Eos, Vol. 94, No.
9, 26 February 2013
In Brief
PAGES 87–88
Parts of Antarctica’s King George
Island are littered with trash A report
released 7 February by ecologists from
Germany’s Friedrich Schiller University Jena
reveals that parts of King George Island, a
logistical hub for international research in
Antarctica, are home to open pits of trash,
decaying field huts, and other forms of
pollution.
The report, “Current ecological situation of
the Fildes Peninsula region and management
suggestions,” documents how the permanent
research stations on the island’s Fildes
Peninsula—three Chilean, one Chinese, one
Russian, and one Uruguayan—have led to
“a genuine waste problem,” according to lead
author Hans‐Ulrich Peter.
The report describes how a large amount of
the trash on the ice‐free peninsula was buried
prior to 1998 when the Protocol on
Environmental Protection to the Antarctic
Treaty entered into force and committed its
signers to protecting Antarctic biodiversity,
ecology, and sites of geological interest. These
piles of buried trash are being exposed by
solifluction—a process by which soil
saturated with water from melting frost oozes
downslope.
However, Peter and colleagues have
documented more recent pollution. For
example, of 220 sites identified to have large
amounts of litter, about 22% were freshly
dumped. The trash included 200‐liter drums
that had been “lost” in the countryside, car
batteries, oil cans, and canisters with legible
labels attesting to their contents: aircraft fuel,
disinfectants, and antifreeze, among other
pollutants.
The permanent scientific stations were
visited by more than 900 tourists last year, but
it is the researchers and staff of these stations,
who number between 100 and 300 people
depending on the season, who contribute to
most of the new pollution and adverse
environmental effects, according to the report.
“Particularly problematic here is that, based
on empirical evidence, a large proportion of
station staff regard the Antarctic environment
as being insensitive and not really worth
protecting,” the report states. “Moreover, not
all station members, including scientists,
receive sufficient training with respect to
behavioural guidelines and environmental
issues.”
Staff with open access to vehicles have
been seen to go off‐road, tearing up fragile
mosses and disturbing seal pupping locations
and penguin nests. During 3 years of intense
observation in the mid‐2000s, “the minimum
distances from animal colonies recom-
mended by the Antarctic Treaty Parties were
regularly and clearly transgressed,” the report
states.
In addition, sites of fossil discoveries—
including rare leaf imprints—that document
© 2013. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
Antarctica’s environment more than 100
million years ago have been quarried by
station staff for construction purposes. “The
very distinctive beach ridges of this region
have great scientific potential, for example for
the study of palaeobiology and palaeoecol-
ogy, the palaeoclimate or hydrology,” the
report states. “Quarrying these beach ridges
continued in all three seasons of the study
period.” Although some areas of the Fildes
Peninsula where fossils are found are
protected, the quarry sites lie outside these
designated zones. “The loss to science from
the total excavation of these areas must be
considered to be very great,” the report adds.
The full text of the report is available at
http://www.umweltdaten.de/publikationen/
fpdf‐l/4424.pdf. —MK
Largest meteor since Tunguska event
explodes above Russian city The meteor
that disintegrated in the atmosphere above
Chelyabinsk, Russia, on 15 February, injuring
more than 1000 people and causing wide-
spread property damage from the shock wave,
is the largest such incident since the 1908
Tunguska event in Siberia, according to Paul
Chodas, research scientist in the Near‐Earth
Object (NEO) program office at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
During a 15 February teleconference, Chodas
said it was an “incredible coincidence” that
asteroid DA14 passed safely by Earth on the
same day as the Chelyabinsk meteor; the
45‐meter‐wide asteroid sped by the planet at
a distance of just 27,700 kilometers away on its
closest approach. He stressed that the meteor
was not related to DA14. The meteor “was
coming from the wrong direction and at a
completely different velocity,” he said, noting
that the orbit of the meteor went out to the
asteroid belt while the orbit of DA14 “is very
Earth‐like, it does not go out so far.”
According to preliminary results from the
European Space Agency (ESA), the meteor
that exploded over Chelyabinsk at about 3:20
GMT entered the atmosphere at 20 degrees
above horizontal in a northeast- to -southwest
trajectory at an entry speed of more than
64,000 kilometers per hour. When the
meteor, estimated at 17 meters in diameter
before atmospheric entry, exploded at an
altitude of 15–25 kilometers, it released about
500 kilotons of kinetic energy, corresponding
to 30 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, ESA
noted in a 19 February press release. The
event “is a strong reminder of why we need
continuous efforts to survey and identify
near-Earth objects,” stated Thomas Reiter,
ESA’s director of human spaceflight and
operations.
Chodas said that NASA has found about
95% of large NEOs, most of which pose no
hazard, with its 15 year Space Guard Survey.
However, he said that the Chelyabinsk
meteor was not detected in advance. “It
literally came out of the dayside of the
planet,” he said, adding that Earth-based
telescopes cannot detect these small objects
in the daylight. He noted that scientists are
looking into possible infrared detection from
space for these types of NEOs.
During the NASA teleconference, Bill
Cooke, lead for the Meteoroid Environments
Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
in Huntsville, Ala., said that NASA has
recognized that asteroids and meteors “pose
a bigger problem than anybody anticipated a
decade ago.” He said that Earth intercepts
about 80 tons of meteoritic material from
millimeter-sized objects daily and that rocks
the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor arrive
about once every 50–100 years. —RS
Free “Cook Book” for gridding
bathymetric data The International
Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and the
General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans
(GEBCO) program of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization’s Intergovernmental
Oceanographic Commission (UNESCO IOC)
have created a free manual to help users
prepare quality bathymetric grids from
available data points. The new “IHO‐IOC
GEBCO Cook Book,” released last year and
available at http://www.gebco.net, provides
step‐by‐step instructions, screenshots,
command lines, and snippets of code applied
on actual data, to guide users through the
process of gridding data.
To “grid data” means to take all the data
points on a surface within a grid cell and
assign them a representative number value
that serves to aggregate surrounding points.
Gridding quality‐controlled, cleaned data aids
in the creation of accurate maps of bathym-
etry or elevation. Data in gridded form are
advantageous because they can easily be
viewed and analyzed on computers.
The manual’s instructions are divided into
three parts. “The first enables beginning users
to easily produce a grid from xyz data by
following provided examples,” explained
Karen Marks, chief editor and chairperson of
the “Cook Book” working group. “The second
gives a more in‐depth look at topics related to
preparing and processing data and gridding
techniques, and the third focuses on
advanced topics such as data uncertainties
and error models.”
Links in the appendices give Web sites from
which multibeam data, which can be gridded
into maps, are publicly available for down-
load. However, “The methods described in the
‘Cook Book’ don’t have to be limited to
bathymetry—people can take any type of
data and grid them however they want using
this tool,” Marks noted.
The manual will be continually maintained
and amended as better techniques and
software are developed to meet changing user
needs. Scientific contributions to the guide
are encouraged, and feedback can be sent to
Karen.Marks@noaa.gov. —MK
—MOHI KUMAR and R ANDY S HOWSTACK , Staff
Writer
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 Eos, Vol. 94, No. 9, 26 February 2013

© 2013. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.