Scientists looked deep beneath the Doomsday Glacier. What they found spells potential disaster for the planet
Laura Paddison – September 20, 2024
Scientists using ice-breaking ships and underwater robots have found the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is melting at an accelerating rate and could be on an irreversible path to collapse, spelling catastrophe for global sea level rise.
Since 2018, a team of scientists forming the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, has been studying Thwaites — often dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier” — up close to better understand how and when it might collapse.
Their findings, set out across a collection of studies, provide the clearest picture yet of this complex, ever-changing glacier. The outlook is “grim,” the scientists said in a report published Thursday, revealing the key conclusions of their six years of research.
They found rapid ice loss is set to speed up this century. Thwaites’ retreat has accelerated considerably over the past 30 years, said Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey and part of the ITGC team. “Our findings indicate it is set to retreat further and faster,” he said.
The scientists project Thwaites and the Antarctic Ice Sheet could collapse within 200 years, which would have devastating consequences.
Thwaites holds enough water to increase sea levels by more than 2 feet. But because it also acts like a cork, holding back the vast Antarctic ice sheet, its collapse could ultimately lead to around 10 feet of sea level rise, devastating coastal communities from Miami and London to Bangladesh and the Pacific Islands.
Photograph of the high cliffs of Thwaites Glacier taken from the British Antarctic Survey Twin Otter aircraft. – Rob Larter
Scientists have long known Florida-sized Thwaites was vulnerable, in part because of its geography. The land on which it sits slopes downwards, meaning as it melts, more ice is exposed to relatively warm ocean water.
Yet previously, relatively little was understood about the mechanisms behind its retreat. “Antarctica remains the biggest wild card for understanding and forecasting future sea level rise,” ITGC scientists said in a statement.
Over the last six years, the scientists’ range of experiments sought to bring more clarity.
They sent a torpedo-shaped robot called Icefin to Thwaites’ grounding line, the point at which the ice rises up from the seabed and starts to float, a key point of vulnerability.
The first clip of Icefin swimming up to the grounding line was emotional, said Kiya Riverman, a glaciologist at the University of Portland. “For glaciologists, I think this had the emotional impact that perhaps the moon landing had on the rest of society,” she said at a new conference. “It was a big deal. We were seeing this place for the first time.”
Through images Icefin beamed back, they discovered the glacier is melting in unexpected ways, with warm ocean water able to funnel through deep cracks and “staircase” formations in the ice.
Image of Icefin under the sea ice near McMurdo Station. – Rob Robbins/ITGC
Another study used satellite and GPS data to look at the impacts of the tides and found seawater was able to push more than 6 miles beneath Thwaites, squeezing warm water under the ice and causing rapid melting.
Yet more scientists delved into Thwaites’ history. A team including Julia Wellner, a professor at the University of Houston, analyzed marine sediment cores to reconstruct the glacier’s past and found it started retreating rapidly in the 1940s, likely triggered by a very strong El Niño event — a natural climate fluctuation which tends to have a warming impact.
These results “teach us broadly about ice behavior, adding more detail than is available by just looking at the modern ice,” Wellner told CNN.
Among the gloom, there was also some good news about one process which scientists fear could cause rapid melting.
There is a concern that if Thwaites’ ice shelves collapse, it will leave towering cliffs of ice exposed to the ocean. These tall cliffs could easily become unstable and tumble into the ocean, exposing yet taller cliffs behind them, with the process repeating again and again.
Computer modeling, however, showed while this phenomenon is real, the chances of it happening are less likely than previously feared.
The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica – NASA/Reuters
That’s not to say Thwaites is safe.
The scientists predict the whole of Thwaites and the Antarctic Ice Sheet behind it could be gone in the 23rd Century. Even if humans stop burning fossil fuels rapidly — which is not happening — it may be too late to save it.
While this stage of the ITGC project is wrapping up, the scientists say far more research is still needed to figure out this complex glacier and to understand if its retreat is now irreversible.
“While progress has been made, we still have deep uncertainty about the future,” said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine and part of ITGC. “I remain very worried that this sector of Antarctica is already in a state of collapse.”
That outlandish idea has been thoroughly debunked since former President Donald Trump repeatedly raised it as an anti-immigrant talking point in the Sept. 12, 2024, presidential debate. Trump never mentioned where the migrants allegedly “eating the pets” came from, but many viewers understood it as a reference to Haitians, a population that Trump has previously degraded.
As debate moderator David Muir stated in his real-time fact check, there is no evidence that any pets in Springfield have been taken or consumed. NPR and other media outlets have also declared the rumor, which began with local right-wing advocates and officials in Springfield decrying the city’s disorganized response to an influx of Haitian migrants in recent years, to be false.
The Republican ticket’s untrue rumors about Haitians in Springfield reflects a long history of prejudice toward Haitians in the United States. As a scholar of Haitian history and literature, I have identified three anti-Haitian ideas prevalent in the United States that will help put the Springfield story into context.
The unfitness of Haitians ‘to govern themselves’
In July 1915, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson invaded Haiti under the guise of restoring order and economic stability following the assassination of Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.
Five years into what would become a 19-year military occupation, the American diplomat and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson was sent by the NAACP to investigate the supposed benefits of the occupation. His resounding takeaway: “The United States has failed Haiti.”
