Aurora The magnificent northern lights Geoscience on parade: The

Aurora The magnificent northern lights
Geoscience on parade:
What happened when more than 11,000 earth scientists
gathered in Nice last year
The Future of Geosciences
THE EGGS
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THE EGGS | ISSUE 7 | MARCH 2004
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EGU News
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News
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Journal Watch
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Aurora - The magnificent northern lights
Ioannis Daglis and Syun-Ichi Akasofu on the splendors of aurora
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EDITORS
Managing Editor: Kostas Kourtidis
Department of Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering
Demokritus University of Thrace
Vas. Sofias 12, GR-67100 Xanthi, Greece
tel. +30-25410-79383, fax. +30-25410-79379
email: kourtidis@the-eggs.org
Assistant Editor: Magdeline Pokar
Bristol Glaciology Center,
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
University Road
Bristol, BS8 1SS, United Kingdom
tel. +44(0)117 928 8186, fax. +44(0)117 928 7878
email: M.Pokar@bristol.ac.uk
Hydrological Sciences: Guenther Bloeschl
Institut fur Hydraulik, Gewasserkunde und Wasserwirtschaft
Technische Universitat Wien Karlsplatz 13/223,
A-1040 Wien, Austria
tel. +43-1-58801-22315, fax. +43-1-58801-22399
email: bloeschl@hydro.tuwien.ac.at
Biogeosciences: Jean-Pierre Gattuso
Laboratoire d’Oceanographie de Villefranche, UMR 7093 CNRSUPMC
B. P. 28, F-06234 Villefranche-sur-mer Cedex France
tel. +33-(0)493763859, fax. +33-(0)493763834
email: gattuso@obs-vlfr.fr
Geodesy: Susanna Zerbini
Department of Physics, Sector of Geophysics University of
Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat 8 40127 Bologna, Italy
tel. +39-051-2095019, fax +39-051-2095058
e-mail: zerbini@df.unibo.it
Geodynamics: Bert L.A. Vermeersen
Delft University of Technology DEOS - Fac. Aerospace
Engineering Astrodynamics and Satellite Systems Kluyverweg 1,
NL-2629 HS Delft The Netherlands
tel. +31-15-2788272 fax. +31-15-2785322 8
e-mail: B.Vermeersen@lr.tudelft.nl
Atmospheric Sciences: Hans Xiang-Yu Huang
Danish Meteorological Institute, Lyngbyvej 100, 2100
Copenhagen, Denmark
tel. +45-39157423, fax. +45-39157460
e-mail: xyh@dmi.dk
Seismology: Marco Mucciarelli
Universita della Basilicata Di.S.G.G
Campus Macchia Romana, 85100 Potenza Italy
tel. (39) 0971-205094, fax. (39) 0971-205070
e-mail: mucciarelli@unibas.it
Climate: Yu Shaocai
Atmospheric Sciences Modeling Division (E243-01), National
Exposure Research Laboratory U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency
RTP, NC 27711, USA
tel. +1-919-541-0362, fax. +1-919-541-1379
e-mail: yu.shaocai@epamail.epa.gov
Atmospheric Chemistry: Kostas Kourtidis
Department of Environmental Engineering,
School of Engineering, Demokritus University of Thrace
Vas. Sofias 12, GR-67100 Xanthi, Greece
tel. +30-25410-79383, fax. +30-25410-79379
e-mail: kourtidi@env.duth.gr
GENERAL CONTACT
For general matters please contact Kostas Kourtidis,
at: kourtidis@the-eggs.org
SUBMISSION OF MATERIAL
For material submission, please contact the Editor-in-chief or the
appropriate Section Editor.
ADVERTISING
For advertising information,
please contact: adinfo@the-eggs.org
TECHNICAL
For technical questions, please contact: support@dotsoft.gr
Geoscience on parade:What happened when
more than 11,000 earth scientists gathered in
Nice last year
An account by Oliver Morton
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The Future of Geosciences
New Report on the future of geosciences from the International
Union of Geodesy and Geophysics(IUGG)
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Education
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Book Reviews
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Web Watch
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Events
Cover photo: Aurora in Manitoba, Canada. © Warren Justice
© European Geosciences Union, 2004
Reproduction is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged, save where otherwise stated.
Where prior permission must be obtained for the reproduction or use of textual and multimedia
information (sound, images, software, etc.), such permission shall cancel the abovementioned
general permission and indicate clearly any restrictions on use.
THE EGGS
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Improved Meeting Sites
at the forthcoming EGU Assembly
The sites of the Nice EGU Assembly 2004 have been greatly improved
as compared to the EGS-AGU-EUG Joint Assembly 2003
The sites of the Assembly
have been greatly improved as compared
to the EGS-AGU-EUG Joint Assembly
2003:
- posters, exhibition, additional
meeting and lecture rooms and large
Internet and Wlan sites are now located
in an additional 10.000 sqm building, the
Exhibition Centre.
- the tent on Esplanade is for
registration only with separate space for
pre- and on-site registrants
- the Congress Centre is reserved for
oral sessions only with AGORA 2 and 3 for
seating and Wlan areas.
All poster boards are now landscape
of 2 m (width) x 1 m (height) in size, put
up in a straight rather than in a zick-zack
arrangement, plus a power socket for
additional Laptop/Mac presentations.
Thus, for EGU 2004 there will be
10.000 sqm more space for posters and
the exhibition, more lecture and meeting
rooms, better catering facilities and more
science to enjoy.
The deadline for submission of
abstracts expired on 11 January 2004.
The deadlines for pre-registration and
for pre-hotel booking are 08 April 2004
(on-site registration and booking of
accommodation on-site is, of course, also
possible).
More info on the Assembly, to take
place in Nice, France, 25 - 30 April 2004,
can be found at
www.copernicus.org/EGU/ga/egu04
EGU Meeting Office
New open access journal of the European Geosciences Union:
Biogeosciences (BG)
The editorial board announces the launch of a new journal on biogeosciences
12 March 2004.- It is our
pleasure to announce the launch of a
new open access journal of the European
Geosciences Union: Biogeosciences
(BG).
The main fields covered are:
- Biodiversity and ecosystem function
- Biogeochemistry
- Biogeophysics
- Earth system sciences
- Paleobiogeosciences
- Astrobiology and Exobiology
Biogeosciences has an innovative
two-stage publication process which
involves a scientific discussion forum
(Biogeosciences Discussions) and exploits
the full potential of the Internet to:
- foster scientific discussion,
- enhance the effectiveness and
transparency
of
scientific
quality
assurance,
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- enable rapid publication,
- make scientific publications freely
accessible,
- offer an efficient new way of
publishing special issues
This proccess has already beeen
applied, with great success, to EGU’s
journal Atmospheric Chemistry and
Physics (ACP).
Authors are invited to submit their best
papers for publication in Biogeosciences.
Detailed information is available on the
journal web site:
http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/bg/
Jean-Pierre Gattuso and Juergen
Kesselmeier
Co-Editors-in-Chief,
Biogeosciences
bg-chief-editors@copernicus.org
Young Scientists Organise Permanent Global Network
Young researchers in the natural and social sciences and humanities announced
the formation of the World Academy of Young Scientists (WAYS).
18 November 2003.- Young researchers in the
natural and social sciences and humanities announced the
formation of the World Academy of Young Scientists (WAYS)
on the closing session of the World Science Forum.
Speaking in the Hungarian parliament on World Science
Day, the young scientists described their mission: to create “a
permanent global network for the young scientific community
that provides regular input into decision-making on science
and technology.” The new organisation grows out of the
International Forum for Young Scientists, a satellite event of the
1999 UNESCO-ICSU World Conference on Science. Following
this meeting, UNESCO committed to the establishment of a
permanent representative body for young scientists. In fulfilling
this function, WAYS intends to go beyond it: providing fora,
both real and virtual, in which young researchers will have the
opportunity to exchange views, not just on issues of science
policy, but also on their research.
A crucial aim of the new organisation (which will be open,
it is envisaged, to all researchers early in their scientific
careers and nominally aged between 15 and 40), is to bridge
the gap between north and south. One of the young founders
explained the need in terms of his own situation: Serge
Sawadogo said, “I’ m doing research in malaria, a disease that
ravages my country. There are no facilities in Burkina Faso to
study immunogenetics, so I conduct my research in France.”
Through its activities, WAYS will seek to find practical and
effective solutions in the development of science to achieve a
more humane and civilised world. WAYS will hold its founding
General Assembly in Tunisia during the fall of 2004. Meanwhile
it is seeking the active participation of young scientists from all
over the world in its development.
Interested researchers are invited
to contact the WAYS Secretariat.
Peter Kerey
World Academy of Young Scientists
kerey@reak.bme.hu
Tel.: +36 30 441 7679
For further information please contact:
Marta Maczel - Maria Harsanyi
WAYS Secretariat
Tel.: +36-1-279-6119; +36-30-645-6621
ways@sztaki.hu
Mailing address:
H-1461 Budapest
P.O. Box 372.
Hungary
Call for René Descartes prize
Prize for teams having achieved outstanding scientific or technological results
from European collaborative research. Total indicative budget for this prize is one million euro.
21 January 2004.- The European Commission
has published a call for proposals for the Rene Descartes
prizes, funded under the ‘’science and society’’ activity of the
‘’structuring the European Research Area (ERA)’’ specific
programme of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6).
Prizes are available in the following categories:
- Prize for teams having achieved outstanding scientific or
technological results from European collaborative research in
any field of science, including the economic, social and human
sciences (4.3.4.2ai in the work programme).
The total indicative budget for this prize is one million euro.
The minimum amount for a prize will be 200,000 euro.
- Prize for organisations or individuals having achieved
outstanding results in science communication. (4.3.4.2aii in
the work programme). European and national organisations
which carry out awards in the following fields are invited to
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send proposals for:
- professional scientists engaged in science communication
to the public;
- press articles contributing to the popularisation of
science;
- scientific documentaries;
- popular science books;
- innovative action for science communication;
- editorial policy for the promotion of science;
- scientific television/radio programme.
The total indicative budget for this prize is 250,000 euro.
The minimum amount for a prize will be 50,000 euro.
The deadline for applying is 11.5.2004.
Full details of this announcement at
www.cordis.lu/descartes/
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ESF Call:
Investigating Life in Extreme Environments
A Call for Expression of Interest from the Standing Committee for Life and Environmental Sciences (LESC)
together with ESF’s Expert Committees: the ESF Marine Board (EMB), the European Polar Board (EPB) and
the European Space Science Committee (ESSC).
Primitive and complex life forms are capable
of surviving within a wide range of extreme environmental
dynamics in the polar and marine realms. There is also
increasing evidence of potential analogue environments in
the space domain as we begin to explore planetary systems.
Some common and inter-linked parameters may be identified
from the micro to macro scales, including issues such as
genetic adaptation, heat regulation, and for higher life forms,
the psychological impact of living in a harsh environment.
ESF’s Standing Committee for Life, Earth and Environmental
Sciences together with ESF’s Expert Committees (EMB, EPB,
ESSC) have identified the topic Investigating Life in Extreme
Environments as an important area that should be addressed
through broad European scientific and technological activities.
The main purpose of this Call is to identify key challenging
topics from any discipline in this area and investigate the best
ways to explore them.
This consultation process will provide ESF with the views
of the European scientific community on these issues. All
Expression of Interest received will be synthesised in order to
identify key topics of interest to be developed at the European
level.
Submissions of Expression of Interest are invited from
researchers based in Europe. The abstract should be submitted
by March 23, 2004 and should not exceed 400 words.
A panel will discuss the received ideas (Expressions of
Interest) in the last week of April, 2004. All scientists putting
forward ideas will be informed about the outcome of this
exercise. The most engaging ideas will be pursued in a
collaborative way through ESF-managed workshop(s) to be
held in 2004/2005.
Please send Expressions of Interest, and any
questions to:
Nicolas Walter
European Science Foundation
Email:nwalter@esf.org
Record summers might become more common
Last summer’s European heatwave high temperatures were far outside the range of past observations.
Scientists at ETH Zurich and MeteoSwiss, in an article in Nature, to account for this observation,
propose that in addition to a general rise in temperatures, summer temperature variability
is likely to increase in Europe.
08 January 2004.- Summer 2003, in much
of Europe, broke previous records, with temperatures five
degrees celsius above long-term averages. This resulted in
forest fires, serious crop losses, water shortages and deaths
from the heat. An important question is to establish how such
an unusual climatic event can be reconciled with long-term
data, and how it can be explained. Scientists from the Institute
for Atmospheric and Climate Science at the ETH Zurich and
from MeteoSwiss have now proposed a possible explanation.
The results of their research –financed by the Swiss National
Science Foundation and the EU project PRUDENCE – have
been published in the journal Nature.
ETH Professor Christoph Schar suggests that the reason
for the unusual conditions last summer may be found in an
increase in climate variability, i.e., stronger fluctuations from
one summer to the next. As a result of climate change, not only
mean temperatures but also the variability around the mean
may increase. This makes extremely hot summers more likely.
The same applies for the low precipitation amounts. However,
despite the mean warming cool rainy summers may still occur
from time to time.
The calculations are based on a scenario for the period
from 2071 to 2100. This scenario is based on the assumption
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that the concentration of greenhouse gases rises to twice the
current level by the end of the century. For their projections
the ETH research team adopted a new approach, using
a regional climate model. This allows for a more detailed
description of the climate and water cycle than is possible with
a global model alone. The record summer is comparable to the
anticipated mean temperature and precipitation conditions for
the final third of the century.
The research was funded by the National Centre of
Competence in Research on Climate (NCCR climate) and
the EU project PRUDENCE. NCCR climate is a network of
some 100 scientists working in seven partner organisations,
one of which is the ETH Zurich. The Leading House for the
programme is the University of Bern. NCCR Climate is backed
by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Reference URL for the Prudence project:
http://prudence.dmi.dk
Source: AlphaGalileo
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AGU Adopts New Statement
on Human Impacts on Climate
The American Geophysical Union has adopted a new position statement, “Human
Impacts on Climate.” It was adopted by a unanimous vote of the AGU Council at its
regular meeting in San Francisco, California, on December 12.
WASHINGTON, 13 Jan. 2004.- The American
Geophysical Union has adopted a new position statement,
“Human Impacts on Climate.” It was adopted by a unanimous
vote of the AGU Council at its regular meeting in San
Francisco, California, on December 12. The new statement
replaces “Climate Change and Greenhouse Gases,” which
was adopted in 1998 and reaffirmed in 2002 (AGU position
statements expire in four years, unless extended by the
Council).
