Mysterious 650-foot mega-tsunami recorded by satellites

 Mysterious 'mega-tsunamis' sends seismic waves worldwide for nine days 

A new satellite has captured the first direct evidence of a mysterious nine-day seismic signal that shook the world in 2023. Scientists have made the first direct observations of a strange seismic event that shook the world for nine consecutive days and confirmed its cause: two "mega-tsunamis" that sloshed around an East Greenland fjord. Greenland’s eastern edge rarely causes a stir. Then, with no warning, seismic instruments across the world lit up at the same time with a slow, steady rhythm which lasted for nine full days. The pulse rose and fell every ninety-two seconds. The rumble was far too soft for people to feel, but strong enough to rattle bedrock from Alaska to Australia. No typical earthquake behaves that way. Scientists soon linked the signal to Greenland’s Dickson Fjord, a narrow inlet hemmed in by 3,000-foot cliffs on each side. Fresh satellite images showed a new scar where a section of mountain had vanished. Something colossal had struck the water and set the fjord in motion.

The gigantic waves, one of which measured 650 feet (200 meters) high, or about half the height of the Empire State Building, entered East Greenland's Dickson Fjord and rocked back and forth for nine days in September 2023, sending seismic waves reverberating through the planet's crust. The signal was initially a mystery to scientists, but ground and satellite imagery traced the likely culprit to landslides in the fjord. These landslides unleashed the waves, known as seiches, following the climate-change-induced melting of a glacier behind the fjord. However, no direct evidence of these seiches was found. On 16 September, 2023, more than 25 million cubic yards of rock and ice, enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-size pools, broke loose and plunged into Dickson Fjord. The impact hurled up a mega-tsunami wave, reaching about 650 feet high. The surge barreled down the two-mile corridor, bounced off the headland, and tore back again, wrecking roughly $200,000 in equipment at an empty research post on Ella Island. Water did not calm after the first pass. Instead, it began rocking from wall to wall. Computer models later showed the surface rising as much as 30 feet, then sinking the same amount in a steady rhythm that pressed on the seafloor like a giant piston.

The mystery drew seventy-plus researchers from forty-one institutions. “When we set out on this scientific adventure, everybody was puzzled and no one had the faintest idea what caused this signal,” said Kristian Svennevig of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. “All we knew was that it was somehow associated with the landslide. We only managed to solve this enigma through a huge interdisciplinary and international effort.” Now, the theory has been confirmed by a new satellite that tracks water on the surface of the ocean. Field teams measured fresh gouges high on the cliffs, while supercomputers recreated the avalanche’s path and the fjord’s response. “It was exciting to be working on such a puzzling problem with an interdisciplinary and international team of scientists,” said Robert Anthony of the US Geological Survey. “Ultimately, it took a plethora of geophysical observations and numerical modeling from researchers across many countries to put the puzzle together and get a complete picture of what had occurred.” Conventional radar altimeters see only a thin line beneath each spacecraft. By contrast, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission launched in December 2022 maps a 30-mile-wide swath with 8-foot resolution. “Climate change is driving the emergence of unprecedented extremes, particularly in remote regions like the Arctic, where our ability to monitor conditions using traditional physical sensors is limited,” explained Thomas Monahan of the University of Oxford. “SWOT represents a breakthrough in our ability to study oceanic processes in areas such as fjords, places that have long posed challenges for earlier satellite technologies,” Monahan continued. This study highlights how next-generation Earth observation satellites can transform scientific understanding of these dynamic environments. “This study demonstrates how advanced satellite data can finally illuminate phenomena that have eluded us for years,” remarked Professor Thomas Adcock, also from Oxford. “We’re now gaining new insights into oceanic extremes like tsunamis, storm surges, and rogue waves. To fully harness the potential of these new datasets, we’ll need to push the boundaries of both machine learning and our understanding of ocean physics,” Adcock concluded.