In related pieces for The Nation and The Crisis, Johnson chronicled abuses ranging from extra-judicial killings of Haitian citizens – U.S forces killed 15,000 Haitians between 1915 and 1934 – to the harassment and rape of Haitian women. Johnson said the U.S. occupation amounted to nothing more than a belief in the “unfitness of the Haitian people to govern themselves.”
“Racism,” Alexis writes, “was at the core of the seizure of Haiti and all interactions with Haitians.”
The ‘4H disease’
In June 2017, Trump reportedly “stormed into a meeting” on immigration from Haiti and repeated a slanderous anti-Haitian claim: “They all have AIDS,” he said.
The account, from author Jake Johnston, a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, shows the then-president repeating a falsehood that has circulated since HIV erupted in the 1980s.
The federal government turned a small disease cluster into a migration policy designed to keep Haitians out of the U.S.
Betweeen 1981 and 1991, more than 27,000 Haitian asylum-seekers fleeing Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship were intercepted off the coast of Florida and detained. The vast majority were repatriated, in part because of a deportation agreement with Duvalier and in part because stopping Haitians at sea was a “screening strategy” to prevent HIV/AIDS from spreading in the U.S.
The Reagan administration called the virus the “4H disease,” referring to Haitians, hemophiliacs, homosexuals and heroin users. This designation spread harmful lies about four groups, but Haitians were the only nationality singled out as an “at-risk” population for contracting HIV/AIDS.
By the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed Haitians from its list of highest-risk groups in 1985, the damage had been done. Haitians in the U.S. were effectively vilified as vectors of a deadly virus.
Haiti’s occupation by foreign forces has continued on and off in different forms since the U.S. invasion of 1915.
United Nations troops were stationed there for nearly two decades following the the 2004 ouster of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. After the devastating 2010 earthquake, they were joined by the Red Cross and Oxfam. As all three organizations have since acknowledged, their humanitarian interventions left numerous crises in their wake, including cholera, chronic corruption in rebuilding projects and a market for sexually exploiting young girls.
Still, Haiti has long faced the accusation that its instability is homegrown. It is widely portrayed in the U.S. as a basket-case nation incapable of managing its own affairs. Trump, as president, once dismissed the entire country as a “shithole.”
At present, Haitians are coping with overlapping crises that have U.S. fingerprints.
After President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, the Biden administration hand-picked Haiti’s interim prime minister, Ariel Henry, as its new leader. This undemocratic decision was such a resounding failure that in March 2024, Haitian gangs revolted against Henry’s administration, unleashing a wave of gruesome violence that ultimately forced Henry out of office.
In July 2024, the Biden administration granted temporary protected status to 500,000 Haitian migrants in the U.S., allowing them to stay in the country, in recognition of the life-threatening conditions back home.
The people Trump insists are “illegal aliens” are in fact authorized U.S. residents from a country buffeted by American meddling in its politics.
A very old pattern
In barking about cats and dogs in Springfield, Trump, Vance and their right-wing supporters are spreading the same kind of anti-Haitian rhetoric that has sown a harmful distrust of Haitian migrants for over a century.
“This is not the first time that we [Haitians] have been the victims of ‘yon kanpay manti,’” said the Ministry of Haitians Living Abroad in a press release following the debate, using the Haitian Creole phrase for “a campaign of lies.”
The result of such misinformation, it added, is “mistreatment, hatred, and misunderstanding in the interest of politics.”
America is a land of immigrants. Stop weaponizing false language about them.
Alex Seojoon Kim – September 19, 2024
In the recent presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, both sides traded jabs without much regard for the opposition. It made sense, as pulling punches now could spell disaster for the presidential hopefuls. With election day less than two months away, the national stage in Pennsylvania was the perfect opportunity to sway middle ground voters that often determine the result of an election. Yet, in the heat of lax factual statements, one claim made by Trump sparked immense outrage in a large community.
Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets, cats and dogs, in Springfield, Ohio. Not only are these comments harmful, but they are insensitive and dangerous. Assuming these stereotypes about immigrants, specifically those of Haitian descent, can be immensely damaging in the face of the plight and challenges these people face.
Springfield, Ohio, is reported to have “approximately 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants” from Haiti in their county. They are “legally [there] as part of a parole program” in the hopes that they can bring family members from Haiti into the United States. And yet Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have both been targeting this minority community with a lack of reasonable decency behind their claims.
Several reputable leaders from the city, including Springfield’s mayor, police chief and even the state’s governor, have said that these claims are far from true. Troubled by bomb threats at schools since the Trump-Vance pet-eating allegations, at least one with anti-Haitian sentiment, Springfield continues to battle this antilogic.
A cat sits on the porch on a tree-lined street in Springfield, Ohio, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. The area has attracted national scrutiny after conservative figures, including former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance, spread debunked claims that Haitians in the community were stealing and eating people’s pets.More
“We do not have any evidence that [this incident] has happened, and I’ve made it known in multiple interviews that this is absolutely not true,” Springfield Mayor Bob Rue said on BBC Newshour, wanting to make clear that “the weight of [politicians’] words … can negatively affect communities.”
