It may be a bit of poetic fancy, but aeronomers (those who study the upper atmosphere) are talking these days about watching the earth breath. More specifically, a few researchers think they have discovered a “breathing mode” of the upper atmosphere—during which the planet’s gaseous blanket expands and contracts regularly about once every 9 days in a previously unrecognized cycle.

The evidence comes from satellite observations of the thermosphere, the region of sky extending from 85 kilometers to roughly 1,000 km above the surface. Data obtained from Germany’s CHAMP satellite indicate that the density of the thermosphere doubles about every nine days, according to Jeffrey P. Thayer of the University of Colorado at Boulder, one of the researchers who presented data on this newly observed pattern. Geoff Crowley, president of Atmospheric and Space Technology Research Associates in San Antonio, Texas, found a similar 9-day cycle in chemical data taken by the Global Ultraviolet Imager on NASA’s TIMED satellite. Measurements made by the SABER instrument on the same satellite also revealed the 9-day cycle, reported Martin G. Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center.

Aeronomy researchers were well aware of longer cycles, such as the 27-day pattern that corresponds to the rotational period of the sun, but nobody had looked for shorter patterns, said Thayer. He and his colleagues hypothesize that the sun is also driving the 9 day cycle, as well as some weaker, even shorter period, ones that have emerged from the data.

And who says there’s nothing new under the sun?

Nature’s Rich Monastersky has a full story on what happened in the Arctic this summer – including melting in Greenland and methane bubbles in Siberia — available here.

Nature reporter Rex Dalton has a full news story on the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago — and one woman with an alternative theory — here.

Cross-posted from Climate Feedback, on behalf of Olive Heffernan

This evening at AGU there was a special screening of Crude, a film about our love affair with petroleum– oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.

The documentary won Richard Smith of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation this year’s AGU Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, a prestigious prize for outstanding reporting that makes geophysical science accessible and interesting to the general public. In Crude, Smith explores the geological formation of oil, its discovery and ascendancy in society and the potentially catastrophic consequences of our absolute dependence on it. Ironically, the very conditions under which oil was originally formed – a greenhouse world with elevated CO2 levels – are exactly those that its consumption could return us to.

Smith does an excellent job of conveying how oil, formed from the compressed remains of tiny plants and animals, could cause the demise of the most sophisticated species to have ever lived. And although we may be running out of the stuff, its pervasiveness in society means that weaning ourselves off oil will be no mean feat. There are no clear estimates of exactly how much oil is left in the ground, but the overwhelming message in Crude is that there are easily enough fossil fuel reserves to radically alter our climate should we use them all.

Overall, well worth a watch…

Cross-posted from Climate Feedback, on behalf of Olive Heffernan

Over the past 24 hours, some 15,000 earth scientists descended on San Francisco for the annual Fall conference of the American Geophysical Union. Delegates were a dead give away at the airport and on the BART yesterday with their large poster tubes in tow. It’s my first AGU and it could be the jet lag, but I’m feeling slightly overwhelmed by the sheer size and number of parallel sessions; at any given time I could be at one of at least four climate-related talks and invariably find myself wondering why the session next door is receiving louder applause.

A number of talks today focused on the need for climate science to become less curiosity driven and more specific to the needs of stakeholders such as local authorities and natural resource managers.

This is a topic that’s been getting a lot of attention recently. Earlier this year, for example, scientists called for a billion dollar investment in climate computing facilities to enable regional scale climate predictions on decadal time scales. At a press conference this morning, scientists including Jonathan Overpeck from the University of Arizona and Jack Fellows of UCAR highlighted the importance of partnerships between universities and decision makers in enabling states and regions to plan for climate change.

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It makes me sad that my fine colleagues and rivals at Science magazine already beat me to this story, but it is too much fun not to note here. There’s a poster here at AGU in which seismologists report detecting ‘footquakes’ – the sound of jubilant soccer fans (football to you British types) celebrating goals during a major competition.

Garrett Euler, of Washington University in St. Louis and colleagues, were initially puzzled by instaneous tremors that appeared to happen all over Cameroon one day soon after the researchers installed new seismic equipment. But finally one of them figured out it was the stomping of joyous fans across the country, each time the Cameroon team scored a goal in the African Cup of Nations. And the stomping got worse the longer the match went on. “Goals that came later in the match – when the tensions were near boiling point – caused substantially larger tremors,” they write.

For the full story, go to page 13 of the IRIS seismology newsletter found here.

Turns out that Jim Hansen, the outspoken NASA climatologist, didn’t attend John Marburger’s talk on Monday night, in which Marburger (who is President Bush’s science advisor), called accusations of censoring US climate scientists ‘ignorant’.

Hansen, who has long gone public with his thoughts about the problems of human-caused global warming, has said in the past that NASA public-affairs people censored his public speeches and media interviews to play down the risks of climate change. On Monday, Marburger charged that such accusations were baseless, saying that he personally had tracked down each claim and found it to be wanting. Marburger didn’t mention Hansen by name, but the subtext was clear to everyone in the audience.

