Jolt Magazine | Climate

News

The Extraordinary and Disastrous Eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai Volcano

April 4, 2022April 4, 2022

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai Volcano in January 2022 was the largest our planet has seen in decades, wreaking destruction on the island nation of Tonga in which the volcano resides. Studies of this volcano can help us understand the causes and effects of such massive eruptions, and may even give insight into the geological processes that have shaped the landscape of Mars.

Media from NASA Earth Observatory On January 15, 2022, the largest volcanic eruption in decades devastated the island nation of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean. The blast released a massive amount of energy, equivalent to between 4 and 18 megatons of TNT, which is hundreds of times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion created a low-frequency pressure wave that circled the Earth, causing the entire atmosphere to oscillate. Ash has coated the islands, causing a serious shortage of clean drinking water, and a tsunami caused by the eruption wrought widespread damage. The effect on...

Science in Society

Don’t Look Up: A Scientific Review

Kate Braverman

April 4, 2022April 4, 2022

How realistic is Don’t Look Up? What does it tell us about NASA, the importance of peer review, and asteroid-fighting technology in the real world? (Warning: Spoilers Ahead!)

Don’t Look Up, a film released on Netflix in December 2021, provided a metaphorized take on the relationship between the scientific community, the political sphere, and the public in regard to climate change. In a fictionalized United States, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), an astronomer at Michigan State University, and his PhD student, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), try to warn the public about a comet, first discovered by Dibiasky, scheduled to collide with the Earth in six months. Encountering the ineffectual POTUS Orlean (Meryl Streep) anda CEO tech billionaire, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), only concerned with making a profit, Mindy...

Columns Quirky Queries

How does wind happen?

Simon Thill

March 18, 2022March 30, 2022

Have you ever wondered how wind happens? This short article describes the cause of wind and some of its patterns.

Hurricane Katrina. Courtesy of NOAA Quirky Queries answers your random science questions. If you have a query, let us know! — This is an excellent question, and one that I was curious about myself when I was younger. I would often ask my parents scientific questions, and they would do their best to respond, sometimes without actually knowing the correct answer. When I asked this same question, my parents told me something along the lines of “wind is caused by the rotation of the Earth.” While the Earth’s rotation does play a significant role in wind and weather patterns, this is not...

News

The Colorado Wildfires: How Climate Change is Changing Wildfires

Celeste Cubbage

February 23, 2022February 23, 2022

Recent wildfires in the west are just another example of how wildfire seasons are not only increasing, but also becoming more common all over the country. As weather conditions continue to change due to the global climate crisis, more extreme events such as drought and heat waves cause new areas to become susceptible to the possibility of wildfires.

2020 Colorado Wildfire. Photo by Malachi Brooks, via Unsplash. In 2022, as of early February, there have already been 2,388 fires that have burned a total of 40,822 acres across the U.S., surpassing a 10-year average of 1,924 fires and 38,501 acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. In 2021, the state of California faced unprecedented fires that raged throughout the year, burning a total of 2.5 million acres and changing officials’ definition of the “fire season” to a “fire year.” One of the most recent catastrophic wildfires occured on December 30th of last year, when a suburban neighborhood...

Columns Green Chemistry

What Do We Do With E-waste? Flash Joule Heating Presents a Solution

Isabel Thornberry and Atira Glenn-Keough

November 22, 2021December 8, 2022

With Apple rolling out a new iPhone every year and planned obsolescence encouraging consumers to buy and throw out more and more electronics, electronic waste is piling up in landfills globally. An article published in October this year proposes flash Joule heating as a potential solution to the millions of tons of e-waste produced every year.

With Apple rolling out a new iPhone every year and planned obsolescence encouraging consumers to buy and throw out more and more electronics, electronic waste is piling up in landfills globally. Over 40 million tons of e-waste are produced annually, making it the fastest growing category of solid waste globally. E-waste often includes heavy toxic metals that can leach into the surrounding environment, contaminating soil, water, and food sources. Workers who dispose of e-waste have been found to have higher lead content in their blood because of exposure to dangerous dust and smoke when working with the waste and in...

Features

Seaweed: A Savory Solution to Save The Oceans

Cat Kim

November 3, 2021January 31, 2022

Eutrophication is a huge issue that is suffocating our oceans, and farming seaweed may be the key to saving them.

Algal bloom resulting from eutrophication. Photo by Lamiot, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Growing up Korean-American, I ate a lot of seaweed. My mom often made kimbap, vegetables and rice wrapped in seaweed, for me to eat at school. Every year for my birthday, I ate miyeokguk, a seaweed soup. I would have dried and salted strips of seaweed as a midnight snack. Seaweed has always been a huge part of my upbringing and diet, so I did not think much of it and never considered that it would have the potential to save the planet —...

Columns Green Chemistry

Emerging Solutions to Microplastic Pollution

Atira Glenn-Keough and Isabel Thornberry

October 20, 2021October 24, 2021

While the problem of microplastic pollution still looms large, scientists are developing technologies to remove existing microplastics, prevent new plastics from reaching waterways, and even avoid harmful microplastic manufacturing with the development of bio-based plastics. New, innovative technologies involving microorganisms may also be on the horizon.

Microplastics in the Azores, an archipelago in the mid-Atlantic. Photo by Race4Water, via Wikimedia Commons. From heavy metals to hydrocarbons and oil to plastic debris, marine pollution is a world-wide problem. According to a review by H.S. Auta et al. published in 2017 by Environment International, plastic composes 80-85% of marine litter, and on our current trajectory, the amount of plastic litter in water bodies will only increase. Microplastics don’t decompose easily, and with increasing production and few effective clean-up methods currently implemented on a broad scale, we’re likely to see more and more microplastics in our environment. Microplastics are...