Scuttling Our Fleet

Last week, the final mission of space shuttle program completed with the safe touchdown of Atlantis in Florida. With this landing, the American manned space program came to an official, ignominious end. This bitter defeat comes not from a foreign enemy, or from a technological failure--but from the conscious, deliberative, mistaken choice by America to withdraw from space.

Historians regard with bewilderment at the 1433 decision by China to destroy the immense treasure ships of Cheng Ho, and to abandon its flourishing trading routes throughout the Indian Ocean. The size and scale of Cheng Ho’s expeditions is best grasped by the fact that nearly a century later, when the European explorers of Magellan’s voyage first entered this region of the world, many of the locals still prized artifacts, such as fine porcelain, acquired by trading with Cheng Ho’s fleet. Despite the potential of this empire building, one day in 1433 China inexplicably chose to discard its budding empire and withdraw from the world for over five hundred years.

Historians may look upon the end of the space shuttle program, 21 July 2011, as a similar day for the United States.

Generations of Americans have taken for granted the possibility that our best and brightest might one day achieve the dream of becoming an astronaut. Now we no longer have a manned spaceflight program, though it is possible Americans may still travel to the ISS--as passengers on Russian craft. The unearthing of irony is one of the prime motivators for historians, yet this irony is so hyperbolic as to strain credulity.

Astronaut Story Musgrave put it this way:

“Why are we so poor in our vision and so poor in our project management that we come to a point where it's reasonable to phase out the current program and we have no idea what the next one is? … Washington is in total failure that this has happened.”

Just as America has decided to abandon the frontier of space, American science stands at a precipice. American students are fleeing from science; enrollments in scientific disciplines hover in the lower single digits, while more lucrative fields--business administration, accounting, finance--swell with students. But the problems of American education are not restricted to science education.

Americans are spurning higher education, though advanced training has never been more vital to high-paying employment. The United States used to be first among other nations in the percentage of 25-34 year-olds who had earned college degrees; now we are number twelve, behind Belgium and Russia. One-third of universities saw graduation rates fall in the years between 2002 and 2008. Instead of helping this problem by lowering college costs, we are choosing instead to make it more difficult and expensive to attend college; in 2009, the University of California, one of the largest public university systems in the world, decided to raise tuition 32% in one year, making even a public education unaffordable even for many students born in the lower middle classes.

We like to imagine that America is first in every field, but in science the real figure is number twenty-nine; American students rank 29th in science abilities, behind Croatia and the Czech Republic.

Even as we are choosing to fail, other countries are choosing to thrive. The People’s Republic of China is rapidly gaining ground in the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers published English; it is estimated that by 2013, the PRC will publish more scientific papers than America.

Yet this crisis elicits not even a dim reflection of the panic that consumed the country after the Sputnik launch. There are no calls for massive funding for education, no calls for increasing the number of federally-funded scientific research positions, no call for augmenting the number of science professorships at universities so that some of the PhDs snared in perpetual post-doc hell can finally begin their full research careers instead of spending all their time bumping from one temporary job to another. Such fixes are not even remotely part of the discussion.

Instead, on the same day that Atlantis touched down in Florida, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives informed the president that he was ending negotiations over the increase of the federal debt limit, a once-trivial formality needed to maintain the full faith and credit of the United States. Instead of addressing the problems of science, political leaders are consumed with petty games of chicken. Just as during the invasion of Iraq, Americans workers setting up the occupation infrastructure were forced to follow OSHA regulations in the middle of an active war zone, our entire government now seems paralyzed with meaningless theatre while an ominous threat looms. It is as if the captain of the Titanic ordered his officers to make sure their compasses were in calibration even as the ship sank.

Manned spaceflight is not the only scientific casualty of these misplaced priorities. In April, an important radio telescope array in California was forced to shutter its operations for lack of funds . For scientific discoveries in astronomy, or paleontology, or high energy physics, one must increasingly look outside the United States. We have decided to withdraw.

Who would have thought that as scientific research blossom elsewhere--in the PRC, at CERN--the United States would be pulling back? Who would have thought that a little over a half century following Sputnik, the Russians would have finally fulfilled Khrushchev’s taunt and buried the United States?

