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Monday, April 29, 2013
Last pieces of 1 World Trade Center are rising
FILE - One World Trade Center rises above the lower Manhattan skyline, April 13, 2013 in New York. It is already New York?s tallest building. But when the last pieces of its spire go up to the roof Monday, April 28, the 104-floor skyscraper will be one step away from becoming the highest in the Western Hemisphere. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
FILE - One World Trade Center rises above the lower Manhattan skyline, April 13, 2013 in New York. It is already New York?s tallest building. But when the last pieces of its spire go up to the roof Monday, April 28, the 104-floor skyscraper will be one step away from becoming the highest in the Western Hemisphere. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
FILE - In this file photo of April 26, 2013, from Bayonne, N.J., One World Trade Center rises behind the Statue of Liberty in New York. It is already New York?s tallest building. But when the last pieces of its spire go up to the roof Monday, April 28, the 104-floor skyscraper will be one step away from becoming the highest in the Western Hemisphere. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
FILE - In this file photo of April 18, 2013, construction cranes work on assembling the rising spire on top of One World Trade Center in New York. It is already New York?s tallest building. But when the last pieces of its spire go up to the roof Monday, April 28, the 104-floor skyscraper will be one step away from becoming the highest in the Western Hemisphere. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
NEW YORK (AP) ? One World Trade Center already is New York's tallest building.
And when the last pieces of its spire rise to the roof ? weather permitting ? the 104-floor skyscraper that replaces the fallen twin towers will be just feet from becoming the highest in the Western Hemisphere.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey says the spire pieces plus a steel beacon will then be lifted at a later date from the rooftop to cap the building at 1,776 feet.
Installation of the 800-ton, 408-foot spire began in December, after 18 pieces were shipped from Canada and New Jersey.
The spire will serve as a world-class broadcast antenna.
With the beacon at its peak to ward off aircraft, the spire will provide public transmission services for television and radio broadcast channels that were destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, along with the trade center towers.
Overlooking the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the high-rise is scheduled to open for business in 2014.
The tower is at the northwest corner of the site, which is well on its way to reconstruction with the 72-story 4 World Trade Center and other buildings.
Monday's celebration of the reconstructed trade center comes days after a grisly reminder of the terror attack that took nearly 3,000 lives: the discovery of a rusted piece of airplane landing gear wedged between a nearby mosque and an apartment building ? believed to be from one of the hijacked planes that ravaged lower Manhattan.
As officials prepared to erect the spire, the office of the city's chief medical examiner was working in the hidden alley where debris may still contain human remains.
The new tower's crowning spire is a joint venture between the ADF Group Inc. engineering firm in Terrebonne, Quebec, and New York-based DCM Erectors Inc., a steel contractor.
The world's tallest building, topping 2,700 feet, is in Dubai.
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Tuesday, April 16, 2013
New insight into accelerating summer ice melt on the Antarctic Peninsula
Monday, April 15, 2013
A new 1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction shows that summer ice melting has intensified almost ten-fold, and mostly since the mid 20th Century. Summer ice melt affects the stability of Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers.
The research, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, adds new knowledge to the international effort that is required to understand the causes of environmental change in Antarctica and to make more accurate projections about the direct and indirect contribution of Antarctica's ice shelves and glaciers to global sea level rise.
In 2008 a UK-French science team drilled a 364-metre long ice core from James Ross Island, near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, to measure past temperatures in the area. They discovered that this ice core could also give a unique and unexpected insight into ice melt in the region.
Visible layers in the ice core indicated periods when summer snow on the ice cap thawed and then refroze. By measuring the thickness of these melt layers the scientists were able to examine how the history of melting compared with changes in temperature at the ice core site over the last 1000-years.
Lead author Dr Nerilie Abram of The Australian National University and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) says,
"We found that the coolest conditions on the Antarctic Peninsula and the lowest amount of summer melt occurred around 600 years ago. At that time temperatures were around 1.6?C lower than those recorded in the late 20th Century and the amount of annual snowfall that melted and refroze was about 0.5%. Today, we see almost ten times as much (5%) of the annual snowfall melting each year.