Harsh rhetoric is not new in American politics. Immigrants have been falsely accused of bringing a multitude of undesirable ideas and practices into the United States for a long time ― from disease to overpopulation. For centuries, millions flocked from Europe at first, and later Asia, to the United States to escape harsh living conditions and in pursuit of a fair chance of achieving the “American Dream.” Yet nativist ideology spread rapidly through the states time and time again, leading to limitations such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924. Demoralizing language and actions were key in spurring these laws.
Now, both Trump’s and Vance’s incendiary comments about Haitian immigrants seem to be nothing more than a weaponization of rumors for political gain. Similar tactics have been used by politicians in scapegoating other marginalized groups, such as Asians and Hispanics, as well. When prominent figures use their elevated platforms for statements viciously attacking minority groups, it only adds fuel to the fire by instigating hate crimes. Not only are the Haitians in Springfield at risk, but physical and verbal threats can harm all residents in the area.
It’s important to remember that immigrants make up an important sector of this country’s workforce and contribute to their local communities. According to news reports, before Haitian immigrants arrived on the scene, Springfield had lost a quarter of its population over the past few decades, a startling decline for a once-booming agricultural economy. Now, Haitians are essential to the workforce, especially at Springfield’s Dole Fresh Vegetables, where they’re “hired to clean and package produce” and to work at automotive machining plants. Their businesses, cultural foods and identities have merged into the Ohio city, transforming it into a bustling place of diversity. And this is the main reason Trump’s and Vance’s threats of deporting these civilians is so detrimental.
A nation founded, in part, on the backs of immigrants should not use improper, falsified accusations as political leverage. This is not only offensive to Haitians but to all immigrants in the United States. The speeches talking about eating pets in Ohio are not just wrong but a sad distraction from more authentic issues at hand, such as the reformation of immigration laws. Empathy must come first to create a nation that includes and values its citizens and residents, regardless of their origin.
Alex Seojoon Kim is a high school student in Stillwater
Alex Seojoon Kim is a high school student in Stillwater.
Superbug crisis could get worse, killing nearly 40 million people by 2050, study estimates
Jacqueline Howard – September 16, 2024
The number of lives lost around the world due to infections that are resistant to the medications intended to treat them could increase nearly 70% by 2050, a new study projects, further showing the burden of theongoing superbug crisis.
Antimicrobial resistance happens when pathogens like bacteria and fungi develop the ability to evade the medications used to kill them.
The World Health Organization has called AMR “one of the top global public health and development threats,” driven by the misuse and overuse of antimicrobial medications in humans, animals and plants, which can help pathogens develop a resistance to them.
The new study reveals that when it comes to the prevalence of AMR and its effects, “we expect it to get worse,” said lead author Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
“We need appropriate attention on new antibiotics and antibiotic stewardship so that we can address what is really quite a large problem,” he said.
Older adults bear the burden
The researchers – from the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance Project, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and other institutions – estimated deaths and illnesses attributable to versus associated with antimicrobial resistance for 22 pathogens, 84 pathogen-drug combinations and 11 infections across 204 countries and territories from 1990 through 2021. A death attributable to antimicrobial resistance was directly caused by it, while a death associated with AMR may have another cause that was exacerbated by the antimicrobial resistance.
About 520 million individual records were part of the data to make those estimates.
The researchers found that from 1990 to 2021, deaths from AMR fell more than 50% among children younger than 5 but increased more than 80% among adults 70 and older – trends that are forecast to continue.
It was surprising to see those patterns emerge, Murray said.
“We had these two opposite trends going on: a decline in AMR deaths under age 15, mostly due to vaccination, water and sanitation programs, some treatment programs, and the success of those,” Murray said.
“And at the same time, there’s this steady increase in the number of deaths over age 50,” he said, as the world ages; older adults can be more susceptible to severe infection.
The researchers found that the pathogen-drug combination that had the largest increase in causing the most burden among all age groups was methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. For this combination – the antibiotic methicillin and the bacteria S. aureus – the number of attributable deaths nearly doubled from 57,200 in 1990 to 130,000 in 2021.
Using statistical modeling, the researchers also produced estimates of deaths and illnesses attributable to AMR by 2050 in three scenarios: if the current climate continues, if new potent antibiotic drugs are developed to target resistant pathogens, and if the world has improved quality of health care for infections and better access to antibiotics.
The forecasts show that deaths from antimicrobial resistance will increase by 2050 if measures are not in place to improve access to quality care, powerful antibiotics and other resources to reduce and treat infections.
The researchers estimated that, in 2050, the number of global deaths attributable to antimicrobial resistance could reach 1.9 million, and those associated with antimicrobial resistance could reach 8.2 million.
According to the data, the regions of the world most affected by AMR and attributable deaths are South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa – and many of these regions don’t have equitable access to quality care, Murray said.
“There are still, unfortunately, a lot of places in low-resource settings where people who need antibiotics are just not getting them, and so that’s a big part of it. But it’s not just the antibiotics. It’s when you’re sick, either as a kid or an adult, and you get sent to hospital, and you get a package of care, essentially, that includes things like oxygen,” Murray said.
“In low-resource settings, even basics like oxygen are often not available. And then, if you are very sick and you need an intensive care unit, well, there’s big parts of the low-resource world – most of them, actually – where you wouldn’t get access to that sort of care,” he said. “So there’s a spectrum of supportive care, plus the antibiotics, that really make a difference.”
