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01/19/2010

Approximately 50 planetary and terrestrial geophysicists will meet at Arizona State University Jan. 21-22, for an interdisciplinary workshop focusing on the Moon. Participants will discuss and review the current state of knowledge of the Moon and past geophysical studies, discuss existing plans, and begin making preparations for the future. 

 
“We are at a very exciting time where there are multiple lunar geophysical missions in various stages of development by NASA and international space agencies,” explains seismologist Matthew Fouch, a professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and co-convener of the workshop. “This is an important opportunity for us to revisit what we learned from the geophysical data collected by Apollo astronauts, and how we can make significant forward progress based both on those experiences and current efforts to return to the lunar surface.”
 
This high-level workshop for the scientific community, which will pull participants and presenters from universities and research institutes around the world, including NASA centers, is divided into a two-day program organized into lectures, poster sessions, breakout groups, and group discussions. Talks and posters will present topics as diverse as seismic exploration of the Moon, measuring heat flow on the lunar surface, and characterizing the Moon’s interior. Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the last of the Apollo astronauts to walk on the Moon, will deliver the first day’s keynote talk.
 
Besides providing a unique opportunity for research scientists from both the terrestrial and planetary communities to interact, the workshop will highlight how the geophysical community can contribute to NASA’s long-term plans to install a series of autonomous geophysical stations on the Moon.
 
“The goal of the scientific exchange,” explains Fouch, “is to provide NASA and the broader scientific community with ideas and recommendations about how to most efficiently and effectively collect new geophysical data from the lunar surface, using everything from landers to robots to astronauts, and over a range of local, regional, and global scales. We believe that this will be a workshop that catalyzes a new level of collaborations and involvement to promote missions with a goal of geophysically interrogating the lunar interior.”
 
The workshop is sponsored jointly by NASA, ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, the Lunar and Planetary Institute, and the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS).
 
“Given ASU’s historical success as a top planetary geology program, our growth as a top Earth interiors research program, and the recent addition of the LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera) facility, it’s quite appropriate that SESE hosts this meeting,” says Fouch. “The broad interest in the meeting from the terrestrial and planetary scientific communities demonstrates once again the importance that geophysical interrogations of planetary interiors play in helping us develop a complete understanding of the Moon and other planetary bodies.”
 
 
(Image courtesy of NASA)

 

Research scientists congregate to discuss future of lunar geophysical exploration
01/15/2010

The Doomsday Clock has been set back by a single minute for the first time in its 63-year history

A group of international scientists composed of more than a dozen Nobel laureates moved the hands of the symbolic "Doomsday Clock" for the first time in two years. This end-of-the-world clock, created in 1947 by a group of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, was designed to reflect how close civilization is to the end of the world caused by nuclear catastrophe. The hands of the symbolic “Doomsday Clock” were moved away from midnight -- or the figurative apocalypse -- but only by one minute, an expression of optimism for humanity’s future.

"By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasize how much needs to be accomplished, while at the same time recognizing signs of collaboration among the United States, Russia, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and others on nuclear security and on climate stabilization," the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said in a statement. A news conference announcing the change took place at the New York Academy of Sciences Building in New York City. The actual clock is maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and housed in Chicago, Ill., and so a representation of the clock was shown at the news conference.

First set at seven minutes to midnight, the clock has been moved only 18 times since its inception. Over the years, the clock has come to also reflect the threats posed by climate change, nuclear terrorism and biological weapons. Though the types of threats have changed since the clock's creation, security experts say it still maintains its significance.

"We are poised to bend the arc of human history," said Lawrence M. Krauss, co-chair of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors and a professor at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration and its physics department.

"What that means is that there's great potential for it to move in either direction depending on what happens," he said, adding that for both nuclear weapons and climate change threats there has been "a sea change in attitude, an opening up of possibilities, but not yet a lot of action."

"That's hopeful enough to move it but just by a little bit," he said.

Though immediate threats to civilization may not be at the top of most people's minds, the clock helps bring a sense of urgency to the threats now facing humanity.

For the first time, the public was invited to take part in the Bulletin's announcement as the group streamed live video of the event online. To watch, visit: TurnBacktheClock.org.

 

Image credit: Mary Altaffer / AP

 

Turning back the clock
01/05/2010

More than twelve billion years of cosmic history are shown in this full-color view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of morphology.

 

Shown in an extremely broad range of color and showcasing more than twelve billion years of cosmic history, Hubble’s recent image is a full-glory cosmic renaissance of the history of the Universe. This image provides a record of the Universe’s most exciting formative years, from the birth of stars in the early Universe all the way through the materialization of the Milky Way.

 

Constructed from mosaics taken with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in fall 2009 and Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) taken in 2004, the final image combines a broad range of colors, from the ultraviolet, through visible light, into the near infrared. Such a detailed multi-color view of the Universe has never before been assembled at such a level of clarity, accuracy, and depth.

 

“It’s like taking off rose-colored glasses and seeing the Universe in a whole new light, and what we’re seeing is fantastic,” says Rogier Windhorst, a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and a member of the WFC3 Science Oversight Committee. “We’re seeing stars on a galactic scale being born, we’re seeing galaxies in formation, galaxies replenished with new fuel for making stars; we’re seeing a messy Universe, a Universe in action, and we’re seeing it like astronomers have never seen it before.”

 

Hubble’s sharp resolution and new color versatility, accomplished by combining data from the two cameras, is allowing astronomers to sort out the various stages of galaxy assembly, from the mature spiral and elliptical galaxies in the foreground, to smaller, fainter, irregularly shaped galaxies that are in general farther away, and hence existed farther back into time. These smaller galaxies are considered the building blocks of the larger galaxies that we see today. The wide range of new colors now observed with WFC3 also allows astronomers to estimate a galaxy’s distance from Earth, and reveal information about its stellar populations.

 

Acquiring this image was much more time intensive than simply pointing and shooting. The data that comes off the telescope is in a raw form that requires processing. The Science Oversight Committee designed a science program to test and demonstrate the science capabilities of the WFC3, referred to as Early Release Science (ERS) data. Windhorst and students in the School of Earth and Space Exploration have been involved in the processing and analyzing the ERS data, spending the better part of July and August calibrating the data and removing background artifacts.

 

“Certain instrumental effects and cosmetic problems have to be taken out,” explains Seth Cohen, a postdoctoral research associate in SESE. “Some artifacts are due to cosmic rays or satellites, while others are due to the detectors themselves. You have to remove all these things before you can do the science. You don’t want to mistake the residual effects of these in your image if they are not due to something in your galaxy of interest.”

 

“Your eye is very good at picking out the artifacts, but you have to train a computer to do this and use software to reduce these out,” says Michael Rutkowski, a graduate student in SESE who has worked on prepping the image.

 

The image shows a rich tapestry of 7,500 galaxies stretching back through most of cosmic history. The closest galaxies seen in the foreground emitted their observed light only 0.9 billion years ago. The farthest galaxies, a few of the very faint red specks, are seen as they appeared more than 13 billion years ago, or roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang. This mosaic spans a slice of space that is 10 arc minutes across in its largest diameter, or about one third of the diameter of the full Moon in the sky.

 

The new Hubble view highlights a wide variety of stages in the galaxy assembly process. The WFC3 ultraviolet light shows the blue glow of hot, young stars in galaxies teeming with star-birth. The orange light reveals the nearly final assembly stages of massive galaxies about 8 to 10 billion years ago. The near infrared reveals the red glow of very distant galaxies --- in a few cases as far as 12--13 billion light years away --- whose light has been stretched, like a toy Slinky, from ultraviolet light to longer-wavelength infrared light due to the expansion of the Universe.

 

The region covers a portion of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey’s (GOODS) Southern field, first observed by Hubble with the ACS in 2004, and now with Hubble’s new WFC3 from Sept.-Oct. 2009.

