Plus: Omicron’s origins; ‘flurona’ explained; how Olympians use physics to break records; the rise of the Snow Moon
| Wednesday, February 16, 2022 | |
| In today’s newsletter, we dig into Omicron’s origins, discover why ‘flurona’ won’t be huge, describe tonight's rise of the Snow Moon, see the life-saving bogs at South America’s tip … and present this week’s Nat Geo News Quiz. | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY PAULA BRONSTEIN, GETTY IMAGES | | By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE Executive Editor
In the September 1896 issue of National Geographic magazine, writer Eliza Scidmore recounts what happened when a “great earthquake wave” struck that June in Japan. She informed readers that the Japanese word for this type of wave is a tsunami—kicking off widespread adoption of the term for ocean waves created when quakes displace water, linguist Ben Zimmer tells NPR.
Japan has certainly seen its share of powerful earthquakes and accompanying tsunamis, so it makes sense the world would adopt the Japanese term for the phenomenon. According to the UN’s International Tsunami Information Center, most tsunamis happen in the Pacific Ocean, where conditions are ripe for strong, shallow quakes to send devastating waves crashing ashore. But don’t let the etymology fool you: Tsunamis can happen all over the world if the geologic conditions are right. And as scientists recently discovered, some earthquakes can unexpectedly generate tsunamis powerful enough to be felt in multiple oceans.
That’s what happened last August, when a quake in the remote South Sandwich Islands was followed by a tsunami recorded along the coasts of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. “Although the swell wasn’t destructive, it was the first since the catastrophic tsunami of 2004 to be recorded in three different oceans,” Robin George Andrews reports. The South Sandwich Islands are prone to quakes, but by all accounts, this one was too deep to have made the ocean slosh so dramatically, creating a conundrum for geologists. | | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER FISHER | | It took months for Caltech’s Zhe Jia and colleagues to figure out the answer to this tectonic mystery, in part because the South Sandwich Islands are uninhabited and not set up with seismic monitoring. Using data from a global open-access seismic network, they eventually concluded that the quake actually happened in five parts, and one previously hidden rumble was both powerful enough and shallow enough to be the culprit. It’s a great new piece of the puzzle for scientists seeking to understand the types of quakes that can trigger tsunamis, which helps with developing warning systems. But it’s also a reminder that earthquakes can be a tricky lot, and there’s still much to be learned about the science of tsunamis 126 years after that fateful magazine report.
As marine geophysicist Robert Larter puts it: “The natural world is full of surprises.” Read our account of the three-ocean tsunami here.
(Pictured at top, destruction in Japan from a broad March 2011 tsunami. Above, South Georgia Island, the closest inhabited landmass to the source of the August 2021 tsunami.)
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 | | ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW FAZEKAS | | The Snow Moon: That’s a common term in North America and Europe for February’s full moon, which begins to dominate the night skies tonight. It will rise in the east soon after sunset and sweep across the high southern sky overnight. Look closely and you’ll notice the moon is joined by the bright star Regulus in the constellation Leo. By late Sunday night the waning gibbous moon will have moved to the constellation Virgo and will be parked next to the bright star Spica (illustrated above). Starting Friday, for about one to two hours after dusk, look for the ghostly glow of the zodiacal lights. They will be visible in northern latitudes in the western sky. This pyramid-shaped beam of light is easily mistaken for the glow of a far-off city but actually results from sunlight reflecting off dust particles floating across the plane of the solar system. — Andrew Fazekas
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| The beauty of bogs: Photographer Luján Agusti grew up in the southern part of Argentina and focused on the peatlands of Tierra del Fuego—South America’s largest—for a project on lowering Earth’s carbon emissions. Bogs and wetlands, she tells us, “retain carbon dioxide in enormous quantities, even more than forests do.” Her images, from this Nat Geo article, show the beauty of what she calls the planet’s connector: “They connect land and water; life and death; the past, the present, and our future.”
The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has funded the work of Nat Geo Explorer Luján Agusti. Learn more about the Society’s support of Explorers.
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 | | What we find is important but what’s most important is the stories that we recover and that we bring back to memory as a result of what’s found. We don’t necessarily need to find the holy grail of a specific artifact or a specific thing but the fact that we’re searching for and discovering these general stories brings back the memories of these people. | | | Justin Dunnavant
| Archaeologist, Diving With a Purpose instructor, Nat Geo Explorer
Dive deeper: A diver's hunt for lost slave ships led to an incredible journey | | |
 | | ILLUSTRATION BY JERRY PINKNEY | | An underappreciated legacy: We often know what African American people invented, but not the life stories of those behind the discoveries. By reducing these inventors to the sum of their innovations, we discard many of the lessons their lives could teach us, Ezelle Sanford III writes in his story for National Geographic. (Above, illustrated clockwise from top left: Sarah E. Goode is believed to be the first African-American woman to receive a U.S. patent, for a collapsible bed that converted into a rolltop desk; sail innovator James Forten rose to own a Philadelphia sail business, where he employed both Black and white workers to foster equal rights; Lonnie Johnson has more than a hundred patents; George Washington Carver established the Agricultural Wagon to visit farms so rural Southerners could learn about agrarian methods and best practices; Lewis Howard Latimer quickly drafted plans for a new invention, the telephone, in time for Alexander Graham Bell to file for a patent just ahead of a competitor.)
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This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Jen Tse, and Monica Williams. Have an idea or a link? We'd love to hear from you at david.beard@natgeo.com. | |
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