"Summer melting at the ice core site today is now at a level that is higher than at any other time over the last 1000 years. And whilst temperatures at this site increased gradually in phases over many hundreds of years, most of the intensification of melting has happened since the mid-20th century."
This is the first time it has been demonstrated that levels of ice melt on the Antarctic Peninsula have been particularly sensitive to increasing temperature during the 20th Century.
Dr Abram explains,
"What that means is that the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed to a level where even small increases in temperature can now lead to a big increase in summer ice melt."
Dr Robert Mulvaney from the British Antarctic Survey led the ice core drilling expedition and co-authored the paper. He says,
"Having a record of previous melt intensity for the Peninsula is particularly important because of the glacier retreat and ice shelf loss we are now seeing in the area. Summer ice melt is a key process that is thought to have weakened ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula leading to a succession of dramatic collapses, as well as speeding up glacier ice loss across the region over the last 50 years."
In other parts of Antarctica, such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the picture is more complex and it is not yet clear that the levels of recent ice melt and glacier loss are exceptional or caused by human-driven climate changes.
Dr Abram concludes,
"This new ice core record shows that even small changes in temperature can result in large increases in the amount of melting in places where summer temperatures are near to 0?C, such as along the Antarctic Peninsula, and this has important implications for ice instability and sea level rise in a warming climate."
###
British Antarctic Survey: http://www.nerc-bas.ac.uk
Thanks to British Antarctic Survey for this article.
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Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Byrd came oh-so-close, but probably didn't reach North Pole
Apr. 8, 2013 ? When renowned explorer Richard E. Byrd returned from the first-ever flight to the North Pole in 1926, he sparked a controversy that remains today: Did he actually reach the pole?
Studying supercomputer simulations of atmospheric conditions on the day of the flight and double-checking Byrd's navigation techniques, a researcher at The Ohio State University has determined that Byrd indeed neared the Pole, but likely only flew within 80 miles of it before turning back to the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
Gerald Newsom, professor emeritus of astronomy at Ohio State, based his results in part on atmospheric simulations from the 20th Century Reanalysis project at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The study appears in a recent issue of the journal Polar Record.
"I worked out that if Byrd did make it, he must have had very unusual wind conditions. But it's clear that he really gave it a valiant try, and he deserves a lot of respect," Newsom said.
At issue is whether Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett could have made the 1,500-mile round trip from Spitsbergen in only 15 hours and 44 minutes, when some experts were expecting a flight time of around 18 hours.
Byrd claimed that they encountered strong tail winds that sped the plane's progress. Not everyone believed him.
"The flight was incredibly controversial," Newsom explained. "The people defending Byrd were vehement that he was a hero, and the people attacking him said he was one of the world's greatest frauds. The emotion! It was incredibly vitriolic."
Newsom was unaware of the debate, however, until Raimund Goerler, now-retired archivist at Ohio State, discovered a flight journal within a large collection of items given to Ohio State by the Byrd family at the naming of the university's Byrd Polar Research Center. In 1995, Goerler opened a previously overlooked cardboard box labeled "misc." In it, he found a smudged and water-stained book containing hand-written notes from Byrd's 1926 North Pole flight and his historic 1927 trans-Atlantic flight, as well as an earlier expedition to Greenland in 1925.
Goerler looked to Newsom for help interpreting the navigational notes. "Given the strong opinions on both sides from people in the polar research community, we thought an astronomer who had no prior opinion about the flight would have the skills to do an assessment, and the neutrality to do it in an unbiased way," he said.
In fact, Newsom had helped teach celestial navigation during his early days as a graduate student, and still had an interest in the subject. With the help of current Byrd Polar archivist Laura Kissel, he pored over copies of the notebook and other related writings, including the post-flight report by Byrd's sponsors at the National Geographic Society.
