Pictures: Centralia Mine Fire, at 50, Still Burns With Meaning

Photograph from AP

Hours after plunging into the Earth, Todd Domboski stares at the abyss that briefly swallowed him—a hole swirling with toxic gases from an underground mine fire.

On February 14, 1981, 12-year-old Domboski sank into a cave-in that ruptured the soil in his grandmother's backyard in Centralia, Pennsylvania, where an abandoned coal mine had smoldered for 19 years.

The Centralia blaze, still burning more than 50 years after it began, ranks as the worst mine fire in the United States. But it is by no means the only one. More than 200 underground and surface coal fires are burning in 14 states, according to the U.S. Department of Interior's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.

And with worldwide demand for coal surging, especially in industrializing nations such as India and China, mine fires have emerged as a global environmental and public health threat. Thousands of coal fires rage on every continent but Antarctica, endangering nearby communities. The blazes spew toxic substances such as benzene, hydrogen sulfide, mercury, and arsenic, as well as greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide. (See related story: "Seeking a Safer Future for Electricity's Coal Ash Waste.")

In Centralia, Domboski survived his 45-second ordeal by grabbing onto tree roots. He screamed for help until his cousin ran to his aid, reached into the void, and hoisted him out.

Many Centralia residents had long feared a calamity like the one that nearly unfolded that Valentine's Day. Four years earlier, Domboski's father had told a reporter, "I guess some kid will have to get killed by the gas or by falling in one of these steamy holes before anyone will call it an emergency."

—Joan Quigley

Joan Quigley is author of the 2007 book about Centralia, The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy.

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

Published January 8, 2013

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Pictures: Wildfires Scorch Australia Amid Record Heat

Photograph by Jo Giuliani, European Pressphoto Agency

Smoke from a wildfire mushrooms over a beach in Forcett, Tasmania, on January 4. (See more wildfire pictures.)

Wildfires have engulfed southeastern Australia, including the island state of Tasmania, in recent days, fueled by dry conditions and temperatures as high as 113ºF (45ºC), the Associated Press reported. (Read "Australia's Dry Run" inNational Geographic magazine.)

No deaths have been reported, though a hundred people are unaccounted for in the town of Dunalley, where the blazes destroyed 90 homes.

"You don't get conditions worse than this," New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons told the AP.

"We are at the catastrophic level, and clearly in those areas leaving early is your safest option."

Published January 8, 2013

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2012: Hottest Year on Record for Continental U.S.

Temperatures across the continental United States soared in 2012 to an all-time high, making last year the warmest year on record for the country by a wide margin, scientists say. (Related: "July Hottest Month on Record in U.S.—Warming and Drought to Blame?")

"2012 marks the warmest year on record for the contiguous U.S., with the year consisting of a record warm spring, the second warmest summer, the fourth warmest winter, and a warmer than average autumn," Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at the National Climatic Data Center at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said in a press conference Tuesday.

According to a new NOAA report, the average temperature for the lower 48 states in 2012 was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius), which is higher than the previous 1998 record by one degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degree Celsius).

A single degree difference might not seem like much, but it is an unusually large margin, scientists say. Annual temperature records typically differ by just tenths of a degree Fahrenheit.

"That is quite a bit for a whole year averaged over the whole country," said Anthony Barnston, chief forecaster at Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), who was not involved in the study.

2012: An Odd Year

To put that difference in perspective, said NOAA's Crouch, consider that the entire range of temperature increase between the coldest year on record, which occurred in 1917, and the previous hottest year in 1998 was just 4.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 degrees Celsius).

"2012 is now more than one degree above the top of that. So we're talking about well above the pack in terms of all the years we have data for the U.S.," he added.

2012 was also the 15th driest year on record for the nation: The average precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 26.57 inches (67.5 centimeters), 2.57 inches (6.5 centimeters) below average.

Moreover, every single one of the lower 48 states had above average temperatures. Nineteen states had their warmest year on record and an additional 26 states experienced one of their top ten warmest years on record.

2012 was unusual in another way for the nation, according to the NOAA report. Last year was the second most extreme year on record for the U.S., with 11 natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy and a widespread drought that each cost at least a billion dollars in losses. (See pictures of the U.S. drought.)

Global Warming at Play?

The country's record year can't be explained by natural climate variability alone, noted Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"It is abundantly clear that we are seeing [human-caused] climate change in action," Trenberth, who also did not participate in the NOAA report, said in an email. "These records do not occur like this in an unchanging climate." (Test your global warming knowledge.)

(Also see "Climate Predictions: Worst-Case May Be Most Accurate, Study Finds.")

Just how much of a role climate change played is still unclear, however. "That's kind of hard to state at this point," NOAA's Crouch said.

