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Yellowstone rumbles spark fear of steam explosions
News in perspective
TIM FITZHARRRIS/MINDEN
Upfront– YELLOWSTONE QUAKES UP What’s rumbling beneath Yellowstone? Hundreds of tremors have been rippling through the national park in Wyoming from late December to early January, prompting worries that the shaking may trigger dangerous steam explosions. The motion of magma and hot fluid permeating the rock beneath Yellowstone is thought to be responsible for the thousands of small earthquakes recorded in and around the park each year. These everyday quakes usually go unnoticed by people on the surface. Since 26 December, however, a much more powerful swarm of quakes has shaken the area. The strongest were easily felt by visitors and park staff, including one with a magnitude of 3.9. These were still too small to cause damage directly, but there were worries that the vibrations might cause pent-up steam to burst through the
surface with explosive force. Yellowstone is pockmarked with craters thought to have been produced in this way, and geologists estimate an explosion big enough to create a 100-metre-wide crater happens there every 200 years or so. Reassuringly, as New Scientist went to press, the quakes appeared to be subsiding. “It hasn’t stopped, but it’s reduced markedly in the last couple of days,” said Robert B. Smith of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, on Monday. There are no signs of volcanic eruptions on the way either, says Smith, who monitors Yellowstone’s geological activity. The quakes appear to be concentrated along a fault beneath the park. Further analysis should reveal their cause, such as forces associated with the fault or the activity of hot fluids underground.
–Poised to let off some steam?–
Defending Ares WHY is NASA developing a new generation of space rockets when the US already has two that could do the same job? That’s one of the questions the transition team for the incoming Obama administration was reportedly asking NASA last week. At issue is the Ares series of rockets, currently being built to carry crew and supplies to the International Space Station, the moon and possibly Mars. These rockets have been plagued by questions over their design and cost, and are unlikely to be ready until 2015, leaving a gap in astronaut-launch capability if
“Rockets that loft satellites could be modified to launch astronauts” the space shuttle retires in 2010 as expected. The Ares programme looks likely to be reviewed by the new US administration. A possible alternative to Ares that was mooted last year and now appears to be facing fresh scrutiny would be to use Atlas V or Delta IV 4 | NewScientist | 10 January 2009
rockets to carry astronauts. These are mainly used by the US military to loft heavy satellites but could both be modified to become “human rated”. NASA has been here before. In 2006, the agency compared Ares to the Atlas and Delta heavy-lift rockets as candidate launchers. It concluded that many key Ares components have been adapted from the space shuttle, making it by far the safer option for crewed flights. For example, Ares’s first stage is a variant of the space shuttle’s solid-fuel rocket booster (SRB) – a design whose safety has been exhaustively scrutinised since the Challenger tragedy in 1986, when an SRB gas leak ignited the shuttle’s main fuel tank during launch. Ares’s second-stage liquid-fuelled engine doesn’t sit next to the SRB as on the space shuttle, so a failure in the SRB cannot ignite the liquid fuel – giving astronauts the chance to escape. “With Ares we are prioritising safety processes and systems for human spaceflight from the very beginning, rather than making an existing system suitable for people,” says a NASA spokeswoman.
Cheaper insulin? INSULIN grown in plants has been injected into people for the first time. The hope is that plants will provide a cheaper source of insulin for people with diabetes. Sembiosys Genetics, a Canadian company based in Calgary, Alberta, inserted human insulin genes into safflowers, causing them to make a compound called pro-insulin. Enzymes then converted this into a type of insulin called SBS-1000. Previous tests indicated that SBS-1000 is identical to human insulin, so last month Sembiosys
compared its effects with insulin from other sources in healthy volunteers. The company plans to release the results later this year. Most insulin products are produced by bacteria in a fermenter. As this is an expensive process, Sembiosys hopes using plants will be cheaper because they do not need this stage. Safflowers are not widely grown in North America, and have no wild relatives there. This should minimise the risk of genes escaping from insulin-producing safflowers grown there, says Maurice Maloney of Sembiosys.
DINO GRAVE SOLVES MYSTERY One of the world’s biggest dinosaur graves, in China, has yielded a key discovery: the 2-metre-long skull of a ceratopsid, a close relative of the triceratops. It is the first evidence that ceratopsids lived beyond North America. Since March 2008, over 7600 fossils have been found at the site in Zhucheng city, says Zhao Zijin at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. The bones are thought to date from the Late Cretaceous.
