[Here are some amazing facts about this dwarf planet: It is 2,000 times further away from the Sun than the Earth! That makes it 2.5 times further away than Pluto. Even crazier, this dwarf planet takes 40,000 years to revolve once around the Sun!]
While searching for the mysterious Planet X that some astronomers believe lurks on the edge of our solar system, researchers instead found an extremely distant object they dubbed “the Goblin.” And this object provides compelling evidence for the existence of Planet X.
The object is on the small end of being a dwarf planet, with a 40,000-year orbit — meaning it takes that long to go around the sun. That’s more than 2,000 times the distance between the Earth and the sun. Its current location is about 2½ times farther from the sun than from Pluto.
“I think we are nearing the 90% likelihood of Planet X being real with this discovery,” said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science.
The Goblin got its nickname because the scientists first observed it around Halloween 2015. It is considered an Inner Oort Cloud object. The Oort Cloud is a predicted bubble around our solar system far beyond Pluto, filled with trillions of icy bodies and the supposed birthplace of long-term comets.
The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center announced the object, formally known as 2015 TG387, on Tuesday. The researchers, including Sheppard, Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujilllo and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen, have also submitted a paper to the Astronomical Journal detailing their findings.
“This new object has the largest orbit of all the extremely distant objects that stay well beyond Pluto,” Sheppard said. Given its orbit, the Goblin never comes close enough to the giant planets in our solar system to be affected by their gravitational influence.
It joins other objects Sheppard and his team have found on the edge of the solar system since 2012. Their isolation makes them unique. “They can be used as probes to understand what is happening at the edge of our solar system,” Sheppard said.
The researchers were able to detect the Goblin in the first place because they’re using the Japanese Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, one of the largest telescopes in the world and the most powerful survey telescope due to its large field of view.
Given the object’s slow movement along an elongated orbit, it took Sheppard and his team a few years of observing to understand the Goblin and its orbit.
“We think there could be thousands of small bodies like 2015 TG387 out on the Solar System’s fringes, but their distance makes finding them very difficult,” Tholen said in a statement. “Currently we would only detect 2015 TG387 when it is near its closest approach to the Sun. For some 99 percent of its 40,000-year orbit, it would be too faint to see.”
So if the Goblin is unaffected by the gas giant planets in our solar system, what contributes to its strange orbit? That’s where Planet X comes in.
Like the other objects found by Sheppard and his team on the edge of the solar system, the Goblin behaves in a way that is pushed into a similar orbit by some unseen force.
Based on simulations using the basic parameters they have for Planet X, the researchers say the Goblin acts like it is “shepherded” by the planet but never nears the proposed massive planet. This is similar to why Pluto never gets too close to the gas giant Neptune, although their orbits actually cross.
“These distant objects are like breadcrumbs leading us to Planet X,” Sheppard said. “The more of them we can find, the better we can understand the outer Solar System and the possible planet that we think is shaping their orbits — a discovery that would redefine our knowledge of the Solar System’s evolution.”
Sheppard and his colleagues continue their survey, the largest and deepest ever for distant solar system objects, by observing the northern and southern skies at all times of year.
“We are very uniform in our sky coverage and can find all types of orbits, yet we seem to only be finding objects with similar types of orbits that are on the same side of the sky, suggesting something is shepherding them into these similar types of orbits, which we believe is Planet X,” Sheppard said.
“What makes this result really interesting is that Planet X seems to affect 2015 TG387 the same way as all the other extremely distant Solar System objects. These simulations do not prove that there’s another massive planet in our Solar System, but they are further evidence that something big could be out there,” Trujillo said in a statement.
[This is a fun video and don’t miss the No 1 creature on the video! Freaking awesome science! I really enjoyed this little video. This is where I learned about the 52 hertz whale. Jan]
The ocean is without doubt the most fascinating place on this planet. This quote pretty much sums it up…. “Earth Should be Named Planet Ocean, Not Planet Earth”. That couldn’t be more true. We are surrounded by ocean, yet for the most part, we have no idea what creatures are sharing the planet with us. In this video you will see five truly awesome underwater creatures that prove the ocean has far more to offer than what we think. So, from an enormous deep sea shark, to a mysterious alien like creature that was washed up on a beach. Sit back & enjoy this video!
