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Mars may be going through a period of climate change, new findings from NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter suggest.
Odyssey has been mapping the distribution of materials on and near Mars' surface since early 2002, nearly a full annual cycle on Mars. Besides tracking seasonal changes, such as the advance and retreat of polar dry ice, the orbiter is returning evidence useful for learning about longer-term dynamics.
Martian Ice Shrinking Dramatically
New gullies that did not exist in mid-2002 have appeared on a Martian sand dune.
That's just one of the surprising discoveries that have resulted from the extended life of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which this month began its ninth year in orbit around Mars. Boulders tumbling down a Martian slope left tracks that weren't there two years ago. New impact craters formed since the 1970s suggest changes to age-estimating models. And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous years size, suggesting a climate change in progress.
Prediction of a global climate change on Jupiter
Philip S. Marcus
Jupiter's atmosphere, as observed in the 1979 Voyager space craft images, is characterized by 12 zonal jet streams and about 80 vortices, the largest of which are the Great Red Spot and three White Ovals that had formed1 in the 1930s. The Great Red Spot has been observed2 continuously since 1665 and, given the dynamical similarities between the Great Red Spot and the White Ovals, the disappearance3, 4 of two White Ovals in 1997−2000 was unexpected. Their longevity and sudden demise has been explained5 however, by the trapping of anticyclonic vortices in the troughs of Rossby waves, forcing them to merge.
Pluto is undergoing global warming, researchers find
October 9, 2002
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.--Pluto is undergoing global warming, as evidenced by a three-fold increase in the planet's atmospheric pressure during the past 14 years, a team of astronomers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Williams College, the University of Hawaii, Lowell Observatory and Cornell University announced in a press conference today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's (AAS) Division for Planetary Sciences in Birmingham, AL.
Pluto thought to be warming up
Astronomers at the University of Tasmania have found that the solar system's smallest planet is not getting colder as first thought and it probably does not have rings.
Dr John Greenhill has collected observations from last month's event when Pluto passed in front of a bright star, making it easier to study.
French scientists have shared the measurements they took in Tasmania that night, which indicate that the planet is unlikely to have rings.
Dr Greenhill says the results are surprising because they show Pluto is warming up.
Observational arguments in favor of such a cloud are presented, and implications of the presence of a nearby cloud are discussed, including possible changes in terrestrial climate. It is suggested that the postulated interstellar cloud should encounter the solar system at some unspecified time in the near future and might have a drastic influence on terrestrial climate in the next 10,000 years.
ESA sees stardust storms heading for Solar System
PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Monday, August 18, 2003
Source: Artemis Society
Until ten years ago, most astronomers did not believe stardust could enter our Solar System. Then ESAs Ulysses spaceprobe discovered minute stardust particles leaking through the Suns magnetic shield, into the realm of Earth and the other planets. Now, the same spaceprobe has shown that a flood of dusty particles is heading our way.
History demonstrates that warmer is healthier. Since the end of the last Ice Age, the earth has enjoyed two periods that were warmer than the twentieth century. Archaeological evidence shows that people lived longer, enjoyed better nutrition, and multiplied more rapidly than during epochs of cold.
That Ice Age ended about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago when the glaciers covering much of North America, Scandinavia and northern Asia began to retreat to approximately their current positions. In North America the glacial covering lasted longer than in Eurasia because of topographical features that delayed the warming. Throughout history warming and cooling in different regions of the world have not correlated exactly because of the influence of such factors as oceans, mountains, and prevailing winds.
As the earth warmed with the waning of the Ice Age, the sea level rose as much as 300 feet; hunters in Europe roamed through modern Norway; agriculture developed in the Middle East, the Far East and the Americas. By 7,000 years ago and lasting for about four millenniums, the earth was more clement than today, perhaps by 4deg. Fahrenheit, about the average of the various predictions for global warming from a doubling of CO2. Although the climate cooled a bit after 3000 B.C., it stayed relatively warmer than the modern world until sometime after 1000 B.C., when chilly temperatures became more common. During the four thousand warmest years, Europe enjoyed mild winters and warm summers with a storm belt far to the north. Rainfall may have been 10 to 15 percent greater than now. Not only was the country less subject to severe storms, but the skies were less cloudy and the days, sunnier.
large climate changes in Europe/Near East during the last 15,000 calendar years (note that these dates are in 'real' years not radiocarbon years).
14,500 y.a. - rapid warming and moistening of climates. Rapid deglaciation begins.
13,500 y.a. - climates about as warm and moist as today's
13,000 y.a. 'Older Dryas' cold phase (lasting about 200 years) before a partial return to warmer conditions.
12,800 y.a. (+/- 200 years)- rapid stepwise onset of the intensely cold Younger Dryas.
"Historical records of solar activity indicate that solar radiation has been increasing since the late 19th century. If a trend, comparable to the one found in this study, persisted throughout the 20th century, it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years," he said.
In this study, Willson, who is also Principal Investigator of NASA's ACRIM experiments, compiled a TSI record of over 24 years by carefully piecing together the overlapping records. In order to construct a long-term dataset, he needed to bridge a two-year gap (1989 to 1991) between ACRIM1 and ACRIM2. Both the Nimbus7/ERB and ERBS measurements overlapped the ACRIM 'gap.' Using Nimbus7/ERB results produced a 0.05 percent per decade upward trend between solar minima, while ERBS results produced no trend. Until this study, the cause of this difference, and hence the validity of the TSI trend, was uncertain. Willson has identified specific errors in the ERBS data responsible for the difference. The accurate long-term dataset, therefore, shows a significant positive trend (.05 percent per decade) in TSI between the solar minima of solar cycles 21 to 23 (1978 to present). This major finding may help climatologists to distinguish between solar and man-made influences on climate.
Venus’ Winds Are Mysteriously Speeding Up
by Jason Major on June 18,
High-altitude winds on neighboring Venus have long been known to be quite speedy, whipping sulfuric-acid-laden clouds around the superheated planet at speeds well over 300 km/h (180 mph). And after over six years collecting data from orbit, ESA’s Venus Express has found that the winds there are steadily getting faster… and scientists really don’t know why.
By tracking the movements of distinct features in Venus’ cloud tops at an altitude of 70 km (43 miles) over a period of six years — which is 10 of Venus’ years — scientists have been able to monitor patterns in long-term global wind speeds.
What two separate studies have found is a rising trend in high-altitude wind speeds in a broad swath south of Venus’ equator, from around 300 km/h when Venus Express first entered orbit in 2006 to 400 km/h (250 mph) in 2012. That’s nearly double the wind speeds found in a category 4 hurricane here on Earth!
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Jupiter Photos Reveal Big Changes on Giant Planet
by SPACE.com Staff
Date: 17 October 2012 Time: 04:58 PM ET
Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, has made some dramatic transformations in recent years, a new study reveals.
Huge belts in the giant planet's atmosphere have changed color, radiation hotspots have faded and flared up again, and cloud levels have thickened and dissolved, all while space rocks have been hurtling into it the gas giant, astronomers said.
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"The changes we're seeing in Jupiter are global in scale," Glenn Orton, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement today (Oct. 17).
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Orton and his team found that in 2011 the North Equatorial Belt grew whiter than it had in a century, though it started to darken again earlier this year. And along the southern edge of this belt, the team observed infrared hotspots (which signal radiation being released from a deep layer of Jupiter's atmosphere) vanished from 2010 to 2011, but remerged by June 2012. During this period, the researchers also observed thickening of the deeper cloud decks in the northern belt, the while both the deeper and upper cloud decks of the southern belt condensed and then cleared up.
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"Other changes haven't been seen in decades, and some regions have never been in the state they're appearing in now. At the same time, we've never seen so many things striking Jupiter," he explained in a statement. "Right now, we're trying to figure out why this is all happening."
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Over the past 30 years, the Earth has warmed by 0.6° C or 1.08° F. Over the past 100 years, it has warmed by 0.8° C or 1.44° F.
Current warmth seems to be occurring nearly everywhere at the same time and is largest at high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Over the last 50 years, the largest annual and seasonal warmings have occurred in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Peninsula. Most ocean areas have warmed. Because these areas are remote and far away from major cities, it is clear to climatologists that the warming is not due to the influence of pollution from urban areas.
Ribbon at Edge of Our Solar System: Will the Sun Enter a Million-Degree Cloud of Interstellar Gas?
ScienceDaily (May 24, 2010) — Is the Sun going to enter a million-degree galactic cloud of interstellar gas soon?
