The eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in the Pacific in January was so powerful that it shot water vapor high enough to touch space, the first time an earthly volcano has been observed achieving that feat.
Tonga Geological Survey Team, Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY 3.0 )
When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in the Pacific Ocean erupted earlier this year, the event was one for the record books — in several surprising ways.
The January 15 eruption was so explosive that it injected water vapor so high that it touched space, a first-of-its-kind observation for an earthly volcano. And the event produced the greatest concentration of lightning ever detected — making it far flashier than the 2018 eruption of Krakatau in Indonesia or the 2021 tornado outbreak across the U.S. South.
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The eruption also released so much energy that its disturbance of a charged layer of Earth’s atmosphere, called the ionosphere, rivaled that of a solar geomagnetic storm.
Seismologists, geophysicists and oceanographers described these and other eruption superlatives at a news conference on December 12 and in several presentations in Chicago at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting.
“These are once in a lifetime … observations,” said Larry Paxton, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.
He and colleagues examined data from NASA’s Global Ultraviolet Imager, on a spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. On the day of the eruption, Paxton said, the instrument revealed “something unusual” in the far-ultraviolet light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum: a roundish spot in the satellite data coinciding with the volcano’s location where there was a temporary decrease in those UV emissions.
The instrument doesn’t see anything in the atmosphere below about 100 kilometers above sea level, what’s typically thought of as the boundary of space. That means that some sort of emitted material — most likely water vapor from the undersea volcano — had reached high enough into space to briefly absorb those particles of light , the researchers reported. Scientists had previously estimated that the eruption extended past the stratosphere and into the mesosphere. The new finding suggests the explosion reached even higher.
The volcano woke up in December 2021 ( SN: 1/21/22 ). By early January, the ongoing eruption was already “one of the most prolific lightning producers” on the planet, said Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with Vaisala Inc., an environmental instruments company headquartered in Vantaa, Finland.
Using Vaisala’s Global Lightning Detection Network, Vagasky and colleagues estimate that on the day of the big blast on January 15 alone, there were at least 400,000 lightning strikes at and around the volcano — an order of magnitude higher than generally observed in Earth’s most powerful supercell thunderstorms, Vagasky said. “This was the most extreme lightning event ever detected by the global network.”
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Some of the volcano’s explosive energy made it to the ionosphere, the layer of Earth’s atmosphere where charged plasma coexists with other atmospheric particles. Atmospheric pressure waves from the eruption propagated into space , shifting the plasma around ( SN: 8/29/22 ).
Those plasma shifts then rippled along Earth’s magnetic field lines, resonating through the ionosphere to disturb plasma thousands of kilometers away . “It’s like plucking a guitar string,” said Claire Gasque, a space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. ( Gasque is the daughter of Science News ’ news director, Macon Morehouse, who wasn’t involved in this article.)
In the vicinity of the volcano, that effect on the ionosphere from the January 15 eruption rivaled, and even surpassed, the impact of a minor solar geomagnetic storm that began on January 14, Gasque added. “Despite a simultaneous geomagnetic storm, the volcano dominated changes in ionospheric dynamics.”
“Most people think of space weather as caused by solar influences,” Gasque said. But these data suggest a volcano can have just as much power.
The volcano may yet break other records, the researchers said, as scientists continue studying data from the powerful explosion.
Carolyn Gramling is the earth & climate writer. She has bachelor’s degrees in geology and European history and a Ph.D. in marine geochemistry from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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Researchers first identified and described the snake clitoris by studying the genital anatomy of two female common death adders ( Acanthophis antarcticus ), one of which is shown here.
Luke Allen, M.J. Folwell et al / Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2022
Clitorises are found in a wide range of vertebrate life, from crocodiles to dolphins ( SN : 1/10/22 ). One exception is birds, which lost their clitorises over the course of their evolution. Female snakes appeared to have lost the sex organ too, which was puzzling, since their close lizard relatives possess paired clitorises, called hemiclitorises. Male lizards and snakes have accompanying paired phalli, or hemipenises.
