A DISCOVER’ MAGAZINE SPECIAL Pease ary THENEW HOW.10 Area mV Et 3 SL VS CATT abet ESI AAT MAT THE NEXT Th ees is at QUAKE ne) es2)Centents LEARNING FROM DISASTER 4 By studhing catastrophes, we canleam what spawns then—and perhaps even pravant the next one. by Gillan Conahian WORLD POWERS 22 The awesome strergth of nature dwarfs some of manknd's mast anorgate teats. by Mary Beth Grigns DEEP EARTH 24 THE INSIDE STORY 26 (ur planet had a strange, hat, and iolant begining says Caltech shysicst Davia Stevenson. by Linds Marea ‘THE QUAKE HUNTERS 30 a Cascadka fault could wreck everthing fem Vancouver ta SanFrarcisca Wilths steeping monster wake Up? by Jerry Thompson, EARTH'S INNER TURMOIL 35 Anew view ofthe turbulence nse our wore. by Emly Elart ON LAND 38 WRITTEN IN THE ICE 40 ‘A the way atthe bottam of the wold, the movamant af se vers ‘forecasts the fete of warm planet by Douglas Fox ARE YOU FASTER THAN DISASTER? 48, Cutrunrng ava is easy it tus out. tsunami?Not so much by Mary Beth Griges STORM KING 50 Cn the road with tomado scientist Joshua Wurman~anthetalof a ‘wistar that amazed even him. by Leora Frankel ‘SHOCKING FRENZY INSIDE THE CLOUD 54 Charged atoms rattle around mighty within a thundarhead, creating 2 zy storm of elactrical nergy. by Emly Ela AT SEA 56 ‘THE WORST WAVES IN THE WORLD 58. ttsnatjust a sala’ bed dream: Tawering breakers realy can emerge autof nowhere to topple mighty ships. by Bruce Stutz ‘Simulated currents n Earth's mantle, Red regions are hat, blue cok. STRIP-MINING THE SEA 62 Soon huge underwater robots wll dredge hidden bounty of gol ‘and precious metals fromthe bam af the ocean. by Robert Kunzig ‘TAMING ZEUS 68 Fring rackets int thunderstorms, researchers tick ighninginta Zapping thelr inctumentstaleam how bolts bagi. by Emily ler IN THE SKY 70 LOOK! UP IN THE Sky! 72 Wave clouds fre tomadoes, and other aerial odes. by Emily Elert ‘THUNDERSTORM RAYGUN 78 Computer models capture the mament when the Pest and fury of storm shoots beams af gamma rays nt the shy. by Emily Elert ‘THE ORIGINS OF OUTER GLOW 60 Flectrons dance cross the Farts magnetic fei shaping the cool sroens and soft eds a the polar auroras. by Emily Ele HOW TO CHANGE THE WEATHER 62 Meetarew generation of weather mofers: f-makers,hal-stooners, and engineers wha green the desert. by Danavan Wabster EARTH, WIND, AND IRON 68 ‘Te extraordinary history of a unique natural scuptue, by Emily letPeer ern fees ‘A DISCOVER’ MAGAZNE SPECIAL EXTREME EARTFROM THE EDITOR Just another Tuesday afternoon in August. I’m in a sandwich shop a few blocks from piscovEr’s editorial office in New York City, but my mind is far away. Planning this special issue, I’m thinking about incredible things: the churning liquid fire at Earth’s core, Antarctic rivers of pure ice, tornado winds strong enough to peel paint off a house, the Mars-size asteroid that apparently smashed into our infant planet some 46 billion years ago. T'm also brooding about catastrophes. These days it's hard not to, The tsunami that wrecked. Japan, the earthquake thar shattered Haiti, the tornadoes that tore through the southern and. central United States-we've been through an. impressively bad few years. S ton and dark thoughts about our failure to control natural disasters fil my mind as I walk down S wr in hand, something Funny is going on. The streets are ‘unusually packed, even for lunchtime in Man- hattan. A lot of people are texting frantically. Others are clustered in little groups, comparing. notes. It seems tobe the aftermath of some minor outbreak of urban chaos~a car erash, maybe, or abank robbery. Nope. “I felt!” said a woman right in front of me. “Everything was shaking!” New York City had just experienced an earth mnes of destruc- enth Avenue, jawns on me that S temblor centered in Vir~ ginia that shook the ground all the way from ‘Montreal to Georgia to Detroit. In Manhattan, people flooded out of their office towers, which, swayed dramatically as the Earth quivered. But down at ground level in my sandwich shop, I hhadn’t even noticed the motion, In terms of destructive power, this feeble little quake hardly rates—a nonstarter in the annals of disaster, But it was important all the same. It was a reminder of how strange and surprising the world around us stills. Earthquakes rattling New York are just the ngs start, Much weirder and more startling t go om all the time across the world, atmosph physicists and earth scientists will tell you. At least 2,000 thunderstorms rage across Earth at any given moment, flinging 100 bolts of lightning. every second. The physies of thunderheads is confusing enough, but now we know those clouds also shoot beams of gamma rays into space, We've learned that huge fires actually ereate their own storm systems, funneling toxie gases and smoke into the stratosphere through pyro. cumulonimbus clouds like sooty gray dragons. And the powers that shape our pl inconceivably vast. The tsunami that followed the Japanese earthquake last year was so pow. erful that it broke apart an ice shelf more than £8,000 miles away in Antarctica. ‘A tempestuous atmosphere enclosing torment ced geology and restless waves—this is the stuff of our planet, The more we learn, the more amaz- ing and extreme our hon141133 Cod cm ea od fod rey or) Sona ayMelOM memes CTCt) Ht Ee Cee rescue specialists, and Tiere) ee) ATU TAO) aoe and so do scientists. Every natural disaster contains important clues about how such Calamities arise, AHO UaO Mate ean h devastation. And every new insight marks progress idan Ee) ait) (dU etsy awful events and reining TUR LmcURH = Nel = TEXT BY GILLIAN CONAHANea ec Car Sore Tea 9 earthquake off Japan, sections of the ocean foe lurch upward nearly 10 fest. The quake and the tsunami it spawned kled in ockstp with he tsunami onthe ocean” says Jonathan Makel, a romoteSens-Newspaper reporter Toya Chiba « {s swept away by the tsunami as trushes through the portDAKOTA TERRITORY, AUGUSTi 28, 1884: Four strong tornadoes strike, rc ees Peete er eta eee taken by F.N. Robinson, and another by A. A. Adams. Both men promptly se Pee er ee ees hore touched down in Miner County of what was then the DakataTeritory, oe ee et ee ene ey 3 or Fé on today’s Fujita scale. Earlier that year, a feociows outbreak of 60 tornadoes between Missssippl and Vigna killed 420 people in 12 hours. eee ferent retard forts ofa single ploneering researcher, John Pinay of the Army Signal Corps. His 1882 roport, “The Character of 600 Tornsdoes,” Included all Poe en anno ere Pe eer a ire Sid Se ee a ee eet warning sigs including a “sultry, oppressive condition of the atmosphere" Se ee ne er ee eer eee ee ee a en ee Sener ter ore eee eet ern ets er ane reer ene ets be ~A storm’s slow grind plays out mare gradually than an ‘atomic bomb's split-second explosion-but in terms of their total energy content, natural phenomena dvart almost anything humans can do. Ahurricane lke Katrina ‘an generate 200 bilionkilowai-hour (kWh) each hur, ‘more than 10,000 times as much energy asthe A-bomb unleashed on Hiroshima. A meteor that exploded above Siberia In 1908-a direct hit from outer space-produced ina moment almost the same amount of energy asthe entre 1980 Mount St, Helens volcanic eruption, The only human activity that measures up to these spectacles is the work's collective energy ouput But even that figure about 16 billion kWh each hour-can't match the 44.2 bition kWh streaming houry trom the Earth’ ht cre, tiving our plane's geologic activity. ware aetucncescy recor during the co en Pron Pret arOur planet seems almost like a living thing its insides churning restlessly, its skin constantly renewed. This activity slowly reshapes the landscape but can also make itself known with terrible abruptness in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. OUT /(H) (=1n1 M(t] gm etsy TAT 8)N @8|=l=) 0) As (8 |=) AUTH t= 1h (i= fem (0 (6S) Ae) nA NU TSm OU Lm AT tools of geophysics and seismology EVeMiiN NASM SMUT CONT =1) 2 lau)ma) TORY The core of the Earth is only 1,800 mil away, but what goes on there is a deep-down mystery, ays Caltech physicist David!StEVENSOn. bp LINDA MARSA photograph by MI SHA decades studying the gigantic collisions and geologic eata ‘lysms that created the planet we call home, His discover: ies have helped answer some of the biggest questions about Earth's formation, structure, and evolution. We know that the planet has a partly solid, partly liquid core, composed largely of iron, surrounded by a thick, flowing mantle, topped thin layer of crust. Still, we are surprisingly ignorant about our planet's deep structure old New Zeal: says the 63-year nd native. Hoping to learn more, he con- tributed ideas for Nasa’s Juno mission, which blasted off in August. The spacecraft will orbit Jupiter to study its inte rior, which may indireetly reveal insights about Earth as well-stch as how the core was formed, where our planet's magné i field came from, and why we have so much water. From his office at Caltech in Pasadena, Stevenson talked with niscover about the still-simmering controversy regard: ing the moon's formation, his wild proposal to send a probe into Earth's fiery depths, and why we remain largely in the dark about what les right beneath our feet. GRAV NOR Earthapparenty bad aharroving bith. What wast he? You start with the formation of the sun and a dise of mate rial around it, which contained both gas and small bodies Those small bodies progressively built up into bigger bodies, which collided with each other and then collapsed, together because of the action of gravity. The end stages of making the Earth involved very large bodies other, releasin billion asa very traumatic, high-energy process involving very big things colliding and Earth's being compl very hot~a very nasty place. ing each ‘alot of heat, These events happened 4.6 ars ago. This gives us a picture of our planets birth ely molten and Wat about the other planets-what were they doing atthe tine? The architecture of the solar system is dominated by the sglant planets, in particular Jupiter, because it's more mas: sive than all the others combined and so it has such a bi gravitational influence, Many of the smaller bodies that crashed into Earth were put on their collision course by ‘Jupiter. Jupiter is also responsible for so much water being here. The most commonly accepted id the oceans is that the water came from icy bodies out near Jupiter; the planet sent those bodies to collide with Earth. Some of Jupiter’s satellites, such as Ganymede and Callisto, bout the origin of Stevenson i his Catach office. Th “rack” he s hosting 0 effortlessly is made of fierglass. The papers are all real.28 ‘Abody smashes into the proto-arth inthis simulation, created by the Southwest Research Institute's Rabin Canup. These frames show the aftermath ofthe type of impact that formed the moon. Color indicates temperature; red regions are hotter than 1,000 degrees F. are 50 percent water, Delivering objects like that was a very effective way of providing Earth with water And what out our moon? According tothe atest thinking, twas bor out meus clision igh The origin of the moon involves a really yet anathes ig thing hitting the Earth, a giant impact of something the size of Mars, which is about 10 percent ofthe mass of Earth. ‘We think the collision happened 50 mil: Tion years after the formation ofthe solar system, and it was the last big event inthe formation of E 10 percent thing hitting Earth at at least 7 miles per second, splashing out mate rial that goes into orbit. Most of it goes into building the Earth, but some orbit ing debris accumulates and becomes the th, So you've got your material for making the moon. While for the origin of the moon is well established, the way it actually the basic i happened and even the timing—is hotly debated. If anything, this is an even hotter topic than it was adecade ago. And the connections to how Earth got its iron. rich cor e are very much part ofthe story since the impact that formed the moon set the stage for Earth's What about the mantle, which makes up the buk of Earths intror-ai tha also come trom what ver slammed into ou plant Everything on Earth, not just the mantle, came from elsewhere. The gs that hit Earth were both the stuff e now call the mantle and the stuff we call the outer and inner core. The arated rnd then its much greater density caused it to mantle exists because iron se out from the mantle rocks, sink to the center How do we knaw so much about lng-past events and pats ofthe plana we've never seer? The chemical composition of Earth and the moon can tell you where the material came from. Wealsolearnabout how planets form by looking elsewhere in the universe, at other places where planets are forming. The third part is computer and theoretical modeling. Earths the only known planet with plate tectonics, in which parts ofthe upper mantle and crust mave about, shifting cantinants and triggering all kinds of geologic activity, Whatisso special about ou worl? That's one of the big unsolved questions. The best candidate for answering that question is water. We are familiar with the idea that liquid water is vital for life bout water also changes the rocks. It changes the strength of the rocks and makes them weaker. If they're weaker, then it’ easier to break the outer shell [Earth's rigid litho: sphere] into plates. The chemistry of water may also help, the formation of rocks like granite, which are the founda. tion of the continentsTo get more answers, you once proposed embed a prabe in auiron and shooting ito the center ofthe Earth What happened with that idea? Ic was tongue in cheek, although it had a serious intent, ‘which was to get people to realize that maybe there is some ‘de the Earth that we haven't tried. ‘We know you can't drill very far. [The longest borehole is just over 7 miles deep] I's just hopeless. So there has to be ‘some other way. We have spent many billions of dollars send- ing spacecraft all over the solar system. We haven't spent, anything like that amount of money to look down beneath ‘our feet. My idea was to open a crack~perhaps explosively, bbut not necessarily—so you excavate a wedge in the ground, and then pout gui fon int Liguid iron is heavier than rock so it could push the going down. You could put a probe inside ‘go down to the outer core and send bac cally—communicate by sending sound waves. way of getting down i How do we study the core now? ‘One of the most important methods is seismology. When you have a big earthquake, sound waves go through the inside of the Earth, and you can detect those atthe surface ‘and notice how long it took for them to get there. That tells ‘you about the materials inside, because different mater ‘als have different sound speeds. By looking in detail at the seismic record, you can deduce that Earth has a liquid outer ‘core and a solid inner core, and that both are mostly iron. “The Earth also has a magnetic field that is generated in the outer core, in the liquid part. So if more than just composition, you look at Earth's magnetic field, I's alittle bit like studying weather, beeause the feld is dynamic, undergoing reversals and fluctuations in strength, ght now, the main part of the magnetic field is declining: quite rapidly. But that’s not particularly unusual, ma want to know ‘you could dig dawn twa thousand miles and retrieve a place af Earth's core, what woud be ke? If Thad a piece of Earth's core in my hand? It’s mostly iron, but there are other things in there, And those other things are a memory of how the core formed and how it, ‘evolved. That's exciting because it's like opening a book that tells us the story of Earth, We have good reason to think the core formed early, soit is perhaps the best place for learning about the early history of Earth. And we ‘could learn more about how the magnetie field is produced. Although we have a “dynamo theory” for how the field is, produced, we can't actually see the dynamo, Dynamos are possible beeause mechanical energy’—in this ease the move- ment of the fuid in the outer core—ean generate a magnetic field. This is called magnetic induction, first explained by English physicist Michael Faraday over 150 years ago. Tur- nes that create electricity run on a similar principle. ‘What about the things