmer version of the icy moons orbiting Jupiter and
Saturn.

MORE OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD STORIES

1. An Orphaned Planet Got Kicked Out Of Its Own Solar System

2. Poof! The Planet Closest To Our Solar System Just Vanished

3. Hubble Video Reveals Mystery Object In Jupiter’s Red Spot

“Ceres is basically unique, in terms of objects that we’ve been to,” says Andy
Rivkin of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. “The Moon is rocky; Pluto
is icy. Ceres is the only one you look at with aspects of both, and that makes it a
great way to learn about both.”

The dwarf planet’s soft, flat-bottomed craters, enigmatic bright spots, a possible ice
volcano, and tufts of water vapor hint at a world with something exciting going on
beneath the surface. Even more telling, perhaps, is that its density is similar to that
of Pluto, which lives in the region beyond Neptune’s orbit.

“It sure smells like something that came from the outer solar system,” Caltech
astronomer Mike Brown told National Geographic back in January.

A composite image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows Ceres' Occator crater, home to a collection of
intriguing bright spots of unknown composition.
 
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Researchers have been studying Ceres for a long time, but ground-based telescopes
haven’t been able to convincingly identify ammonia, since they have had to contend
with Earth’s obstructive atmosphere. The orbiting Dawn spacecraft has a more ideal
perch to observe how molecules on the dwarf planet’s surface reflect various
wavelengths of light. It was in those wavelengths that Dawn investigator Carle
Pieters and her colleagues spied the signature of ammoniated phyllosilicates, which
are minerals similar to clays on Earth, mixed in with other materials.

Ceres today is much too warm for a volatile molecule like ammonia to survive on its
own—it would just drift away as vapor. That means the ammonia must have become
bound to those minerals when the mix was somewhere much colder, meaning Ceres
either flew in from afar, or was bombarded by ammonia-bearing materials from
farther out.

Of the two scenarios, Bill McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louisfinds

Ceres’ frigid origin more plausible. “The idea that pebbles of ammonia would drift
in to coat Ceres seems like a kludge,” he said, noting that everything in the mid- and
outer-asteroid belt would also be covered in ammonia, which is not observed.

But determining which scenario actually happened will be a tough task for the team.
Each history should be associated with a unique distribution of crater sizes and
numbers on Ceres, kind of like a fingerprint. In principle, the team only needs to
read Ceres’ craters to figure out which prediction fits. However, “the global
distribution of craters—and in particular the lack of large craters—is at odds with
both scenarios,” says Marchi.

The issues arise because Ceres’ outer layer, a viscous mixture that’s “more like icy
dirt than dirty ice,” according to Michael Bland of the U.S. Geological Survey’s
Astrogeology Science Center, is smoothing over craters and erasing them over time.
The problem is particularly pronounced with the bigger, older craters, and that will
make it a bit tricky to reconstruct Ceres’ history.

Of course, it’s also possible that the detection of ammonia itself is flawed. Some
researchers, wary of the result, maintain that Ceres’ surface spectra are better
explained by brucite, a magnesium-based mineral that readily forms in the asteroid
belt. “I do not understand how they concluded so firmly that it’s not brucite,” says
Rivkin, who has challenged earlier claims of ammoniated compounds on Ceres.
But it’s too soon to say the results are wrong: The complete analysis will be
published soon in the journal Nature, and it’s possible the results will withstand
closer scrutiny.  “It may be that ammoniated phyllosilicates have taken Game Five to
go ahead three games to two in a best-of-seven series,” says Rivkin

The North Star or Pole Star – aka Polaris – is famous for holding nearly still in our sky while the entire northern sky
moves around it. That’s because it’s located nearly at the north celestial pole, the point around which the entire
northern sky turns. Polaris marks the way due north. As you face Polaris and stretch your arms sideways, your right
hand points due east, and your left hand points due west. About-face of Polaris steers you due south. Polaris
is not the brightest star in the nighttime sky, as is commonly believed. It’s only about 50th brightest. But you can
find it easily, and, once you do, you’ll see it shining in the northern sky every night, from N. Hemisphere locations.
Follow the links below to learn more about Polaris.

How to see Polaris

History of Polaris

Polaris science

Polaris on a stormy night. Spotting the North Star – and in that way knowing the direction north – has gladdened the heart of many a lost traveler.
Photo by EarthSky Facebook friend Jv Noriega in the Philippines.
 If you can find the Big Dipper, you can find Polaris. The two outer stars in the bowl of the Dipper – Dubhe and Merak – always point to the North
Star.