But in a scenario where the world has better health care, 92 million cumulative deaths could be averted between 2025 and 2050, the researchers forecast. And in a scenario where the world has new, more potent drugs, about 11 million cumulative deaths could be avoided.
‘There is possible hope on the horizon’
The “innovative and collaborative” approach to this study provides a “comprehensive assessment” of antimicrobial resistance and its potential burden on the world, Samuel Kariuki, of the Kenya Medical Research Institute, wrote in a commentary that accompanied the new study in The Lancet.
Yet he warned that the forecast models do not consider the emergence of new superbugs “and might lead to underestimation if new pathogens arise.”
Overall, “these data should drive investments and targeted action” toward addressing the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance in all regions of the world, Kariuki wrote.
The new paper represents decades of research on the global burden of antimicrobial resistance, said Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, associate dean of global health sciences and distinguished professor at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.
Strathdee saw firsthand the effects that antimicrobial resistance can have on health when her husband nearly died from a superbug infection.
“I’m somebody who’s lived with antimicrobial resistance affecting my family for the last eight years. My husband nearly died from a superbug infection. It’s actually one of the infections that’s highlighted in this paper,” said Strathdee, who serves as co-director of the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics at UC San Diego.
During a Thanksgiving cruise on the Nile in 2015, Strathdee’s husband, Tom Patterson, suddenly developed severe stomach cramps. When a clinic in Egypt failed to help his worsening symptoms, Patterson was flown to Germany, where doctors discovered a grapefruit-size abdominal abscess filled with Acinetobacter baumannii, a virulent bacterium resistant to nearly all antibiotics.
The annual number of people dying from gram-negative bacteria, like A. baumannii, that are resistant to carbapenem – a class of last-resort antibiotics used to treat severe bacterial infections – rose 89,200 from 1990 to 2021, more than any antibiotic class over that period, according to the new study.
“That’s one of the urgent priority pathogens, which is one of these gram-negative bacteria,” Strathdee said. “And my husband, when he fell ill from this, he was 69. So he’s exactly at the age that this paper is highlighting, that older people are going to be affected by this more in the future, because our population is aging and people have comorbidities, like diabetes, like my husband has.”
Strathdee’s husband recovered after treatment with phages, viruses that selectively target and kill bacteria and that can be used as a treatment approach for antimicrobial-resistant bacterial infections.
“The most important alternative to antibiotics is phage therapy, or bacteriophage therapy, and that’s what saved my husband’s life,” Strathdee said. “Phage can be used very effectively with antibiotics, to reduce the amount of antibiotics that are needed, and they can even be used potentially in livestock and in farming.”
The new study gives Strathdee hope that the world can reduce the potential burden of antimicrobial resistance. That would require improving access to antibiotics and newer antimicrobial medications, vaccines, clean water and other aspects of quality health care around the world, she said, while reducing the use of antibiotics in livestock, food production and the environment, which can breed more resistance.
“There is possible hope on the horizon,” Strathdee said. “If we were to scale up these interventions, we could dramatically reduce the number of deaths in the future.”
Officials confirm first fatal case of mosquito-borne virus in nearly two decades: ‘A stark reminder’
Juliana Marino – September 3, 2024
County officials in the Bay Area confirmed a death related to a mosquito-borne disease for the first time in nearly 20 years, according to a report published by the San Francisco Chronicle.
What’s happening?
Officials in Contra Costa County announced that a resident died from West Nile virus in July. It was the first death from West Nile in Contra Costa since 2006.
Mosquitoes can carry West Nile virus after feeding on an infected bird. Though many cases of West Nile virus do not lead to any symptoms, some patients experience a fever, headache, body aches, and vomiting.
While most cases of West Nile virus are not fatal, officials in Contra Costa viewed the death as a wake-up call.
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of a Contra Costa County resident to West Nile virus,” Contra Costa Mosquito and Vector Control District general manager Paula Macedo told the Chronicle. “This tragic event serves as a stark reminder of the importance of protecting ourselves from mosquito bites and supporting community efforts to control mosquito populations.”
Increasing global temperatures have created more ideal conditions for disease-spreading mosquitoes. The tragic death of the Contra Costa resident is a reminder to take necessary precautions to prevent mosquito bites, especially during summer months.
Using insect repellent and wearing loose-fitting clothing that covers your arms and legs are ways you can protect yourself from bug bites.
What’s being done about West Nile in the Bay Area?
Moving toward a more sustainable future to keep the planet’s temperatures in balance not only helps protect the environment but also global health. Simple actions to reduce pollution causing Earth to warm at an accelerated rate include switching to LED light bulbs and unplugging appliances when they aren’t in use.
In Contra Costa, officials are still investigating the cause of the disease, per the Chronicle. While they have not provided updates on where the infection happened, they have detected additional cases of West Nile virus in a bird and five chickens, according to district spokesperson Nola Woods.
NH man fights for life with 3 mosquito viruses, including EEE
Paul Burton – September 3, 2024
KENSINGTON, N.H. – A New Hampshire man is fighting for his life because of a mosquito bite. Fifty-four-year-old Joe Casey of Kensington has tested positive for three mosquito-borne viruses, including eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) and West Nile Virus.