that we really can touch-what canwelear fram the rocks onthe surface? ‘The oldest Earth rocks, in the sense of something you The birth of our planet was a very traumatic, high-energy process involving very big things colliding. The Earth was completely molten and very hot— a very nasty place.” cean put in the palm of your hand, are about 4 billion years old. But there's an enormous difference between 4 billion and 4.6 billion years, so those rocks tell you nothing about, how Earth formed, although they do tell you about how continents formed and stabilized. The oldest rocks happen to be in Canada, but there are rocks nearly as old in Australia, in Greenland, and perhaps, South Africa, Tiny minerals called zircons have also sur- vived from the early Earth. Zircons are highly resistant to weathering and some, particularly in western Austra- Tia, have been dated all the way back to maybe 4.4 billion, _years, Some people are hoping we might find stuff that, dates all the way baek to the time when Earth formed. After three decades of study, da you fel asf you aly understand the ime contruction of or planet? Not as much as I would like. Yes, we know the core is mostly iron. Yes, the outer partis liquid. Yes, the mantle is silicates and we even know approximately which sili- cates. But a lot of the information about how Earth formed and how it evolved is in the details. In that sense, ‘we still don’t understand it because we haven't had the opportunity to look more earefully. |:HUNTERS The enormaus fault off the Pacific Northwest has been silent for three centuries. But after years of detective work, geologists have discovered that it can unleash mayhem on an epic scale. Will this be the next Big One? bp JERRY THOMPSON les northwest of Cape Mendocino, California, a pimple of rock roughly a dozen mi Floor finally reach ‘Two slabs of the Ea slip and shudder and snap apart. ‘The first jolt of stress coming out of the rocks sends a shock wave hurtling into Northern California and southern Oregon like a thunderbolt. For a few is i the pulse of energy tears through the ground looks dimly like a 20-mile wrinkle moving through a trees ae us ve eat age isa: IT COULD BE THAT THESE TWO GREAT SLABS OF EARTH’S CRUST WERE LOCKED TOGETHER BY FRICTION, BUILDING UP THE KIND OF STRESS AND STRAIN THAT ONLY A MONSTER EARTHQUAKE COULD RELIEVE. carpet of pastures and into thick stands of redwoods. ‘Telephone poles whip back and forth as if caught in a hurricane. Power lines rip loose in a shower of blue and yellow sparks, falling to the ground where they writhe like snakes, snapping and biting. Lights {go out and the telephone system goes dows. Comnices fall, brick walls erack, plate glass shat- ters. Pavement buckles, ears and trucks veer into ditches and into each other. A bridge across the Eel River is jerked off its foundations, taking a busload of farm workers with it. With computers erashing and cell towers dropping offline, all of Humboldt and Del Norte Counties in California are instantly. cut off from the outside world, so nobody beyond the immediate area knows how bad itis here of how. widespread the damage. Atthe US. Geological Survey (oscs) lab in Menlo Park, seismometers peg the quake at magnitude 8.1, and the tsunami detection centers in Alaska and Hawaii begin waking up the alarm system with standby alerts all around the Pacifie Rim. Early ‘morning commuters emerging from a nai station in San Francisco feel the ground sway beneath their feet and immediately hit the sidewall in a variety of awkward crouches, a familiar fear chilling their guts. ‘Then another little rough spot on the bottom of the continent snaps off ‘The fault unzips some more. ‘The outer edge of California snaps free like steel spring in a juddering lurch—nine feet to the ‘west, The continental shelf heaves upward, lifting a ‘mountain of seawater. ‘The fault continues to rip al the way to Newport, Oregon, halfway up the state. The magnitude sud denly jumps to 8.6. A power surge blows a breaker somewhere east of town and feeds back through the system, throwing other breakers in a easeade that, quickly crashes the entire grid in Oregon, Wash- ington, and parts of California, Idaho, and Nevada. A brownout begins in six more western states. The wire line phone systems crash in lockstep. Newport shears away. The faule unszips the rest of the way to Vancouver Island. The quake now pins scismicneedles at magnitude 9.2. High rise towers in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria begin to ‘undulate, The shock wave hammers through sandy soll, soft rock, and landfill ike the deepest notes on a big string bass. The mushy ground sings harmony ‘and tall buildings hum like so many tani ‘On 15, the main north-south interstate 37 bridges berween Sacramento and Bell ‘Washington, collapse or are knocked off their pins. Five more go down between the Canada-United States border and downtown Vancouver. Nineteen, railway bridges along the north-south coastal main- line of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway are wrecked as well. The runways of every major coastal airport from Northern Californis couver are buckled, eracked, and their glass, In some downt cade of broken shards has i Shock waves have been pummeling the Pacific Northwest for four minutes and thirty-five seconds now, and it still isn’t over. After 64 cycles, enough. welds have eracked, enough concrete has spalled, ‘enough shear walls have come unstuck that some towers begin to pancake. The same death spiral ‘everyone saw in New York on 9/11 happens all over again. Smaller buildings, but more of them. Dozens ‘of rowers go down in the four northernmost of the affected cities. In the five major urban areas along the fault, tens of thousands of people have been seriously injured. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, are dead. More than a third of the oncoming shift of police, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and doctors do not show up for work. They are either stranded by collapsed build- ings, bridges, and roadways, injured or dead them= selves, or have decided to stick close to home to make sure their own families are ox before going to work, People who survive the collapses must do their own search and rescue for family members, friends neighbors still trapped in the rubble. Help will come ‘eventually, but who knows when? ‘think at all about earthquake disasters, probably‘conjure up the San Andreas fault in the worst-case scenario, In California, as they wait for “the ‘One," people wonder which city the San Andreas will wreck next~San Francisco or Los Angeles? But if by the Big One they mean the earthquake that will wreak havoc over the widest geograpl area, that could destroy the most critical infrastrue- ‘ture, that could send a train of tsunamis across the Pacific causing economie mayhem that would prob ably last a decade or more—then the seismic demon to blame could not possibly be the San Andreas. It ‘would have to be Cascadia’s fault ‘One year after Japan's devastating Tohoku earth- ‘quake and tsunami, scientistsare still trying to ‘out how the world’s most organized and earthquake: ready nation could have been taken so much by surprise. They were hit by an earthquake roughly 25 times more powerful than experts thought possible in that part of the country. How could the forecast have been so wrong? The short answer is they didn’t look far enough back in geologie time to see that quakes and tsunamis just this big had indeed occurred there before. Ifthey had prepared themselves for a much larger quake and wave, the ‘outcome might have been entirely different Exactly the same is true of the Cascadia Sub. duction Zone—an almost identical geologic threat ‘off the west coast of North America. When it was first discovered, many scientists thought Cascadia’s fault was incapable of generating giant earthquakes, Now they know they were wrong. They just hadn't looked far enough into the past crack in the Earth's erust, roughly {60 miles offshore and running 800 miles from northern Vancouver Island to Northern California. This fault is part of the infamous Pacific Ring of Fire, the impaet zone where several ‘massive tectonic plates collide. Here, a slab of the Pacifie Ocean floor called the Juan de Fuca plate slides eastward and downward, “subducting” ‘underneath the continental plate of North America ‘When any two plates grind against each and get stuck, enormous stress builds up until the rocks frac- ‘ture and the fault rips apart in a giant earthquake. ‘Two other segments of the Ring of Fire ruptured this way—Chile in 1960 at magnitude 9.5, the largest ‘quake ever recorded on Earth, and Alaska's horrible Good Friday earthquake of 1964, at 9.2 the strongest jolt ever to hit the continent of North America. Cascadia, however, Is classified as the quietest subduction zone in the world, Along the Cascadia segment, geologists could find no evidence of major quakes in “all of recorded history"-the 140 years since white setters arrived in the Pacific Northwest. and began keeping records, For reasons unknown, it appeared to bea special case, The system was thought to be ascismic—essentially quake free and harmless. By the 1970s several competing theories emerged to explain Cascadia’s silence. One possibility was that the Juan de Fuca plate had shifted direction, spun slightly by movement of the two larger plates on either side of it. This would reduce the rate of eastward motion underneath North America and thus reduce the buildup of earthquake stress. “Another possibility was that the angle of the down- going eastbound plate was too shallow to build up. the kind of friction needed to cause major quakes, Bur the third possibility was downright scary. In this interpretation, the silence along the fault was ‘merely an ominous pause, It could be that these two great slabs of the Earth's crust were jammed against each other and had been fora very Tong time-locked together by frietion for hundreds of years, far longer than “all of recorded history." that were true, they. ‘would be building up the kind of stress and strain, that only a monster earthquake could relieve. Inthe early 1980s, two Caltech geophysicists, Tom Heaton and Hiroo Kanamori, compared Cascadia to active quake-prone subduction zones along the coasts of Chile and Alaska and to the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan. They found more similarities than differences. In fact, they found that the biggest ‘megathrust events in these other zones were direetly related to young, buoyant plates’ being strongly cou. pled to the overlying landmass at shallow angles— which fit the description of Cascadia perfect Bottom line: If giant ruptures could happen there—in. Chile, Alaska, or Japan—the same would probably happen here, in the Pacific Northwest. ‘The problem, as Heaton explained it to me, was that there was no direct physical sign of earthquakes. All the comparison studies in the world could not prove unequivocally that Cascadia’s fault had rup- tured in the past. What everyone needed and wanted was forensic evidence. In the breach, significant doubt and strong disagreement had separated the scientists into opposing camps. “There was plenty ‘of skepticism out there among geophysicists that the zone really was eapable of doing this stuff" confirms paleogeologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey at the University of Washington in Seattle. ‘The only thing that could put an end to the back. and-forth debate would be tangible signs of past ruptures along the entire subduction zone. If the two plates were sliding past each other smoothly, at constant rate, and without getting stuck together, then there should be a slow, continuous, and irre vversible rise in land levels along the outer coast. On. the other hand, ifthe two plates were stuck together 3Bero rs eerie JUAN DE FUCA PLATE fn cy Ea Coy PLATE Pam by friction, strain would build up in the rocks and the upper plate would bend down along the outer edge and thicken inland, bumping upward until the rocks along the fault failed. In the violent, shudder ing release of strain during an earthquake, the upper plate would snap to the west, toward its original shape. The clear signal-the geodetic fingerprint—of a large subduction earthquake would be the abrupt Towering of land behind the beaches when the upper plate got stretched like tafly, snapped to the west, and then sank below the tide line That was something Atwater figured he could probably measure and verify-or disprove. “When they said the Pacific Coast was rising three milli meters 1 Sound, I said, ‘Aha! ‘Three meters per thousand!’” He would go out to the coast and find out whether a 3,000-year-old shoreline was now 30 feet above sea level, simple as that. year relative to Pi N MARCH 1986 ATWATER DROVE WEST h Bay and Cape Flat ‘of Washington ‘State, and started searching the beaches, tide marshes, and river estuaries for clues about whether the outer coast had risen or dropped. ‘Neal Bay was as good a place as any to start because the land all around itis so close to sea level it was highly likely he would be able to spot even slight changes in shoreline elevation, from Seattle toward tery, on the northwestern water spent a few rainy days on At first he poked holes with a core barrel and came up with nothing unustal, just si ing a fr n, he tried his lack digging into the muddy bank of m that emptied into the marsh, Several swipes of his army shovel exposed something odd a few feet below the top of the bank, beneath «layer of sand from the bay. Itwas a marsh soil, marked by the remains of a plant he recognized: seaside arrowgrass Pretty quickly he recognized what he was looking at-evidence that land formerly high enough above the highest tides for plants to be living on it had sud. denly dropped down far enough for the plants to be the marshy floor of this valle ns that sand and silt had built che marsh by fill bay. But late one afternoon, with the tide killed by saltwater. This subsidence of the landscape had apparently happened very quickly. That uppermost layer of sand, above the peaty soil, had been dumped on top auickly enough to seal off the arrowgrass from the ait and keep it from rotting, These plants were hundreds of years old, but they were still recognizable. ‘Was it physical proof that the ground here had slumped during an earthquake, that the plants of a marsh or forest meadow had been drowned quite suddenly by incoming tides and perhaps buried under the sands ofa huge tsunami? Could this finally be a real smoking gun?The deeper Atwater dug, the more he found, During that summer he and two coworkers uncov: ered evidence of at least six different events— presumably six different earthquakes—that had ‘each caused about three feet or so of down-drop. He returned to the coast in 1987 with David Yamaguchi, who had a Ph.D. in forestry from the University of Washington and was working on a project for the uscs to use tree-ring dating to figure ‘out when Mount St. Helens had erupted prior to 1980, Together they found groves of weather beaten, ‘moss-draped dead western red cedar tree trunks standing knee-deep in saltwater, what became known as ghost forests, Western red cedar doesn't ‘grow in saltwater; these trees had presumably been krilled when forest meadows subsided following an ‘earthquake and were swamped with saltwater, ‘Yamaguchi’s first effort to use spruce stumps to ‘establish a time of inundation and death had failed because, with all the rot, there were not enough rings left to count. Western red cedar, however, ‘was more durable than spruce. Using live trees for ‘comparison, Yamaguchi was able to establish that the cedars had rings up until the early 1690s. The ‘earthquake that killed these cedars must have hap pened some time soon after then, and later samples from the roots of these trees confirmed that they were killed in the winter of 1700. ‘What Brian Atwater had discovered in estuar- ies along the Washington shore, Alan Nelson of the vscs and a team of international colleagues found as well in Oregon and British Columbia in 1995. He ‘and IL other scientists invested considerable time and effort—including 85 new radiocarbon-dated ‘samples—to obtain the most accurate time line pos- sible. They