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Heading to the lake for some shinny this winter? New study finds more children dying due to unstable ice – CBC.ca

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Marc Chartrand remembers falling through the ice.

It was Halloween night in 2019. It was cold, but not too cold, and snow had not yet fallen, making it an ideal night for a skate on Fish Lake, roughly 13 kilometres southwest of Whitehorse. He enjoyed skating near the shore, where the ice was thickest, yet still clear enough to see fish swimming among the rocks below. 

But this particular day, Chartrand decided to venture further out. Armed with a wooden hockey stick and a puck, he headed further away from shore, the sound of his skates cutting across the ice echoing across the lake. 

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And then, suddenly, he watched with dread as the black puck disappeared. Skating at full speed and unable to stop, the ice cracked beneath him. In a split second, he was submerged in the frigid water.

“When I fell through, I couldn’t really see anymore,” Chartrand recalled. “It was really like just a dark black hole under me.”

Marc Chartrand, like many other Yukoners, enjoyed skating on Fish Lake near Whitehorse. Last year, he skated right into open water. He eventually was able to pull himself to safety, and now shares his story to educate others. (George Maratos/CBC)

After a friend tried unsuccessfully to pull Chartrand out with her stick, he was left to try to get out on his own. He tried to pull himself up, but the ice just cracked. He could feel his strength running out. With one last try, he hauled himself out of the icy water.

While Chartrand blames himself for what happened — “waiting a couple extra days would not have hurt” — stories like these are becoming more common as Canadian winters become warmer.

Recent studies have shown that globally, lakes are warming due to climate change and new research has found it’s something that can have dire consequences.

A study published on Wednesday in the journal PLOS One found that more children and youth are dying as a result of unstable lake ice, mainly at the beginning and end of winter.

WATCH | Researcher discusses findings the risk of drowning during warmer winters:

Associate Professor Sapna Sharma of York University’s Faculty of Science talks about what her research team found in 10 different countries over the last 10 to 30 years about winter drownings and a changing climate. (Credit York University) 1:55

The team of authors looked at 4,000 drownings across 10 countries including Canada, Russia, Germany, Russia, Sweden and 14 states in the United States. The research included 30 years of data across every Canadian province and territory.

Most of the drownings occurred when the temperature was between –5 C and 0 C. Other factors that came into play as well, including thaw-freeze events, rain and wind.

Children on the ice

The researchers used Minnesota as a case study; the state collects data on the age and source of drownings.

They found that children under nine years old accounted for 44 per cent of the winter drownings that didn’t involve a vehicle. Youth from 15 to 39 years old were also “vulnerable” as they spent more time on the ice fishing, for example, and tended to engage in riskier activities.

The findings concern lead author Sapna Sharma, a professor at York University’s department of biology, who has been studying lakes her entire career. 

“I started going through this data and I was just like, ‘I can’t do this,'” said Sharma, who is the mother of a five-year-old. “It’s devastating because the kids are four, five, six years old.”

In the case of people who died while using vehicles, such as snowmobiles, most of the deaths were in those younger than 24 years old. 

And while the research did not include a case study in Canada, Sharma said the data showed similar patterns.

“The climate is changing, and winters are warming,” she said. “And as individuals, it’s really hard to put that into your everyday decision-making. Being in Canada you think, ‘Oh, I’m going to the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, and everybody goes skating on the Rideau Canal.'”

But while the canal might have been frozen by this time last year, or the years before that, one can’t assume it’s always the case.

And Sharma is particularly concerned about what this winter might bring with the pandemic.

“I think this is really important especially this year with COVID and more people spending time outside,” she said. “It might be the first year that they’re going out, like exploring nature, because there’s nothing else to do.” 

Deaths in the North

For some countries included in the research, he number of winter drownings through lake ice were 15 to 50 per cent of their annual drownings. Canada had the highest with a median of 70 — particularly in the territories, where people use frozen lakes as a means of their livelihood, be it for hunting, fishing or as a means of transportation. 

And it’s the North that is seeing the most rapid warming.

According to Canada’s Changing Climate Report, released in 2019, the average annual temperature has warmed by roughly 1.7 C above the average from 1948. In the North, that anomaly is 2.3 C, with the greatest warming occurring in the winter.  

The study highlights the importance of incorporating local knowledge into better understanding ice conditions and specifically mentions the experience of Cree hunters who monitor air temperatures and precipitation to evaluate inland ice conditions.

In March, five French tourists and their guide died after their snowmobiles fell through the ice in Quebec’s Lac Saint-Jean in March. The Sûreté du Québec is seen here during a search attempt. (Julia Page/CBC)

“Indigenous communities … have a lot of experience using ice, so I think it’s crucial to incorporate traditional knowledge, and the Indigenous communities into the safety frameworks,” Sharma said. “We need that knowledge.”

There could also be more agencies devoted to monitoring the ice and issuing outlooks or advisories as to ice conditions, something that Germany and Italy use, which helped reduce their winter ice drownings in the early and late winter months, according to the study.

