Tag: earth
New Technology Is Keeping The Air We Breathe Under An Unprecedented Level Of Scrutiny

New Technology Is Keeping The Air We Breathe Under An Unprecedented Level Of Scrutiny

By William Yardley, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES – Measure twice, cut once, they say. Unless you are trying to save the planet.

In that case, measure and cut constantly. Rising calls to create cleaner air and limit climate change are driving a surge in new technology for measuring air emissions and other pollutants – a data revolution that is opening new windows into the micro-mechanics of environmental damage.

The momentum for new monitoring tools is rooted in increasingly stringent regulations, including California’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions, and newly tightened federal standards and programs to monitor drought and soil contamination.

A variety of clean-tech companies have arisen to help industries meet the new requirements, but the new tools and data are also being created by academics, tinkerers and concerned citizens – just ask Volkswagen, whose deceptive efforts to skirt emissions-testing standards were discovered with the help of a small university lab in West Virginia.

Taking it all into account, the Earth is coming under an unprecedented new level of scrutiny.

For more than a year, satellites launched by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been orbiting Earth to track the global flow of carbon emissions. In Colorado, workers are using infrared cameras to find methane leaking from natural gas wells. In Boston, researchers using new measuring devices have detected “fugitive emissions” in hundreds of places across the city, including the Massachusetts State House.

Los Gatos Research in Silicon Valley now makes portable equipment for measuring greenhouse gases and other pollution that has been used on airplanes and in national forests. Piccaro, another California company, makes the machines that have been used to measure methane leaks in Boston and other cities. Other startups have created software that collects existing air quality data into apps that can advise asthmatics on areas to avoid and steer cyclists toward the least-polluted paths to work.

“There are a lot of companies picking up on this, but who is interested in the data – to me, that’s also fascinating,” said Colette Heald, an atmospheric chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We’re in this moment of a huge growth in curiosity – of people trying to understand their environment. That coincides with the technology to do something more.”

The push is not limited to measuring air and emissions. Tools to sample soil, test seismic regions, monitor water quality, test ocean acidity and improve weather forecasting are all on the rise. Drought has prompted new efforts to map groundwater and stream flows across the West. In space, NASA recently began a global precipitation measurement program intended, in part, to more accurately predict extreme weather events and the availability of water.

The Obama administration has rolled out a series of regulatory changes intended either to reduce pollutants in the air people breathe or limit greenhouse gases – and sometimes both. This month, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized new rules to reduce ozone and, for the first time, required so-called fenceline testing near oil refineries to track pollutants such as benzene that may be escaping – a task that requires sensitive monitoring equipment.

Industry groups often oppose new rules because complying costs money, but these rules can also drive technological development and new industries. While older emissions-monitoring devices may occupy the footprint of a living room, equipment is being developed that is portable and more sophisticated.

“Fifteen years ago we were talking about percent – fenceline testing the percentage of a particular species in a gas,” said Chris Anthony, who oversees analytical products for the ABB Group, which has expanded its investments in air and gas monitoring in recent years, including buying Los Gatos Research in 2013. “Five years ago, 10 years ago, we started talking about parts per million. In many areas now, we’re measuring parts per billion, which is very, very low levels of trace gas in exhaust.”

Chet Wayland, the director of the air quality assessment division within the EPA’s office of air quality planning and standards, recalled a research conference the agency hosted a few years ago where he met a graduate student who showed him a hand-held, homemade device that measured air pollution. The parts appeared to cost about $50.

“It wasn’t great but it was not bad,” Wayland recalled. “I’m sitting there going, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ I’m used to working in the world where these devices are $30,000 and they’re highly sophisticated, and here’s somebody who built this in a lab basically by himself. That’s when I realized that the world was changing.”

Wayland and one of his colleagues, Dan Costa, who works on air and climate issues in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, said that as more companies and individuals make affordable equipment, they need to demonstrate that their products are accurate and reliable.

“That’s one of the key issues we at the EPA are trying to focus on,” Wayland said. “When the technology is out there and everyone starts using it, the question is, how good is the data? If the data’s not high enough quality, then we’re not going to make regulatory decisions based on that.”

He added, “Where is this data going to reside in 10 years, when all these sensors are out there, and who’s going to (manage) that information? Right now it’s kind of organic so there’s no centralized place where all of this information is going.”

Two years ago, Heald, the professor at MIT, helped lead a group of students who created a campus air quality monitoring network. They launched a website where people can track gases such as ozone and carbon monoxide.

But the site also includes a disclaimer, warning that the numbers were not necessarily “regulatory grade” measurements. Costa said the EPA’s long-term vision is “this harmonization, a synthesis of the gold standard monitoring network (run by government) with the evolving sensor technology” used by citizen groups and individuals.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Kevin Dooley via Flickr

Ted Cruz’s Climate Change Denial Poses A Big Threat To NASA

Ted Cruz’s Climate Change Denial Poses A Big Threat To NASA

Among the most worrying aspects of the GOP’s new Senate majority is the elevation of climate change deniers to oversight of federal scientific agencies.

While Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) monitors the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) runs the committee which oversees NASA — and that’s bad news for the agency’s study of the planet.

On Monday, astronomer Phil Plait explained the danger facing NASA in Slate. Making a case for why NASA needs to study Earth as well as space, Plait pointed to Senator Cruz’s attempt at “refocusing” the agency.

Last week, the senator held a hearing regarding NASA’s funding, and called the agency’s administrator Charles Bolden as a witness. As Cruz urged him to redirect NASA’s core mission away from Earth and its environment, Bolden firmly replied, “We can’t go anywhere if the Kennedy Space Center goes underwater…”

Clearly, the agencies tasked with protecting our environment are now operating in a toxic atmosphere. The upside is that for Senator Cruz and the Republican majority to cut funding for NASA, they would have to get signed approval from the president, which would never happen. But with a Republican in the White House, the consequences for NASA, NOAA, and the EPA could be dire.

Photo: NASA HQ Photo via Flickr

Orbital Cargo Ship Departs Space Station

Orbital Cargo Ship Departs Space Station

Washington (AFP) — Orbital Sciences Corporation’s unmanned Cygnus cargo ship left the International Space Station Friday on its way to a fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

The spacecraft was released from the orbiting lab at 6:40 a.m,. NASA said in a live broadcast of the event.

“Cygnus is free of the International Space Station,” a NASA commentator said.

The spaceship will stay in orbit until Sunday morning, when it will fire its engines and push its way into Earth’s atmosphere.

The de-orbit burn is scheduled for 8:33 a.m. Sunday and the spacecraft should burn up at 9:11 a.m.

The crew on board the space station plans to document the spacecraft’s plasma trail.

The cargo ship launched July 13 and arrived at the ISS three days later, bearing a load of 3,653 pounds of gear, food, and science experiments.

The resupply mission is part of a billion dollar contract with NASA for multiple journeys to the ISS.

AFP Photo/Bill Ingalls

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Asteroid Impact That Killed The Dinosaurs Also Cooled The Earth

Asteroid Impact That Killed The Dinosaurs Also Cooled The Earth

By Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs also caused a temporary but devastating “impact winter” — darkening the sky, cooling the Earth and inhibiting photosynthesis, new research suggests.

Sixty-six million years ago, a 6.2-mile-wide asteroid known as Chicxulub struck the Earth off the Yucatan coast, setting off a series of catastrophic events that led to one of the world’s worst mass extinctions.

Computer simulations suggest that in the hours immediately after the impact, life on Earth was rattled by massive earthquakes and tsunamis, as well as global wildfires.

Then, dust and soot rose into the atmosphere, absorbing sunlight and keeping it from reaching the Earth’s surface. Plants had trouble getting enough light to photosynthesize, causing a wide-scale collapse of the food web. At the same time, the surface of the planet began to cool.

Because water holds onto heat longer than land or air, there were initially significant temperature differences between the atmosphere and the oceans that led to large storms and hurricanes.

The impact winter did not last long, however. Over a few months or possibly a few decades, the dust and soot fell out of the atmosphere and rained down onto the land and oceans, allowing sunlight to warm the planet once again.

It’s a compelling story, but one that has been difficult to prove — until now. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists from the Netherlands say they have found the first hard evidence of the hypothesized impact winter, buried deep in the geological record.

To take the temperature of the Earth 66 million years ago, the researchers looked at lipids produced by an ocean-dwelling microorganism called Thaumarchaeota, preserved in sediment rocks near the Brazos River in Texas.

Thaumarchaeota adjust the composition of the lipids in their cell membranes to the temperature of the sea water. When the organism dies, it sinks to the sea floor, and the lipids in its membrane are preserved in sandy ocean sediments.

Because the impact winter didn’t last long, it was difficult for the researchers to find a place where there was a thick enough sediment layer to look for the tell-tale lipid composition that would imply a short but severe cool spell.

But at the Brazos River site they got lucky. Back in the Cretaceous period this site was covered by a warm sea, said Johan Vellekoop of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the lead author of the paper. When the giant asteroid hit, a tsunami rolled over the site and covered it with a series of sandy layers. On top of that, the researchers found a thin layer of sediment that is more fine at the top than at the bottom, and it is in this layer that they found lipid evidence of a major cooling.

According to Vellekoop, the story embedded in the rocks goes like this: Initially, the lipids tell us there is a warm climate. Then, the asteroid hits, and a wash of sandy layers from a resulting tsunami arrives. Next, storms and hurricanes churn the ocean waters stirring up sediments in the ocean. Finally, the storms subside. As the seas settle, bigger sediments fall to the seabed first, and the finest sediments fall last. Embedded in this layer are the lipid evidence of cooler temperatures.

In other words, it seems the computer models were right — and evidence of the impact winter has been found at last.

Flickr via Rupert Taylor-Price