In my last post how knowing the science behind a picture makes it better. I still say that’s true, but also, sometimes, the beauty and awe of a picture can speak for itself.
Behold, swirls of sea ice off the coast of Greenland: Breathtaking, isn’t it? [Click to phasechangenate.] This was taken by on October 16, 2012. Aqua is designed to observe Earth’s water cycle: the oceans, evaporation, clouds, precipitation, snow cover, and, obviously, sea ice.
It takes a vast amount of energy to move water from the ocean into the atmosphere and then move it around the planet, energy which comes from sunlight and. Observations like those of Aqua show us how the constituents of the atmosphere change how that transport occurs, how that energy is stored, and that with our grand experiment of adding carbon dioxide to the air. That also affects our environment, how plants and animals eat, drink, live, and die. We are animals, too, and we live in this environment created by sunlight, air, water, ice, and our own actions.
I am awed and moved when I see images like the one above. Its beauty is transcendent, and was made possible by our curiosity, our desire to learn more about the world we live in – an urge so strong we invented science, and engineering, and then built satellites that can look back at us from space and show us how surpassingly beautiful our world is, and how we need to take care of it.
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I suppose I was wrong at the beginning of this post. Sometimes the picture doesn’t always speak for itself. It still helps to know the how and why of it. When you do, the picture speaks with far more authority, import, and wide-ranging impact. Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team Related Posts: – – – –.
The Petermann Glacier is a vast tongue of flowing ice in Greenland. In 2010 it calved – broke off a chunk – releasing an iceberg far larger than Manhattan Island in New York City. That huge chunk of ice moved into the ocean and eventually melted in the Atlantic (see Related Posts below for more on that event). And now Petermann has done it again. A crack appeared several years ago, and on July 16th conditions were right to allow a new chunk to break free: Note the scale: the width of that glacier at that point is 20 kilometers, or 12 miles., designed to monitor Earth’s oceans.
The berg itself is about half the size of the last one, but don’t kid yourself: that’s still huge. As before, we can speculate whether this is due to global warming or not. Icebergs calf all the time. However, note that the last time, the berg calved later in the summer (August), and this crack is much farther up the glacier than usually seen. As climate scientist Michael Mann says, global warming is like loaded dice.
You don’t know if any particular throw of snake eyes is due to them being fixed, but you’ll see a lot more rolls turn up snake eyes than you would otherwise. Global warming is predicted to give us longer, hotter summers, drier conditions across the US, more record temperatures, thinner arctic ice, and having it cover less surface area of the Earth.
And, yes, more frequent glacier calving. By the way, the 2010 calving event was the largest seen in nearly 50 years. And also by the way, June 2012 was one of the hottest since records have been kept. And also also by the way June 2012 had the highest land and ocean average surface temperatures in the northern hemisphere in recorded history.
And oh, one more thing: it also was the 328th consecutive month with a global temperature higher than the 20th century average. You can read all about this in. But you global warming, you just go ahead and keep on denying. Keep, keep, keep, and keep slinging (note: that last one is skeevy and foul and disgusting almost beyond belief). In the meantime those of us who understand the actual situation will take it seriously, and continue to speak out. The rate of warming in the past century or so. This corresponds to the time of the Industrial Revolution, when we started dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Greenhouse gases warm the planet (hence the name) — if they didn’t. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which is dumped into the atmosphere by humans to the tune of, 100 times the amount from volcanoes. And finally, approximately that global warming is real, and caused by humans.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using data from the Land Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE). Related Posts: – – – –. [The Desktop Project is my way of forcing myself to clean off my computer’s desktop by systematically writing a blog post for every cool picture I’ve been collecting and neglecting. I’ve been posting them every day for two weeks now. And there’s more to come!] Regular readers know I’m fascinated by clouds.
The shapes they take on and the processes that form them are really interesting, especially when more unusual and rare conditions produce spectacularly odd clouds. You’ve probably never heard of 'cloud streets', technically called horizontal convective rolls.
I hadn’t either until recently, but they are amazingly cool-looking, especially when seen from space. Proof: check out this shot from March 2012 of cloud streets over Greenland: [Click to ennebulenate, or.] Isn’t that incredible?, but it involves gently rising warm, moist air getting blown to the side by a shear wind. This starts up a rotation in the clouds and stretches them out into these fantastically long parallel strips.
Each row you see is spinning along the long axis, and each one is spinning in the opposite direction of the one next to it (). To give you a sense of scale, this image is over 2000 km (1200 miles) across!
