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Gizmorama - June 16, 2014
Good Morning, According to a new study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), hidden Antarctic volcanoes have been a contributor to accelerated glacier melting. Oh, that sounds hot!
Learn about this interesting story and more from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
ErinP.S. Did you miss an issue? You can read every issue from the Gophercentral library of newsletters on our exhaustive archives page. Thousands of issues, all of your favorite publications in chronological order. You can read AND comment. Just click
GopherArchives****-- NASA's warp-speed mission leads to Star Trek-like spacecraft concept --*WASHINGTON (UPI) - Since 2012, physicist Harold White has been working with engineers at NASA to determine whether a spacecraft could be designed to reach "warp speed" -- to travel faster than the speed of light.
White and his team call themselves and their project Advanced Propulsion Team Lead. And they're now beginning to put their ideas on paper.
White has recruited Mark Rademaker, an artist, to render their far-out concepts tangible, at least in the two-dimensional sense. Accordingly, Rademaker has produced a series of drawings of what a NASA spacecraft capable of warp speed might look like.
The product looks a lot like the starship Enterprise -- the vehicle Spock, James T. Kirk and their fellow Star Trek colleagues used to explore strange new worlds. Rademaker's drawings are available at his Flickr gallery.
And while it all sounds rather fantastical, White and his fellow scientists at NASA aren't joking.
They believe it's possible to manipulate space to travel long distances in a very short amount of time. Their hypothetical craft would not actually travel faster than light, however.
"A spheroid object would be placed between two regions of space-time," the scientists explain. These objects would create a sort of worm hole or warp bubble, which move space-time around the object, repositioning it and allowing the craft to shortcut its way through space.
Using such tactics, White surmises a spacecraft could travel to nearby stars in just a couple weeks.
Now, the scientists just have until 2063 to make it all a reality.
*-- Hidden Antarctic volcanoes contribute to glacier melting --*AUSTIN, Texas (UPI) - The list of things that don't contribute to glacier melting keeps getting shorter. Now, the list-keeper can cross off "underground volcanoes."
According to a new study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), the Thwaites Glacier of Western Antarctica -- which recently made the news headlines for its accelerated melting and structural vulnerabilities -- is also being eroded from beneath by geothermal heat released by underground volcanoes.
Ice-penetrating airborne radar clued the researchers from UT's Institute for Geophysics into the fact that geothermal heat sources are more extensively distributed beneath Antarctica than previously thought. They also learned that Antarctica's hotspots put out a much larger amount of heat than expected.
Beneath the Thwaites Glacier, geothermal sources give off an average of 114 milliwatts per square meter, with 200 milliwatts per square meter emanating for the most concentrated hotspots. (A square meter is roughly the equivalent of ten square feet.) Similar underground volcanoes in North America give off only around 65 milliwatts per square meter.
"It's pretty hot by continental standards," said researcher Don Schroeder, speaking of Antarctica. Schroeder helped author the new study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But Schroeder and co-author Don Blankenship say more research is needed to accurately predict how and at what rate geothermal warming will contribute to the predicted collapse of the Thawites Glacier -- as well as the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet.
"It's the most complex thermal environment you might imagine," said Blankenship. "And then you plop the most critical dynamically unstable ice sheet on planet Earth in the middle of this thing, and then you try to model it. It's virtually impossible."
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