This picture of Ilulissat’s port in Greenland raises the question of why exactly there is ice floating in the water. The answer is becoming the response to an increasing number of enquiries: climate change.
Due to rising temperatures, 2021 saw Greenland experience the biggest melt of its ice sheet on record – enough to cover the entire state of Florida with five centimetres of water, according to Danish researchers. As parts of the ice sheet broke up, smaller chunks of ice ended up floating in Ilulissat’s port. As if that wasn’t concerning enough, for the first time in recorded history, rain fell onto the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet.
A shot in the arm
Lady from Coventry is the first to be vaccinated against COVID-19
Photo by Jacob King/Pool/AFP/Getty Images
Coventry, UK 8 December 2020
A round of applause from healthcare workers greets Margaret Keenan after she became the first person in Britain to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. The 90-year-old grandmother was given her first dose on 8 December 2020 at University Hospital in Coventry to kick off the UK’s mass vaccination programme.
When the time came for her second dose in April 2021, around 28 million people in England had been given at least one jab, and Keenan had turned 91. Keenan made the headlines again in September when she became the first person in the world (outside of a clinical trial) to receive a vaccine booster shot.
Wandering lonely, under a cloud
Photo by NASA/JPL
Photo by NASA/JPL
Gale Crater, Mars 19 March
Perseverance wasn’t the only Martian rover making headlines in March. Curiosity got in on the act too, after snapping this shot of unusual clouds forming over Gale Crater, near the Red Planet’s equator. It’s unusual because the clouds formed earlier and higher than they usually do on this part of Mars.
The thin, dry atmosphere on Mars means clouds only tend to form when the planet’s elliptical orbit takes it furthest from the Sun. These ones began appearing in January, sooner than they were expected, beginning as small, wispy puffs before becoming the more substantial bodies seen here in March.
Most clouds on Mars are formed by water crystals and float at altitudes of around 60 kilometres, but analysis by the Curiosity team on Earth suggests the clouds photographed in March are higher and are likely to contain frozen carbon dioxide.
So that’s what you look like
Actual image of a
Photo by Nanographics GmbH
Beijing, China January
COVID continued to dominate the news, and everyone’s lives, throughout 2021. But in January we got possibly our best look yet at the virus. By using a combination of cryo-electron tomography, machine learning and advanced visualisation algorithms, a team of experts from China’s Tsinghua University, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, and Vienna-based Nanographics, produced this high-resolution 3D image of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
We had images prior to this, but they were either models or composites constructed from different scans. This is the first single-scan, 3D image of the real virus (although the colours are artificial). You can see all 360° of it at nanographics.at/projects/coronavirus-3d/
Ghost detector
Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector deep underwater neutrino telescope
Photo by Alexei Kushnirenko/TASS/Getty Images
Lake Baikal, Siberia 13 March
It may not be what you typically think of as a crystal ball, but this strange-looking clear sphere could help us see ghosts. Ghost particles, that is, otherwise known as neutrinos. It’s one of the optic modules being used in the Baikal-Gigaton Volume Detector – essentially a telescope made of eight vertical ‘strings’, each carrying 12 modules spaced 15 metres apart – being submerged around one kilometre below the ice of Siberia’s Lake Baikal.
Neutrinos are thought to be the most abundant particle in the Universe, yet they have no electric charge, almost no mass and travel at nearly the speed of light. They’re extremely difficult to study because they don’t interact with matter or magnetic fields (hence they’re ghost-like). But they do emit a type of light, known as Cherenkov radiation, when they hit water. And that’s what the optic modules have been designed to pick up in the hope of confirming the existence of neutrinos and determining their sources.
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