The Star - News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area

As we begin a new year, I thought it relevant to consider our home planet — Earth. Maybe, like you, when I view images being obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope it validates a personal observation: Earth is inconsequential in the totality of Space. Our limited scientific knowledge offers a hypothesis; there could be other planets in other universes that can support life forms. Humans have visited the Moon, and they will again. Now, there are proposals to visit Mars. Both require life support systems so one can simply survive in those hostile environments. Yet, we are still bound to Earth, our home planet.

This past November, the human population of Earth reached 8 billion. The life support system that Earth provides makes that possible. A breathable and protective atmosphere, protective magnetic fields, water, cultivatable soils, sunlight for photosynthesis, and many chemical compositions. All this allows us, along with an estimated 8.7 billion species of plants and animals, to exist.

Humanity will continue to experience life threats here on Earth. Pandemics, plagues, famine, cholera, flu and so on, have taken millions of lives, the most recent pandemic being COVID-19. World wars and enormous natural disasters take great tolls too. The actions of humanity take a toll on those 8.7 billion species of plants and animals we share Earth with. The continual loss of biodiversity and habitat brought by human activity is at a critical stage globally.

We also know the weight of Earth. Scientists recently announced new prefixes to express the largest and smallest weights. Richard Brown, head of meteorology at the United Kingdom National Physical Laboratory shared a number with one of those new prefixes. “If we think about mass, instead of distance, the Earth weighs approximately six ronnagrams, which is a six followed by 27 zeroes (6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).”

The new, official prefixes “ronna” and “quetta” represent the largest and “ronto” and “quecto” the smallest. They are now listed with all the other prefixes like kilo and milli. The surface area of Earth, land and water, is 196.9 million square miles. About 71 percent is water surface.

All cultures have unique Earth creation stories. Scientists estimate Earth formed over a number of phases and some billions of years. Earth and its climate have witnessed bombardment from asteroids, global scale volcanism, continental shifts, massive cooling ice-ages and huge changes in solar radiation. Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have studied and found, using a mathematical analysis, that Earth has a stabilizing mechanism that dampens atmospheric temperature swings. What does that mean regarding current climate change? Constantin Arnscheidt of MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, states that it means little. “On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled through this stabilizing feedback. But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.”

Cataclysmic events on Earth have seriously impacted living organisms. Our science has helped humanity stave off massive human losses. Writing about these things has me reflecting on a brilliant science fiction book called “Earth Abides.” The author is George R. Stewart. The book was published in 1949. It is about global-scale devastation and how the protagonist faces the challenges, tests, and ongoing suffering of a shattered life. The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle states that Jimi Hendrix was a great fan of Sci-Fi. “Earth Abides” was a favorite book of his. The book inspired the Hendrix song “Third Stone from The Sun.” As we enter this new year, consider Earth, it is the ultimate work of e--ART--h.

Here is the review of weather data for December 2022. Again, all data are from my personal home weather station. Temperature high was 45.4˚F on the 27th, low was -5˚F on the 22nd and the mean was 22.6˚. The all-time high for December is 66˚F in 2021. The all-time low was a -16 back in 1968, and the all-time mean is 29.3˚. Precipitation for December was 3.19 inches. The mean is 1.38 inches. The all-time wettest December is 3.44 inches in 1996. I measured 10.9 inches of snowfall with a water content of 1.32 inches. The all-time largest snowfall for December is 27.8 inches back in 1964, and the all-time mean is 4.8 inches.

Now, let’s look at weather data for calendar year 2022. Once again, all data sets are from my home weather station. The high temperature was 109.1˚ in July. We had two lows in the minus category, -1.8˚ in January, and -5˚ in December. The wettest months were June, with 2.56 inches; and December, with 3.19 inches. There are some decent numbers for precipitation. Snowfall for the year was a total of 36.6 inches. Total precipitation was 12.79 inches, 3.45 inches of which was snow water. All my precipitation and snowfall measurements are done manually. A manual rain gauge is used for capturing rain. Snowfall, while snow is on the ground, is measured using a designated spot for a snowboard.