In a press release, AGU announced the new position
statement:
“Human activities are increasingly altering the Earth’s
climate. These effects add to natural influences that have
been present over Earth’s history. Scientific evidence strongly
indicates that natural influences cannot explain the rapid
increase in global near-surface temperatures observed during
the second half of the 20th century.
Human impacts on the climate system include increasing
concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon
dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons and their substitutes, methane,
nitrous oxide, etc.), air pollution, increasing concentrations of
airborne particles, and land alteration. A particular concern is
that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide may be rising faster
than at any time in Earth’s history, except possibly following
rare events like impacts from large extraterrestrial objects.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have increased
since the mid-1700s through fossil fuel burning and changes in
land use, with more than 80% of this increase occurring since
1900. Moreover, research indicates that increased levels of
carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds
to thousands of years. It is virtually certain that increasing
atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases will cause global surface climate to be
warmer.
The complexity of the climate system makes it difficult
to predict some aspects of human-induced climate change:
exactly how fast it will occur, exactly how much it will change,
and exactly where those changes will take place. In contrast,
scientists are confident in other predictions. Mid-continent
warming will be greater than over the oceans, and there will be
greater warming at higher latitudes. Some polar and glacial ice
will melt, and the oceans will warm; both effects will contribute
to higher sea levels. The hydrologic cycle will change and
intensify, leading to changes in water supply as well as flood
and drought patterns. There will be considerable regional
variations in the resulting impacts.
Scientists’ understanding of the fundamental processes
responsible for global climate change has greatly improved
during the last decade, including better representation of
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carbon, water, and other biogeochemical cycles in climate
models. Yet, model projections of future global warming
vary, because of differing estimates of population growth,
economic activity, greenhouse gas emission rates, changes in
atmospheric particulate concentrations and their effects, and
also because of uncertainties in climate models.
Actions that decrease emissions of some air pollutants
will reduce their climate effects in the short term. Even so, the
impacts of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations would
remain.
The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change states as an objective the ‘...stabilization of
greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level
that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with
the climate system.’ AGU believes that no single threshold level
of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere exists at
which the beginning of dangerous anthropogenic interference
with the climate system can be defined. Some impacts have
already occurred, and for increasing concentrations there
will be increasing impacts. The unprecedented increases in
greenhouse gas concentrations, together with other human
influences on climate over the past century and those
anticipated for the future, constitute a real basis for concern.
Enhanced national and international research and other
efforts are needed to support climate related policy decisions.
These include fundamental climate research, improved
observations and modeling, increased computational capability,
and very importantly, education of the next generation of climate
scientists. AGU encourages scientists worldwide to participate
in climate research, education, scientific assessments, and
policy discussions. AGU also urges that the scientific basis
for policy discussions and decision-making be based upon
objective assessment of peer-reviewed research results.
Science provides society with information useful in dealing
with natural hazards such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and
drought, which improves our ability to predict and prepare for
their adverse effects. While human-induced climate change
is unique in its global scale and long lifetime, AGU believes
that science should play the same role in dealing with climate
change. AGU is committed to improving the communication of
scientific information to governments and private organizations
so that their decisions on climate issues will be based on the
best science.
The global climate is changing and human activities are
contributing to that change. Scientific research is required to
improve our ability to predict climate change and its impacts
on countries and regions around the globe. Scientific research
provides a basis for mitigating the harmful effects of global
climate change through decreased human influences (e.g.,
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slowing greenhouse gas emissions, improving land management practices), technological advancement (e.g., removing carbon
from the atmosphere), and finding ways for communities to adapt and become resilient to extreme events.
Adopted by AGU Council, December, 2003.”
AGU Release No. 03-35
Contact:
Harvey Leifert
hleifert@agu.org
Key data on women and science released by the EC
The Commission has just released “She Figures 2003”, a unique compilation of key data, which presents the
latest figures on the participation of women in scientific education and employment.
Quote from the Press
Release:
“The number of women researchers
in universities and businesses across
Europe is on the increase. Yet there
are signs that government research
institutes in some countries are losing
researchers, both men and women.
Despite accounting for 40% of today’s
Ph.D. graduates in Europe, women
represent only 15% of researchers
in enterprises, and one third of the
researchers in government and higher
education research institutions. And
less than one person in ten of the top
layer of academic staff is a woman in
six Member States. (...) CEOs of top
European companies (...) signed a
commitment to boost the number of
women researchers in their companies,
and make the most of their talent. (...)
‘She Figures 2003’ is a handy
reference tool that will enable policymakers to review the latest European
and national trends for both highly
qualified women and men. It presents
descriptive statistics and indicators for
EU Member States and Associated
Countries as well as explanatory texts
and methodological notes. As such,
the document signals a new era in
the availability of sex-disaggregated
data on human resources in the
European Research Area. Only 15
% women in Business Enterprise
Sector She Figures 2003 finds overall
healthy growth rates in the numbers
of researchers in the Higher Education
sector in nearly all Member States
and Candidate Countries, and among
industrial researchers in Portugal,
Spain, Finland, Italy, Lithuania, Cyprus,
Norway and Hungary between 19982001. However, government research
institutions and industry lost research
staff, both women and men, in about
half of the Associated countries during
the same period. The percentage of
research posts held by women is half
as much in the Business Enterprise
Sector (15%) than in the Higher
Education Sector (34%) or Government
Research institutions (31%). Between
1999 and 2000, the average percentage
of women researchers for the EU-15
increased slightly by 2% in the Higher
Education Sector (from 32% to 34%).
Why are women so under-represented?
Level of qualification can no longer be
regarded as an excuse for the underrepresentation of women as researchers.
However, the statistics presented in She
Figures 2003 suggest that appropriately
qualified women may be less likely
than their male counterparts to opt for
research posts in R&D, and are more
likely to prefer technical occupations.
Since today’s graduates are tomorrow’s
scientists, She Figures 2003 examines
the graduate statistics for 2001 and has
discovered that the EU-15 average for
women graduates from doctoral / Ph.D.
education has just reached 40%. In
all of the Associated countries except
Hungary, the Czech Republic and
Norway, more than 40% of graduates
from these advanced programmes are
women.
In six out of the 14 Member States
presented in She Figures 2003, there is
still less than one woman for every ten
men in the top echelons of academia.
From 1999-2000, there was a slight
overall increase from 11.6% to 13.2%
women in the top grades of University
staff, but in Austria and the Netherlands
only 6% of senior academic staff are
women. Just 3% of the top layer of
academic staff in engineering sciences
in Portugal (‘Professor Catedratico’) are
women and this figure is as low as 1.7%
in Austria. Men are overall three times
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more likely than women to reach the
most senior levels. Only 6.4% of women
academics reach these top grades in
the EU, whereas the same recognition is
reserved for as many as 18.8% of men.
Women also appear to be blocked from
membership of scientific boards. In eight
out of 15 Member States and in nine out
of 11 Associated Countries, less than
25% of the members of scientific boards
are women. These figures are as low as
6.6% in Luxembourg, 10.3% in Belgium
and 11.8% in Austria. This calls for an
urgent review of recruitment strategies
and appointment procedures. The lack
of women in senior, decision-making
positions in science means that their
individual and collective opinions are
less likely to be voiced and heard in the
crucially important ‘science and society’
dialogue.
She Figures 2003 marks the
beginning of a comprehensive collection
of sex-disaggregated data on women
in science. All the countries involved
in this activity will continue monitoring
these indicators in the future, in order
to measure the rapid change occurring
in the gender dynamics of the European
Research Area. Bringing together
this data in a co-ordinated way is the
result of a specific effort on the part
of the Statistical Correspondents of
the Helsinki Group on Women and
Science.”
The full report can be found at:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/
science-society/highlights_en.html
and
http://europa.eu.int/comm/
research/science-society/women/wssi/
publications_en.html
European Commission
Press Release
Global Allergy and Asthma European Network
GA²LEN, a €29 million Network of Excellence funded through the EU Sixth Research Framework
Programme (FP6 2002-2006), will study allergy and asthma throughout the course of life.
9 February 2004.- GA²LEN,
a €29 million Network of Excellence
funded through the EU Sixth Research
Framework Programme (FP6 20022006), will study allergy and asthma
throughout the course of life. According
to an EC Press release this will include
intrauterine life and foeto-maternal
interactions, the relation between
genetic and environmental factors
in early life and the development of
allergies, via the analysis of statistical
samples of existing and newborn
Europeans. The study aims to create
an international network of European
centres of excellence which will conduct
multidisciplinary research programmes
on issues relating to the environment
(including outdoor and indoor pollution),
nutrition, lifestyle (including occupation),
infections and genetic susceptibility.
Genetic and epidemiological studies
will address the relation between
genetics and the environment, which
might underpin the dramatic increase in
allergy rates in the EU over the last few
decades.
The project also encompasses the
effect of nutritional patterns on allergic
disposition through epidemiological
studies focusing on specific regions.
The dissemination of information to
patients and the public is necessary
in order to reduce the socio-economic
impact of allergy and asthma. The 5year project is co-ordinated by Dr. Paul
Vancauwenberge, University of Ghent
(Belgium) and the EU will provide funds
of €14.4 million contributing to the total
budget of €29 million.
More information can be found at:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/
headlines/news/article_04_02_03_
en.html
The Network was launched at an
event in Hotel Le Meridien in Brussels
on 12 February 2004.
Source: EC Research web site
Research Announcement
The European Space Agency together with NASA, JAXA, DLR, CNES, CSA, and NSAU are soliciting
proposals for Space Life Science experiments.
Noordwijk, 3/2/2004.- The European Space Agency
together with NASA, JAXA, DLR, CNES, CSA, and NSAU are
soliciting proposals for Space Life Science experiments to be
conducted on the International Space Station (ISS). Please
notice that the ESA Announcement also includes additional
research opportunities not described in the International
Research Announcement.
Deadlines are:
For Notices of intent: 2 March 2004
For proposals: 5 May 2004
The complete text of the research announcement can be
viewed and downloaded at
http://www.spaceflight.esa.int/ILSRA
Didier Schmitt,
Head of Life Sciences Unit,
Didier.Schmitt@esa.int
Timothy Killeen Elected President-Elect of AGU
Timothy Killeen, Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder,
Colorado, has been elected President-Elect of the American Geophysical Union.
WASHINGTON, 17 Feb-ruary 2004.- With a
press release, the American Geophysical Union announced
today that Timothy Killeen, Director of the National Center
for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado,
has been elected President-Elect of AGU. According to the
press release, Killeen will become President-Elect on July 1,
2004, and will assume the presidency of the 41,000 member
organization on July 1, 2006. The current President-Elect, John
A. Orcutt, Professor of Geophysics at the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography in La Jolla, California, becomes President on
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July 1, 2004, succeeding Robert E. Dickinson of the Georgia
Institute of Technology.
The other Union officers elected were Terry E. Tullis of
Brown University as General Secretary and Anny A. Cazenave
of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales in Toulouse, France,
as International Secretary (both re-elected).
AGU members also elected presidents-elect and other
officers of the organization’s eleven scientific sections. They
take office on July 1, 2004, and the presidents-elect become
section presidents two years later.
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ESA to select new Earth Explorer missions
This spring it will be decided which of the six candidate Earth Explorer missions are to be selected for
development. Before decisions are taken, the user community is invited to express their views.
5 February 2004.- An
important milestone for ESA’s Living
Planet Programme is to be reached
this spring when it will be decided
which of the six candidate Earth
Explorer missions are to be selected
for development. Before decisions are
taken, the user community is invited to
express their views at the Earth Explorer
User Consultation Meeting which will be
held on 19-20 April at ESA’s ESRIN
facility in Frascati, Italy.
Following
the
successful
implementation of the ERS satellites
and Envisat, which address Earth
science issues of a global nature,
Earth Explorers are smaller research
missions dedicated to specific aspects
of our Earth environment. The first
four Earth Explorers were selected
for development in 1999, the first of
which is due for launch at the end of
this year. Over the last two years the
Agency has been working on the next
generation of candidate missions and
is currently evaluating the resulting six
satellite concepts. Before the Earth
Science Advisory Committee provides
recommendations to the Agency, the six
missions will be reviewed at the Earth
Explorer User Consultation Meeting.
Meeting registration details and
the Agenda can be found at: http:
//esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/EEUCM/
index.html
The six candidate missions are:
EarthCARE
(Earth,
Clouds,
Aerosols and Radiation Explorer
The biggest scientific uncertainties in
climate change prediction are associated
with the effect that clouds and aerosols
have on the Earth’s radiative budget.
Although it is known that high-altitude
clouds warm the Earth while clouds
lower in the atmosphere contribute to
cooling, it is unclear whether clouds
have an overall warming or cooling
effect on the Earth. Aerosols can also
have both a warming and a cooling
effect. Estimates of global warming
currently have an uncertainty of 4-5°C.
The main aim of the EarthCARE mission
is to measure clouds and aerosols and
the geophysical parameters associated
with them in order to minimise climate
predication uncertainty.
SPECTRA (Surface Processes
and Ecosystem Changes Through
Response Analysis)
The release of carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere by human activity is
recognised as one of the main drivers
of climate change, therefore a better
understanding of the biosphere’s
ability to sequester carbon from the
atmosphere is extremely important. In
order to address issues such as climate
change, the greenhouse effect and
environmental degradation it is vital to
understand more about the interactions
between
terrestrial
ecosystems,
in particular vegetation, and the
atmosphere. The objective of this
mission is to describe, understand and
model the role of terrestrial vegetation in
the global carbon cycle and its response
to climate variability.
WALES (Water vapour and Lidar
Experiment in Space)
Water vapour is the dominant
greenhouse gas and knowledge of its
distribution is crucial to understanding
the global energy and water cycle, cloud
interaction, radiation and dynamics
and transport processes in the Earth’s
atmosphere. Water vapour data
are therefore of primary importance
for climate and numerical weather
prediction. The objective of WALES
is to overcome the shortcomings of
radiosondes and passive satellite
sensors by providing global water
vapour observations in the troposphere
and lowermost stratosphere with high
vertical resolution and accuracy. It will
also provide accurate measurements
of areas with low humidity and low
temperature such as polar regions.
