Science Friday - The Science Behind Hurricane Milton | ‘Unsettling’ Warm Water In Lake Michigan

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Hurricane Milton caused a major storm surge, but also a reverse one. And, Lake Michigan's surface temperature has been above average nearly every day this year so far. All five Great Lakes are heating up.The Science Behind Hurricane MiltonOn October 9, Hurricane Milton made landfall in Siesta Key, Florida, then barrelled across the state. This comes just a couple of weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the southeastern US. Hurricane Milton dumped up to 18 inches of rain in some places, flooding cars, homes, and other buildings. Several people are confirmed dead. Around 3 million are without power.Hurricane Milton was expected to cause a 15-foot storm surge, but it appears that the storm surge maxed out at five to six feet. And there wasn’t just a storm surge, but a reverse one.Ira talks with Maggie Koerth, science writer and editorial lead for Carbon Plan, about some of the science of Hurricane Milton. They also discuss other science stories from the week, including President Biden’s new rule for replacing lead pipes, concerns about the security of genetic data with 23andMe, and how to tell if an elephant is left or right-trunked.Lake Michigan Swimmers Enjoy ‘Unsettling’ Warm WaterOn a sunny, mid-September afternoon, Olu Demuren took a running start off the concrete ledge just south of Belmont Harbor and leapt into Lake Michigan for the first time.“I was preparing myself for cold water,” Demuren said. “And this immediately felt very nice.”The water along Chicago’s lakeshore averaged an unseasonable 71 degrees that day. The weather was picturesque too: clear blue skies and temperatures in the mid-80s. Annelise Rittberg watched their friends from the concrete ledge and said the weather felt “deeply abnormal.”“While it’s fun to be out here, it’s also unsettling,” Rittberg said.Lake Michigan is heating up. The lake’s surface temperature has surpassed the running average dating back to 1995 nearly every day this year, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data. And it’s not just one Great Lake. All five are warming. The massive bodies of water, which provide drinking water to more than 30 million people, are among the fastest-warming lakes worldwide, according to the federal government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment.Read the full story at sciencefriday.com.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.

It's October in Chicago, so time for a swim, right? Obviously, this weather is deeply abnormal, and while it's fun to be out here, it's also unsettling. It's Friday, October 11th, and this is Science Friday. I'm SciFry producer Deep Petersmith. Climate change is affecting just about everything, including the Great Lakes. In fact, Lake Michigan's surface temperature has been higher than average almost every day this year. That might be great for swimmers, not so great for the freshwater ecosystem. We'll get to that in a bit, but first, here's Arafledo with the biggest stories in science this week.

So many folks saw the Aurora last night. It may be back tonight if you missed it. And while you are outside, you might get a bonus. A look at a comet, Kameatsuchishan Atlas, visible to the naked eye, low in the western sky at sunset. It's going to be hard to see so low on the horizon, but viewing will get better over the next few weeks as it rises higher. See it soon. or you'll have to wait 80,000 years. So I'm going to have a look. Here with other news of the week is Maggie Kerth Science Writer based in Minneapolis. Maggie, welcome back.

Did you get to see the Aurora last night? I did a little bit. We drove about an hour north of the Twin Cities and saw some really great, like, silver streaks and this pulsing silver colored stripe in the sky. And then my children were very responsible and told me it was a school night and they needed to go to bed. Oh, there you go. All right, let's move on to some of the analysis of Hurricane Milton following that disastrous path through Florida. The hurricane was expected to cause a big, what, 15-foot storm surge?

Yeah, and they got really lucky because Milton was down to a category three by the time it made landfall. Florida got hit with tornadoes, they got rain flooding, they got high winds. But that 15-foot storm surge didn't happen. Instead, oceans rose between 5 and 10 feet in Siesta Key. While up towards the north of that, the hurricanes counterclockwise winds were pushing water out of Tampa Bay and temporarily exposed the entire ocean floor. Wow. That's sort of a reverse storm surge. Yes, that is exactly is a reverse storm surge because of the way that hurricanes, you know, they move in that circle. So some part, they're pushing water into land.

and in another area they're pushing water away from the land. You know, that sounds like what happens in a tsunami. First, the water goes away. Yep. And then it comes back. But it did not seem to come back in the tsunami kind of way. It was back to normal yesterday. Yeah, yeah.