 

In this ambitious use of Hubble’s observing time, the 2004 ACS exposures totaled over 100 orbits in the optical in this portion of the sky, and the new WFC3 exposures total 104 orbits in the ultraviolet and near-infrared. The image was made from a mosaic of 2x4 WFC3 ultraviolet pointings, and 2x5 WFC3 near-infrared pointings. In just two orbits per pointing, the WFC3 peered deeper into the Universe than comparable near-infrared observations from ground-based telescopes. This set of unique new Hubble observations reveals galaxies to about 27th magnitude in brightness over a factor of 10 in wavelength.

 

“Having this broad spectrum wavelength coverage allows us to do many different things that we couldn’t do before without having deep observations at all these wavelengths at the Hubble resolution,” says Cohen.

 

Astronomers are using this multi-color panorama to trace many details of galaxy formation over cosmic time: the star-formation rate in galaxies, the rate of mergers among galaxies, and the abundance of weak active galactic nuclei, along with many other measurable quantities.

 

Rutkowski is most excited about the panchromatic nature, particularly the UV capabilities since UV astronomy can’t be done from the ground.

 

“My interest is in elliptical galaxies known as “red and dead galaxies.” We believed that there wasn’t much going on by way of current star formation in these galaxies, but as the UV becomes more accessible, there are a lot of red and dead galaxies that are actually quite blue. This image suggests that they’re neither as red nor as dead as we originally thought.”

 

New panchromatic capabilities of Hubble reveal an unprecedented view of the Universe
12/31/2009

Lead-lead (Pb-Pb) dating is among the most widely used radiometric dating techniques to determine the age of really old things, such as the age of the Earth or the Solar System. However, recent advances in instrumentation now allow scientists to make more precise measurements that promise to revolutionize the way the ages of some samples are calculated with this technique.

Radiometric dating can be used to determine the age of a wide range of natural and human-made materials. The comparison between the observed abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope, such as uranium (U), and its decay products can be used to determine the age of a material, using known decay rates. The Pb-Pb dating technique has been used for decades under the assumption that the ratio of the 238U and 235U isotopes, both of which decay to different isotopes of Pb, is constant in the Solar System. This assumed value is built into the Pb-Pb age equation.

According to research published online in the Dec. 31 issue of Science Express and in the Jan. 22 issue of Science magazine by Greg Brennecka, a graduate student in the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at Arizona State University (ASU), the 238U/235U ratio can no longer be considered a constant in meteoritic material. Any deviation from this assumed value causes miscalculation in the determined Pb-Pb age of a sample, meaning that the age of the Solar System could be miscalculated by as much as several million years. Although this is a small fraction of the ~4.57 billion year age of the Solar System, it is significant since some of the most important events that shaped the Solar System occurred within the first ~10 million years of its formation.

Brennecka and colleagues at ASU and at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, measured the 238U/235U ratio in the earliest solids in the Solar System, calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs). CAIs were the first solids to condense from the cooling protoplanetary disk during the birth of the Solar System. The absolute ages of the CAIs, determined through Pb-Pb dating, are generally considered to date the origin of the Solar System. The high-precision data they obtained from CAIs of the Allende meteorite showed that the 238U/235U ratio is not the same in all CAIs.

“This variation implies substantial uncertainties in the ages previously determined by Pb-Pb dating of CAIs,” explains Brennecka. “This will likely make U isotope measurements part of the procedure for Pb-Pb dating, as the 238U/235U ratio can no longer be assumed to be invariant.”

Brennecka began to think about the idea that the U isotope ratio might not be constant in meteoritic material after learning about work done by Professor Stefan Weyer of the Goethe University of Frankfurt during a sabbatical visit to ASU the previous year. Weyer spent a semester at ASU developing a technique to measure natural variation of U isotopes in Earth and planetary materials, working in the state-of-the-art laboratories of Ariel Anbar, a professor in SESE and ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Science’s Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, and in the W. M. Keck Foundation Laboratory for Environmental Biogeochemistry. That work revealed measurable differences in 238U/235U in different environments on Earth, when everyone thought the ratio was invariant in everything on Earth and our Solar System.