The mummified body of a Russian climber who went missing 31 years ago on Europe’s highest mountain has been found. Elena Bazykina reportedly looked like a “wax doll” as her body was pulled from Mount Elbrus in southern Russia.
The mountaineer was 36 when she died alongside another six of her friends after they were hit by an avalanche back in 1987.
The body of the woman was found encased in ice by a group of tourists at an altitude of about 4,000 meters (over 13,000 feet). Her USSR passport was found on the remains, as well as her Aeroflot air ticket from Moscow, dated 10 April 1987.
Footage released by Russian authorities show rescue teams trying to free the mummified body, which was still clad in a thick winter jacket and bearing climbing gear when it was discovered.
Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported that Bazykina – who was unmarried and without children when she perished – worked at the Moscow Scientific Institute. Mountains were “the biggest love of her life.”
Both of Elena’s parents have died, and a search for surviving loved ones was not looking promising, when her cousin saw the Komsomolskaya Pravda article and contacted the paper.
All this time, the family thought that maybe Elena was still alive, he said. “We have been waiting for Elena for 30 years.”
“We tried to guess what could have happened to her – and feared perhaps that she was kidnapped or kept hostage somewhere. It is such a dangerous region,” he said.
Soviet emergency workers had failed to find Bazykina or any of her six companions – all from the Lenin Tourist Club in Moscow – when they were first reported missing.
“The rescue operation was begun immediately, but it brought no result in 1987,” said Aleksey Yaroshevsky, vice-president of the Sports Tourism Federation of Russia. “We continued searching for them the following year but again we had no luck. Elena is the first from this group to be found.”
It is still unclear whether the discovery of Bazykina means her friends will be found soon as well.
Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, has captured the interest of everyone from Facebook to Microsoft. One of the biggest investors in the technology has been Mastercard, holding nearly thirty blockchain patents to its name.
What does a company like Mastercard want to do with all that blockchain tech? It wants to make the future of money look a bit more like Bitcoin.
STOPPING THE SKIMMERS
According to the ATM Industry Association, two billion in losses from credit card “skimming” occur each year around the world. Using a skimming device at places like gas stations and ATMs, thieves can easily steal credit card information from those who previously used it. While chip cards have done a lot to solve that problem, companies like Mastercard always need to stay one step ahead of hackers.
“Every year, billions of dollars are stolen through identity theft and skimming credit cards,” said Arran Stewart, an expert on blockchain from Job.com, told Digital Trends. “Utilizing blockchain technology, Mastercard will be able to eradicate many of the fraudulent activities that happen through the abuse of their card services.”
Stewart is the co-owner of the recruitment platform Job.com, which implements a smart contract on the blockchain to facilitate private information, not unlike how Mastercard proposes to do it.
Mastercard’s patent would put credit cards on a publicly-accessible blockchain, which can then verify payments in a secured fashion. Stewart explained that Mastercard could remedy the problem by encoding an image of a payment card to the blockchain and then encrypt it with a public and private key. Once the payment is finished, the system decrypts the card image using those private keys.
Despite blockchain’s many demonstrated use cases, its application in finances have always been important. It’s the backbone of how a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin functions — a public database that allows the currency to exist without direct oversight from a single entity, known as a “distributed ledger.”
However, Mastercard’s interest in blockchain goes far beyond this single patent. In fact, the company is one of the largest holders of blockchain-related patents in the world.
BLOCKCHAIN MONEY
In the last few months, Mastercard has created a program that allows developers to build new applications on top of its own set of APIs. That helps Mastercard work closer with companies like PayPal and Apple and opens interesting new opportunities that take blockchain even further.