Climate change is giving rise to new, unseen extremes. These extremes are changing the fastest in remote areas, such as the Arctic, where our ability to measure them using physical sensors is limited. This shows how we can leverage the next generation of satellite Earth observation technologies to study these processes. Glacier ice once buttressed the failing slope, but warming air and ocean water have eaten away at that natural brace. “Climate change is shifting what is typical on Earth, and it can set unusual events into motion,” Gabriel noted. Similar instability elsewhere triggered a deadly tsunami in Karrat Fjord in 2017 which destroyed eleven houses and claimed four lives. Though no passengers were present last year, the episode highlights rising risks as Arctic travel grows. Authorities are now reviewing early-warning options which combine satellite feeds with real-time seismic data. Seismic stations normally record frantic scribbles during earthquakes. This time, the trace formed smooth peaks spaced a minute and a half apart and barely weakened over the better part of two weeks. No seiche had ever produced such a persistent global signature. One modeling group pegged the slosh at about 8½ feet; a second group estimated 23 to 30 feet. The disagreement stemmed from different assumptions about Dickson fjord’s shape, but both sets of simulations agreed on the source: the landslide-driven wave.

Typically, scientists study the movements of tsunami waves using a method called satellite altimetry, in which radar pulses are sent to the ocean's surface from orbit to measure a wave's height based on the time it takes for the pulses to return. But because satellites have long gaps in coverage and their instruments can only measure what's beneath them, they are unable to measure the differences in water height in confined areas like those within the fjord. “It was a big challenge to do an accurate computer simulation of such a long-lasting, sloshing tsunami,” said Alice Gabriel of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. To confirm the existence of the seiches, the scientists turned to data captured by the new Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, a joint project of NASA and CNES, France's space agency. Launched in December 2022, the satellite uses an instrument called the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) to map 90% of the water across the ocean's surface. KaRIn works by using two antennae mounted across a boom on each side of the satellite to triangulate the return signals of radar pulses with unprecedented accuracy, measuring water levels with a resolution of up to 8.2 feet (2.5 m) along a 30-mile (50 kilometers) arc.

SWOT data taken above the fjord during the two mega-tsunamis revealed two cross-channel slopes moving in opposite directions between it, confirming their presence. Seismic observations made thousands of miles away, alongside weather and tidal readings, further enabled the researchers to reconstruct the waves and conclusively link them to the mysterious seismic signals. Researchers are now combing through seismic archives looking for similar slow pulses, which may uncover other natural disasters from the past that evaded detection. “This shows there is stuff out there that we still don’t understand and haven’t seen before,” said Carl Ebeling of Scripps. “The essence of science is trying to answer a question we don’t know the answer to – that’s why this was so exciting to work on.” Every new discovery will refine models of how slope failure, fjord geometry, and water depth interact. Better forecasts could one day provide critical minutes of advance warning for ships and settlements in high-latitude waters. Even the quietest corners of the planet deserve a closer listen. "This study is an example of how the next generation of satellite data can resolve phenomena that has remained a mystery in the past," Thomas Adcock, a professor of engineering science at the University of Oxford, said. "We will be able to get new insights into ocean extremes such as tsunamis, storm surges and freak waves," he added. "However, to get the most out of these data we will need to innovate and use both machine learning and our knowledge of ocean physics to interpret our new results."

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Survival of ancient microbial life in Martian ice

 Ancient microbial life could survive 50 million years in Martian ice, NASA study says

Is there life on Mars? If life ever existed on Mars, its best hiding place may be frozen deep within the planet’s ice. This means, Mars’ frozen ice caps may be time capsules for ancient life. This is at least according to science studies. Laboratory experiments show that key building blocks of proteins can survive tens of millions of years in pure ice, even under relentless cosmic radiation. Ice mixed with Martian-like soil, however, destroys organic material far more quickly. The findings point future missions toward drilling into clean, buried ice rather than studying rocks or dirt. NASA's Phoenix mission in 2008 was the first to excavate down and capture photos of ice in the Mars equivalent of the Arctic Circle. Future missions to Mars may want to dig into ice rather than rock. Scientists say ancient microbes, or traces of them, could be locked inside Martian ice deposits, preserved for tens of millions of years.

