Decade’s EndDecade’s EndGizmodo, io9, and Earther look back at our passing decade and look ahead at what kind of future awaits us in the next ten years.
The 2010s will be remembered as the decade when we could no longer deny climate change.
I mean, it’s not like any rational person could deny it in the preceding decades, but the past 10 years have seen scientists’ predictions become reality. Our world has entered an unsteady state, one where the things previous generations took for granted—a frozen Arctic, less violent weather—are no more.
While the impacts of the climate crisis are clear to anyone living on Earth, satellites continue to offer the most striking view of the large-scale changes. Orbiting anywhere from about 400 to 500 miles above the Earth’s surface, satellites operated by NASA and the European Space Agency have revolutionized our understanding of the planet. They’ve provided fuel for groundbreaking discoveries about climate change from pole to pole. But you don’t have to have a PhD to look at the imagery being sent back to Earth and see the changes afoot.
With the help of Pierre Markuse, a satellite imagery expert who worked with Sentinel Hub, Earther took a look at a handful of the changes over the past decade that illuminates the ongoing climate crisis.
Baffin Island’s disappearing ice cap
Ice all around the world is melting, and really, we could’ve picked any of the hundreds of disappearing glaciers, ice patches, and Arctic sea ice. But the Barnes Ice Cap on Canadian Arctic’s Baffin Island stands out for a few reasons. For one, the cap is a remnant of some of the Earth’s most ancient ice, the Laurentide Ice Sheet that stretched from Baffin Island as far south as Chicago during the last Ice Age. Momentous research published earlier this year used ancient plants taken at the edges of the cap to show the Arctic hasn’t been this heated in at least 115,000 years.
Despite existing for more than 100,000 years, the rapid Arctic warming of the past decade has taken a noticeable toll on the ice. Imagery from NASA’s Terra satellite shows the ice cap—which differs from a glacier because it sits in place rather than moving—has retreated and grown darker. The darkening of the cap could hasten its demise. While we may have to wait another few centuries for that to happen, the fact that we can see changes over the past decade illustrates we’re already losing history.
The Tubbs Fire remakes California
This has also been the decade of fire for the West as the climate crisis dried out forests and increased the odds of hot weather that can fuel large fires. But California is perhaps the place most synonymous with flames. Five of the largest fires on record for the state occurred this decade. Of the 10 most destructive fires that state has seen, seven occurred this decade (and six in the last three years alone).
The Tubbs Fire ranks second on that list. The October 2017 fire marauded through the North Bay community of Santa Rosa, charring nearly 37,000 acres and destroying 5,636 structures. ESA’s Sentinel satellite captured the immediate aftermath of the fire. But it also shows that two years later, the landscape and community are still recovering. The burn scar is still visible in the hills surrounding Santa Rosa and the neighborhoods most affected are still in early stages of being rebuilt.
When it occurred, the Tubbs Fire was the most destructive fire in state history, but it was bumped to number two just a year later by 2018’s horrific Camp Fire. This year’s fire season was mild by comparison, but that’s largely because utilities that have been responsible for some of the state’s worst fires shut down power to avoid a repeat (which came with a whole host of other issues). That raises questions about where we should build (or rebuild) and what future forest communities should look like.
The big ‘berg that captivated the world
“Superstar” and “iceberg” are not usually synonymous. But the Larsen C iceberg fit the bill. The saga of the ‘berg began in 2016 when cracked formed on the Larsen C ice shelf that sits on the Antarctic Peninsula. The cracks portended a massive iceberg could break away from the floating chunk of ice and reshape the remaining ice.
After a year, the iceberg finally broke away in July 2017. Dubbed A68, the iceberg was about half the size of Jamaica and began a languorous journey out to sea. The open water in front of the new face of the ice shelf became a protected area, and scientists planned a trip into the breach to catch a rare glimpse of what happens when a ‘berg opens up new water. Sea ice, unfortunately, thwarted the trip, but researchers eventually made it there in 2019.
What happens next for the rest of Larsen C is still TBD. The neighboring Larsen A and B ice shelves collapsed specularly in 1995 and 2002, respectively. The calving event was massive but largely due to natural forces, though warming oceans could now cut away at the weakened ice shelf. As for A68? The trillion-ton iceberg is still swirling along the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula on a slow track north. Once in warmer waters, it will eventually meet its watery demise.
The Aral Sea continues its disappearing act
The Aral Sea began to disappear long before the 2010s, but that doesn’t make its continued decline any more shocking. The inland sea was once the fourth-largest lake in the world. A 1960s Soviet irrigation project cut off the two rivers that were its lifeblood, and what was once the fourth-largest lake in the world has been shriveling in the decade since. The climate crisis has contributed to the sea’s transition into a desert, which, in turn, has further altered the region’s climate to an even harsher state.
The 2010s weren’t kind to the sea. Imagery from the start of the decade shows the Aral Sea had a bit of brackish water sitting in the eastern portion of the basin. But by 2014, the only bit of the sea remaining is a sliver on the west side of the lake. While the northern reaches of the sea have bounced back slightly thanks to a dam that has helped build up water levels, the larger southern portion continues to suffer.
Coastlines recede in the Arctic
Drew Point, Alaska, is about 70 miles as the crow flies from Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in the U.S. The pedestrian chunk of coastline isn’t anyone’s idea of an ideal place for a beach vacation. It’s cold, winter brings 24-hour darkness, polar bears are a concern. But the biggest issue is that it’s rapidly eroding.
Battering storms coupled with disappearing sea ice mean house-sized chunks of permafrost and tundra have fallen into the sea. The coastline has recently receded by up to 50 feet per year. The erosion can release stores of greenhouse gases the permafrost holds. And the loss of coast in this remote location is indicative of struggles around the Arctic. The Alaskan village of Kivalina is being forced to relocate due to erosion, making residents some of the first climate refugees in America. And other communities could follow suit as sea levels rise and continue their assault on the coasts.
Solar flourishes in the desert
A time-lapse of the Tengger Solar Park as it grows over the course of the 2010s.Gif: Pierre Markuse (Sentinel Hub)
Hey, it’s not all bad news (just mostly). Renewables are part of the solution to the climate crisis. While the world has failed to tilt the balance of the energy system toward them in the 2010s, we’ve at least made some headway. The Tengger Solar Park is the world’s largest solar farm, covering more than 16 square miles of China’s Ningxia province. The solar plants there have the capacity to generate 1.5 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power roughly 380,000 American homes.
In China and globally, wind and solar have been growing by leaps and bounds over the course of the 2010s. That’s the good news. The downside is, they still account for just 10 percent of global energy generation, a level they’ve stood at for years as energy demand continues to outpace the amount of renewables being installed. The world will have to draw down carbon emissions (and not just from electricity) nearly 8 percent per year in the 2020s to avert catastrophic climate change. Solar parks like these will be just the tip of the iceberg if we are to succeed.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