Polaris marks the end of the Handle of the Little Dipper. Chart for early autumn evening Image via EarthSky Tonight
How to see Polaris. This star is bright enough to spot even from some suburban skies. In a dark country sky, even
when the full moon obscures a good deal of the starry heavens, the North Star is relatively easy to see.

That fact has made this star a boon to travelers throughout the Northern Hemisphere, both over land and sea. Finding
Polaris means you know the direction north.
Best of all, Polaris is readily found by using the prominent group of stars known as the Big Dipper, called the
Plough in the UK, which may be the Northern Hemisphere’s most famous star pattern.

To locate Polaris, all you have to do is to find the Big Dipper pointer stars Dubhe and Merak. These two stars
outline the outer part of the Big Dipper’s bowl. Simply draw a line from Merak through Dubhe, and go about 5
times the Merak/Dubhe distance to Polaris.
The Big Dipper, like a great big hour hand, goes full circle around Polaris in one day. More specifically, the Big
Dipper circles Polaris in a counter-clockwise direction in 23 hours and 56 minutes. Although the Big Dipper travels
around Polaris all night long, the Big Dipper pointer stars always point to Polaris on any day of the year, and at any
time of the night. Polaris marks the center of Nature’s grandest celestial clock!

By the way, Polaris is famous for more reasons than one. It’s famous for hardly moving while the other stars wheel
around it. And it’s famous for marking the end of the Little Dipper‘s handle. The Little Dipper is tougher to spot in
the night sky than the Big Dipper. But if you use the Big Dipper’s pointer stars to locate Polaris, you’ll be one step
closer to seeing the Little Dipper.

As you travel northward, Polaris climbs higher in the sky. If you go as far north as the North Pole, you’ll see Polaris
directly overhead. As you travel south, Polaris drops closer to the northern horizon. If you get as far as the equator,
Polaris sinks to the horizon. South of the equator, Polaris drops out of the sky.

Does the North Star ever move?

A planisphere is virtually indispensable for beginning stargazers. Order your EarthSky planisphere today.
 When you take a time exposure photograph of the northern sky (or, in this case, the northeast), you see all the stars are moving around Polaris, which
is on the left in this image. This image by Taro Yamamoto via an article on long exposure star trail photography.
History of Polaris. Polaris hasn’t always been the North Star and won’t remain the North Star forever. For example,
a famous star called Thuban, in the constellation Draco the Dragon, was the North Star when the Egyptians built the
pyramids.

But our present Polaris is a good North Star because it’s the sky’s 50th brightest star. So it’s noticeable in the sky. It
served well as the North Star, for example, when the Europeans first sailed across the Atlantic over five centuries
ago.

And Polaris will continue its reign as the North Star for many centuries to come. It will align most closely with
the north celestial pole – the point in the sky directly above Earth’s north rotational axis – on March 24, 2100. The
computational wizard Jean Meeus figures Polaris will be 27’09” (0.4525o) from the north celestial pole at that time
(a little less than the angular diameter of the moon when at its farthest from Earth).

Meanwhile, there is no visible star marking the celestial pole in the Southern Hemisphere. What’s more, the
Southern Hemisphere won’t see a pole star appreciably close to the south celestial pole for another 2,000 years.

At one time in human history, people literally depended on their lucky stars for their lives and livelihood. Luckily,
they could trust the Big Dipper and the North Star to guide them. People could sail the seas and cross the trackless
deserts without getting lost. When slavery existed in the United States, slaves counted on the Big Dipper (which
they called the Drinking Gourd) to show them the North Star, lighting their way to the free states and Canada.

While being honored as the North Star, Polaris enjoys the title of Lodestar and Cynosure as well.

Star Errai: Future North Star

Does Mars have a North Star?

An artist’s illustration of Polaris and its two known

companion stars via the Hubble News Center.
Polaris science. The single point of light that we
see as Polaris is actually a triple star system, or
three stars orbiting a common center of mass.
The primary star, Polaris A, is a supergiant with
about six times the mass of our sun. A close
companion, Polaris Ab, orbits 2 billion miles
from Polaris. Much farther away, near the top of
the illustration at right, is the third companion
Polaris B. Polaris B is located approximately
240 billion miles from Polaris A. The two companion stars are the same temperature as Polaris A, but are dwarf
stars.

Astronomers estimate Polaris’ distance at 430 light-years. Considering the distance, Polaris must be a respectably
luminous star. According to the star aficianado, Jim Kaler, Polaris is a yellow supergiant star shining with the
luminosity of 2500 suns. Polaris is also the closest and brightest Cepheid variable star – a type of star that
astronomers use to figure distances to star clusters and galaxies.

Polaris’ position is RA: 2h 31m 48.7s, dec: +89° 15′ 51″