Mitsubishi Motors Corporation and Japan Delivery System Corporation Develop EV Charging System for Apartment Buildings in Japan

Over view of the i-CHARGER system.

Mitsubishi Motors Corporation (MMC) and Japan Delivery System Corporation (JDS) have jointly developed an electric vehicle (EV) charging system for apartment complexes. The system, called i-CHARGER, is to be sold by JDS starting 1 December.

Installation and management of EV charging infrastructure for shared parking lots of apartment complexes is an issue in Japan for the popularization of electric vehicles. The i-CHARGER addresses this problem by utilizing existing “delivery box” systems. A “delivery box” is a system of lockers that allow for delivery or sending of packages when tenants are not at home. The “delivery box” notifies tenants when a package has arrived, and the package can be retrieved by the tenant by PIN code or verification card.

<!––>These systems were first introduced to the apartment building market 15 years ago, and are now often installed in new apartment buildings. JDS is involved in the management, sales, and construction of “delivery box” systems for apartment complexes in Japan and holds a 40% market share.

Utilizing the authentication capability of the “delivery box” system, the i-CHARGER can manage who, when, and how much electricity was used, making it easy for apartment complex supervisors to sort out electricity usage of the building’s tenants.

At present the i-CHARGER is aimed at apartment complex residents who own an electric vehicle, however once the reservation system that is currently under development is completed, electric vehicle sharing in apartment complexes becomes possible, greatly contributing to the spread of charging infrastructure.

The i-CHARGER, applying the security, user management and tenant verification capabilities of the “delivery box” system can provide the following functions in conjunction with electric charging equipment:

• When a tenant uses their “delivery box” verification card over the main charging unit, the outlet unit installed at the parking space is activated, allowing for charging of the user’s electric vehicle.
• The charging time is calculated and managed by the “delivery box,” allowing for the building supervisor to charge the correct electricity fees to the correct tenant.
• The same 24-hour toll-free support line for the “delivery box” system will be made available for charger support as well.

There are also plans to develop a stand-alone unit that is not dependent on a “delivery box” system.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/12/mitsubishi-motors-corporation-and-japan-delivery-system-corporation-develop-ev-charging-system-for-a.html

Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense

CLIMATE CONTRARIAN: Senator James Inhofe has called global warming the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.  Senator James Inhofe

Evidence for human interference with Earth’s climate continues to accumulate

By John Rennie

On November 18, with the United Nations Global Warming Conference in Copenhagen fast approaching, U.S. Senator James R. Inhofe (R-Okla.) took the floor of the Senate and proclaimed 2009 to be “The Year of the Skeptic.” Had the senator’s speech marked a new commitment to dispassionate, rational inquiry, a respect for scientific thought and a well-grounded doubt in ghosts, astrology, creationism and homeopathy, it might have been cause for cheer. But Inhofe had a more narrow definition of skeptic in mind: he meant “standing up and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism.”

Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists. Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course—some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming.

What follows is only a partial list of the contrarians’ bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them.

Claim 1: Anthropogenic CO2 can’t be changing climate, because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in CO2 are irrelevant.

Although CO2 makes up only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, that small number says nothing about its significance in climate dynamics. Even at that low concentration, CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and acts as a greenhouse gas, as physicist John Tyndall demonstrated in 1859. The chemist Svante Arrhenius went further in 1896 by estimating the impact of CO2 on the climate; after painstaking hand calculations he concluded that doubling its concentration might cause almost 6 degrees Celsius of warming—an answer not much out of line with recent, far more rigorous computations.

Contrary to the contrarians, human activity is by far the largest contributor to the observed increase in atmospheric CO2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, anthropogenic CO2 amounts to about 30 billion tons annually—more than 130 times as much as volcanoes produce. True, 95 percent of the releases of CO2 to the atmosphere are natural, but natural processes such as plant growth and absorption into the oceans pull the gas back out of the atmosphere and almost precisely offset them, leaving the human additions as a net surplus. Moreover, several sets of experimental measurements, including analyses of the shifting ratio of carbon isotopes in the air, further confirm that fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are the primary reasons that CO2 levels have risen 35 percent since 1832, from 284 parts per million (ppm) to 388 ppm—a remarkable jump to the highest levels seen in millions of years.

