Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Chasing Volcanoes Around the Solar System

Episode Date: March 14, 2005

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Chasing the Solar System's Volcanoes, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan, and boy do we ever have a hot show for you this time. Planetary scientist Rosalie Lopez is here with both of her new books about volcanoes, which are turning up just about everywhere in the solar system, even though some of them are freezing cold. We've got lots more in store,

including the latest space trivia quiz from Bruce Betts. Here's the latest news from around the Milky Way. The Bush administration wants Mike Griffin to be the next NASA administrator. Griffin currently heads the space division of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, but he has very broad experience throughout NASA. We'll have more to say next week, but you can also read all about the choice right now at planetary.org. Cassini has had another close encounter with one of Saturn's moons. This time it was strangely smooth and solidus. Lots of great snapshots are on the website.

And another interplanetary mission has just visited that mysterious and dangerous place called Earth. The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft swung by our pretty little home, picking up speed on its way to orbit and land on a comet. Did you wave as it passed by? Next up, Emily is also examining Earth. She can't help but notice we've put on a few pounds. I'll be back with Rosalie Lopez in a minute. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, is the Earth's mass increasing over time as babies are born and plants grow from seeds? The Earth's mass is pretty much constant with time at 6 million million million million kilograms. Although three babies are born every second, and giant sequoias can grow from tiny seeds,

these objects grow in mass through the acquisition of mass from other sources like fresh water, nutrients and soil, and oxygen atoms from the air. One of the foundations of classical chemistry is the law of conservation of mass, which was discovered by chemist Antoine Lavoisier through careful experiments in the late 18th century. That being said, there are a couple of things that do act to change the mass of the Earth over time, though by an amount that is too small to measure compared to the mass of the Earth. How does the Earth's mass change?

Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. The last time Rosalie Lopez was on our show, we learned that she had wanted to study planetary science and explore space ever since she was a girl growing up in Brazil. And she has done just that, working as a lead scientist for the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California. But she's also traveled the world, getting close to both active and dormant volcanoes, sometimes uncomfortably close. It has helped make her one of the world's leading volcanologists, studying and discovering

them throughout our solar system. Rosalie Lopez, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be back here. You've been staying very, very busy in addition to all of your research at JPL. We have not one, but two books about volcanoes to talk about, a subject near and dear to your heart. One of them we're going to get to in the second half of our conversation. That's the Volcano Adventure Guide, and it's a beautiful book. We'll save a few moments for it. But this being Planetary Radio, we're going to concentrate on another book,

one that you co-edited and contributed a chapter to, and that is Volcanic Worlds, Exploring the Solar System's Volcanoes. I'm looking at a copy of the book now, and I have lots of post-its in here because it was absolutely fascinating. And one of the things I didn't know about the book until it arrived is that in all of these various chapters, each considering a different aspect or a different location in our solar system for volcanoes, all of them are written by women. That's right. And that's why Sally Wright wrote our foreword. It didn't start out this way.

My colleague Tracy Gregg and I started out editing a book on Plan 3 volcanism, and we wanted to make it an accessible book, a book that would inspire young people and students. And as we started putting down names of experts who we would like to ask for writing these different chapters, we started coming up with names of all these women. And I remember we were having lunch, and I said, Tracy, why don't we make this book all women? This is going to be a first. Does that say something about volcanology?

I think it says something about the progress of women in the field of planetary sciences in general. We have around 30% women in the fields of various aspects of planetary sciences. And when I started in this field 20 years ago as a graduate student, you couldn't even dream of doing something like that. It's only in the last few years with enough women acquiring the required expertise in this field that this book became possible. It is extremely accessible, and yet it is filled with science, not just what we know of volcanoes, but very current knowledge of volcanoes.

I noticed that it even brings it up to the era of the Mars Exploration Rovers. Not very much, a little bit in there, but very current data. Yes, it's always one of the problems of writing books in a field that is changing so fast is that by the time the book is published, you have more data. But, of course, you have to stop somewhere. And now we have data from Cassini that is not mentioned in the book, but maybe in a future edition. So much has changed in this field of volcanology in the last 20 or 30 years. I think that's one of the major points you bring out. Oh, yes.

