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Farmers preparing a field for the planting season outside Wonsan, North Korea, in the shadow of a denuded hillside.

Inside North Korea's Environmental Collapse

North Korea has been hiding something. Something beyond its prison camps, its nuclear facilities, its pervasive poverty, its aching famine, its lack of energy—electrical, fossil, or otherwise. What the hermit kingdom has been covering up is perhaps more fundamental than all of those: an environmental collapse so severe it could destabilize the entire country. Or at least, it was hiding it. Before ecologist Margaret Palmer visited North Korea, she didn’t know what to expect, but what she saw was beyond belief. From river’s edge to the tops of hills, the entire landscape was lifeless and barren. Villages were little more than hastily constructed shantytowns where residents wore camouflage netting, presumably in preparation for a foreign invasion they feared to be imminent. Emaciated looking farmers tilled the earth with plows pulled by oxen and trudged through half-frozen streams to collect nutrient-rich sediments for their fields. “We went to a national park where we saw maybe one or two birds, but other than that you don’t see any wildlife,” Palmer says. “The landscape is just basically dead,” adds Dutch soil scientist Joris van der Kamp. “It’s a difficult condition to live in, to survive.” Palmer and Van der Kamp were part of an international delegation of scientists invited by the government of North Korea and funded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to attend a recent conference on ecological restoration in the long-isolated country. Through site visits and presentations by North Korean scientists they witnessed a barren landscape that is teetering on collapse, ravaged by decades of environmental degradation. “There are no branches of trees on the ground,” Van der Kamp says. “Everything is collected for food or fuel or animal food, almost nothing is left for the soil. We saw people mining clay material from the rivers in areas that had been polished by ice and warming their hands along the roadside by small fires from the small amounts of organic bits they could find.” Farmers carrying supplies on foot in North Korea. The country’s ecological ruin is partially responsible for the disastrous famine in the 1990s, when massive flooding washed away crops and destroyed stored grain. Today, it continues to undermine the country’s economy and threaten national stability. Yet as dire as the current situation is, it’s neither unprecedented nor irreversible. And the sooner environmental conditions can be improved, the better things will be for either the current regime or whoever is left to pick up the pieces. <h2> A Broken Landscape </h2> For Palle Madsen, visiting North Korea was a bit like going back in time 150 years. “At that time the forest was nearly completely gone here in Denmark,” says Madsen, a forester at the Danish Center for Forest Landscape and Planning at the University of Copenhagen. “There wasn’t a totalitarian regime, but we had a similarly overexploited and degraded landscape. It influences the entire microclimate when you remove all of the trees,” Madsen says. During a three-day conference in Pyongyang, the nation’s capital, North Korean scientists spoke frankly to delegation members about problems related to deforestation and overexploitation of the soil. Mountains make up much of the country’s landscape leaving only 15 percent of land available for agriculture. Erosion, lack of nutrients, and acidification of the soil have had a devastating effect on crop yields, according to presentations by members of North Korea’s Academy of Sciences. North Korea’s isolation means detailed data on environmental conditions are hard to come by. However, a 2004 study by the Korea Environment Institute based in Seoul, South Korea, reports that forest cover in North Korea dropped by 17 percent from the 1970s to the late 1990s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which provided oil to its communist ally at a discounted “friendship price,” oil imports dropped by 60 percent. Unsurprisingly, the use of firewood for heating more than doubled. North Korean soldiers hauling firewood back to base. Fuel for heating is scarce, so many rely on what wood they can find, including, apparently, the normally well-supplied Korean People's Army. What resulted was an increasingly barren landscape. Even saplings are felled for fuel, stripping forests of their ability to regenerate. “They don’t have trees to hold the soil,” says Jinsuk Byun of Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul. Byun was not a part of the recent delegation but has closely followed environmental conditions in the country. “When it rains the soil washes into the river, landslides occur and rivers flood. It triggers a really serious disaster.” Damage from a July 2012 flash flood near South Hamgyong, North Korea. Conditions in North Korea appear to be little better now than during the famine of the 1990s. In Pyongyang, generally considered to be the most well-off city in the country, delegation members saw bonfires burning on apartment balconies at night, presumably lit by residents to keep warm. Other basic utilities were lacking, too. “I saw a woman lifting a bucket of water with a rope up ten stories to her apartment,” Palmer says. <h2> Looming Famine? </h2> Such glimpses of reality in North Korea are seldom seen but often rumored. “Guided tours are designed not to show you poverty,” says Barbara Demick, author of Nothing To Envy , a book about the lives of ordinary North Koreans who later defected. She says living conditions for the vast majority of those living in the country are likely much worse than what the researchers saw on their tour. “Up to 10 percent of the country perished from starvation in the 1990s. It’s a cold mountainous country, and there is very little arable land. North Korea is highly dependent on artificial fertilization and irrigation and when they ran out of electricity, everything spiraled downhill.” The lack of birds and other small animals noted by the scientists on their recent visit are a direct result of the famine in the 1990s, Demick says. “The frogs disappeared because everyone caught the frogs,” Demick says. “You see many fewer birds and small animals in North Korea than other countries. People living near the sea ate seaweed but that also ran out.” Ongoing food scarcity continues to take its toll.. A United Nations <a href="http://www.wfp.org/sites/default/files/DPRK%20Overview%20Of%20Needs%20And%20Assistance%202012.pdf"> report </a> released in May 2012 estimated that two-thirds of North Korea’s 24 million people continue to suffer from chronic food shortages and malnutrition. Similar famines occurred throughout Europe in the 1800s due to over-exploitation of the land, says Madsen, the Danish forestry expert. What turned things around in Europe was the development of artificial fertilizers, the capacity to breed better crops, emigration to North America, and above all, land reform. “The feudal system of old Europe was still in existence,” he says. “It’s a different system in North Korea, much worse than the feudal system of Europe, but allowing farmers to own their own land is what changed things here.” The reddish hue of exposed soil in North Korea indicates a lack of organic matter, which is vital for farming. Small-scale land reform has begun in North Korea, but such policy changes may be making matters worse instead of better. In recent years, the government has allowed individual households to cultivate their own private vegetable gardens. But that has lead to the cutting down and cultivation of forested hillsides. “They are farming every inch of the land,” says delegation member Keith Bowers, president of Biohabitats, an ecological restoration consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland. “From the rivers to the hillsides, there is no vegetation on this landscape that provides any of the types of ecosystem services in terms of stabilizing soils, filtering air, attenuating flood flows, or controlling against erosion.” Flooding in North Korea left more than 212,000 people homeless last year according to recent news reports. “You have whole towns being buried in mud because they’ve terraced around the town,” Demick says. <h2> Costs of Reunification </h2> North Korean scientists told the delegates that they would like to reforest hillsides with trees, including the Japanese chestnut, black chokeberry, and Korean pine, that could both stabilize the soil and provide edible fruits and seeds. But funding for such reforestation appears tight. During their week-long visit the foreign scientists were taken to a tree nursery that is part of the country’s current reforestation effort. The automated potting machinery was inoperable either due to a lack of fuel or spare parts, delegates report, and its greenhouse stood empty. Even if the nurseries were running at full capacity, North Korea would still have a long road ahead of it. Bowers estimates that reforesting even half the country would cost around $46 billion, an amount that exceeds the nation’s annual gross domestic product by $6 billion. Despite the bleak outlook, many in South Korea view reunification with the north and absorbing the costs of retooling the country as inevitable. Estimates for the cost of reunification run from the hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. Byun, of Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, has studied the German reunification as a possible model for Korea. In the 1990s, Germany spent the equivalent of approximately $450 billion in today’s dollars to reduce air and water pollution from factories, waste treatment systems, and inefficient power plants, Byun says. A woman operates a machine inside a fertilizer plant in North Korea. But reunifying Korea would be a more daunting challenge, in part because of the heavily depleted soils. North Korean farmers are heavily reliant on nitrogen-based fertilizers, which in certain formulations can paradoxically drain the soil of nutrients. “It’s a very unbalanced fertilizer, lacking in magnesium, calcium, potassium, and phosphorus,” says Dutch soil scientist Van der Kamp of the fertilizer predominantly used in North Korea. “When you don’t replace those minerals you basically mine the soil for these other nutrients, so the soils in general are very acidic, with very low organic matter content and low microbial activity.” In 2012 the United Nations planned to distribute 2,000 metric tons of fertilizer containing each of the above-mentioned minerals to 260 collective farms as part of a $14 million agricultural aid package. But that aid is likely a drop in the bucket in terms of what is needed. <h2> Hope For Collaboration </h2> Rather, delegation members would like to see ongoing collaborations with the scientists they met during their trip. The idea is that a more informed scientific community in North Korea could help the country recover from its environmental collapse in a more sustainable fashion, one not reliant on infusions of aid. Bowers, of U.S. company Biohabitat, is working with the Society of Ecological Restoration to set up a chapter in China to exchange technological information with North Korean scientists. “If we are looking at any kind of regime change in next 25 to 40 years in North Korea, I think that doing whatever we can from an ecology restoration perspective will only enhance people’s ability to effect a positive regime change,” he says. Madsen, the Danish soil scientist, is currently looking for funding to host North Korean scientists to study in Europe. “It was pretty hard to have good interactions with our colleagues there, but you could feel some of the people were both smart, and you felt they really wanted increased cooperation and interaction with us,” Madsen says. “It’s encouraging to proceed to try to raise some funding to do something for them. We can only hope changes will happen in that country, good changes in the near future, so we can have something to build on with these colleagues when it does.” Photo of flood damage courtesy <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/69583224@N05/8163462018/"> EU Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection </a> (CC-BY-SA). All other photos courtesy <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/josephferris76/"> Joseph A Ferris III </a> (CC-BY-NC-ND).