At this time, Brennecka was taking a class on meteorites and the origin of the Solar System from Meenakshi Wadhwa, a professor in SESE and director of the ASU Center for Meteorite Studies. For a class assignment, Brennecka developed a research proposal centered on the implications of variable U isotopes in early Solar System materials. Anbar and Wadhwa encouraged him to take the proposal from the classroom to the laboratory.

“This project is a prime example of what’s possible as a result of the unusual culture of collaboration and cross-fertilization that exists in SESE, and at ASU in general,” says Anbar. “It is also a direct result of ASU’s investments in world-class laboratory facilities for Earth and planetary sciences. Those facilities were critical for Greg’s measurements, and also sparked the collaboration with Stefan Weyer’s group that started us down this research path.”

Brennecka worked with Anbar and Wadhwa to refine the procedures at ASU to be able to measure 238U/235U in the extremely small CAIs, using Wadhwa’s lab and instruments in the ASU Center for Meteorite Studies. Eleven of the thirteen CAIs were from the ASU Center for Meteorite Studies collection; the other two were from the Senckenberg Museum collection in Frankfurt. The project was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), including the NASA Origins of Solar Systems Program, and the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). ASU is home to one of 14 research teams from across the country that comprise the NAI which explores the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life on Earth and in the universe.

“We started with CAIs because the Pb-Pb age of those materials is considered the start of the Solar System, so that is one of the most important dates for the cosmochemistry community, and it should be as accurate as possible,” explains Brennecka. “Because this was a very new area of research and to ensure accurate results, we talked with Stefan, who was then back in Frankfurt, to set up a collaborative effort for laboratory comparison on the results. We shared samples and standards and independently ran tests to see if we got the same answer, which we did.”

The U isotope ratios in all but two CAIs differed significantly from the standard “assumed” value. One of the possible mechanisms that could have produced these U isotope variations in meteorites is the decay of extant 247Cm to 235U. 247Cm is created during only certain types of supernovae and has a very short half-life (15.6 million years) compared to the age of the Solar System, so all of the 247Cm that was present originally has since completely decayed away. Brennecka and colleagues performed additional tests to determine if this was the cause of the U isotope variation.

If a correlation existed between the 238U/235U values and the original Cm/U in the CAIs, it would provide evidence that 247Cm was the reason for the 238U/235U variations. Since 235U is from the decay of 247Cm, higher Cm/U ratios mean there is relatively more 235U produced from 247Cm decay. As Cm has no long-lived stable isotope, the initial Cm/U ratio of a sample cannot be directly determined, so geochemical proxies were used. The correlation of these proxies, or elements that behave like Cm, with U isotope ratios in the CAIs provided strong evidence for the presence of extant 247Cm in the early Solar System. The 238U/235U ratios Brennecka obtained from the Allende meteorite were used to quantify the amount of 247Cm present in the early Solar System.

“Cosmochemists have searched for evidence for live 247Cm in the early Solar System for decades, and this is the first time that its presence has been demonstrated definitively. This work not only impacts precise and accurate dating of the earliest events to occur in our Solar System, but it also has broader implications for the environment and conditions in which our Solar System was born,” explains Wadhwa.

“It is possible that in the future we will be able to use the 247Cm-235U system as a short-lived chronometer,” says Brennecka. “But most importantly in the short term, this will help improve the accuracy of Pb-Pb dating.”

 

(Nicole Staab)
 

Student’s proposal moves beyond the classroom and into the laboratory, leading to a reevaluation of the age of the Solar System
12/15/2009

NASA’s MESSENGER mission team and cartographic experts from the U. S. Geological Survey have created a critical tool for planning the first orbital observations of the planet Mercury – a global mosaic of the planet that will help scientists pinpoint craters, faults, and other features for observation. The map was created from images taken during the MESSENGER spacecraft’s three flybys of the planet and those of Mariner 10 in the 1970s. A presentation on the new global mosaic is being given today at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The MESSENGER spacecraft completed its third and final flyby of Mercury on September 29, concluding its reconnaissance of the innermost planet. The MESSENGER team has been busily preparing for the yearlong orbital phase of the mission, beginning in March 2011, and the near-global mosaic of Mercury from MESSENGER and Mariner 10 images is key to those plans.

“The production of this global mosaic represents a major milestone for everyone on the MESSENGER imaging team,” says MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “Beyond its extremely important use as a planning tool, this global map signifies that MESSENGER is no longer a flyby mission but instead will soon become an in-depth, non-stop global observatory of the Solar System’s innermost planet.”

“The process of making a mosaic may seem relatively straightforward — simple software can stitch together panoramas from multiple images. However, the challenging part has been to make cartographically accurate maps from a series of images with varying resolution (from about 100 to 900 meters per pixel) and lighting conditions (from noontime high Sun to dawn and dusk) taken from a spacecraft traveling at speeds greater than 2 kilometers per second (2,237 miles per hour),” says Mark Robinson, a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and a member of the MESSENGER Science Team.

Small uncertainties in camera pointing and changes in image scale can introduce small errors between frames, Robinson says. “And with lots of images, small errors add up and lead to large mismatches between features in the final mosaic. By picking control points — the same features in two or more images — the camera pointing can be adjusted until the image boundaries match.” This operation is known as a bundle-block adjustment and requires highly specialized software.

Cartographic experts at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Ariz., picked the control points to solve the bundle-block adjustment to construct the final mosaic using the Integrated Software for Imagers and Spectrometers (ISIS). For the MESSENGER mosaic, 5,301 control points were selected, and each control point on average was found in more than three images (18,834 measurements) from a total of 917 images. Scientists at ASU and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) were also instrumental in making the mosaic possible.

“This mosaic represents the best geodetic map of Mercury’s surface. We want to provide the most accurate map for planning imaging sequences once MESSENGER achieves orbit around Mercury,” says Kris Becker of the USGS. “As the systematic mapping of Mercury’s surface progresses, we will continually add new images to the control point network, thus refining the map,” he says. “It has already provided us with a start in the process of naming newly identified features on the surface.”

In the final bundle-block adjustment the average error was about two-tenths of a pixel or only about 100 meters — which is an excellent match from image-to-image. The biggest remaining issue is the absolute control of features on the surface. For instance, if the north pole is not precisely at the spin axis you could have a mosaic in which all the seams overlapped perfectly, but the whole mosaic could slide around like the skin of an orange that somehow became detached from the interior fruit.

Much work was done with the Mariner 10 images collected in 1974 and 1975 to make an absolute control network even though only 45% of the planet was seen at the time. The longitude system for Mercury is tied to a small crater named Hun Kal (the number twenty in an ancient Mayan language, because the crater is centered at 20°W). For now, MESSENGER data are tied to the earlier Mariner 10 control network.

Absolute positional errors in the new mosaic are about two kilometers, according to the MESSENGER team. Once the MESSENGER spacecraft orbits Mercury, much progress will be made refining the relative and absolute control of the MESSENGER (and Mariner 10) images, and the entire planet will be imaged at even higher resolution. The global mosaic is available for download on the USGS Map-a-Planet web site, http://www.mapaplanet.org.

MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) is a NASA-sponsored scientific investigation of the planet Mercury and the first space mission designed to orbit the planet closest to the Sun. The MESSENGER spacecraft launched on August 3, 2004, and after flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury will start a yearlong study of its target planet in March 2011.

 

Prepared jointly by ASU, USGS, JHU-APL
 

MESSENGER Team Releases First Global Map of Mercury
12/07/2009

Chemical, physical, biological, and human processes constantly reshape the Earth’s surface, at scales ranging from particles to continents and from nanoseconds to millions of years. These processes form a complex network of interactions and feedbacks. Earth surface science has helped solve practical problems related to these interactions such as restoring ecosystems, maintaining water supplies, and predicting the effects of changing conditions, but currently these interplays are not well understood, and challenging questions face science and society.

In recognition of the need for a more complete understanding of processes that shape Earth’s surface, the National Science Foundation requested that the National Research Council assess the fundamental questions in Earth surface processes, identify challenges and opportunities in this particular area of study, and outline the research needed to meet these challenges. The report titled, “Landscapes on the Edge” published in November 2009 is the resulting work.

