Today is the 64th anniversary of the official beginning of the IGY on July 1, 1957.
The onset of the IGY was a front page story on the NY Times (upper left) that day, above the fold (I didn't realize that term is also used for highlighting material in web page design). Here is a pdf of the full article.
This was chronologically the 431st oldest article out of exactly 1500 hits as of today in the New York Times ProQuest database when searching on the term "International Geophysical Year!" I'll have to explore what more "the newspaper of record" has had to say about our favorite scientific enterprise.
Geophysical Year Starts as World Studies Sun Storm
As if to start the International Geophysical Year with a bang, the sun showered the earth with electron particles today, causing severe disturbances in this planet's upper air and magnetic field.
Radio communications on many long-range circuits were at a standstill,
The "year," which will last eighteen months, began at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, which as midnight Greenwich Mean Time.
President Eisenhower called it today "one of the great scientific adventures of our time."
Scientists the world over -- in sixty-four nations in the East and West -- turned on or checked recording instruments in the eleven sciences on which the effort is focused. These are the fields of study concerned with the earth as a whole.
In anticipation of this day Americans had been placed in the remote corners of the earth -- in specially constructed camps at the South Pole and on drifting ice in the Arctic Ocean.
Men on Mountain Peaks
Men of other nations worked in huts perched on mountain peaks while their instruments recorded the influx of cosmic rays, radio star impulses or other phenomena affected by the current magnetic storm.
They were on summits from Stalin Peak in Bulgaria to Mount Eva Perón in Argentina (neither name has been changed, at least in the I.G.Y. literature).
They were at Tungchwan in the mountains of southwest China, on Mount Norikura in Japan. American scientists were on Sacramento Peak at Sunspot, N.M.
The most dramatic events of the I.G.Y. will probably be the launching of earth satellites by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States launching is not expected before next spring. The Russians have set no date for their first shot.
Todays upheavals in the earth's atmosphere were the consequence of a solar flare that occurred at 3 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time Friday. It was seen by the observatory at Krasnaya Pakhra twenty miles south of Moscow and reported to the World Warning Center at Fort Belvoir, Va.
A solar flare is an eruption in the chromosphere -- the atmosphere of the sun. It is usually followed, a day or two later, by severe magnetic storms on the earth. The World Warning Center issued an alert at noon Friday and a day later called a Special World Interval.
This was flashed to thousands of scientists around the world and called for the intensified observations in the sciences affected by such solar eruptions. These are concerned with the earth's magnetism, the ionized regions above the atmosphere whose layers normally reflect radio waves, cosmic rays, aurora and even weather.
Early today the deluge of electron particles from the sun reached the outer atmosphere.
The I.G.Y. was timed to coincide with a period of intense sunspot activity, but there has been evidence that the peak of the eleven-year spot cycle has already been reached.
Today's storm may prove to be the most severe of the I.G.Y. The eighteen-month length of the "year" was designed to carry it well beyond the peak of the cycle, to provide contrasting information from a period when the sun is quiet.
President Eisenhower pointed to the international cooperation that has made possible this scientific enterprise, regarded by many as the greatest in history.
He said that, in his view, "the most important result of the International Geophysical Year is the demonstration of the ability of peoples of all nations to work together harmoniously for the common good."
"I hope," he said, "this can become common practice in other fields of human endeavor."
A basic precept of the I.G.Y. is that all information be exchanged. For this purpose three groups of World Data Centers have been established to collect and duplicate the mountains of information collected in the various sciences. The centers are in the United States, the Soviet Union and in Western Europe, with subcenters in Australia and Japan.
While many of the earth sciences are affected by events on the sun, others are more concerned with what takes place on or inside the earth. To study fluctuations in gravity American scientists have set up instruments in an unused tunnel near Dalton Canyon, California; Germans are in a potash mine and Italians are at work in a grotto near Trieste.
I'll make two comments on the contents of this article.
First is the statement that "The most dramatic events of the I.G.Y. will probably be the launching of earth satellites by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States launching is not expected before next spring. The Russians have set no date for their first shot." Yes, these launches were keynote events of the IGY. Note that both the U.S. and the USSR were expected to launch satellites. Those cagey Russians got Sputnik successfully into orbit without announcing the launch beforehand; the U.S. only got Explorer 1 into space four months later. Other than bragging rights (i.e., propaganda), this is a de facto tie. As I will write about another time, there was a big brouhaha that the Russians "beat us," but the intention and ability of the Soviets to potentially get into space first should have surprised no one who was paying attention.
Second is the statement "Today's storm may prove to be the most severe of the I.G.Y." There are models that predict how a solar cycle will play out, but I wonder how good they were back then. It seems a bit presumptuous to have made this "prediction," and looking back, we can see from solar activity graphs in a previous post that the sun became more active in solar cycle 19 after July, 1957. This compendium of significant historical solar storms does not list the July 1957 event, but it does include five other significant space weather storms that occurred later during the IGY.
Anyway, on this 64th "birthday" of the IGY, let's listen to the relevant Beatles song:
According to Wikipedia, this was one of the first songs Paul McCartney wrote, when he was 14, a year before the start of the IGY. It was finally released on the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 (to mark the 10th anniversary of the IGY?), which I have as a CD (scan is below, top). I have seven Beatles albums on vinyl, including what I think is my oldest record, Meet the Beatles! (scan is below, bottom), the second album released by the band in the U.S., in 1964. What can I say, one of my favorite bands ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment