The Musings of Chris Samuel

For those looking for the joint assessment by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO that’s all over the news at the moment, you can find it on the MAFF website. There is also a web page listed for the data and analysis in the report, but it’s not working yet (I guess they forgot the webmaster doesn’t work on weekends).

It’s about 35 pages long and is fairly technical, but not overly daunting. The content, however, is pretty scary. For us in Victoria is it predicting:

• by 2010-2040, exceptionally hot years are likely to affect about 75% of the region, and occur every 1.3 years on average;
• by 2010-2040, exceptionally low rainfall years are likely to affect about 10% of the region and occur about once every 12 years on average;
• by 2030, exceptionally low soil moisture years are likely to affect about 11% of the region and occur about once every 9 years on average.

Historically it says that Victoria and Tasmania are down 109 mm in rainfall since 1950 and average temperature is up by almost 0.8C over the same 50 year timescale.

The most worrying thing is that these predictions are based on a lower level of CO2e emissions than we are currently tracking towards.

Observations since 1990 show that we are tracking the highest IPCC emission scenario, called A1F1, but climate simulations have not been performed using the A1FI scenario. Most climate research institutes around the world did simulations using the mid-range emission scenarios, called A1B and A2. Hence, in this report, projections for the next 20 to 30 years are based on simulations using mid-range emission scenarios.

So if we carry on how we’re doing now, then the reality could be much worse..

The Planetary Societys Emily Lakdawalla has blogged about an interesting project up on their website at the moment, trying to rope in volunteers to help NASA locate Mars Polar Lander using images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Emily writes:

What I would really love is if any of you readers out there who wanted to join in the search would write to me and let me know which image you’re searching, or ask me to assign you one, so that we can spread out the effort of all the volunteer searchers and make sure each image is examined by multiple people. I’ve also given some guidelines on how to report anything that you think might be a piece of the missing Mars Polar Lander. So if you want to join in the search, go check out that page.

Currently there are 18 images to search through, and the full resolution JPEG 2000 images are over 1GB a shot..

In 1969 Bob Wilson (later the first director of Fermilab) was called before a hearing of the US Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to answer questions about particle accelerators. In it Senator John Pastore demanded to know how such a device improved the security of America and Bob Wilsons response of “nothing at all” didn’t go down to well, and so he was prodded further.

His obituary from Cornell in January 2000 puts it like this:

“It has only to do,” Wilson told the lawmakers, “with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”

I have to concur.

The USGS has reported a magnitude 6.0 quake in the area of Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lake Kivu is one of three known “exploding lakes“, and Wikipedia says:

The trigger for lake overturns in Lake Kivu’s case is unknown but periodic volcanic activity is suspected. The gaseous chemical composition of exploding lakes is unique to each lake; in Lake Kivu’s case, methane and carbon dioxide due to lake water interaction with a volcano. The risk from a possible Lake Kivu overturn would be catastrophic, dwarfing other documented lake overturns at Lakes Nyos and Monoun, since approximately 2 million people live in the lake basin.

The USGS maps show the epicenter on dry land, but with a possible error margin of over 4 miles it could just be under the southern part of the lake. Even in the current location the USGS shake map shows a large area of the lake that could be affected.

The BBC has the first reports of casualties, though thankfully no reports of a lake overturn.

The USGS is reporting a magnitude 6.8 earthquake off of the coast of the South Island of New Zealand, near the inlet to Milford Sound and 64 miles from Queenstown (which is a way inland).

You can get an idea of where it was from this Google Map link and it looks like the coastal area is all national park, with no settlements marked.

This doesn’t sound good..

An analysis of images taken during Wednesday’s lift-off in Cape Canaveral, Florida, shows that the shuttle’s underbelly was hit by a piece of ice - rather than foam from its external fuel tank as previously believed, he said. The impact left what appeared to be a 19 square centimetre gouge near the hatch of one of the shuttle’s landing gears.

Hopefully carrying teachers on the shuttle isn’t bad luck..

The Planetary Society has some amazing images & animations of Earth taken by planetary spacecraft.

My favourite at the moment has to be the image of Earth from the surface of Mars, taken by the Spirit rover in 2004 and the first image taken from the surface of an object beyond the moon.

Shades of the Total Perspective Vortex, for those HHGTTG fans out there.

Speaking of which, Paulo Ang has a rather wonderful Flash animation entitled “The Total Perspective Vortex” which makes powerful use of planetary and astronomical imagery alongside music and a liberal smattering of Hitch Hikers quotes.

Here’s some interesting news:

India has gone into business in outer space, launching its first commercial rocket. The rocket was carrying an Italian astronomical satellite that will be used to gather information about the origins of the universe. India is the fifth entry into the commercial satellite launch business after the US, Russia, China, Ukraine and the European Space Agency.

I hadn’t realised Ukraine was in the business too..

A great physics quote courtesy of New Scientist:

Despite the fact that the SQUID supports a macroscopically measurable current, it may in fact be a small cat

Perhaps a huge SQUID of a chaotic nature could be called a Cthulhu ?

According to the USGS maps for the Solomons and PNG there have been 22 quakes greater than mag 4.8 in the 15 hours or so since the mag 8.0, here’s a quick graph of magnitude versus time after the first quake (click for a larger version)..

This graph was brought to you by cat, awk, tac and OpenOffice.org Calc and Draw.