How Federal Cuts Hampered West Alaska’s Storm Forecasts

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday, I’m Ira Flatow. Later in the hour, the promise of AI-powered drug development, and why it hasn’t lived up to the hype so far. But first, residents of Western Alaska are recovering from record setting flooding from the remnants of typhoon Halong. The storm left at least one confirmed dead and displaced thousands of residents, with officials still trying to assess the damage from the storms and flooding.

Joining me now with more on the storms and other stories from the week in science is Maggie Koerth, science journalist and climate and weather editor for CNN. Welcome back, Maggie. Congratulations.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Thanks so much. I’m really liking this new job.

IRA FLATOW: The storm was devastating, but you have a story about how the disaster may have been made worse by government cuts. Tell me about that.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, so back in February, Elon Musk’s DOGE made all those cuts to staffing at federal agencies, and that included the National Weather Service. And this week, Andrew Friedman, who’s one of the reporters that I’m working with at CNN, he found evidence that these layoffs had reduced the accuracy of forecasts in Alaska during that big storm, and it all kind of ties around weather balloons.

The Weather Service is, typically, sending up two times a day balloons from these stations all over the country. They collect information on wind speed and direction, air temperature, humidity. All of that goes into building weather models and forecasts.

And it turns out that those cuts to staffing meant that coastal Alaska had several stations where only one balloon a day was going up, and two of them where balloon flights had been completely canceled.

IRA FLATOW: Wow, completely canceled?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, they just weren’t getting that data at all. So we know now that there’s this reduction in balloon flights, we know that the model predicting the path of the storm was wrong about where the worst would hit. The model predicted that the worst of the storm would be hitting in the Bering Strait. And instead, you had those 100 mile per hour winds that were crashing into these villages that were much further South.

Now, we can’t prove that the lack of the data caused a poor forecast. But mainly, we can’t prove that because what scientists use to see how much weather balloon data contributed to a forecast, the way they do that is to run the model with the balloon data and, again, without it. And in this case, we never had the balloon data to begin with.

[SIGHS]

IRA FLATOW: So I want to move on to other weather and climate related news. There’s signs from coral that we’re nearing or at a climate tipping point. Tell me about that.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, so scientists have warned for decades that hotter the planet gets, the more likely we are to hit these points where natural systems start changing drastically in ways that are unstoppable and irreversible. And there’s a new international report out on global tipping points that says we have crossed one of these thresholds.

For more than a year, the planet has been experiencing temperatures higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial averages. It looks like that’s going to become a norm faster than expected. And along with all of that warming has come hotter oceans and unprecedented die off of coral reefs. These 160 researchers from around the world who collaborated on this report say that these coral reefs have passed a point of no return.

IRA FLATOW: So that when they’re gone, they’re gone?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. Now, the good news is that it doesn’t mean that all reefs everywhere are dying off instantaneously. Because there was another paper out this month that actually found good news about the reefs in the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba. There has been major heat waves there for four Summers in a row. Water has gotten much hotter, but the corals have not experienced a mass bleaching event. They’re staying resilient. And, you’re talking about five different species, all surviving heatwaves.

IRA FLATOW: So maybe we can figure out what species those are, and then move them around the world where corals are dying off.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, we’ll figure out what’s helping them out.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. All right, let’s move on to our next topic. There’s an update on our planet’s magnetic field. Please don’t tell me it’s going away.

MAGGIE KOERTH: No, it’s not, but there is a weak spot in the magnetic field. And I did not know this, but it is a real thing. It is called the South Atlantic anomaly. It’s off the Coast of Brazil. Researchers have apparently known about this since the 19th century. And this is kind of like a divot in this spot. The boundary of the magnetic field is only about 120 miles above the planet’s surface instead of 400 miles, which is the average.

And in that zone, the main thing that you see is problems for satellites. The field is what protects them from space radiation. So when they’re traveling over that spot, there’s a heightened risk of electrical disruption, hardware damage, all that kind of stuff.

IRA FLATOW: Do we know what’s happening on the ground? Is there a rock outcropping or something that affects the magnetic field?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Not something you can see. It’s actually under the ground. So you have the magnetic field generated by the planet’s outer core, which is liquid iron 1900 miles below the surface.

