Discover, January 31, 1995

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Every few years the people of Peru endure a trial. Normally the trade winds blow west across the Pacific, pushing warm surface water toward the Philippines. That allows cool water to well up from the ocean depths off the coast of South America, bringing nutrients that support the Peruvian fishery. But every few years the trade winds collapse, and the warm water sloshes back east in a vast, slow wave that caps the supply of cold water and crushes fish populations. Because it often happens around Christmas, the disturbance has been dubbed El Nino–the Little One, in reference to the infant Jesus–but over the past 15 years researchers have discovered just how inapt that name is.

Continue reading “El Grande” →

Discover, January 31, 1995

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Walter Lyons says he saw the Angel of Death last summer. It towered over a nighttime Nebraska thunderstorm, its head reaching 50 miles into the sky, its wings extending out into the stratospheric darkness. Then, after a few hundredths of a second, it disappeared.

Lyons isn’t given to mystical hallucinations. He’s an atmospheric scientist at Mission Research Corporation in Fort Collins, Colorado, and he has a contract from NASA to look for enigmatic flashes of light. Lyons and his co-workers have found hundreds of them, and they sometimes give names to the wild shapes. “We’ve got the Angel of Death, we’ve got one called the Bird, one called the Blessed Trinity,” Lyons says. “And then we’ve got the Dancing Carrots.”

Continue reading “Carrots over Nebraska” →

Discover, January 18, 1995

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Discover, December 1, 1994

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In 2001, NASA plans to launch a spacecraft that will fly within less than 2 million miles of the sun–and do so without melting.

What we know of the sun we have learned from a safe distance. The Ulysses probe that flew under the south solar pole last June, for instance, did so at a distance of more than 200 million miles. The closest we’ve come to the inferno was 26 million miles, with a 1974 satellite named Helios. As a result there are a lot of things we don’t understand about the sun–why small flares on its surface can produce huge magnetic storms on Earth, for example, or why big flares sometimes barely cause a stir. 

Continue reading “Into the Fire” →

Discover, December 1, 1994

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Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms Earth. But just how much warming you get depends on where you put your continents.

If adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere creates a greenhouse effect that warms Earth, it must have happened in the past. That’s why paleoclimatology, once a small and esoteric field, is such a growth industry these days, with legions of geologists trying to glean past temperatures and CO2 levels from rocks, and legions of climate modelers trying to tell us what it all means–not only for the past but also for the future of Earth’s climate.

Continue reading “Location, Location, Location” →