Solar Variability and Cosmic Rays

Abstract

The Sun is a variable star, as evidenced by its 11-year sunspot cycles, but the changes in its radiative output are so small as to have no unambiguous effect on climate. Longer term variability is uncertain. Expulsion of solar matter in ‘coronal mass ejections’ produces space weather which may affect electrical devices. In the latter part of the twenty-ninth century it was discovered that the flux of neutrinos from the sun was lower that it should be. The neutrino problem was solved when it was discovered that neutrinos can change between their different forms. Satellites have shown that although the change in radiation in the visible and infra-red parts of the spectrum during the sunspot cycles is small, there are large variations in the ultraviolet. Cosmic rays are high energy particles coming in from outer space. They can interact with Earth’s atmosphere to produce carbon-14 and beryllium-10. It has been suggested that they can affect cloudiness, but detailed analysis of satellite records indicates this is not the case.

Intermezzo XIII. JOIDES History

In the last Intermezzo I gave you a brief account of how the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) got started—now I’ll recount how I got involved in it.

When JOIDES was formed in1965, I was asked to be on one of its geographic panels, that for the Gulf of Mexico. I was still full time at the University of Illinois, but had students studying the calcareous nannofossils and planktonic foraminifera of the Gulf Coast sediments in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. The Panel met during the Annual Convention of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in New Orleans. Among the things we wanted to know was: what was that strange hill, Sigsbee Knoll, doing on the flat floor of the Gulf of Mexico?

In1966, when the JOIDES proposal for an18 month drilling campaign was sent out by the National Science Foundation for review, I was one of the recipients. I called Bill Benson, who was in charge of the review at NSF, and told him I had a conflict of interest. My conflict was that if the program was funded and cores were recovered, I would want samples to examine for calcareous nannofossils. I remember that conversation very well. Bill was delighted. He told me to write a review expressing my enthusiasm, and to note my conflict of interest. It was just the sort of strongly supportive review from outside the JOIDES institutions that was needed to be able to fund such a large project in geology. The program was approved in1967, with the management office located at Scripps in La Jolla.

JOIDES had an Executive Committee, which consisted of the directors of the Oceanographic Institutions. But, of the four original institutional members, only Maurice Ewing at Lamont had a geological background. Because of their lack of expertise in the field they relied on a Planning Committee for the actual design of the program. Each of the four institutions had one member on the Planning Committee. As soon as my joint appointment with the Institute of Marine Sciences in Miami was settled in1968, I was appointed to be its representative on the JOIDES Planning Committee. That same year the University of Washington’s Department of Oceanography joined JOIDES. The other Planning Committee members were Joe Worzel (geophysicist), representing Lamont, Art Maxwell (geophysicist) for Woods Hole, Bill Riedel (paleontologist) for Scripps, and Joe Creager (sedimentologist) for Washington.

My first meeting was very exciting. The DSDP had just started operations, and had drilled several holes but recovered very little sediment. Joe Worzel had been on Leg1and gave us a firsthand account. The Project Manager at Scripps, Ken Brunot was an engineer from industry, where the objective was to ‘make hole’ not recover cores. We were meeting at Scripps, and decided we needed to urge the Institutions Director, Bill Nierenberg, to replace Ken with a scientist to oversee the program. Since it had been Bill who had decided to put an engineer should be in charge and had chosen Brunot, our meeting could turn into a difficult confrontation. Bless their hearts, my three senior colleagues elected me to the honor of telling the Director of the US’s largest oceanographic institution that he had made an unwise decision.

We invited Bill to have lunch with us at a little restaurant in La Jolla. Pleasantries were exchanged, and then I had to jump in with all four feet to make our case. Bill was obviously startled; I was a youngster, and telling him rather forcefully that he had to do something. Perhaps it was because I was someone who actually used the materials recovered on a routine basis, he listened and understood. At the end of the meeting he told us he would pass the management of the program to a scientist, but it might take some time. A few weeks later Melvin Peterson, a Scripps geochemist was appointed Project manager, and Terry Edgar Chief Scientist.

After few months later, when the Planning Committee met again, the other members dropped another bombshell on me. The project was so successful that a proposal for an extension, this time for30 months, would be needed. With a straight face, Art Maxwell explained that these jobs always fell to the youngest member of the committee. I ended writing up the proposals not only this first extension of the program, but the next two.

To us it was the Deep Sea Drilling Project. To the National Science Foundation, thanks to Bill Benson, it was the Deep Dea Drilling Program, both abbreviated ‘DSDP.’ The Program was not funded by a grant, but by a contract to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. There is an important distinction. For NSF, ‘projects’ funded by grants end when the grant period expires; ’programs‘ can be extended through amendments to the original contract. Bill had already foreseen that the DSDP was going to be a great success, and had worked to steer it down the right path from the very beginning. It could be continued through amendments to the contract.