found that all the ghost forests and marsh plants along the Pacifie Northwest coast had been killed at the same moment in time astheland dropped down and was covered by tsunami sand, roughly three centuries ago. IF the coastline had slumped in rriver mouths and bays that were many miles apart, the quakes must have been very big. Atwater was pretty sure they were bigger than anything that had happened during Washington's written history. But across the Pacific, written history extends further into the past. Kenji Satake of the Geologi- cal Survey of Japan and colleagues soon discovered another piece of the puzzle. They found records from the year 1700 of a 16-foot-high tsunami that struck the eastern seaboard of Japan—apparently ‘out of nowhere, since there was no mention of a local earthquake. Taken together, the evidence strongly suggested that Caseadin’s fault was the source ofthe giant wave. Together, Atwater, Yamaguchi, Satake, and their colleagues had sleuthed out precisely when Casca. dia had last yawned open, Atwater's tsunami sands gave a carbon date some time between 1690 and. 1720. Rings from the cedar trees narrowed the date to the winter of 1699-1700, Finally, Satake's written, records ofa tsunami hitting villages all along eastern, ‘Japan nailed the date: Cascadia's last monster quake happened on January 26, 1700, at 9 p.m. They had cracked the ease—except in this detective story, the culprit would almost certainly strike again, The evidence amassed since then suggests that in fact, Cascadia has generated powerful earthquakes not just once or twice, but over and over again throughout geologic time. A research team led by’ Chris Goldfinger at Oregon State University (ost) "used core samples from the ocean floor along the fault tocestablish that there have been at least 41 Cascadia, events in the Inst ten thousand years. Nineteen of those events ripped the fault from end to end, a “full, ‘margin rupture.” Te turns out that Cascadia is virtually identical to the offshore faults that devastated Sumatra in 2004 and Japan in 2011—almost the same length, the same width, and with the same tectonie forces at work. Cascadia’ fault can and will generate the same kind. of earthquake we saw last year: magnitude 9 or higher. It will send a train of deadly tsunami waves across the Pacific and crippling shock waves across a far wider geographic area than all the California quakes you've ever heard about. southern end of the fault—from Cape ‘Mendocino, California, to Newport, Oregon—has a large earthquake every 240 years, For the north: ‘ern end—from mid-Oregon to mid- ‘Vancouver Island-the average “recurrence interval” 480 years, according to a recent Canadian study. ind while the north may have only half as many jolts, they tend to be full-size disasters in which the centire fault breaks from end to end. ‘With a time line of 4 events the science team at osu has now caleulated that the California-Oregon. end of Cascadia's fault has a 37 percent chance of producing a major earthquake in the next 50 years. ‘The odds are 10 percent that an even larger quake will strike the upper end, in a full-margin rupture, within 50 years. Given that the last big quake was 312 years ago, one might argue that a very bad day’ on the Caseadia Subduction Zone is ominously overdue, It appears that three centuries of silence along the fault has been entirely misleading. The monster is only sleeping. Excerpted from Cascadia’ Fault by Jerry Thomp- son. Counterpoint Press, 201 wems EAU MMe Se ee to power the global magnetic field that shields life from the sun's deadly high-energy radiation. This “geodynamo" eannot bbe measured directly, and the core's intense temperature and pressure cannot be fully re-created in the lab, so research- Pd Cee eee eet” Ser Instead are the turbulent regions na Poe Peet a Puna Cen tenes neers oer ne ers turn to digital models such as this one from Japan’s Earth ‘Simulator supercomputer. Models of the planet's 1,400-mile- thick outer core incorporate data ranging from general principles of fluid dynamics to specific observations of ‘magnetic field patterns preserved in ancient rocks. EMILY ELERT Do ne ee Ce ues Pee aa ee eT) Se Ee aene ete ea ee ed eee eae oe Me ene Re ee) eee ee acca CCRC en Con enc gers Ue EU n e Scee con Peo nee ro Prey cee rarerpruvasnauaumnasn 2° atte ceeessiiiean LISS SFP BBDaD Mitt } se rn HUY HORSE IESaevevevosevotg eee Peete ee nay Boner aOur species has explored, investigated, and tamed just about every corner of the planet. You’d think that by now nothing CeCe etl eM eee bizarre and incredible phenomena still have the power to amaze and terrify.Monster tornadoes that shred the landscape, ancient glaciers melting into floods, miles-high thunderstorms spewing gamma rays into the stratosphere—it’s just another day on Earth.we orth” Mf TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY DOUGLAS FOXLE At the bottom of the world, the slow creep of ice across Antarctica gives clues about Climate—and what Earth’s warmer future will look like. Propellers roar. The twin-eny bounces on skis over the wind-pocked ice, bobs into the ai and shrinks to a dot in the sky. Then it's just the four of us standing here, a pile of boxes and bags, and flat, white hori zon in every direction, We're on our own in At the next few weoks, in the middle of a million square miles of e about 380 miles from the South Pole. Aside from le bacteria, we're the only living things for hun- dreds of miles in any direction, We pause to lett sink in then we grab our tent bags and set to work, We atypi Sheet. A wind blows from the south, scouring the ice free of loose snow so it resembles weathered sandstone. We're atop. ‘one of the largest hunks of ice on Earth. You might call this ‘ground zero in the effort to predict climate change, sea level rise, and the fate of coastal cities around the world. With a volume of more than 700,000 cubic miles and an average thickness of 4,000 feet, the West Antaretic Iee Sheet holds tea for summer afternoon on the West Antaretie lee ‘A subglacial ake 7 glaciologist Rickard Pettersson probes for buried crevasses before the ather members of hs team dismount. A2 ‘enough water to raise sea levels hy 15 to 20 feet—and it is already sweating off 130 billion tons of ice per year. Satel: lites have helped monitor changes in the region, but there are some things you simply have to explore Tce sheets aren't the static scabs of frost that scientists once Imagined, but rather complex structures with many moving. parts. In the West Antaretic Ice Sheet, massive conveyor belts of ice (called ice streams) up to 100 miles across and hundreds of miles long ooze toward the ocean, where they splinter into icebergs. Guiding their movement is an array of unseen forces, including mountains, valleys, and lake and maybe even smoldering voleanoes-hidden beneath ice. We cannot predict how the ice will respond to warming, without understanding those forces. Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist from the University of California at Santa Cruz, do just that. The wind whips at his tent as he anchors it to the snow with yard-long bamboo stakes. The rest of his team are also raising tents: Tulaczyk’s Ph.D. student Nadine Quintana Krupinski, Rickard Pettersson, a glaci cologist from Uppsala University in Sweden, and me. In the ‘coming weeks we will venture far from this eamp, using penetrating radar to map the landscape half a mile below the surface of the iee. We'll to eavesdrop on “ice quakes” that rattle the ice sheet twice person. has come to Antaretica to stall seis AATwin Otter alrcraft makes an unschetuled landing to drop of four 56-gallon barrels of fuel thatthe research team badly needs. per day like clockwork, and we'll plant sensors that moni- tor every slip and lureh to within the nearest inch, It sounds simple, but in Antarctica nothing is. Even in shrinking modern world of supersonic jets and global FedEx, it has taken Talaczyk 26 days to reach this spot from California, He was delayed eight daysin Christchurch, New Zealand, as summer storms belted the Antarctic coast. Then, main U.S. base in Antarctica, and nine more days stranded, by weather at a remote airstrip deep inside the ice sheet. ‘Today the tiny Basler ferried us 200 miles south to our final destination, 84.45 degrees south of the equator. During our weeks on the ice, we will travel as much as 10 hours per day on snowmobiles. We'll navigate the fea tureless white using Grs technology, and we'll walk in spots, where Homo sapiens has never stepped. Our first stop in Antarctica is MeMurdo Station, home to 1,000 people during the austral summer field season, ‘which lasts from November to February. McMurdo’s cargo. pallets, shipping containers, and metal buildings spravel across a rocky corner of ice-cloaked Ross Island, 30 miles, me nine days of preparation in MeMurdo Station, theWE WILL TRAVEL AS MUCH AS io xours per vay oN SNOWMOBILES. WE'LL NAVIGATE THE FEATURELESS WHITE USING GPS, AND WE'LL WALKIN SPOTS WHERE HOMO SAPIENS HAS NEVER STEPPED. SSS off the mainland, We spend most of our time here gather ing eargo sleds, fuel for our snowmobiles, and other supplies for the deep field, One afternoon I sit in a eramped office as ‘Talaczyk and Pettersson browse satellite images of the West, Antaretie Ice Sheet. Pettersson hits a key on his Toughbook ‘and pulls up an aerial view of the region we'll soon visit: the massive Whillans Ice Stream, 3,000 feet thick and 50 miles, ‘wide, bounded on either side by slower-moving ice. Pettersson’s picture is actually a patchwork of satellite photos and radar images that he has assembled. He and ‘Tulaczyk have inspected these images for months, tweak ing the routes that we'll travel in order to avoid hazards. “In this area we have lots of crevasses,” Pettersson says as he runs his cursor over a striated patch of ie several miles across that our planned route skirts widely. “The erevass- ing probably continues,” he says, “but we don’t know.” In Antarctica, crevasses have a nasty habit of lurking, beneath fragile crusts of snow. One wrong step and you ‘can drop out of sight without a squeak, perhaps crashing 100 feet down and breaking a femur while your colleagues above are wondering where you've sneaked off to. “These crevasses are like minefields,” Tulaczyk says. “You would prefer to have them open and visible.” We will use ice-penetrating radar to detect the hidden crevasses in our path when we ride our snowmobiles on the ice sheet. We'll also travel with our vehicles roped together-just in ease. But roped travel is no guarantee of safety, warns Allen O'Bannon, one of Antarctica’s better- known ice guides, during lunch in MeMurdo's dining ball. ‘The British have already learned that one snowmobile falling into a crevasse ean drag another with it. O'Bannon recommends that we rope a argo sled between the first two snowmobiles, The sled will leverage the counter ‘weight ofthe second snowmobile, should the first drop into ‘a crevasse. And if worse comes to worst, we ean do some fancy driving. “What the hell,” he says, as though discuss- ing snowboard moves. If the snowmobile in front of you falls into a crevasse, “you're probably going to get dragged forward all of a sudden at a high rate of speed. But slam that thing into reverse if you can and just gun it” motivation isnt fame; in fact, he and other glaciologists seem, positively allergic to it. Tulaczyk himself had a bitter brush, with fame thanks to Michael Grichton’s best-selling con. spiracy novel State of Fear. One of the novel's characters, an agent named John Kenner, cites a paper published by. Tulaczyk and a collaborator, Ian Joughin of the University, cof Washington in Seattle, to support his elaim that climate «change is pretty much bunk. Joughin's and Tulaczyk’s paper, published in Sezence in 2002, documents an increase in fee ‘mass for one region ofthe ie sheet called the Ross Sea Sector. ‘The fievional Kenner contends that this and other research, indicate that Antarctica’s ice isnot actually melting. Glaciologists say this is not the ease: The Ross Sea Sector is gaining mass because one glacier, the Kamb Tee Stream, ‘which periodically stops and starts, is currently in stop mode and therefore not dumping ice into the ocean. “It was over- Dlown and exaggerated,” Tulaczyk says, “in terms of proving something that itdidn't prove.” But Crichton was an effective publicist, and Joughin and Tulaczyk—willingly or not—were taken up as heroes who “disproved” climate change. Sen. James Inhofe invited Crichton, based on the sue: cess of his novel, to testify before the Senate Committee on, Environment and Publie Works about the potential for bias, in climate research, which he did on September 28, 20 Several months later the American Association of Petro: leum Geologists (sac) honored Cri its annual Journalism Award. “It is fiction,” the group's, communications director, Larry Nation, was quoted as telling The New York Times on February 9, 2006. “But it has the absolute ring of truth.” (Shortly afterward, sro changed the prize’s name to the more vague Geosciences in the Media Award.) The studies cited in Crichton's book, are still bandied about across the Web. And a document released by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in of those studies in a elimate-seience primer for members of the Senate Republics ‘The state of Antarctica’s ice is more complex than a few hijacked factoids would imply. The ice sheet concerns many. researchers. True, itis gaining ice in the spot where Tulaczyk, and Joughin looked. But measurements from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (cRAct) satellites, which, weigh ice by measuring its gravitational tug from space, suggest that West Antaretica as a whole is losing ice— together with the Antarctic Peninsula, between 173 and, 5319 gigatons per year from 2006 to 2009. During the last 20 years, the amount of ice lost each year has increased by. about H gigatons per year, according to satellive data. “Even, before climate change came onto the scene, we were worried, about the potential contribution to sea level of West Antare- tica,” says Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist emeritus at hhton's novel with 1007 cites some ams | HOP OFF MY SNOWMOBILE AND WALK AFEW STEPS. IT’S ONLY AFTER MY RIGHT FOOT HAS SUNK SIX INCHES THAT | FEEL SOMETHING IS WRONG. HORRIBLY WRONG. a the wasa Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Mary. land, Unlike other ice sheets, the West Antarctic Iee Sheet rests on ground that sits below sea level (without ice, West, Antarctica would be an archipelago). This leaves it uniquely sensitive to warming oceans. It is the only marine ice sheet to have survived beyond the last ice age, and the parts of that are shrinking are those that are raked by sea currents, “The very shape of the ice sheet makes it vulnerable, says ‘geophysicist Donald Blankenship of the University of Texas ‘at Austin, Moving inland from the ice sheet’s edge, the glacier bed plummets farther below sea level and the ice gets thicker, As the glaciers retreat inland, more and more of their ice will come in contact with warmer water, while the ‘area on which new snow can gather will decrease~a double hit that many people think will cause the glaciers to melt, ‘more and more quickly. “Once they get short enough theyre not stable,” Blankenship says. Another wild card lies beneath this ce sheet. The sea basin that it straddles isa rift valley, a geologically active zone with volcanoes and geothermal heat accelerating the melting of ice off the sheet’s underside. That water gushes in rivers beneath the ice and collects in lakes, which periodically flood. No one knows how muich that water influences slippage of the {ce above it, but finding out is critical to predicting how the ice sheet will respond to warming temperatures. “That's the total holy grail right now, to see if we can pin down the response ofthe ice stream to lakes filling and drain- ing,” says Helen Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Ocean- ‘ography in San Diego, Fricker used a laser altimetry satellite called icrsat to monitor these lakes as they fill and drain by ‘measuring the rise and fall ofthe ice above them. But it was decommissioned