A16
NEWS
Wallowa County Chieftain
Near earth asteroids
WSU student
helps predict
future collisions
Washington State University
Astroids can provide future
resources, and can also be on
collision courses with Earth
ties for possible asteroid
mining.
NASA maintains a cat-
alog that includes informa-
tion on more than 20,000
near-earth asteroids and
comets. In the mid-1990s
scientists knew of less than
200 of such outer space
rocks, but with better tele-
scopes and more efforts at
surveying, the numbers of
known asteroids has grown
dramatically.
In the mid-1990s, Hud-
son, who has an asteroid
named after him, wrote the
primary modeling software
tool that researchers use to
describe asteroids and their
behavior. Using ground-
based radar and optics
data, the software helps
researchers learn import-
ant information, such as
an asteroid’s possible min-
eral make-up, current and
future orbit, shape, and
how it spins in space. In
fact, Hudson co-authored
a paper published in Sci-
ence that determined that
at least one asteroid, 1950
DA, has a very tiny chance
of hitting earth during a
precise 20-minute period
in March of 2880.
“The software was writ-
ten for a super computer,
so it’s really, really slow,”
said Engels, who jumped
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It’s not just cows anymore
Sid Perkins
AAAS
Tina Hilding
WSU
Modeling the shape and
movement of near-Earth
asteroids is now up to 25
times faster thanks to new
Washington State Univer-
sity research.
The WSU scientists
improved the software
used to track thousands of
near-Earth asteroids and
comets, which are defi ned
as being within 121 million
miles or about 1.3 times
the distance to the sun.
Their work provides
a valuable new tool for
studying asteroids and
determining which of them
might be on a collision
course with Earth.
Matt Engels, a PhD stu-
dent who has been working
with Professor Scott Hud-
son in the School of Engi-
neering and Applied Sci-
ences at WSU Tri-Cities,
is lead author of a paper
on the research in the July
issue of Astronomy and
Computing.
Researchers would like
to have better informa-
tion on asteroids, including
which of them might crash
into earth. The rocks also
can provide valuable scien-
tifi c information, answer-
ing fundamental questions
about the creation of our
solar system and providing
a glimpse into our plane-
tary past. Knowing more
about individual asteroid
composition also could
open up new opportuni-
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Natural gas, long touted
as a cleaner burning alter-
native to coal, has a leakage
problem. A new study has
found that leaks of methane,
the main ingredient in nat-
ural gas and itself a potent
greenhouse gas, are twice as
big as offi cial tallies suggest
in major cities along the U.S.
eastern seaboard. The study
suggests many of these fugi-
tive leaks come from homes
and businesses—and could
represent a far bigger prob-
lem than leaks from the
industrial extraction of the
fossil fuel itself.
“This is an issue that peo-
ple tend to ignore when try-
ing to estimate methane
emissions,” says Kathryn
McKain, an atmospheric
scientist with the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s Earth Sys-
tem Research Laboratory
in Boulder, Colorado, who
wasn’t involved in the new
research. When compared
with the global amount
of natural and human-
driven methane emissions,
she notes, “These emis-
sions are small, but they’re
preventable.”
When burned for heat or
power, methane emits less
carbon dioxide (CO2) than
fossil fuels such as coal. But
when leaked directly into
the atmosphere, its warm-
ing effect can be dozens of
times stronger than CO2,
depending on the time scale
over which the warming is
measured.
The new fi ndings come
courtesy of data gathered
by aircraft over six U.S. cit-
ies: Washington, D.C.; Bal-
timore, Maryland; Philadel-
phia, Pennsylvania; New
York City; Providence; and
Boston. In 2018, research-
ers fl ew at altitudes between
300 and 800 meters and
measured concentrations of
Ellen Morris Bishop
Cows are not alone as producers of the greenhouse gas
methane. Researchers have discovered that many major U.S.
cities release methane from faulty and aging natural gas and
propane infrastructure.
methane, ethane, CO2, and
carbon monoxide, among
other gases.
The ethane measure-
ments were clues to likely
sources of the methane
leaks, says Eric Kort, an
atmospheric scientist at the
University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor and co-author of
the new study. There aren’t
any large natural sources of
ethane, but it does appear in
small amounts in the natu-
ral gas supplied to homes
and businesses. Kort and his
colleagues could, therefore,
use detected ethane levels to
distinguish leaked methane
from other sources.
The team’s analyses sug-
gest the fi ve biggest urban
areas
studied—which
together include about 12%
of the nation’s population—
emit about 890,000 tons
of methane each year, the
researchers report this week
in Geophysical Research
Letters. The vast majority of
that, at least 750,000 tons,
comes from methane leaks
from homes, businesses,
and gas distribution infra-
structure, rather than natural
sources and other human-
driven sources such as land-
fi lls. For comparison, the
team notes, that’s well over
triple the amount emitted by
gas production in the Bak-
ken shale formation in the
U.S. Midwest.
It’s also much more than
the amounts estimated by
the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency (EPA). A 2016
report suggested methane
emissions in the six major
urban areas the researchers
studied totaled only 370,000
tons. “It’s easy to say that the
Sumpter Valley Dredge a monument to area mining
Richard Hanners
Blue Mountain Eagle
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gon!
