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geology, meteorology, climate change, astronomy

When will global warming end??

2024-03-19T12:11:41+01:0019 March 2024|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , , |

There is a question that worries climate scientists a lot: il riscaldamento globale si fermerà quando arriveremo a emissioni zero di gas serra? Ci sono due scuole di pensiero al riguardo: quella “ottimista” sostiene che quando (e se) arriveremo ad emissioni nette zero di gas serra (CO2, metano, N2O, CFC, …), l’aumento della temperatura terrestre a lungo termine si fermerà; l'altra campana è quella “pessimista”, che afferma che le nostre emissioni rischiano di aumentare la concentrazione di gas serra in atmosfera talmente tanto da creare un effetto domino difficile da arrestare. Le etichette “ottimista” e “pessimista” qui non hanno [...]

The Dawn of the Next Day

2024-03-19T12:15:07+01:0018 January 2024|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , , |

Imagine a boundless expanse of ice. Smooth, dazzling, immutable. Succede qualcosa però. Il ghiaccio comincia a rompersi, mettendo a rischio i malcapitati protagonisti che si trovano sulla calotta. Se avete pensato alla scena iniziale de ”L’Era Glaciale”, ci avete quasi azzeccato. Invece di un adorabile scoiattolo preistorico e la sua amata ghianda, in questo caso però il problema è il cambiamento climatico. In “L’Alba del Giorno Dopo” (2004) il protagonista è Jack Hall, uno scienziato esperto di paleo-clima (lo studio del clima passato della Terra). L’ambientazione iniziale è la piattaforma di ghiaccio Larsen C in Antartide, che è effettivamente [...]

Einstein Telescope: an underground window between the past and future of the universe

2024-01-15T19:31:00+01:0015 January 2024|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

In 1916 Albert Einstein pubblica il suo primo e unico articolo sulle onde gravitazionali. Today, a oltre cent’anni di distanza, il suo lavoro è più attuale che mai. I rivelatori LIGO e VIRGO hanno identificato nel 2015 per la prima volta le onde gravitazionali e hanno spianato la strada per il prossimo e ambizioso progetto di ricerca: l’Einstein Telescope, ribattezzato amichevolmente ET. Nonostante ci troviamo nelle fasi iniziali del piano coordinato dall’Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) e dall’Istituto Nazionale Olandese di Fisica Subatomica (Nikhef), negli ultimi 15 anni di lavoro ET ha conquistato l’intera comunità scientifica, solleticandone la [...]

Euclid's journey begins, the ESA mission that will study dark matter and energy

2023-12-11T14:27:35+01:0011 December 2023|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , |

Il telescopio spaziale dell’ESA è decollato con successo il primo luglio su un razzo Falcon 9 di SpaceX dalla Space Force Station in Florida. La missione ha uno scopo ambizioso e senza precedenti: scoprire la natura delle due componenti più misteriose del nostro universo, la materia oscura e l’energia oscura. Lo strumento dovrà esaminare un miliardo di galassie e mappare gli ultimi dieci miliardi di anni di storia cosmica su più di un terzo del cielo, per provare a risolvere il più grande enigma della cosmologia e rispondere alla domanda fondamentale: di cosa è fatto l’universo? “L’obiettivo primario della [...]

Watch out for those two! The return of El Niño

2023-09-22T19:17:34+02:0022 September 2023|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

The pestiferous child who modulates the earth's climate, together with his little sister. One of the most powerful climatic phenomena that occur on the planet. We are naturally talking about El Niño (the child, in Spanish) and its counterpart La Niña. Se ne parla di nuovo perché l’ufficio meteorologico australiano ha finalmente annunciato che è ufficialmente iniziato un evento del Niño nell'Oceano Pacifico [1], after its American counterpart had already done so a few months ago, che durerà probabilmente fino all'anno prossimo. Let's see together why it is important. The climate has its own cycles of change, that is, not caused by any external forcing. La più [...]

What happens in Antarctica doesn't stay in Antarctica

2023-03-04T20:12:49+01:0013 February 2023|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

News of huge icebergs detaching from the polar ice shelves is increasingly frequent. The latest in chronological order is that relating to the block of ice detached from the Brunt shelf in Antarctica [1], now called A-81. The event was captured by ESA's Sentinel-2 satellite, which also allowed the experts to monitor all stages of formation and widening of the rift on the platform, until the final detachment of the block. As usual, we indulged ourselves in finding comparisons for the size of the iceberg; we say that the extent of the piece of ice in question is similar to twice the [...]

Who caused climate change?

2022-11-03T18:58:31+01:003 November 2022|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

The twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties begins on Sunday (COP27) of the United Nations on climate change. This year the conference is held in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt. Delegates from every country in the world are called to discuss political and economic solutions to the climate crisis. The science is clear: the cause of recent climate change is greenhouse gas emissions from human activities [1]. The main task of the conference is therefore to review (and possibly strengthen) national commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to find ways to implement them. This is part of the set of measures taken [...]

An extreme summer

2022-10-04T17:42:19+02:004 October 2022|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , |

Last summer has been difficult on the front of extreme events in the world. Let's start from Italy. After months of drought, in the evening of the 15 September the Marche region was affected by a self-regenerating storm, a very dangerous type of weather system, characterized by its ability to self-feed and stay on the same area for hours. We have already talked about this event in a post [2]. We only add some data that we did not have at the time. The disturbance led to very heavy rainfall, over 400 mm of cumulated rainfall in some areas, according to Protezione Civile [1]. In meteorology, 1 [...]

The strange shape of the Earth

2022-04-22T11:55:17+02:0022 April 2022|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

What is the shape of Earth? Sounds like an easy question but it's not at all. The dispute over the shape of the Earth has been going on for millennia, because it is a far from trivial problem. Despite what the flat-earthers say, the hypothesis of the "spherical Earth" was already known in Antiquity: using a very ingenious geometric method, the mathematician Eratosthenes calculated the size of the Earth with amazing accuracy [1], wrong a few hundred kilometers only. A trifle, considering the method. All this in defiance of Christopher Columbus, who several centuries later blatantly misjudged his estimates, tried to reach the Indies by sea and was [...]

Winter Olimpics Games, on the brink of extinction

2022-10-11T17:48:34+02:0010 February 2022|Categories: Earth and Sky|Tags: , , , |

The 2022 Winter Olympic Games are currently ongoing in Beijing. Other than in the China capital city, competitions are also held in the nearby mountainous areas of Yanqing and Zhangjiakou, which are usually too dry to have a good snow cover, needed for running the competitions. The lack of snow is the main concern of the organizers. Artificial snow is one of the potential solutions [1], which is more and more employed all over the world, to make up for the lack of natural snow. That leads to sustainability issues, of course (we'll covered that later), ma [...]

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