Scientists from the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute, and Boston University suggest that the ribbon of enhanced emissions of energetic neutral atoms, discovered last year by the NASA Small Explorer satellite IBEX, could be explained by a geometric effect coming up because of the approach of the Sun to the boundary between the Local Cloud of interstellar gas and another cloud of a very hot gas called the Local Bubble. If this hypothesis is correct, IBEX is catching matter from a hot neighboring interstellar cloud, which the Sun might enter in a hundred years.
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[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/63ffeeb144dd.jpg[/atsimg]
The Sun traveling through the Galaxy happens to cross at the present time a blob of gas about ten light-years across, with a temperature of 6-7 thousand degrees kelvin. This so-called Local Interstellar Cloud is immersed in a much larger expanse of a million-degree hot gas, named the Local Bubble. The energetic neutral atoms (ENA) are generated by charge exchange at the interface between the two gaseous media. ENA can be observed provided the Sun is close enough to the interface. The apparent Ribbon of ENA discovered by the IBEX satellite can be explained by a geometric effect: one observes many more ENA by looking along a line-of-sight almost tangent to the interface than by looking in the perpendicular direction. (Credit: SRC/Tentaris,ACh/Maciej Frolow)
Our solar system may be headed for an encounter with a dense cloud of interstellar matter
Our solar system may be headed for an encounter with a dense cloud of interstellar matter–gas and dust–that could have substantial implications for our solar systems interplanetary environment, according to University of Chicago astrophysicist Priscilla Frisch. The good news is that it probably won’t happen for 50,000 years. Frisch presented the results of her research Monday, June 10, at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisc.
Frisch has been investigating the interstellar gas in the local neighborhood of our solar system, which is called the Local Interstellar Medium (LISM). This interstellar gas is within 100 light years of the Sun. The Sun has a trajectory through space, and for most of the last five million years, said Frisch, it has been moving through a region of space between the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy that is almost devoid of matter. Only recently, within the last few thousand years, she estimates, the Sun has been traveling through a relatively low-density interstellar cloud.
“This cloud, although low density on average, has a tremendous amount of structure to it,” Frisch said. “And it is not inconsistent with our data that the Sun may eventually encounter a portion of the cloud that is a million times denser than what we’re in now.”
Frisch believes the interstellar cloud through which we’re traveling is a relatively narrow band of dust and gas that lies in a superbubble shell expanding outward from an active star-formation region called the Scorpius-Centaurus Association. “When this superbubble expanded around these stars, it expanded much farther into the region of our galaxy between the spiral arms, where our sun lies, because the density is very low,” Frisch said. “It didn’t expand very far in the direction parallel to the spiral arms because it ran into very dense molecular clouds.”
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Originally posted by cosmo740
reply to post by ElectricUniverse
Thank you for sharing.
This will help me when I try to ell people that global warming is not man mad. It a tool people use to profit from.
Title:
Is the solar system entering a nearby interstellar cloud
Authors:
Vidal-Madjar, A.; Laurent, C.; Bruston, P.; Audouze, J.
Affiliation:
AA(CNRS, Laboratoire de Physique Stellaire et Planetaire, Verrieres-le-Buisson, Essonne, France), AB(CNRS, Laboratoire de Physique Stellaire et Planetaire, Verrieres-le-Buisson, Essonne, France), AC(CNRS, Laboratoire de Physique Stellaire et Planetaire, Verrieres-le-Buisson, Essonne, France), AD(Meudon Observatoire, Hauts-de-Seine; Paris XI, Universite, Orsay, Essonne, France)
Publication:
Astrophysical Journal, Part 1, vol. 223, July 15, 1978, p. 589-600. (ApJ Homepage)
Publication Date:
07/1978
Category:
Astrophysics
Origin:
STI
NASA/STI Keywords:
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Abstract
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Observational arguments in favor of such a cloud are presented, and implications of the presence of a nearby cloud are discussed, including possible changes in terrestrial climate. It is suggested that the postulated interstellar cloud should encounter the solar system at some unspecified time in the near future and might have a drastic influence on terrestrial climate in the next 10,000 years.
ESA sees stardust storms heading for Solar System
PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Monday, August 18, 2003
Source: Artemis Society
Until ten years ago, most astronomers did not believe stardust could enter our Solar System. Then ESA's Ulysses spaceprobe discovered minute stardust particles leaking through the Sun's magnetic shield, into the realm of Earth and the other planets. Now, the same spaceprobe has shown that a flood of dusty particles is heading our way.