“He’s my brother. It’s very difficult, especially because it’s from a mosquito,” his sister-in-law Angela Barker told WBZ-TV, fighting back tears. “He was positive for EEE, for West Nile, and St. Louis Encephalitis, but the CDC, the infectious disease doctors, they don’t know which one is making him this sick.”
Barker said Casey started to feel sick back in early August. He now has swelling in the brain and is barely able to communicate at Exeter Hospital.National & World NewsLatest U.S. and global stories
“My brother-in-law is not a small man, and to see someone that you love be as sick as he is and not be able to talk, to move, to communicate for over three weeks is terrifying and gut-wrenching,” Barker said.
Joe Casey. / Credit: Family Photo
Casey and his wife Kim have four children. They believe he will have a long road to recovery ahead of him. His family has set up an online fundraising page and they’ve received an outpouring of support from the community.
“It could happen to anybody”
“Joe is going to have to go a long-term care and patient rehabilitation, that’s going to be 24-hour care, and really want to get the word out to help this incredible family,” Barker said. “He just got bit by a mosquito and it could happen to anybody.”
The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services said Kensington has had at least one mosquito pool test positive for EEE. The town has sent out postcards notifying residents and the threat level has been raised to high.
Casey’s family wants people to be careful.
“Be safe, cover up, wear bug spray. It can happen to anybody, and that’s the scariest thing. Be careful and take proper precautions,” Barker said.
How long do we have until sea level rise swallows coastal cities? This fleet of ocean robots will help find out
Laura Paddison, CNN – September 3, 2024
A team of NASA rocket scientists is developing autonomous underwater robots able to go where humans cannot, deep beneath Antarctica’s giant ice shelves. The robots’ task is to better understand how rapidly ice is melting — and how quickly that could cause catastrophic sea level rise.
In March, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory lowered a cylindrical robot into the icy waters of the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska to gather data at 100 feet deep. It was the first step in the “IceNode” project.
The ultimate aim is to release a fleet of these robots in Antarctica, which will latch on to the ice and capture data over long periods in one of the most inaccessible places on Earth.
There is an urgent need to better understand this remote, isolated continent; what happens here has global implications.
A slew of recent research suggests Antarctica’s ice may be melting in alarming new ways, meaning the sea level rise forecast might be vastly underestimated. If Antarctica’s ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would cause global sea level rise of around 200 feet — spelling complete catastrophe for coastal communities.
Scientists are particularly keen to understand what’s happening to Antarctica’s ice shelves, huge slabs of floating ice which jut out into the ocean and are an important defense against sea level rise, acting as a cork to hold back glaciers on land.
The “grounding line” — the point at which the glacier rises from the seabed and becomes an ice shelf — is where the most rapid melting may be happening, as warm ocean water eats away at the ice from underneath.
But getting a detailed look at the grounding line in the treacherous Antarctic landscape has been exceptionally difficult.
“We’ve been pondering how to surmount these technological and logistical challenges for years, and we think we’ve found a way,” said Ian Fenty, a climate scientist at JPL and IceNode’s science lead.
NASA’s plan to release around 10 IceNode robots, each around 8 feet long and 10 inches in diameter, into the water from a borehole in the ice or a ship off the coast. They have no propulsion but will ride ocean currents, directed by special software, to their Antarctic destination where they will activate their “landing gear” — three legs which spring out and attach to the ice.
Once in place, their sensors will monitor how fast the warmer, salty ocean water is melting the ice, as well as how quickly the cold meltwater is sinking.
The fleet could operate for up to a year, capturing data across the seasons, NASA said.
Once they have finished monitoring, the robots will detach themselves from the ice, drift to the surface of the ocean and transmit data by satellite. This data can then be fed into computer models to improve the accuracy of sea level rise projections.
“These robots are a platform to bring science instruments to the hardest-to-reach locations on Earth,” said Paul Glick, JPL robotics mechanical engineer and IceNode principal investigator.
The team is currently focused on developing the robots’ technical capabilities and there are more tests planned. There is currently no exact timeline for when they will be deployed in Antarctica, Glick told CNN, “but we’d ideally like it to be as soon as possible.”
An IceNode prototype beneath the frozen surface of Lake Superior, off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, during a field test in 2022. – NASA
Robots have been used to look beneath Antarctica’s ice before. A recent research project used a torpedo-like robot called Icefin, a remotely operated vehicle which recorded information about ocean heat, saltiness and currents.
But where Icefin included a propulsion system and remained attached to a tether, through which it was controlled and could send back data, the IceNodes will be entirely autonomous.
Both systems complement each other, said Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, which was part of the research project using Icefin.
Where Icefin can release data in real time, deployments are limited by how long a borehole can be kept open before freezing over, usually a matter of days. IceNodes will be able to collect data over much longer periods but won’t transmit until its mission is over.
Deployment of both machines is challenging and involves substantial risk to sophisticated equipment, Larter told CNN, “but such innovative approaches and risk taking are necessary to find out more about the critical hidden world beneath ice shelves.”
On the COVID ‘Off-Ramp’: No Tests, Isolation or Masks
Emily Baumgaertner – August 27, 2024
Visitors on the Coney Island boardwalk on the Friday ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, May 24, 2024. (Karsten Moran/The New York Times)
Jason Moyer was days away from a family road trip to visit his parents when his 10-year-old son woke up with a fever and cough.
COVID-19?