Scientists who recently visited the hermit nation report the situation is dire.

Life in the Death Zone

The tireless efforts of two men transformed the Iron Curtain into a wildlife reserve for the 21st century.

Cloaking Buildings from Earthquakes and Tsunamis

The powerful earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25, 2015, opened this large crack in a roadway. Image Credit: Stéphane Brûlé, Krish Dulal/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA), NOAA

In August 2012, civil engineers from the French firm Menard drilled three rows of shallow holes into the soft clay soil at the base of the Alps near Grenoble. Each hole was roughly the depth and diameter of what a utility company might dig to secure the base of a telephone pole.Then, on one side of the boreholes, they lowered a vibrating probe several feet into the soil. On the surface, they placed a network of sensors to record vibrations. By the time the waves reached the second row of boreholes, a distance of 11 feet, their signal, which would typically travel through 160 feet of soil, hardly registered. The holes had stopped the vibrations in their tracks. Sensors sitting atop concrete blocks monitor seismic waves near the boreholes drilled as a seismic cloak. For more than 2,000 years people living in earthquake zones have tried to keep the shaking beneath their feet from destroying their buildings. In his history of ancient Greece, Pliny the Elder describes how a temple’s foundation included a layer of sheepskin to allow the ground to slip and slide without damaging the building above. The state of the art for earthquake protection today, including bearings, springs, moveable pads, and other “base isolation” systems, works in much the same way as those employed by the ancient Greeks.Now, simple rows of boreholes like those drilled in the field could make all of that obsolete. They appear to work as a “seismic cloak” that could hide a building—or perhaps an entire city—from an earthquake’s deadly waves. “If we drill holes around the building, forget about all your earthquake protections inside the building. We don’t need them anymore,” says Sébastien Guenneau, the originator of the idea and a physicist at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France.Guenneau compares the effect to that of what we see in a mirage when light, which typically travels in a straight line, is bent by low density, hot air immediately above the surface of the earth. “Instead of having a ray of light that goes straight to the Earth, now it is curved, which is why if you are looking at a mirage, you don’t see the soil but you see the sky,” Guenneau says. “The same thing happens to seismic waves when you change the density of the soil by drilling boreholes. Instead of bending a ray of light, you are bending a seismic wave.”<h2>From Microscopic to Massive</h2>Guenneau’s efforts at seismic cloaking stem from recent efforts to cloak or hide objects from light. In 2006, John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College in London, along with researchers from Duke University, showed it was theoretically possible to bend light around an object, effectively making it invisible. Later the same year the group made a partial cloak for microwaves, whose frequencies are slightly larger than those of visible light.But cloaking the foundation of an entire building from seismic waves would likely be a much greater challenge. “I was a bit wowed by the daring of this paper,” Pendry says. “But when you think about it, it’s a reasonable proposition. Earthquakes are waves—or those are the things which do the damage—and they propagate along the surface of the Earth. If you’re smart enough, presumably you can deflect them to go different places.”Though Pendry doesn’t say it, he likely presumes Geunneau is smart enough. Before Pendry made headlines around the world for his invisibility cloak, Guenneau spent over a year working for him as a postdoc on a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project for the U.S. Department of Defense. Guenneau can’t say exactly what all the project entailed, in part because the work he did was basic research and he says he doesn’t know what DARPA did with it. He does add, however that “they are very interested in invisibility cloaks.”For more than a decade since, Guenneau has continued to work on metamaterials, artificial materials that have properties not found in nature, such as the ability to bend waves in directions they wouldn’t normally go. The vast majority of people working in the field, Pendry included, work in optics, trying to bend light to create things like cloaks and “super lenses” that have incredibly high resolution. Largely as a way to distinguish himself in an increasingly crowded field, Gueunneau started thinking on a completely different scale, much to the amusement of many of his colleagues.“They were just laughing, to be honest,” Guenneau says when he first told coworkers about his plans for a seismic cloak. They ticked off a laundry list of problems, including the fact that soil is viscoelastic—both viscous and elastic, complicating how it reacts to forces—and maddeningly heterogeneous in its composition. “There have been people working on soil structure for many years,” he says his colleagues told him. “And you think you will make a revolution?”Guenneau hasn’t sparked a revolution just yet, but the results he and his colleagues have obtained are compelling. Their goal is a true cloak, a circle of boreholes that bends seismic waves around the holes, like water flowing around a boulder in a stream. What they demonstrated in Grenoble was a good first step. There, rows of boreholes caused seismic waves to reflect backwards, like light hitting a mirror. The reflections, however, created seismic waves in front of the boreholes that had twice the strength as those initially generated by the probe. Such an approach could prove catastrophic in real world applications.“Behind the mirror, you may have protected your nuclear plant, but in front of your mirror, you have a hospital or a school that gets destroyed,” Guenneau says. The group now hopes to conduct a follow up study that demonstrates their ability to create a true cloak.Guenneau is aiming to protect high value—and potentially highly vulnerable—facilities like nuclear power plants.For all its daring, creating a seismic cloak may actually be easier than constructing an invisibility cloak for light waves, Pendry says. For metamaterials to work, they have to be smaller than the length of the wave they cloak. Visible light requires nanometer scale metamaterials, devices that are proving incredibly difficult to create. Seismic waves, by contrast, require meter-scale metamaterials like the boreholes used in Grenoble. Yet even if the group is able to hide a building from seismic waves, Pendry questions how widely applicable their approach will be.“I don’t think this technology is anything that is going to work in a place like San Francisco because the cloaks tend to be the same size as object you are hiding,” he says. “In a dense city, you wouldn’t be able to excavate the area around buildings without knocking down their neighbors.”Guenneau says they aim to protect high value—and potentially highly vulnerable—facilities like nuclear power plants with a sufficient amount of undeveloped land surrounding them where they could drill their holes.Still, others say the recent study does little to show that the approach will work at all. “The mechanism of earthquake shaking is very different than a single discrete source that is very close to the boreholes,” says Youssef Hashash a civil engineering professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. “It comes from underneath you. Some from the surface, but a lot of it comes from below these boreholes, and the technique they have doesn’t affect anything underneath you.”Jeroen Tromp, a geologist at Princeton University, disagrees, saying surface waves are typically more powerful and do more damage than waves coming up from below. “Surface waves spread in two dimensions as opposed to subsurface waves that spread in three dimensions,” Tromp says. “The energy is distributed over a surface rather than a volume, so they are much more destructive.”Tromp cautions, however, that there is no one-size fits all approach to seismic protection. Smaller structures like single-family homes resonate, or shake, at higher frequencies, making them more prone to damage from the less powerful but higher frequency waves coming from underground.Hashash adds that the vibrating probe used in the study only tested a single, 50 Hz frequency, while the most damaging surface waves typically occur across a wider and lower range of frequencies between 0.1–10 Hz. “You cannot produce the richness of waves that an earthquake produces with that device,” Hashash says.Stéphane Brûlé, a seismologist and geotechnical engineer with Menard and lead author of the Grenoble study, says the initial experiment was a proof of concept to show that boreholes can alter the path of seismic waves similar to how prior studies altered microwaves. Brûlé and his colleagues completed a second experiment several months after the initial test that used significantly wider holes that were seven feet in diameter. This time they dropped a mass of 21 tons from a height of 164 feet to simulate an earthquake. Shaking in the immediate area registered between 2.0 and 3.0 on the Richter scale, and, perhaps more importantly, created waves in the 3 to 12 Hz range, similar to those seen in an actual earthquake. <h2>Taming Tsunamis</h2>At the same time, Guenneau is moving forward with cloaking techniques to protect against entirely different, yet equally destructive waves. In 2008, he and colleagues from Liverpool University in the U.K. and the Fresnel Institute in France showed how a series of rods arranged in concentric rings could redirect liquid waves, similar to what Pendry and others had shown for microwaves.“Tsunami waves and surface waves for earthquakes are pretty much the same in terms of the mathematical equations,” Guenneau says. “You can have a huge storm, you can have waves of very high amplitude, but in center of the cloak you will have calm water.”The initial experiment was conducted with an eight-inch diameter disk, a scale so small that the group had to use methoxynonafluorobutane, a compound similar to Freon once used in refrigerators, instead of water because of water’s high viscosity at such a small scale. Waves produced by the March 11, 2011, earthquake off the coast of Sendai, Japan, reached across the Pacific Ocean. In February 2015, Guenneau and a team of French researchers published a follow up study for an “invisibility carpet,” a significantly larger rectangular pad with several rows of rods jutting out of the water. In wave tank testing, the carpet reflected the waves, which would otherwise have washed over a small seawall, back in the direction from which they came.Guenneau says he is now working with a private company to develop a larger scale prototype. “The cost would remain quite affordable compared to the cost of a nuclear plant which is destroyed or a city which is devastated,” Guenneau says. “You prefer to have a carpet which costs perhaps 10 or 20 million euros than have 50,000 human beings wiped from the surface of the earth.”Pendry, however, questions whether such a carpet could withstand a tsunami. “I’d be very, very skeptical just because of the enormous forces involved,” Pendry says. “It would involve a very large, very expensive structure, and maybe one that you couldn’t even find the materials to build in the first place.”<h2>Protective Forests</h2>Whether or not columns sticking out of the sea could provide adequate protection against a tsunami, similar structures on land may already be absorbing earthquake waves.In 2014, researchers in France found that a forest of long aluminum rods extending vertically from a horizontal plate canceled out vibration waves. The rods didn’t cause the waves to reflect as if bouncing off a mirror nor bend around a protected area like a cloak. Rather, each rod acted as a resonator absorbing a small fraction of the wave’s energy. Collectively, the rods canceled the wave entirely.The finding made the researchers wonder if an actual forest would have a similar effect on seismic waves. In a yet-unpublished study, researchers in Grenoble recorded ambient vibrations in the ground using a pair of seismometers, one located within a small wooded area and one located just outside the wood’s western border. Both instruments detected vibrations from road construction roughly 100 yards away to the north. Vibrations inside the wooded area were six times weaker than those outside.“If you have many trees close to each other you can completely cancel the incoming wave,” says Philippe Roux, director of research for the National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble and co-author on both papers. This massive weight is dropped by the crane to simulate the waves produced by an earthquake. Trees, however, have their limitations. Like the metal rods, they only resonate, or absorb wave energy at certain frequencies based on their height. The 33–66 foot pine trees that damped the construction vibrations resonate at 30–45 Hz, a significantly higher frequency than the most dangerous seismic waves that are less than 10 Hz.To absorb energy from the most destructive waves, Roux says structures 260 to 330 feet tall would be required. Instead of using trees, we might someday design cities so that a forest of skyscrapers or other tall structures neutralize seismic waves, Roux says.Ping Sheng, a physicist at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, says the energy absorbed from seismic waves could then be converted to electricity. In a recent paper Sheng demonstrated it is possible to convert energy from acoustic waves into electricity, suggesting the same could be done for seismic waves. “If you could have a large-scale dissipative mechanism, then you may be able to lower the effective Richter scale by one while simultaneously converting a lot of energy,” Sheng says. “That would be huge.”Cloaking buildings from earthquakes and tsunamis or converting the energy of seismic waves into electricity may seem far-fetched, but probably no more so than it once did to isolate marble temples from the ground with a layer of sheepskins. Researchers will have to continue testing their cloaks and resonators in increasingly complex, real-word settings against a number of different seismic waves before we’ll know just how effective they will be. But in certain applications they might just work. “We are at the stage when people stop laughing,” Guenneau says.