You know, we've talked about how climate change can make storms more intense. But do we know how much of this is attributed to climate change versus other factors? Yeah, well, there have actually been two reports that came. came out this past week tied to Helene and Milton and kind of trying to make those evaluations. The first one was from the World Weather Attribution Initiative, which is an international team of scientists and they do rapid studies aimed at figuring out whether and how climate change contributed to these immediate weather disasters. And so their analysis found that these significantly warmer than average water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were really helped

fueling Hurricane Helene specifically and increased the likelihood of heavy rains in Appalachia by as much as 70%. And then the second one was from Climate Central, which is a non-profit news and science organization. And they were also looking at those increased water temperatures in the Gulf. Climate change made those increased temperatures hundreds of times more likely than they otherwise would have been, according to that report. And we know that hotter surface water is behind that big increase in power that we saw in Hurricane Milton this week when it was briefly one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded. Wow, there is evidence for that.

Okay, Maggie, this week was Nobel Prize Week of the three science awards. I'm going to ask you which one were you most excited about. I was most excited about the Chemistry Award, which is all about protein folding. That one went to David Baker from the University of Washington, and then also to two researchers from Google DeepMind in London, Demis Hasibis and John M. Jumper. So proteins are these chains of amino acids. They twist and fold on themselves.

They are the doers of chemical life. You know, they control everything from hormones to the movement and function of neurotransmitters to growth and repair of tissues. And the way that they fold up affects what their function is. And so Baker and his team have been studying protein folding and using different ways of computer modeling to understand how it works for more than 20 years. And this is where it gets exciting to me because you might remember, Ira, a couple of times when you have interacted with

some of Dr. Baker's work and maybe not realized it was the same guy that just won the Nobel. If you think back to 2005, there was a program called Rosetta at Home, which was a volunteer computing project that linked up thousands of people's sleeping computers. Yep, to make one kind of mega-computer that could process huge amounts of data and predict and design proteins. That was the Baker Lab. And in 2008, Foldit came out, which is this online puzzle game that puts hundreds of thousands of human brains to the problem of protein structure. And that was also the Baker lab. And I was really excited about that because it was really cool to sort of have this, oh, hey, I know that guy feeling, even though I don't actually know that guy. But like, it was great. That's great. Let's move

on to news about a problem for a decade. We've been following this story. President Biden announced a new rule that would replace lead pipes. right? Yes, and this is such a big deal. You know, 10 years ago, the citizens of Flint, Michigan, learned that poorly treated water was corroding lead pipes in their town. It was leaching this toxic metal into the water supply. And now the federal government is taking steps to make sure that something like that doesn't happen again. So over the next 10 years, most utilities are going to be required to assess where lead pipes are in their systems and replace those pipes with something else. And would this cover everybody's? No, not exactly. So this is only going to cover the utility

owned pipes. So if you have lead pipes in your house or on your property, that's going to be the responsibility of you or your landlord. Ouch, that's going to cost some money. And that's going to impact low-income families the most, right? In addition, there are some utilities, such as those in Chicago, which is the city with the nation's largest lead pipe concentration, those utilities are going to get longer than 10 years to make changes because there's just so much lead pipe in their system. Yeah, longer. Well, we hope all that happens. In other news, former President Trump has been pushing eugenics ideas lately. Yeah, this is scary. This is, but I think it's an important thing to call out for what it is. You know, Trump has been in a couple of podcast interviews and in his

speeches talking about this idea that immigrants and murderers have bad genes. And eugenics is this pseudoscience that claims some people are just born to be poor or born to be criminals because of traits they inherited from their parents or their grandparents. And likewise, that the wealthy and powerful are genetically predisposed to their positions as well. And these are ideas that had a lot of power in the early 20th century in the United States. They formed the basis of, of really horrible programs where the government was sterilizing Americans against their will. And they contributed to policies here that blocked immigration from certain regions, certain countries.

