The Astronaut View of Colorado Fires

The Consequences of Beetle Kill, Drought, and Climate Change

Look at this picture for a while. It shows a complex of fires going on southwest of where I live.

Plumes of smoke belie the existence of massive forest and wildfires in southwestern Colorado. Courtesy NASA.

These thick plumes are the last gasps of dead trees and drought-ridden vegetation that only needed one strike of lightning to get started. This is what the fires look like from space. The images were taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station and show the results of a confluence of beetles, extreme drought, and climate change. (Read more about this confluence in Alan Boyle’s article at NBCNews.com.)

Ther Wild Rose blaze is now fully contained, meaning that there is a line of control all around it.  The West Fork Complex fire continues to chew its way across the landscape, threatening towns and forests.

This mega-blaze started as three smaller fires (started by lightning), and together they consumed approximately 75,000 acres (30,000 hectares) by June 25. The fires were burning in rugged terrain with large amounts of beetle-killed spruce forests. According to the information published with this image by NASA, the West Fork Complex fire was so hot that it spawned numerous pyrocumulus clouds. These are tall, cauliflower-shaped clouds that billowed high above the surface. Pyrocumulus clouds are similar to cumulus clouds, but the heat that forces the air to rise (which leads to cooling and condensation of water vapor) comes from fire instead of sun-warmed ground.

Scientists monitor pyrocumulus clouds closely because the clouds can inject smoke and pollutants high into the atmosphere. As pollutants are dispersed by wind, they can affect air quality over broad areas. As noted by the University Maryland at Baltimore County (UMBC) Smog Blog, smoke from the fire contributed to elevated concentrations of particulate matter over large sections of the eastern United States. We’ve smelled the smoke from this fire over our own home, which is at least a day’s drive away. Last year we had plumes of smoke over much of the state from fires in Arizona and New Mexico, and so in addition to the dangers that fires pose to immediate areas, they also affect life great distances away.

Preliminary observations by the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) satellite indicate the West Fork Complex fire lofted smoke plumes as high as 13.5 kilometers (8.4 miles) up in the atmosphere. Satellite observations also show that smoke from the fire reached European air space by June 24.

This year is a very dry one for the southwestern part of Colorado. All of us who live in or near the mountains are very aware of the fire dangers. Although our area got quite a lot of snow and rain this year, the chances for one lightning strike, one cigarette butt flicked out of a car by an ignorant idiot, or an illegal campfire to do great damage are foremost in our minds. We see the loss of trees to beetle kill.

We also see the changes in the forests and wildlife due to the warmer temperatures and more extreme weather brought on by changes in Earth’s climate.  And, it’s not just forest fires that are a side consequence of climate change. There are people in Oklahoma and Texas and Central Europe, where flooding continues, and Southeast Asia, where monsoon weather is more extreme than usual. THEY also see the effects of climate change. They’re living it first-hand.

The fires I see in this image are just one stark reminder of what we face as our planet’s climate continues to change.  It is time, as President Obama, and many U.S. military leaders and environmental scientists around the world, joined by other world leaders have ALSO said, to confront the issue instead of denying it (in the face of all the evidence). It is time because the people who live in damaged areas and have lost their homes, their livelihoods (and sometimes their lives) around the world are also part of the consequences of climate change. It’s time to get real, people.

A Realm of Planets

More Exoplanet Discoveries

An artist’s concept of the seven planets possibly found orbiting Gliese 667C. Three of them (c, f and e) orbit within the habitable zone of the star. Click to get a larger version. Image courtesy Rene Heller.

The search for exoplanets (also known as extrasolar planets) is a painstaking one. You have to tease out “signals” from the planets, and by that I mean you have to look for evidence of planets in the light from distant stars. If a planet orbiting a star passes in front of its “primary” (its star), that passage dims the light a tiny fraction of a percent. And so, you need a very sensitive light meter attached to your telescope to catch that signal. Likewise, as a planet orbits its primary, it can cause the apparent motion of the star to “wiggle” a bit, and that “signal” shows up in the light streaming from the star. To tease out the wiggles and signals, astronomers break starlight into its component wavelengths (i.e., they take a spectrum) and look for changes in that spectrum. Specific kinds of changes may mean that a planet is affecting the star’s orbit, or causing it to dim down a tiny bit.

There are, however other things that can cause a star to appear to dim down or wiggle in its orbit. For example, it could be a variable star whose light intensity varies a tiny but—just enough to make it seem like a planet is passing between us and the star. Or, the star could be experiencing gravitational perturbations from another nearby star, enough to make it wiggle in its motion. The data not only tell that a planet possibly exists at the star, but also gives astronomers a good idea of what its minimum mass could be.

So, looking for these distant worlds is a complex science. Along the way, astronomers have discovered many new variable stars and even the occasional stellar black holes that affect a star’s light as they pass by. But, often enough, astronomers also find planets. And, that’s when the fun begins. Ground-based observers using large telescopes (larger than you have in your backyard) train their instruments on distant stars with planet candidates and begin the lengthy (often years-long) observations it takes to confirm that a planet is actually orbiting those stars.

Just today, an international team of astronomers, led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the University of Göttingen, Germany, and Rory Barnes of the University of Washington announced that they’ve found three “Super-Earth” type planets in the s0-called “habitable zone” of a nearby star. Incredibly enough, this world was previously thought to host two or three planets already, so that brings its possible world count to six or seven. “Super-Earths” are planets that are what they sound like—not more than 10 times more massive than Earth. This is the first time that so many of them have been found orbiting in one system.

The name of the star is GJ 667C, and its actually part of a three-star system that lies in the S-shaped constellation Scorpius. GJ 667C is an M-dwarf star, somewhat fainter than the Sun, and has about a third of the mass that our star does. A star this faint has a habitable zone—the region around it where liquid water could exist on a world—that is very close.  Because the habitable zone is so close to the star, the each planet’s year is much shorter than Earth’s is. They range from 20 and 100 days to go once around the star.  The planets are also very likely “tidally locked,” which means the same hemisphere always faces the star. Luckily astronomers know that life can exist under such conditions.

Since such low-mass stars are inherently faint, their habitable zones—the swath of space that would allow an orbiting rocky planet to sustain liquid water on its surface—lie much closer to the star. The closeness of the habitable zone then makes it easier to find potentially habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars.

In the past few years, astronomers have confirmed at least two planets orbiting this star, and possibly a third one that is still being confirmed. More observations allowed the team to find the new planet candidates. The next steps are to do more observations and detailed study in order to prove that these really are planets. If they are, then there’s a very good chance that this realm of planets will feature worlds with solid surfaces and maybe even atmospheres similar to Earth’s.

That’s the exciting part about planetary searches around other stars. While no one has yet found an Earth analog where life is teeming in oceans or on the surface, the time is drawing near when such a world could be found. It surely does lie out there, somewhere, waiting to be discovered and confirmed.