To make progress in addressing the grand challenges, the committee suggested a collaborative approach to the emerging field of Earth surface science, integrating expertise from Earth, atmospheric, climate, ocean, biological, geographic, engineering and social sciences. In addition, the application of new technologies will fuel advances towards the four research initiatives.

“The report includes a strong “call to arms” that resonates with some of the new initiatives of the School of Earth and Space Exploration, especially the co-evolution of surface and society,” says Kelin Whipple, a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE), and one of the committee members who prepared the report.

Although no specific SESE research results or projects are highlighted in the report, it does spot light the type of work done by many professors in the school including Ramon Arrowsmith, Hilairy Hartnett, Arjun Heimsath, Kip Hodges, Everett Shock, Enrique Vivoni, Kelin Whipple, and others.

SESE earth science research increasingly concentrates on modern Earth system processes – addressing questions about how the Earth works today – as a context for creating and evaluating models for how Earth may evolve in the future. By using state-of-the-art technologies in environmental sensor networks, we can better monitor the effectiveness of our efforts to mitigate global threats to society such as rapid climate change and regional threats including earth¬quakes, volcanic eruptions, megastorms, and floods. We promote a long view of sustainability – informed by the past and present, focused on the future – which we like to call “deep sustainability”.

 

The report in brief is available at:
http://dels.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/earth_surface_processes_final.pdf

 

And the full report (only downloadable page by page) is available at:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12700

 

 

Landscapes on the Edge
Icy 'greenhouses' create pockets of liquid water on Mars
12/04/2009

That possibility is raised in a recent paper in the scientific journal Icarus by scientist Diedrich Möhlmann of the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, according to a report published Dec. 2 by NewScientist.com.

If sunlight can enter deposits of ice near the Martian surface, embedded particles of dirt or dust could grow warm by a kind of greenhouse effect, and form tiny pockets of meltwater around them. Sealed in by overlying ice, the water would be protected from evaporating. Such an environment could preserve liquid water near the Martian surface and provide a possible habitat for life.

When New Scientist writer David Shiga asked ASU Mars scientist and professor Philip Christensen about the idea, he replied, "If I was going to search for life on Mars I would certainly include landing and looking at some of these potential snow deposits."

Could icy "greenhouses" make pockets of water for life on Mars?
11/24/2009

Jeff J. Geier, a student in SESE working on an M.S. in geological sciences, was named this year’s recipient of the J. Harold Courtright Scholarship by the Arizona Geological Society (AGS). The title of Geier’s research is: Timing and Structural Control of Gold Mineralization, Santa Gertrudis Mining District, Sonora, Mexico. Professor Steve Reynolds is Geier’s thesis advisor.

The award, in the amount of $2,000, is intended to help defray thesis-related expenses. The award will be presented at the AGS December dinner meeting. In evaluating proposals, the AGS Scholarship Committee considers the scientific significance of the proposed research, the applicability of the research methodology to the problem at hand, and the likelihood that research goals can be achieved.

Harold Courtright had a life-long interest and career in mining and geology. He honed his field mapping skills and porphyry copper exploration techniques in the Northern and Southern Cordillera and was instrumental in discovering some of the better-known porphyry copper deposits in Arizona and Peru, including Silver Bell and Toquepala.

The scholarship fund, set up by the Arizona Geological Society after the death of J. Harold Courtright in 1986 and largely funded by AGS member contributions, is designed to promote graduate research in all geology fields with special emphasis on field geology, economic geology, and the study of ore deposits. Graduate students working towards a degree in the geological sciences at Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona are eligible to apply.
 

Congratulations to Jeff Geier
11/13/2009

The School of Earth and Space Exploration hosted a symposium “Living with the Planet” Nov. 13 that featured the premiere screening of the documentary film “Mud Max: Investigative Documentary - Sidoardjo Mud Volcano Disaster.” The event included a panel discussion with earth scientists from leading European and American institutions, which concluded that the cause of the Sidoardjo mud volcano disaster (also known as LUSI) is still inconclusive.

