Why is methane seeping on Mars? NASA scientists have new ideas

Only at night though, it seems. “It’s a story with a lot of plot twists”, said a Mars project scientist. Saturn’s moon Titan is awash with methane, but no sign of life present or past, so why should Mars having some be a surprise?
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The most surprising revelation from NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover—that methane is seeping from the surface of Gale Crater—has scientists scratching their heads, says Phys.org.

Living creatures produce most of the methane on Earth [Talkshop comment – really?]. But scientists haven’t found convincing signs of current or ancient life on Mars, and thus didn’t expect to find methane there.

Yet, the portable chemistry lab aboard Curiosity, known as SAM, or Sample Analysis at Mars, has continually sniffed out traces of the gas near the surface of Gale Crater, the only place on the surface of Mars where methane has been detected thus far.

‘This is weird’: Experts ‘shocked’ by record-breaking longevity of Death Valley’s phantom lake

No sign of any blame being attached to human activities, in this article at least.
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A temporary lake at Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park has persisted for more than six months, which is far longer than it has lasted before.

And experts say that it could stick around for quite a while yet, says Live Science.

Park rangers in Death Valley are scratching their heads as to how the desert’s phantom lake has persisted for more than half a year — likely its longest lifespan in living memory.

A recent rain dump also means that the puzzling pool of water, which normally dries up within weeks of appearing, could remain intact for several more months.

2023’s record heat partly driven by ‘mystery’ process: NASA scientist

It’s warming, but not as they thought they knew it. ‘Everybody has lots of ideas, but it doesn’t quite add up.’ Aerosols, undersea volcano, El Niño, ‘new processes’ – the list of suspects goes on, but nothing convincing so far. Settled science has been unsettled, but persists with its usual assertions blaming humans anyway.
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It’s no secret human activity is warming the planet, driving more frequent and intense extreme weather events and transforming ecosystems at an extraordinary rate, claims Phys.org.

But the record-shattering temperatures of 2023 have nonetheless alarmed scientists, and hint at some “mysterious” new processes that may be under way, NASA’s top climatologist Gavin Schmidt tells AFP.

Claim: the James Webb telescope ‘threatens to break cosmology as we know it’

Ye Olde Universe
[image credit: Hubble / Wikipedia]

Or did it just confirm the unhappy status of the ‘dark energy’ seekers, long after Nobel prizes were handed out for its ‘discovery’? Quote: ‘despite much searching, astronomers have no clue what dark matter or dark energy are.’ A Nobel for having no clue – where’s the physics?
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For decades, measurements of the universe’s expansion have suggested a disparity known as the Hubble tension, which threatens to break cosmology as we know it. Can it be fixed? asks Live Science.

Now, on the eve of its second anniversary, a new finding by the James Webb Space Telescope has only entrenched the mystery.

Something is awry in our expanding cosmos.

The Moon’s Far Side Is Inexplicably More Conductive, Korean Lunar Orbiter Reveals

Far side of the Moon [image credit: NASA]

The Nature article on this says: ‘Perhaps the most baffling of Danuri’s measurements was of the magnetic fields on the Moon’s far side.’ Open season for theorists!
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There’s something odd about the far side of the Moon, scientists have concluded based on data from the Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter.

The results are yet to be published, but suggest a discrepancy between the conductivity of the near and far sides, which so far lacks a plausible explanation, says IFL Science.

Lunar exploration is becoming a global affair. Along with missions from the United States, China, India and Japan, the Korean Aerospace Research Institute has had an orbiter around our satellite for a year. Nicknamed Danuri, the mission is proving there is plenty the larger nations have missed.

Geminids mystery

The Geminids are Still a Mystery

– – – “Our work has upended years of belief about 3200 Phaethon, the source of the Geminids,” says co-author Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab. “It’s not what we thought it was.”

The Mystery of Orange Auroras – Explained?

The Mystery of Orange Auroras (Updated)

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Alignment with the Earth’s magnetic field is shown here.

Scientists wrestle with ‘unknown force’ acting on particles

Muon g-2 building (white and orange) at Fermilab [image credit: Z22 @ Wikipedia]

A clash of observation and basic science theory looms. The BBC tries to sound positive about it.
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Scientists near Chicago say they may be getting closer to discovering the existence of a new force of nature, says BBC News.

They have found more evidence that sub-atomic particles, called muons, are not behaving in the way predicted by the current theory of sub-atomic physics.

Scientists believe that an unknown force could be acting on the muons.

More data will be needed to confirm these results, but if they are verified, it could mark the beginning of a revolution in physics.