Consider the tourism and hospitality industry. Mastercard has developed a platform that would let travelers to plans and personal information privately, and then reap the reward of finding the best deals for their trip.
“Mastercard has recognized the value in the travel industry and are providing a platform that allows holidaymakers/travel seekers and others to tell the tourism world where they wish to go privately through blockchain encryption,” said Stewart. “Airlines, travel companies, hotels and many others will be able to bid to offer that user the best possible price and service over other competing bidding providers, all powered on Mastercard’s blockchain.”
It’s a fascinating idea, but tourism is only the tip of the iceberg. Mastercard has a number of applications, from sending money, to setting budgets through voice assistants, paying employees instantly and securely, and, most interestingly, something it calls “proof of provenance.” It’s a way of creating a transparent supply chain that both consumers and wholesalers will have access to. That could help both restaurants and ordinary people keep track of where the food on their plate comes from.
“Transparency in the supply chain has been something that consumers and wholesalers have been looking for since supply goods began,” said Stewart. “Proof of provenance is the future of knowing where and how goods and services reach the hands of the consumer. Blockchain will be the backbone of this and one major example of this being put into practice will be Amazon utilizing this technology to provide evidence of the supply of their goods. This technology will also reduce loss, damage, theft and time to deliver within any supply chain.”
Mastercard
Obviously, Mastercard isn’t the only financial company developing new technology on the blockchain. Competitors like Visa and American Express aren’t far behind, and both have numerous secured patents in the blockchain world. Despite the fact that Mastercard is ahead of the pack, Visa patented a “digital asset network” based in blockchain in August of last year. What it’ll do with these patents is still unclear, but it seems Mastercard won’t be the only player in the game.
While we shouldn’t expect financial institutions to embrace cryptocurrency anytime soon, it’s clear our money is going to function a lot more like Bitcoin than dollar bills in the future.
[Today I discovered that there are big BitCoin “mining companies”, and one of the biggest is found in China. BitCoin is a cryptocurrency. In order to “mine” or “discover” a new Bitcoin, you have to use a complex software algorithm. The complexity is the key to stopping an over-production of BitCoins. Bitcoins are designed to become ever more complex to “discover”. So people even build special computers to process through the numbers ever faster. Bitcoin mining thus becomes ever more expensive. Currently, every day in the world, they discover only 18 Bitcoins! There is some concern over whether newer hardware and software could overcome the Bitcoin algorithm. But so far this has not happened. Bitcoin is the King of cryptocurrencies!]
One of the world’s largest bitcoin mines is located in the SanShangLiang industrial park on the outskirts of the city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region that’s part of China. It’s 400 miles from China’s capital, Beijing, and 35 miles from the the city of Baotou. The mine is just off the highway, near the intersection of Latitutde 3rd Road and Longitude 3rd Road. It sits amidst abandoned, half-built factories—victims of an earlier coal mining boom that fizzled out, leaving Ordos and its outlying areas littered with the shells of unfinished buildings.
The mine belongs to Bitmain, a Beijing-based company that also makes mining machines that perform billions of calculations per second to try and crack the cryptographic puzzle that yields new bitcoins. Fifty Bitmain staff, many of them local to Ordos, watch over eight buildings crammed with 25,000 machines that are cranking through calculations 24 hours a day. One of the buildings is devoted to mining litecoin, an ascendant cryptocurrency. The staff live on-site in a building with a dormitory, offices, a canteen, and a repair center. For recreation, they play basketball on an unfinished cement court.
Bitcoin mining consumes enormous amounts of electricity, which is why miners seek out locations that offer cheap energy. The Ordos mine was set up in 2014, making it China’s oldest large-scale bitcoin mining facility. Bitmain acquired it in 2015. It’s powered by electricity mostly from coal-fired power plants. Its daily electricity bill amounts to $39,000. Bitmain also operates other mines in China’s remote areas, like the mountainous Yunnan province in the south and the autonomous region of Xinjiang in the west.