in 2009, and Tulaczyk and Joughin hope to gather information that no satellite could by installing crs sensors on the ice. They will monitor changesin the Whillans Tee Stream as closely as doctors monitor an icv patient's vital signs, simultaneously measuring its vertical and lateral move- ne the effects of water running below. ments to detern 1718 10 Pah, AND SUN FILTERS THROUGH THE FOG LIKE FL.UO- rescent light. In this nondeseript spot 25 miles from camp, ‘Tulacayk connects boards on the first rs unit. The instru ‘ment must survive conditions notorious for sapping celectronies—four months of sunless winter, with tempera tures down to -50 degrees Fahrenheit. A solar panel will recharge its four 70-pound batteries during summer, a ‘wind-powered generator during winter. Every 10 seconds, this unit will triangulate radio signals with ors satellites, overhead to measure movement ofthe ie tothe nearest inch. By now we have developed a field routine: 9-hour work- days alternating with 14-hour workdays. We return to ‘camp as ate as 1a.m., which hardly matters in the 24-hour summer light, Back at camp we anchor our equipment in the snow with bamboo poles so it doesn't blow away. We pee at a patch, of yellow snow. At night we sleep in one-person tents and, use bottles when the need arises (my bottle, issued to me in MeMurdo, bears the words Karen’ pee written in black, marker). We store our food in snow trenches, and in the morning we use a hacksaw on slabs of frozen egg to fry up. ‘The temperature ranges from 5 to 15°F, “It is the banana belt of Antarctica,” Tulaezyk had assured me months before our trip, but [still seep with my laptop computer to keep its elec- tronies from going haywire inthe cold, and [ must warm the iy object on my bare belly so it will start up. ‘We install a total of 10 crs units, some of them atop Lakes Whillans, Mercer, and Seven, subglacial lakes that Fricker, the scientist at Seripps, discovered by satelite a few months, before, Pettersson's ice radar identifies water channels under the ice, ahove which we place other ors units, The lakes and, channels are undetectable by human senses, since they lis beneath half mile of ie. Only our crs coordinates tell us, when we've arrived on top of them, ‘We ride our snowmobiles as much as 10 hours per day’ as ‘we install the GFs units. Those long rides present the periods of greatest discomfort as hands, feet, and thighs gradually snumb with cold—but also the best moments. The Antarctic ice, sculpted by wind into the layered texture of Monument Valley sandstone, flies past, and the snowmobile’s shocks juudder and clack over ice ridges called sastrugi. The glare of sunlight turns the ce silver-gray, and at times we seem to be zooming through a desert By the time we make our second trip to Lake Mercer, the ice scape feels as Familiar to me as the hills of Northern Cali fornia. We're retracing our tracks from two days earlier. ‘When we stop for a moment, Ihop off my snowmobile and walk a few steps along the tracks Iv’s only after my right foot has sunk six inches that 1 begin to feel that something is wrong. Horribly wrong. My_ right foot sinks deeper in the snow and I shift my weight 10 the left. By the time I stop my leg from sinking further, i's hhalfway to the knee. I pull it out and look into the hole that ve created. It has no bottom.P'm peering into a hidden world inches beneath our feet. walls of ice drop vertically. Cold blue light seeps in. The erack, afoot or more wide, plunges 20 feet, 30 feet, and disappears into bottomless black. It's concealed beneath ‘8 rust of snow 12 inches thick. On the surface only the faintest impression as thin asa shoclace—trickles across our snowmobile tracks. I share a couple of quict seconds with this thing, star- ing into its maw, mostly—believe it or not—in wonder. ‘Then I step back gingerly from its lip. “Hey, guys,” Lyell. “Grevasse.” Pettersson motions us onto our snowmobiles; they're safer, since they ereate a bigger footprint for distrib- uting weight, Drive forward halfa kilometer, he says. In 30 seconds we cross the mark of another crevasse, then another and another—four or five total. The marks eut through our tracks from two days ago, meaning that the cracks have widened in just the last 48 hours. Our crevasse-detecting. radar missed them, I spend the rest of that afternoon in solitude, bouncing for hours on the radar-bearing cargo sled as Pettersson, drags it across the ice plain. We are measuring the eon: tours of the landscape below. All the while, the crevasse 1 stepped into plays on an endless loop in my mind, often, with a horrible ending: wedged in a crack without any. help. That image will quicken my pulse at unexpected ‘moments for weeks to come. At the same time, the memory ‘of what really did happen—having looked into a cold bhie portal and walked away unharmed—will remain one of my most cherished from the trip. Given the extreme costs and dangers of putt ‘on the ice, much Antaretic research these days is done with satellites. But satellite monitoring is a young science, which presents limitations. When Bindschadler, the Nasa Goddard glaciologist, wanted to study how the ice sheet boots: had changed over decades, the problem was that few satel: lites had orbited over the area decades ago. Bindschadler's research led him to an archive of newly declassified spy. satellite photos from the cold war. Among them he found, two images taken by one of the cix’s Corona satellites on, October 29 and October 31, 1963. These satellites, launched, to monitor Soviet military movements, captured photos on, ‘massive spools of film that were parachuted back to Earth, and snagged in midair by U.S. planes. A comparison of these photos with images from 1992 revealed surprisingly rapid changes: the Whillans Iee Stream had widened by 2.5 miles and had eroded 10 miles off a wedge of slow-moving ice to the north called, Engelhardt Ridge. Even people using modern satellites to monitor ice suffer from a lack of options. The icesat satellite, which Fricker used to monitor subglacial lakes and which others used 10 monitor the sagging tops of melting glaciers, stopped work- ing in 2009 and has no immediate replacement. Scientists also face shortfalls in other satellite functions that they need for monitoring Antarctic ice: high-frequency radar for measuring the speed of glacier movement and lov- frequency radar for measuring ice thickness. “It's a major impediment to developing realistic ice sheet models when ‘you don’t even know how thick some of these outlet gla- tiers are,” says Eric Rignot, a remote-sensing glaciologist, at the University of California, Irvine. sasa’s gravity- sensing GRACE satellites, have provided stunning ice mass, data since their Iauneh i tioning long. beyondtheir planned 2007 expiration date. “Thisisprobably. Slacolgist Slawek Tulaczyk does chores around camp at 10 pan. ona breezy evening. 375 miles from the South Pole.46 the best method to look at mass changes of ice sheets if you want to get a number that you can trust,” Rignot says, In February 2008 wasa announced it satellite missions for the next decade. They include a expected to launch unt died. NASA also has plans for new gravity-sensing satellites, Dut not for a decade or more—well after the current GRACE mmission has ended. “We're definitely going to have an instru: ment gap,” Fricker says. “We're going to e blind for a whil “That blind spot comes at atime when ice sheets in West At arctica and Greenland are changing more quickly than anyone 16, seven years after the first one ‘expected. Glaciologists would like to know what's happening. The shortage of satellite coverage underscores the need for field projects like Tulaczyk’s and Joughin’s to succeed, trapezoid with each gust. Katabatie winds, caused by cold air accelerating as it slides off the polar plateau, have bat tered us for 36 hours. Thave hardly slept. Tkick at the wall ofthe tent to break away a shell of ce and slip outside with Karen's pee bottle in hand. As I stumble through blowing snow, the ghost of a bamboo flagpole looms into view, We planted these flags the previous day’ to mark the route to the cooking tent, for which I'm thankful. T turn Team leader Stawok Tlaczyk and PhO student Nan Quintana Krpin skiroviw satelite imagery at Sipel Dame airstrip, 81 degrees south iy back to the wind, look up, and despite the whiteout Tsee acirdle of blue sky directly above—the quintessential sign of an Antarctic storm. Very little new snow is actually falling; ‘most ofits being redistributed, wind-blasted off the ice or blown off the Transantarctic Mountains 40 mi The storm gives way to an afternoon of digging cargo sleds and food out of the snow. A flag marks the loca- tion of each object; 47 of them flap and clap nonstop. The morning after that day of digging, and I depart for what we expect to be our toughest d following ily erevassed ice, 30 miles away. We anticipate a 10-hour 10 minutes serpentine route to place a crs unit near heay- ride, slow and roped together, but after only begin to glimpse the telltale marks of covered crevasses, ‘We slow down and Pettersson stands on his snowmobile to, sean the snow ahead. minute later he raises his hand for usto stop. He dismounts, plays out some rope, and slides an, avalanche probe into the snow to check for erevasses. Jab after jab, the probe sinks easily to the hilt Pettersson announces the ve ‘wide, blocks our path. Itis covered by just two feet of fragileWE SPEND THE DAY CHIPPING cur s.ecpne tents OUT OF THEICE THAT CLINGS TENACIOUSLY TO THEIR EDGES AND DIGGING THE COOKING TENT QUT OF ORIETS AS DEEP AS SIX FEET. ey a snow. The gentle slope ofthe ice predicts bigger cracks ahead. Despite months of planning, our day is over. We turn around. (Over the next several days, we install the last oPs units, ‘one of them near the crevasse that I stepped into and another near the 10-footer that stopped us, The erevasses are inter: esting, Tulacayk says, because they mark spots where, half a mile below, the ice grinds over a high spot in the underly- ing rock-sort of a thorn in its belly. The ice stretches over these sticking points twice per day as the tide lifts up and sets down the Ross Ice Shelf, «slab of ice up to 1,000 feet, thick, the size of Spain, that hangs over the ocean several hundred miles away. “You could actually get daily eycles of, ‘opening of these cracks,” Tulaczyk says. ‘Our time in the Field ends with a day spent chipping our sleeping tents out of the ie tha clings tenaciously to their edges ‘and digging the cooking tent out of drifts as deep as six feet. home, Tulacayk and Pettersson open thei laptops av every opportunity to peck atthe data they've collected s0 far. The ors stations have tracked the movement of, the Whillans Ice Stream and confirmed a curious fact: ‘The Whillans sits still most of the time, Twice per day it Turches into motion, slipping 18 inches forward across its entire 5,000-square-mile expanse. That slip corresponds to ‘ocean tides lifting up and setting down the Ross Ice Shelf. (The Ross acts as a brake that holds the ice sheet back; its tension is released at these twice-daily moments.) ‘The seismometers that we planted show the curvy peaks of ice quakes oceurring each time the glacier lurches.. Several months after we return home, another team will, report in the journal Nature that these twice-daily ice ‘quakes measure a staggering magnitude 7~strong enough 10 topple cities and kill thousands ifthey were to happen in, ‘a populated area. Only because the quakes occur in slow motion were we not tumbled out of bed every morning. during our stay on the ice sheet. Tulaczyk’s own calcula. tions put them at a more modest magnitude 4, still large ‘enough to jostle jars of honey off kitchen shelves in Los Angeles or San Francisco. ‘The bigger questions that brought Tulaczyk to Antare tica will take longer to answer, but the ice sheet already. seems to be cooperating. Shortly after we return to Cal fornia, the crs unit on Lake Mercer will start to report ‘via satellite link~that the iee is rising, a sign that the lake is filling with water, Since the stations were put in place, the Take has been filling continuously, and the surface is now approximately 40 feet higher than it was initially. Lake Whillans, on the other hand, rose 20 feet and then fell in ‘small subglacial flood. In the next two years Tulaczyk. will lead another mission to Antaretica, where he and, his team will drill 2,300 feet into the ice sheet to reach the subglacial Lake Whillans. From below, they will, examine the physical processes that govern movement of the ice sheets, measuring water pressure, taking videos of the ice from underneath and measuring the amount of geothermal heat at the base of the ice stream. Tulaczyk and Joughin have not yet seen evidence that the water causes the movement of the ice to accelerate, and they are still trying to come up with models to explain their results. Different glaciers may respond differently, Tulaczyk says. The data they collect will feed into models that tell us how the West Antarctic Iee Sheet will fare in ‘the next 100 years and whether its glaciers are capable of a ‘massive speedup, as some people fear. We have the technology” to predict the ice sheet’ fate, ‘Tulaeayk says as we chat in a quiet corner of MeMurdo’s dining hall a few hours before leaving Antarctica. “The ‘commitment to invest the money isthe limiting factor” ‘As we sit there, exhausted, my mind wanders. In a few minutes I'll head to my dormitory and take my first shower ina month. Then I'll eatch an hour of sleep before boarding. a2a.m, light on a military eargo jet back to New Zeal December 21, last flight before Christmas. Twelve hours from now I'll walk the streets of Christchurch and revel in things that I haven't experienced in six weeks: sunset, stars, living things, the color green, and hot Indian curry. For eons our species and its ancestors have lived according to the faraway rhythms of the Antaretic iee as it expanded, and collapsed time and again, helping drive sea levels up and, down around the world. Only now is humanity exploring. this remote area that affects its fate. “Many of the places we went have probably never been crossed by people,” Tulaczyk says. His beard is full and hi skin darkened by the ultraviolet rays that glaciologists come to expect from working on a reflective ice sheet in 24-hour sunlight. “Almost every time you make measurements on, the ice, something really new pops up,” he says. “That's part ‘of why people put up with this type of work.”MARATHON | WINNER: 27 MPH aS > A! Fr) al r Adil 7a Pri, i SLACIER, MAXIMUM ‘SPEED: C1001 NPA 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ‘SPEED: a | im: UN, | wax ARE YOU FASTER THAN DISASTER? The answer depends on what typeof natural calamity is rushing toward you. ‘decent jogger could outrun a lava flow, since molten rock becomes thick and gooey ast hits the ar and begins to coo. More violent volcanic eruptions, on the other and, can send torent of hot ash and gas acing down mountl sides at beyond-human speeds; that kindof flow kl the people of Pompei, Hurricane winds can top 155 miles per hou, but such immense storms usually advance slowly, according to the whim of surounding weather pressure systems and winds. Forecasters are beginning to understand what affects the speed of storms, but forthe most part, clocking ahuricane’s pace remains a guessing {game-even when itis bearing dawn ona coast. Nuch faster are tsunami: n the open ocean they can outpace even a jetliner, though they slow dramatically when they reach the shallow slope ofa coastline. In theory, a tsunami moving ‘30 mph across shore is escapabe with advance warning, but by the time you can see it coming, you're probably to lat. ag 28 onas HURRICANE, APPROACHING: 1 MPH WP SPEED: 600 MPH LUQUE UTAOUT TALL LAO A LusiTNING: 223,689 NPHCUT YOUR HEATING AND COOLING COSTS UP T0 80% Cut your energy bills. ClimateMaster geothermal systems tap the constant temperature of the earth to provide heating, cooling, and hot water. Your home stays comfortable year-round while trimming your energy use by up to 80%. 