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This element of female snakes’ sexual anatomy went unexamined in detail for so long partly because hemiclitorises can be fragile and easy to miss, but also because female genitalia have historically been considered “quite taboo,” says evolutionary biologist Megan Folwell of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
“Even in humans, the proper function and significance of the human clitoris was still being discussed in 2006,” she says.
Conflicting accounts of snake hemiclitorises in some scientific papers led Folwell to take a detailed look. She first examined a euthanized female common death adder ( Acanthophis antarcticus ). “I just started with dissecting the tail and going into it with a really open mind of what I might find,” she says.
She was “pleasantly surprised” to find dual organs within that were completely different from the hemipenises found in male snakes. Also, unlike lizard hemiclitorises, the snake’s couldn’t turn out externally.
To confirm she wasn’t looking at a lump of some other tissue, Folwell and her colleagues carefully examined sections of the organs under a microscope. The team also soaked the tail in iodine, which allowed the soft tissues in the genital region to be seen with greater resolution using X-rays.
These analyses showed that the tissues were fundamentally different from the male snake’s hemipenises. The female organs were full of primarily collagen rather than muscle fibers running through the structure. Another analysis showed the organs had “heaps of nerves” throughout them, Folwell says, suggesting they probably have substantial tactile sensitivity. Like other species’ clitorises, the snake’s showed a robust blood supply.
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The team expanded its study to eight more snake species across four families, revealing a dizzying array of clitoral diversity. For instance, Folwell says, the hemiclitorises of the Mexican cantil viper ( Agkistrodon bilineatus ) are huge, filling the space of the tail. “Then you see the Ingram’s brown snake, which was so teeny tiny. If you didn’t know what you’re looking for, it definitely could have been missed,” Folwell says.
Some hemiclitorises are thin and lay atop the scent glands, while others are sandwiched between or even a combination of on top and between, she adds.
Snakes are thought to have evolved from lizard ancestors. The findings show that, evolutionarily speaking, the snake clitoris “wasn’t lost; it was just changed,” says Diane Kelly, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who wasn’t involved with this study.
Folwell and her colleagues think the hemiclitorises may be stimulated during courtship and mating behaviors, such as the twisting together of tails. This may make the female more receptive, encouraging longer and more frequent mating and enhancing the chances of fertilization.
“It’s been often believed that, in snakes, it’s been all about coercion, and all about the male driving mating,” Folwell says. “It may be a little bit closer toward seduction in some species.”
Going forward, Folwell wants to look further into how nerves in hemiclitorises are involved in any touch sensitivity and function during mating.
Kelly notes that comparing hemipenises and hemiclitorises of the same species could help get an idea of the organs’ function in snakes, and potentially reveal any back-and-forth evolution between males and females.
“It’s 2022, and here’s a brand-new anatomical finding in a really common animal,” Kelly says. “There’s a lot of anatomy that we still don’t know yet.”
Jake Buehler is a freelance science writer, covering natural history, wildlife conservation and Earth’s splendid biodiversity, from salamanders to sequoias. He has a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
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The world needed bold climate action this year, and we got it.
California and other states announced plans to phase out gas-powered cars after 2035. The United States ratified an international treaty to slash production of the climate-warming hydrofluorocarbons used in cooling and refrigeration. The European Union is finalizing its plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent relative to 1990s levels by 2030. The list of legislative victories goes on.
But the biggest win came August 16, when President Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act.
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The historic legislation marks the first major move by the United States, which has emitted more carbon dioxide than any other country, toward neutralizing greenhouse gas emissions. It gets the ball rolling by investing $369 billion into accelerating the adoption of wind, solar and other renewable energy sources and decarbonizing the economy. By the end of the decade, the act will help cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by around 40 percent of the levels in 2005 , when U.S. emissions nearly peaked, scientists project, bringing the nation within reach of fulfilling its pledge to halve emissions by 2030.