The prospect threatened to upend the family’s plans.
“Six months ago, we would have tested for COVID,” said Moyer, 41, of Ohio. This time they did not.
Instead, they checked to make sure the boy’s cough was improving and his fever was gone — and then set off for New Jersey, not bothering to tell the grandparents about the incident.
In the fifth summer of COVID, cases are surging, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported “high” or “very high” levels of the virus in wastewater in almost every state. The rate of hospitalizations with COVID is nearly twice what it was at this time last summer, and deaths — despite being down almost 75% from what they were at the worst of the pandemic — are still double what they were this spring.
As children return to schools and Labor Day weekend travel swells, the potential for further spread abounds. But for many like Moyer, COVID has become so normalized that they no longer see it as a reason to disrupt social, work or travel routines. Test kit sales have plummeted. Isolation after an exposure is increasingly rare. Masks — once a ubiquitous symbol of a COVID surge — are sparse, even in crowded airports, train stations and subways.
Human behavior is, of course, the reason that infections are soaring. But at some point, many reason, we need to live.
“I no longer even know what the rules and recommendations are,” said Andrew Hoffman, 68, of Mission Viejo, California, who came down with respiratory symptoms a few weeks ago after his wife had tested positive for COVID. He skipped synagogue, but still went to the grocery store.
“And since I don’t test, I can’t follow them,” he said.
Epidemiologists said in interviews that they do not endorse a lackadaisical approach, particularly for those spending time around older people and those who are immunocompromised. They still recommend staying home for a couple of days after an exposure and getting the newly authorized boosters soon to become available (despite the poor turnout during last year’s round).
But they said that some elements of this newfound laissez faire attitude were warranted. While COVID cases are high, fewer hospitalizations and deaths during the surges are signs of increasing immunity — evidence that a combination of mild infections and vaccine boosters are ushering in a new era: not a post-COVID world, but a postcrisis one.
Epidemiologists have long predicted that COVID would eventually become an endemic disease, rather than a pandemic. “If you ask six epidemiologists what ‘endemic’ means, exactly, you’ll probably get about 12 answers,” said Bill Hanage, associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But it certainly has a sort of social definition — a virus that’s around us all the time — and if you want to take that one, then we’re definitely there.”
Certain threats remain clear. For vulnerable groups, the coronavirus will always present a heightened risk of serious infection and even death. Long COVID, a multifaceted syndrome, has afflicted at least 400 million people worldwide, researchers recently estimated, and most of those who have suffered from it have said they still have not recovered.
But the CDC director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, called the disease endemic last week, and the agency decided this year to retire its five-day COVID isolation guidelines and instead include COVID in its guidance for other respiratory infections, instructing people with symptoms of COVID, RSV or the flu to stay home for 24 hours after their fever lifts. The updated guidelines were an indicator that, for most people, the landscape had changed.
Hanage defended the hard-line mandates from the early years of the pandemic as “not just appropriate, but absolutely necessary.”
“But,” he said, “it is just as important to help people onto an off-ramp — to be clear when we are no longer tied to the train tracks, staring at the headlights barreling down.”
The absence of stringent guidelines has left people to manage their own risks.
“I don’t bother testing myself or our kids for COVID,” said Sarah Bernath, 46, a librarian on Prince Edward Island in Canada. “My husband doesn’t test himself either. Knowing if it’s COVID wouldn’t change whether I stay home or not.”
In some social circles, diverging choices can make for uncomfortable dynamics.
Debra Cornelius, 73, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, stayed home from a recent indoor party because she learned that several other guests — a family of five — had returned from vacation and tested positive for COVID three days before the gathering, but still planned to attend.
“They said, ‘Oh, it’s like a bad cold, we wouldn’t stay home for a cold,’” she said. “I think people’s attitudes have changed considerably.”
But for countless others, attitudes haven’t changed at all. Diane Deacon, 71, of Saginaw, Michigan, said she tested positive for COVID three days into a trip to Portugal with her two adult daughters. She isolated herself for five days before flying home wearing a mask.
“A number of people asked me, ‘Why did you test? You could have carried on with your vacation,’” she said.
For Deacon, it was about remembering the refrigerated morgue trucks of 2020 and anticipating the vulnerable people she might see on her flight home — people in wheelchairs, or people on oxygen, she said.
“I’m trying to avoid a moral judgment of people who make other choices,” she said. “To me, it was inconvenient and it was unfortunate, but it was not a tragedy.”
In a Gallup poll this spring, about 59% of respondents said they believed the pandemic was “over” in the United States, and the proportion of people who said they felt concerned about catching COVID has been generally declining for two years. Among people who rated their own health positively, almost 9 in 10 said they were not worried about getting infected.
That could be, at least partly, a result of personal experience: About 70% of people said they had been through a COVID infection already, suggesting that they believed they had some immunity or at least that they could muscle through it again if need be.
If the Olympics were any barometer, the rest of the world seems to have exhaled as well. In Tokyo in 2021, there were daily saliva samples, plexiglass dividers between cafeteria seats and absolutely no live spectators; the arenas were so empty that coaches’ voices echoed. In Beijing in 2022, under China’s zero-tolerance policy, conditions were much the same.
But in Paris last month, the organizing committee for the 2024 Olympics offered no testing requirements or processes for reporting infections, and so few countries issued rules to their athletes that the ones that did made news.