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What is surprising in this new Ulysses discovery is that the amount of stardust has continued to increase even after the solar activity calmed down and the magnetic field resumed its ordered shape in 2001.
Scientists believe that this is due to the way in which the polarity changed during solar maximum. Instead of reversing completely, flipping north to south, the Sun's magnetic poles have only rotated at halfway and are now more or less lying sideways along the Sun's equator. This weaker configuration of the magnetic shield is letting in two to three times more stardust than at the end of the 1990s. Moreover, this influx could increase by as much as ten times until the end of the current solar cycle in 2012.
Space radiation hits record high
Now, the influx of galactic cosmic rays into our solar system has reached a record high. Measurements by NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft indicate that cosmic rays are 19 per cent more abundant than any previous level seen since space flight began a half century ago."The space era has so far experienced a time of relatively low cosmic ray activity," says Richard Mewaldt of Caltech, who is a member of the ACE team. "We may now be returning to levels typical of past centuries."
Surprise In Earth's Upper Atmosphere: Mode Of Energy Transfer From The Solar Wind
www.sciencedaily.com
"Its like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun. This discovery is like finding it got hotter when the sun went down," said Larry Lyons, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a co-author of the research, which is in press in two companion papers in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
"We all have thought for our entire careers — I learned it as a graduate student — that this energy transfer rate is primarily controlled by the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field," Lyons said. "The closer to southward-pointing the magnetic field is, the stronger the energy transfer rate is, and the stronger the magnetic field is in that direction. If it is both southward and big, the energy transfer rate is even bigger."
However, Lyons, Kim and their colleagues analyzed radar data that measure the strength of the interaction by measuring flows in the ionosphere, the part of Earth's upper atmosphere ionized by solar radiation. The results surprised them.
"Any space physicist, including me, would have said a year ago there could not be substorms when the interplanetary magnetic field was staying northward, but that's wrong," Lyons said. "Generally, it's correct, but when you have a fluctuating interplanetary magnetic field, you can have substorms going off once per hour.
"Heejeong used detailed statistical analysis to prove this phenomenon is real. Convection in the magnetosphere and ionosphere can be strongly driven by these fluctuations, independent of the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field."
Originally posted by purplemer
How long may I ask have we been measuring weather and temperature on other planets. Is it long enough to get any credible data..?
MIT researcher finds evidence of global warming on Neptune's largest moon
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- We're not the only ones experiencing global warming. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher has reported that observations obtained by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based instruments reveal that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, seems to have heated up significantly since the Voyager space probe visited it in 1989. The warming trend is causing part of Triton's surface of frozen nitrogen to turn into gas, thus making its thin atmosphere denser.
While no one is likely to plan a summer vacation on Triton, this report in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature by MIT astronomer James L. Elliot and his colleagues from MIT, Lowell Observatory and Williams College says that the moon is approaching an unusually warm summer season that only happens once every few hundred years. Elliot and his colleagues believe that Triton's warming trend could be driven by seasonal changes in the absorption of solar energy by its polar ice caps.
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Astronomers Observe Colossal Saturn Storm
July 6, 2011 4:14 PM
LOS ANGELES (AP) – It began as a bright white dot in Saturn’s northern hemisphere. Within days, the dot grew larger and stormier.
Soon the tempest enveloped the ringed planet, triggering lightning flashes thousands of times more intense than on Earth.
The international Cassini spacecraft and ground telescopes have been tracking the turbulence since last December, visible from Earth as a type of storm known as a “Great White Spot.”
“It’s still going like crazy,” said Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Such planet-wide weather disturbances are rare on Saturn, where the atmosphere is typically hazy and calm. Since 1876, astronomers have observed only five other mega-storms on Saturn.
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Magnetic Field Weakening in Stages, Old Ships' Logs Suggest
John Roach
for National Geographic News
May 11, 2006
Earth's magnetic field is weakening in staggered steps, a new analysis of centuries-old ships logs suggests.
The finding could help scientists better understand the way Earth's magnetic poles reverse.
The planet's magnetic field flips—north becomes south and vice versa—on average every 300,000 years. However, the actual time between reversals varies widely.
The field last flipped about 800,000 years ago, according to the geologic record.