"Climate change has had a role in this ... but it's hard for us to say at this time what amount of the 2012 temperature was dependent on climate change and what part was dependent on local variability."

For example, Columbia University's Barnston pointed out, an atmospheric weather pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) was in the positive phase for much of the winter of 2012, which lead to warmer winters in the eastern U.S.

Warming Trend May Continue

There's no guarantee that the weather pattern will continue in 2013. "It could be in the negative phase, which would make it more like it was a few years ago when we had very snowy winters in the eastern part of the country," Barnston said.

The NAO is an example of "a factor that makes the U.S. annual mean temperature kind of jog up and down from year to year. It won't just gradually go straight up with global warming. It can take big dips and have big jumps."

But if climate change continues unchecked, heat records will become more common, NOAA's Crouch said.

"If the warming trend continues, we will expect to see more warmer than average years."

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Albino-like Bald Eagle Spotted in Washington State

Talk about an odd bird—a bald eagle with white spots has been seen in Washington State.

Photographers Chris Teren and Traci Walter snapped the bird feeding on the Nooksack River, near Bellingham (map), on January 6. (Also see "'White,' Albino-like Penguin Found in Antarctica.")

"It was chaotic, with eagles flying and calling everywhere, then in came this eagle. It didn't take me long to figure out what we saw was something very special," Walter told National Geographic News by email.

"I was so excited, but I contained myself and focused on this eagle, and wound up with some great shots. I have seen a couple leucistic animals before, and figured that's what was going on."

Indeed, the animal likely has leucism, according to Andrew Griswold, an expert on bald eagles and director of ecotravel for the Connecticut Audubon Society.

Leucism is a mutation that prevents melanin, or pigment, from being produced in parts of an animal's body. In the case of birds, the pigment is absent from some feathers.

Another condition that creates white coloration in animals is albinism, which occurs when an animal produces no melanin at all throughout its entire body. (See pictures of albino animals.)

Bald eagles on the cusp of adulthood have similar mottled feathers, but in this case, the bird has the telltale golden eyes and beak of an adult, added Teresa McGill, a wildlife photographer with McGill's Nature in Motion. The pure-white head is also a sign of adulthood.

"This is an extremely mature eagle, [and it's] not just going through its change of plumage. Beautiful!" McGill said by email.

Odd Eagle May Have Romantic Woes

Leucism is seen in many bird species, although it's relatively rare, noted Patrick Comins, director of bird conservation for Audubon Connecticut. Comins has seen only a handful in his lifetime of bird-watching, mostly in red-tailed hawks.

Their rarity may be because leucistic birds are at a disadvantage. Unless they live in snowy regions, their striking white color may be more noticeable to predators or prey and may also turn off members of their own species.

The recently photographed bald eagle probably doesn't have trouble feeding or staying safe, since the large birds have few predators and scavenge their prey.

However, the fact that the bird looks like a teenager could be problematic, he said.

The plumage "might give a signal to another eagle that's a potential mate: This is not quite an adult bird, why would I want to mate with it?" Comins said.

Luckily, though, the bald eagle as a species is "a tremendous conservation success story," he noted. Once federally endangered, the well-known bird has rebounded from an estimated 16,000 birds in 1999 to at least 26,000 in 2011.

Added photographer Walter, who has watched wildlife her whole life, the rare eagle "was a sighting I will never forget."

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See Near-Earth Asteroid Buzz Our Planet—Live

 The asteroid Apophis, pictured here in three colors, will whiz by Earth later today. Image courtesy B. Altieri and C. Kiss, ESA/MPE/Konkoly

Sky-watchers can enjoy a close encounter today with an infamous asteroid once (erroneously) thought to pose a serious threat to Earth—the force of an impact would be like detonating tens of thousands of "Little Boy" atomic bombs. Slooh Space Camera will stream a live look at Apophis, which at a comfortable distance of 9 million miles (14.5 million kilometers), poses no present risk but still has an extremely remote chance of smashing into Earth on future passes.

"Back in 2004 when this asteroid was discovered there was concern that it had a relatively high probability of impacting Earth, a 1 in 45 chance during the 2029 flyby," said Slooh president Patrick Paolucci. "Fortunately they were able to determine that was inaccurate. But on that next approach in 2029, it's still going to be closer [to Earth] than our satellites. That's really why this event is on our radar."

Watch Now

Scientists will watch Apophis to better fine-tune its future path. Wednesday's pass could even influence the miniscule possibility (1 in 250,000 by NASA estimates) that the 885-foot (270-meter) rock might actually hit Earth in 2036. It would happen only in the extremely unlikely and unlucky event that Earth's gravity alters the rock's orbit in precisely the wrong way and creates a collision course.

