Ig Nobel Prizes

The Ig Nobel Prizes is an annual award ceremony that parodies the Nobel Prizes. This year's ceremony will be held Thursday evening at Harvard University. The ceremony is orchestrated by Improbable Research an organization devoted to "research that makes people laugh and then think". The Awards have run the gamut of absurdity from the 2007 Medicine Prize which went to a group of researchers for their paper entitled, "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects" to the 2006 Ornithology Prize which went to scientists who explored and explained why woodpeckers don't get headaches. Since the first ceremony in 1991 several awards have been (loosely) related to Earth science. Here are a few highlights.

The 2001 ASTROPHYSICS Award went to
Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. [REFERENCE: The March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the "Jack Van Impe Presents" program. (at about the 12 minute mark).]

The 2000 PHYSICS Award went to
Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University (UK), for using magnets to levitate a frog. [REFERENCE: "Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons" by M.V. Berry and A.K. Geim, European Journal of Physics, v. 18, 1997, p. 307-13.]

The 1999 SCIENCE EDUCATION Award went to
The Kansas State Board of Education and the Colorado State Board of Education, for mandating that children should not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution any more than they believe in Newton's theory of gravitation, Faraday's and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Pasteur's theory that germs cause disease.

The 1997 ASTRONOMY Award went to
Richard Hoagland of New Jersey, for identifying artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the moon. [REFERENCE: "The Monuments of Mars : A City on the Edge of
Forever," by Richard C. Hoagland, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA,1996.]

The 1997 METEOROLOGY Award went to
Bernard Vonnegut of the State University of Albany, for his revealing report, "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed." [Published in "Weatherwise," October 1975, p. 217.]

The 1996 BIODIVERSITY Award went to
Chonosuke Okamura of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan, for discovering the fossils of dinosaurs, horses, dragons, princesses, and more than 1000 other extinct "mini-species," each of which is less than 1/100 of an inch in length. [REFERENCE: the series "Reports of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory," published by
the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan during the 1970's and 1980's.]

The 1994 CHEMISTRY Award went to
Texas State Senator Bob Glasgow, wise writer of logical legislation, for sponsoring the 1989 drug control law which made it illegal to purchase beakers, flasks, test tubes, or other laboratory glassware without a permit.

For a full list of past winners and links to the above cited research, click here. The Ig Nobel Prizes have been covered by a number of reputable news organizations over the years including: the Wall Street Journal [video], the Chronicle [video], MSNBC [video], Reader's Digest, Nature Network, ABC News [video], Newsweek(1,2,3,4), CBS News (video and commentary), Wired News, Nature, the BBC, and Popular Science. We'll have to see on Thursday who are this year's Earth science winners and what the media is saying about them.

The Great Garbage Patch

The great garbage patch, also called the Pacific garbage patch, is a large-scale system of rotating marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean estimated to be twice the size of Texas. The garbage patch has received a lot of attention from the news media recently due to several related stories released in the last few months. First, large patches of debris in the Atlantic Ocean were originally thought to have been from the missing Air France plane that crashed in June, but ended up being part of an Atlantic Ocean garbage patch. The confusion drew attention to the even larger Pacific garbage patch. More recently, in August, a group of students and researchers collected samples of plastic floating in the North Pacific Ocean during a three-week expedition. Several news organizations covered the expedition including LA Times and Associated Press. The research team, SEAPLEX (Seeking the Science of the Garbage Patch) has their own blog and website that should keep us posted as the team begins to analyze their data. Drawing further news coverage to the garbage patch, a research study was released in August that reports that plastic breaks down in the ocean much faster than we originally thought. This means that not only do we need to worry about the plastic (and garbage) that we see in the ocean, but also the plastic we can't see. If we include tiny bits of dissolved plastic, the garbage patch might be even larger than has been predicted. The study was was covered by BBC News and was featured in an Op-Ed in the New York Times.

The existence of the garbage patch was first predicted in 1988 after scientists found large amounts of garbage circulating in the Pacific Ocean. Their results suggested that similar patches of garbage could be found in other parts of the Ocean with similar currents. Although the size of this debris is estimated to be twice the size of Texas, the exact size is unknown. We'll have to keep an eye on the SEAPLEX research team's analysis to see if they are able to develop a better estimate of the garbage patch's size and whether that estimate will take into account tiny, dissolved bits of plastic.

Welcome!

Welcome ENVA 050 students to the Earth Science in the News blog site. On this site you’ll find a compilation of Earth science topics that have been recently covered by news media sites and commentary on those topics and coverage. Check back regularly for postings by myself, Dr. Kate Meierdiercks, and your classmates. And I look forward to reading your posting(s).