ACE+ (Atmosphere and Climate
Explorer)
Accurate observations of humidity
and temperature in the troposphere and
stratosphere, including their variability,
are highly important in climate change
research. The aim is to monitor climatic
variations and trends throughout the
free troposphere and stratosphere and
during different seasons so as to improve
THE EGGS
9
the understanding of climate feedbacks.
ACE+ will establish highly accurate
and vertically resolved climatologies
of humidity in the troposphere and of
temperature in both the free troposphere
and the stratosphere. This will allow
the validation and improvement of
atmospheric models in support of
climate research and numerical weather
prediction.
EGPM (European contribution to
the Global Precipitation Monitoring
mission)
Compared with the Earth’s total
water budget the amount that is
available as freshwater is extremely
small. Precipitation is a crucial element
affecting life on Earth and constitutes
the foremost exchange process within
the water cycle. EGPM is part of the
bigger international GPM (Global
Precipitation Monitoring) mission, which
aims to measure precipitation all over
the world every three hours. EGPM has
its own unique objectives to measure
light precipitation and snowfall. The
mission will improve rainfall estimation
accuracy, enhance the detectability
of light rain and snowfall, particularly
over land and at high altitudes, and it
will provide a significant contribution
to the monitoring and understanding of
hazardous storms along the coasts of
the Mediterranean.
SWARM (a constellation of small
satellites to study the dynamics of
the Earth’s magnetic field)
Magnetic field plays an important
role in many of the physical processes
throughout the Universe. The Earth is
surrounded by a large and complicated
magnetic field caused to a large extent
by a self-sustaining dynamo operating
in the fluid outer-core. Currents flowing
in the ionosphere, magnetosphere
and oceans, and magnetised rock and
currents induced in the Earth by timevarying fields also influence the magnetic
field. SWARM will provide the best ever
survey of the geomagnetic field and its
temporal evolution, offering new insights
into the composition and processes in
the interior and the surroundings of the
Earth, thereby improving our knowledge
of the Earth’s interior and climate.
The first-generation Earth Explorers
are all currently under implementation.
CryoSat will be launched at the end of
2004 and is dedicated to monitoring
precise changes in the thickness of
polar ice-sheets and floating sea-ice.
It will be followed by the Gravity Field
and Steady-State Ocean Circulation
Explorer
(GOCE)
scheduled
for
launch in 2006, which will measure
high-accuracy gravity gradients and
provide global models of the Earth’s
gravity field and of the geoid. In 2007,
the Atmospheric Dynamics Mission
(ADM-Aeolus) will be launched to make
novel advances in global wind profile
observations. The Soil Moisture and
Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission will also
be launched in 2007 and will provide
global observations of soil moisture and
ocean salinity.
The Earth Explorer User Consultation
Meeting is an important milestone in the
Living Planet Programme that will pave
the way for the continuation of Earth
Observation missions from space to
advance our understanding of the Earth
system.
From the ESA Portal
UK and ESA announce Beagle 2 inquiry
Today, the UK Science Minister Lord Sainsbury and the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that an
ESA/UK inquiry would be held into the failure the Beagle 2 lander. The Inquiry Board is to be chaired by the
ESA Inspector General, Rene Bonnefoy.
Paris, 11 February 2004.- Beagle 2, the Britishbuilt element of ESA’s Mars Express mission, has failed to
communicate since its first radio contact was missed shortly
after it was due to land on Mars on Christmas Day. The Beagle
2 Management Board met in London on Friday 6 February
and, following an assessment of the situation, declared
Beagle 2 lost.
Today, the UK Science Minister Lord Sainsbury and the
European Space Agency (ESA) announced that an ESA/UK
inquiry would be held into the failure the Beagle 2 lander.
Lord Sainsbury, of the Department of Trade and Industry,
said: “I believe such an inquiry will be very useful. The reasons
identified by the Inquiry Board will allow the experience gained
from Beagle 2 to be used for the benefit of future European
planetary exploration missions.”
The Inquiry Board is to be chaired by the ESA Inspector
General, Rene Bonnefoy. The UK deputy chairman will be
David Link MBE.
The inquiry will investigate whether it can be established
why Beagle 2 may have failed and set out any lessons which
can be learnt for future missions. Such inquiries are routine
in the event of unsuccessful space missions and this one will
help inform future ESA robotic missions, to Mars and other
bodies in the solar system.
The Inquiry Board will be set up under normal ESA
procedures by the Inspector General. Because the inquiry is
into a British-built lander, it will report to Lord Sainsbury as well
as to the Director General of ESA.
Its terms of reference are as follows:
1. Technical Issues
· Assess the available data/documentation pertaining
to the in-orbit operations, environment and performance
characterisation, and to the on-ground tests and analyses
during development;
· Identify possible issues and shortcomings in the above
and in the approach adopted, which might have contributed to
the loss of the mission;
have contributed to the loss of the mission.
The Board, made up of people with no direct involvement
in the Beagle 2 mission, is expected to begin work shortly and
report by the end of March 2004.
The key players in the Beagle 2 mission, including Colin
Pillinger, the Open University, the University of Leicester, the
National Space Science Centre, EADS-Astrium, and BNSC
partners have all welcome the setting up of the Inquiry Board.
The Beagle 2 project to make a lander element of the ESA
Mars Express mission was headed by the Open University,
providing the science lead, and EADS-Astrium, the prime
contractor responsible for the main design, development and
management of the lander.
David Link is a former Director of Science and Radar
Observation at Matra Marconi Space, now EADS-UK.
Beagle 2 was designed to look for signs of life on Mars. It
was to parachute down to the surface of the planet and collect
soil samples, which would have been analysed for signs of past
and present biological activity. The lander was also packed
with a suite of instruments to take pictures, acquire geological
information and study the weather, including temperature,
pressure and wind.
The Beagle 2 lander was funded through a partnership
arrangement involving the Open University, EADS-Astrium,
the DTI, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council
(PPARC), the Office of Science and Technology and ESA.
Funding also came from the National Space Science Centre
and the Wellcome Foundation. UK principal investigators
for Beagle 2 came from the Open University (gas analysis
package), Leicester University (environmental sensors and
x-ray spectrometer) and Mullard Space Science Laboratory
(imaging systems).
The ESA Mars Express spacecraft, the mother ship,
successfully entered orbit around Mars on Christmas Day
and, following a series of orbital manoeuvres, has been
performing excellently as it starts its two-year global survey of
the planet. Among first results announced on 23 January were
unprecedented 3-D high-resolution images of the surface and
the detection of water ice on the South Pole.
2. Programmatics
· Analyse the programmatic environment (i.e. decisionmaking processes, level of funding and resources,
management and responsibilities, interactions between the
various entities) throughout the development phase;
· Identify possible issues and shortcomings which might
THE EGGS
ESA Media Relations
Press Release 09-2004
10
Predicting recovery of acidified freshwaters in Europe and Canada
Special issue of Hydrology and Earth System Science (HESS)
A Special issue of HESS (Volume 7, Number 4, 2003) presents papers from various projects (also from the
RECOVER:2010 and EMERGE projects) aiming at predicting future water chemistry in Europe and Canada given standard
scenarios of future emissions of S and N. Mountainous lake regions in Europe and Eastern Canada are included in these
predictions. The articles can be viewed online at
http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/hess/hs7/contents7-4.htm
NPG Special issue on the ocassion of the 70th birthday
of Prof. A.D. Kirwan Jr.
Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics (NPG) Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 dedicated to A.D. Kinley Jr.
Below the Preface of the Special issue,
by Al Osborne:
His national and international memberships include the
American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical
Union, the American Association for Advancement of Science,
the Society of Engineering Science, the American Physical
Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, the European
Geophysical Union, and Sigma Xi.
Kirwan has developed significant research collaborations
with Brown University in Rhode Island, the California Institute
of Technology, and Old Dominion University in Virginia;
government research laboratories such as the Naval Research
Laboratory and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic
(SACLANT) Undersea Research Centre in Italy.
Kirwan received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton
University and his doctorate from Texas A&M University. His
book Mother Nature’s Two Laws: Ringmasters for Circus Earth,
recently published by World Scientific, introduces nonscientists
to thermodynamics and explains how this science is applied in
issues of societal concern. Kirwan has also co-edited the book
Rapid Environmental Assessment published in 1998.
We would all like to congratulate Denny for his 70th
birthday! We all have fond memories of having worked with
him in many fruitful collaborations over the years. This issue is
dedicated to him as a symbol of the scientific excellence that
he represents to all of his many friends and colleagues, the
level of excellence to which we would all strive to achieve.”
NPG, Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics (2004) 11: 1 can
be viewed online at
http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/npg/11/contents1.htm
“Prof. A. D. Kirwan, Jr. (Denny to his friends) has had a
long and distinguished career as a physical oceanographer.
Denny is currently program director of Physical Ocean
Science and Engineering at the University of Delaware. He
has held academic positions at Old Dominion University, the
University of South Florida, Texas A&M University, and New
York University. He was program director for the Physical and
Chemical Oceanography Program, Office of Naval Research,
and worked as a research scientist for both Exxon Production
Research Company and Science Applications, Inc. While at
Texas A&M University, he developed technology enabling
scientists to measure surface currents by satellite-tracked
drifting buoys. More recently, he has been active in applying
dynamical systems methods to oceanography.
He is author/co-author of over 70 reviewed papers and
articles in scientific journals, and he is a former editor of
Journal of Geophysical Research and of Nonlinear Processes
in Geophysics.
Dr. Kirwan has served on a number of national and
international oversight committees for ocean research. Dr.
Kirwan’s awards include a Fulbright Research Fellowship
to Freie Universitat, West Berlin, and the Outstanding
Performance Award at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
He had been an invited lecturer at several foreign institutions.
His career has included active duty as a lieutenant in the U.S.
Navy.
THE EGGS
11
Aurora
The magnificent northern lights
Ioannis Daglis and Syun-Ichi Akasofu on the splendors of aurora
Image 1: Auroral bands with rays, Alaska. © Jan Curtis
The aurora is beautiful, spectacular, splendid, and appears quite frequent - almost nightly in the polar sky.
Appearing in the form of majestic, colourful, irregular lights in the night sky, the aurora has a variety of shapes,
colours, and structures, and continuously changing in time. Everybody who has seen the Northern Lights
will agree that they are nature’s optical poetry. Physicists say that the aurora is just a large-scale electrical
discharge phenomenon in the high-altitude atmosphere, resulting from quantum leaps in oxygen and nitrogen
atoms. Indeed, the aurora is atomic physics, but the aurora was also a superstitious subject in mythology
and fairy tales. From ancient times, it has filled people with awe and wonder, with delight and pleasure, with
both joy and fear. It has inspired artists and it also terrified people who thought that the end of the world was
approaching. Exact explanations of the phenomenon had to wait until modern space and particle physics
was developed in the 20th century and knowledge about details in the Earth’s electromagnetic environment
became available through spacecraft measurements.
THE EGGS
12
oxygen and nitrogen atoms and
molecules are energized and/or
ionized by energetic electrons.
In this transition region between
the earth’s atmosphere and nearearth space free electrons abound.
Accelerated by electric fields in
the magnetosphere, a cometshaped structure around the Earth,
energetic electrons streaming
along geomagnetic field lines hit
and excite atoms and molecules.
The auroral light results from the
de-excitation of these particles. The
colour, shape, and intensity depend
on the electromagnetic forces that
shoot electrons downward into the
upper atmosphere.
Since prehistoric times, there
have been many beliefs about the
Northern Lights. The Inuit people
in Northeast Canada have the
following belief regarding auroral
displays: “The sky is a huge dome
of hard material arched over the flat earth and outside of it
there is light. In the dome there are a large number of small
holes and through these holes you can see the light from the
outside when it is dark. And through these holes the spirits
of the dead can pass into the heavenly regions. The way to
heaven leads over a narrow bridge which spans an enormous
abyss. The spirits that were already in heaven light torches to
guide the feet of the new arrivals. These torches are called
the Northern Lights.” The Eskimos of the lower Yukon River
believed that the aurora was the dance of animal spirits (deer,
seals and salmon).
In Middle-Age central Europe, the Northern Lights were
considered a bad omen. They warned of illness, plague and
death. When red, which is the most common colour of aurora
at mid to low latitudes (i.e. central Europe), they signalled
the outbreak of war. On the contrary, up in the North, in
Image 2: Aurora in Manitoba, Canada. © Warren Justice
Northern Lights appear in a narrow
annular belt around both the northern and southern
geomagnetic poles, over Fairbanks, Tromso and Kiruna, in
a variable pattern. Seen from there, the display starts with a
phosphorescent glow over the horizon. The glow dies out and
comes back, and then an arch is lit. It drifts up over in the sky
as new arches are lit and follow the first one. Small waves
and curls move along the arches. Then, within a few minutes
a dramatic change is seen in the sky. A hailstorm of charged
particles hit the upper atmosphere in what is called an auroral
substorm. Rays of light shoot down from space, forming light
draperies, which spread all over the sky. They really compare
to draperies or curtains that are flickering in the wind. They
also remind us of Swan Lake and other dance performances.
We can see a violet and a red trimming at the lower and upper
ends, or the colours all mixed together, woven into each other.
The curtains disappear and form all
over again by new rays of light shooting
down from space. Above our head, we
can see rays converging to a point
in the sky, forming what is called an
auroral corona. After 10 to 20 minutes
the storm is over and the activity
decreases. The bands are spread
out, disintegrating in a diffuse light all
over the sky. We can not see individual
pockets of light, but the total effect is
bright enough to enable us to make out
details of the countryside around us. If
we look very carefully, we can see the
remains of the Northern Lights display
as faint, pulsating flames. Clouds of
light are turning on and off regularly
every few to tens of seconds by an
invisible switch. Then nature’s own
gigantic light-show is over.
What exactly happens? In the
highest reaches of the atmosphere,
above about a hundred kilometres,
THE EGGS
Image 3: Auroral bands in Alaska. © Carolyn Szepanski
13
Lights in his book Metereologia as a light resembling a
shining cloud. However, the credit for the first rational, nonmythical description of the aurora belongs to two Greek
philosophers from Asia Minor, who lived in the 6th century
B.C., i.e. some 200 years before Aristotle: Anaximenes of
Miletus (c. 585-528 B.C.) and Xenophanes of Colophon (c.