Apophis is one of many asteroids orbiting between Earth and the sun that may pose future impact threats, and any close look is an opportunity to learn more about them. (See more asteroid pictures.)

"People may be surprised how many of these asteroids come whizzing past us and some of them are unexpected, which is scary," Paolucci said. "2012 LZ1, for example, was a big asteroid that was only discovered a few days before it flew by Earth. We streamed that live and it was a really cool show, but also an eye-opener for us. We want to cover these objects for the general public and bring awareness so that people can understand what's going on out there."

Slooh will capture and stream live images of the flyby from its high-altitude observatory on the island of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Free live shows with real-time discussion by Paolucci and others begin at 4 p.m. PST/7 p.m. EST on Slooh.com.

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Pictures: Florida Wildlife Corridor to Protect Bears, Panthers

Photograph by Carlton Ward

Bears in Florida aren't just the stuff of Disney—the Sunshine State is home to at least three thousand black bears, including M13, pictured, a male captured in Highlands County (map) in 2006.

But due to human activities, bears and other Florida wildlife are increasingly isolated in remote patches of habitat, preventing them from moving freely through their territories and potentially leading to the local extinction of some species.

That's partly why, a year ago this January, a team of explorers set off on a hundred-day, 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) expedition to drum up awareness and support for a proposed Florida Wildlife Corridor, a strip of uninterrupted wild and rural land that would link landscapes from the Florida Peninsula all the way to Georgia. (Related blog: "Follow Carlton Ward's 1,000-Mile Trek Through Florida.")

The corridor would protect wide-ranging species such as the black bear; keep the watershed that drains into the Everglades clean and safe; and also maintain ranches and farms, which house much of the potential corridor land, Carlton Ward, Jr., a National Geographic explorer and conservation photographer who led the expedition, said recently. (National Geographic News is a division of the National Geographic Society.)

"Despite very intensive development, we still have a chance to create a corridor that touches millions of acres of high-quality conservation land," Ward said.

The Florida Wildlife Corridor is gaining recognition within state agencies, Ward said, and formal recognition is a near-term goal.

Overall, the state's wild wonders are "really an untold story," he said.

"This is Florida—it's not just coast, beaches, and amusement parks."

—Christine Dell'Amore

Published January 9, 2013

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Embryonic Sharks Freeze to Avoid Detection

Jane J. Lee

Although shark pups are born with all the equipment they'll ever need to defend themselves and hunt down food, developing embryos still stuck in their egg cases are vulnerable to predators. But a new study finds that even these baby sharks can detect a potential predator, and play possum to avoid being eaten.

Every living thing gives off a weak electrical field. Sharks can sense this with a series of pores—called the ampullae of Lorenzini—on their heads and around their eyes, and some species rely on this electrosensory ability to find food buried in the seafloor. (See pictures of electroreceptive fish.)

Two previous studies on the spotted catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula) and the clearnose skate (Raja eglanteria)—a relative of sharks—found similar freezing behavior in their young. But new research by shark biologist and doctoral student Ryan Kempster at the University of Western Australia has given scientists a more thorough understanding of this behavior.

It all started because Kempster wanted to build a better shark repellent. Since he needed to know how sharks respond to electrical fields, Kempster decided to use embryos. "It's very hard to test this in the field because you need to get repeated responses," he said. And you can't always get the same shark to cooperate multiple times. "But we could use embryos because they're contained within an egg case."

Cloaking Themselves

So Kempster got his hands on 11 brownbanded bamboo shark (Chiloscyllium punctatum) embryos and tested their reactions to the simulated weak electrical field of a predator. (Popular pictures: Bamboo shark swallowed whole—by another shark.)

In a study published today in the journal PLoS One, Kempster and his colleagues report that all of the embryonic bamboo sharks, once they reached later stages of development, reacted to the electrical field by ceasing gill movements (essentially, holding their breath), curling their tails around their bodies, and freezing.

A bamboo shark embryo normally beats its tail to move fresh seawater in and out of its egg case. But that generates odor cues and small water currents that can give away its position. The beating of its gills as it breathes also generates an electrical field that predators can use to find it.

"So it cloaks itself," said neuroecologist Joseph Sisneros, at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the study. "[The embryo] shuts down any odor cues, water movement, and its own electrical signal."

Sisneros, who conducted the previous clearnose skate work, is delighted to see that this shark species also reacts to external electrical fields and said it would be great to see whether this is something all shark, skate, and ray embryos do.

Marine biologist Stephen Kajiura, at Florida Atlantic University, is curious to know how well the simulated electrical fields compare to the bamboo shark's natural predators—the experimental field was on the higher end of the range normally given off.

"[But] they did a good job with [the study]," Kajiura said. "They certainly did a more thorough study than anyone else has done."