Newsom was particularly curious about the solar compass that Byrd used to find his way to and from the pole. The compass was state-of-the-art for its time, with a clockwork mechanism that turned a glass cover to match the movement of the sun around the sky. By peering at a shadow in the sun compass, Byrd gauged whether the plane was heading north.
Among the artifacts in the Byrd Polar Research Center is a copy of the barograph recording made during the flight, showing atmospheric pressure. A small calibration graph was labeled with altitudes for different pressures, allowing Byrd to determine how high the plane flew throughout the flight. Byrd used the altitude to set a device mounted over an opening in the bottom of the plane, and with a stopwatch he timed how long it took for features on the ice below to move in and out of view. The stopwatch reading then gave the plane's ground speed.
Byrd could then calculate the distance traveled, and know when he and Bennett had traveled far enough to reach the pole. He would also be able to tell if a crosswind was nudging the plane off course. And he would have had to repeat the calculations every few minutes for the entire trip north.
The partially open cockpit would have been very loud, Newsom explained, so Byrd wrote messages in the book so Bennett could read his suggested course corrections. For example, there was a note from Byrd to Bennett asking for a three-degree correction to the west, to counter a crosswind.
The problem, Newsom quickly found, is that the notebook didn't contain any calculations of ground speed, only the results of the calculations. "I would have thought he'd have pages and pages of calculations," Newsom said. "Without that, there's no way of knowing for sure, but deep down there's a worry I have -- that he did it all in his head."
Newsom found that the barograph recording and calibration graph were remarkably small. A change of atmospheric pressure of one inch of mercury would equal only one quarter of an inch on the barograph record. "That's tiny," he said. "If Byrd was off by even a tenth of an inch on the barograph recording, then his altitude would be off 18 percent, and that means his ground speed would be off by 18 percent. And he had the same chance for error every time he took a reading throughout the flight."
Changes in the atmosphere at different latitudes meant that Byrd's calibration graph lost accuracy during the duration of the flight. Newsom calculated that this could have led Byrd to believe that he had reached the pole when he was still as much as 78 statute miles away, or caused him to overshoot the pole by as much as 21 statute miles.
As he wrote in the Polar Record paper: "This type of analysis by itself will not resolve any controversy over whether Byrd reached the pole. But it does indicate that he was considerably more likely to have ended up short of his goal than to have exceeded it."
Next, Newsom decided to test whether Byrd could have experienced strong tailwinds as he claimed, and to do that, the astronomer turned to an unbiased resource of his own: NOAA's 20th Century Reanalysis dataset.
Using U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers, NOAA calculated likely atmospheric conditions all over Earth for every six hours between 1870 and 2010. The data used a computer model that calculated 56 plausible scenarios for every six-hour interval, and the results of the 56 model atmospheres were averaged together to arrive at the most likely conditions.
The model winds did not appear consistent with what Byrd said, so Newsom examined each of the 56 scenarios individually, to see if even one of them allowed for strong tailwinds during the trip. They didn't.
"For the most part, he probably had a headwind going north, and a tailwind going south. But there's no evidence of the winds shifting as much as he described. Of course, the models are NOAA's best guesses for what the conditions were that day, not an actual measurement, so Byrd could have had strong tailwinds just like he said. But the simulations suggest that if he did have strong tailwinds that day, he was very lucky."
It's easy to forget, he continued, how difficult and dangerous navigation was before modern altimeters and GPS. Byrd was under a tremendous amount of pressure: he'd overloaded the plane with fuel to make sure he and Bennett wouldn't run out over the Arctic (they would likely have died in that circumstance), but the extra load made the plane hard to control; he had to calculate the plane's location constantly for nearly sixteen hours, in a screaming-loud cockpit while worried about frostbite; and partway through the trip, one of the plane's engines sprang an oil leak and seemed likely to stop working.