Despite the costs, bitcoin mining remains a lucrative industry. At the current bitcoin price of about $4,000 per bitcoin, miners compete for over $7 million in new bitcoins a day. The more processing power a mining operation controls, the higher its chances of winning a chunk of those millions. The Ordos mine accounts for over 4% of the processing power on the bitcoin network—a huge amount for a single facility.
Quartz visited the mine in Ordos on Aug. 11.
AURELIEN FOUCAULT FOR QUARTZ
The Bitmain mine in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, has eight buildings containing mining machines. One of them is dedicated to litecoin and seven mine bitcoins. An additional building is inactive.
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Racks of litecoin-mining machines in the Bitmain unit dedicated to litecoin.
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Power cords and their fuse box inside a bitcoin mining unit.
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Racks of bitcoin-mining machines inside a mining facility.
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Leftover tubing and cables lying on the ground between two mining units.
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A bitcoin mining machine with its battery on a shelf.
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A worker monitors operating status of bitcoin-mining machines.
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Workers clean the shelves of bitcoin-mining machines.
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Industrial suction blower fans can be found all along the side of the mining units. They’re used to increase the airflow inside the building and lower the temperature.
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The administrative office of the main building.
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Packing materials from mining devices fill up a warehouse on site.
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A worker fixes a component on a mining machine.
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Workers prepare to bring fixed machines back to the mines.
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The exterior of one of the mining units.
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A worker monitors operating status of a machine.
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The massive switch to one of the many power transformers on the mine. These are hosted in buildings separate from the mining machines.
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A set of keys used to get access to the transformers on site.
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A local citizen of nearby Ordos, recent college graduate Hou Jie, 24, is a maintenance worker at the mine. He shares this dorm room with seven other employees.
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A cook prepares dinner in the kitchen of the main building.
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Workers enjoy their dinner in the dining hall.
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View of one of the buildings in the compound.
Correction (Aug. 21): Xinjiang is in the west of China. A previous version of this story incorrectly said it was in the east.
[Below is an artist’s impression of what this strange planet looks like close up based on what scientists know. Note the aurora. Take special note at the bottom of the article, the mention that the planet would have an aurora due to its magnetic field. This is very important. The topic of planets with powerful magnetic fields is very important.]
A planet over 12 times more massive than Jupiter has been found drifting alone through space around 20 light years away from Earth.
The ‘rogue’ object is not attached to any star, and is the first of its kind to be discovered using a radio telescope from Earth.
Both its mass and the enormous strength of its magnetic field challenge what scientists know about the variety of astronomical objects found in the depths of space.
“This object is right at the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf, or ‘failed star,’ and is giving us some surprises that can potentially help us understand magnetic processes on both stars and planets,” said Dr Melodie Kao, an astronomer at Arizona State University.
Brown dwarves are difficult objects to categorise – they are both too huge to be considered planets and not big enough to be considered stars.
Originally detected in 2016 using the Very Large Array (VLA) telescope in New Mexico, the newly identified planet was initially considered a brown dwarf.
Much still remains unknown about these astronomical bodies – with the first one only observed in 1995 – and the scientists behind the discovery were trying to understand more about the magnetic fields and radio emissions of five brown dwarves.
However, when another team looked at the brown dwarf data they realised one of the objects, dubbed SIMP J01365663+0933473, was far younger than the others.
Its age meant that instead of a ‘failed star’, they had found a free-floating planet.
The boundary often used to distinguish a massive gas giant plant from a brown dwarf is the “deuterium-burning limit” – the mass below which the element deuterium stops being fused in the objects core.
This limit is around 13 Jupiter masses, so at 12.7 the newly identified planet was brushing right up against it.
As this was being established, Dr Kao had been conducting measurements of this distant object’s magnetic field – the first such measurements for a planetary mass object outside our solar system.
“When it was announced that SIMP J01365663+0933473 had a mass near the deuterium-burning limit, I had just finished analysing its newest VLA data,” she said.