Record-Breaking Detection of Solar Photons

The HAWC detector (2014) [image credit: Jordanagoodman @ Wikipedia]

In a related Phys.org article a researcher says: “The sun is more surprising than we knew. We thought we had this star figured out, but that’s not the case.” But it has long been known that cosmic rays go up when solar activity goes down, and vice versa.
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Observations over the past decade or so have shown that the Sun emits many more gamma rays at GeV energies than is expected from modeling, says APS Physics.

Now a collaboration operating the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory in Mexico show that this gamma-ray excess extends up to TeV energies [1].

This finding has implications for our understanding of both stellar atmospheres and astroparticle physics.

How Predictive Was NOAA’s Gloomy 2022 Hurricane Forecast? Not Very

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

Trying to use Atlantic hurricane patterns to promote climate alarm in the US and elsewhere was blown off course this year. Instead the predictive reputations of the experts of all shades of global warming opinion took a battering. Natural variation threw them off the scent somehow.
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While the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) held firm to its prediction of an above-normal hurricane season – despite zero hurricanes at the halfway mark – the 2022 season proved to be nothing out of the ordinary, says CNS News (via Climate Change Dispatch).

Hurricane season, which runs from June through November annually, turned out to be pretty average this year, NOAA’s end-of-season report reveals.

There were just two “major” hurricanes (categories 3-5), below the annual average of three and less than NOAA’s prediction that there would be 3-6.

Miyake event radiation deluges still unexplained as solar flare theory questioned

When they say ‘sudden’ they don’t mean short-lived. The report notes that ‘some of the events, unlike the brief flashes we recognize as solar flares, lasted for one or two years’. Only a handful of these so-called ‘cosmic barrages’ have occurred in the last 9000 years or so, according to the data.
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One of the events was 80 times more powerful than the strongest solar flare ever recorded, says LiveScience.

A series of sudden and colossal spikes in radiation levels across Earth’s history could have come from a series of unknown, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic cosmic events, a new study has revealed.

Named Miyake events after the lead author of the first study to describe them, the spikes occur roughly once every 1,000 years or so and are recorded as sudden increases in the radiocarbon levels of ancient tree rings.

The exact cause of the sudden deluges of radiation, which periodically transform an extra chunk of the atmosphere’s nitrogen into carbon sucked up by trees, remains unknown.

Study suggests La Niña winters could keep on coming, but climate models are out of step with observations

The conclusions of a recent study are quite blunt: ‘We show that the spatial pattern of observed surface temperature changes since 1979 is highly unusual, and many aspects of it cannot be reproduced in current climate models, even when accounting for the influence of natural variability.’ Hardly inspiring, when such models are being relied upon by governments for radical so-called climate policies.
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Forecasters are predicting a “three-peat La Niña” this year, says Phys.org.

This will be the third winter in a row that the Pacific Ocean has been in a La Niña cycle, something that’s happened only twice before in records going back to 1950.

New research led by the University of Washington offers a possible explanation. The study, recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that climate change is, in the short term, favoring La Niñas.

Oh my days! Midnight comes a fraction sooner as Earth spins faster

As Nasa is reported as suggesting that ‘stronger winds in El Niño years can slow down the planet’s spin’, can we – on the basis of no research at all – nominate La Niña as a suspect here? Just trying to be helpful, as MSN claims: Experts confused after earth spins faster.
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Analysis: Reflecting a recent trend, 29 June was the shortest day on our planet since the 1960s. What’s going on? – wonders The Guardian.
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If time feels tighter than ever of late, blame it on the revolution. On 29 June this year, Earth racked up an unusual record: its shortest day since the 1960s, when scientists began measuring the planet’s rotation with high-precision atomic clocks.

Broadly speaking, Earth completes one full turn on its axis every 24 hours. That single spin marks out a day and drives the cycle of sunrise and sunset that has shaped patterns of life for billions of years.

But the curtains fell early on 29 June, with midnight arriving 1.59 milliseconds sooner than expected.

Why did Mars dry out? Carbon dioxide loss not a factor, say scientists

Mars from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope

The hunt is now on for the offending ‘missing ingredient’: “Carbon dioxide is a strong greenhouse gas, so it really was the leading candidate to explain the drying out of Mars,” said Kite, an expert on the climates of other worlds. “But these results suggest it’s not so simple.” The article calls this ‘unusual’, but is what it considers usual really so?
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Mars once ran red with rivers, says Phys.org.

The telltale tracks of past rivers, streams and lakes are visible today all over the planet.

But about three billion years ago, they all dried up—and no one knows why.

“People have put forward different ideas, but we’re not sure what caused the climate to change so dramatically,” said University of Chicago geophysical scientist Edwin Kite. “We’d really like to understand, especially because it’s the only planet we definitely know changed from habitable to uninhabitable.”

