Let’s start thinking about water!

Evolution of the climate forcing during the two years after the Hunga Tonga‐Hunga Ha’apai eruption

Like walking past the open doors of Neiman Marcus in downtown Dallas in August, volcanic eruptions can temporarily cool the atmosphere. Dust and ash spewed into the upper reaches of the atmosphere act as trillions of tiny parasols, shading the planet from incoming solar radiation. This shading quickly ebbs over the ensuing years as those particles slowly parachute back to the surface. However, the 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga‐Hunga Ha’apai east of Australia also spewed a great deal of water vapor—a greenhouse gas—due to its location below the waves of the Pacific Ocean.

 Scientists have pointed to Hunga Tonga, along with a heat-dumping El Niño and new particulate pollution regulations, as a potential contributor to spiking global temperatures over the past couple of years. However, Schoeberl and chums show that Hunga Tonga is actually cooling the planet, not warming it (Andrew Dessler with Texas A&M is the anchor chum [if you’re looking for a deeper-than-Wikipedia understanding of climate change, his book Introduction to Climate Change is quite good). They confirmed that Hunga Tonga provided a touch of initial warming; however, over the two years since and overall, Hunga Tonga has cooled the planet. In short, Hunga Tonga spewed both aerosols (tiny parasols) and water vapor, but the tiny parasols provided more cooling than the water vapor cooked.

Monitoring of ground subsidence using PS-InSAR technique in the Southeast Texas Region

I have an affinity for these Houston-area land subsidence papers because some folks in the area are, for some odd reason, subsidence deniers (perhaps it’s sort of an “I prefer to lift people up instead of pulling them down” thing). Actually, I think I do know the reason: $$$. Addressing land subsidence affects the cost of water since alternative sources need to be found, and those alternative sources are expensive. So here’s yet another study showing that land subsidence is occurring in a broader area than Harris, Galveston, and Fort Bend counties.

Nur and compadres used satellite data (Persistence Scatterer Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar [PS-InSAR]) to estimate subsidence between January 2020 and March 2023. They found that greater Houston’s northwestern and eastern parts are sinking with rates as high as 8 inches per decade. The area from Katy through southern Montgomery County is sinking at a rate of 4 to 8 inches per decade. They show that their results correlate with spot measurements of land subsidence and groundwater production. It also appears that denying land subsidence doesn’t stop it. Go figure.

U–Pb calcite dating reveals the origin of a 600 km-long intraplate fault: The Balcones Fault System of Texas

Folks from south of Dallas through Waco, Killeen, Austin, San Antonio, and Del Rio live on the Balcones Fault Zone, which marks a continental divide that used to be marked by a mountain range. When the Rocky Mountains formed and lifted the area out of the sea, the roots of the old mountain range acted like the fulcrum of a continental teetertotter where everything west rose, and everything east sank. Hippolyte and peeps used uranium-lead dating to assess the timing of this faulting. They found that the faulting started 45 to 61 million years ago, much earlier than previously thought. Once the Rockies formed and began eroding, the sediments that landed east of the fulcrum caused rock layers to slip toward the coast, thus creating the Balcones Fault Zone.