Contrarians frequently object that water vapor, not CO2, is the most abundant and powerful greenhouse gas; they insist that climate scientists routinely leave it out of their models. The latter is simply untrue: from Arrhenius on, climatologists have incorporated water vapor into their models. In fact, water vapor is why rising CO2 has such a big effect on climate. CO2 absorbs some wavelengths of infrared that water does not so it independently adds heat to the atmosphere. As the temperature rises, more water vapor enters the atmosphere and multiplies CO2’s greenhouse effect; the IPCC notes that water vapor [pdf] may “approximately double the increase in the greenhouse effect due to the added CO2 alone.”

Article Continues (in detail) – http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seven-answers-to-climate-contrarian-nonsense

Five things you should know about climate change

Confused by the sound and fury that accompany any studies of the climate? Learn five things you should know about the science of climate change.

By John Timmer

Writing about vaccines, evolution, and even dark matter has ended up setting off contentious discussions here at Ars. But no area seems to bring out impassioned arguments as reliably as climate change. Covering the latest scientific results can bring forth cries of scientific fraud, conspiracies, and denialism; considering policy implications can be even worse.

It can be really difficult for anyone not well-versed in the debate to get any sense of the science at all, something that’s clear from the huge gap between the scientific community’s acceptance of climate change and the public’s wariness about the topic. So it’s probably useful to step back from the latest findings, and look at science’s basic understanding of how greenhouse gasses can force climate change, which often gets lost in the arguments.

All things being equal, adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere will warm it

The concept of greenhouse gas-driven warming was worked out about a century ago, shortly after it was realized that carbon dioxide is transparent to visible light, but absorbs infrared radiation. Once absorbed, it is transformed into vibrational and rotational energy, which we perceive as warmth. This plays out very simply: the sun’s output in the visible spectrum passes through greenhouse gasses on the way to the ground, where a lot of it gets absorbed and radiated back out as infrared at a later point. With more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, a greater fraction of that IR is absorbed by the atmosphere, increasing its heat content.

Not only are the physics simple, it’s easy to calculate the impact of greenhouse gasses by measuring the amount of energy sent our way by the sun, and then assuming it’s all radiated back to space. Without the influence of greenhouse gasses, including water vapor and CO₂, the planet would be a much colder place, and uninhabitable by most of its current life.

The basics of the greenhouse effect, courtesy of the Department of Energy.

It’s also relatively simple to calculate that adding more of these gasses would shift the energy balance further. This really can’t be emphasized enough. In the hyperbolic language that has infested the debate, researchers have been accused of everything from ditching the scientific method to participating in a vast conspiracy. But the basic concepts of the greenhouse effect is a matter of simple physics and chemistry, and have been part of the scientific dialog for roughly a century.

Greenhouse-driven climate change is used to explain many historic events

There are any number of indications that climate change driven by greenhouse gasses is far more readily accepted among the scientific community than it is among the general public, from surveys of researchers to statements released by organizations of professional scientists. But perhaps the clearest indication of the acceptance of an idea like this is the fact that it’s deeply engrained in scientific discussions. The scientific literature makes it clear that scientists view greenhouse effects as plausible explanations for everything from historic shifts in the Earth’s climate to the dynamics of the atmospheres of other planets.

In the last month or so, I’ve come across a paper that suggested the global glaciations occurred when oxygen appeared in the atmosphere because that oxygen reacted with and eliminated a specific greenhouse gas (I’d seen something similar years ago that proposed the same thing, but with a different greenhouse gas). In the same span, two papers have suggested that a plunge in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused the glaciation of Antarctica. The importance of atmospheric carbon dioxide for an earlier period of warming called the PETM has also been an area of intensive study.