No disaster in recent history has received as much attention nor created as much controversy as that of LUSI, the world’s fastest growing mud volcano in Indonesia that suddenly erupted on May 29, 2006. Dubbed LUSI as a compendium of the Indonesian word for mud (lumpur) and the East Java town near which LUSI was born (Sidoarjo), the phenomenon has been a unique disaster. The hot mud, which first began spewing from the earth following a powerful earthquake and nearby exploration drilling, is still pouring forth at the rate of up to 150,000 cubic meters per day. Some 40,000 residents living near the eruption have lost their homes, belongings and, in some cases livelihoods and lives. Whole villages have been inundated with mud, infrastructures destroyed and reputations ruined.

International experts have been divided over the cause of the mud eruption. The early point of views favored the theory that the nearby drilling activity may have triggered the eruption, but others, after having time for considerable scientific investigation, support the idea that seismic activity linked to an earthquake just two days before the mud eruption began could have been the likely cause.

While conducting research in Indonesia, Associate Professor Amanda Clarke was interviewed by the film crew creating the documentary film ‘Mud Max.’ The project was produced over a 27-month period by the British company Immodicus in conjunction with the School of Earth and Space Exploration and involved researchers, geologists, drilling experts and scientists whom explore the facts of the tragic, on-going disaster including the scientific, economic, humanitarian and political issues that have made LUSI the talk of the geophysical world. The film aims to highlight the facts and views from every side, but leaves the decision to the viewer as to what caused the mud volcano eruption.

Rather than pointing fingers and dwelling on the causes of the eruption, the Living with the Planet panelists emphasized the importance of seeking out solutions and using LUSI to learn from.

Panel member Jonathan Fink, professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and director of the Center for Sustainability Science Applications, pointed out that volcanology is a relatively young science that requires observations of active eruptions to advance knowledge.

“Mud volcanism of the scale of LUSI has rarely if ever been seen before, so volcanologists may not be able to answer all of the questions that policy makers and the public want to know,” explains Fink. “Each eruption teaches us something new, so LUSI may help scientists interpret future mud events.”

Adriano Mazzini, a researcher at the Physics of Geological Processes Centre of Excellence (University of Oslo), whose research has focused on mud volcanoes, has conducted extensive research on LUSI during his three visits.

“Our results support a scenario where the strike-slip movement of the Watukosek fault triggered the Lusi eruption and synchronous seep activity witnessed at other mud volcanoes along the same fault,” says Mazzini. “The possibility that drilling contributed to trigger the eruption cannot be excluded. However, so far, no univocal data support the drilling hypothesis, and a blow-out scenario can neither explain the dramatic changes that affected the plumbing system of numerous seep systems on Java after the May 27 earthquake.”

Preparing for and reacting quickly to natural disasters such as LUSI requires both deep knowledge of the broader Earth system context and careful monitoring of biological, chemical, and physical processes.

“The development of effective environmental monitoring systems has not progressed very far as yet, and Indonesia - with its complex geology and high risk of natural hazards - would be an excellent place to develop and test state-of-the-art monitoring technologies,” says Kip Hodges, director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration. “The School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU is establishing itself as one of the premier centers for such technology development. We are very excited to explore opportunities to work with our friends in Indonesia to develop world-class hazard monitoring systems for deployment in their country.”

The school sees an important aspect of such collaboration as being a cooperative educational program that would provide opportunities for bright young Indonesian students to receive training at ASU in science and engineering, such that they can return to Indonesia and play leadership roles in developing a strong intellectual foundation for Indonesia in Earth system science and engineering.

According to Clarke and other panel members, the region around LUSI is very complex geologically, making prediction of future mud activity difficult at best.

“Real-time and/or continuous monitoring of several key geophysical, geochemical and volcanological parameters will provide data to help understand the phenomenon,” she says. “This type of campaign, coupled with context gained from detailed study of the area's geologic past, may help scientists predict LUSI's future.”

 

(Nikki Staab)

‘Mud Max’ documentary film on mud volcano launched at premiere screening in Arizona
10/29/2009

ASU researcher leads overall effort (total of four papers in Science), and reports on the fact that oxygen production began in the Earth's oceans at least 100 million years before oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere.