IRA FLATOW: Sloshing around there–

MAGGIE KOERTH: Washing around.

IRA FLATOW: –making a magnetic field. Yeah.

MAGGIE KOERTH: And so the magnetic field spreads outward from the core, usually. But there are spots where it’s kind of like looping back in on itself instead of flowing out the way it should, and that makes weak spots. This one is growing. It’s kind of like creeping towards Africa.

And there’s other spots where get one thing on one side of the planet, and a corresponding response on the other side. So since 2014, there’s a growing weak spot over Canada and a growing strong spot over Siberia.

IRA FLATOW: A lot of downer news today. I need something a little lighter. You flagged a story for us about how we smell. And I’m not talking about our body odors here.

MAGGIE KOERTH: No, no, how we smell other things. So olfactory receptors are these proteins. They’re in our nasal cavities. They detect smell at a chemical level, like kind of how you have the taste receptors on your tongue. And what is interesting about this is that we have about 400 different kinds of receptors, but we can smell almost infinite types of odors, and at really low concentrations.

So it’s a cool thing. Scientists want to study it more. But it’s been hard because you can’t really get the lab research cell lines to express the genes for functioning as olfactory receptors, until now. These researchers at a Swiss flavorings company figured out how to do that, and they’ve started using those cells in the lab. And they are finding evidence that contradicts the model of how smell works that won a Nobel Prize back in 2004.

IRA FLATOW: Whoa. Fill me in a little bit more.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, OK, so the basic idea is that you’ve got these 400 different kinds of receptors, and they’re working together to pick up different parts of a single smell molecule at a chemical basis. And then, the patterns of receptors and chemical scents gets interpreted by the brain as this system, like you’re remembering patterns.

And it’s all a little hand-wavy. And it’s been hard to test because, again, the receptors didn’t work in vitro.

IRA FLATOW: Sure.

MAGGIE KOERTH: These Swiss researchers, now that they’re able to do the tests, are finding that there are some scent molecules that are activating a single receptor. So like patchouli, you have a scent receptor for patchouli.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. And so that upsets what we’ve thought over the years about how we smell.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, instead of having this system that is these networks that are broken down by different chemical parts of a smell, you’ve got one receptor just the same way that you have sweet and salty and sour on your tongue. And it doesn’t work that way for all smells, but it definitely seems to work for some. This all still needs to be confirmed, but it’s really fascinating and weird and I am looking forward to learning more.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, one on one. That is interesting. So let’s move to a related topic from smell to taste. You have the archeology of ancient chewing gum. I need to know this, Maggie.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, so what we’re talking about is birch bark tar. Taking hunks of birch bark and boiling it down until you get this thick goo. And researchers find these 6,000 year old spat out lumps of the stuff at Stone Age European sites.

They also find it attached to bits of pottery and other things that people are trying to stick together. So it’s kind of part super glue, part gum, and it carries traces of DNA in it. And these researchers have looked at 30 samples of the tar. Some of it was coming from just spat out lumps. Some of it was coming from pottery. Some of it was coming from spears and arrows and tools that were kind of being connected to shafts.

And nine different archaeological sites near Alpine lakes, where bones and teeth don’t usually last. So these are DNA samples that we otherwise would not have from these peoples. They were able to get 19 samples, and were able to identify biological sex from 16 of them. And they found these really interesting things that point to aspects of culture.

So all four of the samples that were from tools had been chewed by males. All three of the samples from pottery had been chewed by females. Some pieces of gum had been chewed by multiple people.

IRA FLATOW: Multiple sharing. They were sharing gum.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, so that’s apparently a thing people were doing 6,000 years ago in Switzerland.

IRA FLATOW: Well, I don’t feel so bad now.

MAGGIE KOERTH: No, right. And it’s just a really interesting direction for future research, and a way to learn about how people lived and what gross things they were up to.

IRA FLATOW: Always great to have you, Maggie. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Thanks so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Maggie Koerth, science journalist and climate and weather editor now for CNN.

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