Science Friday - Evidence For Liquid Water On Mars | Making Campsite Booking Fairer

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Data from the Mars InSight lander points to the presence of liquid water underneath its crust. Also, some national and state parks are changing the way they open up campsite reservations online to make them more accessible to everyone.Scientists Find Strong Evidence For Liquid Water On MarsScientists discovered that there could be oceans’ worth of liquid water hidden underneath Mars’ surface. More than 3 billion years ago, Mars had lakes, rivers, and maybe even oceans on its surface. It was very different from the arid red planet we know today.But the question remains—when Mars’ atmosphere changed, where did all that water go? This discovery could offer up new clues and possibly spur on the search for life on Mars.Ira talks with Maggie Koerth, science writer and editorial lead for Carbon Plan, about this discovery and other science news of the week, including why the WHO declared mpox a global health emergency, the microbiome of your microwave, a green-boned dinosaur named Gnatalie, and how love is in the air for brown tarantulas.Releasing Campsite Reservations In Waves Makes Booking FairerBack in 2022, Science Friday discussed how campsites in state and national parks were virtually impossible to reserve, unless you had a lot of time on your hands and knew exactly when those reservations were going online. Research had shown that the people able to reserve these sites were often wealthy, educated, and white, leaving lots of other people out of the fun of camping.But two years later, the same team that found those results says there’s good news: Many state and federal campgrounds have changed how their booking windows work, and as a result, camping has become more equitable.For example, Saddlehorn Campground near Grand Junction, Colorado, was identified as a campground with an inequitable reservation system in a 2022 study. After its publication, campground managers reached out to the study authors to see how they could do better.“They’ve created what I would call the gold standard in an equitable recreation rationing spectrum for these campsites,” said Dr. Will Rice, assistant professor of outdoor recreation and wildland management at the University of Montana in Missoula.This method is to release campsites in waves: Some become available six months in advance, some two weeks in advance, and some day-of. This allows more flexibility for people to book, and is an easy fix on the part of the campgrounds.Rice joins Ira Flatow to talk about these advancements. Since his first appearance on Science Friday, Rice has testified before Congress about the importance of camping reservation equity, and has helped both federal and state campgrounds change their booking reservation windows.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Is getting a spot at a campground harder than getting Beyonce concert tickets? The demand's still there, but we've had some really cool breakthroughs in improving equity in terms of how those limited permits are distributed across the public. It's Friday, August 16th, better known as Science Friday. I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. Camping can be a blast, a chance to get out in nature, sleep under the stars, eat those little dehydrated food packets. but actually getting a campsite at a state or national park can be really competitive. The good news, lots of sites are changing how that booking process works, making the whole thing a whole lot more equitable.

We'll talk about that story in just a little bit, but first, here's Ira Flato with the biggest science stories of the week. Exciting space news, new evidence suggests, there could be oceans worth of liquid water hidden underneath's Mars surface, More than three billion years ago, Mars had lakes and rivers and maybe even oceans on its surface. It was a very different place from the arid red planet we know today. But the question remains, when Mars's atmosphere changed, where did all that water go? This discovery could offer up new clues and maybe spur on the search for life on Mars.

Here with this story and more science news is Megah Kerth, science writer and editorial lead for carbon plan based in Minneapolis. Welcome back. Maggie, always good to talk to you. It's always good to be here. Yeah, get into the water with us, so to speak. This is so interesting because it's data that's coming from NASA's Mars Insight Lander. The mission for that ended back in 2022, but the data collected by that equipment is what is feeding this study now. So the lander's job was to listen for earthquakes, and it clocked more than 1,300 of them over the course of four years. And by documenting the speed at which seismic waves are traveling through a planet,

you can tell what kinds of materials the waves are moving through. And so it's that data from insight that is suggesting that deep below the surface of Mars, the seismic waves are moving through liquid water. How deep below and how much water are we talking about? Well, we are talking about six to 12 miles under the surface. This is kind of the same technique that people use to find liquid water and like oil and gas on Earth. So it's a pretty trustworthy concept. And Insight isn't a rover. So it's only looking like right underneath of itself. But the scientists suspect that similar patches would exist all over the planet. So if they're extrapolating from that, they estimate that there could be more water down there now than existed in those Martian oceans

billions of years ago enough to cover the whole surface of that planet to the depth of a mile. Wow, wow. Just to be clear, they haven't actually found water, just signs of it, right? Yeah, yeah, just like this seismic data that suggests that there is water down there. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we're always looking for signs of water on Mars. And people think about, well, when we find it may be, It will help space travel, but that's a real leap, so to speak.