A simple yet apparently effective metamaterial could save vital buildings from earthquakes’ destructive waves.

Offshore Wind Lands in America

America’s first offshore wind farm will connect sometime today to Block Island, a small, pork chop-shaped part of Rhode Island off the tip of Long Island. For Cliff McGinnes, a co-owner of the Block Island Power Company, the transition to wind power can’t come soon enough. For decades, McGinnes’s company ferried up to a million gallons of diesel fuel a year from the Rhode Island mainland to power this tiny resort community (population 1,000). The fuel, a particularly costly and dirty energy source whose carbon dioxide emissions are second only to burning coal, lit up four antiquated generators on an island where power outages are common. Tourists snap photos of the new Block Island Wind Farm. Last year, an oil leak at one generator burst into flames, destroying that dynamo and two others. The fire also melted one of McGinnes’s utility trucks and caused rolling blackouts at the height of the summer tourism season, when the Block Island population balloons past 20,000. The company spent more than $100,000 to rent a pair of portable diesel generators. Customers, who already pay more for electricity than anyone in the country—50 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) or more during peak summer months, nearly five times the national average—shouldered the costs. From now on, Block Island’s power will emanate from five wind turbines three miles off its southeast coast, each nearly twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. They were built by a company called Deepwater Wind at a cost of roughly $300 million. The energy they produce will not be cheap. Yet at a starting cost of 24 cents per kWh, the new system will save Block Islanders $25 to $30 a month off their electricity bills. Offshore wind power clearly works for Block Island, a place where the economics of fossil fuels no longer makes sense. Can it also be an important part of the energy mix for the coastal U.S.? Analysts say it can, though states will have to work with developers to bring the costs down. For now, fossil fuel-generated power still dominates in New England, where just 3% of electricity currently comes from wind and solar. But the Block Island pilot project, capable of powering 17,000 homes, offers the promise of more to come. The environmental group Oceana once dubbed the Eastern Seaboard the “Saudi Arabia of offshore wind” for its strong ocean breezes, shallow waters and close proximity to a densely populated region eager to decarbonize. Massachusetts and New York have both committed to generating a portion of their power in coming years from offshore wind, and Deepwater Wind is slated to build a larger clone of the Rhode Island wind farm—which began supplying power to the mainland in December—to serve Long Island. Block Island, Rhode Island Meanwhile, first-mover Rhode Island is in a position to capture a significant share of the approximately 11,000 jobs and $50 billion in investment projected for potential a 20- year regional build-out. Onshore wind power has proved its worth. Electricity from new installations—which are being erected at a pace of roughly one turbine every two and a half hours around the country—sells for less than 6 cents per kWh, a price competitive with natural gas. Offshore wind is still much more expensive, but that could change. Europe has shown that, when produced on a big enough scale, such power can compete. There, the price has fallen 46% in the last five years to an average of 13 cents per kWh. The figure beats the 16 cents for new nuclear power plants and is closing in on Europe’s 9 cent price tag for new coal plants, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “If we could do what Europe is doing, then it would be at market price today,” says Willett Kempton, research director at the University of Delaware’s center for carbon-free power integration. Block Island’s McGinnes, a lifelong Republican with no environmental leanings, is a convert. As chief operating officer of the Block Island Power Company, a position the plain-spoken 82-year-old Rhode Island native relinquished in November, his interest in wind was driven mostly by economics. Cliff McGinnes, co-owner of the Block Island Power Company “For some people in this world, it doesn’t matter what the cost is,” McGinnes says, sitting at his desk last August before he retired as chief operating officer of Block Island Power. “They want to feel green, or they want to have an electric car, or they don’t want to get their electricity from a company that burns fuel oil. I have a tendency to be more about cost. That’s just the way I am.” When the power company executives flip the switch, energy will flow from the turbines to the island via a subsea cable already connected to the mainland. The turbines will harness a steady offshore breeze that on most days will supply all the island’s energy needs and send additional electricity to the mainland. When the wind is not blowing, electricity will flow in reverse, sending electrons from conventional power plants on the mainland to the island. Costs will be subsidized by the larger pool of ratepayers statewide, who will see their electricity bills increase by an average of $1.35 per month when the system is in full operation. McGinnes likes both the economics and the relative simplicity of wind power. “Running those diesels is nothing but a headache; there is always something going wrong,” McGinnes says. “If it hadn’t been for the wind farm and cable, we’d still be running them. It’s the best thing that has ever happened to us as a community.” <h2> Centuries of Struggle </h2> The struggle for energy security on Block Island goes back centuries. In 1721, the island’s settlers voted in a town meeting to prohibit the construction of fences higher than four feet, lest they run out of firewood. Fast forward 250 years and islanders were still wrestling with the energy issue. In 1973, they set their clocks one hour ahead of the rest of the East Coast, moving to year-round daylight savings time, to try to save energy during the Arab oil embargo. Following a second global oil crisis in 1979, the Block Island Economic Development Foundation compiled a report that underscored the urgent need for the island to kick its dependence on oil. Its authors considered a number of potential alternatives, including onshore wind, waste incineration, burning peat and a connection to the mainland grid via subsea cable. Also in 1979, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy began testing what, at the time, was one of the world’s largest wind turbines, which they erected in the Block Island Power Company’s back lot. The location provided strong steady winds and an opportunity to try to pair wind power with the island’s existing diesel generators. Though small by today’s standards—the wind turbine’s blades were less than one third the length of those installed offshore by Deepwater Wind—the 200 kilowatt-capacity turbine produced as much as 11% of the island’s energy needs during off-peak winter months. The years-long test was one of four conducted at sites across the country—in Puerto Rico, Block Island, New Mexico and Hawaii—by federal researchers in the late 1970s and early ’80s that some hoped would jump-start a new era of wind energy. Block Island stuck with diesel fuel for another 30 years, despite increasingly loud complaints power outages. The energy crises of the 1970s, however, gave way to an oil glut in the 1980s, and Block Island’s dependence on diesel continued. When NASA completed its testing in 1984, the agency offered to sell the $2.3 million turbine to Block Island Power at a steep discount, but Franklin Renz, the owner at the time, declined, and the turbine was sold for scrap. “We didn’t have the money we needed to repair and fix it,” Renz says. “If we ran into a problem with the computer or some other technical part that we couldn’t handle, we’d have to hire someone, and so I said, ‘no, we wouldn’t take it.’ ” So Block Island stuck with diesel fuel for another 30 years, despite increasingly loud complaints from residents about power outages and voltage irregularities that made appliances burn out and clocks run fast. McGinnes, though he profited from ownership of both the power company and one of the trucking companies that transported fuel to the island, finally agreed that the diesel generators had to go. “We’d have been at the mercy of the cost of fuel and of course the capital expense,” McGinnes says. “Now all of that goes away.” <h2> Catching up With Europe </h2> The question now is whether Block Island’s wind turbines and others being planned along the U.S. coast will prove the long-term value of offshore wind power. For the moment, offshore wind in the U.S. is only cost-effective in special cases like Block Island. And even that project only came to fruition because it was willed into existence by Rhode Island politicians against the objections of various critics. When the Deepwater Wind contract was approved by the state government in 2010, ratepayers on the mainland, the state’s attorney general and an environmental group called the Conservation Law Foundation all sued, citing the high cost and alleged strong arm tactics employed to get the project approved. The state’s Supreme Court approved the project in 2014, but only after expressing hope that the turbines would prove as beneficial for Rhode Island as the controversial 1867 purchase of Alaska, known at the time as Seward’s folly, was for the nation. For now, the high expense of the new turbines is locked in. To amortize the $300 million price of the wind farm, Deepwater Wind negotiated a contract with National Grid, the utility company that provides electricity for most of the state, that will increase the price of electricity generated by the turbines 3.5% annually to nearly 50 cents per kWh in 20 years. The cost will be absorbed by all Rhode Islanders, not just residents of Block Island. Five wind turbines provide Block Island with power. Nevertheless, those who have studied the long-term viability of offshore wind are optimistic. In March 2016, the University of Delaware’s Special Initiative on Offshore Wind published a study on the future cost of proposed projects in Massachusetts based on a survey of industry experts. The study predicted that the cost of offshore wind power would drop from 30 cents per kWh—the average cost of energy from the Block Island wind farm, including its subsea cable but not including federal tax credits—to 11 cents by 2027. Federal tax credits for both onshore and offshore wind are slowly being drawn down and are set to expire in 2020. Aside from Block Island and a second, slightly larger Deepwater Wind project now in the works, offshore wind development in the U.S. is not expected to benefit from federal subsidies. “When we came out with the study,” says Willett Kempton, lead author of the University of Delaware review, “some said, ‘You are crazy, you are saying the price is going to be way lower than what we are seeing. You are just going to mislead people.’” Yet soon after Kempton’s study came out, winning bids for offshore wind projects in Europe had already come in at or below his 2030 estimates with subsidies. In July, Denmark-based DONG Energy, the world’s largest developer of offshore wind, won a contract to build a new wind farm off the coast of the Netherlands and to sell the electricity it generated for 8 cents per kWh. In September, Swedish power company Vattenfall won the right to build two offshore wind projects in the Danish North Sea for 7 cents per kWh. And in April, DONG Energy got the green light to build the third and final stage of an existing wind farm off the northern coast of Germany after agreeing to a price of just 6 cents per kWh for the electricity it generated. “Now our numbers are looking too high based on what industry is already able to do,” Kempton says. <h2> Reducing Costs </h2> To catch up with Europe and benefit from economies of scale, the U.S. needs to develop purpose-built infrastructure and a well-trained workforce, Kempton says.The lack of such resources substantially increased the cost of constructing Block Island’s wind farm. For instance, since no U.S. ship was capable of hoisting the 400-ton nacelles, or generators, 330 feet to the tops of the Block Island turbine towers, Deepwater Wind had to lease a Norwegian vessel to do the job. The ship had to steam across the Atlantic to Rhode Island, a trip that took two weeks each way. Costs for such specialty vessels range from $140,000 to $250,000 per day. The cost problem will resolve itself if the federal and state governments mandate a shift from dirty to clean electricity generation, Kempton says. In August 2016, for example, Massachusetts passed legislation requiring local utility companies to get 1.6 gigawatts of their electricity from offshore wind farms in the coming decade. That’s the equivalent of the energy output from three average-sized coal-fired power plants. New York went one better in January, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo committed to developing 2.4 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. Taken together, the states’ plan to produce 3 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity is 100 times larger than the 30 megawatt capacity of the Block Island wind farm. The Massachusetts law envisions a steady, sizable build-out, equivalent to one large wind farm every two years over an eight-year period. Details of the New York commitment are still being worked out but will likely do the same thing. “That’s really different from building one wind farm, because now it makes sense to invest in factories, it makes sense to invest in specialized vessels,” Kempton says. “If we have policies that provide a pipeline of projects, then you get the price down to market price. You aren’t paying a premium for renewable energy anymore.” Efforts by Massachusetts and New York, however, may not be enough to entice industry to make the kinds of investments in the U.S. that are necessary to drive down the price of wind to the low levels seen in Europe. “It will take a number of projects and a number of waves of projects before we get to anywhere near what we see in Europe in terms of price,” says Tom Harries, an offshore wind energy analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Days after New York committed to its offshore wind build-out, Deepwater Wind won its second contract, this time to build a 15-turbine wind farm that will connect to Long Island. The company has agreed to sell electricity from this project at <a href="http://www.newsday.com/long-island/suffolk/offshore-wind-farm-may-not-meet-peak-summer-demand-on-south-fork-1.13468717"> an estimated 22 cents per kWh </a> averaged over a 20 year agreement. The cost is still far more than that of offshore wind in Europe but significantly less than the 24 to nearly 50 cents per kWh on Block Island. Back on Block Island, the transition to clean energy was underway even before the electricity began flowing. The ferry operator that used to haul McGinnes’s diesel trucks to the island now runs sightseeing tours to the offshore wind farm. McGinnes seems humbled. In November, his two co-owners sold their shares of the Block Island Power Company to the town, which finally fulfilled an aspiration of ownership that had been around for decades. Block Island Wind Farm may be the first of many installations on the East Coast. McGinnes resigned from his position as the plant’s chief operating officer as part of the transition. He and his wife still retain their one-third stake, though he said it may only be a matter of time before they are forced to sell as the private company reorganizes under town ownership. Though opposed to the town takeover of his company, McGinnes is upbeat about the switch to wind power. “From a business standpoint, it’s a real win for us,” McGinnes says. “We’re tickled pink.” This article was <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28042017/block-island-wind-farm-deepwater-wind-renewable-energy-climate-change"> first published </a> at <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org"> InsideClimate News </a> , a Pulitzer Prize-winning, non-profit, non-partisan news organization dedicated to covering climate change, energy and the environment. Photo credits: Phil McKenna/InsideClimate News, Timothy J. Quill/Wikimedia Commons, Deepwater Wind, U.S. Department of Energy

America’s first offshore wind farm now powers an East Coast island. Is the tech ready for prime time in the U.S.?