There were high-fives, group hugs, throngs of crowds and plenty of transmission to show for it. At least 40 athletes tested positive for the virus, including several who earned medals despite it — as well as an unknowable number of spectators, since French health officials (who had once enforced an eight-month-long nightly COVID curfew) did not even count.
In the United States, about 57% of people said their lives had not returned to prepandemic “normal” — and the majority said they believed it never would. But the current backdrop of American life tells a different story.
The years-old social-distancing signage is faded and peeling from the floors of an indoor market in Los Angeles. Hand-sanitizer dispensers at amusement parks have dried up. The summer camp hosted by Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo requires children to bring a face covering — not to protect other children, but the animals.
Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the newfound complacency can as much be attributed to confusion as to fatigue. The virus remains remarkably unpredictable: COVID variants are still evolving much faster than influenza variants, and officials who want to “pigeonhole” COVID into having a well-defined seasonality will be unnerved to discover that the 10 surges in the United States so far have been evenly distributed throughout all four seasons, he said.
Those factors, combined with waning immunity, point to a virus that still evades our collective understanding — in the context of a collective psychology that is ready to move on. Even at a meeting of 200 infectious disease experts in Washington this month — a number of whom were older than 65 and had not been vaccinated in four to six months — hardly anybody donned a mask.
“We’ve decided, ‘Well, the risk is OK.’ But nobody has defined ‘risk,’ and nobody has defined ‘OK,’” Osterholm said. “You can’t get much more informed than this group.”
Asked about how the perception of risk has evolved over time, Osterholm laughed.
The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the portion where Trump spoke was built under the Obama administration, the Post added.
The newspaper said a nearby extension was started under the Trump administration ― at a cost of $35 million a mile ― but didn’t get very far, with much of the construction material left in piles at the site.
Trump in 2016 repeatedly vowed to build a “big beautiful wall” across the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border if elected.
He has claimed that he completed the task.
“I did finish the wall,” he said on CNN earlier this year. “I built a wall.”
A 2022 report found the wall built under Trump was breached thousand of times using “inexpensive power tools.” Others reported the wall could be breached with a primitive ladder made from about $5 in material.
Trump border event at wall that Obama built highlighted an unfulfilled promise
Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianne LeVine and Erin Patrick O’Connor,
The Washington Post – August 26, 2024
MONTEZUMA PASS, Ariz. – A brown ribbon carved a straight gash across a vast, flat desert basin, the only mark of human civilization visible on this wilderness. The partition charged up a steep hill in Montezuma Canyon, then suddenly stopped. Extra pieces lay in piles nearby, rusting monuments to an unfinished campaign promise.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump came here on Thursday to heap praise on the structure standing to his right – “the Rolls-Royce of walls,” he called it – and lament the unused segments lying to his left. Joining him there, Border Patrol union leader Paul A. Perez called the standing fence “Trump wall” and the idle parts “Kamala wall,” after his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Those labels were inaccurate. This section of 20-foot steel slats was actually built during the administration of President Barack Obama. Trump added the unfinished extension up the hillside, an engineering challenge that cost at least $35 million a mile. The unused panels of 30-foot beams were procured during the Trump administration and never erected.
“Where you were, that was kind of a joke today,” John Ladd, a Trump supporter whose ranch extends along the border, said while driving the dirt road along the barrier, the gapped panels making a flipbook out of the shrubby trees and grass on the other side. “Had to be in front of Trump’s wall, but you went to Montezuma, and that’s Obama’s wall.”
The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the barrier next to Thursday’s campaign stop was built during the Obama administration. The Trump campaign and Perez did not respond to questions about the discrepancy.
“If Kamala truly wanted to close the border and continue building President Trump’s wall, she could go to the White House and do it today,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Only President Trump will get it done.”
This spot along the U.S.-Mexico border, quickly accessible from nearby Sierra Vista, has often served as the backdrop for Republican photo ops. The scenery here did not attest to the fearsome migrant caravans or invasions of military-age foreign men that Trump often describes. There was no evidence here of Trump’s depiction of vicious criminals and terrorists, cannibals and infectious hordes, or people sent directly from prisons and mental institutions pouring over the border. There was no sign of foot traffic over such hostile shadeless wilderness, other than a small patrol of Mexican authorities on the other side.
Nor did this site show the very real conditions that exist in other parts of the border: Towns teeming with displaced people, cars backed up at legal crossings and swept for smuggling, bodies recovered from the Rio Grande.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in front of the US-Mexico border, Thursday, Aug 22, 2024, in Sierra Vista, Arizona. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)
For Trump, a campaign stop here on Thursday had larger meaning. It was an attempt to recapture the storyline of this presidential race from Vice President Kamala Harris, who wrapped up an ebullient Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday evening. For Trump, visiting the border was also something of a spiritual homecoming to the place that has animated his candidacy and movement since 2015.
But the reality on the ground was not as straightforward as the “Build the Wall” chant that electrified his campaign eight years ago suggested. His vow to finish the wall, now formalized in the Republican Party platform, highlights the uncomfortable fact that he did not finish it in his first term, and Mexico did not pay for it, as he once promised it would.