Ceratopsids were four-legged rhinolike herbivores whose huge skulls bore horns and distinctive bony frills. Their remains had been found only in Alaska, western Canada, and the western US. Dinosaur hunters had been bamboozled that ceratopsids had apparently not ventured into Asia as tyrannosaurs did. “Eastern Asia and western North America had more similar biogeography than we thought,” says Tom Holtz of the University of Maryland in College Park.
www.newscientist.com
TIM FITZHARRRIS/MINDEN
Upfront– YELLOWSTONE QUAKES UP What’s rumbling beneath Yellowstone? Hundreds of tremors have been rippling through the national park in Wyoming from late December to early January, prompting worries that the shaking may trigger dangerous steam explosions. The motion of magma and hot fluid permeating the rock beneath Yellowstone is thought to be responsible for the thousands of small earthquakes recorded in and around the park each year. These everyday quakes usually go unnoticed by people on the surface. Since 26 December, however, a much more powerful swarm of quakes has shaken the area. The strongest were easily felt by visitors and park staff, including one with a magnitude of 3.9. These were still too small to cause damage directly, but there were worries that the vibrations might cause pent-up steam to burst through the
surface with explosive force. Yellowstone is pockmarked with craters thought to have been produced in this way, and geologists estimate an explosion big enough to create a 100-metre-wide crater happens there every 200 years or so. Reassuringly, as New Scientist went to press, the quakes appeared to be subsiding. “It hasn’t stopped, but it’s reduced markedly in the last couple of days,” said Robert B. Smith of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, on Monday. There are no signs of volcanic eruptions on the way either, says Smith, who monitors Yellowstone’s geological activity. The quakes appear to be concentrated along a fault beneath the park. Further analysis should reveal their cause, such as forces associated with the fault or the activity of hot fluids underground.
–Poised to let off some steam?–
Defending Ares WHY is NASA developing a new generation of space rockets when the US already has two that could do the same job? That’s one of the questions the transition team for the incoming Obama administration was reportedly asking NASA last week. At issue is the Ares series of rockets, currently being built to carry crew and supplies to the International Space Station, the moon and possibly Mars. These rockets have been plagued by questions over their design and cost, and are unlikely to be ready until 2015, leaving a gap in astronaut-launch capability if
“Rockets that loft satellites could be modified to launch astronauts” the space shuttle retires in 2010 as expected. The Ares programme looks likely to be reviewed by the new US administration. A possible alternative to Ares that was mooted last year and now appears to be facing fresh scrutiny would be to use Atlas V or Delta IV 4 | NewScientist | 10 January 2009
rockets to carry astronauts. These are mainly used by the US military to loft heavy satellites but could both be modified to become “human rated”. NASA has been here before. In 2006, the agency compared Ares to the Atlas and Delta heavy-lift rockets as candidate launchers. It concluded that many key Ares components have been adapted from the space shuttle, making it by far the safer option for crewed flights. For example, Ares’s first stage is a variant of the space shuttle’s solid-fuel rocket booster (SRB) – a design whose safety has been exhaustively scrutinised since the Challenger tragedy in 1986, when an SRB gas leak ignited the shuttle’s main fuel tank during launch. Ares’s second-stage liquid-fuelled engine doesn’t sit next to the SRB as on the space shuttle, so a failure in the SRB cannot ignite the liquid fuel – giving astronauts the chance to escape. “With Ares we are prioritising safety processes and systems for human spaceflight from the very beginning, rather than making an existing system suitable for people,” says a NASA spokeswoman.
Cheaper insulin? INSULIN grown in plants has been injected into people for the first time. The hope is that plants will provide a cheaper source of insulin for people with diabetes. Sembiosys Genetics, a Canadian company based in Calgary, Alberta, inserted human insulin genes into safflowers, causing them to make a compound called pro-insulin. Enzymes then converted this into a type of insulin called SBS-1000. Previous tests indicated that SBS-1000 is identical to human insulin, so last month Sembiosys
compared its effects with insulin from other sources in healthy volunteers. The company plans to release the results later this year. Most insulin products are produced by bacteria in a fermenter. As this is an expensive process, Sembiosys hopes using plants will be cheaper because they do not need this stage. Safflowers are not widely grown in North America, and have no wild relatives there. This should minimise the risk of genes escaping from insulin-producing safflowers grown there, says Maurice Maloney of Sembiosys.
DINO GRAVE SOLVES MYSTERY One of the world’s biggest dinosaur graves, in China, has yielded a key discovery: the 2-metre-long skull of a ceratopsid, a close relative of the triceratops. It is the first evidence that ceratopsids lived beyond North America. Since March 2008, over 7600 fossils have been found at the site in Zhucheng city, says Zhao Zijin at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. The bones are thought to date from the Late Cretaceous.
Ceratopsids were four-legged rhinolike herbivores whose huge skulls bore horns and distinctive bony frills. Their remains had been found only in Alaska, western Canada, and the western US. Dinosaur hunters had been bamboozled that ceratopsids had apparently not ventured into Asia as tyrannosaurs did. “Eastern Asia and western North America had more similar biogeography than we thought,” says Tom Holtz of the University of Maryland in College Park.
www.newscientist.com