Electrifying Protection?

In addition to the freezing behavior he recorded in the bamboo shark embryos, Kempster found that the shark pups remembered the electrical field signal when it was presented again within 40 minutes and that they wouldn't respond as strongly to subsequent exposures as they did initially.

This is important for developing shark repellents, he said, since some of them use electrical fields to ward off the animals. "So if you were using a shark repellent, you would need to change the current over a 20- to 30-minute period so the shark doesn't get used to that field."

Kempster envisions using electrical fields to not only keep humans safe but to protect sharks as well. Shark populations have been on the decline for decades, due partly to ending up as bycatch, or accidental catches, in the nets and on the longlines of fishers targeting other animals.

A 2006 study estimated that as much as 70 percent of landings, by weight, in the Spanish surface longline fleet were sharks, while a 2007 report found that eight million sharks are hooked each year off the coast of southern Africa. (Read about the global fisheries crisis in National Geographic magazine.)

"If we can produce something effective, it could be used in the fishing industry to reduce shark bycatch," Kempster said. "In [America] at the moment, they're doing quite a lot of work trying to produce electromagnetic fish hooks." The eventual hope is that if these hooks repel the sharks, they won't accidentally end up on longlines.

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How "Cheating" Slime Mold Escapes Death

Cheaters do prosper—at least if you're a slime mold, a new study says.

The slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum, found in most warm parts of the world, has an unusual life cycle. Most of the time Dicytostelium cells are "happy" single cells that hang out and eat bacteria, according to study leader Lorenzo Santorelli of the University of Oxford, who conducted the research while at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine.

But sometimes, when food is scarce, different strains of Dictyostelium, including a mutated strain, form a mobile, multicellular organism called a "slug." This cluster then sprouts a stalk called a fruiting body, which produces spores that disperse into new slime molds. (Also see "Slime Has Memory but No Brain.")

For a slug to produce a stalk, however, nearly 20 percent of its cells must die—essentially sacrificing themselves to pass on their genes. (Get a genetics overview.) The remaining 80 percent live on and become spores.

Now, for the first time, Santorelli and colleagues have figured out the mechanism by which the mutated strain is able to survive in higher numbers than the others.

It suppresses normal cells from becoming spores, thereby forcing more of these cells to sacrifice themselves for the stalk and die. Meanwhile, more cells in the mutated strain become spores—and thus avoid dying as stalk cells. In other words, more than the "fair share" of cheater cells see another day.

Cheating Cells Surprisingly Healthy

To make the discovery, the team mixed the cheater strain with normal strains and observed that more cells in the cheater strain live on. (See "Smart Slime, Ovulating Strippers Among 2008 Ig Nobels.")

On one hand, this isn't all that surprising, Santorelli noted: "Cooperation is always under attack in any organism—trying to get something for [yourself], it's just nature."

But what is striking, he said, is that usually cheaters eventually cause the entire cooperative system to collapse. Not so in Dictyostelium—somehow it's evolved a way to keep everything running smoothly, said Santorelli, whose study was recently published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

What's more, cheaters are usually weaker than cooperative individuals. But not in Dictyostelium cheaters, which appear to be quite healthy.

Santorelli wants to find out how the cheater strain is so successful. And, just maybe, the lowly slime mold could unravel the evolutionary and genetic basis for cooperation, he added.

"Slime mold is an amazing organism."

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Google and Twitter Help Track Influenza Outbreaks

 A 3-D illustration shows the structure of a generic influenza virus.

Illustration courtesy Douglas Jordan, CDC

This flu season could be the longest and worst in years. So far 18 children have died from flu-related symptoms, and 2,257 people have been hospitalized.

Yesterday Boston Mayor Thomas Menino declared a citywide public health emergency, with roughly 700 confirmed flu cases—ten times the number the city saw last year.

"It arrived five weeks early, and it's shaping up to be a pretty bad flu season," said Lyn Finelli, who heads the Influenza Outbreak Response Team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Boston isn't alone. According to the CDC, 41 states have reported widespread influenza activity, and in the last week of 2012, 5.6 percent of doctor's office visits across the country were for influenza-like illnesses. The severity likely stems from this year's predominant virus: H3N2, a strain known to severely affect children and the elderly. Finelli notes that the 2003-2004 flu season, also dominated by H3N2, produced similar numbers. (See "Are You Prepped? The Influenza Roundup.")

In tracking the flu, physicians and public health officials have a host of new surveillance tools at their disposal thanks to crowdsourcing and social media. Such tools let them get a sense of the flu's reach in real time rather than wait weeks for doctor's offices and state health departments to report in.

Pulling data from online sources "is no different than getting information on over-the-counter medication or thermometer purchases [to track against an outbreak]," said Philip Polgreen, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa.