The legislation is no panacea for the climate emergency, but researchers and activists are optimistic that it will be the helping hand that clean energy needs to flourish. “There would be no way to really mitigate the climate crisis without the investments in this bill,” says Raul Garcia, a legislative director at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization.
Here’s a look at some of the law’s major provisions and a few of its limitations.
The law aims to ease and incentivize the transition away from fossil fuels by creating tax credits that reduce the cost for companies to adopt clean energy. For instance, small businesses can qualify for credits that support up to 30 percent of the cost of transitioning to solar power.
The act also aims to help consumers, with $9 billion for rebates that help people ditch gas and buy appliances powered by electricity, such as electric induction cooktops and heat pump water heaters. Households can also get up to $7,500 in tax credits for electric vehicle purchases.
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“It’s huge,” Denise Mauzerall, an atmospheric scientist at Princeton University, says of the law’s potential to advance clean energy. But if the United States is to take full advantage of the increased clean energy capacity, it will be crucial to also construct sufficient infrastructure to deliver that energy, she notes. The bill offers only some support to build overhead power lines and other ways to transmit energy. “Without transmission,” she says, “we will really slow ourselves down.”
A major goal is to build up a clean energy economy by promoting high-quality jobs in industries such as solar and wind. To maximize tax credits, companies must pay workers a “prevailing wage” and employ apprentices to work a minimum number of hours on clean energy projects.
The legislation also invests in the domestic manufacturing of clean energy goods. Tax credits of up to 30 percent are available to companies that build or recycle wind turbine blades, solar panels, energy storage equipment and other clean energy products, and funds grants to retool factories to make electric vehicles.
Methane — a greenhouse gas that can trap more than 25 times as much heat as CO 2 — is another target. The legislation devotes $850 million to the monitoring and mitigation of methane emissions from fossil fuel operations. It also establishes a fine for operations that annually release amounts of methane that exceed 25,000 metric tons of CO 2 equivalent.
And CO 2 is legally defined as an “air pollutant,” cementing the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate its production under the Clean Air Act.
But there’s more to the climate problem than decarbonizing today’s pollutive energy industry, Mauzerall says. “Going forward, we need to pay more attention to reducing emissions from the agricultural sector,” she says. About 11 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and about a third of global emissions come from agriculture ( SN: 5/7/22 & 5/21/22, p. 22 ).
Billions of dollars are slated to go toward climate justice, a movement that confronts the disproportionate impacts of climate change on marginalized communities. Funding includes $2.8 billion in grants for community-based projects, such as those that increase energy efficiency in affordable housing developments or monitor air quality in marginalized communities.
“But there are some troubling provisions,” Garcia says. The law authorizes new offshore oil and gas leases and provides fossil fuel companies with carbon capture and sequestration tax credits. These could prolong the life of pollutive oil and gas operations, which are often located near marginalized communities.
It will be crucial to follow these investments with laws that enforce both climate justice and the clean energy transition, Garcia says. “We need rules and regulations that hold industries’ feet to the fire, to make sure that those investments are going where they need to.”
A version of this article appears in the December 17, 2022 issue of Science News .
Nikk Ogasa is a staff writer who focuses on the physical sciences for Science News . He has a master’s degree in geology from McGill University, and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
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Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Medical language can sometimes stump patients. And some common sayings are straight-up head-scratchers.
Calling a patient’s neurological exam “grossly intact,” for example, might not sound so great, says Michael Pitt, a pediatrician at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis. But it actually means that everything is normal and working as expected.
In 2021, Pitt and his colleagues asked 215 adults at the Minnesota State Fair to decipher that language and 12 other medical sayings a patient might hear from a doctor or read in their notes. People can trip up on familiar words and phrases that have one meaning in everyday English and an entirely different meaning in medicine, the researchers report November 30 in JAMA Network Open .
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Only about 20 percent of people surveyed, for example, understood what it meant when their doctor said, “The findings on the X-ray were quite impressive.” In plain language, that means the doctor is giving you bad news, Pitt says — the opposite of what some patients might expect.