"That they returned at all is a major accomplishment, and the fact that they arrived back where they were supposed to -- that shows that Byrd knew how to navigate with his solar compass correctly," Newsom said.
And, since the plane was theoretically high enough to see nearly 90 miles to the horizon, Byrd may not have reached the pole, but even in the worst-case scenario, he almost certainly saw it through his cockpit window.
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Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ohio State University. The original article was written by Pam Frost Gorder.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- G.H. Newsom. Byrd's Arctic flight in the context of model atmospheres. Polar Record, 2012; 49 (01): 62 DOI: 10.1017/S0032247412000058
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Thatcher played polarizing role in pop culture
By Randee Dawn, TODAY contributor
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died Monday at age 87, inspired pop culture for decades. Her politics and her presence had a special influence on the British music scene, as she rose to power just as a new generation of musicians were making their mark on the art form. In the U.S., she may be best remembered for the 2011 film "The Iron Lady," which won Meryl Streep an Oscar and was not without controversy itself, inventing memories and thoughts for an elderly Thatcher. ?
Here's a quick look at some of the ways Thatcher was portrayed in the arts world.
Iron Lady, big screen
Thatcher may be most recently remembered from her 2011 portrayal in "The Iron Lady," which won Meryl Streep her third Oscar. But the movie received mixed reviews, and was criticized by some for not taking a stand on Thatcher's politics. "Was she a monster? A heroine? The movie has no opinion," late critic Roger Ebert wrote?in the Chicago Sun-Times. "She was a fact. You leave the movie having witnessed it. Whatever your feelings were about Thatcher were before you saw it, you now have some images to accompany it."
Streep issued a statement on Monday, which read in part, "To me she was a figure of awe for her personal strength and grit. To have come up, legitimately,? through the ranks of the British political system, class bound and gender phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement. ...?I was honored to try to imagine her late life journey, after power; but I have only a glancing understanding of what her many struggles were, and how she managed to sail through to the other side. I wish to convey my respectful condolences to her family and many friends."
Thatcher's time in office provided the backdrop for the 2000 film "Billy Elliot," which took place amid a 1984-87 coal miner's strike that gave Thatcher a solid victory and more or less broke the trade unions. The musical version that hit Broadway featured an Elton John song, "Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher," in which children sang, "We all celebrate today/'Cause it's one day closer to your death."?
Protest songs
Musicians coalesced around songs that beat down Thatcher and her policies, and that anti-government feeling arguably helped fuel the growth of the country's punk and ska music scenes. Many songs actively looked forward to her death, and singers like Billy Bragg and Morrissey typified some of the angriest lashings out at their leader, with songs like "Margaret on the Guillotine" (Morrissey) and Elvis Costello's "Tramp the Dirt Down." Sinead O'Connor sang about the shooting of a black British man that allegedly was covered up by police in "Black Boys on Mopeds"?while Genesis used a "Spitting Image" puppet of Thatcher in their "Land of Confusion" video (which also satirized other world leaders, including Ronald Reagan).
A large number of influential British bands got their start?during Thatcher's time in office, including The Clash, Gang of Four and The Jam. Her time in office provided lyrical inspiration as well as the impetus for songwriting. Musician Billy Bragg told?The Guardian, "Whenever I'm asked to name my greatest inspiration, I always answer, 'Margaret Thatcher.' ... Try as I might to resist her, she provided the backdrop for all the songs I wrote in that turbulent period."
Live from New York, it's Maggie Thatcher
At home in England, the prime minister was the inspiration for any number of TV series -- including the original version of "House of Cards" in 1990, which features a fictional successor to Thatcher. As recently as 2009, two productions, "Margaret" and "The Queen" offered up modern looks at Thatcher, but for sheer American satire it's hard to beat late-night television. "Monty Python" member Michael Palin hosted "Saturday Night Live" in 1979 just a week after Thatcher's election as prime minister, and appeared as Thatcher. Palin's Thatcher even?got to utter the catchphrase of the day, "Jane, you ignorant slut," after a grilling by Jane Curtin on the show's "Weekend Update" segment. And in the early 1980s, "Tonight Show" host Johnny Carson played a practical joke on Joan Rivers, hiring a Thatcher lookalike to talk to her about her jokes about the royal family.?