We now know that volcanism is one of the major processes in shaping the surfaces of planets. And volcanism is a very important process. We not only have what we know on Earth as volcanism, like the magma coming out of the ground and the lavas and so on, we know that that has happened on Mars and the Moon. Possibly Mercury is happening right now in Io. But we also, with the exploration of the outer solar system, found out that we have ice volcanism or cryovolcanism in the outer solar system, in the satellites in particular.

So that's a whole new field. And you have a chapter about that. I mean, talk about an oxymoron. Cryo-lava. Exactly. In fact, as you will gather from this book, my expertise is on volcanoes on Io, which are the hottest volcanoes in the solar system. But now I'm working on the Cassini mission. So in fact, I have started studying

volcanoes on Titan because we have discovered deposits of cryovolcanic activity on Titan. So I'm going from the very hot to the very cold. Well, let's talk about the very cold for a moment, since we brought up this cryovolcanism. We're not talking, obviously, about molten rock here, but water or water ice being treated as if it was a volcanic product? That's right. In these icy satellites, you can have water or we think water-ammonia mixtures, perhaps, that are actually buoyant and come up to the surface and they can erupt as geysers, like we have seen on Triton, or as flows on the surface. And in fact, certain mixtures, like, for example, water and ammonia, can have viscosity that's very similar to the terrestrial lava, so they can end up forming very much the same landscapes. And the similarities extend beyond the landscapes.

Even the mechanisms that cause these eruptions are, I guess, somewhat similar to what happens with more traditional volcanoes? Yes, that's right. You need to have a material that is less dense than the surrounding rock or clean ice coming up, and the gases that you have dissolved cause it to explode. Satellites that don't have an atmosphere like Io, you have this fantastically tall plume. It's because the material is erupting into a vacuum. On Earth, the plumes wouldn't go so high, and it's not just a gravity effect. But yes, and it's one of the very interesting things is when you look at the physics of volcanism.

On Earth, if we only studied the Earth, we would have a very narrow view of what's possible in volcanism. While if we studied the other planets, we start seeing these weird things. We start seeing lava on Io that is hotter than any lavas we see on Earth today, and cryovolcanism, all these weird things. We start seeing lava on Io that is hotter than any lavas we see on Earth today, and cryovolcanism, all these weird things. And all this exciting stuff going on in the solar system, which, as we said, I guess really prior to Voyager, scientists generally thought, planetary scientists felt, the solar system was a pretty dead place in terms of volcanism, except for Home Sweet Home. Exactly. In 1979, when Voyager flew by Io, that was the most incredible surprise.

And I remember, and I describe in the book, that I was a graduate student in London, England, and my advisor told me, well, they just discovered active volcanoes on Io. And I was, for a while, while trying to imagine how could that be? Io is this small satellite like our moon. Because we didn't understand how there could be a mechanism that would generate the forces that would be necessary to create volcanoes? That's right. We didn't know about tidal forces and tidal dissipation that would heat up the interior of satellites. Actually, a paper had been published about two weeks before the Voyager flyby

by Stan Peel and colleagues, but I don't think that that issue of science had even arrived in our library at the time. So they actually said it was possible that Io could have active volcanoes, said it was possible that Io could have active volcanoes, but it was still, I think, one of the biggest surprises in the exploration of the solar system. When we come back from a break, let's talk about Io, because for one thing, you, I'm going to guess, are maybe the all-time champion discoverer of volcanoes, with 71 under your belt? That's right. I have even been contacted by the Guinness Book of Records. That's great. Well, let's talk about this hot little moon of Jupiter when we come back,

and much more when we'll continue our conversation with Rosalie Lopez, planetary scientist, volcanologist. She has edited Volcanic Worlds, Exploring the Solar System's Volcanoes, and has written another beautiful book, The Volcano Adventure Guide. We'll be talking about those as soon as we come back from this break. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group.