They contributed to policies that marked some Americans as not worth educating or helping. And these are, you know, let's just say it. These are racist ideas. And they lead to morally reprehensible outcomes. And they're also scientifically incorrect. You know, people are not cows. Intelligence, let alone the concept of lawbreaking, it does not work like hair color. And if you want to know more about that, there is a really good book a couple years ago that was written by a geneticist, Adam Rutherford.

And it's called Control, the dark history and troubling present of eugenics. I really recommend reading it. Long-held belief of the Third Reich also. Also, yeah, contributed to that as well. Maggie, we got to ditch some of this bad news for a while. Let's head out for a trip to space. The European Space Agency recently launched the mission called Hera to revisit an old friend. Tell us about that.

Yeah. So two years ago, we did some real action movie stuff. You know, we sent DART, the double asteroid redirect mission out to sort of bonged into an asteroid and see if we could successfully alter its course. And now we have this other spacecraft called Hara. So Hara successfully launched this week. It's accompanied by a couple of CubeSats. and they're going out to the asteroid dimorphous,

they're going to look at the size and shape of the crater that Dart left, and whether Dart has also affected the little moon that goes around dimorphus. And those kubats are going to study the surface of the asteroid at its gravity and kind of help refine data in the models for future missions. Yeah, yeah. Okay, now here's an item that's surely going to be the talk around the dinner table. How can you figure out if an elephant is left or right-handed, Maggie? How do you do that?

Because it's very important to me. I can't tell you how long I spent trying to come up with a punchline to this joke. That is obviously a joke, but I don't know what it is. I failed. I'm so sorry. An elephant walks into a bar. I know. I know.

Okay. So elephant-handedness is actually about the direction that their trunks bend when they're picking up objects. They can kind of curl a little to the left or a little to the right. and researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany found that over time, the elephants will kind of scuff the trunk hairs off the outside of the curl, and they'll get more wrinkles on the skin on the inside of it. And those two signals will tell you which direction an individual elephant tends to bend. Well, why do we care?

I mean, whose idea was it, hey, sitting around, let's find out if an elephant is left-handed or now? It's because they're mechanical engineers, and they're really into this idea, of designing soft, bendy, flexible robots based on animal biology. And elephant trunks are these really cool things. These systems are boneless tubes containing tens of thousands of muscles that can change shape. And so this study was looking at trunk skin and how it helps with that and is affected by all that movement. All right. That's great.

But Maggie, finally, something that only may top that, scientists found the head of a giant, I mean giant ancient millipede. Yes. So in 1854, scientists discovered fossils of the world's largest arthropod. This is a millipede the size of a king-sized bed. Wait a minute. It's a real big millipede. But for 100 years, nobody had seen the head, like all the fossils were headless.

And now that has changed because two newly discovered fossils are showing us the face of this absolutely horrific beastie. It is also turns out to be kind of a transitional species. So this is a millipede whose head turns out to look a lot more like that of a centipede, but it was also walking around with its eyes on stalks, kind of like a crab. This is great. Thank you. Maggie, you always bring us good stuff. Thank you so much. I love being here. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KER News.

For W. W.W.S.P.L.S. Local science stories of national significance. Like most things these days, the Great Lakes are getting warmer. At Lake Michigan, for example, surface temperatures have been above average almost every day this year. Producer Kathleen Davis is here with why that is important. Hi, Kathleen. Hey, Ira. Yes, this warm weather means that beach season in Chicago now extends into October.

But it also has scientists worried about what that will mean for ice cover this winter. Joining me to talk about it is my guest, Juan Pablo Ramirez Franco, climate reporter for WBEZ in Chicago, and Grist. Juan Pablo, welcome to Science Friday. Hey there, Kathleen. Happy to be here. So first, set the scene for us. You came across some late-season beachgoers in Chicago recently. What did they have to say?