570-475 BC). Anaximenes was a pioneer in the revolutionary
new approach to the nature of human intellect that came to
be known as natural philosophy; and for him, fundamental
reality was material and mechanical. This is the viewpoint we
have inherited as “scientific.” Xenophanes, the founder of the
Eleatic school of philosophy, wrote of “moving accumulations
of burning clouds.” At about the same time, Plutarch gave a
clear description of the Northern Lights, but it was probably a
quotation from missing writings of Anaxagoras: “… there was
an enormous and furious figure in the sky. It was like a flaming
cloud, which did not stay at its position but moved windingly
and regularly …”.
In the fourth century B.C., Theophrastus of Eresos, a
student of Plato and Aristotle, was said to be one of the first
to observe sunspots, a solar feature that is linked to the
appearance of aurora. Many centuries later, in 1610, the
sunspots were rediscovered by Galileo. Galileo again, in 1619,
or, according to others, the French scientist and philosopher
Pierre Gassendi in 1622 was said to “christen” the Northern
Lights with the name that is still used: Aurora Borealis. The
etymology of the name is “Northern Dawn”, from the ancient
Greek goddess of dawn Eos (called Aurora in Latin), and the
word boreios (Borealis in Latin), meaning “northern” in Greek.
The existence of “Southern Lights” (Aurora Australis) was, of
course, unknown in Europe. The Aurora Australis was first
sighted by Europeans in the end of the 18th century, during the
expeditions of Captain James Cook around Australia and the
South Pacific. Cook’s crew on the HMS Endeavour recorded
that “a phenomenon appeared in the heavens in many things
resembling the aurora borealis”. Historical documents from
China later revealed that an aurora was observed on the same
night, 16 September 1770, in the Northern Hemisphere. Thus,
this was the first ever recorded sighting of mirror – or conjugate
– auroras.
Soon after Galileo, Descartes observed and commented
Image 4: Aurora over Yellowknife, Canada. © Peter Jeffery
Scandinavia, people’s conceptions were more characterized
by wonder and awe for this impressive phenomenon. One was
warned to step carefully during auroral displays and in no way
should the Northern Lights be frightened by waving, whistling,
staring or by showing any other form of disrespect.
Aurora has always been a particularly rare phenomenon
in low latitudes and had astonished
people in antiquity. Accordingly, it
has been recorded with effervescent
descriptions in the Theogony of Hesiod
and the Old Testament. Hesiod, one
of the greatest poets of the ancient
Greek civilization, mentioned “blazing
skies” and “flaming sky dragons” in
his Theogony (8th century B.C.). In
the Old Testament, Ezekiel’s vision
(6th century B.C.) of a burning wheel
way up in the middle of the sky can
be interpreted as the account of
either a comet or an aurora (Ezekiel,
1:1-28).
Nevertheless,
Ezekiel’s
interpretation of the phenomenon
was clearly religious. The first
attempt for a rational explanation of
the bright celestial appearance is
often credited to Aristotle. Instead
of invoking supernatural powers or
beasts, he described the Northern
THE EGGS
Image 5: Magnificent overhead aurora. © Jan Curtis.
14
where he established a network of
magnetic field observatories. The
results of his expeditions produced
the first determination of the global
pattern of electric currents in the
auroral region from ground magnetic
field measurements. Birkeland is
also known for his magnetized
terrella, which was suspended in
a vacuum chamber, simulating
the Earth. Birkeland directed an
electron beam toward the terrella
and noticed that the beam was
guided
toward
the
magnetic
poles and produced rings of light
around the poles. He consequently
concluded that the aurora could
be produced in a similar way.
Based on his terrella experiments,
he proposed a theory, according
to which energetic electrons are
ejected from sunspots on the solar
surface, then directed to the Earth,
and finally are guided to the Earth’s
Image 6: During the recent November storm, red aurora reached as far south as Athens, Greece! © Anthony
polar regions by the geomagnetic
Ayiomamitis.
field where they produce the visible
aurora. This device is now displayed
on the Northern Lights, but due to the extremely low solar
at the University of Tromso. The identity of the particles that
activity over the interval 1645 to 1715 (called the Maunder
actually produce the aurora remained uncertain for a long time,
minimum) there were no northern lights to observe and the
although laboratory experience (such as Birkeland’s) suggested
relevant discussions subsided. Following the spectacular
that these particles behaved like electrons. Eventually, half a
auroral displays in Europe in March 1716, Edmund Halley
century after Birkeland’s terrella experiments, auroral electrons
considered particles that move along the field lines of the
were observed by detectors aboard a rockoon, a combination
earth’s magnetic field, but his wholly terrestrial origin for the
of rocket and balloon, launched in 1954 into the aurora by
lights proved unsatisfactory. In 1733, the French scientist Jean
James Van Allen’s team at the University of Iowa.
Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan correctly proposed an interaction
In the early 20th century, Carl Stormer, known for
of zodiacal light material with the terrestrial atmosphere
his theoretical work on the orbits of particle trapped by
and even noted a connection with
sunspots, but both he and so great a
mind as Leonard Euler, who proposed
a theory based on reflected sunlight
in 1746, moved a step backward by
rejecting Halley’s link to geomagnetic
phenomena. Alexander von Humboldt
supported Halley’s conception by
showing a correlation between auroras
and geomagnetic disturbances in
1806, by observing slight changes
of the tip of a magnetic needle at
the time of auroral displays. Despite
von Humboldt’s support to Halley,
the theories of de Mairan and Euler
remained the leading rivals. In 1741,
the connection between the Northern
Lights and magnetic activity was also
proposed by the Swedish professor
of astronomy Anders Celsius, who
devised the Celsius thermometer.
At the end of the 19th century,
Kristian Olaf Birkeland, a famous
Norwegian scientist, organized a
series of expeditions to the highImage 7: “Curly” aurora over Greenland and Iceland. © DMSP
latitude regions of his country,
THE EGGS
15
the geomagnetic field, used
triangulation to estimate that
auroras occur most frequently
around at 100 km altitude. In the end
of the 1950s a new instrument was
developed, the “all-sky camera”,
which was able to record the entire
sky, from horizon to horizon, by
photographing its reflection from
a curved mirror. More than 100 allsky cameras were used during the
International Geophysical Year in
1957-1958, and their observations
led Yasha Feldstein to propose
the concept of the auroral oval
- the locus of usual appearance
of auroras. Since auroras are
in fact three-dimensional, the
auroral ovals (north and south)
actually are elliptical tori around
the poles. Each torus is up to
3,500 km in diameter and a few
hundred kilometres thick. The
two-dimensional projection of the
torus reminds a belt that is wider
on the night side of the Earth, and
is centred on the geomagnetic pole
while the earth revolves around the
geographic poles. The width of the
belt on the night side is up to 600
km.
The space age contributed
significantly to our understanding
of the aurora by opening several
new ways of studying it. The most
important one has been imaging
the aurora from above by satellites,
which permitted simultaneous
observations of large areas of
aurora and spectacular views.
Spacecraft can carry imaging
cameras that use filters to observe
the aurora in selected wavelengths
and block interference from
scattered sunlight. The first imager
was flown on the Canadian ISIS-2
spacecraft in 1972. It discovered
the “diffuse aurora”, i.e. a
continuous elliptical ring of aurora
around the polar cap, which is not
easily noticeable to observers on
the ground.
More
comprehensive
observations of the aurora from
above were carried out (1981 1987) by the US satellite Dynamics
Explorer 1 (DE-1), which moved
in an elongated polar orbit and
operated in several modes,
taking images both in the visible
and in the ultraviolet part of the
spectrum. With a time resolution
of several minutes, DE-1 was
Image 8:
Large-scale image of the auroral oval from space, as seen by the DMSP satellite on 21 July 1993. © DMSP
THE EGGS
16
in the auroral zone, presumably
accelerated by a voltage below the
satellite orbit. However, a voltage that
accelerates positive ions upwards will
also accelerate negative electrons
downwards. Accordingly, scientists
realized
that
the
accelerating
mechanism for electrons creating
the aurora must have been below
the spacecraft, and not in the deep
magnetotail or other far-away regions
where many scientists were looking
for it. As the peak altitude of S3-3
was 8000 km and the O+ ions were
typically observed at altitudes of the
order of one Earth radius (6371 km),
electron acceleration should take
place quite close to Earth, at distances
of about 6000 km or so.
We now know that the acceleration
of electrons creating the aurora
Image 9:
3-D view of the Aurora Australis, as seen by the astronauts of the Space Shuttle mission STS-39. © NASA
essentially is provided by electric
fields existing parallel to magnetic
fields or plasma instabilities. The
able to distinguish substorm phases in the morphology of
existence of such electric fields had been proposed in 1950
the aurora, but could not resolve finer details. DE-1 further
by the 1970 Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven. One would expect
imaged a special class of auroras that are not aligned with
that voltage differences along field lines would be soon
the auroral oval but lie across it, , generally aligned with the
cancelled by the electrons and ions that slide along the field
noon-midnight meridian. Such auroras occur at quieter times.
lines like beads. Alfven however, showed that under proper
DE-1 found that at times such arcs extended completely
conditions, the mirror force repelling trapped particles from
across the oval, bridging the dark space from the nightside to
regions of stronger magnetic field could balance this tendency
the dayside. Because this pattern resembles the Greek letter
to wipe out all voltage differences. Because the magnetic field
theta (a circle with a bar
across its middle), this
auroral form was named
the “theta aurora.” No
good explanation exists as
yet for either sunward arcs
or the theta aurora.
One of the central
questions has always
been the origin and
the acceleration of the
electrons
responsible
for the aurora. Early
researchers thought that
these electrons originated
far
away
(Birkeland
believed they came from
the Sun). The answer
came in 1976,
when
Don Gurnett and Lou
Frank of the University
of Iowa discovered the
so-called
‘inverted
V’
structure in the spectra of
auroral electrons; which
suggested an electric field
along the geomagnetic
field lines. The US Air
Force satellite S3-3, which
discovered positive oxygen
Image 10: In the Middle Ages, aurora was considered a bad omen in central Europe.
ions shooting upwards
THE EGGS
17
Image 11:
Image of a coloured
woodcut by Wolf
Drechsel, showing an
auroral display over
the German town of
Nuremberg on October
5, 1591.
is most intense near Earth, the repulsion is strongest there too,
and the voltage drop balanced by it turns out to be strongest
there as well.
Currently, three auroral imaging cameras covering
different parts of the spectrum (visible, UV, x-ray) are flying
aboard NASA’s Polar satellite, while another imager (extreme
ultraviolet) is flying aboard NASA’s IMAGE satellite. Another
NASA mission, the Fast Auroral SnapshoT (FAST), was
designed to resolve (as the name implies) rapid variations as it
flies through auroral arcs. FAST has been investigating plasma
processes occurring in the low altitude auroral acceleration
region. Several coordinated studies have been using data from
these three NASA spacecraft and have shed light on details of
auroral dynamics. We are beginning to grasp the acceleration
THE EGGS
process, leading to the magnificent celestial ballet of the
Northern Lights. However, we are still far from understanding
causes of the magnificent auroral displays associated with the
auroral substorm.
Dr. Ioannis A. Daglis
Research Director, National Observatory of Athens
Athens, Greece
Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu
Professor, University of Alaska
Director, International Arctic Research Center
Fairbanks, USA
18
Geoscience on parade:
What happened when more than 11,000 earth scientists gathered
in Nice last year
An account by Oliver Morton
On the evening of Sunday 6th April the baggage reclaim at Nice airport is full of people with tubes a metre
or so long slung over their shoulders. They bring their tubes in from the gates alone or with a friend; soon
they recognise others of their ilk and congregate collegially before the arrival of checked-in bags spurs them
to break off in taxi-sized cliques and head off into the night.The tube-bearers are coming to what is probably
the largest meeting of Earth scientists ever to take place in Europe - a joint meeting of the European Union
of Geosciences, the European Geophysical Society and the American Geophysical Union. The posters
wrapped up in their tubes carry the results and hypotheses that they will be presenting to their peers. When
the occasional poster tube turns up on the baggage carousel, there’s a mild susurration of shock at the
nonchalance of checking in a poster; lose your poster and you lose your presentation.
Monday morning
which even you could see them,” she says to Smit at one point.
Given that English is not her first language it’s possible that
she doesn’t mean this to sound as patronising as it does.
During a coffee break I talk to one of the majority group.
He tells me how important it is that a hypothesis should have
insistent critics like Keller. It keeps everyone on their toes. He
then tells me just how irritating it is that she won’t shut up.
In the Apollon theatre, a vast auditorium at one end of
Nice’s Acropolis congress centre, Jan Smit of Vrije University
in Amsterdam is talking about the Chicxulub crater in Mexico
- the site of the asteroid impact 65m years ago that seems to
have killed off the dinosaurs. Smit is part of an international
team that recently drilled a borehole into the rocks of the
crater, and this is one of the first presentations of their results.
Unfortunately, most of the people who might want to hear him
are stuck in a long queue outside the centre waiting to pick up
their badges and get through security.One person who made
a point of getting here early enough to be sure of making
the session is Gerta Keller of Princeton. Keller is the most
prominent of the small band of scientists who believe that
Chicxulub is not the impact that killed the dinosaurs. She nd
her colleagues think that the crater was made 300,000 years
before a second impact left the global layer of fallout that marks
the true boundary between the Cretaceous period and the
subsequent dinosaur-free Tertiary. Today she is focusing on a
layer of rock deep inside Chicxulub. Smit and his colleagues
think these rocks are sediments that flowed back into the
crater as soon as it was made, before the global fallout thrown
up by the impact had had a chance to do its falling. But on the
basis of tiny fossils within them, Keller thinks the sediments
represent 300,000 years of steady sedimentation between
the formation of the crater and the fallout layer, which must
have come from somewhere else. The opposition just doesn’t
accept it, much to Keller’s frustration. “I have some samples in
THE EGGS
Monday afternoon
I am beginning to realise how vast this meeting is. There
are about 11,000 delegates, maybe more - no one is sure. The
talks are divided into 22 “programme areas” corresponding to
sub-disciplines or interest groups: tectonism and sedimentary
processes, natural hazards, volcanology, geochemistry and
petrology, and so on. There are four or five sets of talks
going on in any one of these areas at any time. They are
accommodated in about two dozen theatres or large rooms on
the conference centre’s three floors. For the next week, each
space will have a new presentation every 15 or 30 minutes.