The most successful of these endeavors, Google Flu Trends, analyzes flu-related Internet search terms like "flu symptoms" or "flu medication" to estimate flu activity in different areas. It tracks flu outbreaks globally.

Another tool, HealthMap, which is sponsored by Boston Children's Hospital, mines online news reports to track outbreaks in real time. Sickweather draws from posts on Twitter and Facebook that mention the flu for its data.

People can be flu-hunters themselves with Flu Near You, a project that asks people to report their symptoms once a week. So far more than 38,000 people have signed up for this crowdsourced virus tracker. And of course, there's an app for that.

Both Finelli, a Flu Near You user, and Polgreen find the new tools exciting but agree that they have limits. "It's not as if we can replace traditional surveillance. It's really just a supplement, but it's timely," said Polgreen.

When people have timely warning that there's flu in the community, they can get vaccinated, and hospitals can plan ahead. According to a 2012 study in Clinical Infectious Diseases, Google Flu Trends has shown promise predicting emergency room flu traffic. Some researchers are even using a combination of the web database and weather data to predict when outbreaks will peak.

As for the current flu season, it's still impossible to predict week-to-week peaks and troughs. "We expect that it will last a few more weeks, but we can never tell how bad it's going to get," said Finelli.

Hospitals are already taking precautionary measures. One Pennsylvania hospital erected a separate emergency room tent for additional flu patients. This week, several Illinois hospitals went on "bypass," alerting local first responders that they're at capacity—due to an uptick in both flu and non-flu cases—so that patients will be taken to alternative facilities, if possible.

In the meantime, the CDC advises vaccination, first and foremost. On the bright side, the flu vaccine being used this year is a good match for the H3N2 strain. Though Finelli cautions, "Sometimes drifted strains pop up toward the end of the season."

It looks like there won't be shortages of seasonal flu vaccine like there have been in past years. HealthMap sports a Flu Vaccine Finder to make it a snap to find a dose nearby. And if the flu-shot line at the neighborhood pharmacy seems overwhelming, more health departments and clinics are offering drive-through options.

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Space Pictures This Week: Australia Burns, Pulsars Wobble

Image courtesy P. Kalas, U. California, and ESA/NASA

This new Hubble Space Telescope image of a nearby star, Fomalhaut, and its surrounding disc of debris have made astronomers sit up and take notice. That's because the picture, released January 8, reveals that the debris field—made of ice, dust, and rocks—is wider than previously thought, spanning an area 14 to 20 billion miles from the star.

Scientists have also used the image to calculate the path of a planet, Fomalhaut b, as it makes its away around the star. It turns out that the planet's 2,000-year elliptical orbit takes it three times closer to Fomalhaut than previously thought, and that its eccentric path could send it plowing through the rock and ice contained in the debris field.

The resulting collision, if it happens, could occur around the year 2032 and result in a show similar to what happened when the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter, astronomer Paul Kalas, of the University of California at Berkeley, said in a statement.

Published January 11, 2013

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In Kulluk’s Wake, Deeper Debate Roils on Arctic Drilling

Part of our weekly "In Focus" series—stepping back, looking closer.

When the energy company Shell* was allowed the first crack in decades at drilling for oil in promising patches of the Arctic off the coast of Alaska, it didn’t skimp, energy analysts say. The company deployed the Kulluk, a rig designed to withstand the rigors of drilling in the Beaufort Sea. And it deployed a brand-new ship to tow the Kulluk to Seattle for maintenance after the drilling season was over.

Even so, Shell’s careful preparations ended with a technological and PR disaster: the grounding of the Kulluk in a storm on the rocky shoreline of southern Alaska on New Year’s Eve, after the new ship lost all four engines and the Kulluk broke free. (Related: “Pictures: Errant Shell Oil Rig Runs Aground Off Alaska”)

The Kulluk story is a cautionary tale for the crowd of energy companies looking north. An oil rush has hit the Arctic, as companies run out of other places to drill and shrinking sea ice leaves more open water. From Alaska’s northern seas to the frigid waters off Siberia, companies are pumping billions of dollars into exploration and new infrastructure in the hope that they’ll be able to pump oil and gas worth even more from the icy depths. (Related: "Ice-Breaking: U.S. Oil Drilling Starts as Nations Mull Changed Arctic")

But the Kulluk incident shows that not even the sharpest minds know exactly how to drain the oil beneath the northernmost Arctic, an area that is among Earth’s most extreme environments. And even meticulous plans years in the making can end in embarrassing failure—or worse.