But then, during the height of the treasure fleet, how could Cheng Ho have known that the forces of irrationality and incorrect decisions would so easily overwhelm progress?

new landslide hazard map

The California Geological Survey has released a new map of landslide hazard that reinforces some of the incontrovertible facts about the equation that governs landslides in the Bay Area:

slope angle + clay expansion + weak rock + rain = landslide

The last variable, rain, is one that is peculiar in the Bay Area. We're moderately arid--not as many inches as Seattle, far more than Barstow. But the signature of Bay Area rains is that they come all at once, in catastrophic storms that funnel into the Bay Area across the Pacific as if by a pipeline. The effect of this is saturation, and the effect of saturation is overland runoff, water literally unable to soak into the receiving clay. This runoff can have an ferocious erosive effect, transforming stable slopes in a matter of hours to undercut, unstable, moving landscapes.

As the San Jose Mercury News has reported, this is bad news for Marin County. Marin is blessed with steep, interesting hills of schist and serpentinite and chert. But the vertiginous fractured Franciscan landscape are both weak and steep, simply waiting for a slight nudge, in the form of water weight and lubrication. And unlike the East Bay, where the mountainous regions are sparsely developed, Marin has extensive building on very steep slopes.

As bad as this is, it gets worse. As was recently discussed at a conference in Sacramento, California faces a risk from periodic "megastorms," called ArkStorms, which can deluge the state with biblical rain.

Earthquake predictions, and the coming storm

Citizens of Rome are frightened that an earthquake is about to occur:

Thousands of people are reported to be staying out of Rome for the next few days, over fears the city will be hit by a huge earthquake.

The panic was sparked by rumours that seismologist Raffaele Bendandi, who died in 1979, predicted the city would be devastated by a quake on 11 May ...

But many people said they were leaving the city to be on the safe side.

There are reports of an 18% increase in the number of city employees planning to stay away from work

The magnitude of this silliness is shocking.

Earthquake prediction has never been able to pinpoint an exact day and time of a quake. This may be a goal forever out of reach of seismologists; the same nonlinear dynamics that make short-term weather prediction impossible more than about a week ahead are involved in the dynamics of earthquakes, meaning that very slight changes in initial conditions produce very different results.

But, in a very real way, this doesn't matter.

Geologists still know 1) where earthquakes will occur in the future, 2) how large they will be in the future, 3) approximately how many people they will kill in a given urban area, based upon existing buildings, and 4) a range of time, in years, when the earthquake, based on past events, is most likely to occur.

For example, on the world's deadliest urban fault, the Hayward Fault, geologists know exactly where the fault lies. In fact, its traces through the San Francisco East Bay are unmistakeable, in thousands of offset foundations, building cracks, and sidewalks buckled by creep. We know where the fault is, and because the subsurface geometry of Hayward goes (unlike many other faults) pretty much straight down, we have a reasonable idea that epicenters will be focused along the fault trace.

We also know approximately how large the coming quake will be. Right now there is thought to be enough stored energy in the rocks to produce a >6.7 Mw quake. That will be quite devastating in proximity to so many homes. We know that the tens of thousands of unreinforced brick buildings in the Bay Area will likely mean casualties on the scale of Japan's 1992 Kobe quake, which killed 1994, which killed over 6400 people.

We also know when we can expect the Hayward to rupture, based on trench work that has revealed a long-term record of past events. According to the great work of Jim Lienkaemper, of the USGS, the recurrence interval of the Hayward ranges from about 161 years, plus or minus 65 years, to 170 years, plus or minus 82 years. For the five most recent big quakes, however, the recurrence interval is only 138 years, plus or minus 58 years.

The last big Hayward Fault event was the quake of 1868, which was 143 years ago. That means by the last-five measurements, we are squarely in the time zone for the next quake, though we, in fact, entered the lower range of this in 1948. By 2064, we are virtually guaranteed to have the quake, though it most likely will occur well before this. Likewise, with the 161 and 170 numbers, we long ago entered the time zone where the quake is primed and ready to occur. This is not good news for us, but it is a prediction, one verified by much scientific research.

So when people ask when the next big quake will be, we can tell them that geologists know where, when, and how bad it will be. This usually comes as a surprise. People are looking for some sort of 3-day warning, which does not exist. People--and municipalities--need to start preparing for the guaranteed seismic event in the near future, rather than imagining scientists are somehow going to come up with a warning as they would with an approaching storm.

quakes can drop land

We often think of sea level as the height of water relative to the land. But geologists know that the land is also in motion, somewhat complicating measurements of rising sea level. (Alaska, which is tectonically rising, records less apparent sea level rise than elsewhere, for example.) In cases where land is subsiding, sea level rise may actually seem augmented. And no part of the Earth underwent a quicker subsidence than areas of coastal Japan during the great quake of 11 March 2011.