When surveyed, doctors overwhelmingly agree that they should avoid medical jargon when speaking with patients, Pitt says. But many don’t even know they’re doing it. There’s a technical term for this too, Pitt adds: “jargon oblivion.”
He’s hoping his team’s results give doctors an “aha moment” and some awareness about phrases that might be puzzling patients. If a doctor says something that’s unclear, Pitt says, he wants patients to feel empowered to speak up.
He’s coached his family for years on this. When they go to the doctor, there’s one question in particular he wants them to ask. Before they leave an appointment, they’ll summarize what the doctor has said and ask, “Am I getting this right?”
“That type of phrase is amazing to have in your back pocket,” Pitt says.
Meghan Rosen is a staff writer who reports on the life sciences for Science News . She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology with an emphasis in biotechnology from the University of California, Davis, and later graduated from the science communication program at UC Santa Cruz.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
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Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
This year, the world had to face the growing burden of long COVID. A tidal wave of people with lingering symptoms — some mild, some profoundly disabling — commanded attention.
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One key question is: Who is at risk? The search for risk factors has yielded few clear answers. Women may be slightly more likely than men to get long COVID , as are people who had more than five symptoms during their initial week of COVID-19 ( SN: 10/8/22 & 10/22/22, p. 18 ).
Part of what confounds simple answers is that long COVID can hit multiple body systems, leading to fatigue, smell loss , memory trouble, blood clots and even sensations of internal tremors that feel like earthquakes ( SN: 9/24/22, p. 14 ).
Symptoms could be due to persistent virus hiding out in the body, as well as the body’s responses to the intruder. Micro blood clots, antibodies that turn against the body, inflammation and even disturbances of helpful bacteria are all being scrutinized for their roles in the disease.
The lack of clarity is what makes finding treatments so hard. Doctors at long COVID clinics, which are few and far between , are scrambling to ease people’s symptoms, often borrowing therapies from other disorders that cause similar problems, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome ( SN: 11/5/22, p. 25 ).
The long list of unanswered questions has taken on new urgency given the swell of people experiencing long COVID. Epidemiologist Priya Duggal of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and colleagues suspect that between 10 and 30 percent of people who get COVID-19 may go on to get long COVID. That fits with federal data suggesting that about 30 percent of U.S. adults who have had COVID-19 have experienced long COVID. But surveys, medical records and other data all come with flaws, so exact numbers are impossible to come by, she says.
What’s perhaps most useful, Duggal says, is to consider how many people are severely constrained by their illness. “These are the people [who] were living happy, healthy lives and now they’re not,” she says. About 1 to 5 percent of people who had COVID-19 may fall into this category, she estimates. That sounds like a tiny number, she says, but “even if it’s 1 percent, it’s 1 percent of all people who have had COVID. And that’s just a really, really large number.” An estimated 100 million people in the United States have had COVID-19. That’s probably an undercount, Duggal says.
In the first days of the pandemic, Duggal and colleagues wanted to collect as much biological data on people as they could, before COVID-19 tore through the world. But logistics and a lack of funding prevented those baseline studies. “Had we had some of that in place, we could now be asking better questions and getting better answers,” she says. “I would hope that some of what this has taught us is that the next time this happens — and let’s hope it is no time soon — we have a bit more thought about what’s to come.”
A version of this article appears in the December 17, 2022 issue of Science News .
Laura Sanders is the neuroscience writer. She holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Southern California.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
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Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
New seismic analyses of the magma under the Yellowstone supervolcano are sharpening the picture of what lies beneath and keeps features such as the Grand Prismatic Hot Spring (shown) simmering.
More liquid magma lurks beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano than scientists once thought. But don’t panic: That amount of magma, researchers say, is still nowhere near enough to portend an eruption any time soon.
That reassurance comes courtesy of new state-of-the-art seismic images that give the sharpest picture yet of what lies beneath Yellowstone.