Similar to the aurora borealis or Northern Lights seen on Earth, this planet and some brown dwarves are known to have auroras of their own – despite lacking the solar winds that are known to drive them.
It is the radio signature of these auroras that allowed the researchers to detect these distant objects in the first place, but it is still unclear how they are being formed.
However, the research team’s analysis showed the planet’s magnetic field is incredibly strong, around 200 times stronger than Jupiter’s, and this could help explain why it also has a strong aurora.
“This particular object is exciting because studying its magnetic dynamo mechanisms can give us new insights on how the same type of mechanisms can operate in extrasolar planets – planets beyond our solar system,” explained Dr Kao.
“We think these mechanisms can work not only in brown dwarfs, but also in both gas giant and terrestrial planets,” she said.
The scientists said their study shows that auroral radio emissions can be used to discover more planets beyond our solar system, including more rogue ones not attached to stars.
Gen. Thomas Waldhauser sounded a little uneasy. “I would just say, they are on the ground. They are trying to influence the action,” commentedthe chief of US Africa Command (AFRICOM) at a Pentagon press briefing in March, when asked about Russian military personnel operating in North Africa. “We watch what they do with great concern.”
And Russians aren’t the only foreigners on Waldhauser’s mind. He’s also wary of a Chinese “military base” being built not far from Camp Lemonnier, a large US facility in the tiny, sun-blasted nation of Djibouti. “They’ve never had an overseas base, and we’ve never had a base of…a peer competitor as close as this one happens to be,” he said. “There are some very significant…operational security concerns.”
At that press conference, Waldhauser mentioned still another base, an American one exposed by TheWashington Post last October in an articletitled “U.S. has secretly expanded its global network of drone bases to North Africa.” Five months later, the AFRICOM commander still sounded aggrieved. “The Washington Post story that said ‘flying from a secret base in Tunisia.’ It’s not a secret base and it’s not our base…. We have no intention of establishing a base there.”
Waldhauser’s insistence that the United States had no base in Tunisia relied on a technicality, since that foreign airfield clearly functions as an American outpost. For years, AFRICOM has peddled the fiction that Djibouti is the site of its only “base” in Africa. “We continue to maintain one forward operating site on the continent, Camp Lemonnier,” reads the command’s 2017 posture statement. Spokespeople for the command regularly maintain that any other US outposts are few and transitory—“expeditionary,” in military parlance.
While the United States maintains a vast empire of military installations around the world, with huge—and hard-to-miss—complexes throughout Europe and Asia, bases in Africa have been far better hidden. And if you listened only to AFRICOM officials, you might even assume that the US military’s footprint in Africa will soon be eclipsed by that of the Chinese or the Russians.
Highly classified internal AFRICOM files offer a radically different picture. A set of previously secret documents, obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act, offers clear evidence of a remarkable, far-ranging, and expanding network of outposts strung across the continent. In official plans for operations in 2015 that were drafted and issued the year before, AFRICOM lists 36 US outposts scattered across 24 African countries. These include low-profile locations—from Kenya to South Sudan to a shadowy Libyan airfield—that have never previously been mentioned in published reports. Today, according to an AFRICOM spokesperson, the number of these sites has actually swelled to 46, including “15 enduring locations.” The newly disclosed numbers and redacted documents contradict more than a decade’s worth of dissembling by AFRICOM and shed new light on a constellation of bases integral to expanding US military operations on the African continent and in the Middle East.
A map of US military bases—forward operating sites, cooperative security locations, and contingency locations—across the African continent in 2014, from declassified AFRICOM planning documents (Nick Turse / TomDispatch).
A CONSTELLATION OF BASES
AFRICOM failed to respond to repeated requests for further information about the 46 bases, outposts, and staging areas currently dotting the continent. Nonetheless, the newly disclosed 2015 plans offer unique insights into the wide-ranging network of outposts, a constellation of bases that already provided the US military with unprecedented continental reach.