Scientists widely accept that around 2.4 billion years ago, the Earth's atmosphere underwent a dramatic change when oxygen levels rose sharply. Called the "Great Oxidation Event" (GOE), the oxygen spike marks an important milestone in Earth's history, the transformation from an oxygen-poor atmosphere to an oxygen-rich one, paving the way for complex life to develop on the planet.

Two questions that remain unresolved in studies of the early Earth are when oxygen production via photosynthesis got started and when it began to alter the chemistry of Earth's ocean and atmosphere.

ASU scientists, working with collaborators at other institutions, have been pursuing these questions in a series of studies of ancient rocks from Western Australia. The latest of these studies appears in the Oct. 30 issue of Science.

The new findings corroborate previous results that oxygen production began in Earth's oceans at least 100 million years before the GOE, but also go a step further in demonstrating that even very low concentrations of oxygen can have profound effects on ocean chemistry. This research was led by geoscientists at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), working with Ariel Anbar, a professor in the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Earth and Space Exploration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU.

To arrive at their results, the researchers analyzed 2.5 billion-year-old black shales from Western Australia. Essentially representing fossilized pieces of the ancient seafloor, the fine layers within the rocks allowed the researchers to page through ocean chemistry's evolving history. These rocks were obtained under the leadership of Anbar, with support from the NASA Astrobiology Institute of which ASU is a member.

Specifically, the shales revealed that episodes of hydrogen sulfide accumulation in the oxygen-free deep ocean occurred nearly 100 million years before the GOE and up to 700 million years earlier than such conditions were predicted by past models for the early ocean. Scientists have long believed that the early ocean, for more than half of Earth's 4.6 billion-year history, was characterized instead by high amounts of dissolved iron under conditions of essentially no oxygen.

"The conventional wisdom has been that appreciable atmospheric oxygen is needed for sulfidic conditions to develop in the ocean," said Chris Reinhard, a Ph.D. graduate student in the Department of Earth Sciences at UCR and and lead author of the research paper. "We found, however, that sulfidic conditions in the ocean are possible even when there is very little oxygen around, below about 1/100,000th of the oxygen in the modern atmosphere."

Reinhard explained that at even very low oxygen levels in the atmosphere, the mineral pyrite can weather on the continents, resulting in the delivery of sulfate to the ocean by rivers. Sulfate is the key ingredient in hydrogen sulfide formation in the ocean.

Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at UCR, whose laboratory led the research, explained that the hydrogen sulfide in the ocean is a fingerprint of photosynthetic production of oxygen 2.5 billion years ago.

"A pre-GOE emergence for oxygenic photosynthesis is a matter of intense debate, and its resolution lies at the heart of understanding the evolution of diverse forms of life," he said. "We have found an important piece of that puzzle."

"These data don't make much sense unless there were at least small amounts of oxygen in the environment. The simplest explanation is oxygen-producing photosynthesis long before concentrations of oxygen in the atmosphere were even a tiny fraction of what they are today," said Anbar, a co-author of the research paper. "The results are beautifully consistent with our previous results. The story just gets stronger and stronger the more we look at these ancient sediments."

The researchers argue that the presence of small amounts of oxygen may have stimulated the early evolution of eukaryotes - organisms whose cells bear nuclei - millions of years prior to the GOE.

"This initial oxygen production set the stage for the development of animals almost two billion years later," Lyons said. "The evolution of eukaryotes had to take place first."

The findings also have implications for the search for life on extrasolar planets.

"Our findings add to growing evidence suggesting that biological production of oxygen is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the evolution of complex life," Reinhard said. "A planetary atmosphere with abundant oxygen would provide a very promising biosignature. But one of the lessons here is that just because spectroscopic measurements don't detect oxygen in the atmosphere of another planet doesn't necessarily mean that no biological oxygen production is taking place." Anbar, Reinhard, and Lyons were joined in the research by Clint Scott of UCR and Rob Raiswell of the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. The two-year study was supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

 

(Jenny Green)

Ariel Anbar and colleagues discover a new wrinkle in ancient ocean chemistry