The Earth Science Blog by Mr. Schwartz

A few years ago I saw an exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art.    There were samples of art from the earliest days of Great Britain right through to the present time.

Around the late 1600′s, the paintings change.  Suddenly the trees change from warm-weather Beeches to cold-weather Oaks.  There is snow in most of the paintings.  There are people ice skating on the Thames River.  This was the time of the Little Ice Age.

For hundreds of years, researchers have tried to figure out the cause of the Little Ice Age.  For a long time it was thought that it was a lack of sunspots (there were very few storms on the Sun during that period.

Now we know better.  Between the years 1275 and 1300, four tropical volcanoes erupted violently.  The ash would have darkened the atmosphere, letting slightly less sunlight down.   Cooling from volcanoes would have sent some of the expanding Arctic sea ice down along the eastern coast of Greenland until it eventually melted in the North Atlantic.

Since sea ice contains almost no salt, when it melted the surface water became less dense, preventing it from mixing with deeper North Atlantic water.  This weakened the major current that brings warm water back to the arctic.  England froze.

So, by 7:00 AM on February 3, what is the name given to the major current (which includes the Gulf Stream) that transports water around the world and brings warm water past England and back to the arctic ?

Accretion is still happening.

A small asteroid the size of a city bus zoomed between Earth and the moon’s orbit Friday, just days after its discovery.

The space rock passed Earth at a distance that is only about 0.17 times that between Earth and the moon.

In September, NASA announced that it has spotted about 90 percent of the largest asteroids (the size of a mountain or bigger) that can come near Earth. About 911 such giant space rocks have been confirmed. Astronomers estimate there are about 981 big near-Earth objects that occasionally creep close to our planet.

So learn to get ALL of the facts before you fire Shirley.

From the New York Times: 

For $2 a Star, a Retailer Gets 5-Star Reviews

It turns out that some marketers on Amazon.com have been paying their customers for good online reviews.

From FactCheck.org, on the Florida debates:

“Newt Gingrich falsely claimed he never favored a federal mandate requiring individuals to have health insurance. Rick Santorum claimed five times more people are seeking free care at Massachusetts hospitals because of Mitt Romney’s health care law — a claim contradicted by official statistics.

Romney repeated a false accusation that President Obama failed to denounce Hamas rocket attacks in a speech to the United Nations. And Santorum insisted that Muslim terrorists are seeking missile bases in Cuba — a wild claim based most likely on mistranslations of an Italian newspaper report.”

You can HEAR a warm front

As a warm front moves in, it slides over the cold air already here.   At the boundary, the warm air cools into flat layers of clouds.   There is a calm before the storm, as air can’t rise;  there is warmer air above it.   The boundary between the warm and the cold air causes sound to bounce back.

So, when flat layers of clouds appear, the world seems to have a hollow, echoing sound, and the winds die down, you are seeing a warm front arriving, and will enjoy a day or two or three of rain or snow, followed by warmer temperatures.

This from Phil Plait, Astronomer and Skeptic:

The Earth is warming up. The rate of warming has increased in the past century or so. This corresponds to the time of the Industrial Revolution, when we started dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases warm the planet (hence the name) — if they didn’t we’d have an average temperature below the freezing point of water. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which is dumped into the atmosphere by humans to the tune of 30 billion tons per year, 100 times the amount from volcanoes. And finally, approximately 97% of climatologists who actually study climate agree that global warming is real, and caused by humans.

Your last extra credit for the semester:  What do you think of the facts above?

Friday (1/13) I predicted the weather for Saturday and the rest of the holiday weekend.  I did it with the map below, and with 4 basic facts that you should know.  How did I do?

1)  Rising air is raining air.    What this means is:
~ As air rises  (for whatever reason) it expands in the thin air up high.
~ As the air becomes less dense the heat carried in the air becomes less dense.
~  The temperature goes down.
~ The water vapor in the air condenses and falls.

2)  Sinking air is sunny air.
~ As air sinks (for whatever reason) it gets compressed by the air above it.
~ As the air becomes more dense the heat carried in the air becomes more dense.
~ The temperature goes up.
~ Water evaporates and clouds disappear.

3)  Our prevailing winds – and the weather – travel from west to east.

4)  Isobar lines (iso = the same, bar is the weight of the atmosphere) on a map show changes in air pressure.   Lines that are close together mean that the air pressure is changing a lot over a short distance – like a steep hill.  Just like a truck will rush down a steep hill very quickly, air rushes from high pressure to lower pressure faster where the change in pressure is steep.

Now, looking at the map:

The air pressure lines (isobars) around us are very close together.  That means that the pressure differences are steep and there will be WIND for the next day.

There is nothing but high pressure to our west.  Once the showers and flurries we have now are gone, there will be mostly sun for the rest of the weekend.

There is a cold front to the west of us.  The air will be very cold this weekend.

So cold, sunny, and VERY windy at the start of the weekend, and no rain or snow before Tuesday.  How did I do?

[Saturday morning - the wind came through as predicted, with loss of power in some places.  Now on Saturday morning, the cold front is just to the west.  Watch for temperatures near 0F tonight.]