And that’s before the fruit of the tubes. In a huge marquee on
a nearby parking lot - reached by a walkway that is doubtless
much more sturdy than it feels - there is room for the display of
over 1,900 posters, which change every day.
If I’m diligent, I guess I could do some justice to 30
presentations a day, more than half in the form of posters,
though I won’t get all the subtleties. That represents about
1 per cent of what’s on offer. Unlike people with posters to
display, I don’t have a single outstanding reason for being
19
here. I write about the Earth and planetary sciences; I’ve
written a book about Mars and am planning a couple about
the Earth, and part of the point of coming is to build up ideas
and contacts for those projects. Shorter term, there are some
subjects here I should be digging into for articles I am working
on. But mainly I really enjoy a good scientific conference, and
this one sounded so promising I wanted to sample it. It’s a kind
of high-intensity face to face browsing.
One field I can browse with great pleasure is paleoclimatology, the study of the various and often peculiar
climates that the Earth has managed to produce for itself over
time. Among the most intriguing is the very warm climate of the
Eocene period, about 50m years ago; fossils from the Eocene
show that the world as a whole was warmer then than it is
today, and that at high latitudes it was much, much warmer.
The Thames valley was choked by mangrove swamps; forests
reached pretty much to the poles themselves.
There’s good evidence that during the Eocene (and similar
earlier periods) carbon dioxide levels were higher than they
are today, and that they warmed the world. But if you bump up
the carbon dioxide levels in computer models that reproduce
today’s climate, you don’t produce what the fossils seem to
show happened in the Eocene. You get a warmer world - but
not a world so startlingly warm at high latitudes. You can’t get
the poles hot enough.
Daniel Kirk-Davidoff, of the University of Maryland, offers
a possible mechanism for warming those recalcitrant poles. In
a warmer world, he argues, the flow of heat out of the tropics
towards the poles - the meridional flow - will be reduced. As a
result, the altitude of the tropopause - the boundary between
the lower atmosphere and the stratosphere -will be lower, at
the equator, than it is today. More water vapour will leak into
the stratosphere, making it a lot damper. This moisture will flow
north and south, and eventually form stratospheric clouds over
the poles, trapping the heat so that the poles will warm up.
(The details of which clouds warm the earth and which cool it
are a week of talks on their own; but polar stratospheric clouds
are definitely warmers.)
This mechanism provides a way for a world that is warmer
overall to get a lot warmer at the poles, which is what is needed
to make sense of some of those past greenhouse climates.
Though Kirk-Davidoff doesn’t expound on this, it’s possible
that when the amount of carbon dioxide reaches Eocene levels
we will see such an effect starting to amplify global warming.
Back in the press room - an oddly shaped space below
the banked seating of the Athena lecture theatre on the first
floor - I try to explain the virtues of Kirk-Davidoff’s argument
to my friend Gabrielle Walker, a former editor at New Scientist
and the author of Snowball Earth, a wonderful book about a
very different type of extreme climate from the past. Gabrielle
isn’t impressed, partly because I can’t reproduce some of the
subtleties of the argument well enough. The fact that I can’t
pronounce the word “meridional” consistently doesn’t help.
Moreover, Gabrielle has seen polar stratospheric clouds in
Finland and found them incredibly beautiful, like a sky “full of
peacock feathers.” She is unwilling to see a downside to such
beauty.
presence. The AGU, like most US scientific organisations,
takes press communications more seriously than its European
counterparts.
The methane press conference, chaired by the unflappable
AGU press officer, Harvey Leifert, covers several lines of
research into the vast deposits of clathrate - a sort of methanerich ice - that have been found under the sediments of various
seas and oceans. The methane is produced by bacteria in the
deepest sediments. Some people - notably James Kennett of
the University of California, Santa Barbara - think that sudden
releases of methane from these clathrate stores have huge
effects on the climate (methane is a much more powerful
greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide). Kennett thinks that
methane in the air bubbles trapped in ice laid down at the
ends of various ice ages is evidence of a “methane trigger,”
and that a sudden spike of methane-induced warming set off a
longer term, carbon dioxide-based warming. Others think the
methane spikes at he ends of ice ages are a response to the
initial warming, not its cause. After an hour of press conference
and another hour of milling around with the speakers, it’s not
clear if any side in the debate has the upper hand. Carbon
14 dating of the methane in the ice would do the trick - but
it is difficult to measure, and the people trying it ay not have
definitive results for some time.
Later, at one of the hundreds of posters on the topic, I
come across a German clathrate cynic. German researchers
have set the pace on methane research, but he tells me the
field only has the prominence that it has because of interest
from Germany’s press, and that claims about the amount of
clathrate beneath today’s oceans are greatly overblown. He
thinks it is an interesting issue, but secondary. He works on it
anyway; it’s where the funding is.
Tuesday morning
I bump into a geophysicist I’ve known for several years.
For all that time he has been working on ways to transport
seismometers to the surface of Mars, most recently as part
of a French-led project called Netlander. Unfortunately, the
spacecraft that was meant to take the four little Netlanders to
Tuesday evening
Peter Westbroek is honoured with the Vernadsky medal for
contributions to geobiology, the discipline which uses biology
to understand the workings and history of the Earth. Peter,
a retired professor from the University of Leiden, gives an
idiosyncratic and endearing lecture about the way that, over
the history of the Earth, the production of carbonate rocks
has gone from being a purely chemical process to one driven
almost entirely by biology. Afterwards a number of us head out
to eat seafood in one of the colonnades that ring nearby Place
Garibaldi. This is a hardcore seafood restaurant: no salads,
no vegetables, no vertebrates. The service is a touch on the
brusque side, and the temperature drops alarmingly when
one of the gas heaters sputters and dies. The sediments of
the Mediterranean may be packed with methane, but not this
restaurant. Still, the conversation, wine and food make up
or everything. Peter gets stuck in to a large plate of oysters,
doubtless attracted by their carbonate shells. Next to me,
Graham Budd, a palaeontologist with great expertise in
arthropod anatomy, tries out his dissecting skills on a crab, with
mixed results. He might have done better on a trilobite.
Wednesday morning
The day is packed with talks on methane - there’s even a
press conference on it. Press conferences, like the well-hidden
press room, are the result of the American Geophysical Union’s
THE EGGS
20
Mars has recently been cancelled, sending the project into a
spin. For a while it looked possible that Nasa might help out by
providing room on a mission it has planned for 2009, but while
one part of Nasa was studying that possibility, the part that
was funding the American instruments on the landers pulled
out. So my friend’s careful study of Marsquakes looks likely to
be deferred for another decade. It’s hard not to think that the
past few months have probably not been the most propitious
time for French space scientists to look to Washington for help.
Collateral damage?
Thursday morning
I’m not meant to be concentrating too much on Mars at
this conference but sometimes it is hard to resist. Jim Head, a
planetary geologist from Brown University, is giving a number
of presentations on the iciness of Mars. On Earth, most of
the ice we see has its origins in liquid water - cloud droplets
freeze to form snowflakes that fall to form ice caps and glaciers
- and ends up as water again when it melts. Earthlings have
thus come to think that because the surface of Mars shows
relatively few signs of liquid water, there can’t be much ice
moving across it, even though there is clearly ice at the poles.
New images, though, are convincing Head and others that
there is ice all over the place: ice that falls as snow, sits as
glaciers and turns back into water vapour, hardly ever messing
up the dust below by melting into a liquid.
Head has a poster showing some superb evidence for this.
Pictures of the flanks of a crater in Mars’s southern highlands
show a set of what seem to be smoothly flowing lobes of rock
which are more or less impossible to see as anything but the
remains of dirt-covered glaciers.
Wednesday afternoon
Graham Budd, neophyte eater of crabs, gives a terrific
account of the “Cambrian explosion” - the sudden burst of
diversity seen in fossils 540m years ago. The arguments
are clear and convincing, the delivery droll, the attacks on
the various theories with which Budd disagrees sharp to
near brutal. (Asked what he thinks of a theory that links the
explosion to the genetic programmes by which arthropods
develop, Budd replies “It’s utter nonsense.” When asked to
expand on this his head rocks back in bewilderment. Is utter
nonsense a difficult concept to grasp?)
Later on, Andy Ridgwell - a one-time eco-warrior with
partially dreadlocked hair and just short of wild eyes - gives a
talk on the role of the oceans around Antarctica in governing the
amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the end of the
most recent ice age. Like Budd’s, the talk takes the audience
through a field overburdened with competing theories; again,
there is clarity, wit and insight, although the delivery is a little
less barbed. It strikes me that maybe Cambridge, where they
were both ndergraduates, imbues its students with a rhetoric
articularly well suited to the complex histories of the living
Earth. That said, it is entirely possible that, while studying at
Cambridge at roughly the same time, my idea of what a good
talk on the biogeosciences should sound like became fixed on
what I was exposed to. Budd’s style, in particular, reminds me
of Simon Conway Morris, one of the palaeontologist heroes
of Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life, and by far the most
entertaining lecturer on the year-long introductory geology
course I took at Cambridge. Both explanations probably work:
they’re really good at it and I still carry prejudices fixed as an
undergraduate.There is a set of sessions tomorrow on why the
Himalayas are so tall and on what their shooting up may have
meant for the climate; the fact that a lot of the work is by the
Cambridge professor whose lectures I remember least fondly
is the shameful reasons I won’t be going.
Knackered, I head off to a little pizzeria by the old port,
thinking to dine with just the Herald Tribune. The patron
thinks differently, and I share a table and a conversation with
a Swiss petrologist. As time goes by I realise that, even by
the standards of the Swiss, he speaks truly excellent English.
Not many non-native speakers will use the word “hullabaloo”
in just the right way; still fewer will do so without a certain
relish of accomplishment. It turns out, though, that English is
not his second language but his fifth, from a total of nine or
ten (two of them, admittedly - classical Greek and Latin - are
written, not spoken). I learn this only by digging; he is entirely
unboastful about it, although aware it’s unusual. As someone
who finds even rudimentary language-learning hard, I am
normally somewhat envious of polyglots. But achievement
this prodigious is heartening; if humans can do something as
wonderful as that, I’m all for them.
THE EGGS
Head, recently returned from a field trip to the dry valleys of
Antarctica that taught him a lot about what earthly glaciers can
look like in arid situations, is clearly very pleased with them. A
Norwegian glaciologist ambles by, looks at the pictures, looks
away, looks again. “Are these really on Mars?” he asks with a
tone of what I take to be subdued Scandinavian wonder. “They
are,” replies Head. And the two of them grin at each other,
delighted by the universe in general and planets in particular.
Thursday lunchtime
Every day brings more talks about links between sun and
climate. The amount of energy given off by the sun varies over
a number of timescales - most famously the 11-year solar
cycle - but not by very much, and so most specialists tend to
see solar variability as only a minor factor in the variability of
the climate. However, a growing body of data and hypotheses
argue that the sun may have a greater role to play. One
possibility is that ultraviolet radiation is important. Although the
overall brightness of the sun varies only a little, the amount
of UV it generates changes a lot more, and could affect the
stratosphere, which could in turn affect the lower atmosphere.
Another possibility hinges on the solar wind - the constant
stream of charged particles that pours off the sun. The
magnetic fields carried by this wind help to shelter the Earth
from cosmic radiation; at times of low wind more radiation gets
through, creating more electrically charged ions in the lower
atmosphere. These ions may then catalyse the formation
of water droplets and clouds. The sort of clouds formed,
according to this theory, are those which reflect sunlight back
to space, cooling the surface below.
These are provocative possibilities, and from chatting to
people looking at posters on the subject I get the impression
that people interested in the history of the climate are taking
them more seriously than they did a few years ago. But the
suggested mechanisms for linking changes in the climate to
the sun are not yet widely accepted, for a number of reasons.
One is that the evidence is still basically circumstantial. Another
is that most of the people championing such a link do so from
outside the mainstream of climate science; they come at it from
21
a physics background. Outsiders who think they know better
are rarely welcomed in any discipline. Another issue is that on
more than one occasion these sun-Earth connections have
been championed by people, institutions and corporations with
a history of trying to downplay the importance of the vast buildup in atmospheric carbon dioxide now underway. A bigger role
for the sun is a way to argue that this carbon dioxide doesn’t
matter much. From there it’s a short, often easily taken step to
saying that the climate science establishment is just feathering
their own nests with grant money. This is not fair, and doesn’t
help the debate.
Listening to the sun-Earth evidence, though, I can’t help
feeling that even if it is true that the sun is a bigger player
in climate change than previously thought, it’s hardly the
reassuring message the carbon lobby seems to think it is. It’s
just another thing to worry about. The idea that sun-induced
climate change over the course of this century will offset
any greenhouse-induced climate change seems absurdly
optimistic. Although their net effects on global average
temperature might be of the same sort of magnitude, the
patterns of climate change they would be expected to produce
will not be equal and opposite. If UV is dominant, solar cooling
will be felt more at low latitudes; if clouds play a role, cloudy
places will cool more; greenhouse warming, on the other hand,
tends to affect the high latitudes. It also works at night as well
as by day, while solar effects would probably be daytime only.
Rather than expecting such different patterns of change to
cancel each other out, you might more plausibly expect that,
by pushing the climate system in opposite directions, the two
different influences will set it ringing like a bell, or bouncing like
a jack-in-the-box.
have not heard a single volcanologist. I failed to get to the
meeting on the digital divide in the earth sciences. (The lack
of third world participation here reminds me of a meeting of
scientists studying Gondwanaland, the ancient supercontinent
made up of India, Africa and nearly all of the rest of the land
south of the equator, which took place in South Africa in the
late 1990s. Nelson Mandela addressed the conference, and
while welcoming the almost exclusively northern delegates
expressed the hope that a few more scientists native to
Gondwana might soon swell their ranks. Not much evidence
of it here.)I have spurned the geodynamics and hydrological
sciences talks almost completely, not to mention the geodesy
panels, the geophysical instrumentation sessions, the natural
hazards and the tectonism and sedimentary processes.
Hundreds of pages of the vast programme book I’ve been
carrying around are unsullied. At the same time, I feel entirely
full of new information. Random example: John Priscu of
Montana State University, if I have understood him correctly,
thinks there is as much biomass inside the Antarctic ice cap as
in he world’s freshwater lakes.