“I’d hear people say, ‘Oh, he didn’t build the wall’ – we built the wall,” Trump said defensively on Thursday in front of the unfinished barrier. “We built much more than I was anticipated to build.”
The day before, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump responded to a supporter who shouted “Build the Wall” by saying, “Well, the wall was largely built. We were adding space onto the wall.”
As president, Trump spent more than $11 billion to finish more than 450 miles of wall along the almost 2,000-mile southern border, one of the most expensive federal infrastructure projects in history. During the primary, some GOP rivals experimented with attacking Trump for failing to finish the wall, but Republican voters largely shrugged or scoffed.
He references the wall in a smaller percentage of his social media posts and speeches than he did eight years ago, according to a Washington Post analysis. Instead, he has emphasized plans for large-scale, militarized roundups and deportations of undocumented immigrants throughout the United States. To justify such drastic measures, he has frequently used dehumanizing language to vilify undocumented immigrants as violent and dangerous. The overwhelming majority of people in removal proceedings do not have criminal charges, according to an analysis of Department of Homeland Security records by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee.
Even as Trump has made immigration central to his bid to take back the White House, border apprehensions have declined dramatically this summer amid the Biden administration’s new asylum restrictions and stepped-up enforcement in Mexico. In July, illegal border crossings, which rose to record levels during the Biden administration, declined to the lowest levels in almost four years, after the Biden administration enacted sweeping measures to limit asylum access.
A short walk from the spot where Trump spoke on Thursday, the barrier crosses a dry stream bed, and the uniform bollards give way to storm gates. The gates were wide open, to accommodate the sudden floods of the summer monsoon season, spanned only by a few strands of barbed wire. The base of some of the nearby slats show the scars of erosion that have sometimes left the fence dangling above the ground.
Smugglers have breached the barrier thousands of times, including while Trump was in office. The wall has been tunneled under and climbed over. It has been walked around and sawed through. It has not stopped migration any more that it has stopped drug and human smuggling, most of which happens at ports of entry.
The wall’s defenders argue that, as part of broader border enforcement, it helps slow down crossings and free up Border Patrol resources. The border wall “completely changed the operational environment and allowed Border Patrol to secure those areas with significantly fewer agents,” said Rodney Scott, who was chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under Trump and under Biden until August 2021.
But some policy experts say the barrier simply shifts where and how migrants cross the border. And many experts argue that U.S. immigration policy and conditions in migrants’ home countries are what drive migration, regardless of the obstacles placed in their path to reaching the United States.
“It’s really hard to measure the effectiveness of the wall because it’s one piece of a larger puzzle in U.S. policy on immigration, and even though it is a physical barrier, there are so many other reasons why migrants end up where they end up trying to cross into U.S. territory,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
In his first term, Trump used executive power to bypass congressional opposition to the wall. In late 2018, his fight with Congress over funding led to the longest government shutdown in American history. When Congress refused to budge, Trump declared a national emergency in order to divert money from the military budget.
Former administration officials and the Trump campaign said he would be determined to use every available power to complete the wall in a second term.
“There’s no doubt in my mind … he will, I hope on day one, declare a national emergency,” said Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under Trump. “On day one, that will give him the ability then to tap into those [Department of Defense] funds … while at the same time working with Congress … You’re going to see the same approach that he used during the first administration.”
The former president “will utilize any and all appropriate authorities necessary to continue construction of the border wall and protect America’s homeland,” Leavitt said in an emailed statement.
If Trump were to declare a national emergency again in a second term, outside groups would likely sue to stop him. But the legal process could take a long time, said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Trump might be able to complete large sections of wall in the meantime, she said.
“The appeals would run the entire course of the Trump presidency and even though there might be, and I think there are, meritorious legal challenges … it’s still quite possible that the Trump administration could continue to rely on that power while this process played out, if the lower courts stayed their rulings,” Goitein said.
A changed political environment might also make it easier for Trump to complete the wall. The Republican Party has become more Trump-aligned, and should Trump become president and Republicans control the House and the Senate with significant margins, border wall funding is likely to increase in the annual appropriations process.
The border wall has also become more popular with the public than it was during the Trump administration. A Monmouth University poll found that 53 percent of Americans favored the border wall in February 2024, the highest share since Monmouth began asking the question in September 2015, when support for the wall was at 48 percent. Support for the wall hit a low in September 2017, with 35 percent of Americans in favor.
Mexico has opposed the construction of the border wall and has pursued more aggressive enforcement along the border, helping the Biden administration reach its lowest level of illegal border crossings in almost four years.
But as long as construction takes place on the U.S. side of the border, Mexico can’t do much to stop it, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior adviser for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Even if he gets the funding, Trump might face obstacles obtaining the land he needs for construction. Much of the land along the border in Texas is privately owned, and some landowners are reluctant to sell.
Trump might also face environmental opposition to renewed wall construction. The incomplete border wall has already affected the migration patterns of many northern American wildlife species, said Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator at the Wildlands Network, a nonprofit conservation organization focused on sustaining biodiversity. The current barrier will also require constant, expensive maintenance, Traphagen noted.
“There’s going to be this big albatross hanging around America’s neck to continually maintain this beast,” he said.
For many Americans, though, the border wall has become a symbol. Traphagen added: “The border wall reinforces that, okay, this guy is doing something.”
Nick Miroff, Clara Ence Morse, Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.
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