Weather’s unwanted guest: Nasty La Niña keeps popping up, confounding climate modellers

When observations show modellers ‘the opposite of what their best computer model simulations say should be happening with human-caused climate change’, it’s surely time to revisit their assumptions. Meanwhile, much head-scratching.
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Something weird is up with La Nina, the natural but potent weather event linked to more drought and wildfires in the western United States and more Atlantic hurricanes, says Phys.org.

It’s becoming the nation’s unwanted weather guest and meteorologists said the West’s megadrought won’t go away until La Nina does.

The current double-dip La Nina set a record for strength last month and is forecast to likely be around for a rare but not quite unprecedented third straight winter. And it’s not just this one.

Antarctic sea-ice expansion in a warming climate confounds model predictions

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

The obvious conclusion would be that the climate models are wrong, due to application of incorrect climate theory. As usual, researchers cast around desperately for other alternatives, only to find natural variation preventing warming from being global.
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Antarctic sea-ice has expanded over the period of continuous satellite monitoring, which seemingly contradicts ongoing global warming resulting from increasing concentrations of greenhouse gasses, says Phys.org.

In a study, published in Nature Climate Change, an international team of scientists from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and South Korea shows that a multi-decadal swing of the tropical sea surface temperatures and its ability to change the atmospheric circulation across large distances is in large part responsible for the observed sea-ice expansion since the late 1970s.

A ‘heat wave’ and snowfall: Why researchers are puzzled by Antarctica’s recent weather

Antarctica

The alarmist Guardian’s ‘climate disaster’ turns out to be ‘climate mitigation’, due to the massive snowfall. A so-called heatwave where temperatures reached a chilly 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-12 Celsius), seems to have fooled a lot of people. The Guardian speculates that ‘climate breakdown could be accelerating’, but seeing what you wanted to see doesn’t always work.
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While researchers say it’s too early to know what role, if any, climate change plays here, the event has their attention because it’s so extreme, says NBC News.

It’s been a strange stretch for the icy desert at the bottom of the world.

In mid-March, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica soared 70 degrees Fahrenheit above average. It was high enough for researchers living there to brave the elements for a bare-chested group photo.

The comparatively balmy temperatures, which reached around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, arrived courtesy of a history-making atmospheric river — a plume of concentrated moisture that flows through the sky.

This one brought an incredible dump of snow in the inner reaches of the ice sheet, something quite rare for the area.

Earth is spinning faster now than it was 50 years ago, say scientists

Credit: NASA

Compensating for the lost time may prove challenging for scientists, says Astronomy magazine. Turning the internet clock back one second implies a repeat of a computer-generated timestamp for example, which might confuse some vital systems not designed to handle that.
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Ever feel like there’s just not enough time in the day? Turns out, you might be onto something.

Earth is rotating faster than it has in the last half-century, resulting in our days being ever-so-slightly shorter than we’re used to.

A Big Glowing Cloud of Marsdust

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Escaping a planet’s gravity is supposed to be difficult, but some Martian dust does just that.

Spaceweather.com

July 6, 2021: Dust storms on Mars are bigger than we thought; they even spill into space. According to a recent paper in JGR Planets, Mars appears to be leaking dust, filling a huge volume of the inner solar system with gritty debris. You can see it with your naked eye. The bright triangle in this image from the Haleakalā Observatory in Hawaii is marsdust:

“A friend described it as blazing,” says Rob Ratkowski, who took the picture on Feb. 10th. “It was bright and very obvious.”

It’s called Zodiacal Light, and astronomers have long wondered what causes it. The usually faint triangle is sunlight scattered by dust in the plane of our solar system. The dust, it turns out, comes from Mars.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew through the dust cloud en route to Jupiter between 2011 and 2016. Dust grains smashed into Juno at about 10,000 mph…

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Solar wind temperature mystery

During a total solar eclipse, the Sun’s corona and prominences are visible to the naked eye [image credit: Luc Viatour / https://Lucnix.be ]

Expecting a variable, researchers found a constant.
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From traversing sand dunes in the Sahara Desert to keeping watch for polar bears in the Arctic, a group of solar scientists known as the “Solar Wind Sherpas” led by Shadia Habbal, have traveled to the ends of the Earth to scientifically observe total solar eclipses—the fleeting moments when the Moon completely blocks the Sun, temporarily turning day into night.

With the images, they’ve uncovered a surprising finding about the Sun’s wind and its wispy outer atmosphere—the corona—which is only visible in its entirety during an eclipse, says NASA (via Phys.org).

From more than a decade’s worth of total eclipse observations taken around the world, the team noticed that the corona maintains a fairly constant temperature, despite dynamical changes to the region that occur on an 11-year rotation known as the solar cycle.

Similarly, the solar wind—the steady stream of particles the Sun releases from the corona out across the solar system—matches that same temperature.