Geophysics in the news - a solar coronal mass ejection

I happened to run into this geophysical story in the news today.

NASA's Solar Orbiter launched on February 10, 2020, and is currently in the cruise phase ahead of the main science mission, which begins in November of this year. This mission has already detected and tracked the evolution of a coronal mass ejection (CME) on February 12-13, 2021. CMEs are eruptions of particles from the solar atmosphere that blast out into the Solar System, and are responsible for space weather phenomena in the near-Earth environment. Understanding the sun and its relationship to the Earth was one of the major areas of study during the IGY.

CMEs, first identified as such in 1971, are often related to solar flares and prominences, such as shown on the U.S. IGY stamp (see the cover image below).

Here is a beautiful simulation of a CME interacting with the Earth's magnetosphere.

One of the most impressive solar storms in history was the 1859 Carrington event, since identified as a CME. This was almost 100 years before the IGY. The storm caused strong auroral displays and wrought havoc with telegraph systems. A solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts, and extended outages of the electrical grid. So knowledge about extreme solar events has useful technological implications.

Currently we are just past the solar minimum between solar cycles 24 and 25. During solar minima, CMEs are less frequent, but still occur.

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-cycle-progression

I mentioned the International Year of the Quiet Sun (IQSY) in my post of Feb. 22. That year of scientific study around solar minimum complemented the solar research during the IGY and a solar maximum. 

My IGY philately colleague Bob Greenwald recently alerted me to the solar science Forever stamp series that will be issued this year.  If you click on and enlarge the image below, you'll notice the stamps showing coronal holes and coronal loops.

U.S. sun science Forever stamps to be issued in 2021

Below is a 1964 cover, produced by the Rocket Research Institute, from my collection (US 169, my index #). One stamp is the 3¢ 1958 IGY stamp. The other 5¢ 1963 stamp is US #1237, comemmorating the centennial of the founding of the National Academy of Sciences. The cover honors the 5th anniversary of the IGY, and the contemporaneous IQSY. The postage of 8¢ was the airmail rate from 1963-1968. The cachet includes logos for both the IGY and the IQSY. The insert is a graphic of John C. Fremont's encampment on Pyramid Lake (near Reno, the city where the stamp was postmarked), over which the rocket carrying this cover was flown.

IGY-IQSY cover (1964), front

IGY-IQSY cover, back

IGY-IQSY cover, insert

Elon Musk - rocket mail?

Cheerios, the U.S. biological warfare program, the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, and the Congressional IGY report

I will suggest some (tenuous?) relationships between all those topics.

One of the four cereals we keep on hand for breakfast (along with generic corn flakes, generic raisin bran, and homemade granola) is General Mills Cheerios. My editor likes to mix Cheerios with the granola, and won't abide by a generic oat cereal (that I could go with).

Scan of actual Cheerios box at right. Note that this is a General Mills product.

Recently, I read the book Baseless, by Nicholson Baker. I had read some of his fiction in the past. 

According to the dust jacket blurb:

Baker assembles what he learns, piece by piece, about Project Baseless, a crash Pentagon program begun in the early [19] fifties that aimed to achieve "an Air Force-wide combat capability in biological and chemical warfare at the earliest possible date." Along the way,  he unearths stories of balloons carrying crop disease...

The book is presented as a daily journal of sorts, covering just over two months of entries in 2019, describing Baker's quest, thoughts, findings, fears, and his attempts to use the CIA CREST database and the Freedom of Information Act requests to learn about his topic. Those inquiries are sometimes answered, albeit often with redactions, but responses are commonly unduly delayed or the questions mothballed and ignored. This censoring and burial of information that should belong to we-the-people is the flip side of the open archives mentioned in my past post.

A review of this book from The Nation describes Baker's hypotheses as plausible narratives, although not fully confirmed by the publicly available information.

You can also watch a video of an interesting conversation about the book with Baker at the Harvest Book Store.

So, connection #1: In his entry for May 2, 2019, Baker writes:

After the war [World War II] General Mills's president, Harry Bullis [emphasis mine], a friend of Allen Dulles, began a balloon program, General Mills Aeronautical Research Laboratory. Abbott Washburn [emphasis mine], General Mills's head of public relations, became director of an ostensibly private undertaking, the Crusade for Freedom, which used CIA funds channeled through the National Committee for Free Enterprise to launch thousands of leaflet-bearing balloons into Czechoslovakia and other countries of Eastern Europe.

These General Mills balloons

fed into the covert plan to destroy Communist food sources, using high-altitude "balloon disseminators" filled with heated containers of wheat stem rust and hog cholera.  

Not only did General Mills have the research know-how to make cereal crops thrive, but also to poison and destroy them via germ warfare.

Connection #2: That name, Abbott Washburn, rang a bell in my head, different from the ringing I otherwise hear there. In my post of March 10, on the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) which was established in the IGY year 1957, I wrote that Washburn was:

head of public relations for General Mills Inc. in Minneapolis, and then executive vice chairman of Crusade for Freedom, which raised money for Radio Free Europe. He was deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency from 1953-1961, acting as liaison between the broadcast agency and the White House and National Security Council during a peak period of the Cold War. He served on the Citizens' Advisory Committee in this capacity.