It’s important to emphasize that, with the exception of the PETM, the precise role of greenhouse gas changes in these events is pretty speculative at this point. But a couple of things should be clear: scientists consider changes in greenhouse gasses a plausible driver of changing climates, and view the field as a fruitful area of study.

That “all things being equal” caveat is a big one

Obviously, however, greenhouse gasses are hardly the only climate influence that can change. The amount of energy sent our way by the sun varies in 11-year cycles, and often displays longer-term trends. Aerosols, such as those released by volcanoes and burning fossil fuels, can reflect sunlight back into space; so can some clouds.

The levels of any of these can change at the same time as greenhouse gasses, either enhancing or obscuring their climactic impact. As a result, researchers have attempted to track the changes in these other factors in order to understand the precise role played by rising levels of CO₂ and methane in recent temperature rises. These efforts have included tracking the activity of the sun (pretty easy) to measuring the levels of aerosols and the extent of cloud cover (much, much harder).

Complicating matters further, a change in temperature can induce changes in other factors that influence climate. So, for example, higher temperatures melt glaciers, which normally reflect sunlight back into space—their absence will tend to enhance the warming. In the same way, higher temperatures allow the atmosphere to hold more water vapor, which is a potent greenhouse gas (but one that circulates through the atmosphere within days, rather than the centuries typical of CO₂).

It’s pretty clear that these feedbacks play a critical role in modulating the climate—the Earth wouldn’t either enter or exit ice ages if it weren’t for feedbacks that enhance otherwise minor changes in the distribution of sunlight that reaches the planet. That said, the relative importance or magnitude of different feedbacks is an active area of research, and there is plenty of room for scientific disagreements there.

Still, not knowing everything isn’t the same as not knowing anything; it’s possible to get some reasonably accurate estimates of many of the feedbacks and forcings, or to set upper and lower bounds on their likely values. In the case of solar forcings, we actually have pretty good measurements of the changes in our sun’s activity over the last several decades. The limits we have on these values mean that future estimates, such as those provided by the IPCC, include a range of potential values for likely future temperature changes.

 

This isn’t weather forecasting

Both sides of the public debate have a really unfortunate tendency to equate climate with the weather. People will happily point to extreme weather events as evidence of a changing climate, even though the links between increased temperatures and, say, hurricane strength, are still not entirely clear. Others will list news reports of record low temperatures, apparently oblivious to the fact that one unusually cold day can easily occur in an exceptionally hot year.

These arguments conflate two very different things: weather is what happens on a given day, while the climate is what the weather will typically be like. To give a simple example: the climate in Texas is generally warmer than that in New York, but it’s entirely possible to have a colder day in Texas, or hotter day in New York. So, although the global climate is now warmer than it was in 1900, that certainly doesn’t preclude the possibility of record cold days.

The difference between weather and climate in the US. Record highs and lows (weather) continue to occur, but the climate drives decade-long trends in their frequency.
Image ©UCAR, graphic by Mike Shibao.

There’s a related misconception: many seem to think that if we can’t get weather forecasts right, we can’t possibly predict the climate. Not surprisingly, if weather and climate are very different things, the methods and tools used to predict them are equally different. We’ve gone into the differences in detail in the past, but the difference is what you’d expect based on the difference between weather and climate: it’s very hard to predict the specific state of a complex system over longer time periods, but nowhere near as difficult to get a sense of what its general outlines are likely to be.

It’s important to look for the science

It’s impossible to cover every possible aspect of climate science in a single piece; the climate is big and complex, and raging arguments have developed over all sorts of minutia. So, the best piece of advice one can have when attempting to engage with climate science is simply to recognize scientific data and reasoning.

So, using examples from above, if you see someone confusing weather and climate, you can probably assume that they’ve not been paying careful attention to scientific issues. In the same way, you’ll often see people arguing that since the planet’s climate has changed in the past without human intervention, there’s no reason to worry about human-generated greenhouse gasses now—which ignores evidence indicating some of those past changes have been driven by greenhouse gasses. We’ve also discussed (twice!) why using 1998 as a starting point for discussing some sort of “global cooling” involves a careful preselection of data.