Those documents divide US bases into three categories: forward operating sites (FOSes), cooperative security locations (CSLs), and contingency locations (CLs). “In total, [the fiscal year 20]15 proposed posture will be 2 FOSes, 10 CSLs, and 22 CLs” state the documents. By spring 2015, the number of CSLs had already increased to 11, according to then–AFRICOM chief Gen. David Rodriguez, in order to allow US crisis-response forces to reach potential hot spots in West Africa. An appendix to the plan, also obtained by TomDispatch, actually lists 23 CLs, not 22. Another appendix mentions one additional contingency location.
These outposts—of which forward operating sites are the most permanent and contingency locations the least so—form the backbone of US military operations on the continent and have been expanding at a rapid rate, particularly since the September 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The plans also indicate that the US military regularly juggles locations, shuttering sites and opening others, while upgrading contingency locations to cooperative security locations in response to changing conditions like, according to the documents, “increased threats emanating from the East, North-West, and Central regions” of the continent.
AFRICOM’s 2017 posture statement notes, for example, a recent round of changes to the command’s inventory of posts. The document explains that the US military “closed five contingency locations and designated seven new contingency locations on the continent due to shifting requirements and identified gaps in our ability to counter threats and support ongoing operations.” Today, according to AFRICOM spokesman Chuck Prichard, the total number of sites has jumped from the 36 cited in the 2015 plans to 46—a network now consisting of two forward operating sites, 13 cooperative security locations, and 31 contingency locations.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
AFRICOM’s sprawling network of bases is crucial to its continent-wide strategy of training the militaries of African proxies and allies and conducting a multi-front campaign aimed at combating a disparate and spreading collection of terror groups. The command’s major areas of effort involve: a shadow war against the militant group al-Shabaab in Somalia (a long-term campaign, ratcheting up in the Trump era, with no end in sight); attempts to contain the endless fallout from the 2011 US and allied military intervention that ousted Libyan dictator Moammar El-Gadhafi (a long-term effort with no end in sight); the neutralizing of “violent extremist organizations” across northwest Africa, the lands of the Sahel and Maghreb (a long-term effort with no end in sight); the degradation of the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin nations of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad (a long-term effort—to the tune of $156 millionlast year alone in support of regional proxies there—with no end in sight); countering piracy in the Gulf of Guinea (a long-term effort with no end in sight); and winding down the wildly expensive effort to eliminate Joseph Kony and his murderous Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa (both live on, despite a long-term US effort).
The US military’s multiplying outposts are also likely to prove vital to the Trump administration’s expanding wars in the Middle East. African bases have long been essential, for instance, to Washington’s ongoing shadow war in Yemen, which has seen a significant increase in drone strikes under the Trump administration. They have also been integral to operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, where a substantial (and deadly) uptick in US airpower (and civilian casualties) has been evident in recent months.
In 2015, AFRICOM spokesman Anthony Falvo noted that the command’s “strategic posture and presence are premised on the concept of a tailored, flexible, light footprint that leverages and supports the posture and presence of partners and is supported by expeditionary infrastructure.” The declassified secret documents explicitly state that America’s network of African bases is neither insignificant nor provisional. “USAFRICOM’s posture requires a network of enduring and non-enduring locations across the continent,” say the 2015 plans. “A developed network of FOSes, CSLs, and non-enduring CLs in key countries…is necessary to support the command’s operations and engagements.”
According to the files, AFRICOM’s two forward operating sites are Djibouti’s Camp Lemonnier and a base on the United Kingdom’s Ascension Island off the west coast of Africa. Described as “enduring locations” with a sustained troop presence and “U.S.-owned real property,” they serve as hubs for staging missions across the continent and for supplying the growing network of outposts there.
Lemonnier, the crown jewel of America’s African bases, has expanded from 88 acres to about 600 acres since 2002, and in those years the number of personnel there has increased exponentially as well. “Camp Lemonnier serves as a hub for multiple operations and security cooperation activities,” reads AFRICOM’s 2017 posture statement. “This base is essential to U.S. efforts in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.” Indeed, the formerly secret documents note that the base supports “U.S operations in Somalia CT [counterterrorism], Yemen CT, Gulf of Aden (counter-piracy), and a wide range of Security Assistance activities and programs throughout the region.”
