Breakthrough In Fusion

On August 8th 2022, after a year of anylizing data, scientists from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's National Ignition Facility celabrated their breakthrough in nuclear fusion. The breakthrough, which came in August of 2021, was a successful fusion ignition. Nuclear fusion is what powers the sun. It occurs when two light atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier one with the result being a powerful release of energy.

Unlike the sun, which uses gravity to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium atoms, the researchers used a pellet of deuterium/tritum as fuel and a piston which is made of rhe same. 192 lasers were trained on the pellet in an effort to create a hot spot. The result is a super hot plasma. The reaction, which only lasted 100 trillionths of a second, yeilded 1.3 megajoules or an estimated release of 10 quadrillon watts of power.

Greenland's Ice Sheet Is Melting

On July 20th 2022, scientist reported that Greeland's ice sheet is melting. Scientists say that due to a temperature rise as high as 60 degree F, caused 6 billion tons of water a day from July15th through the 17th. According to Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at the University of Colorado's Earth Science and Observation Center, the amount released by the melt was enough to "cover West Virginia in a foot of water, 4 inches a day."

Scambos attributed the melt as the result of a warm air mass drifting over the Canadian Archipelago which is located noth of the Canadian Mainland. Greenland has had two other large scale ice melt in 2012 and again in 2019. Scambos said, "We can expect on the order 100 billio tons of water going into the ocean." Melting of Greeland's ice sheet has contributed to about half an inch of rise in sea level over the last 30 years.