You’ll also see some people leave basic logic behind. Many will cite surfacestations.org in an attempt to show that recent temperature records are inaccurate, and then turn around and use those same records to argue that temperatures have recently cooled.

So, in addition to knowing the basics of climate science, perhaps the most important thing to know when dealing with the climate is how to recognize when someone has stopped using science entirely.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/five-things-you-should-know-about-climate-change.ars

Oceanic Crust Formation Is Dynamic After All

A research team led by Brown University studied seismic velocities — the speed of seismic waves — in the Gulf of California to determine that a geological phenomenon known as dynamic upwelling occurs in the Earth’s mantle as oceanic crust is formed. (Credit: Yun Wang/Brown University)

Imagine the Earth’s crust as the planet’s skin: Some areas are old and wrinkled while others have a fresher, more youthful sheen, as if they had been regularly lathered with lotion.

Carry the metaphor a little further and a good picture emerges of the geological processes leading to the creation of the planet’s crust. On land, continental crust, once created, can remain more or less unaltered for billions of years. But the oldest oceanic crust is only about 200 million years old, as new crust is continually forming at midocean ridge spreading centers.

While geologists have known that oceanic crust continually replenishes itself, they have been unsure what occurs below the surface that leads to the resurfacing. What geodynamics are occurring in the mantle that eventually produces new crust, that new layer of skin on the ocean’s bottom?

The answer has been elusive in part because oceanic crust is difficult to reach and instruments that can measure seismic activity have not fully covered the terrain to obtain an accurate picture of forces below the surface. Now earth scientists led by Brown University have observed — in detail and at unprecedented depths — a geological phenomenon known as dynamic upwelling in the underlying mantle beneath a spreading center. Their findings, reported November 26 in Nature, may resolve a longstanding debate regarding the relative importance of passive and dynamic upwelling in the shallow mantle beneath spreading centers on the seafloor.

“We know the crust of the ocean is produced by upwelling beneath separating plates,” said Don Forsyth, professor of geological sciences at Brown. “We just didn’t know the upwelling pattern that took place, that there are concentrated upwelling centers rather than uniform upwelling.”

Mantle upwelling and melting beneath spreading centers has been thought to be mostly a passive response to the separating oceanic plates above. The new finding shows there appears to be a dynamic component as well, driven by the buoyancy of melt retained in the rock or by the lighter chemical composition of rock from which melt has been removed.

The scientists from Brown and the University of Rhode Island based their findings on a high-resolution seismic study in the Gulf of California. In that region, there are 25 seismometers spaced along the western coast of Mexico and the Baja California peninsula, which lie on either side of the Gulf of California. Yun Wang, a Brown graduate student and the paper’s lead author, tracked the velocity of seismic waves that traveled from one station to another. She noticed a pattern: The seismic waves in three localized centers, spaced about 250 kilometers (155 miles) apart, traveled more slowly than waves in the surrounding mantle, implying the presence of more melt in the localized centers and thus a more vigorous upwelling. From that, the geologists determined the centers, located 40-90 kilometers (25 to 56 miles) below the surface, showed evidence of dynamic upwelling in the mantle.

“We found a pattern that was predicted by some of the theoretical models of upwelling in midoceanic ridges,” Forsyth said.

While other studies have been done of mantle geodynamics, most notably an experiment on the East Pacific Rise, the Brown-URI study imaged seismic activity, or the shear velocity of the seismic waves, some 200 kilometers (124 miles) below the surface — a far deeper seismic penetration into the mantle than previous experiments.

Brian Savage, assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Rhode Island and a contributing author on the paper, said the finding is important, because it helps to provide “a basic understanding of how a majority of the earth’s crust is formed, how it emerges from the mantle below to create the oceanic crust. It’s a basic science question that helps understand how crust is created.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Brown University.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091125135126.htm

Penguins and Sea Lions Help Produce New Atlas

Southern elephant seals were fitted with GPS collars to help provide data for the new atlas. (Credit: Valeria Falabella/Wildlife Conservation Society)

Recording hundreds of thousands of individual uplinks from satellite transmitters fitted on penguins, albatrosses, sea lions, and other marine animals, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and BirdLife International have released the first-ever atlas of the Patagonian Sea — a globally important but poorly understood South American marine ecosystem.

The atlas contains the most accurate maps ever assembled for this ecosystem revealing key migratory corridors that span from coastlines to deep-sea feeding areas off the continental shelf hundreds of miles away.

Data for the atlas was gathered by a team of 25 scientists working over a 10-year period — many of them supported by the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). The team tracked 16 species of marine animals, which produced some 280,000 individual uplinks of data over the Patagonian Sea, a huge area ranging from southern Brazil to southern Chile.

Called Atlas of the Patagonian Sea: Species and Spaces, the 300-page book was edited by Valeria Falabella and Claudio Campagna of the Wildlife Conservation Society, and John Croxall of Birdlife International.

The atlas, which is in English and Spanish, will be used to help inform potential policy decisions in the region such as managing fisheries and charting transportation routes of oil tankers. This vast region, which spans 3 million square kilometers (1.1 million square miles), is becoming increasingly threatened by burgeoning development and overfishing.

“This unprecedented atlas was essentially written by the wildlife that live in the Patagonian Sea,” said Dr. Claudio Campagna who runs the Wildlife Conservation Society’s “Sea and Sky” initiative. “The atlas helps fill in many gaps of knowledge and should serve as a blueprint for future conservation efforts in this region.”

“This is an exceptional collaborative achievement; now that we know where some of the region’s most important marine areas are, they need to receive appropriate protection and management,” said John Croxall, Chair of BirdLife’s Global Seabird Programme.

The atlas underscores the need to establish a new network of marine protected areas that would include open-sea environments that are linked to key coastal areas. Many of the species tracked travel vast distances between coastal breeding grounds and feeding areas. For example, satellite data revealed that southern elephant seals travel more than 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) during an average season at sea, and an additional 10,000 kilometers in repeated vertical dives for food.

“The Patagonian Sea is a remarkable intersection of global physics, marine biodiversity, and climate and economic change,” said Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, President and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “The Atlas of the Patagonian Sea will advance conservation of this region and can serve as a roadmap for the creation and management of future marine protected areas — of which there are precious few worldwide.”

The list of species tracked for the atlas includes five species of albatross, three species of petrel, four varieties of penguin, two fur seal species, the South American sea lion, and the southern elephant seal.

The completion of the Atlas of the Patagonian Sea is due in large part to the generosity and long-standing support of the Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation for the WCS “Sea and Sky” initiative. Additionally, WCS’s conservation work in this region has been supported by the Mitsubishi Foundation for the Americas and Mr. and Mrs. James M. Large, Jr.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Wildlife Conservation Society, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091116131831.htm

Supervolcano Eruption In Sumatra Deforested India 73,000 Years Ago

Landsat satellite photo of Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia. (Credit: Image courtesy of NASA / via Wikimedia Commons)

A new study provides “incontrovertible evidence” that the volcanic super-eruption of Toba on the island of Sumatra about 73,000 years ago deforested much of central India, some 3,000 miles from the epicenter, researchers report.

The volcano ejected an estimated 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, leaving a crater (now the world’s largest volcanic lake) that is 100 kilometers long and 35 kilometers wide. Ash from the event has been found in India, the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea.

The bright ash reflected sunlight off the landscape, and volcanic sulfur aerosols impeded solar radiation for six years, initiating an “Instant Ice Age” that — according to evidence in ice cores taken in Greenland — lasted about 1,800 years.