Yes. So picture this. It's mid-September, clear blue skies, mid-80s. We're on one of Chicago's famous concrete beaches on the north side. and I come upon this group of friends. They've just done a team cannonball into Lake Michigan. And so while they're drying off, I asked them, I'm like, you know, how was it in there? And here's what they had to say.

Delicious. Incredible. Beautiful. Yeah, really warm. And yeah, you know, while they say they're having a great time, there is this thing nagging at them, at the back of their mind. Because one of the things they tell me is that the way they think about it is that this is because of climate change. Right. So just how warm have the Great Lakes been this year? You know, when these beach goers came out of Lake Michigan, the lake shore was close to 71 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's pretty warm for that late in the season. It's not the hottest it's ever been, but it's close. The same goes for Lake Michigan generally in 2024. It's warm, sure, but it's not the warmest on record. So while the heat isn't like anomalous, that's because it's part of a broader trend in warming across the lake. lakes. The way one scientist put it to me was that all the warmest years recorded across the lakes, those occurred in just the past 10 years. So again, what we're talking about here is like a trend. But I should be clear, there were points throughout 2024 that did break heat records. So Lake Michigan started 2024 at the hottest temperature ever recorded for the first of the year. So that was around 42 degrees Fahrenheit. That's really cold for sure. But that's warm for the lake at that time of the

year. There's another point here, which is that right at the tail end of September and the very beginning of October, so just a couple days ago, Lake Superior, Michigan, and Huron all broke heat records for a couple days. I want to add that there's a lot of natural variability occurring in the Great Lakes. So like major climactic patterns like El Nino or a polar vortex can swing the region in either temperature direction in any given year. So it wouldn't be totally surprising if some weather pattern caused a really cold winter in 2025. But on the whole, what we're seeing is a warming trend across the world's largest freshwater ecosystem. So the Great Lakes are warming up, but how fast are they warming up? Yeah. To put that into perspective, the Great Lakes are among

the fastest warming lakes anywhere in the world. And that's according to the federal government's fifth national climate assessment. That's this big federal study that comes out every couple of years or so, and it surveys the most recent climate science to understand how climate change is impacting the country. But when we talk about how quickly things are warming, in the upper Great Lakes, so that's Superior, Michigan, Huron, there are estimates of warming as much as seven degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, so mid-century, and 12 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Wow, that is staggering. Let's talk a little bit about ice cover. So, I mean, looking at the maps from last winter, it appears that there was little, if any, freezing of the lakes.

Tell me about what the state of this ice is. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's been seasonal ice formation on the Great Lakes since they were first formed thousands of years ago. That's changing. Here's Drew Grunwald. He's a professor at the University of Michigan. Winters are, in fact, getting warmer and warmer, both in the lakes and in the air and the land around us. Across the lakes, we've been losing something like, like 5% of ice cover per decade since the 70s. What that means is that there's something like 25% less ice cover today than there was 50 years ago. And so to bring that to the present this year has been the fourth lowest year for ice cover across the lakes.

Are there downstream effects, no pun intended, to having less ice cover? Yeah, Kathleen, there sure are. You know, ice during the winter actually forms this kind of protective buffer between the lake shore and stormy, choppy waters. When there's less of that buffer, the shore is what really feels it. So there's more erosion, which isn't ideal for a city like Chicago that's built on the lake shore or so many of the other cities that are built right on the Great Lakes, right? Less ice will also mean a longer commercial shipping season. And it also mean big adjustments for some fish species. You know, entire communities of life have evolved around this freezing and thawing cycle in the lakes.

This goes back thousands of years. And as that cycle responds to a warming climate, that'll mean changes. Well, we'll keep an eye on what this winter looks like. Thank you so, so much for joining us today. Sure, thank, Kathleen. Juan Pablo Ramirez Franco, climate reporter for WBEZ in Chicago and Grist. I'm Kathleen Davis. That's all the time we have for today.

A lot of folks help make the show happen, including... Jordan Smudjik. Rasha Ridi. Charles Bergquist. Shoshana Bucksbaum. And many more. On Monday, we'll talk about community resilience in the face of major hurricanes. But for now, I'm SciFRI producer D. Peter Schmidt.

Have a great weekend.