Earth & Planetary Sciences
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Pluto’s hazy skies are making the dwarf planet even colder, James Webb Space Telescope finds
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered that a hazy sky over frozen Pluto is helping to cool the dwarf planet’s atmosphere. The discovery of the haze was predicted back in 2017 by planetary scientist Xi Zhang of the University of California, Santa Cruz, to explain why Pluto’s thin atmosphere is so leaky. Additional…
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Webb confirms Pluto’s atmosphere cools with haze
After New Horizons’ Pluto flyby, UC Santa Cruz‘s Xi Zhang proposed in 2017 that Pluto’s atmosphere is dominated by haze particles, making it unlike any other in the solar system. He suggested that these particles heat up and cool down, controlling Pluto’s entire energy balance.
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Santa Cruz wharf collapse: Plans take shape for rebuilding as summer beach season begins
The wharf has more than 4,400 wooden pilings, made of Douglas Fir. They are pounded roughly 20 feet into the ocean bottom, and city crews replace several dozen each year. But piers come and go. There have been five others back to the mid-1800s in that area, noted Gary Griggs, a distinguished professor of Earth…
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The Pacific Coast Highway, a Mythic Route Always in Need of Repair
Gary Griggs, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has advised on a major repair to the route, said that he doubted the highway would ever again be open in its entirety for an extended period. “Attaining stability is impossible,” he said.
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As Coastline Erodes, One California City Considers ‘Retreat Now’
“We overall are much better at spending recovery money — that is, addressing issues after disasters — than we are at spending hazard mitigation,” said Michael Beck, director of the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience at the University of California, Santa Cruz. On the East Coast, the predominant strategy for protecting shorelines has been to…
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Our moon may have once been as hellish as Jupiter’s super volcanic moon Io
“The moon gets sort of confused,” planetary scientist Francis Nimmo, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Space.com. “It doesn’t know exactly what orbit it should be adopting, and so it can develop kind of a weird orbit.”