[Sunday morning - I slept late, but when I woke up the temperature was only 2F.  Warmer tomorrow as the polar air warms up down here, but there is still a very good chance of a late opening on Tuesday due to freezing rain overnight.  You heard it here first!]

Yes, Spring!!   Arriving in 17, 16, 15 …   days.

February 2nd marks the cross-quarter holiday that ushers in the Biosphere’s Spring.  That is the time when the lengthening amount of light wakes up plants and animals.  Willow branches will turn orange as the sap rises.  Maple trees will be tapped for syrup.  Skunks and woodchuck guys will be out looking for love.  That first pungent whiff of skunk on a snowy morning tells the nose that Spring is here!

Black-Capped Chickadee

When I went out this morning to bring in some stove-wood,  I heard a chickadee trying out his Spring whistle!   He saves this sound for welcoming Spring (and letting the girls know that he is the best chickadee around).   We have already gained over 20 minutes of daylight, and that is working chemical wonders in his brain.

Click on the link to hear the whistle.  << Black-capped Chickadee  >> When you hear that song, Spring is close!

Have you heard this bird?  Let me know before school starts on 1/17/12.

Today (Friday 1/13) I predicted the weather for Saturday and the rest of the holiday weekend.  I did it with the map below, and with 4 basic facts that you should know.  How did I do?

1)  Rising air is raining air.    What this means is:
~ As air rises  (for whatever reason) it expands in the thin air up high.
~ As the air becomes less dense the heat carried in the air molecules becomes less dense.
~  The temperature goes down.
~ The water vapor in the air condenses and falls.

2)  Sinking air is sunny air.
~ As air sinks (for whatever reason) it gets compressed by the air above it.
~ As the air becomes more dense the heat carried in the air molecules becomes more dense.
~ The temperature goes up.
~ Water evaporates and the air becomes drier.

3)  Our prevailing winds – and the weather – travel from west to east.

4)  Isobar lines (iso = the same, bar is the weight of the atmosphere) on a map show changes in air pressure.   Lines that are close together mean that the air pressure is changing over a short distance – like a steep hill.  Just like a truck will rush down a steep hill very quickly, air rushes from high pressure to lower pressure faster where the change in pressure is steep.

Now, looking at the map:

The air pressure lines (isobars) around us are very close together.  That means that the pressure differences are steep and there will be WIND for the next day.

There is nothing but high pressure to our west.  Once the showers and flurries we have now are gone, there will be mostly sun for the rest of the weekend.

There is a cold front to the west of us.  The air will be very cold this weekend.

So cold, sunny, and VERY windy at the start of the weekend, and no rain or snow before Tuesday.  How did I do?

[Saturday morning - the wind came through as predicted, with loss of power in some places.  Now on Saturday morning, the cold front is just to the west.  Watch for temperatures near 0F tonight.]

[Sunday morning - I slept late, but when I woke up the temperature was only 2F.  Warmer tomorrow as the polar air warms up down here, but there is still a very good chance of a late opening on Tuesday due to freezing rain overnight.  You heard it here first!]

Science, unlike belief,  is “self correcting”;  that is, if an error is made, sooner or later someone will realize it, and the laws and theories will be changed to fit the correct data.

UConn officials have conducted a review of the work of Dr. Dipak K. Das, director of the cardiovascular research center at the university.

Das had been known in recent years for his research on the benefits of resveratrol, a compound found in red wine.

The officials found 145 instances of fabrication and false data and notified 11 journals – including the Journal of Cellular & Molecular Medicine and Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry – of its review, the university said in a written statement:

“We have a responsibility to correct the scientific record and inform peer researchers across the country,” Philip Austin, interim vice president for health affairs, said in the statement.

As a result of UConn’s three-year investigation that culminated in a 60,000 page report on the allegations, UConn has declined $890,000 in research grants and cut off external funding to the lab.

Unlike politics, lies have no place in science, and Das will soon be looking for a new job.

Science works.

In later life, Steno was a Catholic Bishop

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Nicolas Steno, born on January 11 in 1638.   During his lifetime Steno rejected the authority of the “experts”, and came up with such discoveries as, the heart is a muscle that pumps blood, tears are formed in the eye, fossils are the remains of living organisms from previous geologic ages, and that older rocks tend to lie deeper in the earth than younger ones.

Steno wrote a book on geology in 1669 with ideas that are still taught in geology classes today.

The backbone of Steno’s system was that the layers of rock that contain fossil shells were made by the gradual accumulation of sediment.   Steno saw no way to measure the number of years or centuries involved,  but it was clear that the layers, one on top of the other,  formed a sequence:  The lowest layer had been formed first, the highest last.

Depending on their fossils and their sediments, the layers recorded the succession of seas, rivers, lakes, and soils that once covered the land.   Layer by layer, the history of the world is written in stone.

Here is a perfect opportunity for you to earn some extra credit.   Before 7:00 AM on Thursday, January 12, tell me:   What is the name of Steno’s law of geology that states that newer layers of rock form on top of older layers?