As a recent story confirms,

The March 11 earthquake that hit eastern Japan was so powerful it pulled the entire country out and down into the sea. The mostly devastated coastal communities now face regular flooding, because of their lower elevation and damage to sea walls from the massive tsunamis triggered by the quake.

One of my professors of geology remembers camping on a beach the night of the 1992 Mendocino earthquake, and finding in the morning that the coastline had been visibly uplifted, exposing mussell-covered rocks now well-above the high tide line, dooming their sessile molluscan tenants.

While we human like to imagine the solid land as solidly fixed in one place, the reality is far more complex, though our short life spans rarely allow us to the opportunity to observe changes first hand. This the nature of deep time; we can see the long term effects of geologic changes but usually only indirectly observe them occurring.

Japan is an exception:

Some areas in Ishinomaki moved southeast 17 feet (5.3 meters) and sank 4 feet (1.2 meters) lower.

"We thought this slippage would happen gradually, bit by bit. We didn't expect it to happen all at once," says Testuro Imakiire, a researcher at Japan's Geospatial Information Authority, the government body in charge of mapping and survey.

The now permanent situation in Japan should give those of us who live in California a moment of pause to reflect on how quickly the land around may one day change.

magma ocean on Io

Students always come to intro geology courses with the misconception that beneath our thin, rocky crust, there exists an ocean of magma. Intro geology students imagine that volcanoes are simply breaches in this ocean, where pressure forces this liquid rock to spew out.

The reality, of course, is that the mantle is solid, not liquid. The mantle's ability to flow over time makes it seem liquid-like, but it is in fact quite crystalline. Beginning geology students have no end of trouble over this distinction; maybe it's something wrong with the way I teach it, but I'd say at least a quarter of students just never quite get this fundamental fact about the earth. And when I throw in decompression and flux melting, students really start to have difficulty.

Now, to add to the confusion, it seems that Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, does in fact have a "magma ocean." In fact, estimates are that about 10% of the volume of Io involves liquified material. This may account for Io's strikingly-intense volcanic activity. Compared to our relatively tame planet, Io has frequent volcanic activity.

wither agate?

Well, it's happening again.

The great state of Louisiana is poised to enact a geological injustice. This time the victim is agate, which has held the distinction of being LA's state gem. Now under consideration is a much-debated proposal to downgrade agate to LA's state mineral.

The irony is that because agate is cryptocrystalline, it's borderline to call it either a gem or a mineral. "Gem" is a geologically-meaningless term synonymous with a mineral, which is an inorganic, naturally-occurring compound assuming a regular, orderly crystallinity.

But when you look at agate under a polarized light microscope, what you see is... well, not much. The crystals are so tiny that even under high magnification, what you mostly see in thin section is an iridescent swirl that reminds one of a CD refracting light. You could say these individual crystals are minerals, but the nature of agate as a whole is more amorphous than mineralic.

Nonetheless, more for the sake of convenience than consistency, geologists do classify agate as a mineral, a gem, or a rock, depending on the circumstances. And just as California should not have considered removing serpentinite as its state rock, so too should Louisiana refrain from offering any geological insult. Geologists vote... and we carry rock hammers, too.

anti-wolf, anti-science

Fear of wolves is one of those irrational, deep-seated human traits. As Farley Mowat and others have pointed out, wolves pose virtually danger to humans, and little danger to livestock. Yet in the West wars over the classification of wolves take on an unusual prominence.

As part of the unfortunate budget deal Obama agreed to last Friday, a hostage negotiation with the operation of the federal government on the line, Obama agreed to a small, little-noticed rider that allowed Congress to change the endangered status of wolves in Montana and Idaho.

Now there is nothing wrong, per se, with a species being taken off the Endangered Species list, if the evidence warrants such an action. But the process established by Congress does not--until this week--allow for political machinations to override scientific consensus. Now the status of every animal on the list is on the table, with congress members vying with each other for which animal--stubbornly confounding some development project with its insistence on living--is to be taken off next.

The issue is science denial. Do we have a system where scientists come to a conclusion based on evidence, and then take action on a species' status, or do we have a system where politicians make these decisions, based on their own economic interests?

In the reality based community, scientific facts have meaning and relevance. In the world of science denial, facts are as fungible as opinions, because at their core denialists do not accept the idea of an objective, rational world outside their own subjective experience. They engage in magical thinking at its worst.