Urban Transit’s Uncertain Future

Imagine if nine out of every ten cars suddenly disappeared from city streets. On-street parking would be eliminated entirely, giving way to restaurant seating, bike paths, and green space. Parking garages would all but disappear, making room for additional housing, retail, and office space.Now imagine if cities around the world sprawled for hundreds of miles, their centers clogged with twice today’s car traffic, and daily commutes lasted for hours. Both scenarios, it turns out, are entirely plausible futures with the rise of autonomous vehicles, the self-driving cars now navigating city streets from Silicon Valley to Singapore. Cities could be forever changed by the adoption of autonomous vehicles. “There is a huge potential for change,” says Philippe Crist, an economist with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “It creates new possibilities that we are only starting to get our minds around.” The OECD is one of a growing number of think tanks and institutions peering into the crystal ball of urban mobility’s future and, more often then not, conjuring rosy expectations. Fleets of shared, self-driving vehicles could indeed remove nine out of every ten vehicles on city streets, eliminating the need for all on-street parking and 80% of off-street parking, according to a recent study by the group. The Paris-based think tank’s assessment comes from simulations of Lisbon, Portugal, a mid-sized European city, based on real trip-taking activity and assuming that people rode in self-driving cars that can be shared simultaneously by several passengers. The findings were comparable to similar recent studies of shared autonomous vehicles in New York, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Singapore.The significant reduction in vehicles—a 90% drop in cars over a 24-hour period and 70% fewer vehicles during peak travel periods—comes through sharing of cars that today typically sit unused 23 hours per day. “The arrival of this technology allows consumers, or companies, to extract value from these stranded assets the rest of the day,” Crist says.While autonomous vehicles may sound futuristic, self-driving cars are increasingly part of the present. Last January, Mercedes-Benz introduced the F 015 Luxury in Motion self-driving concept car with front seats that can swivel away from the windshield to face the rear seats. In March, industry supplier Delphi Automotive drove from San Francisco to New York in an Audi Q5 piloted almost entirely by radar, cameras, and laser sensors. And Google, which has already logged over 1.3 million driving miles with autonomous vehicles, is now building a fleet of 100 next-generation prototypes. In June, the vehicles, each of which looks like a large computer mouse, began navigating city streets from Silicon Valley to San Francisco.“The pace at which autonomous cars are coming on is dramatically faster than what people had imagined,” says Robin Chase, former CEO of car sharing company Zipcar.<h2>Utopia or Something Else?</h2>While autonomous vehicles are coming, it’s still entirely unclear what their arrival will bring. If everyone rides in an autonomous vehicle, there will be few if any accidents, which will allow for lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicles. And if people share these vehicles as they move about the city, the total miles driven each day will also decrease. Combine lighter cars with fewer miles traveled, and the amount of energy used to get people where they need to go drops by 80%. This, at least, is the “utopian scenario” in a recent study by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.Yet in the study’s “dystopian scenario,” energy consumption more than doubles as larger, privately owned vehicles travel longer distances. “You could imagine a consumer wanting to be able to cook dinner on their way home or to watch movies while the car is driving, and they could then not care if they lived close to their work place,” says lead author William Morrow. “Why do we still insist on buying a car?” Luís Bettencourt, a professor of complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, who was not involved with the study, thinks a dystopian outcome is more likely. “I think the expectation is they would tend to make cities bigger and less dense,” he says. Bettencourt, whose research focuses on cities and urbanization, cites Marchetti’s constant. Named for the Venetian physicist who devised it, <a href="http://persquaremile.com/2012/09/13/marchettis-constant/">Marchetti’s constant</a> states that throughout history, no matter where people lived or what form of transportation they used to get about, they have always spent and will continue to spend an average of 30 minutes each way getting to and from work. Autonomous vehicles could speed up commutes, allowing people to live farther apart, Bettencourt says.“Once you have autonomous vehicles and algorithmic ways of coordinating traffic, then the obvious next step is you start coordinating vehicles into convoys. You can imagine 200 mph corridors where these trains made out of cars are just moving across the city, and those would be the future highways.” Bettencourt questions why the reduction in vehicles, predicted by many, hasn’t already occurred. “We’ve had taxi services for a while, and we have Uber and new incarnations of those same services,” he says. “Why aren’t these things taking over cities entirely? Why do we still insist on buying a car?”Fewer people, however, are insisting on buying cars. Recent studies suggest car ownership in the U.S. peaked during the last decade and is now on the decline. One study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor found more than 30% of households do not own a car in six out of 30 of the largest U.S. cities. In New York City, 57% of households do not have a vehicle, up from 54% in 2007.A separate study by the same institute found a significant decrease in recent years in the number of young drivers across 15 countries. The decrease correlated strongly with internet access, suggesting that virtual contact via electronic devices may be reducing the need for actual contact.<h2>Rise of the Taxibot</h2>Electronic devices may not only be reducing interest in car ownership but are enabling the sharing of vehicles that make shared, self-driving vehicles possible.“You couldn’t have imagined this ten years ago when people didn’t have smart phones and mobile computing was not available,” says Emilio Frazzoli, head of Future Urban Mobility for the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. “Now you have this ability to connect and book a car. You see it with Uber and the proliferation of taxi booking apps or public transportation schedule routing apps, and this is at the same time you have autonomous vehicle technology that is evolving. You can marry the two.”Sharing of non-autonomous vehicles already offers a distinct advantage over traditional car ownership, says Chase, author of the book Peers Inc and a champion of the sharing economy. “If you are financially smart and you are living in the city and you don’t need a car to get to work, you are insane to own one,” she says. “You will always be saving money by renting them when you need them.” The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology is already trialing self-driving cars in a small area of Singapore. Further savings come when people not only share a car but also share the ride. Ride-sharing startups Uber and Lyft now offer UberPool and Lyft Line, carpooling services that allow people headed in the same direction to share a ride. “In San Francisco today, UberPool is $7 to go from anywhere to anywhere. That’s probably one-third the cost of a taxi,” says Xavier Mosquet, a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group. If a private company could use an autonomous vehicle rather than paying a driver, the cost of transporting people across the city would be even less. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group found the cost of conveying one passenger by an autonomous vehicle would be 35% less than by conventional taxi at the average taxi occupancy rate of 1.2 passengers. Increase an autonomous vehicle’s rate of occupancy to just two passengers and the cost per passenger becomes competitive with mass transit.Mosquet says such shared, autonomous vehicles may not work everywhere but will be well suited for the world’s 50 to 100 largest cities where population density is greatest. “In Manhattan, you have ten people looking for the same cab and mostly likely headed in the same direction on every corner,” he says. “With a smartphone now collecting that information, using it is extremely easy.” The Mercedes-Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion concept seats four people in seats that can swivel to face each other. Where demand is high, larger, driverless buses could give autonomous vehicles an added advantage. Today, the Exclusive Bus Lane (XBL), a 2.5 mile stretch of highway connecting the New Jersey Turnpike with midtown Manhattan, is the busiest bus lane in America, with the capacity to transport up to 41,000 people per hour through the Lincoln Tunnel. Self-driving buses could reduce the time between vehicles from five seconds to one second, allowing the tunnel to accommodate more than 200,000 passengers per hour, according to a recent study by researchers at Princeton University.Singapore and a number of European countries are now testing or preparing to test fully autonomous buses that could complement fleets of self-driving cars. “You can combine different types of transportation to provide both the convenience that people need with the scalability that a city needs,” Frazzoli says.<h2>Detours Ahead</h2>Before fleets of self-driving cars or buses can replace the cars of today, a number of challenges still need to be addressed. Among a range of sensor technologies for autonomous vehicles that includes radar, ultrasound, and cameras, laser-based “LiDAR” sensors shows the most promise. The technology, however, has been incredibly expensive. The LiDAR sensors that Google used on its first generation prototype cost $80,000 per vehicle and $8,000 per vehicle for its current prototype, Mosquet says. Costs continue to drop quickly. Just last week, automotive startup Quanergy announced a solid-state LiDAR system that will cost under $250 when it enters mass production later this year.Apart from technical issues, a significant challenge may simply be gaining widespread adoption. The best case scenario of the recent OECD study—where shared autonomous cars take nine out of ten vehicles off city streets—is based on the assumption that everyone rides in an autonomous vehicle and shares each trip with others headed in the same direction. If half of a city’s population continues to drive their own cars, the number of vehicles—and the amount of time people spend idling in traffic jams—could actually increase.Lower costs alone may not be enough to get people to give up car ownership. If any city is likely to embrace shared autonomous cars it will likely be Singapore, an authoritarian city-state that has pioneered a number of regulations designed to limit car ownership and ease traffic congestion. For the past quarter century, Singapore has imposed heavy taxes and licensing fees for car ownership that would be difficult to pass elsewhere. A BMW 435i that sells for $55,000 in the US costs $220,000 in Singapore after all taxes and fees. A $16,000 Ford Fiesta would set you back $108,000 in Singapore. In 1998, the city also introduced the world’s first electronic road pricing, or “congestion pricing,” which charges vehicle operators a fee to enter the city’s central business district.In spite of these and other efforts, including free subway rides for early morning commuters, ridership on the city’s subway system has declined slightly, from 67% of all commuters in 1997 to 66% in 2014.“They have tried to implement almost every measure that people have thought of in terms of encouraging public transportation use versus cars,” Bettencourt says. “But the fact is—what has been happening in parallel—is they have had such strong economic growth that a lot of people can afford a car even under those conditions. It’s actually a fairly congested city for all the wonderful public transportation it has.” The cost of shared transport could drop so low that car ownership wouldn’t be worth it. Frazzoli, who plans to submit a bid in Singapore’s recent call for an autonomous vehicle pilot program, says he thinks the technology has a bright future in the city-state due to strong government support. “They see this as a critical technology for their city, and therefore they are supporting its development,” he says.Elsewhere, private companies like Uber, which recently began test-driving its own autonomous vehicle, could drive down the cost of shared transport to such a point that car ownership wouldn’t be worth it.Bettencourt, however, remains skeptical whether enough people, in Singapore or elsewhere, will buy into shared self-driving cars to make them a success. “The past may already be giving you all kinds of hints to the future of what people may and may not prefer,” he says. Photo credits: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisschoenbohm/6326047652/">Chris Ford/Flickr (CC BY-NC)</a> , Mercedes-Benz, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/anotherangle/15236768169/">Michael Muraz/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND)</a>

