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Science In Action: 25/02/2011

25/02/2011

BBC World Service - Science In Action, 25/02/2011

A new way of rating the destruction and devastation of earthquakes - PAGER

Rating earthquakes; Kepler Space Telescope; Johannes Kepler- Europe's robotic space freighter; How tiny sea creatures collected by Captain Scott lock up carbon in the oceans

Rating earthquakes
Geologists and seismologists have come up with a new way to rate the destructive power of earthquakes.  The current Movement Magnitude Scale, which rated this week's earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand as a 6.3, does not illustrate the likely death tolls and economic losses.  But the PAGER system – Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response, which has been devised by the US Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Centre, takes into account, not only the strength of the earthquake, but also where it has struck, how close to the surface, the state of the infrastructure and buildings, the population and even the time of day.  All factors that can have an impact on the amount of devastation and damage and help response teams to co-ordinate their efforts better.


Kepler Space Telescope
NASA's search for extrasolar planets, using the massive Kepler Space Telescope, is starting to reveal that there are many more Earth-sized, suitably temperate planets in our Galaxy than we first thought.  Science in Action visits the people who made the telescope and discovers that it is not only looking for new stars and planets, but also listening to them using astro-seismology.


Johannes Kepler Space Freighter
The European Space Agency's sophisticated space freighter, Johannes Kepler, has successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS).   The unmanned robotic tanker has delivered fuel, food, air, and equipment to the station's astronauts.

It is totally automatic and one of the freighter's main tasks in the coming months will be to raise the altitude of the station.  The ISS has a tendency to fall back to Earth over time as it drags through the top of the atmosphere.  Every few weeks the freighter will use its thrusters to accelerate the platform, taking it further out.


Carbon storage by tiny ocean sea creatures
Over a century ago the explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott led the first Discovery expedition to the Antarctic.  At the time, he may not have realised that the samples of tiny sea creatures, called Bryozoans, that he collected, could tell modern scientists about how the oceans trap and store carbon.  Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey in the UK have been comparing modern samples of these branching sea creatures with museum samples and the samples collected by Scott.  By tracking their development over the century, they are learning about how they could be trapping and storing carbon on the sea bed and thus taking it out of the atmosphere.

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