In 2015, when he announced the increase in cooperative security locations, then–AFRICOM chief David Rodriguez mentioned Senegal, Ghana, and Gabon as staging areas for the command’s rapid-reaction forces. Last June, outgoing US Army Africa commander Maj. Gen. Darryl Williams drew attention to a CSL in Uganda and one being set up in Botswana, adding, “We have very austere, lean, lily pads, if you will, all over Africa now.”
CSL Entebbe in Uganda has, for example, long been an important air basefor American forces in Africa, serving as a hub for surveillance aircraft. It also proved integral to Operation Oaken Steel, the July 2016 rapid deployment of troops to the US Embassy in Juba, South Sudan, as that failed state (and failed US nation-building effort) sank into yet more violence.
Libreville, Gabon, is listed in the documents as a “proposed CSL,” but was actually used in 2014 and 2015 as a key base for Operation Echo Casemate, the joint US-French-African military response to unrest in the Central African Republic.
AFRICOM’s 2015 plan also lists cooperative security locations in Accra, Ghana; Gaborone, Botswana; Dakar, Senegal; Douala, Cameroon; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and Mombasa, Kenya. While officially defined by the military as temporary locales capable of being scaled up for larger operations, any of these CSLs in Africa “may also function as a major logistics hub,” according to the documents.
CONTINGENCY PLANS
The formerly secret AFRICOM files note that the command has designated five contingency locations as “semi-permanent,” 13 as “temporary,” and four as “initial.” These include a number of sites that have never previously been disclosed, including outposts in several countries that were actually at war when the documents were created. Listed among the CLs, for instance, is one in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, already in the midst of an ongoing civil war in 2014; one in Bangui, the capital of the periodically unstable Central African Republic; and another in Al-Wigh, a Saharan airfield in southern Libya located near that country’s borders with Niger, Chad, and Algeria.
Officially classified as “non-enduring” locations, CLs are nonetheless among the most integral sites for US operations on the continent. Today, according to AFRICOM’s Prichard, the 31 contingency locations provide “access to support partners, counter threats, and protect U.S. interests in East, North, and West Africa.”
AFRICOM did not provide the specific locations of the current crop of CLs, stating only that they “strive to increase access in crucial areas.” The 2015 plans, however, provide ample detail on the areas that were most important to the command at that time. One such site is Camp Simba in Manda Bay, Kenya, also mentioned in a 2013 internal Pentagon study on secret drone operations in Somalia and Yemen. At least two manned surveillance aircraft were based there at the time.
Chabelley Airfield in Djibouti is also mentioned in AFRICOM’s 2015 plan. Once a spartan French Foreign Legion post, it has undergone substantial expansion in recent years as US drone operations in that country were moved from Camp Lemonnier to this more remote location. It soon became a regional hub for unmanned aircraft not just for Africa but also for the Middle East. By the beginning of October 2015, for example, drones flown from Chabelley had already logged more than 24,000 hours of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions and were also, according to the Air Force, “responsible for the neutralization of 69 enemy fighters, including five high-valued individuals” in the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
AFRICOM’s inventory of CLs also includes sites in Nzara, South Sudan; Arlit, Niger; both Bamako and Gao, Mali; Kasenyi, Uganda; Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles; Monrovia, Liberia; Ouassa and Nema, Mauritania; Faya Largeau, Chad; Bujumbura, Burundi; Lakipia, the site of a Kenyan Air Force base; and another Kenyan airfield at Wajir that was upgraded and expanded by the US Navy earlier in this decade, as well as an outpost in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, that was reportedly shuttered in 2015 after nearly five years of operation.