Risky Business

Prospecting in Arctic waters “is a very risky business, no matter how you slice it,” said Lysle Brinker of Colorado-based IHS CERA, an energy research and analysis firm. “They’re pushing . . . into waters and exploration frontiers that are for the most part uncharted, untested.” (Related: “Pictures: Four New Offshore Drilling Frontiers”)

“The size of the prize is very large, and it is up for grabs,” said Surya Rajan, also of IHS CERA. “But we just can’t figure out a good way to get at it.”

The Kulluk accident, now the subject of a review ordered by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, may force Shell to abandon its plans to look for oil and gas off Alaska this summer, and repercussions of the mishap could extend to other energy companies as well. The incident has reinforced concerns that drilling could lead to an Arctic version of the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. (Related Quiz: “How Much Do You Know About the Gulf Oil Spill?”) Other companies, which are keeping a close eye on Shell’s plight, may decide to delay their campaigns to search for oil and gas in the Arctic, Rajan said. (Related: "The Next Prospects: Four Offshore Drilling Frontiers")

The stereotypical image of an oil well is a rig amidst the sands of the Saudi desert or the waves of the sultry Gulf of Mexico. But a 2008 report by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the area north of the Arctic Circle holds 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, the main ingredient in gasoline and other fuels, and 30 percent of its undiscovered natural gas, used for heating and for producing electricity. Nearly 85 percent of those resources, the report said, lie not on land but under frigid Arctic waters.

Energy companies have been extracting oil and gas from the far north for decades, mostly in the subarctic. But now interest in the Arctic is growing—even in the iciest locales, said Edward Richardson, an associate analyst at London-based Infield Systems, an energy research firm.

Forging Ahead

Russia’s first Arctic oil field could start producing oil later this year, he says. Exxon Mobil signed a deal in 2012 to prospect for oil and gas in Russia’s ice-laden Kara Sea. Despite Shell’s troubles, ConocoPhillips plans to drill one or two exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea e in 2014, a spokesman said.

Why would companies brave the ice, the cold, the lack of hotels and golf courses to drill in such isolated locales? Experts say the big energy firms are out of options. Existing megafields, such as those in Alaska’s North Slope, are running dry, and many countries with massive oil and gas deposits have chased private companies off.

“These big companies don’t really have a lot of choice but to go up there,” said Charles Ebinger, an energy analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.. “They almost have to.”

Fortunately for the energy industry, the Arctic has become more hospitable to drilling just as other locations have become more hostile. The Arctic sea ice melted away to a record low in 2012, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, spelling easier access for drill ships, though melting ice also brings new problems.

Technological innovation has also given industry a freer hand. Companies have learned to bury pipelines to protect them from ice that scours the seafloor. Drill ships that can operate in deeper water and drill to greater depths are being designed.

Even so, it will be perhaps a decade before large quantities of oil begin to gush from the iciest parts of the Arctic. Engineers have to figure out how to supply power to equipment below the ice, and how to keep their products flowing through pipelines in extreme temperatures. In Alaska, there’s no port within hundreds of miles of the Chukchi that could host large support or emergency-response ships.

“I’m convinced it can be done right,” Ebinger says, referring to oil production in the northernmost Arctic. “But as we’ve seen with this recent incident . . . no one should underestimate the difficulty of drilling in conditions like that.”

The Kulluk wasn’t even in Arctic waters when it broke free of its tow ship. Instead the rig was in the more hospitable shipping lanes off southern Alaska when a violent storm caused it to lose its mooring to tow ships and run aground, leading to a U.S. Coast Guard-coordinated rescue and recovery operation that involved more than 700 people.

So far there doesn’t appear to have been any breach of the Kulluk’s steel tanks holding 150,000 gallons of diesel fuel and oil products, although officials say some fuel may have spilled from rescue ships that dislodged from the rig when it was grounded.

Shell’s other drill rig, the ship Noble Discoverer, hasn’t avoided mishap, either. In mid-July, before heading north, it slipped its anchor in Alaska’s Dutch Harbor and drifted perilously close to shore. It had to halt its drilling campaign on the Chukchi Sea to dodge a 30-mile-long (48-kilometer-long) ice floe. After it returned to harbor in the fall, a small fire broke out aboard the ship. (Related: "Shell Scales Back 2012 Arctic Drilling Goals")

Shell has stressed that the Kulluk incident was a transportation accident, and did not involve drilling, nor was there any risk of crude oil release. The company has pledged to cooperate in the investigation into the causes of the incident and to implement lessons learned.

“We undertake significant planning and preparation in an effort to ensure these types of incidents do not occur,” said Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil Company, in a statement. “We’re very sorry it did.”

But critics point to the Kulluk episode as evidence that—despite the promises of Shell and other companies—too little has been done to ensure that drilling doesn’t damage the fragile Arctic environment..