For planning for the future I had to make a number of trips to the office at Scripps. Mel, Terry and I became close friends. The extension was made from taking proposals for drilling submitted by individuals or groups of scientists, having them evaluated and ranked by the Planning Committee, and then trying to design a ship track that achieved the largest number of high priority objectives with the least unproductive steaming time from one area to the next.

During this time, I was spending half of the year at the University of Illinois, and I made use of the best students in my oceanography class to help design the ship tracks. I’ve never told this story before, but here is how it was done: I would invite five students to dinner. They would come about5 p.m., but before we ate, which usually turned out to be closer to9 p.m., they had to solve a problem—design alternative ship tracks taking into account the proposals for drilling. The first extension was to be a global circumnavigation. I had world maps for each student, and a little Texas Instruments calculator that could determine distances between latitude/longitude points. Some were told that they could go through the Panama Canal, others that they could not use the Canal but had to use the Drake Passage to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific. One could use both. They already knew the general pattern of ocean currents, and ‘to go with the flow.’ They had to start from a Gulf Coast port. I had even checked out books on global port facilities from the library to make sure they could handle the Glomar Challenger. Bottles of wine were opened, and by dinner time I had five different solutions to the problem.

I then took three of the solutions to the next Planning Committee meeting. Two efficient ones, but going to different sites, and the least efficient one. I figured that the five member Planning Committee would have a difficult time with three competitive routes, but they could handle two. Sure enough the Committee soon figured out which was the least efficient, and threw it out so they could concentrate discussion on the other two solutions. The global circumnavigation ship-track chosen by the Committee was the one the Illinois students had agreed was best after they had finished dinner. Terry Edgar, who attended the Planning Committee meetings as a guest was delighted at having this hurdle overcome, and when I met with Mel Peterson later, he was equally impressed. I used the Illinois students to help design the next extension as well, but till now, no one ever knew.

The Chairmanship of the Planning Committee rotated every2 years, and I became Chair in1972, just as the program was about to enter a new phase, internationalization. In reality, the program had been international from its inception, including shipboard scientists from many countries to take advantage of their expertise, and others onboard as observers from countries in whose waters we would be drilling.

Bill Nierenberg was deeply involved in Republican politics, and working with the National Science Foundation was able to persuade the Nixon administration that it might be possible to expand the funding for the project to include contributions from the Soviet Union, Japan, Germany, France, and Great Britain. By1971serious approaches were made to the possible foreign partners.

In the spring of1972I was walking down a hallway in the National Science Foundation, which in those days was located on16thstreet in Washington, only a block away from the Executive Office Building and the White House Complex. A beautiful, tall woman came out of a door and looked at me. “You’re Bill Hay, aren’t you?” ”Yes” I replied. “Come into my office, I have something to show you.” She was Mary Ann Lloyd, Chief Counsel for the Foundation. She handed me the JOIDES agreement. “Have you ever read this?” I confessed I had not. She told me that it made every institution, including their parent Universities, and every individual involved in planning the program personally and collectively liable for damages should anything go wrong. “What if you make a miscalculation and have an oil spill off some country that depends on its offshore fisheries for its food. You’ve wiped out the entire nation’s livelihood. Who pays? You folks have to incorporate before we can go any further with international funding possibilities. We need to be sure that the liability ends up with the Foundation and United States Government.” I had a good idea of what she was talking about; as Chair of the Planning Committee I now served on the Pollution Prevention and Safety Panel and considering disaster scenarios was its business.

The next week was the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in my home town, Dallas. I flew to Dallas and asked my father if I could use our family lawyer, Ed Smith, to check on a little matter. Monday morning I handed him the JOIDES agreement to look over. I told him that the National Science Foundation’s Counsel thought it had liability implications. I left it with him and went off to the Convention. A few hours later I was paged. Ed Smith needed me to call him right away. I returned his call. “Bill, you don’t have anything to do with this organization do you?” “Yes I’m the Chairman of the Planning Committee that is responsible for the program.” Silence. I’ll never forget what he said next. “Bill, how long would it take for you to get out of that position?” His interpretation of the original JOIDES agreement was the same as Mary Ann Lloyd’s. Everybody was liable for everything.

A few minutes later I saw Manik Talwani, who had replaced Maurice Ewing as Director of Lamont, and just happened to be the Chair of the JOIDES Executive Committee. I told him about the situation. He laughed, “Lawyers are always looking for something to do. I’m sure its not a problem, but I’ll have our lawyers take a look when I get back”.

A week or so later Manik called a special meeting of the JOIDES Executive Committee, and explained the situation. Walton Smith asked me to represent Miami at the meeting. Manik explained that we had to have a corporation to relieve our institutions and ourselves of liability. Within a matter of weeks the corporation was formed: Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI, Inc.) to be located in Washington, D.C. JOI immediately contracted with JOIDES to provide the scientific advice for the drilling program. In case of a disaster, the buck stopped with JOI and NSF. The road was clear for making overtures to other countries.