For the first time in Eastern Ore
Rich gold diggings in the
Elkhorn Mountains of East-
ern Oregon drew 5,000 resi-
dents to the town of Sumpter
in the early 1900s. At its
height, Sumpter claimed
plank sidewalks, seven
hotels, 16 saloons, three
newspapers, two churches,
an opera house and a red
light district.
A fi re in 1917 burned
much of the city. Today,
about 175 people call
Sumpter home, but the
population booms during
fl ea market events held
on Memorial Day, Fourth
of July and Labor Day
weekends.
The year-round daily
attraction in Sumpter is the
gold dredge that recovered
about 128,570 troy ounces
from the Powder River Val-
ley, worth about $180 mil-
lion at current prices. The
Sumpter Valley Dredge
State Heritage Area covers
93 acres and sees more than
100,000 visitors each year.
The last of three dredges
that traveled about 8 miles
across the valley starting in
1913, Sumpter No. 3 was
constructed in 1935 from
pieces of the second dredge,
which had sat idle for a
decade. Sumpter No. 3 oper-
ated until 1954.
The dredge was added to
the National Register of His-
toric Places in 1971. Resto-
Richard Hanners/Blue Mountain Eagle
The Sumpter No. 3 gold mining dredge operated in the
Powder River Valley from 1935 to 1954. It’s now on display in
a state park in Sumpter.
ration work began in 1995,
and the state acquired the
site and associated equip-
ment and buildings for a
park after that.
The principle of dredge
mining is effi ciency gained
through volume, but it cost
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EPA inventory is low, but it’s
not as easy to say why it’s
low,” Kort says. One possi-
ble reason for this huge dis-
crepancy: The EPA estimate
includes leaks from the nat-
ural gas distribution system,
but it doesn’t include leaks
from homes and businesses.
Those “beyond the meter”
emissions could include, for
example, tiny whooshes of
incompletely burned meth-
ane from home appliances
such as gas stoves, furnaces,
and hot water heaters. Taken
together over a city of mil-
lions, such emissions could
be substantial.
The team’s results are
“a confi rmation and expan-
sion” of what was already
known from smaller-scale
studies in the Boston and
the Washington, D.C.–Bal-
timore areas, says Ste-
ven Wofsy, an atmospheric
chemist at Harvard Univer-
sity, who wasn’t involved in
the new analysis. The new
study, conducted over six
metropolitan areas, “shows
this is not an isolated phe-
nomenon,” he adds.
The new fi ndings could
also incentivize research-
ers to study where these
emissions are coming from,
Wofsy says. Possibili-
ties include leaking pipe-
lines, pumps, and valves;
water treatment systems;
equipment in power plants
fueled by natural gas; and
leakage within homes and
businesses.
Kort says it’s diffi cult to
extrapolate the new leak-
age estimates to other urban
areas across the United
States. For one thing, other
cities are younger and are
thus likely to have newer
infrastructure that is less
prone to leaks. Kort adds
that, globally, the identifi ed
leaks are somewhat of a blip:
Worldwide, annual methane
emissions from natural and
human-driven sources add
up to about 550 million tons.
www.windingwaters.org
more to run Sumpter No.
3 than the gold could pay
for, and the company was
$100,000 in debt when it
shut down.
It took three men to
operate the machinery and
another 17 for maintenance,
bookkeeping,
surveying,
truck driving, management
and other roles.
On the outside, a min-
ing dredge resembles a boat
fl oating on a pond of its own
making. Projecting from the
bow is a boom with 72 one-
ton buckets that dug up the
countryside at the rate of 20
buckets per minute. Another
boom at the stern depos-
ited tailings across the land-
scape that, seen from the air,
resemble worm castings and
can be seen for miles along
State Route 7.
Inside the dredge, elec-
trically powered machinery
duplicated on a larger scale
the same processes used by
placer miners during the
gold rush across the West.
Large rocks and gravel were
sifted, sorted and separated
from fi nes and then washed
over a series of riffl es, where
gold settled and was trapped.
A fi lm crew shot footage
of Sumpter No. 3 for an epi-
sode in the 2013 television
series “Ghost Mine” about
a phantom called Joe Bush.
Dredge workers claimed to
have seen wet footprints,
fl ickering lights and doors
opening and closing on their
own.
The name Joe Bush
does not appear in com-
pany records, but in 1918
an oiler named Chris Rowe
was crushed in the gear-
box of Sumpter No. 1, and
the story goes his spirit
may have ended up inside
the third dredge along with
equipment from the earlier
dredges.
To reach the historic
dredge from John Day,
drive east on Highway 26
to Austin Junction, follow
State Route 7 for 25 miles,
turn left on State Route 410
and drive about 4 miles to
Sumpter.
The state park is open
May 1 through Oct. 31
from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily.
Guided tours, gold panning
lessons and other programs
are offered on weekends.
Admission to the park is
free. For more information,
call 541-894-2472 or visit
historicsumpter.com.