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The weather was just too nice But when the scientists finally intercepted their first tornado of the season in Goshen County, Wyoming, it they were offered an amazing coup. For the first tim able to capture detailed data on the entire life cycle of a tornado, from gestation to birth to demise. Analysis of information from this storm and dozens of lesser inter 009 and ‘computer simulations, may finally answer the researchers cepts in 010, combined with new insights from biggest question: What triggers a tornado? Zeroing in on how tornadoes get going could lengthen warning times from the current, dang and also lower the rate of false alarms, DISCOVER recently serously short average of 13 minutes spoke with Wurman, who has probably collected data on more tornadoes than any other scientist, about his theory of how tornadoes form, the twisters that claimed 548 lives in 2011, and a recent storm that flat-out awed hi What makes tornadoes so unpredictable? We know the fundamentals of how supercell thun. derstorms—the ones that produce tornadoes-form. We ‘Wurman in Battie Pass, Wyoming, n November. Behind him is. the Doppler on Wheels, the mobile wether radar truck he invented. 30(JOSWANWVGERA may have crossed paths with more tornadoes than any other s his experience to understand what mons' st. He is using and to predict where they will appear. by LEORA FRANKEL photographs by BETH WALDknow that there need to be certain conditions of temperature, relative humidity, and wind speeds at differ cent altitudes, What we don't really understand very well is why only 25 percent of the supereells make tor- rnadoes and when in their life cycle they do it: Why did that particular supercell make a tornado now, not 15 minutes ago, or 15 minutes from now? (000 miles a ch 10 tornadoes is because ‘we don't know which supercells are going to mi atornada? sa pretty foggy, blurry view— we're looking through a distorted window with eracks in it, We do fairly wellatseeing the winds throughout the storm. Radar is great at doing that. We should probably get a Bs, Where we getan F, maybe an Fs, is in measuring the temperatures and relative humidi- ties, what we call the thermodynamics, inside the storms. We know that som thing is causing the winds to move up and down in the supercell, and we believe that the temperatures and rela tivebumidity arecritical tthat process. Yet we have almost no direet way of obtaining those numbers. V with unmanned aerial vehicles but didn't get many measurements tried af data on Why was capturing an hour's wart habig dear? We observed the tornado from well before its genesis the Goshen tras ‘through its dissipation, using different radars and instrament ble to capture its whole life eycle It’s the best data set ever. We think we have at least a smok- ing gun, ifnot éhe smoking gun, for why this partic made a vornado when it did, and we think there's a good argument forthe case that a secondary surge was causing it ced vehicles. So we were \What does that telus about haw thunderstorms make trnadoes? ‘We've known for decades that all supercell thunderstorms have a gust front, which is the boundary between the moist, warm air thats flowing into thestorm and the generally cooler air coming down out ofthe storm. But what we noticed in sev is that thunderstorms tha tornadoes, have ‘are making, oF secondary front, which rushing down from aloft. A strong an important funetion: It brings the rotation to the ground. But fora tornado to form, you still need to tlt the i this requires a nearby updratt. fare about to ma islikea second wave of downdraft rotation into the verti Joshua Wurman (ight) confers with technician Justin Walker, another ‘member of the VORTEX2 team, inside the Doppler on Wheels. ‘The intensity of the downdrafts and updrafts is vital, because in the end there needs to be a lot of stretching, whieh is when you take that existing rotation and turn it into something. really violent like a tornado. I's like her arms and spinning faster and faster. In the Goshen County tornado, we cion that the development of this secondary surge or front sparked the genesis of the tornado, We need to test this. If, after looking at more link, then perhaps in the future a forecaster observing the development of a secondary surge will have an increased, figure skater palling in fea strong suspi ability to forecast tornadogenesis. The data analysis emerging from VORTEX2 aso identifies anather possible dng reflectivity core" Whats that, naw does it wack? ‘Some supercell thunderstorms have a descending core of intense rain and hail wrapping around the west side of the trigger astorm, That's what we call a descending reflectivity core, or xc, This oxc drags rotating air downward from: or five kilomerers up and might cool the air in var As you drag the air downward, you antirotation in different parts of the storm, and that seems to occur around the time of tornadogenesis ‘two features, the prc and the secondary surge, hold the most hope for explaining why some supercells are able to generate rotation near the ground and why the low-level rotation is turning into a tornado when it does aybe four as places. reate rotation and ight now these \Why was 201 the deadliest trnada season we've seenin75 years? Wore the storms stronge than usval this past year? In recent years, we've become very used to tornadoes ‘causing a relatively small number of deaths. A few dozen is typical. Unfortunately, while some ofthat may be due to better forecasts, some oft is also due to luck. hit larger places. They hit Tuscaloosa, they hit Joplin. The total ‘number of tarnadoes may have reached 1,800, which is excep: tional, but the big spike in deaths was really based on a few ast year, the tornadoes What we don’t understand is why only 25 percent of the supercells make tornadoes, and when they’Il do it.” individual points. Just one tornado in Joplin killed almost three times the yearly average of the last few decades. The Joplin tornado was rated #15, but there wasn’t some added degree of destruction. The difference between Greensburg, Kansas, [where an 175 tornado killed 11 people in and Joplin ‘washow many people got hit, not the strength ofthe tornado, You were busy sitting through data from VORTEX2 tis past year. Was it ‘fustating ts out the volatle 201 tna season? ‘We did go out a couple of times. One day we got some fase nating data ina strong tornada in Oklahoma that had winds ‘of about 200 miles per hour. We observed this tornado as it crossed a lake, and in the radar we saw this very clear central, eye and a very strange wind, because it was lifting up a huge mount of water. We saw for the first time ever, think, a tor- nado surge, like a hurricane surge. Then, landfall-and that's aterm we usually use with hurrieanes-—it sthe tornado made just st ted shredding the forest. The eye suddenly ball of debris, From a scientifie perspective interesting because one of the great limitations we have in meteorology is that we're not a laboratory science. But in thi cease, we had a tornado that was experiencing pure, simple conditions: lake for afew minutes and then pretty simply, woods, The structure of the tornado changes dramatically led up ‘with al right when it erosses from the lake tothe forest. You have warned thatthe risk of atrnado-caused catastrophe inthis county i underestimate, or even overlooked altogeter. My colleagues and I wrote a paper in 2007 that asked, what if one of those large tornadoes that we've observed. with the Doppler on Wheels went through the suburbs of ra ss of thousands, Chicago of St, Louis? This is a worst-c say it was a plausible worst-case scenario, even 100,000 homes could be destroyed. [think we should, have at least some degree of preparation. DShocking Frenzy Inside the Cloud A thunderstorm is like « turbulent, temporary power plant. Violent updrafts and downdrafts transfer electrons from water and ice particles, and the separation of negative and positive charges gives rise to a strong electric field within the cloud, which draws electrons upward. Meanwhile, as See eet ee eee een ok er een eee er ene ete ee ascend and disperse. Joe Dwyer, physieist at the Florida Institute of Technology, created this computer image of electrons (her paths depicted in red) cascading aross ‘one cloud in a thunderstorm several miles wide. Ultimately, Pee eee nes ttc cries that can spark lightning—the process this eee neers ea> aia 3 Waves crash pr cg) anPeople have always loved yarns about the bounty and iNAT= MLE MO) Tot) t TTS Today those tales are more thrilling than ever, but the characters have changed. Where storytellers once warned about sea monsters, now scientists probe the dynamics of rogue waves, 75-foot swells that can crush a supertanker like a tin can. Now, rather than tales of sunken treasure chests, we tell of real-life plans to mine the lavish mineral riches that form around black smokers at the bottom of the sea.SHE eit 0DFreaky, fluky 75-foot-high rogue waves can spring out of nowhere with enough fury to smash supertankers. So far, the origins of these sea monsters are a mystery. PRUCE STUTZ onsen eeeeter ed eee piereeeren tres a ane eed Peete ses eect Derg eenene eens ces that will drive en ais Poe a omen on eet an Pen eats pert Enea Rose eteeay peers enter tested Peers rceeinery eee eee Sree ere paper. They respond in E Sar ae ees er heer an re nee Ree races eek ee Pees es rors corer hints Coe era Poe ea a Cee meee eee eae ey ee where he worked at the U.S. freee d Peete as eee Pacer ee edmis tcachesat the University of Torinoand con ducts research for a numberof companies and government agencies, He is in Trond- Ihcitn to make waves Big waves. The kind nade Famous in The Perfect Stormthat sink ships and drown sailors, many of them inthe cold North Sea that stretches south- ‘west ofthe Trondheim waterfront. Called rogues or freaks, such waves are the stuff ‘of mariners’ nightmares: towering, stecp- faced walls of water that weigh millions of tons. They are so unexpected they leave 0 time for escape, so powerful they can take ‘out supertankers and ol rigs Two thousand years ago, rogue waves ‘were considered the work of angry gods like Neptune or Aeolus. More reeently, seamen and engineers alike have di missed them as easily explainable. If you know the speed and direction of ‘the wind, ifyou know the distance over ‘which it has been blowing and the depth of the water, you can predict the height, length, speed, and even the frequency of any wave, Two 10-foot waves become a 20-foot wave; two 20-foot waves become £8. 40-foot wave; but the waves can grow only so high before their energy dissi- pates and gravi ‘There is only one problem: The wave models that offshore engineers have used and improved upon for decades almost never come up with a rogue wave. They ‘ean make big waves, but not ones that rise—as rogue waves do—three to five times as high asthe waves around them and seem to come out of nowhere, out of syne with the rest of the sea, from adirec- tion completely different from that of the ‘wind an other waves. Waves that big are, in the understated lexicon of naval archi tects, “nonnegotiable” Perhaps they are mythological. Pechaps the memories ofthe ‘mariners who lived to describe them were ‘unreliable. The math says those waves are nearly impossible. But until recently few people concentrated on ocean waves—not in an age of quantum mechanies, super- strings, and other mysteries. As Osborne says, “Nobody was going to win a Nobel Prize for studying ocean waves” Unless, perhaps, you could re-create them some- where other than the ocean, The Trondhei industrial space, wi feet high, 30 feet wide, and as long as a takes them down, wave tank is a raw ‘concrete walls 30 football field. When Cael Stansberg, the slim Norwegian engineer who runs the facility, arrives to escort us tot, I ask him ‘what he thinks of Osborne's attempts to create rogue waves, He smiles coolly and says, “We will see.” Osborne's swagger seems a bit subdued as we wind our way through the laboratories and testing pools, ppast seale models of tankers and oll plat forms detailed down to the company logos ;painted on their sides (no photos allowed). ‘Wave tanks are where engineering is pat tothe tes, and theory can take a beating. Onorato and Brandini are already at work when we arrive. They are stand- ing at an impressive bank of controls and ‘computer terminals on a stel footbridge raised several feet above the water. Below, the water in the dark wave tank isso clear and sill that it reflects without distortion the array of fluorescent ceil: ing fixtures above, Staring into the tank from the bridge, Ihave to keep remind: ing myself chat I'm looking at water. will be Osborne's private ‘ocean. He'll be both Aeolus and Neptune, but his abil- ity to create walls of water ‘will depend solely on the soundness of his physics. Rogues are more events than waves, he believes. They arise from the unstable energy present in otherwise normal waves, like a monstrous sound blaring suddenly from the predictable har- jonies of an orchestra, Osborne believes 1e can make such waves appear when and where he wants. And if he ean do that, ppethaps he can predict their oceurrenes the real world, “We're going to be making magic,” he says. Osborne has studied rogue waves for 30 years, but physicists have known about ‘them for much longer than that. In 1832 the Scottish engineer John Scott Russell was riding along a canal in Edinburgh when he saw a bow wave form behind a horse- drawn canal bout It moved “at great veloc- ity,” he later reported at the 1844 meeting ‘of the British Association for the Advance ‘ment of Science, “assuming the form of large solitary elevation, a well-defined heap of water which continued its course along the channel.” Russell followed the ‘wave on horseback for nearly two miles. It never changed shape or slowed dawn, ‘The sight would obsess Russell for the rest of his life. “He was going around talk- ing about a column of water that propagates itself” Osborne says. “Miraculous, But it ‘nearly destroyed his career, Ittook 70 years Defore it was solved. And it was solved like ‘a problem in quantum mechanics. This beast, this solitary wave, this soliton, as they called it, was behaving like a particle” Solitons defy Newtonian logie. They fare coherent structures that somehow emerge from a random background structures with properties far different From those of the waves around them. ‘When a soliton is moving fast, it can over- take a smaller soliton and pass through itunchanged. Since Russell’s discovery, scientists have found solitons everywhere there is wave motion. Telephone signals ‘ide solitons in fiber-optic cables, enabling them to move unchanged across vast tances, Solitons have been found in the electrical activ in the electromagnetism that affects the ionized gases, or plasma, that make up ‘most ofthe visible universe But rogue waves are not exaetly solitons. ‘Osborne says that they lie somewhere in the hierarchy between sine waves and soli tons. His first glimpse of one came in 1999, ‘when he saw a graph ofthe data on a wave that had struck a deilling ig in the North ‘Seaon New Year's Day in 1995. The wave was 85 feet high and halfas broad as afoot ball field. f arose out of a storm-tossed sea (f 30-foot waves and swept across the deck of the rig at 45 miles per hour. ‘According to the Norwegian ofl indus ty, it wasan event that occurs only on 10,000 years. More importantly from hi perspective, the data perfectly matched the ‘nonlinear wave equations that he had been studying. More than 15 years later, itis still the most clear-cut, convincing example of real-world freak wave. Maritime records are filled with stories of fishermen and sailors who claim to have been struck by these giants. Some of these stories are probably exaggerated. As one marine insurer put it, “Ia captain loses a ship or crew in rough waters, they blame von a rogue wave rather than admit they ‘were out when they shouldn't have been ‘out.” But many such stories are not exag. _gerated, Reports from the Norwegian and y of cardiae tissue andaM ER ENEMIES 85 FEET HIGH and half as broad as a football field; it swept across the deck of the oil rig at 745 Raya at British shipping industry suggest that rogue waves sink one supertanker or freighter ‘every year. Rod Rainey, an engineer who investigates