So these clouds can stretch a long, long way. You probably see clouds every day, or certainly quite often. Yet there’s a lot we don’t know about them, and certainly many kinds I bet you’ve never even heard of. What else is there you might be missing that’s sitting in plain sight?
Image credit: Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC Related Posts: – – – –. In case you were wondering what the snow was like here in Colorado the other day [Click to ensnowflakenate.] That’s on February 5, 2012. I live in Boulder, to the northwest of Denver (which is labeled), right on the edge of the Rockies. We got well over 30 cm here locally, and it was deeper in other places.
Typical of the area, though, the Sun was out the next day, and now our yard looks like a fairyland of sparkles. It’s unusual to get a heavy snowfall like this in February (we do get big ones, but later in the year) and from what I’ve heard this was a record for a February. And not to overextend the post to climate change, but a) weather is not climate unless you add time, and 2) contrary to any soundbite you might hear, snowstorms will actually become more common as the Earth warms. Warmer weather means more evaporation, so more moisture in the air.
It’s still cold higher up in the atmosphere, and it’s still cold in the winter over land, so a warmer planet overall means more snow in some places. I’m not attributing this event to global warming, to be clear. But it’s the kind of thing we can expect in the coming years. NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC Related posts: – – –. This is truly amazing: you may remember that last August,.
This chunk of ice broke free and has made its way off Labrador and is headed to the north Atlantic. NASA’s Aqua satellite: It looks almost serene and tiny, doesn’t it? Yeah, until you grasp the scale of this picture: from left to right it’s well over 400 km (320 miles) across, and that ice floe is still something like 20 km (12 miles) across, having shrunk a bit on its 3000 km journey. A beacon was placed on it last year and.
Some fisherman. It’s unclear what will happen with this monster icecube. It may present a shipping danger, or even be trouble for offshore oil rigs in the Newfoundland area. Between the radio beacon and satellite images like this, hopefully its position and movement will be tracked well enough to predict where it’s headed and minimize any trouble it might cause. Image credit: Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC Related posts: – – – – (pix of a glacier I took in Alaska). The other day showing GOES space imagery of the severe storms that blasted across the United States on April 27.
NASA has other satellites that observe the Earth as well, including, which captured of the aftermath of the storms. The picture is centered on Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and you can clearly see the tracks in the ground left by the killer tornadoes that swept through the state.
Are absolutely terrifying. The Red Cross was in the area immediately after the storms went through; if you have a mind to, they are as always. Images like this help meteorologists track down and understand the conditions for such storms to form.
Obviously, the better we understand those conditions the more prepared we can be. And the farther in advance we can predict these storms — even by minutes — the more lives we can save. Image credit: Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC.
So yesterday I spent several hours rearranging my office and had a pile of other stuff to do, keeping me pretty busy throughout the day. So instead of some deeply insightful science post or lengthy discussion of skepticism, I’ll simply show you off the coast of Patagonia: [Click to unmicroorganismenate] This was taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite, designed to study the Earth’s oceans. This isn’t really a true-color picture, (though there is one available ).
But it’s still pretty. And useful scientifically; blooms like this happen when there’s a confluence of various factors, like currents, nutrients, sunlight, and of course the plankton themselves, so scientists can use these blooms to study conditions in the water. Crashday Download Pc Completo Restaurant. And since about half the planet’s supply of oxygen is created by photosynthesis by these little guys, blooms are useful in a more basic way, too!
Image credit: Norman Kuring, NASA’s. I have no real reason to post this image of the new — now exploding into a category 4 monster in the Atlantic — other than to make the joke in the title, and because it’s terribly pretty. [Click to encoriolisize, or to see a range of size options.] The picture was taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite on Sunday, September 12 at 16:00 UT. It’s well east and south of the US right now, but its path is unclear. I suspect Chris Mooney at will be keeping a close eye — yes, haha — on it. Gomez Peer Reddit. Image credit: NASA, Aqua team hunger force. This is very cool:.
I don’t think it’s embeddable, so just click that link and take a look. To add to the coolness factor, there is also a thermal camera pointed at it with the same field of view and scale, so you can compare what you’re seeing visually with what’s going on in the far infrared. Here’s a still I grabbed last night; You can clearly see the ash plume through the cloud layers: They provide a map of the camera location, but there’s no scale. I put it into Google maps, and just a few kilometers from the volcano. That matches the rate the plume appears to change, too.
It’s mesmerizing. And don’t forget that the NASA Earth Observatory is posting quite often as well. Put that in your RSS feed reader! I check it every day; besides the volcano they frequently have incredible imagery of places I’ve never even heard of. It’s a big planet, with lots to see.