Autonomous vehicles will transform the way we move. The only question is how.

Seismic Cloak Successfully Deflects Earthquake Waves

MIMIZAN, FRANCE—For an experiment with such ambition, the setting couldn’t have been more humble. Yet scientists from across Europe converged here—a dirt lane between a farmer’s field and a small wood in southern France—in the fall of 2016 to test a provocative idea: could they make the seismic waves of an earthquake disappear? Straddling rows of canola and maritime pine, they assembled an array of more than 1,000 seismometers, devices so sensitive they could detect a beating heart, treetops swaying in the breeze, or ocean waves crashing on distant shores. Then, with a robotic-looking device they’d nicknamed R2-D2, they planned to shake the ground beneath their feet. The experiment was the largest field test thus far of ongoing efforts in Europe and the United States to create a seismic barrier that would shield or perhaps even cloak key infrastructure from an earthquake’s deadly force. The technique is still in its infancy, yet government agencies are beginning to take notice. Seismic cloaks could someday protect nuclear reactors, crude oil pipelines, or even entire cities. “The payoff for this could be huge,” said Eric Dunn of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Research and Development Center in Hanover, New Hampshire. “If this works, it’s fantastic.” Before there could be any chance at a payoff, however, the geophysicists gathered in France needed help from their farmer host. The generator they’d brought with them from Grenoble refused to start. Without it, they couldn’t power R2-D2, and without the ground-shaking device, there would be no experiment. <h2> Protective Trees </h2> Several years ago, researchers at the National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble noticed that if they connected long aluminum rods to a thin metal plate and then vibrated the plate, each rod would absorb and dissipate a small amount of the vibration wave’s energy. If they connected enough rods to the plate, the forest of resonating rods would cancel out the wave entirely. “One tree doesn’t have that much effect, but if you have many trees combined together you can kill the seismic wave.” Would the same phenomenon occur at a larger scale, with an actual forest and a simulated seismic wave? Initial results from the forest experiment in southern France, published earlier this year in the journal Seismological Research Letters , suggest the answer is “yes.” The experiment “confirms the strong influence that a dense collection of trees can have on the propagation of seismic waves,” the study <a href="https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/srl/article-abstract/525828/toward-seismic-metamaterials-the-metaforet-project?redirectedFrom=fulltext"> concludes </a> . Velocimeters placed on the trunks of several trees showed that as the wave passed underground, each tree absorbed some of the wave’s energy, causing the trees to vibrate ever so slightly. Vibrations from the trees then caused new waves to spread from the trees in all directions, dissipating the energy of the seismic wave. The waves emanating from the trees were also out of sync with the original seismic wave and thus had a canceling effect on the original wave operating in much the same way that noise-cancelling headphones eliminate background noise. The collective vibration of hundreds of trees, each weighing roughly 500 pounds, was enough to nullify the simulated wave. “One tree doesn’t have that much effect, but if you have many trees combined together you can kill the seismic wave,” said Philippe Roux, director of research for the National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble and the study’s lead author. While maritime pines worked well in mitigating a small, simulated seismic wave, much taller trees would be needed to protect against a real earthquake. R2-D2, the shaker used to simulate seismic waves, generated waves at frequencies ranging from 10 to 100 Hz. Seismic waves from an actual earthquake have longer wavelengths, i.e. lower frequencies, ranging from 0.1 to 10 Hz. The maritime pine trees tested in the experiment were all approximately 45 feet tall and resonated the most when exposed to significantly shorter wavelengths around 50 Hz. To absorb the longer waves of an earthquake, the trees would have to be between 260 and 300 feet tall, roughly the height of the tallest redwoods, and would need to be of varying heights to dissipate waves across a broader range of frequencies. Planting redwoods around critical infrastructure and then waiting decades or perhaps even centuries for the trees to mature, isn’t viable. But redesigning cities in such a way that buildings act as artificial resonators to collectively reduce or redirect a seismic wave may be. Specially designed cities could help buildings resist damage caused by earthquakes. Many of the same researchers working on the forest experiment are now considering how groupings of buildings could act as metamaterials—artificial materials with properties not found in nature—to mitigate against seismic waves. In <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41062-017-0063-x"> a study </a> published in June in the journal Innovative Infrastructure Solutions they proposed “a district of buildings could be considered as a set of above-ground resonators” and expressed the hope that “our proposal will contribute to all theoretical and experimental efforts in [the] design of cities of the future, from a metamaterial standpoint.” In short, they suggest that, like trees, buildings could be used to dissipate the energy of a seismic wave. Alternatively, the buildings could bend the wave around part of the city that they want to protect, like an invisibility cloak for seismic waves. The upshot is that much of a seismic wave’s destructive force could be rerouted around the most sensitive areas of a city, including power plants, hospitals, and schools, the authors wrote. As fanciful as an invisibility cloak for earthquakes may seem, the idea has some credence. In 2006, physicists at Imperial College in London and Duke University showed it was theoretically possible to bend light around an object, effectively making it invisible. Later the same year, the group used metamaterials several nanometers tall to make a partial cloak for microwaves, whose frequencies are slightly larger than those of visible light. In the experiment, the metamaterials didn’t absorb the waves like resonators but bent the waves, like water in a stream flowing around a stone. In theory, you could scale up the metamaterials used to bend longer waves, such as seismic waves. Stéphane Brûlé, the lead author of the cities study and a geotechnical engineer with French civil engineering firm Menard, has done some preliminary studies suggesting boreholes or concrete columns in the ground could work as well as buildings sticking above the ground <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/earth/seismic-cloak/"> to deflect seismic waves </a> . If holes or columns in the ground could reduce even small vibrations, Brûlé and his colleagues wouldn’t have to look far for potential applications. Perfume manufacturer Chanel threatened to close one of its facilities in the French city of Grasse in 2016 over plans for a high-speed rail line. The company claimed the project threatened the flowers it used to make its best-known fragrance, Chanel No 5. “The construction of a viaduct and the regular passage of high-speed trains over these fields of flowers would force Chanel to cease supporting its artisanal activities in the region,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/dec/01/chanel-no5-threatens-close-grasse-perfumery-high-speed-rail-plans"> the company said in media reports </a> . Chanel did not reply to a request for comment, however ground vibrations from high speed rail have been <a href="http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/8/845/pdf"> well documented </a> elsewhere. Researchers in the U.S. suggest an approach similar to Brûlé’s could reduce much more powerful seismic waves. <h2> Subterranean Defenses </h2> “If we had a magnitude 7 earthquake, the structure that we designed would bring it down to a magnitude 5.5 which is significantly less in damage scale,” said Robert Haupt, a staff scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory. Haupt and colleagues at MIT presented their approach at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers symposium on Homeland Security technologies last April. The group proposes a “V” shaped array of boreholes or trenches approximately 500 feet deep filled with either air or a fluid surrounding an area needing protection. The technique could reduce the magnitude of naturally occurring earthquakes as well as man-made earthquakes caused by oil and gas operations. In Oklahoma, for example, <a href="https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/browse/stats.php"> nearly 900 earthquakes </a> shook the earth in 2015, many of which were <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/345/6195/448"> likely caused by </a> large volumes of drilling wastewater injected deep underground. The continual low-magnitude quakes, nearly three per day, pose growing economic and environmental risks for oil pipelines and storage tanks in the state. “We’ve been speaking with the states of Oklahoma, California, and then government agencies as well, because there are real problems with earthquakes, and people don’t know what to do about it,” Haupt said. The growing threat also poses a potential opportunity for researchers to test a seismic barrier against an actual earthquake rather than a simulation like the one in France. “We are talking with the state of Oklahoma, since they have three a day, maybe we can take advantage of those naturally occurring earthquakes—the ones that have been induced by man—and use that as a source to see how this works on a small scale,” Haupt said. If real world testing shows that the boreholes or trenches that Haupt and colleagues are proposing can significantly reduce the magnitude of a seismic wave, the results would be game changing. <h2> Protecting Vital Infrastructure </h2> “It would be huge to be able to do that, especially when you consider something like nuclear facilities, power facilities, and the ability to get a community back on its feet after it’s been destroyed by an earthquake,” Dunn of the Army Corps said. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, a “megaquake” that most experts say isn’t a matter of “if” but “when,” would immediately kill 8,000 people in Washington State alone according to <a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3898598/Cascadia-Rising-Report.pdf"> a recent estimate by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) </a> . Reducing the magnitude of such a powerful quake in urban areas could save countless lives. Meet the earthquake that drowned the Pacific Northwest and transformed a once lush landscape into a ghost forest. Dunn says protecting an entire city with such seismic barriers would be cost prohibitive, but securing key infrastructure would be of tremendous benefit. “If you were able to retain power, water, and protect some dams and have hospitals ready to receive people, it’s going to be much easier to recover.” Still, Dunn is cautious, noting that, at least for the MIT research, they have yet to test the concept in the real world. “The fact that the modeling shows it works, is much better than the modeling showing that it wouldn’t work, but models depend a lot on assumptions,” he said. “We’ll have to see how this goes.” <h2> “It’s Happening Now” </h2> Researchers still have a long way to go to develop an invisibility cloak or other barrier for seismic waves, but as the first comprehensive field test in France came to a close, the excitement was hard to contain. “It’s like a kid’s dream,” said Sébastien Guenneau, the theoretical physicist who first came up with the idea of an invisibility cloak for seismic waves. “You feel almost like a wizard,” he said, but “it’s real science, it’s happening now.” As the researchers packed up their equipment, a thick fog enveloped their test site. After wandering a short distance into the canola field, I stopped and turned back around. Looking up, the physicists and the forest, cloaked in fog, had completely disappeared. Travel for this story was supported by a science journalism fellowship from the European Geosciences Union. Photo credits: U.S. Navy, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/37913760@N03/4275395512"> Marco Dormino/United Nations Development Program/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND) </a>