I went on to wonder:

why, you might ask, was a representative of the USIA on the Citizens' Advisory Committee? The USIA was an agency responsible for American "public diplomacy" (emphasis mine; read public diplomacy as propaganda, maybe?), especially during the Cold War. It was the largest public relations organization in the world, with an annual budget over $1 billion in the years directly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It presided over U.S. government communications to over 150 international populations. So yes, you could say those Liberty Series stamps carried an "agenda" around the world. 

I find it interesting that Washburn honed his PR skills with a food company that engaged in activities related to biological warfare, moved to the USIA, and then served on the CSAC, presumably as a point person who helped guide stamp design selection to signal our country's national interests.

Connection #3: Note the mention of Harry A. Bullis (1890-1963) in the Baker book entry above. He was President and then Chairman of the Board if General Mills during the IGY. And last post, the author of the 1973 document, The Political Legacy of the Inertnational Geophysical year, was Harold Bullis, This was another case where I thought these two men were the same. The biographical details don't quite match up. The foreword to the IGY report states that

The author of this study, the 11th in the series on “Science, Technology, and American Diplomacy,” is Mr. Harold Bullis, Analyst in Science and Technology with the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. Mr. Bullis holds baccalaureate and masters degrees in physics from the University of Minnesota and Ohio State University as well as a masters degree in public administration from American University. Prior to joining the Library of Congress he served as physicist with the Wright Air Development Center and the Harry Diamond Laboratories.

This must be this L. Harold Bullis, who was "a specialist in science and technology and head of the Geosciences, Materials, and Industrial Technology Section of the Science Policy Research Division of the Congressional Research Service [my emphasis]." I assume he is also the same as this LHB (1927-2015).

Connection #4: Although I haven't been able via obituaries or other online documentation to link these two Harold Bullises with complete certainty, I assume they are father and son, consistent with their ages, and also with a common Minneapolis (General Mills and University of Minnesota) component in their bios. Growing up in the Washington, DC, area, I had a cousin Bernie (connection #5?) who also worked at the Harry Diamond Laboratories, which among other things developed fuzes for munitions such as bombs, rockets and mortar shells. Both Bullises had associations with companies that made devices useful for warfare. (My first real job in the DC area from 1972-74 with Fairchild Space and Electronics Company involved subcontracts for satellite projects of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.)

Make of these connections what you will, and chew them over with your next bowl of Cheerios.

Three U.S. government reports for my IGY archive

I've recently obtained three useful government documents pertaining to the IGY. I have not yet read any of them all the way through, so I won't comment on their contents in any detail, although I hope to draw on them in future posts. 

The first is titled Proposed United States Program for the International Geophysical Year 1957-58.  It was put together by the United States National Committee and published in August 1956, 109 pages. It gives a clear overview of the expected IGY work in each of the major areas of research. It is available for download from the National Academies Press. Until recently, this was the only one of these three documents that was readily available for download as a complete document.

A some point in years past I picked up a hard copy of this report (see scan of the cover).

Second, I kept running into references to National Academy of Sciences 1965 Report on the U.S. Program for the International Geophysical Year: July 1, 1957 - December 31, 1958 , but I was surprised not to be able to find a downloadable copy. Because of the great help of the National Academies, this document was tracked down, posted, and can now be downloaded here. It is 906 pages, and again is organized according to the areas of study of the IGY. What a valuable resource! The title page is shown to the right. Note that this is IGY General Report Number 21; I guess I will now have to figure out what and where those preceding 20 reports are.

Third and last is this report: Bullis, H., 1973; The Political Legacy of the International Geophysical Year; Library of Congress, Science Policy Research Division., United States House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments; Washington, D.C.; U.S. Government Printing Office, 64 p. It can be viewed at the web site of the Hathi Trust, a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world, Not being at a partner institution, I could only download or print this document one page at a time. So I downloaded each page, collated it into a single document, which you can access from my server.  Again, the title page is shown at right.

My college librarian assures me that posting this is ok for a government document. I'll also say here, in response to a question (complaint?) I received, that I do not guarantee any consistency in citation styles sources I refer to in my posts. And, I'll have more to say about the author of this report, Harold Bullis, in my next post.

The Foreword of this document starts with some hopeful words in the midst of the Cold War:

This study examines in detail a specific example of how the world scientific community has worked together in cooperation and good will toward resolving international problems. Its subject is the International Geophysical Year (IGY), the largest and most complex international scientific undertaking ever attempted.

In keeping with the objectives of the series of which it is one part, this study analyzes the contributions made by the IGY in overcoming ideological differences as a means of building bridges between science and diplomacy. More specifically, it attempts to identify and explain the attitudes, behavior patterns, and procedures followed in the IGY as a step toward détente.

Only time will tell of course whether the laudable example set by the IGY represents the major turning point in history claimed by some. Of importance here and now is the message conveyed in this study that indeed international cooperation in science and technology is possible. What remains is for that example to be emulated and extended.

Being able to access government documents online is a pretty amazing capability (although I anticipate making some comments in the next post on documents that are harder to come by).  

Of course, there is a National Archives stamp! Below is the stamp (Scott #2081, 1984) commemorating the founding of the U.S. National Archives. I don't own it, so this image is thanks to Mystic Stamps. I'm not very keen on this stamp design. Why George Washington and Abe Lincoln (with that exaggerated stovepipe hat) profiles? Aren't Washington and Lincoln on enough other stamps? Honor the archivists and the librarians more directly somehow.