Chartrand shares his experience mainly as a warning to others that the lake hadn’t yet frozen yet. That day, he remembers seeing more than a dozen people on the ice, albeit closer to shore, including a mother pulling a child on a toboggan. He still believes skating or spending any time on the lake is something everyone should do, but just under the right conditions.

“I would encourage everybody to go,” he said. “But just maybe stay closer to the shore, or maybe do a do a test before.”

But most importantly, Sharma said, be aware of the weather in the days before. Climate change is causing more swings back and forth in temperatures, something that climatologists have nicknamed “winter weirding,” which can weaken ice.

Sharma has a warning for those who may forget it was 10 C just a few days before they plan to skate: “The ice doesn’t forget.”

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NASA to launch sounding rockets into moon's shadow during solar eclipse – Phys.org

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This photo shows the three APEP sounding rockets and the support team after successful assembly. The team lead, Aroh Barjatya, is at the top center, standing next to the guardrails on the second floor. Credit: NASA/Berit Bland

NASA will launch three sounding rockets during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, to study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet.

The Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) sounding rockets will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to study the disturbances in the created when the moon eclipses the sun. The sounding rockets had been previously launched and successfully recovered from White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, during the October 2023 .

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They have been refurbished with new instrumentation and will be relaunched in April 2024. The mission is led by Aroh Barjatya, a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where he directs the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab.

The sounding rockets will launch at three different times: 45 minutes before, during, and 45 minutes after the peak local eclipse. These intervals are important to collect data on how the sun’s sudden disappearance affects the ionosphere, creating disturbances that have the potential to interfere with our communications.

The ionosphere is a region of Earth’s atmosphere that is between 55 to 310 miles (90 to 500 kilometers) above the ground. “It’s an electrified region that reflects and refracts and also impacts as the signals pass through,” said Barjatya. “Understanding the ionosphere and developing models to help us predict disturbances is crucial to making sure our increasingly communication-dependent world operates smoothly.”

A sounding rocket is able to carry science instruments between 30 and 300 miles above Earth’s surface. These altitudes are typically too high for science balloons and too low for satellites to access safely, making sounding rockets the only platforms that can carry out direct measurements in these regions. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The ionosphere forms the boundary between Earth’s lower atmosphere—where we live and breathe—and the vacuum of space. It is made up of a sea of particles that become ionized, or electrically charged, from the sun’s energy or .

When night falls, the ionosphere thins out as previously ionized particles relax and recombine back into neutral particles. However, Earth’s terrestrial weather and space weather can impact these particles, making it a dynamic region and difficult to know what the ionosphere will be like at a given time.

It’s often difficult to study short-term changes in the ionosphere during an eclipse with satellites because they may not be at the right place or time to cross the eclipse path. Since the exact date and times of the are known, NASA can launch targeted sounding rockets to study the effects of the eclipse at the right time and at all altitudes of the ionosphere.

As the eclipse shadow races through the atmosphere, it creates a rapid, localized sunset that triggers large-scale atmospheric waves and small-scale disturbances or perturbations. These perturbations affect different radio communication frequencies. Gathering the data on these perturbations will help scientists validate and improve current models that help predict potential disturbances to our communications, especially high-frequency communication.

This conceptual animation is an example of what observers might expect to see during a total solar eclipse, like the one happening over the United States on April 8, 2024. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The APEP rockets are expected to reach a maximum altitude of 260 miles (420 kilometers). Each rocket will measure charged and neutral particle density and surrounding electric and magnetic fields. “Each rocket will eject four secondary instruments the size of a two-liter soda bottle that also measure the same data points, so it’s similar to results from fifteen rockets while only launching three,” explained Barjatya. Embry-Riddle built three secondary instruments on each rocket, and the fourth one was built at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

In addition to the rockets, several teams across the U.S. will also be taking measurements of the ionosphere by various means. A team of students from Embry-Riddle will deploy a series of high-altitude balloons. Co-investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts and the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico will operate a variety of ground-based radars taking measurements.

Using this data, a team of scientists from Embry-Riddle and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are refining existing models. Together, these various investigations will help provide the puzzle pieces needed to see the bigger picture of ionospheric dynamics.

The animation depicts the waves created by ionized particles during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Credit: MIT Haystack Observatory/Shun-rong Zhang. Zhang, S.-R., Erickson, P. J., Goncharenko, L. P., Coster, A. J., Rideout, W. & Vierinen, J. (2017). Ionospheric Bow Waves and Perturbations Induced by the 21 August 2017 Solar Eclipse. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(24), 12,067-12,073. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076054

When the APEP- launched during the 2023 annular solar eclipse, scientists saw a sharp reduction in the density of charged particles as the annular eclipse shadow passed over the atmosphere.

“We saw the perturbations capable of affecting radio communications in the second and third rockets, but not during the first rocket that was before peak local eclipse,” said Barjatya. “We are super excited to relaunch them during the total eclipse to see if the perturbations start at the same altitude and if their magnitude and scale remain the same.”

The next total solar eclipse over the contiguous U.S. is not until 2044, so these experiments are a rare opportunity for scientists to collect crucial data.