ship damage, told the we that a storm wave 12 meters (40 feet) high will hie with aforce of Gtons per square meter. A ship can take a hit of 15 tons per square meter without damage; 30 tons per ‘square meter will dent it. A rogue wave can bring 100 tons per square meter down on a ship. “That,” Rainey says, “will hole it.” ‘One of Osborne's favorite deseriptions n Virgil's Aeneid: “A squall came howling from the north- ‘east, catching the sail full on, raising the waves to the stars, breaking the oars in a single blow, wrenching the boat around to of a rogue wave is fr offer its lank to the waves as a mountain ‘of water rose above them, immense and immeasurable, Some of the ships rocked ‘on the crests of the waves; the other ships ‘watched in the troughs as the sea parted, ‘exposing the sands on the bottom as they whirled in the furious winds.” These large spikes are the rogues jumping out of a deepwater wave field,” ‘Osborne says. “Water, the stuff we drink, is nonlinear! So in the end the exotie is the more natural, Isn't that pretty’ Ashe talks, the water undulates down the tank in a lustrous black ribbon, then ‘washes up on the concrete beach at the end ‘of the pool. Osborne clambers down from the bridge and continues his commentary, almost coaching the water now. “The frst life. Then it ‘eats from the other waves.” A wave lifts. “There, That's got to be the leading-edge effect.” Then, two-thirds of the way down the tank, a wave rises higher than the ones before or the ones behind. It has a steep face and a narrow crest. “There!” Right on cue, the wave jumps the pool wall, “Bravo!” Osborne, Onorato, and Brandini all shout. But before they ean enjoy the moment, Osbor rogue forming. “Here it comes! It, too, rears up, creat sees another Ing atrough before and ater, then dears the ‘edge ofthe poo, spilling water over the side “Bella | bet Carl's about to drop h drawers! They told us we coulda do it, and we did. If we had a really big tank, we could take out a 10-story bul ‘Now what?” Onorato asks, a huge ‘grin on his face Osborne does! tank. “Turn it up, take his eyes off the fishermen, and the U.S, Navy are beginning to take rogue waves seriously. Despite Osborne's efforts, here is still a serious lack of however, data, The main techniques for measuring sens and waves are around 50 years old: Buoys at sea record the heights to which they're raised. Although n now supplied with electronic transmit- ters and high-tech electroni hood of one’s being in the path of «rogue wave is small, Even if tis, its anchor will ost likely pull it dovrn off the face of the wave before the wave's true heig] been n nd aircraft get a broader perspective but can measure only large-scale effects, and they're ited by cloud cover, resolution, and field of ny buoys are sured, Satellites view. The most detailed data come from radar monitoring on ocean platforms and aircraft, but the searcity of rogue waves means that positioning these instruments at the right place and time to capture a monster isa matter of luck. ‘The secrecy that surrounds offshore drilling rigs is another limiting factor ‘None of the reports on the wave that struck ‘on New Year's Day in 1995 mentions the ature of the damage it did. Drill- ing platforms are built o withstand even waves that occur once in 100 years, and none has ever been reported toppled by a gle rogue wave. But that doesn't mean it hasn't happened, Osborne says. More than 10 years ago, several Euro- ‘pean science organizations began to pool everything known about rogue waves. Between the scientists who didn't believe the waves existed and the prinetpals of oil, shipping, surance companies, who preferred not to discuss them ifthe did, MaxWave,as the project was know: hhad a great deal to find out. The project’s final report summarizes the main find ings of dozens of studies. It concludes that rogue waves not only exist but also are ‘more common than previously thought. They can be deseribed with nonlineat physics and reproduced in a wave tank. Tn 2009 the Ev's Extreme Seas proj cect brought together oveanographers, nd i shipping companies, naval architects, engineers, certification agencies, and insurers to put this growing knowledge into practice. Projected to wrap up in 2012, the $5.3 million project aims to develop new shipbuilding standards and forecasting methods to protect vessels. Osborne hopes that during the next halfdecad conditions will also be able to offer ship ‘captains predictions about rogue waves. saps in data analysis may soon nake it possible to monitor ocean condi jons in real time using ship-mounted radar systems that will prediet rogue waves before they surge out of the chaos. Osborne's restless energy has led him back to the blackboard. He bel nd in the non: , wave forecasts based on wind Recent there’s more to be for linear equations that describe solitons and rogues. What if the equations ean describe even larger waves? What i rogue waves appear in plasma as well as in the ocean? And what if these no Tinearities ean be controlled in nuclear fusion reactions? Who knows? We ma fone day use plasma jets to ride rogue ‘waves to distant planets. “Understand- ing the physies is paramount,” Osborn says. “Its lovely. Every time we turn a leaf we find another marvelous world.” aSU At the bottom of the o« valuable minerals. es ied tre: —_? text by ROBERT KUN ZIG dlustration byes® VE KARP,enna ‘io in search of an enterprise. A native of Bris- ‘bane, Australia, he had transplanted himself ao Se eee DOs Ue eae to airlines—an idea that did not survive the post-9/11 travel slump. Heydon slunk back to Brisbane, There he reconnected with Julian Malnic, an old friend from his student days at the University of New South Wales, and unexpectedly found ee eee erent od coring eros crMs ‘Malnic was 2 mining journalist who had crossed to the other side: He was sitting on a claim to a patch of voleanie seafloor off the coast of Papua New Guinea, There was gold in those submarine voleanoes, Malnie said, and copper, too— Dut it was going to take a lot of eapital to raise it to the sur- face. Heydon had studied geology with Malnie, He knew that if there were rich mineral deposits near Papua New Guinea, there were many more of them all along the Ring of Fire, ‘which includes a chain of underwater voleanoes winding. from New Zealand to Japan. At 45, Heydon hadn't worked, for anyone but himself in more than 20 years and didn't want to start again now. He was looking for his next big thing. “You can’t get much bigger than this," he though. Heydon signed on with Nautilus Minerals, Malnic’s start ‘up, and pretty soon replaced Malnic as chief executive and— for the first four years, at least—the company's sole employee. His solitude did not help his case as he tried to raise funds, Mining on the ground is hard enough; extracting miner- als from the ocean bottom is perceived to be so difficult that ‘many potential investors were unwilling to take the financial risk. “Surely if it was going to happen,” Heydon remembers his would-be investors saying, “it would be done by a big mining company, not some guy sitting in a study in Bris- bane.” He traveied the world on his credit card, until that was no Tonger enough. “So I sold off my backyard,” he says. “My wife had tennis court and a swimming pool. ‘That gave us the funds to proceed.” ‘And even to sueceed, almost. By late 2006 Heydon had taken Nautilus from Australia to Canada and from an empty shell 10 2 eredible operation that had secured the backing of major mining companies such as Teck Cominco and ‘Anglo-American, Nautilus had a ship under construc- tion, a contract out for a giant seafloor-mining robot, and $266 million in the bank. It even had an environmental Impact statement at the ready to persuade environmentalists and local Papua New Guineans that the eompa- ny’s mining scheme would not unduly harm the ocean. Heydon's team (he then had a staff of 60) had every reason to believe they would begin pulling up rich copper ore in 2010, ‘Then the global financial crisis hit. Suddenly it was no longer clear whether Nautilus Minerals would become the first company ever to tap the fantastie mineral resources of the deep sea~or just the latest in a long line of dreams dashed. ‘on the rocks of economic reality. CMCIeE PUBLICATION 1]/M Ta) SSeS te) SiS) NTE TS en LTS sy OF MILLIONS OF TONS OF Ne CRT ‘dea that never seems to dic. In the 1920s the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber dreamed of paying Germany's World War I reparations with gold sifted from seawater, His cash-strapped country even devoted a series of oceanographic expeditions to the idea. It didn’t work out. “Although there are millions of tons of gold in the world’s ‘oceans, itis extremely diluted: In every hundred million tons of seawater, roughly a gram of gold can be found. From the 1960s through the 1980s, a new set of entrepreneurs latched onto the idea of mining manganese nodules, black lumps ‘of rock some as big as baseballs in which metals are more con- ccentrated than they are in seawater. Vast stretches of seafloor ‘mud are littered with these things, which beara striking resem- Dlance to horse droppings. One influential textbook published in 1965 estimated that there were a trillion metrie tons of nodules in the Pacific alone, and a publication in 1977 ealeulated that the North Pacific contained billions of tons of manganese and hun- dreds of millions of tons of nickel and copper. Hundreds of millions of dollars of investment later, plunging ‘metal prices, increased energy costs, and confusing claims to ‘ownership flattened that boom before any ore was delivered to the surface. It did not help that the biggest ocean-mining research opera- tion turned out to be acta front; the spooks were hoisting a sunken Rus- sian sub, not manganese nodules, from the seafloor. But around the time the nodule dream was dissolving, a rnew one was taking its place— the one that would grip Heydon two decades later. On land, some of the biggest and most concentrated metal ores ‘occur in deposits called volea- nogenie massive sulfides. For decades geologists had noticed suspiciously marine-looking fos- sils embedded in those ores. In the Inte 1970s they finally understood why. Exploring off the coast of Baja California in 1979, researchers diving in the submersible A/vin saw plumes of black, metal-rich “smoke” billowing from a voleanie hot spring on the seafloor. The smoke—actually plumes of cloudy. water—was so hot it melted the tip of their thermometer; it ‘was 350 degrees Celsius (about 650°F). As the plume from the hot spring struck the surrounding near-freezing seawater, some of it was lash-freezing to form tall, stalagmite-like chi neys. The rest spewed from the chimney taps and fell out onto the surrounding seafloor. The smoke turned out to containNautilus Winerals plans to begin dgging for copper and gold roughly a mile below the surface at the Solwara site, near New Guinea, in 2013. concentrated metal sulfides, which the superheated saltwater was drawing out from the voleanie rock under the seafloor. Since then, oceanographers have found hundreds of these black smokers (technically known as hydrothermal vents) and learned a great deal about how they work, Over time the smok- ‘ers come and go, and the chimneys that form above them grow and topple, such that they can eventually build up a massive mound on the seafloor. And over millions of years, the move- ‘ment and collisions of tectonic plates have lifted some of these seafloor sulfide mounds onto land, where they have been di covered and mined. The giant Kidd Greck mine in Ontario, ‘Canada, is an example; miners there descend through shafts ‘more than a mile deep to extract copper, zinc, and silver from ‘an ancient chunk of seafloor. “These deposits are scattered all over the world on land,” says Steve Scott, a geologist emeritus from the University of Toronto who has consulted for Nautilus. “And they're forming today on the seafloor.” Scott started looking for the ocean-bottom mineral outerop- pings in the western Pacific in the 1980s, in collaboration with aan Australian geologist named Ray Binns. They towed eam- ‘eras above the seafloor, dredged rock samples from promising. locales, and went down to have a look whenever they could score access to a submersible. Their hope was that understand ing how ores formed on the seafloor would help in the search, for minable deposits on land. “We were not prospectors,” Scott say’. “But it turns out we found a potential mine deposit. We did much better than we thought we would: That was in 1997 in the Bismarck Sea off Papua New Guinea, 30 miles north of the small port of Rabaul. There, between the islands of New Britain and New Ireland, Scott and Binns discovered two large voleanie mounds stretching to within two-thirds of a mile of the sea surface. A local geologist who had joined the expedition named them North Su and South Su, su being the word for “breast” in the local tongue. (Lonesome ale explorers tend to compare mountains to mammaries; the Grand Tetons are perhaps the most pointed example.) On both mounds a submersible video camera showed puffing black smokers surrounded by dense clumps of snails, mussels, and crabs~the kind of rich fauna that has made seafloor hot springs so fascinating to biologists and the public. But Binns and Scott were more fascinated by the rocks that they dredged from the mounds, which were rich in a different way, They contained copper and gold concentrations several times higher than those typieal of mines on land. ‘A press release went out while ther ship, the Franklin, was still at sea. By the time it put into Cairns, Australia, TV came ceras were waiting, and so was Julian Malnie, who was there to report the story. After interviewing Binns, Malnic decided that it made less sense to write about this patch of seafloor than tostake a claim to it. Through contacts in the Papua New Guinean government, he made the first exploration claim toa seafloor sulfide deposit, and it was the beginning of Nautilus ‘Minerals. By the time Heydon joined the company, the eco- ‘nomic booms in India and China were starting to drive eopper prices toa then-record $4 per pound, which after falling to less than half that price in late 2008 have since surged back to around $3.50. Drug addicts in the United States and abroad are back to stealing eopper pipes from air-conditioning units and irrigation systems. The interest in new sources of eopper is in sky-high; the interest in gold is always high. ‘Compared with manganese nodules, the seafloor sulfides associated with hydrothermal vents have a huge advantage: 6as Volcanic gases bubble from an underwater geothermal vent off Papua "New Guinea Such regions can be ich in god, copper, and zinc. ‘They are much easier to get to. Whereas the nodules are scat~ tered across the deep abyssal plains ofthe oceans, hundreds of miles from shore and typically three miles or more below the surface, many of the sulfide deposits are close to a coastlines also, they are always on undersea mountains and therefore located in much shallower water. ‘The deposit Nautilus plans to mine, called Solwara I, les on the north slope of North Su, an active voleano, and itis less than a mile below the surface. Oil companies have drilled in ‘water twice that deep. Nautilus’ plan i to follow the techno- logical path that ofl rigs have already blazed into the deep sea. “We're lucky,” says Steve Rogers, a former offshore oil engi neer who succeeded Heydon as Nautilus ceo in June 2008, “The ofl and gas industry has spent a lot of money developing. these technologies. I suppose it's a little sur- prising that the mining industry hasn't tapped {nto it before—but we are here now.” [Nautilus’s mining scheme consists ofa dedi- cated ship, a mile-long riser pipe, and three “seafloor production tools,” huge, tethered. robots that will strip-mine the seafloor under remote control. The oil industry uses similar robots to dig trenches for pipelines, but these distinct Nautilus bots will work together to ‘perform an unprecedented deep-sea opera- tion. The frst, a crane-necked machine called the auxiliary cutter, will chop up chunks of ore with a double row of sharp teeth on an extended boom. In the process, the robot will