There is one man I have been meaning to track down all
week: a Dutch palaeontologist and climate specialist called
Henk, whose work may be relevant to a Chicxulub-related
story I’m working on. I decide not to seek him out actively, but
to trust to fate. If I meet him, I tell myself, it will be an omen
of completeness. I will have done my duty. Leaving the press
room I spot Dick Kerr, the veteran geosciences correspondent
for Science magazine, and a man who may know more about
the breadth of what is going on here than anyone else. He is
looking at a website that appears to be about rain, and my
guilt for ignoring hydrology wells up. But he only wants to know
whether the pitch on which he will be playing soccer back in
DC tomorrow will be waterlogged.
Thursday afternoon
Friday afternoon
The threat of global climate change has not only brought
about a proliferation of new hypotheses, it has also led to a
salutary interest in monitoring the Earth and finding out how
its atmosphere and oceans really work. A lot of this interest
is expressed through the building of satellites - there must be
dozens of different satellite missions already producing data,
about to launch, or still at the planning stage. On Thursday
afternoon I went to a presentation about one of these missions,
a joint Japanese-European satellite designed to find out how
clouds work. I am ashamed to say that I fell asleep during
some of the details (many of us noticed that the seats in the
vast Apollon hall were by far the comfiest in the conference
centre) but the gist seemed excellent.
The presenters had a well thought through plan to use a
number of different instruments, including radar and lasers, to
measure the particles that make up specific clouds and find out
whether they were ice or water, see how they were influenced
by dust, smoke and other aerosols and work out how much
energy they reflect back into space. They had dramatic
graphics - the illustrator, the speaker said, seemed to have
developed his idea of what a laser looked like by watching
James Bond films. And they had a good acronym: EarthCARE,
standing for Earth, Clouds, Aerosol and Radiation Explorer.
Sounds like a winner; in ten years it could be the talk of the
conference. Or at least the cloud sessions.
There’s a session on the climatic history of Antarctica. One
of the outstanding presentations is by Rob DeConto. His topic
is the sudden growth of the first major Antarctic ice sheets,
about 30m years ago. A lot of previous work has been devoted
to the idea that the key to the ice sheets was the drift away from
Antarctica of all the other continents. As a complete hoop of
ocean opened up around Antarctica, encircling ocean currents
isolated it from the rest of the climate, allowing it to cool and
ice sheets to become established. This idea was developed by
James Kennett, the man now championing methane triggers
for the ends of ice ages. Both these ideas represent exactly
what the planetary sciences need - the tying together of a
number of different phenomena into a story that can then be
tested. The result of the tests matters much less than the fact
there was something testable in the first place.
DeConto and his colleague Dave Pollard have now tested
the ocean-current isolation idea and aren’t convinced. Their
models suggest that the opening up of the southern oceans
may have helped but it was carbon dioxide that drove the show.
A long gradual drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could
have caused the sudden glaciation through a threshold effect;
once it was cold enough for the ice sheets to start growing, they
grew at a terrific lick. A smooth change in carbon dioxide with
dramatically spiky, world-changing results - that’s something to
think about. When I go over to ask DeConto a few questions
afterwards he is deep in conversation with a broad-shouldered
Dutchman wearing a T-shirt from Mauna Kea that is identical
Friday morning
By now I’m acutely aware of how much I’ve missed. I
THE EGGS
22
to one that my brother once gave me. A surreptitious glance at
the name badge on his denim jacket - surreptitious glances at
name badges are a key part of the journalist’s trade at this sort
of thing - brings a surge of fulfilment. I have found Henk.
life. The walk is hard work; the view back over the maritime
Alps is magnificent. As I take it in, I realise that every passing
detail has been thought hard about by someone I brushed
past over the past week. How the cliffs of sandstone in the
opposite wall of the valley were formed on the bottom of a long
lost sea; how cycles in the ancient climate left their rhythms
in those sediments, interleaving thin laminations and great
monolithic bands; how deep the sandstones must have been
buried, and then how high they were lifted when the collision
of two tectonic plates drove them up into the skies; how iceage erosion carved the valley through them; how floods - the
most recent just a few years ago - continue to whittle away at
them; how their sediments whiten the streams in spate below
on their way to the Mediterranean; how the roots of the pines
and oaks and chestnuts eat into the rock for their nutrients,
producing new soil; how the timing of the first spring flowers,
just coming into bloom at the snowline, tells us of the changes
in the climate; how the forest canopies mist the sky with volatile
chemicals, creating a blue haze in the valleys beyond; how the
clouds that form over the peaks affect the world below.
Friday evening
The last talk of the conference takes me back to the
Apollon theatre, in all its luxurious vastness. Uriel Frisch, a
mathematician based here in Nice, has been honoured with
the EGS’s Lewis Fry Richardson medal for work on nonlinear
processes in geophysics. To mark the award, he is giving a
lecture titled “Back to the Primordial Universe by a MongeAmp?re-Kantotovich Mass Transportation Method.” Maybe it is
this striking but not necessarily alluring title, maybe it’s the fact
that the lecture is taking place at eight in the evening on Friday
after a gruelling week, maybe it’s the confusion about which
room it should be in - whatever the reason, the most notable
feature of the talk is that the theatre is basically empty.
Over the week I’ve made various attempts to estimate the
size of the Apollon, and I’ve settled on 2,000 seats in the stalls
and first balcony, another 1,000 higher up. Twenty of these
seats are occupied. Having thought all week I was seeing
about 1 per cent of the conference, I can now see what 1 per
cent really looks like. It looks like nothing at all.
Stomping around the sound desk before the start, Frisch
appears a little pissed off, and who can blame him? Giving
a man a high honour and then setting him up for humiliation
through lack of audience is a mean trick. But Frisch - author,
I’m told by one of the other 19 audience members, of a “really
good” book about turbulence - is clearly a trooper. Once on
stage he gives an excellent and erudite talk, the daunting
differential equations leavened with entertaining disquisitions
on how they came to be misnamed and misunderstood. The
heart of the talk is an equation developed by the French
mathematician and engineer Gaspard Monge in the 18th
century to find the most efficient way of moving earth taken out
of holes on to ramparts. Frisch has seen a way to apply a form
of this equation to new maps of the distribution of galaxies in
the known universe, and thus to work out where they all came
from.
At the end of this tour de force he asks the intergalactic
void stretching out in front of him for questions. To the great
relief of the other 19 of us someone manages to think of one.
Frisch answers it, and honour is satisfied. Our conference is
over. We wander out into the night past vast piles of discarded
posters not deemed worth taking back to the universities they
came from.
Thousands of people who live to try to understand these
wonders are now fanning out from Nice and around the
world. Even thousands are not that many; you could lose ten
thousand people in this one valley. Walking back down from
the pass, I imagine seeing those conference posters again,
unpacked from their tubes, one for every metre of the path,
and in front of them a conga line of academics in a vast chain
of conversation about this landscape and other landscapes;
about the processes that join them and the histories that
distinguish them; about the understanding that flows from
them.
For all that we try, humankind still does not really grasp
the Earth. We damage it out of ignorance. We do not yet
understand all its wonders, even less the ways that they fit
together. But we try to understand, and that adds a crucial last
wonder to the list.
Oliver Morton is a freelance writer and editor who
concentrates on scientific knowledge, technological change
and their implications. He’s a contributing editor at Wired, and
his writing has also appeared in Nature, Science, The New
Yorker, National Geographic, The New York Times, Discover,
New Scientist, The American Scholar and a number of other
newspapers and magazines. His first book, Mapping Mars:
Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World was published
in 2002 by Picador (US) and Fourth Estate (UK), and was
shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, not to mention
the British Science Fiction Award for best related book. He is
currently working on a book about what photosynthesis means
to people, plants and planets. He wrote this article imediatelly
after last year’s EGS-EUG-AGU Joint Assembly in Nice. It
appeared in Prospect Magazine,
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/
Oliver Morton
The Apse
142A Greenwich High Road
London SE10 8NN
Tel: 44 20 8293 7171
abq72@dial.pipex.com
oliver@wiredmag.com
This article is copyright of Oliver Morton.
Saturday
I take a train up into the mountains to hike and clear my
head. I end up walking about six miles along the side of a
valley overlooking the little town of Annot. The last two miles
or so are something of a trudge owing to the snow on the
paths. From the valley floor the snow looked sparse, but that,
I realise, was because I was seeing it through the canopy of
pines. Earlier in the week, I remember, I talked to a climate
modeller about just this issue - the way that pine forests make
the planet darker and thus warmer, even when there is snow
on the ground beneath their needles. Obviously, I need to work
on integrating my theoretical knowledge with my everyday
THE EGGS
23
The Future of Geosciences
New Report on the future of geosciences from
the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics(IUGG)
In summer 2001, the Executive Committee of IUGG (Bureau, Presidents and Secretaries General of the seven
Associations) approved a proposal put forward by Uri Shamir, IUGG Vice President, “to set up a Working
Group of young geo-scientists, one from each of the seven associations, under the title “Geosciences: The
Future” (WG-GTF), to examine the state of the geosciences and identify research challenges, emphasizing
inter-disciplinary research, integration of scientists from around the world, in particular in less developed
nations, and the role that IUGG should play in advancing the geosciences into the future.”
The Group produced a
document entitled “Final Report of the
106-page
Below the last chapter of the report, Conclusions, from E.
E. Brodsky, IAVCEI Chair:
IUGG Working
Group Geosciences: The Future”, available online at
www.iugg.org/geosciences.html.
The report is structured in 12 chapters, including the
Introduction and the Conclusions. The remaining 10 chapters
are the reports of the various disciplines, namely:
“Through the discussions of this report, a few broad
themes have emerged. We see prediction as a major longrange goal of all fields, whether it be prediction of earthquakes,
eruptions or space weather. In some fields, like meterology,
oceanography and hydrology, scientists should aim to not only
predict events, but ultimately, to control them.
In the more immediate future, we recommend the following
general priorities for geoscientists and the associations that
represent them.
--International Association of Seismology and Physics of
the Earth’s Interior (IASPEI)
--International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of
the Earth’s Interior (IAVCEI)
--International Association of the Physical Sciences of the
Oceans (IAPSO)
--International Association of Hydrological Sciences
(IAHS)
--International Association of Geodesy (IAG)
--International Association of Meteorological and
Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS)
--International Association of Geomagnetism and
Aeronomy (IAGA)
--Interdisciplinary Research
--Societal Impact
The chapters are structured on short-term priorities
and long-term goals, recommendations, opportunities and
conlusions.
THE EGGS
1. Interdisciplinary studies are clearly crucial to making
progress in all of the fields in this report. The Earth and its
environs are complex systems where the physics does not
partition itself into neat compartments. The need for true
crossing of boundaries is so great that we recommend that
IUGG rethink the boundaries between associations. Most of the
current member associations of IUGG have their origins in the
first half of the twentieth century when the fields of geoscience
were radically different than today. It no longer makes sense
to segregate freshwater from salt water scientists or those that
measure the Earth’s deformation via satellite from those that
use the same satellites to measure ionospheric perturbations.
There are also major new disciplines that have emerged that
24
are currently unrepresented in the structure of IUGG. Where
do physicists who study surface processes fit in or chemical
physicists who explain the fractionation of isotopes? What
about planetary scientists?
Even the distinction between geophysicists as opposed
to geochemists or geologists has become blurred in practice.
In order to become an effective society for modern scientists,
IUGG must grapple with the new shape of the fields.
challenges facing all areas of geoscience is to combine the
new data with state of the art models to better understand
the complex systems in nature. Both model validation and
incorporating the data in the model areimportant. One
methodology that is gaining momentum in all fields is data
assimilation, i.e., using a weighted combination of observations
and theoretical constraints to produce predictions of future
behavior. Such combinations will be a key component of
progress in natural sciences in the near future.
2. All disciplines represented here found significant
motivation in the societal benefits of their science. We also see
that a healthy future of the field requires emphasis on basic
science. Not every project needs to be tied to a specific benefit
for society. The short-range goals articulated in each section
are primarily scientific questions rather than engineering ones.
This identification of extensive basic scientific needs supports
the assertion in the introduction that governments, funding
agencies and professional societies must support basic
science financially and intellectually at a level comparable to
applied science.
6. The coupling between spheres of geoscience is often
lost at the interface between sciences. Regional models
could be a useful tool for both uncovering these couplings
and answering specific scientific problems. Regional models
are defined by a specific geographic area rather than a
methodology. Studies could focus on a locale such as the East
Pacific rise or the Antarctic sky. Combined expertise from all
the relevant disciplines would help to quantify the observed
processes and, more importantly, elucidate which interactions
between spheres are quantitatively important.
3. At the same time as basic science is being pursued,
geoscientists need to continue to put their short-term results
to use. Knowledge transfer can be successfully accomplished
by utilizing mass media outlets as well as more traditional
advisories to policymakers. The web and television are likely
the best ways to reach the youth audience, a key demographic
in ensuring the future of the field. Regular, continued press
communications from IUGG could be a useful tool for
sustained results.
7. High-resolution Earth system studies pose challenges
for both data collection and modeling. Dense observations
need to be taken to resolve the physics of such highly variable
processes, such as turbulence and other subgridscale
phenomena. Once these dense measurements are collected,
the scale dependence of parameters must be investigated.
In addition, incorporating these findings into global models
is challenging in every field. For example, hydrologists have
discovered that fundamental parameters, like permeability,
depend significantly on the scale of observation. Similar
discoveries probably await investigators in other fields. New
models must incorporate this inherent feature of natural
systems.
4. Geoscience is intrinsically a global science. The internet
and expansion of digital data has recently enhanced our
ability to collect and distribute data and model results across
all fields and nations. Such data distribution is enhancing
interdisciplinary collaborations by improving individual
investigators ability to combine datasets.
8. All of the associations noticed the importance of studies
on other planets as a method of testing and expanding their
current understanding. As discussed in the Interdisciplinary
Chapter, IUGG should consider formalizing its activity in this
important frontier by forming an inter-association body or even
a new association.
The new openness could be a boon to scientists in
developing countries who can now, in principle, enjoy equal
access to state-of-the-art datasets and model results. In
order to make the promises of the digital age a reality, existing
data centers must be expanded and new ones begun for
currently unrepresented disciplines. In particular, this report
cites the need for volcanic, hydrological, and space physics
data and modeling centers. These centers must provide free,
unrestricted access to all users.
The working group hopes that both the general and subject
specific recommendations of this report may provide a useful
framework for much exciting science to come. We look
forward to being part of the future of geoscience.”