Every time new drilling is proposed, “invariably the proponents swear up and down that this time will be different, that they’re going to apply the very best technology, the very tightest standards,” said environmental chemist Jeffrey Short, a former staffer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who is now a consultant for the U.S. environmental group Oceana. “That doesn’t offer much comfort once an accident happens.”

At the moment, he said, there’s so little monitoring of offshore weather and currents that “if a spill occurred, you’d just be flying blind as far as being able to anticipate where to look for the oil.”

Nightmare Scenario

An Arctic “blowout”—an uncontrolled leak triggering an the immense oil flow like the one that happened during the Deepwater Horizon disaster—could create a trail of oil-tainted ice nearly 2,000 miles (3,000 kilometers) long, said University of Cambridge ocean physicist Peter Wadhams, who studies polar ice. That nightmare scenario could become reality if an oil well were leaking when winter ice began to form. Ice near the spill would absorb oil and then drift away, allowing a fresh expanse of ice to soak up oil. There is no way to clean up oil that’s under or in ice, Wadhams said, though it’s possible a method could be developed.

Though the Arctic seems barren, the region nourishes large numbers of birds, walruses, seals, and whales, some of them increasingly rare.

The Arctic is full of “species that are slowly but surely all being put on the endangered species list,” said Marilyn Heiman, a former U.S. Interior Department staffer who now heads Arctic protection efforts for the non-profit Pew Environment Group. “If there’s an oil spill it will be a disaster.”

And not just for animals. The Inupiat Eskimos living on Alaska’s northern coast depend on the sea for food but also as a stage for traditions, such as the bowhead-whale hunt, that are central to their culture.

“We refer to the ocean as our garden, because that’s where we get our seals and walruses. We don’t have Safeway,” said Inupiat elder and politician Edward Itta, who is resigned to drilling in the Arctic but has pushed for stricter regulations. “If the bowhead whale is no more, that in essence would shut down our way of life.”

Stricter safety standards could help reduce the risk of a catastrophic Arctic oil spill, Heiman said, but “this is the most dangerous place in the world to operate . . . . It’s going to be high risk, no matter what.” (Related Quiz: “What You Don’t Know About World Energy”)

*Shell is sponsor of National Geographic’s Great Energy Challenge initiative. National Geographic maintains autonomy over content.

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Sharp-Eared Robots Find Whales—And Help Them Escape Danger

In the Atlantic Ocean, locating a right whale the size of a school bus can be like finding a needle in a haystack. But a new generation of sharp-eared underwater robots can pinpoint the leviathans' locations in real time. Armed with acoustic equipment and onboard computers, these "gliders" hear singing whales and alert humans so shipping traffic can avoid the mammals—and so scientists know where to find them.

Last month, two 6-foot-long (1.8-meter-long), torpedo-shaped robots from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts used digital acoustic monitoring equipment to detect 9 North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) in the Gulf of Maine—the first-ever detection of baleen whales from these types of autonomous vehicles.

"Recording the sound creates a spectrogram, which to a scientist is almost like a sheet of music that visually represents the sounds you're hearing," explained WHOI researcher Mark Baumgartner.

The gliders process and classify these acoustic signatures, then surface every two hours and transmit evidence of whale calls to shore-based computers while the animals are still nearby. "We can use this information to very quickly draw a circle on the map and say, hey, we know there are whales in this area, let's be careful about our activities here. The government can then alert mariners and ask them to reduce their speed and post a lookout."

On December 5, one such glider enabled NOAA's Fisheries Service to alert mariners to 70-ton whales in the Outer Fall area, some 60 miles (96 kilometers) south of Bar Harbor, Maine (map) and 90 miles (145 kilometers) northeast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire (map).

Ship collisions are a major source of mortality for the critically endangered right whales, and account for perhaps a third of all known deaths. Devastated by whaling, the species has been slow to recover: Less than 500 individual right whales remain, and biologists stress that each living animal's survival is important for the future of the species. (Read an article about right whales in National Geographic magazine.)

Biologist Regina Asmutis-Silvia, of Massachusetts-based WDC, Whale and Dolphin Conservation, has worked for years on whale strikes, entanglements, and other conservation hazards. She said the gliders have terrific potential and will be an extremely useful tool for both science and conservation.

"But, like anything else, it does have its limitations," she cautioned. "From a conservation perspective the limitation is that right whales aren't vocalizing all the time. So if you're not hearing them, it doesn't mean they're not there," she said.

High-Tech Whale Hunters Help Science

A high-tech system of listening buoys performs similar whale-detection duties in the shipping lanes that run through Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sancturary near Boston (map). (Learn how to track whales using an iPhone or iPad.)

"That system works fantastically," Baumgartner said. "But it's moored in one place and [our gliders] can move, so this is another step in the direction of having autonomous systems that can remotely detect animals."

