Tag Archives: south pole

Experts concerned over 100 volcanoes melting ice near the South Pole

Volcanoes Antarctica

Important Takeaways:

  • Experts are on red alert after uncovering a ticking time bomb in Antarctica that would reshape the continent and dramatically increase sea levels worldwide.
  • More than 100 volcanoes lie beneath the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is ‘particularly vulnerable to collapse, yet its position atop an active volcanic rift is seldom considered,’ the study noted.
  • As the ice sheet melts, the amount of mass pushing down on the surface decreases, which creates an uplifting effect in the subsurface.
  • This, in turn, allows magma chambers deep within the continent to expand, which speeds up the processes that lead to an eruption by putting stress on the chamber walls and releasing gas trapped inside the magma.
  • When volcanoes erupt, this drives more melting at the surface, and the process starts over again.
  • The researchers modeled this phenomenon using over 4,000 advanced computer simulations, finding that surface melting speeds up the process that initiates the first stages of an eruption by tens to hundreds of years.
  • Some of the chambers released enough heat to melt more than three million cubic feet of ice a year.
  • If the ice sheet completely collapsed, sea levels could rise a catastrophic 190 feet.
  • This would completely submerge entire coastal cities such as New York, Tokyo and Shanghai, rendering them uninhabitable.
  • Luckily, scientists believe that apocalyptic scenario is still a long way off.

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Ten years after ‘suicide’ mission, NASA thirsts for lunar water

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A decade after NASA sent a rocket crashing into the moon’s south pole, spewing a plume of debris that revealed vast reserves of ice beneath the barren lunar surface, the space agency is racing to pick up where its little-remembered project left off.

The so-called LCROSS mission was hastily carried out 10 years ago Wednesday in a complex orbital dance of two “suicide” spacecraft and one mapping satellite. It proved a milestone in the discovery of a natural lunar resource that could be key to NASA’s plans for renewed human exploration of the moon and ultimately visits to Mars and beyond.

“The LCROSS mission was a game changer,” NASA’s chief Jim Bridenstine told Reuters, adding that once water had been found the United States “should have immediately as a nation changed our direction to the moon so we could figure out how to use it.”

The agency now has the chance to follow up on the pioneering mission, after Vice President Mike Pence in March ordered NASA to land humans on the lunar surface by 2024, accelerating a goal to colonize the moon as a staging ground for eventual missions to Mars.

Bridenstine says the moon holds billions of tons of water ice, although the exact amount and whether it’s present in large chunks of ice or combined with the lunar soil remains unknown. To find out before astronauts arrive on the moon, NASA is working with a handful of companies to put rovers on the lunar surface by 2022.

“We need next to get on the surface with a rover to prospect for water, drill into it, and determine how suitable it is for extraction,” said Jack Burns, director of the Network for Exploration and Space Science at the University of Colorado.

Instead of launching expensive fuel loads from Earth, scientists say the lunar water could be extracted and broken down into its two main components, hydrogen and oxygen, potentially turning the moon into a fuel arsenal for missions to deeper parts of the solar system.

OPEN KIMONO

Weeks before the LCROSS impact booster struck the moon’s south pole, the mission’s development timeline “was a bad rush to the finish line,” Tony Colaprete, principal investigator for LCROSS, told Reuters.

“We wanted to make as large of a hole as possible to get as much materials out of the shadows and into the sunlight,” Colaprete said, describing an unusually fast-paced program using technology that had never been used in space before.

Engineers and mission leaders used the business phrase “open kimono” about disclosing company information to characterize the program’s breakneck development speed and the need for clear and open lines of communication between contractors and NASA.

“That almost became a mantra for the project,” Colaprete said.

The current lunar program is also “forcing some cultural changes” at NASA, he added, which has undergone a series of high-level management changes and delays with the agency’s commercial crew program, a public-private effort to resume U.S. human spaceflight for the first time since 2011.

“People are coming together in a way like they did on LCROSS.”

(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Richard Pullin)