There's a lot of extrapolation that's happening from this one point. But it's really interesting. And this is something that life depends on. So it also means that if there is life on Mars, it's probably deep underground. Ooh, I like that. All right. Let's move on to other space news. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, also known as NIST, came up with a plan.

And I love this idea to tell Tom. on the moon. I mean, we have to know how to tell time on the moon. We're going there a lot. What's the story on this? Okay. So to set this up, we have to start off with a really mind-blowing fact that's not the actual news. So bear with me. Time moves faster at higher altitudes. Like literally the GPS satellites up in the atmosphere and like the clocks at sea level are have time moving at different rates. and that happens because of physics and the old theory of relativity, but basically a planet's gravity well slows down time, the deeper you get into that.

So, again, that's not the news. That's just, wow, news. Yeah, it is. Cool. But it's something that we have to account for all the time on Earth. So then think about what happens on the moon, this object with a much lower gravitational field than Earth. And so if you want clocks on the Earth and clock, on the moon to stay in sync, you've got a problem. Like right now, the scientists think that clocks on

the moon would tick about 56 microseconds a day faster than those on Earth, which isn't much, but it matters if you're trying to, like, you know, have human habitation there, have technology be synchronized between the two. Right, right. And you need it for figuring out where you're going to land your spacecraft and things like that. Exactly. And so that brings us back to this actual news. So NIST, what they have done is work out the math that would make it possible to synchronize time on the earth and the moon, this extremely crucial thing to establishing any kind of human base or even just permanent technological infrastructure. What do we call it moon time? We could. In fact, lunar standard time would be a pretty good thing to call it. And the paper is,

it's mostly a math paper. So John Timord Arstekica counted 55 equations. in the paper itself and another 67 in the appendices. So if you were really into equations, go check this paper out. It's definitely going to satisfy. Let's go back to Earth and the WHO declaring M-Pox the virus previously known as a monkeypox as a global emergency. What's happening? Yeah.

So the 2022 M-Pox outbreak in Europe and the United States, that was a pretty mild thing. Less than 1% of the people who were infected died. And it was pretty quickly brought under control with vaccines. But there's a very different scenario playing out in the Congo and nearby countries in Africa right now. And the situation is severe enough that you're getting this global health emergency happening. So what led to this outbreak? Do we know? We don't know exactly what led to the outbreak, but there's two big differences and two big problems that are happening. The first is that Mpox, this one, is called Clayd One.

And it's really different from what we experienced two years ago. which is called clade two. The clade one, impox that's spreading in Congo now, appears to have a death rate of between three and four percent. More than 500 people have died. Almost all of them have been children,

which is another big contrast to how it was spreading two years ago. And while that virus from two years ago was causing really noticeable lesions on hands and chests and feet, this one is kind of slipping under the radar a little bit because the lesions are often just on the genitals and people can go unnoticed, spreading it around through close contact without anyone

knowing that there's a sick person moving around. But one of the big problems here also is just resources. Congo and the other countries that are affected, they don't have the vaccine access that the West did two years ago. In fact, when the U.S. had pledged to send about 60,000 doses of vaccine to Congo and Nigeria back in April, and none of that's arrived yet. And Congolese officials are asking for 4 million doses to actually try to contain this outbreak. So declaring the emergency is kind of the whose way of drawing attention and action from wealthy countries, basically saying if you don't contain this now, it's going to become a global problem. And that's something we're already seeing some signs of this week because Sweden identified a case of Claydwan M-Pox in a person who

had recently traveled to parts of Africa where the M-Pox is spreading. All right. Let's move, pivot to some less existential news because I love this new study out that's describing the microbiome of the beloved microwave oven. Yeah. Well, is this less existential? I don't know. I mean, the prevailing wisdom on microwaves is that they're killing bacteria. Like, you use the oven. It's sterilizing itself. And that's unfortunately not true. So researchers from the University of Valencia in. in Spain found whole colonies of extremophiles, those hard living bacteria that we normally associate with things like Antarctic ice and underwater thermal vents. And they're just happily living inside your microwave oven. Yeah, because they've survived when everything else has been killed off, right?

They're self-selecting inside your oven. Exactly. You know, they swabbed 30 microwaves. Some of them were from home settings. Some were from industrial kitchens. somewhere from research labs, and they found 101 bacterial strains that were growing in the petri dishes. So this includes bacteria that are usually found in human skin.

And it includes bacteria associated with foodborne illness. Wow. Wow. Take away. Get in there and clean your microwave. Yep. I did as soon as I read this. Let's wind down with some critter news.