reduce rough terrain to series of flat steps, as in strip mines on land. A bulk cutter on tank treads wields a large, drum-shaped cutting head that can grind up ore at a faster rate, The ‘two machines will be able to cut up to 3,500 tons of sulfide rock a day from the seafloor, chopping it into nuggets of two inches or les. ‘Three pumps on the third remotely operated vehicle, the collecting machine, will suction ‘up a slurry of ore and seawater into a foot- wide riser leading to the ship. Sonar on the ‘machine will allow the operator to position it to within an inch; sonar is essential because video cameras will not be able to see through the thick cloud of mud and pulverized rock the robot will be kicking up. On board the ship, sereens and centrifuges will separate out the solids, which will be transferred to barges and carried to Rabaul; the water will be sent back down to the sea- floor via two pipes to prevent cooler water from contaminating warm surface water and to drive the riser’s uptake pump. The ship will remain in its first location for two or three years, or however long it takes to mine out Solwara 1, The deposit there is about a mile long and 300 feet wide, but Nautilus eannot say how deep it is— ‘except that in many places it is deeper than the roughly 150- {foot exploratory holes that the company has drilled into it ‘There are at least 2.2 million metric tons of ore to be recov- cred, according to Nautilus, and that ore is richer even than ‘Scott and Binns thought: It contains around 7 percent copper— ‘with some pockets as high as about 30 percent—and around 6 10 8 parts per million of gold. On land today, Rogers says, “you ‘would be pretty excited if you had 1 percent copper, and 610 8 {grams per ton of gold would be a gold mine in itself.” Most of the ore at Solwara 1 is right at the base of the seafloor. To get at it Nautilus will have to remove a mere 130,000 tons of over- burden mud, a bagatelle by mining industry standards. And ‘once the deposit is mined out, the company will simply pack up the robots and riser and steam to the next location. Unlike‘a mining company on land, Nautilus will not leave behind an infrastructure of roads and buildings. a damaged seafloor-but the environmental costs, 10, will be less, Nautilus insists, than those of a comparable mine on land. “If we accept that the world's demand for metal is going to continue to rise, we need to get ‘metals from somewhere in an environmentally responsible ‘way, says Samantha Smith, a biologist who managed the com- pany’s environmental impact assessment. In strip-mining abit less than 30 acres of seafloor, Nautilus will consume hydrother- mal chinmeys and wipe out the luster of snails and barnacles, crab and shrimp that are nourished by their sulfide emanations. But some of the chimneys will regrow, Smith says—mining cannot snuff out the underlying voleano—and the animals are expected to return within a few years. Black smokers are by nature ephemeral, so the animals there are adapted to colo- nizing new springs as old ones wink out. To encourage that process, Nautilas intends to leave the hot springs on South Sa, alittle over mile away, untouched, aa seed stock, ‘With the help of Cindy Van Dover, « Duke University biolo- cst and expert in hydrothermal vents, Nautilus seven studying the possiblity of picking up snails and barnacles in the path of ‘the mining tool and transplanting them to a temporary haven, to be brought home when the coast is clear. “Their enviro mental sensitivity is petty darn good,” Van Dover says, “They came tous and asked, “How do we do this right?” She chaired 4 committee convened by the International Seabed Authority (88) buck in 2005 to draw up recommendations for the ‘of black smokers in international waters. Although Sol- ‘wara I te first case in point, lies in Papua New Guinea’ waters, Nautilus seems to have fol- lowed the authority's recommendations anyway, she says. ‘Yer like many marine setentsts and environmentalist, Van Dover ‘would prefer thatthe seafloor not be mined at all So little of ichas been explored, she says, and itis so ouch harder than ‘onland to see what is going on that there is no way to be sure that mining isnot extin- guishing species; we haven't Inad time to discover the snail darters and spotted owls. “Ie would be as if Lewis and Clark went out and found Yel owstone, and a couple of years later the mining companies said, “We are going wo strp-mine it?" she says Van Dover recognizes that deep-sea ‘mining, will soon become a reality and holds eli aU SY TR aN: Aa Ut} FROM THE SEAFLOOR, ae AUER Ns) Sess thar practical policies must balance marine conservation with mineral extraction. Those policies will help guide other tities that seek to exploit the deep sex’s mineral riches. A company called Bluewater Metals, incorporated in 2008, has similar ambicions in terrzoral waters ofthe Solomon Ialands. Earlier in 2011, 1 formally approved plans submicted by China and Russi to commence explorstory work in ocean ridges inthe Indian and Atlantic Oceans, respectively. Tesounds like deep-sea gold rash, bur jfie@Ptew years ago, the Future looked bleak for pioneering company Nauti- Jas. With the 2008 credit erunch, Nautilus had no prospect for geting the extra funds it needed to bring the undersea ore to market. A week before Christmas that year, the com- pany announced that it was postponing the construction of allits equipment and laying off 30 percent of it staff. Bur by the fourth quarcer of 201, the company’s prospects were brighter. The goverligiibgPapus New Guinea granted the mining lease for Solwara 1 early in the year, then announced ig(@Buld @iBe a 30 percent investment stake inthe company in March. The company currently plans to finish building its equipment in the first quarter of 2015, and start digging later that year. "It's fll steam ahead right rows” Roger sy. ‘As for Dawid Heydon, while the company he built hun- keered down through 2008 and 2009, he set up shop again in Brisbane, starting two new companies. The fist involves harvesting hardwood trapped underwater in patches of tropical rainforest inundated by the construction of hydro electric dams. That project is currently on hold his time now devoted to a project to get in on the ground floor of the old ocean-bottom manganese-nodale business. Heydon is the executive chairman of DeepGreen Resources, a company based in British Columbia that intends fo mine a vast undersea area to the west of Mexico, roughly the size of Scot- land. Estimates hold that there are roughly 500 million metric tons of metal deposits there, about 30 Percent of which is manganese, mixed with copper, nickel, ‘and cobalt, The effort “is ‘quantum leap over Nautilus asfaras scale," Heydon says. Meanwhile, true believ- crs in the potential mineral bounty of black smokers may yet be vindicated, Steve Scott, ‘one ofthe men who discovered the Solwara | deposit remains convinced it will son host the first deep-sea mining project. “I's as sure a thing as youre ever going to ind inthe mining industry,” he says msPa arr) Cea Erreur gece! Poneto) rn et ee eee) ve than explodes fram the See aa rere Coen tot ay Caer aon oes Pec ter) Peete) ona) aU ay Aes eee ee eee See ees een eee ad ee eee er Cerag for Lightning Research and Testing lure natural bolts to the ground. They launch small rockets that trail 2,300 feet of Kevlar-cos een ee eee eat er ene Tetting the wire draw some of the storm's charge. ‘Twenty-five ground stations around the rocket- ee Pine eterna ee tric and magnetic fields, detectors for recording high-energy radiation, and several high-speed ee renner cee per second. These and other instruments allow ee eee ee eae lectrie currents move through air, This bolt was triggered at Camp Blanding military base in north-central Florid peared Cy ‘4 ea aed oun a cite Prana reece tte Peer enn ee) OU) eer may Ce ee Pee oem eat oak res rere tt Poets een rere) Pe nr PO ey Reece Protec Perens eee Poon ee?** CELESTRON ® It took Caroline 14 years to become a SkyProdigy. ty etd CO ae oe cor é Ce atinataant heisecdieeea ateteebacied eet eee en een eta een era een Pe een Sead eeePre rege reer the Republic of pore) errs eos risa Ser Bnd lenticular loudTalk about the weather, and you are really talking about PETA MOTE MTT OL =te hee UES atmosphere that can rapidly replace stunningly blue skies Pan cima 8) re LTE Ue Ie eT aoe AM ateVan Teese a OOP NVAO INVA =tS) some of the most complex and powerful phenomena on the planet—forces that unleash hurricanes and tornadoes and Ue] MiSl eNO RLU feeble attempts to control. atUp in the Flaming tornadoes, stratospheric lightning, and. clouds that look like alien invaders: Sometimes the boring old weather can get downright weird. ae EMILY ELERT PER CEE Pat oe an elephant, Mickey Mouse, Donald Sa eS ony Ce eee scientist could spend her entire career Se ed Ce ote end De ee Ce eo Pec et eT by the sun’s heat and by the planet's rotation. n reality, the ragged surface Cee ad through the atmosphere, disrupting the orderly flow of air masses. Com- Ged Oe ee Dee Sy Deed ee Ce en ea Ce ene eee a eee eT Pe geDry gusty Santa Ana winds fanned a four-day wir in Southern California re ee ea Deo ee er Pre oC er eee totwistintoa vortex that funnels flames upward. Fortunately, most of these Cree Sone ae tier eae ee ere that ripped trough Tokyain 923 nthe aftermath of the Great Kanta Earth Pe noe ee ByNIGHT LIGHTS "Nacreous clouds are nat rar, but they are seldom witnessed outside polar ‘gions. They form during the long, figld winter nights in the Arctic and “Antarctic, up ta 15 miles above Earth's surface-high enough to catch a few ofthe sun's rays even when th surface lis in season-long darkness. Clouds develop in this high layer ofthe atmosphere only when the ar tem perature drops below -117 degrees Fatrenbelt, the threshold for water ‘vapor to condense inthe stratosphere thn, parched air Ice crystals form he aris coldest: on the crests of atmospheric waves, which are ci ‘ated far below as moving ar rises and falls over mountains. The crystals Ineach wave are asightl different size, so they frac ight at different angles. The result isa sky filled with lang, slender undulations of cla,a it INA FLASH For more than a century, witnesses have reported nightime sightings of bit, glowing TO een err career renner ee nn ‘captured one on camera in 1989, As it turns out, weird glows-now known as transient luminous era erro er ree ee ee ee ty Pere en reer nn een ere ey ‘loud-o-ground lightning, though sclentists do not understand the connection Elves,” by far the use een ee ee ad ee ene ene rennet ee eee er Cnr eee rs researchers estimate that thunderstorms around the world generate about 40 TLEs every minute ROLLING OUT Clouds often materialize along the boundary between masses ‘of cold and warm air Usually the result isa big putt of cumu- lus, but under certain rare conditions what formes Instead is an arrow-straigt, rotating tube of futf-a rope or rll cloud. This one appeared off Las Olas Beach in Maldonado, Uruguay, In 2008. Fr a ope cloud ta form, the leading edge ofthe cold alr mass must be advancing straight and steady, which can happen only it itis tlow- Ing over a smooth, tat surface lke the ocean, Evaporation tram the ocean waters can also lower the density ofthe air close to the surface tothe point that it cannot mix with the alr layer above it. With nowhere else to go, the thin layer of lov, moist air gts rlled up ke a rug by the advancing cold font.‘SURF’S UP UP UP ‘An old, familiar shape shows up in unfamiliar territory. These surfllke louds form in much the same way as ocean waves do. When two layers ‘af any fui law past eachother at diferent speeds, they begin to sheat. It there ae ripples along the boundary between those layers, the shear- ing action creates centrifugal forces that swi the fluids-or bodies of aittogether. This process happens in the atmosphere all the time, but ‘only under the ight conditions of temperature and humidity do clouds ike these form, leaving a patter of near-perfect cul cooled watar droplets ina cloud can remain quid at temperatures {ar below freezing, thelr surface tension prevanting sold crystals fram forming. AS an airplane ascends through sucha layer, the wings push air below them and alr pressure above the wings drops dramatically, provid- Ing itt The above-wing ar expands rapidly and cools to -40 degrees Fahrenhelt, the temperature at which supercooled water turns to ice. Newly formed ice crystals fall earthward, andthe energy released in ‘thelr transition rom liquid to solid evaporates nearby water drops, leav- ole inthe cloud. This image, a composite of four photograph taken ‘vera period of 20 minutes, captures the dark “al streak" ofthe plane- {riggered ice crystals, which usually vaporize before they touch groundThe Origins of Outer Glow When electrons bouncing around Earth's magneto sphere-the protective bubble created by the planet's magnetic field collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere near the north and south poles, an aurora is the result. Atoms of oxygen absorb some of the electrons’ energy and remit it as photons of red or green light. It takes about three-quarters of a second for oxygen to release green light, but almost two minutes for red. Although this curtain of light looks almost identical to images from satellites, itis actually an artificial aurora created by Tetsuy ‘a simulation scientist at the University of Hyogo in Japan. The processes that conspire to produce the aurora involve both large-scale phenomena (such as the constant back-and-forth between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind) and small-scale phenomena (such as the interaction between electrons and oxygen atoms). Sato's computer model accounts for both. Able to handle this huge range in scales, such a model could also prediet complex, catastrophic events like earthquakes and hurricanes, Sato says.Everybody talks about it, but these researchers are doing something about it: creating rain, clearing fog, maybe one day shattering storms. by Donovan Webstera body shop on the main street of Grants ville, Utah, stands a rusting, four-foot-tall metal box. The box sits atop a tank of gas- ‘cous silver iodide that, when fired up, sends a plume downwind toward the nearby Oquirrh ied up on the wind, each ‘crystal forms a core, or nucleus, around which water drop- lets collect. Since silver iodide has a erystalline structure similar to that of iee, it allows the tiny water droplets to coalesce until they are big and heavy enough to fall out of the sky, ultimately increasing snowfall betsveen 10 and 15 percent a year. That's more water for the state's thirsty desert during spring and baking summer, more water for irrigation, livestock, huma and sports. It means millions of dollars in water-related ‘revenues forthe state's economy every year. ‘The Utah cloud. seeding effort comes courtesy of North American Weather Consultants, America’s oldest weather modification company, located in an upscale office park in nearby Sandy, Utah. Founded in the 1950s, the group is cur rently run by two solid-citizen scientists with commercial ‘aims, Don Griffith and Mark Solak, who have spent th ‘careers working in privately funded weather modification, efforts around the country and the world. In Colorado they seeded the Gunnison River drainage, aa series of reservoirs and dams in the west of the state. In, California they run seeding programs for the Santa Bar bara County Water Agency, a group that says the effort, ‘may Increase rain in target areas up to 20 percent a year Tn reality, loud seeding is pretty low tech: A tank of silver iodide is topped by a burner and surrounded by a perforated metal wind arrester. The whole contraption is hooked to 8 tank of propane to provide the flame and warmth that lifts mosphere. “We've got lots of ‘loud seeding units in mountainous areas all around Utah," Solak says. When wind, temperature, and humidity are just right, the company’ calls local residents, who ave paid a fee to go out and turn on a cloud-seeding unit, sending a plume of silver fodide downwind. Why an array of cloud seeders? Mountains, Once iver iodide cer release across consumption, the silver iodide into the Although a single plume cannot change the world, a group, of such seeders, each responsible fora small shift in precip tation, can often tilt the balance locally, driving rainfall or decreasing the imensity of storms. “In weather modification, the uninitiated think you ‘must make huge impacts on the atmosphere to get a desired, result,” Griffith says, “But it's actually the opposite, If we make just tiny modifications to existing conditions, little touches here and there, the changes then cascade upward, using the existing weather's navural actions, and that's what gets the biggest results.” Slightly amplifying rain or snow seems a modest achieve- ‘ment, but projects on the drawing board might revolutionize ‘our relationship with the elements, including the capacity 10 climinate enormous and tragie disasters. Imagine the ability to steer hurricanes offshore or shatter twisters, to prevent drought and heat waves, and to stop that worst ofall nightmares—the :meling ofthe polar ice eaps and the flooding of coastal cities as, the planet warms. The insight from weather modification’s old jguard—that tiny changes ean engender profound atmospheric shifes—has been embraced by more recent, cutting-edge inves tigators, those proposing weather-changing satellites and, 1g on theoretical physics to create a climate of choice. feather systems are large, and our inputs as humans are so small you'd think we'd have no influence at al,” says Ross N. Hoffiman, chief scientist and vice president of research and development at Atmosphe Research (Ex), a geophysics and meteorology consultancy based in Lexington, Massachusetts, Yet with the help of new, highly nuanced computer models, Hoffman is work- ing to alter weather by making ti ‘motion of air. Already he has shown, atleast on the computer sereen, that changes as small as 3 to 5 degrees in wind and, air temperature could have redirected hurrieane Iniki away from land in 1992 and reduced the strength of hurricane Andrew that same year: His colleagues hope to obliterate, tornadoes and eliminate the scourge of drought with tools, ranging from lasers to tiny, solar-powered orbiting satellites Efforts to change the weather sem more important than ever in this age of extremes, from killer hurricanes, and Environmental y tweaks to the chaoticcd 10 furious nor'easters to ravaging floods. 