Source: IUGG, from
www.iugg.org/geosciences.html
5. Massive datasets and numerical models have both
become possible in recent years. One of the most significant
THE EGGS
25
The Eggs now offers
FREE posting and
browsing of job positions
You can now post in this Newsletter, free of charge,
available openings in your Institution or group at
http://www.the-eggs.org/submit/jobs.php
Available jobs can be viewed and searched at
http://www.the-eggs.org/jobs.php
On-line job positions are updated every week.
NSF funds Meeting of Young Researchers
in the Earth Sciences
NSF has recently approved funding for the first installment of a novel workshop series,
the “Meeting of Young Researchers in the Earth Sciences” or MYRES.
MYRES-I meeting will take place in La Jolla CA, 12.08.-15.08.2004.
The NSF grant will allow the establishment of a
biennial conference series, the “Meeting of Young Researchers
in the Earth Sciences (MYRES)”, that will gather junior
scientists in geochemistry, geodynamics, mineral physics,
seismology, and other related Solid Earth fields.
The primary aim of MYRES (www.myres.org) is to further
science by accelerating the growth of an interdisciplinary,
international, open, and unbiased community of colleagues
that can interact regularly to informally exchange ideas, data,
and tools, and to formulate new collaborative research projects.
The focus of each MYRES meeting will be the overview and
discussion of a major outstanding problem from the Solid
Earth Sciences. The NSF award will support the first MYRES
meeting, to take place from August 12 to August 15, 2004, in
La Jolla CA on the following subject: “Heat, Helium, Hotspots,
and Whole Mantle Convection” (see meetings at this issue).
It is expected that the primary broader impact of this
activity will be to bring together early-career specialists
that can educate each other about the specific issues each
discipline can address, and thus, allow a more comprehensive
understanding of the nature of the constraints different
disciplines can provide to a specific problem. MYRES also
THE EGGS
plans to implement new ways to educate across disciplinary
boundaries and to evaluate these innovative procedures
to ensure the success of the educational aspect of these
meetings. The long-range goal of the larger MYRES initiative,
which also entails a wide range of planned online resources, is
to establish a framework for unhindered, international scientific
cooperation. Such community-building efforts are expected
not only to have a substantial educational impact among this
new generation of scientists but also help improve the overall
effectiveness of research in the Earth Sciences. You can
contribute to this community effort and participate in MYRES-I
by signing up at www.myres.org/myres1/ (More info about the
MYRES-I meeting can be found at this issue at the events
section).
Dr. Thorsten Becker
IGPP-0225, Scripps Inst. of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla CA 92093-0225, USA
tbecker@igpp.ucsd.edu
27
Highly recommended
Aerosol Measurement:
Principles, Techniques, and Applications
Paul A.Baron and Klaus Willeke (eds.)
Published by: Wiley-Interscience, New York,
Chichester, Weinheim, Brisbane, Singapore,
Toronto
ISBN: 0471356360
YEAR : 2001
EDITION : 2nd
#PAGES : 1160
PRICE : 195.30 €
One could comment that
this is yet another book on aerosol and
how to measure it (them?). The editors
have a head start over other books on
the same topic, since the first edition
was also excellent.
As with a lot of edited books, one
realises that they are directed towards
experts. There is nothing wrong
with this. Everybody’s new graduate
students, need a start with edited books
on their specific subject of study. Each
chapter is concise with a large number
of references, albeit not so new (a usual
problem with edited books). The editors
try to impress to the beginners that
aerosol is not ‘ONE’ compound or ‘ONE’
pollutant hence the comprehensiveness
of the coverage in 37 chapters, starting
from ‘basic principles’ to ‘techniques’ and
‘applications’. It is extremely useful for
graduate students and for academics to
have such a text in our selves, because
of the large and diverse information it
contains.
The chapters are written by a large
number of world leaders in this subject
and the quality is obvious. The book
describes virtually every important
aerosol
measurement
technique
employed currently in research and
monitoringapplications. This includes
filter collection, impaction, optical
microscopy, and methods developed
more recently such as time-of-flight
analyzers,
electrodynamic
particle
levitation, and in situ sensing. Although
all topics expect the TOF –MS were
covered on some level in the first edition,
most chapters include new information
developed in the eight years between
editions. Chapters discussing chemical
analyses for atmospheric aerosols,
analytical microscopy, dynamic mass
and surface area measurements, and
electrical techniques have received
extensive revisions. Applications in
medical rooms, indoor environments,
for biological and chemical aerosol,
although short are also informative to
THE EGGS
28
non experts.
I would highly recommend this
book to anyone that needs to start up
research on this field, or is a legislator or
simply wants this type of information at
hand often. I am the happy owner of two
copies of it.
Prof. Dr. S. Rapsomanikis
Head of Department and Director
of the Laboratory of Atmospheric
Pollution and Pollution Control
Engineering of Atmospheric
Pollutants
Department of Environmental
Engineering
Democritus University of Thrace
(DUTH)
Xanthi, GREECE
rapso@env.duth.gr
BOOK PRESENTATION
Bilion-year earth history of Australia and neighbours
in Gondwanaland
J. J. Veevers (ed.)
Published by: GEMOC Press
Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences,
Macquarie University,
Sydney, NSW 2109 Australia
ISBN: 1-876315-04-0
YEAR : 2004
EDITION : 3rd
#PAGES : 400
PRICE : 50.00 €
Both 400-page Veevers
(ed., 2000) Billion-year earth history
of Australia and neighbours in
Gondwanaland (BYEHA) and 80-colour
page Veevers (2001) ATLAS of BYEHA
are now in their 3rd printing, occasioned
by the first two printings being sold out.
Australia and its neighbours occupy
a third of the earth’s continental
lithosphere, and their billion-year
history encompasses 10% of earth time
and space. In the past 15 years, the
geology of Australia and neighbours has
developed by the application of remote
sensing at global scale, aeromagnetic
mapping, satellite-altimetry (GEOSAT)
of the oceans, geodynamic mapping
by the Global Positioning System
(GPS) - and at micron scale by the UPb dating of single zircon grains by the
Sensitive High Resolution Ion MicroProbe (SHRIMP). In probing beyond the
Phanerozoic into the Neoproterozoic,
we have established a global framework
of time-correlation by the stable
isotopes of carbon and the ratio of 87Sr/
THE EGGS
29
86Sr, calibrated by U/Pb ages of zircon.
Foldbelt deformation has been dated
by 40Ar/39Ar and uplift/denudation
by apatite fission-track analysis. Both
SHRIMP U/Pb in zircon and AFTA
methods were perfected on Australian
rocks. Furthermore, the SHRIMP dating
of single grains of zircon provides a
clear indication of the provenance of
Australian and New Zealand sediment
in the 600-500 Ma Beardmore-Ross
source areas of Antarctica as well as
dating bedrock elsewhere. Connections
in Gondwanaland from Australia
through Antarctica-India to Africa along
the 600-500 Ma Prydz-Leeuwin Belt
are confirmed by zircon ages. The
580 Ma collision of East and West
Gondwanaland, the mid-Carboniferous
Pangean collision in Europe, and the
mid-Cretaceous swerve of the Pacific
plate shaped modern Australia. Except
its recent scalping in New Guinea and
activity along its Phanerozoic plate
margins, Australia has been shaped by
events that originated from afar.
With these perspectives, we recount
the billion-year history of Australia and
neighbours in three parts:
1. PRESENT & PAST GLOBAL
SETTINGS: Australia in Pangea &
Gondwanaland;
paleomagnetism
& paleolatitude; seafloor spreading
around Australia;
morphotectonics
of the margins; Australian-Antarctic
Depression; Quaternary Australia.
2. ANALYSIS OF AUSTRALIA:
present tectonic state; crust &
lithosphere from seismic observations;
lithospheric structure from mantle
xenoliths; Indian & Pacific MORB-type
mantle beneath Australia; heat flow;
vertical motions of the platform since
the Jurassic; mid-Cretaceous & midEocene events and coeval swerves
of the Pacific; Antarctic provenances
saturate
Paleozoic-Mesozoic
East
Gondwanaland with 0.6-0.5 Ga zircons;
Neoproterozoic platform; Tasman Fold
Belt System; Permian-Triassic basins
and fold belts along Eastern Australia.
3.
REGIONAL
SYNTHESIS:
Neoproterozoic-Paleozoic Australia &
neighbours in Gondwanaland; impact
on Australia and Antarctica of the
collisional merging of Gondwanaland
& Laurussia in Pangea; basins and
foldbelts along the Panthalassan
margin of Gondwanaland; Australia’s
neighbours in Gondwanaland along the
Tethyan margin; tectonics of Pangea(s),
Gondwanaland, & Laurussia; synopsis.
Further geographic cover is provided
by analogues in Asia and Africa, and
comparison with Laurentia. The frame
for Australia’s earth history is no less
than the entire globe.
Contributions are by P. Morgan, S.Y.
O’Reilly, E. Scheibner, J.J. Veevers
& M.R. Walter, GEMOC, Macquarie
University, Sydney; D.A. Clark & P.W.
Schmidt, CSIRO Division of Exploration
& Mining, N Ryde; S. Clark, C. Gaina
& R.D. Muller, University of Sydney;
B.L.N. Kennett Research School of
Earth Sciences, ANU, Canberra; and
M.A.J. Williams,University of Adelaide.
We published BYEHA ourselves
in an attempt to provide Australian
geologists with a research monograph
at cost without the enormous overheads
of multinational publishers compounded
by the ruinous exchange rate. The price
is at least 5 times cheaper than books
published overseas. Fellow geologists
(and departmental libraries) have
supported this independent publishing
by buying the book so that with the initial
outlays recouped, we can now offer the
books at further discounts of 10 to 20%.
The new price for BYEHA and ATLAS is
€50 or $AUS 80.
Extracts from reviews follow:
John Crowell in Geotimes: “Huge
amounts of data are presented in
Veevers’
trademark
‘time-space
diagrams’ and skilfully designed maps
and diagrams. The soft-cover book is
beautifully produced and printed on
high-quality paper, and is a bargain.”
Tony Crawford in Episodes: “The
publishers, the contributors, and
especially John Veevers, all deserve
immense credit for this remarkable
volume, which for me will be the single
most useful book on Australian post1 Ga geological evolution of eastern
Gondwanaland - an exceptional
achievement.”
Bill Dickinson in GSA Today: “There
is no more informative summary of
Australian tectonic history in a regional
THE EGGS
30
and global context, something in the
volume for almost everyone, and the
price is right.”
Nick Mortimer in Geological Society
of New Zealand Newsletter: “I was
thoroughly engrossed by the plethora
of thematic paleogeographic maps and
event stratigraphy diagrams: terrifyingly
impressive in their depth, breadth and
number.”
Dick Selley in The Geoscientist
(Geological Society of London): “Wow!
To paraphrase a cliche, this book tells
you everything about Gondwanaland
that you could possibly need to know ....
The book has a sensible large [A4] page
size which enables the effective display
of large maps and cross-sections.
Billion-year Earth History is an essential
reference work for all geologists
interested in the large-scale crustal
evolution of the Earth in general, and for
antipodean geologists in particular.”
Heli Wopfner in Zeitschrift der
Deutschen Geologischen Gesellschaft
(from the original German): “Billion-year
earth history of Australia is a survey of
global geological phenomena of the past
billion years. It is an enormous work of
scholarship .... With its 24 pages of
references the book is an outstanding
source of information.”
For further details, including order
forms and prices elsewhere, visit:
http://www.es.mq.edu.au/GEMOC/
BYEHA/page1.htm
John Veevers
john.veevers@mq.edu.au
Realtime live streaming aurora cam
http://www.aurorawebcam.com/
There is a site that offers live aurora
broadcast on the web from Aurora Mountain, Creek Lodge in
Fairbanks, Alaska.
Upon reading the article “Aurora - The magnificent northern lights”
co-written by Ioannis Daglis and Syun-Ichi Akasofu on the splendors
of aurora (this issue) and also contributing one of my pictures to be
used in the article, I thought this groundbreaking website on the
aurora would be of interest to the European Geophysical Union
and other academic communities that research and teach about the
aurora borealis.
On this website is the first and only realtime live streaming
auroracam. It truly is a groundbreaking and remarkable effort, that
gives many people worldwide a chance to view the aurora.
It is run by Troy Birdsall outside of Fairbanks, Alaska and Stachu
Strzyzewski in Poland. During webcam broadcasts, the aurora can
be viewed in realtime, when the aurora is present.
Carolyn Szepanski
1005 Reese St
Whiting, Indiana USA
K2sleddogs@aol.com
THE EGGS
31
4th International Summer School of
Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
(ISSAOS 2004) - (Course)
atmospheric and oceanic CO2 levels, and possible strategies
for mitigating such increases. The symposium will include
plenary presentations, discussion sessions on research
priorities, and a poster session.
Papers from the symposium will be published in a special
issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans and
research priorities will be published separately for the benefit of
ocean scientists and research program managers worldwide.
The Program for the Symposium will feature:
--Overviews of atmospheric CO2 projections and climate
drivers of the ocean
--Effects of CO2 enrichment on ocean chemistry
--Overviews of proposed sequestration strategies for the
ocean
--Short and long-term effects of CO2 enrichment on
organisms and ecosystems
--Effects and effectiveness of carbon sequestration
techniques
--Summaries of the implications of the high-CO2 world for
ocean chemistry and biology and how the research community
could respond
--Two open discussion sessions to identify research and
observation priorities and approaches
20/09/2004 - 24/09/2004 - University of L’Aquila, Italy
The School will focus on observing systems for
atmospheric composition.
A list of the main topics is provided below:
The need for observing systems of atmospheric
composition
a) Satellites
- TOMS retrievals of tropospheric ozone / composition
- GOME / SCIAMACHY retrievals of tropospheric
composition
- AURA retrievals of tropospheric composition
- Satellites flying in formation: The A train
- Future geostationary measurements
b) Intensive field campaigns (chemistry, microphyics,
and transport process studies)
- Aircraft campaigns building a comprehensive
measurement set
- Intensive field campaigns to validate satellite
measurements
- Ground-based field campaigns
- Environmental chamber studies
- Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: current and future uses
- Integration of networks, satellites, intensive field
campaigns
c) Ground-based monitoring networks
- Ozone monitoring networks
- Lidar networks
Contributions to the Symposium are solicited on
topics that include, but are not limited to:
--Effects of anthropogenic CO2 increase on ocean
chemistry
--Effects of anthropogenic CO2 increase on ocean biology
--Effects of purposeful CO2 enrichment on ocean chemistry
--Effects of purposeful CO2 enrichment on ocean biology
--Mitigation techniques: methods, efficiencies, unknowns
--Observational field programs
--Modelling projects
--Organizations, programs, or scientific activities related to
scientific or technical aspects of ocean carbon science
The concept of a sensor web
- Autonomous systems for data collection and data fusion
- Computational requirements of the sensor web
- Data assimilation
- Inverse modeling techniques using sensor web data
All contributed papers to the symposium will be presented
as posters.