“It’s like getting a better lens for your camera. Things are coming into more focus,” says Michael Poland, a geophysicist who was not involved in the research. “We’re even less worried about an eruption now — and I wasn’t worried before,” adds Poland, who is the scientist-in-charge at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Yellowstone Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash.
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The volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park has garnered interest — and worry — because it has had some of the most explosive, dramatic eruptions in the geologic record, he says. In the last 2.1 million years alone, Yellowstone has had three catastrophic eruptions, generating continent-wide ashfalls and disrupting the global climate.
Yellowstone’s subterranean magma chambers mostly contain hardened, cooled crystals that are mixed in with some amount of molten material. How much magma there is relative to crystals can determine how ready a volcano is to erupt. The average amount of liquid magma in the volcano’s underbelly is between 16 and 20 percent, Ross Maguire, a geophysicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and colleagues report in the Dec. 2 Science .
The “critical melt fraction” at which the volcano might be prepared to erupt is more like between 35 and 50 percent, the team notes.
Previously, researchers had estimated Yellowstone’s melt fraction as between 5 and 15 percent. The new estimates don’t represent an actual change — they’re based on a reanalysis of existing seismic data that required far more computational power than was possible in the past.
“We’re not absolutely pushing the limit in terms of what we can do,” Maguire says, “but we’re getting kind of close.”
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To “see” beneath the surface, scientists use information gleaned from the speeds of different types of seismic waves as they travel through the ground. Seismic waves known as “S waves” are particularly useful when looking for melt because these waves slow down considerably when they encounter any liquid, such as water or molten magma.
Researchers use the time it takes for an S wave to travel from a transmitting source to a receiver, compared with the time it takes for other types of seismic waves that don’t slow down in liquids, to estimate how much melted magma there is.
Before the rise of supercomputers, scientists would imagine the seismic waves as moving along a simple line from point A to point B. Then they would convert the travel time for the wave to a velocity and from there estimate some amount of liquid present.
But waves don’t really move in a line; they radiate outward. They diffract. When encountering a subsurface feature that could slow them down, they might bend around it rather than barrel through it. Those additional wave movements add a lot of fine detail to the picture — but they also require a lot of computational power.
Today, such calculations are possible. So Maguire and colleagues used this more modern way of looking at seismic waves — called full waveform tomography — to reanalyze existing seismic data from Yellowstone.
Peering between three and eight kilometers underground, the team recorded S waves as slow as about 2.1 kilometers per second, occurring near the center of Yellowstone’s caldera. That’s appreciably slower than previous estimates of 2.7 km/s, Maguire says, pointing to more melt.
It’s not certain how the melted part of the magma is distributed. But the most likely scenario is that most of the liquid is isolated, tiny amounts of melt locked away in the spaces between the hardened crystals. Still, the team notes, it can’t rule out the possibility that there are larger pockets of molten magma scattered about.
One interesting implication, Maguire says, is that “Yellowstone may spend large portions of its life cycle with higher melt fractions than thought.” That contradicts the classic view that the volcano’s magma chambers are usually filled with cooled crystals, punctuated by rapid injections of magma before an eruption. Instead, Yellowstone may just be in a long-standing simmering state.
But a bit of simmering is a far cry from about to erupt, Poland says, and these new findings “help to drive home the point that this system is mostly solid.” That’s probably why it hasn’t erupted even small amounts of magma in nearly 70,000 years.
That doesn’t mean Yellowstone is quiescent: It’s still a hot, active volcanic system with hazards, Poland notes. For example, in recent decades there have been deadly steam explosions and landslide-triggering earthquakes ( SN: 1/11/21 ).
Those more likely hazards don’t get as much attention as fears of a catastrophic eruption. “It’s kind of a bogeyman for people and a clickbait topic, and it’s sad,” Poland says. “It’s an interesting place that has so much to offer, and people are focused on the thing that won’t happen in our lifetime.”
Carolyn Gramling is the earth & climate writer. She has bachelor’s degrees in geology and European history and a Ph.D. in marine geochemistry from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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