Comic strips and books
Thatcher was ripe for cartooning and caricaturing.?She popped up in hundreds of political comics over the years, and even got space in Bloom County. Any number of books about her rule -- including a few written by Thatcher herself -- gave her a significant non-fictional section on the shelf. But for those savvy readers who grew up during her time in office, few fictional takes encompass what it was like to live in the Thatcher years like Sue Townsend's?"Adrian Mole" young adult book series. Mole even wrote a poem to his prime minister, called "Mrs. Thatcher": "Do you weep, Mrs. Thatcher, do you weep?" he asked.
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Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Oceans may explain slowdown in climate change: study
By Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle
OSLO (Reuters) - Climate change could get worse quickly if huge amounts of extra heat absorbed by the oceans are released back into the air, scientists said after unveiling new research showing that oceans have helped mitigate the effects of warming since 2000.
Heat-trapping gases are being emitted into the atmosphere faster than ever, and the 10 hottest years since records began have all taken place since 1998. But the rate at which the earth's surface is heating up has slowed somewhat since 2000, causing scientists to search for an explanation for the pause.
Experts in France and Spain said on Sunday that the oceans took up more warmth from the air around 2000. That would help explain the slowdown in surface warming but would also suggest that the pause may be only temporary and brief.
"Most of this excess energy was absorbed in the top 700 meters (2,300 ft) of the ocean at the onset of the warming pause, 65 percent of it in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans," they wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Lead author Virginie Guemas of the Catalan Institute of Climate Sciences in Barcelona said the hidden heat may return to the atmosphere in the next decade, stoking warming again.
"If it is only related to natural variability then the rate of warming will increase soon," she told Reuters.
Caroline Katsman of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, an expert who was not involved in the latest study, said heat absorbed by the ocean will come back into the atmosphere if it is part of an ocean cycle such as the "El Nino" warming and "La Nina" cooling events in the Pacific.
She said the study broadly confirmed earlier research by her institute but that it was unlikely to be the full explanation of the warming pause at the surface, since it only applied to the onset of the slowdown around 2000.
THRESHOLD
The pace of climate change has big economic implications since almost 200 governments agreed in 2010 to limit surface warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial levels, mainly by shifting from fossil fuels.
Surface temperatures have already risen by 0.8 C. Two degrees is widely seen as a threshold for dangerous changes such as more droughts, mudslides, floods and rising sea levels.
Some governments, and skeptics that man-made climate change is a big problem, argue that the slowdown in the rising trend shows less urgency to act. Governments have agreed to work out, by the end of 2015, a global deal to combat climate change.
Last year was ninth warmest since records began in the 1850s, according to the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, and 2010 was the warmest, just ahead of 1998. Apart from 1998, the 10 hottest years have all been since 2000.
Guemas's study, twinning observations and computer models, showed that natural La Nina weather events in the Pacific around the year 2000 brought cool waters to the surface that absorbed more heat from the air. In another set of natural variations, the Atlantic also soaked up more heat.
"Global warming is continuing but it's being manifested in somewhat different ways," said Kevin Trenberth, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. Warming can go, for instance, to the air, water, land or to melting ice and snow.
Warmth is spreading to ever deeper ocean levels, he said, adding that pauses in surface warming could last 15-20 years.
"Recent warming rates of the waters below 700 meters appear to be unprecedented," he and colleagues wrote in a study last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The U.N. panel of climate scientists says it is at least 90 percent certain that human activities - rather than natural variations in the climate - are the main cause of warming in recent decades.
(Reporting by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent; Editing by Peter Graff)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/oceans-may-explain-slowdown-climate-change-study-170410831.html
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