Today in Irony

An icebreaker was scheduled to make a trip to the Arctic to measure and survey the effects global warming was having on the Canadian Arctic. It will not be able to make this trip because Arctic sea ice is unusually active, making the trip too dangerous. So yes, the climate change study was cancelled because of climate change. Whoops.

Pluto: The Story so Far

On July 14, the New Horizons space probe flew past the dwarf planet Pluto, more than 50 years after Mariner 2 successfully completed a Venus flyby, the first time a space probe visited another world. It's been a long time coming for Pluto. Voyager 1 was nearly sent to Pluto after its Saturn visit, but instead it performed a close flyby of Titan. Honestly, considering how little Voyager was able to learn about Titan given the presence of its thick, inscrutable atmosphere, Titan may not have been the best choice for Voyager. But finally, Pluto has gotten its first visit, and as is tradition with cutting edge science such as this, Pluto gave us quite a few surprises.

One of the most unusual features is actually a lack of a particular feature, namely craters. There just aren't any there. Charon, Pluto's most significant moon, has a few craters, but not nearly as many as one would expect. These are two cold, small bits of ice and rock 3 billion miles from the sun. There's no gas giant to exert any sort of tidal flexing as is the case with some moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn. Based on what we know, Pluto and Charon should both be dead worlds. But they're not. Pluto's surface seems to be less than 100 million years old, very young when it comes to geology.

Typically, worlds made up primarily of ice don't have big elevation changes. Look at Europa, the surface there is so smooth that a cue ball, expanded to Europa's size, would have greater elevation changes. So, it would make sense then for Pluto and Charon to be pretty much flat, right? Well, apparently not, because both have some pretty impressive topography. Charon has a canyon that could be up to 6 miles deep, just one of many canyons in a vast network that span for hundreds of miles. Charon also has a plain near the northern pole that scientists have been informally calling Mordor. I hope that name sticks.

Not to be completely outshone, Pluto has its fair share of interesting geography. Of course, there's the heart, which I believe has officially been termed Tombaugh Regio after Pluto's discoverer. Then there's the mountains. Now at the cold temperatures we're familiar with, water ice is pretty soft and not really capable of getting very high. Pluto is an entirely different sort of cold, cold enough for

strange and unusual ices like methane ice and nitrogen ice. At those temperatures, water ice because solid enough to build mountains. These are real mountains too, with the highest peaks soaring up over 10,000 feet. Sure, we've got higher here, but for a little chunk of basically ice, Pluto didn't do too badly for itself.

It's going to take a long time for New Horizons to send back all the data it collected during its brief visit, more than a year. Right now, we still barely know anything. I'm sure I'll be writing more posts about Pluto in the future as the data slowly trickles in. To wrap things up today, I just want to say that Pluto is not a planet, it just isn't big enough. That said, that doesn't make this achievement any less spectacular.

Expanding Ice in a Warming World

The planet is getting warmer. This is a fact, backed by data. This year is looking to be the warmest on record, even if the year doesn't end all that warm. However, it is important to note that despite this fact, the world has not gotten warmer overall, and that some regions may not behave how you might expect.

This year, Antarctic sea ice covered 7.72 million square miles, the biggest area since the 1970's, when accurate measurements began. It's theorized that changing wind conditions from global warming have caused cold air to move across the Ross Sea, allowing for large scale ice expansion, since there's no land to stop anything. Warm air has instead started moving across the Antarctic Peninsula, and it's worth noting that ice coverage in that area has shrunk from past years.

Another area that is not behaving as expected is half a world away, in the Himalayas. Glaciers in the Karakorum region are not shrinking like other glaciers in the area, and if anything, are expanding. As the planet warms, the Himalayas receive more moisture, and for most mountains, this moisture comes in the summer, as rain. Because of geography, the Karakorum receives most of its moisture in the winter, so it falls as snow, feeding the glaciers in the area.  So again, even though the area is warming, not everywhere behaves the same way. It is important to note that while some glaciers are expanding, many are not, and that some inconsistency does not mean global warming is not an issue. It would be more remarkable if every place on the planet was warming in the same way.

Plate Tectonics on Europa

We've seen traces of what could have been plate tectonics on all of the other inner planets, but Earth is the only one to still have an active and moving surface.  Plate tectonics are a big deal, scientists believe the recycling of materials is important for life.  Now, strong evidence suggests Europa also experiences plate tectonics.

Europa is certainly getting interesting, with the recent suspected discovery of plumes of water jetting out from the surface, similar to Enceladus.  While the plates, really large chunks of ice, probably don't go down all the way to the subsurface ocean, material probably gets down there somehow.  It doesn't guarantee life exists on Europa, but it makes sending a spacecraft there to find some answers even more important.  Seriously, when is that happening?