Scientists from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Penn State successfully recreated Mars like conditions in the laboratory to test this idea. The scientists found that pieces of amino acids from Escherichia coli bacteria, if trapped in Martian permafrost or ice caps, could survive more than 50 million years even under constant cosmic radiation. The findings suggest that missions searching for life on Mars should prioritise pure ice or ice rich permafrost instead of focusing mainly on rocks, clay, or soil. Fifty million years is too much for some current surface ice deposits on Mars. The work was funded by NASA's Planetary Science Division Internal Scientist Funding Program through the Fundamental Laboratory Research work package at Goddard Space Flight Center. "Fifty million years is far greater than the expected age for some current surface ice deposits on Mars, which are often less than two million years old, meaning any organic life present within the ice would be preserved," said co author Christopher House, professor of geosciences, affiliate of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and the Earth and Environment Systems Institute, and director of the Penn State Consortium for Planetary and Exoplanetary Science and Technology. "That means if there are bacteria near the surface of Mars, future missions can find it."

The study was led by Alexander Pavlov, a space scientist at NASA Goddard who completed a doctorate in geosciences at Penn State in 2001. In pure water ice, more than 10 % of the amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins, survived the full 50 million year simulation. By contrast, samples mixed with Mars like sediment broke down 10 times faster and did not survive. A 2022 study by the same team had shown that amino acids preserved in a mixture of 10% water ice and 90% Martian soil were destroyed more quickly than samples containing only sediment. The researchers think the faster breakdown in mixed samples may happen because a thin film forms where ice touches minerals. The layer could allow radiation to move more freely and damage amino acids. The results were striking. "Based on the 2022 study findings, it was thought that organic material in ice or water alone would be destroyed even more rapidly than the 10% water mixture," Pavlov said. "So, it was surprising to find that the organic materials placed in water ice alone are destroyed at a much slower rate than the samples containing water and soil."

The team sealed E. coli bacteria inside test tubes filled with pure water ice. Other samples were combined with water and materials commonly found in Martian sediment, including silicate based rocks and clay. "While in solid ice, harmful particles created by radiation get frozen in place and may not be able to reach organic compounds," Pavlov said. "These results suggest that pure ice or ice-dominated regions are an ideal place to look for recent biological material on Mars." The frozen samples were placed in a gamma radiation chamber at Penn State’s Radiation Science and Engineering Center. The chamber was cooled to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit to match temperatures in icy regions of Mars. The bacteria were then exposed to radiation equivalent to 20 million years of cosmic ray bombardment on the Martian surface. Afterward, the samples were vacuum sealed and shipped back to NASA Goddard under cold conditions for amino acid testing. Researchers then modelled an additional 30 years of radiation exposure, bringing the total to 50 million years.

NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will study Europa’s ice shell and subsurface ocean. Europa is the fourth largest of Jupiter’s 95 moons. Europa Clipper launched in 2024 and is traveling 1.8 billion miles to reach Jupiter in 2030. The spacecraft will perform 49 close flybys to determine whether environments beneath the surface could support life. The team also tested organic material at temperatures similar to those on Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. At those even colder temperatures, deterioration slowed down further. Pavlov said the findings are encouraging for NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which will study Europa's ice shell and subsurface ocean. When it comes to Mars, accessing buried ice will require the right tools. The 2008 NASA Mars Phoenix mission was the first to dig down and photograph ice in the Martian equivalent of the Arctic Circle. "There is a lot of ice on Mars, but most of it is just below the surface," House said. "Future missions need a large enough drill or a powerful scoop to access it, similar to the design and capabilities of Phoenix."

In addition to House and Pavlov, the research team included Zhidan Zhang, a retired lab technologist in the Penn State Department of Geosciences, along with Hannah McLain, Kendra Farnsworth, Daniel Glavin, Jamie Elsila, and Jason Dworkin of NASA Goddard. The team also tested organic material at temperatures similar to those on Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. At those even colder temperatures, deterioration slowed down further. The research features in the journal Astrobiology, titled “Slow Radiolysis of Amino Acids in Mars-Like Permafrost Conditions: Applications to the Search for Extant Life on Mars.”

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