Engineers are experimenting with a variety of ways to cloak vital infrastructure—even entire cities—from earthquakes.

"A thief with knowledge of my social security number, address, birthdate, and mother’s maiden name succeeded in changing the contact information associated with my credit card," says NOVA Next contributor Phil McKenna.

My Identity Was Stolen. Here’s How They Did It

I recently received a call that I’d hoped would never come. My bank informed me that a thief with knowledge of my social security number, address, birthdate, and mother’s maiden name had succeeded in changing the contact information associated with my credit card. The representative I spoke with told me we were dealing with a professional identity thief and that I should assume all of my personal information had been compromised. The representative continued, instructing me on what I should do immediately to try to control the damage. I tried taking notes but I was reeling. Life as I knew it, or so I told myself, would never be the same. Each year 13 million Americans, or 5% of the entire U.S. adult population, are victims of identity theft. Fraudulent transactions, including purchases made on existing credit cards, opening new lines of credit, and wiring money from victims’ bank accounts, cost financial institutions and individuals more than $20 billion each year, according to a recent study by financial analysts at Javelin Strategy &amp; Research. But how are identities stolen, how do banks like mine detect fraudulent use, and what, if anything, can we do to protect ourselves? <h2> A Numbers Game </h2> Try to guess an individual’s social security number and you’ll quickly realize that the nine-digit code provides the apparent anonymity of roughly 1 billion different number combinations. It’s enough to keep a den of thieves guessing from here to eternity, right? Not so says Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2009, Acquisti showed that, with some basic demographic information and a general understanding of how the federal government assigns social security numbers, miscreants could predict individuals’ numbers with an alarmingly high degree of accuracy. Combing through millions of publicly available records of deceased individuals’ social security numbers, Acquisti and his colleagues were able to reconstruct how such numbers are assigned. Given an individual’s birthdate and the state they were born in, the researchers could, in some cases, predict the first five digits of an individual’s social security number with more than 90% accuracy. “Thieves are not going after one identity but thousands or millions of them.” All of this assumes that a thief knows the date and location of your birth, facts which some of your friends may not even know. But chances are this information is hiding in plain sight. Using a webcam and commercially available image recognition software, Acquisti’s team was able to identify by name 30% of students on a North American college campus simply by taking their picture and matching it to a database of publically available images downloaded from Facebook. In many cases the Facebook accounts provided the dates and locations of students’ births. Using this information, the team could then predict the first five digits of a student’s social security numbers in four attempts with 28% accuracy. Guessing the remaining four digits is relatively easy. “If you assume a brute force attack where you try combinations of one thousand different social security numbers, then the probability of successfully getting the right number for certain states and years of birth can be disturbingly high,” Acquisti says. “You can start with something as anonymous as a face in a crowd and end up with very sensitive information about that person.” ID thieves have gone well beyond nabbing old credit cards from your trash. Acquisti’s research offers a proof of concept, though it’s unclear whether identity thieves actually take such a circuitous route to acquire information. Easier targets are the data centers of financial institutions and credit bureaus that aggregate consumer information. Last month, online security expert Brian Krebs revealed that an underground identity theft service which illegally sold Social Security numbers had obtained much of its data by conning Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, into selling it to them. “Secured databases are a much more concentrated target,” says Cormac Herley, a security expert with Microsoft Research. “Thieves are not going after one identity but thousands or millions of them.” <h2> A Call From Somewhere </h2> Once an individual’s identity has been stolen, thieves, as I recently discovered, often target call centers. “There are three ways to rob a bank,” says Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop Security. “You can walk in with guns, you can hack into their online systems, or you can call in using a phone. Fraudsters always move to the weakest link, and the phone channel has quickly become the weakest link.” What makes phones weak, Balasubramaniyan says, is a fraudster’s ability to manipulate individuals on the other end. “A computer is emotionless,” he points out. “It won’t react to you differently based on what you say. But if you have a human on the other end, you can start figuring out what their weaknesses are and start using that to your benefit.” Balasubramaniyan gives examples of two highly successful types of thieves his company is monitoring. One begins shouting when he doesn’t get the information he wants. He claims to have been a customer for years and threatens to report the representative to his or her supervisor if he or she don’t provide the information he seeks. Another, he says, “kills with kindness,” calling representatives “Sir” or “Madam” and complementing female representatives on the sound of their voice. In the past, many such attempts were thwarted when the accent of a foreign fraudster gave them away. “What if I’m a Russian hacker and I’ve stolen a US credit card?” asks Daniel Cohen, a cybersecurity strategist with RSA Security LLC. “If I call a call center, they will pick up on my accent.” RSA has seen a growing trend in recent years of underground, online marketplaces that provide identity thieves with “professional callers” who mimic the identity theft victim’s gender, age and accent. “Say I’ve stolen someone’s identity from Mississippi, I could then ask for someone with a southern accent—it’s that developed,” Cohen says. To prevent such call center fraud, financial institutions rely on something known as knowledge based authentication or KBA. Long the gold standard for call center security, KBA is a series of questions and answers related to things like prior residences and financial information that only the consumer should know. Depending on how far back the questions go, however, consumers often don’t recall the correct answers. In fact, identity thieves who obtain an individual’s credit information can often answer the questions better than the victim they are impersonating. Black market sites offer services that help thieves profit from stolen identities, including making calls to banks, stores, and more by people with native accents. If fraudsters gain access to an individual’s KBA information, as likely occurred in my case, the consequences can be far worse than simply having one’s credit card information or social security number compromised. “It’s pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you from a financial data perspective,” says Avivah Litan an analyst with information technology firm Gartner, Inc. It’s possible that the thief had obtained my KBA information through a massive breach of KBA data uncovered on September 25 by Krebs, the security expert who revealed the recent breach at Experian. He found that hackers had entered computer servers at LexisNexis, one of the largest providers of KBA information to financial institutions. Hackers placed a “tiny unauthorized program called ‘nbc.exe’ on the company’s servers,” Krebs writes, likely placed there either by exploiting a weakness in the servers’ configuration or through a malicious email. The program was designed to open an encrypted channel of communication between LexisNexis’s internal computers and botnets, private computers infected with malicious software, that were controlled over the internet by the identity thieves. It’s unclear what data the thieves gained from the breach, though they may have acquired the KBA data of millions of Americans. “They have always been compromised,” Litan