The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds. And we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387.

And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, planetarysociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Rosalie Lopez is our guest on Planetary Radio this week. She is a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena. We're speaking at the headquarters of the Planetary Society at the

moment, not very far from JPL. And we're going to pick up again a little bit more about Io, which has been a particular area of study for you. And it is the chapter in this book, Volcanic Worlds, Exploring the Solar System's Volcanoes. It is the chapter that you authored. And we just established that you may soon be the official Guinness Book of World Records World Record holder and discoverer of volcanoes. You mentioned that the actual first discovery of a volcano on Io was also by a woman, happens to be a former colleague of ours here at the Planetary Society. That's right. Linda Morabito, who was a navigation engineer at the time,

she noticed this umbrella-shaped plume on the limb of Io. At first, didn't know what it was, but she correctly concluded that it could be a volcanic plume. So, in fact, active volcanism on Io was not discovered by the scientists, but by one of the engineers. And active volcanism on Io is kind of an understatement. There really is no place else like this in the solar system. No, not at all. I mean, Io has at least 156 volcanoes, active volcanoes that we know of. A lot of them stay active for very long periods of time.

Gigantic plumes, very hot lavas, gigantic flows and calderas. So it's really the most volcanically active place in the solar system. With Galileo, using the infrared instrument, I detected 71 previously unknown volcanoes. Let's go to another spot in the solar system. There are chapters about every place, including Earth, because there is a very good introduction to volcanology in the book as well. But our neighbor, which one of your authors calls Earth's evil twin, of course, cloud-shrouded, nasty Venus. But I did not know that we had found evidence of volcanoes on Venus. Yes, Venus has a very large variety of volcanic features.

It has a very young surface with relatively few impact craters. Generally, in the solar system, the fewer impact craters you see, the younger the surface is. And one of the ways of erasing the impact craters is by volcanism. You put lava on the surface and then it erases the craters. So Venus has a relatively young surface, very extensive volcanoes. We haven't found any real evidence yet of active volcanism on Venus, but there have been some suggestions that there may still be some degassing going on. So it would be really great to have more data on that.

Let's go to our other neighbor, Mars, and some terrific images in the book, because we are collecting so many now from orbit. It still has, I guess, the tallest, the biggest volcano we know of in the solar system. That's right. Olympus Mons, in fact, was the first volcano I studied as a graduate student. Olympus Mons is 26 kilometers high and is the tallest, largest volcano in the solar system. And Mars has, again, a very wide variety of volcanic features, and we are finding out more and more about Mars with all these missions. Well, let's bring it back home before we run out of time. As I said, there is a good deal of material in this book, Volcanic Worlds, about volcanism on Earth,

which of course is the first place we learned about how these things work. But you have this other book, it is beautifully written, The Volcano Adventure Guide by Rosalie Lopez. For somebody like me, who, as I told you before the interview, I have as my dream seen two more natural phenomena while I'm here on this planet, and one of them is the aurora, and the other is an active volcano. This is definitely the book for me, and this one I found last night and got to spend some time with and stayed up way too late. It is absolutely beautiful, the illustrations, but you've basically given people a travel guide as well as a great textbook about volcanoes. Yes, that was the idea. I always gave a lot of lectures about volcanoes, and people would always

ask me, how do I go and see an eruption? Where can I go? What's safe and what isn't? And I realized that no one had ever written a book to address that, to address how can you travel to a volcano and see a volcanic eruption, and the things that you learn as a volcanologist in the field, and you learn from your colleagues and your advisors what's safe to do and what isn't, and how far away you should stay from an eruption. It depends on

the different types of eruptions. But, you know, it's not just about seeing live eruptions. I actually also included many volcanoes that have, you can see the remains of past eruptions, which are absolutely fascinating, like Vesuvius in Italy. So it's really a travel guide. I also try to put in how people in different places live with volcanoes. In Iceland, they make very good use of the volcanoes they have and of the geothermal energy and how even cultures have evolved to cope and live with the volcanoes. There is also very dramatic history in this story. I was particularly

affected by the story of the eruption that took place in Martinique in the West Indies. Yes, that is absolutely amazing. It just shows what ignorance can do. About 30,000 people were killed by this eruption in 1902. And volcanic eruptions don't usually happen without warning. And this one gave plenty of warning. In fact, life in the town was just absolutely unbearable. There was ash falling and everything was miserable. And yet people weren't living. And the governor at the time wanted to keep people in town because of an election,

and there was this bogus commission, scientific inquiry commission set up, and they kept saying the volcano was safe. And then 30,000 people died. Including that governor. Oh, yes, and his family. It is an extremely exciting book. It is much more than a volcano adventure guide. It is a true textbook about this incredible phenomena

and lots of information about where to stay near them and other flora and fauna that you might find near these volcanoes, literally around the world, although most of them I guess I would say around the Pacific Rim. And I certainly enjoyed reading it. As I've enjoyed speaking to you again, I wish we had more time. I do want to give you a chance to give out your website where people can learn more about these. Yes, my website is called volcanoadventures.com,

volcanoadventures in a single word. And so if you go to VolcanoAdventures.com, you can find out more about the books and the reviews and so on. And I'll be putting some updates because the problem with writing a book about active volcanoes is that they erupt and things change. And we'll put that link on our website, planetary.org, of course. I'll also mention that both books are available online, whether it's Amazon, Barnes & Noble, probably other sources. The Volcano Adventure Guide is from Cambridge University Press, and Volcanic Worlds, I guess, is from Springer, is your publisher? Yes, Springer Praxis.

All right, Rosalie, thank you so much for coming in today. And I wish I could make one of these trips, but even as an armchair traveler, I'm going to keep enjoying these books. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. And we'll be back with Bruce Betts and What's Up right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A.

How does the mass of the Earth change over time? The main input of mass to the Earth is through impacts of meteorites, asteroids, and comets. Major impacts are rare, of course, but the Earth is constantly sweeping up space dust from our solar system, more than a hundred tons of it every day. That may sound like a lot, but compared to the mass of the Earth, it is completely insignificant. Even if you add up all of this infalling material over the last billion years, it still only amounts to about one billionth of the Earth's mass. The Earth is also losing mass at the same time, through the loss of volatile gases from the top of the atmosphere. The Earth has also permanently lost some mass through

the launching of such ships as the Apollo landers, Mars orbiters, the mariners, pioneers, and voyagers that humans have sent to other parts of the solar system and beyond. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here is Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week for this segment. Hey, Bruce, what's up?

Hey, Matt. Fun stuff. False cheerfulness here. I'm sorry. What's happening in the sky, Bruce? Hey, the sky and astronomy are nothing to kid about. People who listen to this show know that I would never make jokes about it. So go out there, be serious, look up and see Saturn.

Actually, please, I beseech you, go see Mercury. Stop it, stop it, stop it. Okay, all right. All right, Mercury, low in the west, following the sun down shortly after sunset. See it now. It's going away again. Just hangs out with us for three weeks or so. Vanishes.

It'll be back in June or July. Looking like a bright star following after the sun. Jupiter, on the other hand, no trouble seeing that bad boy. It's rising a couple hours after sunset. And the brightest star-like object in the sky, in the east. You can also see it in the pre-dawn sky mars is in the pre-dawn sky in the southeast before dawn looking reddish and saturn is up really high near castor and pollux looking yellowish uh right after sunset and then up

through the middle of the night shall we go on to this week in space history? Please do. On March 16, 1975, 30 years ago, Mariner 10 did its third and last successful flyby of the planet Mercury, showing us Mariner 10, the only spacecraft that has visited Mercury, giving us a view of roughly half the planet. The other half will be explored coming soon from the Messenger spacecraft, which is on its way now, doing its first flybys in 2008 orbiting in 2011 on to random space fact venus only has about a thousand impact craters compare this something like the moon or mercury even mars it's a paltry number and this based upon magellan data so this