Since 1840, when accurate measures of the intensity were first made, the field strength has declined by about 5 percent per century.
Biggest Breach of Earth's Solar Storm Shield Discovered
PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Source: Goddard Space Flight Center
Earth's magnetic field, which shields our planet from particles streaming outward from the Sun, often develops two holes that allow the largest leaks, according to researchers sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation.
"The discovery overturns a long-standing belief about how and when most of the solar particles penetrate Earth's magnetic field, and could be used to predict when solar storms will be severe. Based on these results, we expect more severe storms during the upcoming solar cycle," said Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Los Angeles, Principal Investigator for NASA's THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). THEMIS was used to discover the size of the leak.
Earth's magnetic field acts as a shield against the bombardment of particles continuously streaming from the sun. Because the solar particles (ions and electrons) are electrically charged, they feel magnetic forces and most are deflected by our planet's magnetic field. However, our magnetic field is a leaky shield and the number of particles breaching this shield depends on the orientation of the sun's magnetic field. It had been thought that when the sun's magnetic field is aligned with that of the Earth, the door is shut and that few if any solar particles enter Earth's magnetic shield. The door was thought to open up when the solar magnetic field direction points opposite to Earth's field, leading to more solar particles inside the shield.
Secular increase of the astronomical unit and perihelion precessions as tests of the Dvali–Gabadadze–Porrati multi-dimensional braneworld scenario
Lorenzo Iorio JCAP09(2005)006 doi: 10.1088/1475-7516/2005/09/006
Lorenzo Iorio
Viale Unità di Italia 68, 70125, Bari, Italy
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract. An unexpected secular increase of the astronomical unit, the length scale of the Solar System, has recently been reported by three different research groups (Krasinsky and Brumberg, Pitjeva, Standish). The latest JPL measurements amount to 7 ± 2 m cy−1. At present, there are no explanations able to accommodate such an observed phenomenon, either in the realm of classical physics or in the usual four-dimensional framework of the Einsteinian general relativity. The Dvali–Gabadadze–Porrati braneworld scenario, which is a multi-dimensional model of gravity aimed at providing an explanation of the observed cosmic acceleration without dark energy, predicts, among other things, a perihelion secular shift, due to Lue and Starkman, of 5 × 10−4 arcsec cy−1 for all the planets of the Solar System. It yields a variation of about 6 m cy−1 for the Earth–Sun distance which is compatible with the observed rate of change for the astronomical unit. The recently measured corrections to the secular motions of the perihelia of the inner planets of the Solar System are in agreement with the predicted value of the Lue–Starkman effect for Mercury, Mars and, at a slightly worse level, the Earth.
Originally posted by sealing
What about the tool of false climate studies the oil companies use ?
That's protecting profit. Man made or not I sure hope people can see why renewable
clean energies are important. Or just keep on burning up dinosaurs, and make big oil
even bigger.
It's like, I built this car but it emits s***.
And I built this car and it emits nothing.
Let's definetely go with the car that s***'s on me.edit on 21-6-2013 by sealing because: car story
"Other changes haven't been seen in decades, and some regions have never been in the state they're appearing in now. At the same time, we've never seen so many things striking Jupiter," he explained in a statement. "Right now, we're trying to figure out why this is all happening."
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8.2 Other anomalies?
There is one further observation which status is rather unclear bit which perhaps may fit into the other observations. This is the observation of the return time of comets: Comets usually come back a few days before they are expected when applying ordinary equations of motion. The delay usually is assigned to the outgassing of these objects. In fact, the delay is used for an estimate of the strength of this outgassing. On the other hand, it has been calculated in (44) that the assumption that starting with 20 AU there is an additional acceleration of the order of the Pioneer anomaly also leads to the effect that comets come back a few days earlier. It is not clear whether this is a serious indications but a further study of the trajectories of comets certainly is worthwhile.
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The reason for this is totally unclear. One may speculate that an unknown gravitational field within the Solar system slightly redirects the incoming cosmic microwave radiation (in the similar way as a motion with a certain velocity with respect to the rest frame of the cosmological background redirects the cosmic background radiation and leads to modifications of the dipole and quadrupole parts). Such a redirection should be more pronounced for low–l components of the radiation. It should be possible to calculate the gravitational field needed for such a redirection and then to compare that with the observational data of the Solar system and the other observed anomalies.
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