The robots' acoustic system is also very flexible. While currently armed with data to detect right, humpback, fin, and sei whales, new sounds and species could be added that would enable the gliders to travel widely in search of other marine creatures.

The gliders can work at sea for four or five weeks before their batteries need recharging. If money and management priorities allowed, one could imagine a fleet of such vessels someday cruising constantly and collecting valuable data on whales and other marine animals.

The underwater robots boast a suite of environmental sensors to record temperature and salinity, and to estimate algae population levels at the base of the marine food chain. "They even have an instrument that gives us a crude sense of how much of the zooplankton that right whales feed on is in the area," Baumgartner said. "So they have an enormous capacity to help us understand not only where the whales are, but why they are there." (Related: "Right Whales Return to Former Killing Ground.")

But for both conservation and science, the importance of simply finding the whales in the first place can't be overstated. Traditional spotting methods, overseen by NOAA, employ observers on ships and airplanes. They have advantages but are expensive and they don't always work, especially when weather and seas are rough.

"I've worked on a number of projects where we just had great difficulty even finding the animals," Baumgartner said. "So it's a great feeling to have a capability like this that gives us some advance notice. Before we left the dock we knew that right, humpback, and fin whales were in our study area—and when we got there that's exactly what we found."

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Biggest Thing in Universe Found—Defies Scientific Theory

Talk about a whopper—astronomers have discovered a structure in the universe so large that modern cosmological theory says it should not exist, a new study says. (Also see "Giant 'Blob' Is Largest Thing in Universe [2006].")

Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an international team of researchers has discovered a record-breaking cluster of quasars—young active galaxies—stretching 4 billion light-years across.

"This discovery was very much a surprise, since it does break the cosmological record as the largest structure in the known universe," said study leader Roger Clowes, an astronomer at University of Central Lancashire in England.

For comparison, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is just a hundred thousand light-years across, while the local supercluster of galaxies in which it's located, the Virgo Cluster, is only a hundred million light-years wide.

Giant Quasar a Head-Scratcher

Astronomers have known for years that quasars can form immense clusters that stretch to more than 700 million light-years across, said Clowes. But the epic size of this group of 73 quasars, sitting about 9 billion light-years away, has left them scratching their heads.

That's because current astrophysical models appear to show that the upper size limit for cosmic structures should be no more than 1.2 billion light years.

"So this represents a challenge to our current understanding and now creates a mystery—rather than solves one," Clowes said. (Also see "Dark Galaxies Discovered—May Be Cosmic 'Missing Links.'")

The titanic structure, known simply as the Large Quasar Group (LQG), also appears to break the rules of a widely accepted cosmological principle, which  says that the universe would look pretty much uniform when observed at the largest scales.

"It could mean that our mathematical description of the universe has been oversimplified-and that would represent a serious difficulty and a serious increase in complexity," Clowes said.

Decoding Early-Galaxy Evolution

Significant not only for its record-breaking size, the massive structure could possibly shed light on the evolution of galaxies like our own Milky Way. Quasars, which pump out powerful jets of energy, are among the brightest and most energetic objects from when the universe was still young. They represent an early, but brief, stage in the evolution of most galaxies. (See "Earliest Known Galaxies Spied in Deep Hubble Picture.")

One theory holds that this type of colossal collection of quasars may be precursors to galaxy superclusters in the modern universe—but the exact nature of their connection is still a mystery.

The discovery, a prime target for computer modeling, also needs to be mapped out more thoroughly with telescopes, said Gerard Williger, an astronomer at the University of Louisville in Kentucky not connected with the study.

"This structure is bigger than we expect based on the shockwaves formed in the universe after the big bang," said Williger.

"There is very likely some mechanism [that] is turning on quasars over a large scale like this—and in a short time—which could relate to some condition in the early universe."

Th quasar study was published this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Pictures: Civil War Shipwreck Revealed by Sonar

Photograph by Jesse Cancelmo

A fishing net, likely only decades old, drapes over machinery that once connected the Hatteras' pistons to its paddle wheels, said Delgado.

From archived documents, the NOAA archaeologist learned that Blake, the ship's commander, surrendered as his ship was sinking. "It was listing to port, [or the left]," Delgado said. The Alabama took the wounded and the rest of the crew and put them in irons.

The officers were allowed to keep their swords and wander the deck as long as they promised not to lead an uprising against the Alabama's crew, he added.

From there, the Alabama dropped off their captives in Jamaica, leaving them to make their own way back to the U.S.

Delgado wants to dig even further into the crew of the Hatteras. He'd like see if members of the public recognize any of the names on his list of crew members and can give him background on the men.

"That's why I do archaeology," he said.

(Read about other Civil War battlefields in National Geographic magazine.)

Published January 11, 2013

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