is down to about 100 meters in resolution, although you wouldn't see much smaller than that because of the thick atmosphere. Anyway, the real point I'm getting to here is the real random space fact. All of Venus appears to have been resurfaced about 500 million years ago, less than 10% of the age of the solar system, the whole thing resurfaced by volcanic activity, then lots of tectonism after that, fracturing it and doing other weird things. Wow. That's not only a hot place, but a hopping place, I guess.

It is on a cosmic time scale as opposed to ours. Not that we're not cosmic. Okay, on to the trivia contest. We asked you last time around about the new names for Saturn's moon Phoebe's craters, and they have been named after the Argonauts, Jason and the Argonauts. Jason is the name of the biggest one. I asked you what's the name of the one that corresponds to the mythological dude known as the Beekeeper. Yes, the Beekeeper.

Now, we did have Torsten, who I think we quoted last time. He didn't win again this time. Sorry, Torsten. Another quote from the Book have Torsten, who I think we quoted last time. He didn't win again this time. Sorry, Torsten. Another quote from the Book of Torsten? Well, he did correct us, actually. He said that that's some claim that it's an incorrect translation, the beekeeper, that this Argonaut was actually known as the beer keeper and probably therefore was very popular among his shipmates.

I did not know that. We also got an entry from Dominic Turley, who not only knew the answer he claims off the top of his head, but he provided the names of all 50, count them, 50, look at this, here's the list, 50 Argonauts. All off the top of his head? I don't know about that. But I was looking at this, There are all these interesting names. It looks like half these guys are the sons of gods. Then you want to hear our actual winner?

I sure do. Well, it was a longtime listener, Alex Chapman, but a first-time winner. He has been just pleading to win this, and his number finally came up. Alex Chapman from Manchester. He's a Brit. He does say that the answer is, and of course, I don't know how to pronounce this. Oh, but please try, Matt. That's why I asked the question for this moment right here. It's spelled B-U-T-E-S, which could be beauts, boots, beauties, beauties, beauties, beauties, beauties. No, beauts.

Anyway, that's it. That's the Argonaut who was known as the beekeeper. Alex, you won. Even beauties? Yeah. Big beauties. Really? Yeah.

It is. Okay. Yeah. It's not the biggest crater, but definitely large. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to something perhaps a little bit more traditional. Who, who, what person or people have traveled the farthest from the surface of the Earth? Excellent.

Thank you, thank you very much. I was pleased with that one. So please go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter our trivia contest and win a wonderful Planetary Radio t-shirt. Tell us who has been the farthest from the surface of the Earth. And be sure to get that entry into us by noon Pacific time on the 21st of March. Monday, March 21st at noon Pacific time, and we will make sure that you are eligible for a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

Bruce, more big news. Yes, Matt. Yes, there is. What is it, Matt? As of next week, those of you who are already XM Radio subscribers, tune to Channel 133, 10 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Pacific, obviously North America, and you will be able to hear your favorite radio show, and us too, your favorite radio show, and us too, on Channel 133 XM Public Radio because we are going to premiere on that number one satellite radio service as of March 26th. Yay! Thank you to all our listeners who have helped us get to this point

and looking forward to be on XM Satellite Radio. Very exciting. Don't worry, we'll still be all the other places that we've been. You can find us where you find us now. And we hope more and more. We'll hope we'll have more announcements to make over the coming months, but you'll just have to wait and see, won't you? You will. Thanks, everyone.

Go out there, look up the night sky, and think about what a convenient invention chairs are. Thank you, and good night. Well, there he goes, flying by the seat of his pants again, Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society who joins us each week here on What's Up I'm not taking that sitting down

Join us next time on Planetary Radio for a return visit by astrophysicist and head of New York's Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson Have a great week, everyone.