Applications are invited from advanced graduate students
(PhD), postdocs, and professionals.
Organizer:
The Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR)
and The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission
(IOC)
http://ioc.unesco.org/iocweb/co2panel/
HighOceanCO2.htm
Organizer:
For all matters related to the School, please contact
piero.dicarlo@aquila.infn.it
guido.visconti@aquila.infn.it or
send a message to fax no. 39-0862-433089
35th COSPAR Scientific Assembly and
Associated Events - (Meeting)
The Ocean in a High CO2 World: An
International Science Symposium (Meeting)
18/07/2004 - 25/07/2004 - Paris, France
10/05/2004 - 12/05/2004 - Paris, France
Approximately 90 meetings covering the fields
of COSPAR Scientific Commissions (SC)and Panels:
The Scientific Committee on Oceanic
Research (SCOR) and the Intergovernmental
- SC A: The Earth’s Surface, Meteorology and Climate
- SC B: The Earth-Moon System, Planets, and Small
Bodies of the Solar System
- SC C: The Upper Atmospheres of the Earth and Planets
including Reference Atmospheres
- SC D: Space Plasmas in the Solar System, Including
Oceanographic Commission (IOC) are convening an open
symposium on The Ocean in a High-CO2 World on 10-12
May 2004 in Paris, France. The symposium will address the
biological and biogeochemical consequences of increasing
THE EGGS
32
Planetary Magnetospheres
- SC E: Research in Astrophysics rom Space
- SC F: Life Sciences as Related to Space
- SC G: Materials Sciences in Space
- SC H: Fundamental Physics in Space
- Panel on Satellite Dynamics (PSD)
- Panel on Scientific Ballooning (PSB)
- Panel on Potentially Environmentally Detrimental
Activities in Space (PEDAS)
- Panel on Standard Radiation Belts (PSRB)
- Panel on Space Weather (PSW) - Panel on Planetary
Protection (PPP)
- Panels on Space Research in Developing Countries
(PSRDC) and Capacity Building (PCB)
- The Public Understanding of Space Science- Space
Science Education and Outreach
sessions and meals (except breakfast) will be in the Chateau
itself in order to maximise contacts between specialists of
divers disciplines. Participants will be lodged in neighbouring
hotels in the town of Blois.
Details (both scientific and administrative) are available
on the conference web site, where you will find a scientific
programme for the plenary sessions, including a list of the
invited speakers who have accepted to give a talk. An on-line
registration form is also available on this site; you should send
it in as soon as possible, indicating in particular whether you
would be interested in contributing to a parallel session, since
this will enable the organisers to optimize the conference,
and in particular to judge whether parallel sessions are in
demand.
The deadline for registration and hotel reservation is
March 22, 2004, but please do not wait until the last minute
- conference secretaries have quite enough work already!
Some limited financial assistance may be available; if you do
require this, please fill in and send to the indicated address the
financial support application form. The deadline for application
is February 22, 2004.
If you require urgent information which is not on the web
site, please contact Ludwik Celnikier at: blois.confs@obspm.fr
See Assembly home page for complete list of scientific
events. Papers will be published in Advances in Space
Research.
Scientific Program Chair: Dr. M.-L. Chanin, CNRS, Service
d’Aeronomie, Verrieres-le-Buisson, France
Local Organizing Committee Chair: Prof. J. Audouze,
Paris, France
Organizer:
Rencontres de Blois Universite Paris Sud
http://opserv.obspm.fr/confs/climates.html
Contact:
COSPAR Secretariat,
51 bd de Montmorency,
75016 Paris,
France
Tel: +33 1 45 25 06 79
Fax: +33 1 40 50 98 27
cospar@cosparhq.org
Euro-Forum for Scientific Earth Drilling
(Meeting)
16/03/2004 - 19/03/2004 University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Organizer:
The Committee on Space Research (COSPAR)
http://www.copernicus.org/COSPAR/COSPAR.html
We would like to draw your attention to the
“Euro-Forum for Scientific Earth Drilling” which will be held at
the University of Bremen in March (16.-19.03.2004).
Challenges in the Climate Sciences
(Meeting)
Prof. Dr. H. Kudrai,
Bundesanstalt for Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe,
Stilleweg 2, 30655 Hannover,
Germany
Tel.: +49-(0)511-643-2790
Fax: +49-(0)511-643-3663
www.bgr.de/odp
23/05/2004 - 28/05/2004 Chateau de Blois, Blois, France
XVIth Rencontres de Blois
Challenges in the Climate Sciences
This is an announcement and call for contributions
for an international interdisciplinary conference on the
terrestrial climate system. The purpose of the conference
is to emphasize our current lack of understanding of certain
key processes in the stability and evolution of the terrestrial
climate, at all time scales, and to highlight whichavenues of
research could improve that understanding. The conference
will consist of plenary sessions and long poster sessions;
for contributed papers, we have programmed two one hour
long poster sessions per day, coupled with the coffee breaks.
Parallel sessions for short oral contributions can be organised
if there is sufficient demand for them.
The conference will take place in the Chateau de Blois
(France), an ancient Royal residence in the Loire valley; all
THE EGGS
Prof. Dr. R. Oberhunsi,
Universitdt Potsdam,
Institut for Geowissenschaften,
Postfach 601553, 14415 Potsdam,
Germany
Tel: +49-(0)331-9775259
Organizer:
http://www.rcom-bremen.de/English/IODPICDP_2004.html
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MYRES-I: Heat, Helium, Hotspots, and
Whole Mantle Convection - (Meeting)
Session 7: Atmosphere-ocean interactions (IGAC &
SOLAS related). (Mike Harvey and Cliff Law)
Session 8: Trans-boundary transport and transformation.
(Dave Parrish)
Session 9: Mega cities. (Makoto Koike and Laura GallardoKlenner)
Session 10: Biomass burning, dust and light-absorbing
aerosols. (Sandro Fuzzi)
Session 11: Toxic pollutants in the atmosphere. (Ilia Ilyin)
Session 12: Oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere. (Kathy
Law)
Session 13: Emission and deposition fluxes (IGAC &
ILEAPS related). (Phil Rasch)
Session 14: Other aspects of atmospheric chemistry. (Tim
Bates)
12/08/2004 - 15/08/2004 - La Jolla CA, USA
The topic of the four day MYRES-I school
is Heat, Helium, Hotspots, and Whole Mantle Convection,
with the goal to reevaluate models and constraints on Earth
evolution and deep Earth structure.
The aim of MYRES is to further science by accelerating
the growth of an interdisciplinary, international, open, and
unbiased community of colleagues who interact regularly to
informally exchange ideas, data, and tools, and formulate new
collaborative research projects. Several novel strategies for
more effective communication of science will be implemented,
including peer reviewed and coordinated instruction. The
keynote speakers for the four themes of MYRES-I are
*Heat and mass flux: Jie Li (University of Illinois, Urbana
Champaign) and Sujoy Mukhopadhyay (Harvard University).
*Nature of boundary layers: Christine Thomas (University of
Liverpool) and Shijie Zhong (University of Colorado, Boulder).
*Constraints on interior dynamics: Wendy Panero
(University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) and Frederik Simons
(Princeton University).
*Surface observables as constraints: Magali Billen
(University of California, Davis) and Cin-Ty Lee (Rice
University).
More
info
from
Dr.
Thorsten
Becker,
tbecker@igpp.ucsd.edu
If your topic doesn’t fit in sessions 1-13 don’t despair,
submit it.
Invited Speakers: Susan Solomon, Phil Boyd, “Ravi”
Ravishankara, Paulo Artaxo.
Programme Chairs: Ulrike Lohman, Phil Rasch, Sarah
Masonis, Dave Lowe.
Organizer:
The Local Organizing Commitee of IGAC of New Zealand.
http://www.igaconference2004.co.nz/
SOLAS Science 2004 - (Meeting)
Organizer:
The Meeting of Young Researchers in the Earth Sciences
Local Organizers:
Thorsten Becker and James Kellogg
http://www.myres.org/myres1/
13/10/2004 - 16/10/2004 - Halifax,
Nova Scotia, Canada
Welcome to SOLAS Science 2004, the first
open science conference to present the results of SOLAS.
The SOLAS project is focused on the biogeochemical-physical
connectivities between the Earth’s two fluid systems and brings
together scientists from a wide range of disciplines, all aiming
to contribute our piece of the Earth system science jigsaw. The
conference provides the opportunity for the presentation and
discussion of the latest SOLAS results and aims to enable
community building on both a national and international scale.
The conference is structured around a mixture of invited
talks in the morning and poster and discussion sessions in
the afternoon. We welcome suggestions of topics for the
discussion sessions.
For details of the talks, please see the programme.
The conference will be hosted in Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Canada. For information about the area click here, also have a
look at the tours that are available during the conference.
The 8th Scientific Conference of the
International Global Atmospheric
Chemistry Project (IGAC) - (Meeting)
22/12/2003 - 31/08/2004 - Christchurch, New Zealand
Atmospheric
Chemistry
in
the
Environment Themes will include atmospheric
chemistry in a variety of distinct regions such as the marine
boundary layer, stratosphere, cryosphere, and urban areas
as well as trans-boundary transport effects and global
biogeochemical cycling. The Local Organizing Committee
looks forward to welcoming you to this scientifically rewarding
event held in the beautiful city of Christchurch in the spectacular
South Island of New Zealand. Please join us there.
Session 1: Effect of aerosols on clouds and the hydrological
cycle. (Ulrike Lohmann)
Session 2: Aerosol chemical composition. (Trish Quinn)
Session 3: Climate-chemistry interaction (IGAC & SPARC
related). (Celine Mari)
Session 4: Observing the atmosphere. (John Burrows)
Session 5: Air-ice interactions including firn air and air
bubble chemistry. (Eric Wolff)
Session 6: Reactive halogens in the troposphere. (Uli
Platt)
THE EGGS
Organizer:
http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/solas/ss04/
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2004 POGO-IOC-SCOR Fellowships
(Meeting)
Contact e-mail: porsec-2004@udec.cl
18/02/2004 - 15/03/2004 - Dartmouth,
Nova Scotia, Canada
Organizer:
University of Concepcion, Chile
http://www.udec.cl/~porsec-2004/
The Partnership for Observation of
the Global Oceans (POGO) and its partners, the
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) and the
Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR), announce
the Fellowship Programme for 2004. This programme is
designed to promote training and capacity building leading
towards a global observation scheme for the oceans.
This fellowship programme is open to scientists, technicians,
graduate students (PhD) and Post Doctoral Fellows involved
in oceanographic work at centres in developing countries and
countries with economies in transition. In 2004, priority will be
given to applicants from the Indian Ocean region, involved
in, or planning to be involved in, the Indian Ocean GOOS
initiatives.
Gordon Research Conference
Series: MARINE MICROBES
PICOPHYTOPLANKTON, FROM
ECOLOGY TO GENOMICS - (Meeting)
06/06/2004 - 10/06/2004 - Roscoff, Brittany, France
This 2004 Gordon Research Conference
(GRC) will be the first one of a New series dedicated to Marine
Microbes. Microbes (i.e. virus, Bacteria, Archaea, Eukaryota;
autotrophic and heterotrophic) lie at the heart of the functioning
of all marine ecosystems, from the surface euphotic zone to
deep hydrothermal vents. This series will be initiated with a
conference on picophytoplankton because this field appears to
be poised at a turning point. The meeting will first review recent
advances in the taxonomy of picophytoplankton, especially the
discovery of many novel eukaryotic groups both from culture
and molecular-based field studies. In particular, we will cover
extensively the new tools of molecular biology. Then, we will
examine the physiology and ecology of picophytoplankton and
revisit its role in the microbial food web. Finally we will dwell on
the very exciting developments in picophytoplankton genomics
and how the new knowledge will impact on our understanding
of marine ecosystems.
Organizer:
The Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans
(POGO)
and its partners
The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission
(IOC)and
The Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR)
http://ocean-partners.org/fellowshipb.html
Pan Ocean Remote Sensing
Conference - (Meeting)
Program and conference information:
http://www.sb-roscoff.fr/Phyto/Meeting_GRC_2004/
29/11/2004 - 03/12/2004 - Chile
To stimulate scientific and technological
advanced training and specialization in Remote Sensing
and in order to organize PORSEC- 2004, the University of
Concepcion created in June 2002, under Resolution No.162,
an ad hoc Inter-Faculty Committee (Engineering, Agricultural
Engineering, Agronomy, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics,
Forestry Sciences, Natural Sciences and Oceanography and
Center EULA). One of its main priorities was to initiate a
programme of advanced courses directed to the specialization
of graduate students, young professionals and researchers
from the University, the country and Latin America in general.
The organization of the international event PORSEC-2004
(Pan Ocean Remote Sensing Conference) to take place at
the University of Concepcion between 29 November and
3 December, 2004, has also given the opportunity to invite
some reputed specialists and PORSEC members as Visiting
Professors, to dictate these courses initiating an academic
interaction towards further specialization and preparation for
the event.
The University and the Committee cordially thank the
sponsoring international organizations.
THE EGGS
Applications are done directly to the GRC web site at
h t t p : / / w w w. g r c . o r g / s c r i p t s / d b m l . e x e ? Te m p l a t e = /
Application/apply1.dbm
(Select 2004 Marine Microbes and follow instructions)
The organisers anticipate to have some limited financial
support for conference fees and travel for Students and young
Post-doctoral fellows (apply at
http://www.sb-roscoff.fr/Phyto/Meeting_GRC_2004/
#support )
Also send an email to Daniel Vaulot (vaulot@sb-roscoff.fr)
and me (LiB@mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca) to notify the organisers
that you applied to the conference. This will help in the
selection process.
Organizer:
http://www.grc.org/programs/2004/marinemi.htm
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