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Royal Sask. Museum research finds insect changes may have set stage for dinosaurs' extinction – CTV News Regina

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Research by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) shows that ecological changes were occurring in insects at least a million years before dinosaur extinction.

Papers published in the scientific journal, Current Biology, describe the first insect fossils found in amber from Saskatchewan and the unearthing of three new ant species from an amber deposit in North Carolina, according to a release from the province.

The amber deposit from in the Big Muddy Badlands of Saskatchewan, which was formed about 67 million years ago, preserved insects that lived in a swampy redwood forest about one million years before the extinction of dinosaurs.

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“Fossils in the amber deposit seem to show that common Cretaceous insects may have been replaced on the landscape by their more modern relatives, particularly in groups such as ants, before the extinction event,” Elyssa Loewen, curatorial assistant, said.

The research team was led by Loewen and Dr. Ryan McKellar, the RSM’s curator of paleontology.

“These new fossil records are closer than anyone has gotten to sampling a diverse set of insects near the extinction event, and they help researchers fill in a 17-million-year gap in the fossil record of insects around that time,” Dr. McKellar said.

The three ant species discovered in North Carolina also belonged to extinct groups that didn’t survive past the Cretaceous period.

“When combined with the work in Saskatchewan, the two recent papers show that there was a dramatic change in ant diversity sometime between 77 and 67 million years ago,” Dr. McKellar said in the release.

“Our analyses of body shapes in the fossils suggests that the turnover was not related to major differences in ecology, but it may have been related to something like the size and complexity of ant colonies. More work is needed to confirm this.”

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Meteors, UFOs or something else? Dawson City, Yukon, residents puzzled by recent sightings in night sky – CBC.ca

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Some residents in Dawson City, Yukon, say they’ve been seeing unusual things in the night sky lately — and it’s not the Northern Lights. 

But some might say it’s equally as fascinating.

Over the past few weeks, some residents have taken to social media to report seeing what they described as a fireball or meteor overhead. And last week, two residents said they both saw something similar.

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Naomi Gladish lives in Henderson Corner, a subdivision approximately 20 kilometres from downtown Dawson City. She told CBC News she saw something while walking her dog Friday morning.

“I looked up and saw a bright star,” Gladish said. “Or what I thought was a star.” 

“Within a fraction of a second, I realized it was actually moving quickly. And then as I watched it, a second later it grew a long tail.”

Dawson City resident Naomi Gladish said she saw something similar to the fireball shown in this image from the American Meteor Society. (American Meteor Society)

Gladish said the unknown object started to change into a pale blue colour, like a gas flame. Then, a few seconds later, it appeared to burn out.

“I could see fire, or coal,” Gladish said. “Like red glowing bits, breaking off of it. And then that was it. I tried watching to see if I could see any dark chunks falling from that spot, or carrying on from that spot, but the sky was dark.”

A minute or two after Gladish saw what she thought was a meteor, she heard a boom in the distance.

“My dog and I both turned our head to that exact direction that I had just seen it,” she said.”I figured it was related.”

Two women walking through snowy mountain terrain.
Naomi Gladish hiking with her sister at Tombstone Park. (Submitted by Naomi Gladish)

Dawson resident Jeff Delisle reported seeing something similar at about the same time. He then took to social media to ask if anyone else had seen it. Two people responded saying they had. 

“It flew right above me,” Delisle wrote.

“Pretty cool looking…. What is it?”

Likely not a meteor, says astronomer

Christa Van Laerhoven, president of the Yukon Astronomical Society, came across Delisle’s post and got in touch. She asked about what he’d seen, such as how long it was in the sky and the colour.

Van Laerhoven told CBC News that based on descriptions from both Delisle and Gladish, she doesn’t believe it could have been a meteor.

She says a meteor would have been moving much faster, and the colouring would have appeared differently. 

“Meteors can be any colour but … as a rule, are a consistent colour. What these people were describing had different colours. So the head looked blue and then the tail was more of an orange,” van Laerhoven said.

“That’s just something that doesn’t happen with meteors.”

a meteor
This zoomed-in still from a dashcam video captured in 2020 by Louise Cooke from Mount Lorne, Yukon, shows what one space science expert said appears to be an unusually-bright meteor travelling across the sky. (Submitted by: Louise Cooke)

Van Laehoven believes there may be another explanation for the recent unusual sightings: space junk, falling to earth.

“Space junk, when it comes in … comes through the atmosphere and starts glowing that can be more irregular, because of the variety of materials that go into a spacecraft.”

Van Laerhoven also suggested it could a very fast plane, or someone playing with rockets.

Gladish, however, doesn’t think anyone in Dawson was playing with rockets on Friday morning.

“Unless they’re talking about someone in China, or like a distant land playing with very high, powerful rockets … then sure,” she said.

“This was not something that someone in Dawson was doing … This came from much, much higher and it was much, much different to anything that would be locally caused.”

Van Laerhoven also dismissed another possibility: alien visitors.

“If aliens were coming to Earth, we would know,” she said.

“Simply because it would take them so much effort to get here that it would be very hard to imagine them getting here and not doing something dramatic enough that we would actually know about it.”

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