During this instant ice age, temperatures dropped by as much as 16 degrees centigrade (28 degrees Fahrenheit), said University of Illinois anthropology professor Stanley Ambrose, a principal investigator on the new study with professor Martin A.J. Williams, of the University of Adelaide. Williams, who discovered a layer of Toba ash in central India in 1980, led the research.

The climactic effects of Toba have been a source of controversy for years, as is its impact on human populations.

In 1998, Ambrose proposed in the Journal of Human Evolution that the effects of the Toba eruption and the Ice Age that followed could explain the apparent bottleneck in human populations that geneticists believe occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. The lack of genetic diversity among humans alive today suggests that during this time period humans came very close to becoming extinct.

To address the limited evidence of the terrestrial effects of Toba, Ambrose and his colleagues pursued two lines of research: They analyzed pollen from a marine core in the Bay of Bengal that included a layer of ash from the Toba eruption, and they looked at carbon isotope ratios in fossil soil carbonates taken from directly above and below the Toba ash in three locations in central India.

Carbon isotopes reflect the type of vegetation that existed at a given locale and time. Heavily forested regions leave carbon isotope fingerprints that are distinct from those of grasses or grassy woodlands.

Both lines of evidence revealed a distinct change in the type of vegetation in India immediately after the Toba eruption, the researchers report. The pollen analysis indicated a shift to a “more open vegetation cover and reduced representation of ferns, particularly in the first 5 to 7 centimeters above the Toba ash,” they wrote in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The change in vegetation and the loss of ferns, which grow best in humid conditions, they wrote, “would suggest significantly drier conditions in this region for at least one thousand years after the Toba eruption.”

The dryness probably also indicates a drop in temperature, Ambrose said, “because when you turn down the temperature you also turn down the rainfall.”

The carbon isotope analysis showed that forests covered central India when the eruption occurred, but wooded to open grassland predominated for at least 1,000 years after the eruption.

“This is unambiguous evidence that Toba caused deforestation in the tropics for a long time,” Ambrose said. This disaster may have forced the ancestors of modern humans to adopt new cooperative strategies for survival that eventually permitted them to replace neandertals and other archaic human species, he said.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091123142739.htm

Making 3D Maps on the Move

Map maker: This vehicle uses a rotating laser and video camera to generate 3D maps of its environment.   Credit: Stevens Institute of Technology

A vehicle uses off-the-shelf components to build 3D maps of an area.

By Kristina Grifantini

At a robotics conference last week, a vehicle called ROAMS demonstrated a cheap approach to mobile map-making.

ROAMS (Remotely Operated and Autonomous Mapping System) was created by researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, with funding from the U.S. Army. It uses several existing mapping technologies to build 3D color maps of its surroundings, and it was demonstrated at the 2009 IEEE conference on Technologies for Practical Robot Applications in Woburn, MA last week.

The system uses LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), which involves bouncing a laser off a rapidly rotating mirror and measuring how the light bounces back from surrounding surfaces and objects. The same technology is already used to guide autonomous vehicles, to make aerial maps, and in spacecraft landing systems.

A conventional 3D LIDAR system, which consists of several lasers pointing in different directions, costs over $100,000. The Stevens researchers created a cheaper mapping system by mounting a commercial 2D LIDAR sensor, which costs about $6,000, on a pivoting, rotating framework atop the vehicle. While the system has a lower resolution than a regular 3D LIDAR, it could still be used for low-cost architectural surveying and map making in military situations, the researchers say. “The prototype system is around $15,000 to $20,000,” says Biruk Gebre, a research engineer at Stevens who demonstrated the device.

The system takes about 30 seconds to scan a 160-meter-wide area. A color camera also on the rotating frame provides color information that is added to the map later on. And the Stevens researchers developed a way to maintain the same resolution by automatically adjusting the scanning process depending on the proximity of objects. A human operator rides in a larger vehicle that follows the robotic one from up to a mile away, says Kishore Pochiraju, professor and the director of the Design and Manufacturing Institute at Stevens. Ultimately, says Pochiraju, “we want to leave this robot in a location and ask it to generate a complete map.” Such a vehicle could, for example, drive into a dangerous area and generate a detailed map for military personnel.