In first case, there's a dinosaur with green bones. I never heard of that before. Oh, this is so cool. So National Geographic ran a big story about a sauropod specimen that is going to be going on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. And this had photos of these bones, and some of the bones are green. Like they're kind of this gray green like the sea and in a couple of places, this really gorgeous, almost bottle green.

What it turns out is that the scientists think it's from minerals, from hydrothermal vents, that when these fossils were being created, they got mineralized with just the, with things that were coming out of these hydrothermal vents and it happened to have color to it. It's just a random luck of the draw, but it is absolutely gorgeous. And the story is really fascinating also. You know, we're talking about scientists discovering the first bone sticking out of a bluff in Utah in 2007. And then just a decade of digging all of these pieces out because this was a site where dozens of different species got swept into kind of an almost 12-car pile-up of fossils by ancient rivers. So they had to like piece all of this out. And the sauropod specimen is named Natalie with a G after the swarms of bugs that were driving them crazy while they were doing all of this. How cool is that, Natalie with a G? Lastly, it's almost mating season, I understand, for the large, fuzzy, maybe not so cuddly brown tarantula.

Tell us about that. Yeah, well, from August to October, these four-inch-wide, hairy spiders are going to be crawling around in the old. open in eight states looking for someone to love, preferably another spider. Yeah, hopefully. Are these dangerous to us? Not really. The scientists say that one of the nice things about tarantulas is that they're too big to just like accidentally slip inside of your house under a doorframe. So they're unlikely to be in there. And they can bite you, but they're more likely to just run away. And what states, if I wanted to find them, I mean, should I be looking at?

Yeah, well, if you want to see a bunch of tarantulas getting it on, I would recommend Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, which all have populations of these spiders. And the males are going to start coming out of the boroughs that they normally spend most of their time in and traveling around, they'll mate with up to 100 females in one season. Maggie, always a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to be here. Maggie Kerth, science writer and editorial lead for Carbon Plan based in Minneapolis.

We've got a good news update for you on a story we covered two years ago. If you remember back in 2022, we discussed how campsites in state and national parks were virtually impossible to reserve, unless you had a lot of time on your hands, you knew exactly when those reservations were going online, not an easy thing to do. And the people who were able to reserve those sites are often wealthy, educated, and white leaving lots of other people out of the fun of camping.

But guess what? Two years later, the same team that found these initial results says there's good news. Many state and federal campgrounds have changed, have their booking windows work. And as a result, camping has become a more equitable activity. Here with me now to give us an update is my guest, Dr. Will Rice, Assistant Professor of Outdoor Recreation and Wildland Management at the University of Montana in Missoula.

Welcome back. Thanks, Ira. Thanks for having me back. You know, Will, last time you were here, you said something unbelievable that getting a campsite at a national park was harder than getting Beyonce tickets. Is that still the case? Yeah, I mean, I guess we get updated to 2024 and say Taylor Swift tickets. But yeah, the demand's still there. but as you mentioned, we've had some really cool breakthroughs in improving equity in terms of how those limited permits are distributed across the public.

For a few years now, you've been proposing changes to campground reservation rules. Tell us about them, how would they make things more equitable? Yeah, so when our original research came out in 2022, we were asked by policymakers and managers, like you've presented us with this data, what should we do to help amend this issue? And so we proposed a few different things. The one that's gotten the most traction is the recreation rationing spectrum, which is a management paradigm where you don't just have a single booking window. Traditionally in campgrounds, it's like six months in advance, but you have multiple booking windows. So people at different preferences and needs and lifestyles are able to book maybe two weeks in advance or two months in advance or day of as opposed to just a single booking window.

And that's got a lot of traction nationally. Yeah, that's like the concert tickets. they release a certain block of tickets later on, right? That's the beauty of it. It's a simple idea. And it's been shown in hotels, concerts. The private sector's been doing this for a while. And what's really cool is we can then collect data to optimize those booking windows for people's constraints.