Asked for his response today, Hansen simply pointed to a new book called Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming. (I haven’t read it and thus can’t recommend it, but here is a link so you can see at least what it looks like.) According to Hansen, it details a systematic effort to suppress climate scientists such as himself.

Asked if he had ever spoken to Marburger about the issue of censorship, Hansen said simply: “Not about this.”

Hansen isn’t just confining his criticisms to US leadership, though. He’s got a draft letter in the works to UK prime minister Gordon Brown and the German chancellor Angela Merkel, criticising the planned construction of coal-fired power plants in their countries.

Asked today why he was focusing on these leaders when China is constructing a coal-fired power plant at the rate of nearly one per week, Hansen said he feels that the developed world needs to take responsibility, as it has been the source of the majority of carbon dioxide emissions up until this point.

Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist and lead author on the 2007 IPCC report, had a handy hint for any future authors attending her lecture today on stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change:

Proofread your papers.

The famous 1974 Nature paper by Mario Molina and Sherwood Roland, describing how chlorofluorocarbon chemicals are the trigger for ozone destruction in the stratosphere, contains an embarrassing typo in its title – one that has endured for more than 20 years of citations.

Check it out here.

News from the Arctic just continues to get worse. A fair number of presentations here have been dealing with the dire 2007 conditions for sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet.

First up, Greenland. Last summer, more ice melted atop Greenland than ever before measured, adding to a consistent downward trend of some 135 gigatons of ice disappearing per year. Marco Tedesco, of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told the meeting that surface temperatures in Greenland were four to six degrees Celsius warmer than usual this summer, which helped accelerate melting, particularly at high latitudes.

The situation is even more precarious for sea ice. A couple of researchers here have been tossing around dates like 2012 or 2014 for estimates of when the Arctic might be completely ice-free in summer. While these sorts of numbers are pretty arm-waving at the moment (numbers like 2040 were previously considered to be aggressive), there’s little reason to think the situation will get better in the next couple of years. Mark Serreze, of the University of Colorado, spent a keynote lecture on Tuesday showing images of Arctic ice shrinking like a snowman left out too long in the sun. In September of this year, sea ice covered just 4.2 million square kilometers – by far the lowest record ever.

And the ice isn’t only shrinking in extent – it’s also thinning. Don Perovich, of a US army cold regions and research laboratory in New Hampshire, reported on a single but extraordinary ice buoy in the Beaufort Sea. In June the buoy measured sea ice at that location as 3.3 metres thick – “really a healthy piece of ice,” as he put it. But by the end of the summer, 70 centimetres had melted off the top – and 2.2 metres (yes, metres) off the bottom.

When you see those dramatic maps of the Arctic ice extent shrinking over time, don’t forget that it’s also thinning – a complicating factor that may just make things worse in summers to come.

NASA Night is always a stressful evening at AGU. Researchers who depend on NASA funding pack into a lecture hall to hear the head of NASA science talk from on high about how dire the funding situation. Everyone usually ends up leaving the room complaining.

Things are a little different this year, though. The new chief of science at NASA is Alan Stern, who for many years was “one of you”, as he put it — a scientist struggling to fly new missions in an era of ever-uncertain NASA budgets. Fortified with a glass of chardonnay, he held forth from the other side of the podium at NASA Night with an approach that some call a refreshing change. (You can read a Q&A piece Nature did recently with Stern here – subscription required.)

The main thing to remember, Stern cautioned the crowd at AGU, is that blaming the budget is not cool. The science mission directorate at NASA gets $5.4 billion a year. That’s on the scale of the entire National Science Foundation. It has 53 missions currently flying, and a host more are slated for launch in 2008, such as the GLAST gamma-ray telescope and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. In other words, NASA’s space and earth science programs are the envy of the international research community.

But the big problem is cost overruns. This has been known for some time – projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, balloon in cost annually. But Stern made it abundantly clear just how much cost overruns are hurting the science community. Over the past five years, overruns on NASA science missions have cost the agency $5.8 billion. Yes, that’s more than a billion dollars a year. The biggest offenders are the James Webb scope, which ran over by $1.3 billion over the past five years, and the SOFIA airborne telescope, at $1.1 billion (and it isn’t even flying yet, despite having been finished years ago).

As a result, NASA is going to focus ever more strongly on cost control. “Once you’re selected to run a mission, we’re going to hold your feet to the fire,” says Stern. How he will do that isn’t exactly clear, but in many cases it might mean descoping a mission — taking off an instrument or two — or placing it in a different, less risky, orbit.

Of course, even with the most stringent belt-tightening measures at NASA, the agency is still subject to the whims of Congress. If Congress goes into the same financial meltdown it did last year, and passes a ‘continuing resolution’ to keep the government operating at fiscal year 2006 levels, NASA will suffer. A long-term continuing resolution, says Stern, “would almost certainly mean mission cancellations”.