“They’re using a relatively low-cost system,” says John Spletzer, an associate professor at Lehigh University who uses similar technology to create autonomous wheelchairs. “There’s a lot of groups working on it; it’s pretty interesting.”

Nicholas Roy, an associate professor at MIT who develops autonomous and self-navigating vehicles, also notes that other research groups have developed similar technology. He says that the biggest challenges in autonomous map-making are identifying obstacles and sharing mapping between several robots.

Follow link for video – http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23967/?a=f

Volcanic Rift in Ethiopian Desert Confirmed As Beginning of New Sea

photo: © thebigmonkey via flickr.

by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY

A 35-mile long volcanic rift in the Ethiopian desert that opened up back in 2005 has been confirmed as likely being the beginning of a new sea. That’s the word from an international team of scientists, whose work has been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:

The rift began when Mount Dabbahu erupted, for the first time in recorded history, and in a matter of just three weeks spread to up to 25′ wide along a fault line in the Afar desert. Heading towards the Red Sea, it could eventually split off Eritrea, Djibouti and part of Ethiopia from the rest of the continent.

Rather than opening up in a series of small earthquakes, magma was pushed up in the middle of the rift and the whole thing began “unzipping” in either direction.

Report co-author Cindy Ebinger of the University of Rochester said, “We know that seafloor ridges are created by similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this.”

In all, the processes at work here are “nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans” the report said.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/rift-ethiopian-desert-confirmed-beginning-new-sea.php

“Supervolcano” With Twisted Innards Found in Italy

Long before Vesuvius blew its top and smothered Pompeii, Italy was rocked by a “supervolcano” eruption so powerful it possibly blocked out the sun and triggered prolonged global cooling, scientists say. The now fossilized supervolcano last erupted about 280 million years ago, leaving behind an 8-mile-wide (13-kilometer-wide) caldera, which was recently discovered in the Italian Alps’ Sesia Valley.

What’s more, seismic forces have twisted the volcano’s interior, giving scientists an unprecedented glimpse deep into the feature’s explosive plumbing—and a better shot at deciphering when the next one might blow.

(Explore the inner workings of a supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park.)

“There will be another supervolcano explosion,” team member James Quick, a geologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas, said in a statement.

“We don’t know where, [but] Sesia Valley could help us to predict the next event.”

Quite Dramatic

The Italian eruption likely lasted for weeks, Quick told National Geographic News.

During that time the supervolcano hefted an estimated 239 cubic miles (1,000 cubic kilometers) of material into the atmosphere—about a thousand times more material than Mount St. Helens spewed during its infamous 1980 eruption.

The ancient eruption would have been accompanied by a steady rain of volcanic ash and superheated rocks, along with earthquakes and fast-flowing rivers of lava and hot mud, or ignimbrite.

“It would have been quite dramatic,” Quick said.

What’s more, ash and sulfur dioxide ejected into the atmosphere would have blocked sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface. That may have led to a global cold snap that lasted decades or even centuries, Quick said.

(Related: “Ancient Global Dimming Linked to Volcanic Eruption.”)

Plumbing on Edge

Although the Sesia Valley caldera is now extinct, scientists think a similar scene of devastation could be repeated. At least seven other supervolcanoes are known around the world, including one in Yellowstone National Park.

But with these previously known calderas, scientists could see only about 3 miles (5 kilometers) of the massive volcanoes’ interior structures.

A collision between Africa and Europe that started 30 million years ago caused Earth’s crust to twist, turning the Sesia Valley supervolcano’s once vertical plumbing nearly on its edge.

This allows scientists to see 15 miles (25 kilometers) of the supervolcano’s inner workings.

By studying the Sesia Valley caldera, Quick said, scientists might better understand the events leading up to an eruption and perhaps create eruption warning systems.

The research is detailed in the July issue of the journal Geology.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091001-supervolcano-italy-global-cooling.html