7 spring, for example, tornadoes ripped through parts of the southern and midwestern United States, including the three-quarter-mile-wide monster that devastated Joplin, Missouri, in May. That tornado killed 157 people, making. it the deadliest since modern record-keeping began in 1950. April alone ranked as the most active twister month his past to date, with 753 tornadoes. Over in the Horn of Africa, the worst drought in 60 years has led to a famine in which more than 13 million people are at risk of starvation without humanitarian aid. And anyone considering recent weather has to recall the disastrous 2005 hurricane season, which birthed Katrina, Rita, and Wilma and cost the United States not only 2,280, lives but nearly $140 billion in losses, More than six years later, from Bil tion is still being repaired. According to data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, New Orleans to Houston, that destruc- Silver joide canisters mounted ona smal plane. The chemical can induce water in the atmosphere to precipitate as rin. he past decade through 2009 was the hottest on record. ‘To top ital off, 2011 stands as possibly the most meteoro- logically violent year in United States history, breaking. the record with 10 weather-related disasters that each cost more than a billion dollars, a tally that eclipses the previ ous record of nine disasters set in 2008, Considering that some of the most extreme weather has probably been made worse by human impacts such as global warming, the impetus to set things right makes, sense, Climate change may be linked to severe hurricanes in summer and brutal storms in winter. The melting of the ice caps, the flooding of our cities, and the destruction of crops n weather, Perhaps we can set it right again, yy be next. We may indeed have wrecked theNEITHER FOG, NOR RAIN, NOR HAIL Changing the weather has been 2 seientific quest at least since the 6th century, when rogue intellectual Leonardo da Vinci asked the city fathers of Verona to shoot cannonballs skyward to hal the hail. But it wasn't until after World ‘War Il, atthe improbable ste of the General Electric Lab: oratory in Schenectady, New York, that a plan went into effec. In the beginning, a team that ineluded atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut (brother of novelist Kurt) sent up a plane and released dry fee into clouds on four days during November and December 1946. Whether by coin dence or through aetwal impact, the last day of seeding saw the heaviest snowfall of the winter around Schenectady. Vonnegut went on to invent what amounted to a nucleat- {ng machine: He dissolved silver iodide in acetone, sprayed igram for five winters and counting. Back in 2005, a heavy. fog rolled in from the nearby Clark River and blanketed the airport during the busy Thanksgiving travel week. The fog, canceled or diverted 64 flights, prompting airport manag- ersto take action, arranging with North American Weather Consultants for a trial fog abatement operation, When a similar fog socked the region in 2006, two pickup trucks took to the tarmac, their beds loaded with, iquid carbon dioxide tanks. Atop each tank rose an, eight-foot mast, crowed by a nozzle to squirt the earbon dioxide into the air. The frigid liquid caused moisture in the air to condense into ice crystals, which precipi tated out as a dry snow. The effort meant that only four flights were posiponed or canceled, according to airport director Cris Jensen. The uninitiated think you must make huge impacts on the atmosphere, Griffith says. It’s actually the opposite: Tiny modifications cascade into big results. the solution through a nozzle to make droplets, and then, literally burned the droplets, producing trillions of nuclef, under the right conditions, each could form the core of a drop of water or flake of snow. But General Electric, wary of potential lawsuits, gradually moved away from direct, involvement in weather research, By the 1960s the U.S. military had taken the reins. Its effort, called Project StormFury, aimed to weaken, hurricanes by seeding their upper reaches with silver iodide crystals, nucleating agents that would increase the amount of ice swirling around in the storm. The idea was ice, it would release heat. The heat, in turn, would widen the eye of the storm and decrease the strength of its winds, Unfortunately, StormPury's statistical findings were ambiguous. While human manipulations did sometimes ‘seem to weaken hurricanes test flights into the storms never provided proof. “What we didn’t know at the time,” says Charles Hosler, professor emeritus of meteorology at Penn ‘State University and former StormFury panel chairman, “is that meastiring the forces inside hurricanes is far more com: plex than what was possible with the equipment of the time.” ‘The shuttering of StormFury in 1983, the end of major federal funding for weather-control research, signaled anew age of skepticism. While many practitioners pointed to sta tistical evidence suggesting their techniques worked, it was usually impossible to prove it; one could never precisely eon firm what would have happened had the intervention not taken place. Amid such doubt, weather modification became the province of private companies and local municipalities. ‘Some of these efforts have thrived, In western Montana, Missoula International Airporthas run a fog abatement pro- that as water became ‘The fleet has since expanded to four trucks, which head out in the early morning several times a year before the day's first departures. As the fog begins to clear, the trucks start moving in a wider circle to disperse it further. “You, cean see the fog collapse in on itself, which starts almost, immediately,” Jensen says. “During daylight, we see a hole of blue sky. If it’s dark out we'll be looking at stars, assuming there's not a cloud deck above.” Sometimes the accumulation of powder is so great that the airport has to dispatch a truck with a 22-foot broom on its front end to sweep snow off the runways, Weather conditions are key to expelling the cold fog with this technique, which Missoula International licensed, from the University of Utah. Temperatures several degrees below the freezing point of water cause the fog to quickly ‘condense and fall as snow, but as the temperature approach- 32, it may not succeed. Fortunately Montana weather cooperates about 70 percent ofthe time, Jensen says. The abatement program costs the airport about $6,000 annually and has limited the cancellation of flights to about handful a year, versus the dozens that might otherwise be serapped. “We don’ foresee a time when we'll quit doing it,” Jensen continues. “I’s relatively inexpensive to do and, the benefits are pretty dramatic when it works ight.” About 600 miles east of Missoula, in the wide-open plains of western North Dakota, hail suppression is the goal. Hai forms inside powerful thunderstorms, often when warm, ‘moist air rises rapidly. In the Dakotas, these storms can, hhave devastating effects on erops. For more than 30 years, the state of North Dakota has been seeding clouds with, silver iodide both to abate the hail and to create rain. “Ws hhave eight aircraft standing ready,” says Darin Langerud, me:86 director of the North Dakota State Water Commission's atmospheric resource board, “and when conditions are right to promote rain or to suppress hail, they go up.” “The hail suppression program is one of our great suc cesses,” Langerud says. “We know this becatise we've worked with erop insurance companies for statistics. We compared virtually identical seeded and nonseeded areas ‘of farmland, and the area where the seeding had been done 45 percent lower incidence of hail-damage claims, ‘We're not saying that hail didn’t fall, but it fell in smaller pieces, which ultimately did les crop damage on the ground.” showed. ‘THEY'LL STOP THE RAIN Ivis one thing to increase rainfall or reduce the size of hailstones. But when it comes to controlling truly huge, complex, chaotic events like hurricanes and tornadoes, weather modification is still theoretical, At le the testing ground is a computer simulation or sometimes just the inside of a physicists head, Powerful storms like hurricanes and tornadoes are very difficult to measure, since conditions are often too extreme, says Hoffman. “In many eases the weather you're hoping to measure renders your instruments ‘unreliable near the event's peak activity, just when you ned them to measure best.” Still, those obstacles haven't stopped Hoffman and others from hypothesizing how. such systems might be modified and then simulating the fix on a computer screen, Hurricanes, the largest and most damaging weather events, peak im mid to lat summer, when winds coming off the coast of West Africa meet thunderstorms clustered, ‘over the warm tropical ocean. The resulting disturbance can form a self-sustaining low-pressure vortex, or what is called a tropical depression; as the system intensifies i becomes a tropical storm, Then, if the winds of this self sustaining system top 75 miles an hour, it earns a new name: hurricane. In the end, the greater the differen: between the temper ture of the sea and that of the upp. atmosphere, the more powerful the storm, After studying this dynamic, Hoffman suggested a scheme to weaken a hurricane or shift its path by heating and cool- ing the atmosphere in complex patterns. Theoretically, the plan could tame the weather, but we have no reliable way to heat or cool the atmosphere over large enough areas to move a ‘massive storm, “While I ean demonstrate that steering a hur- ricane is possible using computer simulations, we still don't have a practical way to doit,” Hoffman says. The New Rainmakers The quest fora has rece gone higher ‘eh. wis and Geman ‘cinta are experimenting wth casting ain by Bearing aero {he hy. Th int red boas may tha ionize stosphor neon androgen or ext the lols forming new emia com> ‘ation therorarcher ae say case the estos ax much wo miles pin the atmosphere, ied iy amounts five id tht atat water moacles Sf, he particles generated ar {oo sal fl anrops bt leaking could be eae iin fet 10 years, ay lrme Kaspar, ser eseacerin ser sis ath Uri of Genera Ati stage we ae stl ying to nerstand whats happening when we shoot he sr” as terest shames have bee propsedincces whee les snpy won poi See the 170s French engine {ergs Muga tas ered he def tov ag ienberes © perched gions n2009e prberea witch lta company Dasa Syston, hich developed itl D nse erg Sitlted ocean emptature atest i concept. Ins lana ght ‘woul cinch tenant rand an -mbonon erg whch wold be ‘vale malt reduction srt. Ocean caren wal! han mest dfthe vrsport during sea mant-long oye fom pla eons {eqs ay sat: Theerecen snare supe hat ning coer could wor an rae a rns psy eoged ot of New founland with sales ould beg ths spring.Another hurricane-moderating hypothesis, advanced by Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew Univer sity in Jerusalem and W Woodley, an independent weather: modification researcher based in Colorado, holds that seeding a hurr ccane’slower reaches with microscopic dust particles~perhaps microbits of salt—would generate minute water droplets by giving the vapor some thing to attach to. The droplets ‘would eventually be carried into the storm’s higher altitudes, cooling the burricane through evaporation in the same manner that sweat cools human skin, As the droplets evapo rated, they would cool the air in the ower levels of the storm, diminish ing its intensity ‘TELL IT TO THE JUDGE Even as enhanced computer model: ing and more precise measurements bring control of extreme weather closer, those in the vanguard face the same hurdle as Bernard Vonnegut and his colleagues at General Elec- tric half a century ago: the ri getting sued. This is weather modifieation’s nguished research professor ‘emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. “If you cannot predict very precisely what would have happened with, say, a hurricane before you began, manipulating it, you've left yourself, de open to litigation,” he says. There's just too big an opportunity for people to say: “You created this. ide it worse! hat’s exactly why there will never be large-seale weather modification or weather control in America,” agrees Charles Hosler. “All weather You is good for somebody and bad for somebody else.” When altered weather eauses a problem for people, he contends, those people are likely to sue. Hosler speaks from experience. Along with colleagues, hhe was once sued by a sightseer riding a ski lift. After the lif’s motor was hit by lightning and halted, the man jumped. rather than wait for rescuers. On landing, he broke his le He discovered later that Hosler and his team had been study- ing thunderelouds nearby. Soon all parties were involved in ‘lawsuit that was eventually tossed out of court Facing page: Siver iodide canisters. Above: A technician trom Weather Modification Inc, inspects siver iodide flare racks prior to clout seeding run in Bangalore, Ini. Hosler recalls another colleague working in hail abate- ment researeh in Pennsylvania who ran afoul of local fruit farmers, who worried that the effort might cause a drought and ruin their livelihood. They reneted by shoot ing bullets into the sky, hitting a plane flown by student pilots. "People get really emotional about their weather, Hosler says. D &PV Le PU {A gracetlly curving sandstone formation known as cae erent a Wes near the northwestern edge of Arizona on the Coe eee ata Se cr ee eres Se ee ere ts aoe er erie ay ee ee ee ek ec Patt aneCE i ecm Bs ; € 9 de Ps é0a pe ye Wy : The more it LOOKS like a Foot,+ LONG WIRELESS RANGE to 1,000 ft. : + FREQUENT WEATHER UPDATES every 2'% seconds I Vi TT + ALARM SETTINGS for over 70 parameters * OVER 80 GRAPHS for alls highs, lows, and totals Vantage Pro2 weather stations give you the ultimate rae P in professional accuracy wee and durability in their price range. 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