Well, let's keep going with the concert analogy because where you have concerts, you have ticket scalpers. I mean, were there campground scalpers, too, people selling off their prime campgrounds. spots. Yeah, there's anecdotal discussions of that. My grad students and I have been in campgrounds all over the U.S. collecting data this summer. And we talked to campground hosts who tell us about that, you know, things going on Facebook marketplace and that sort of thing. But really, the larger issue is just getting that permit initially. And this isn't exclusive to campgrounds, right? Like people who golf and municipal golf clubs, you know, are well aware of these same phenomenon's happening. It's, It's just tough when it's a public resource because traditionally we use price to allocate and ration

goods, right? Like any private goods ration by price, but we can't do that with these public goods. We have to come up with creative solutions. All right. Then let's talk about the successful solutions you have found. Which campgrounds have made changes to their booking windows? Yeah. So I often point to Saddlehorn Campground in Colorado National Monument just outside Grand Junction,

Colorado. This is a campground we studied in that breakthrough study in 2022 and found some inequities in how these campsites were being allocated. And the superintendent reached out, saw our research, and said, hey, we want to do better and has followed through and created really what I would call the gold standard in an equitable recreation rasting spectrum for these campsites. So at Saddlehorn Campground, they release some campsites six months in advance, some two weeks in advance and some day of. And it's really a first come for the 21st century as you can monitor those first come for serve campsites from your smartphone to see if there's any availability. So if you're driving on I-90 on a cross-country road trip, you can stop in and spend the night as well.

One of your, one of your aims was to increase diversity among who gets the pleasure of camping. Did that happen? And how do you know that? Yeah. So it's all of these kind of natural experiences, that are happening across states and federal campgrounds. We're collecting data on it right now. So we'll see if this yields the diversity and the reduced constraints that we theorize it will. So we're actively collecting data on that. And so maybe in a year or so we'll be able to have the data to talk through some of those

and how we might improve these systems moving forward. Any way to give us a hint right now about which campsites we should be looking at? Yeah, for sure. So in the state of Montana, for instance, we have. legislation that passed through our legislature and was signed by our governor recently that overhauled campsite rationing in accordance to a recreation rationing spectrum. So we have some sites available first come for serve that were not previously available first come for serve so that locals are able to access these resources that potentially

they really heavily rely on for outdoor recreation access. And so we can monitor who's camping in those campsites. are those locals who, from an environmental justice perspective, might be really reliant on those natural resources for their well-being if they're able to access those. So state of Montana, state of California, state of Minnesota, all have changed rules. Some do to kind of administrative rulemaking in California and Montana. It's through actual legislation in both cases passing unanimously, which really tells me there's a lot of support for this.

First come for a serve. Hey, what a radical idea. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's coming back. I think, and we can update it to kind of fit the, and potentially even improve it using technology such as recreation.gov that you can monitor these things real time. I know that as a scientist, you've got to be really excited about seeing these changes happening so fast. I mean, did that surprise you how quickly they changed? Yeah, I mean, often we publish these papers and they're read by our colleagues and a relatively small field. like mine out to recreation research. It's read by, you know, a handful of folks across the country and globally. And, you know, you get a pat on the back at a conference and that's it. So this is really surprising when we published this paper, it just got, you know, it really took off like crazy. And so I had to kind of take off my scientist's hat for a moment and put on more of an outward

facing hat to discuss the science with policymakers. In 2022, I was asked to testify to Congress about this issue. And that was, you know, a very different experience than my day to day. here on campus. And so, yeah, it's been really rewarding, but it's also been a little testing of the comfort zone here and there. As scientists, we're generally, you know, fairly insular. We're talking to each other, but it takes a different skill set to communicate those results of the public.

And then also to really look at your data and propose bold solutions like we did, you know, a recreation rationing spectrum to be adopted by federal land management agencies. that took some doing. Yeah, that's good that you were out front there. Okay, now that you've got that done, what other changes, because there's always something in the future, what other changes that you want to see to make camping and outdoor recreation more equitable? Yeah, so we're doing a lot of research on this topic right now, as you might expect,

across front country camping, backcountry camping. One of the things my students and I are really interested right now, like I have a grad student who's studying camping in the American West from a, political ecology standpoint, understanding access who's able to access these things, looking at all sorts of constraints that people might face. One thing that we're really interested in here in Montana is agricultural communities and how they're able to access the outdoors. Whenever, you know, if you have a six-month booking window, if you're in an agricultural community, potentially you can't plan that far in advance because you don't know what Mother Nature is going to do and how that's going to influence the harvest. So we're

looking at these communities that really haven't been examined too much and how they might access the outdoors. Thank you, Will. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Yeah, thank you too, Ira. Dr. Will Rice, assistant professor of outdoor recreation and wildland management at the University of Montana. Of course, that's in Missoula. And that's all the time that we have for now. A lot of folks help make this show happen, including D. Peter Smith, Phyllis O'Me, Emma Gomez, Jackie Hirschfeld. And many more. Next time, we'll talk to Dr. Anthony Fauci about his new book and his legacy of work in HIV, AIDS, and COVID-19. But for now, I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis.

Have a great weekend.