says of KBA data, “but now they are massively compromised.” “I have half a dozen apps on my smartphone that can spoof your number.” To fill the void of compromised KBA data, banks have started to rely on something known as “phoneprinting,” or the ability to verify the origin of a call. Such verification is now needed because the profusion of online and mobile phone technology in recent years has made it increasingly difficult to tell where a call is really coming from. Thieves use this to add another layer of credibility to their fraud, making it seem as though a call was originated from your number even if the caller is halfway around the world. “I have half a dozen apps on my smartphone that can spoof your number,” Pindrop’s Balasubramaniyan tells me when at a recent conference. To prove it, he opens an app called callerID Faker. Before I know it, the caller ID on my phone tells me I have an incoming call from my own office number. Balasubramaniyan has these apps on his phone for a good reason—his company offers call centers a way to verify the source of a call. By analyzing different aspects of the sound quality in a call, Pindrop’s software can quickly determine whether the call originates from a cell phone in Cincinnati or from a Skype call in Siberia. “Imagine 15 seconds into a call, your bank gets an alert saying this is not Phil McKenna,” Balasubramaniyan says. Pindrop’s software analyzes 147 different aspect of sound quality. It then creates a database of unique “phoneprints” for calls made from different locations using different networks and phone types. A Pindrop analysis of calls in a string of identity theft cases revealed the top 200 numbers connected to the thief's actual phone number (middle). For example, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls such as those made on Skype contain something known as packet loss, or small breaks in the audio signal as a result of how the digital information is transmitted across these networks. The breaks are only milliseconds long, too short to be detected by a human ear, but contain a wealth of information. “I can look at the length of the break and tell you which company—Skype, Google Voice, or magicJack—the caller is using,” Balasubramaniyan says. Pindrop can also identify which network a caller is using by the background noise. Prior to the digitization of phone networks, calls made on analog telecommunication systems all broadcast a slight hiss that let you know the line was live on other end. When phone companies moved to digital transmission, there was no ambient noise. To ease the transition for users, companies recreated it, calling it “comfort noise.” “Each network did it in a different way, so it allows us to identify the network by the characteristics of their comfort noise,” Balasubramaniyan says. The various measures Pindrop uses allows them to correctly identify the provenance of a call, including phone type, network used, and rough geographic location, with over 90% accuracy. The company recently exposed a fraudster in Eastern Europe who had been using stolen KBA information. Once Pindrop’s software revealed the identity thief wasn’t who he claimed to be, it was obvious he was using stolen information. “When he was asked ‘what is your mother’s maiden name,’ we could actually hear him flipping through his notes,” Balasubramaniyan says. <h2> What Can You Do? </h2> For every breach in security new technologies emerge to try to prevent fraud, technologies that in turn will likely be thwarted at some point in the future. It’s a seemingly endless arms race between financial institutions and identity thieves. Still, I can’t help feeling like the recent theft of my information was somehow my fault. Not that I hadn’t taken precautions. I was careful with my personal information. I shredded documents and used strong online passwords. I didn’t fall for obvious phishing scams like pleas from wealthy Nigerians seeking to transfer large sums of money. But perhaps I should have changed passwords more frequently, added additional verification measures, or shared less on social media. Vern Paxson, a computer security expert at the University of California, Berkeley, absolves me of any such guilt. “Not only is there is nothing you did wrong but probably nothing you could have done differently,” he says. The problem, he says, is massive breaches at data centers like the recent ones by Experian and LexisNexis. Professional identity thieves don’t have time to weed through individuals—they’d rather exploit the richest resource, the central databases. No system is perfectly secure, but there are relatively easy steps that financial institutions could take now that would help prevent such breaches from occurring. Simply requiring organizations to establish security policies on how they safeguard consumer information would go a long way, says David Thaw, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. In a recent study of health care and financial industries, Thaw found that institutions that had such policies were four times better at preventing security breaches than those that didn’t. “Fraud is as old as our species.” Acquisti, who showed it is possible to predict social security numbers, suggests we do away with the numbers entirely. The problem, he says, is that they are used for both identification and verification. It’s the equivalent of giving out your phone number to people so they can call you and then using that same number as the pass code for your voicemail. “No sane person would do that,” he says. Still, Acquisti concedes that gutting social security numbers may be prohibitively expensive. “As a whole, these costs, borne by different parties from identity theft, may be less than changing to an entirely new system,” he says. And even if we did change systems, it’s unlikely that the replacement would succeed in stopping identity theft for very long. “Fraud is as old as our species,” says Bruce Schneier, a security expert at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “The crime rate will never be zero in society. The trick is to make it manageable.” Schneier dismisses the severity of recent data center breaches, saying similar events have occurred on a regular basis for years. The key metric, he says, is how quickly identity theft is identified and corrected after it occurs. “A few years ago it was an absolute disaster,” Schneier says, adding that if my identity had been stolen at that time, I may well have been out $50,000 and spent years restoring my credit. In my case, my credit card company thwarted my identity thieves before they made a single charge. I did, however, lose several days of my life trying to shore up my compromised identity. After getting off the phone with my credit card company, I alerted the three major credit bureaus of the theft and reviewed my credit report to rule out any further damage. I then called every financial institution that I have an account with to set up a new, unique verbal password that they will ask me each time I call. Two banks required that I visit one of their local branches to set up the password in person. Another institution initially failed to set up my new password correctly. They continued to ask only for my social security number and mother’s maiden name until I escalated my case to a call center supervisor. After setting up these initial protections, I then submitted an affidavit to the Federal Trade Commission and visited my local police station to fill out a report. The latter allowed me to put a five-year freeze on my credit report with all three credit bureaus. I’ll have to jump through some additional hoops the next time I want a new credit card, but the freeze should make it much harder for a thief to open a new line of credit in my name. The time that millions of identity theft victims like me spend recovering from such cases each year isn’t insignificant. Microsoft’s Herley estimates that the time US consumers lose each year to simply maintaining existing passwords and other security measures runs in the billions of dollars. Yet, as inconvenient as it was, Schneier says my experience is, in fact, proof that the system works. “They caught it before anything bad happened. What more do you want?” Photo credits: Laura Ellis, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/barsen/3714941137/"> barsen/Flickr (CC-BY-NC) </a> and Pindrop Security

Thieves employ sophisticated techniques to steal identities, from phone number spoofing to database hacking.

Phil McKenna

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