Eight Thousand Scientists Gather on San Andreas Fault
The 1964 Good Friday Earthquake in Alaska triggered tsunamis that killed 15 people on the coasts of California and Oregon. Emergency planners on the West Coast have always considered Alaska earthquakes the major source of killer waves, but researchers just found another threat.
The tsunami study was one of the thousands presented at last week’s American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Of the 8,200 scientists there, more than 40 were from the Geophysical Institute and other branches of the University of Alaska. I tagged along to pitch story ideas to the media and gather a few of my own.
The AGU meeting, held in a building large enough to store a few oil tankers, is the largest gathering of people who study geophysics in the world. Sifting through the thousands of topics was a bit like sipping water from a fire hose, but the organizers set up a few press conferences to help funnel the 120 media members toward breaking news. Among the latest was the following:
• Researchers who studied tsunamis that struck Papua New Guinea, Nicaragua, and Mexico earlier this decade reported that “near-shore” tsunamis triggered by local earthquakes may do as much damage to the West Coast as those originating in Alaska.
• New studies by California researchers show that the gasoline additive MTBE, an ingredient of oxyfuel already banned in Alaska and Maine, taints more than one in eight wells in urban areas where it’s still used. The MTBE, (methyl tert-butyl ether), designed to make a car’s engine burn gas more completely, has seeped into groundwater throughout the United States from leaky fuel tanks and spills. California plans to phase MTBE out of fuels in three years, and results given at AGU may convince officials in other states to get rid of the additive earlier.
• Scientists in Boulder, Colorado, saw noctilucent “night-glowing” clouds over Colorado for the first time. Often seen over Alaska in August, noctilucent clouds were first reported in the 1870s, about the time of the Industrial Revolution. Some scientists believe the clouds are related to manmade greenhouse gases. In the past, these scientists predicted that if global warming persisted long enough, the clouds would be seen at more southerly latitudes.
• The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 cooled Earth’s temperature for two years, but some areas of the world experienced warmer winters the first year after the eruptions. Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines spewed sulfur into the atmosphere that spread around the planet for three weeks. Scientists expected these sulfur particles to reflect sunlight and make the planet cooler, but the next winter was warmer than normal in North America, western Europe, and Eastern Siberia. Researchers now think the aerosols spewed by Mt. Pinatubo caused a large temperature contrast between the Arctic and the tropics, and that difference drove a stronger circulation in Earth’s weather systems that caused some areas to be warmer. They expect other large tropical eruptions to effect Earth’s climate as did Mt. Pinatubo, but said eruptions from Alaska volcanoes would cause mostly local effects.