A longtime contingency location in Niamey, the capital of Niger, has seen marked growth in recent years as has a more remote location, a Nigerien military base at Agadez, listed among the “proposed” CSLs in the AFRICOM documents. The United States is, in fact, pouring $100 million into building up the base, according to a 2016 investigation by The Intercept. N’Djamena, Chad, the site of yet another “proposed CSL,” has actually been used by the US military for years. Troops and a drone were dispatchedthere in 2014 to aid in operations against Boko Haram and “base camp facilities” were constructed there, too.
The list of proposed CLs also includes sites in Berbera, a town in the self-declared Republic of Somaliland, and in Mogadishu, the capital of neighboring Somalia (another locale used by American troops for years), as well as the towns of Baidoa and Bosaso. These or other outposts are likely to play increasingly important roles as the Trump administration ramps up its military activities in Somalia, the long-failed state that saw 18 US personnel killed in the disastrous “Black Hawk Down” mission of 1993. Last month, for instance, President Trump relaxed rules aimed at preventing civilian casualties when the United States conducts drone strikes and commando raids in that country and so laid the foundation for a future escalation of the war against al-Shabaab there. This month, AFRICOM confirmed that dozens of soldiers from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, a storied light infantry unit, would be deployed to that same country in order to train local forces to, as a spokesperson put it, “better fight” al-Shabaab.
Many other sites previously identified as US outposts or staging areas are not listed in AFRICOM’s 2015 plans, such as bases in Djema, Sam Ouandja, and Obo in the Central African Republic that were revealed, in recent years, by TheWashington Post. Also missing is a newer drone base in Garoua, Cameroon, not to mention that Tunisian air base where the United States has been flying drones, according to AFRICOM’s Waldhauser, “for quite some time.”
Some bases may have been shuttered, while others may not yet have been put in service when the documents were produced. Ultimately, the reasons that these and many other previously identified bases are not included in the redacted secret files are unclear due to AFRICOM’s refusal to offer comment, clarification, or additional information on the locations of its bases.
BASE DESIRES
“Just as the U.S. pursues strategic interests in Africa, international competitors, including China and Russia, are doing the same,” laments AFRICOM in its 2017 posture statement. “We continue to see international competitors engage with African partners in a manner contrary to the international norms of transparency.”
Since it was established as an independent command in 2008, however, AFRICOM itself has been anything but transparent about its activities on the continent. The command’s physical footprint may, in fact, have been its most jealously guarded secret. Today, thanks to AFRICOM’s own internal documents, that secret is out and with AFRICOM’s admission that it currently maintains “15 enduring locations,” the long-peddled fiction of a combatant command with just one base in its area of operations has been laid to rest.
“Because of the size of Africa, because of the time and space and the distances, when it comes to special crisis-response-type activities, we need access in various places on the continent,” said AFRICOM chief Waldhauser during his March press conference. These “various places” have also been integral to escalating American shadow wars, including a full-scale air campaign against the Islamic State in Libya, dubbed Operation Odyssey Lightning, which ended late last year, and ongoing intelligence-gathering missions and a continued US troop presence in that country; drone assassinations and increased troop deployments in Somalia to counter al-Shabaab; and increasing engagement in a proxy war against Boko Haram militants in the Lake Chad region of Central Africa. For these and many more barely noticed US military missions, America’s sprawling, ever-expanding network of bases provides the crucial infrastructure for cross-continental combat by US and allied forces, a low-profile support system for war-making in Africa and beyond.
Without its wide-ranging constellation of bases, it would be nearly impossible for the United States to carry out ceaseless low-profile military activities across the continent. As a result, AFRICOM continues to prefer shadows to sunlight. While the command provided figures on the total number of US military bases, outposts, and staging areas in Africa, its spokespeople failed to respond to repeated requests to provide locations for any of the 46 current sites. While the whereabouts of the new outposts may still be secret, there’s little doubt as to the trajectory of America’s African footprint, which has increased by 10 locations—a 28 percent jump—in just over two years.
America’s “enduring” African bases “give the United States options in the event of crisis and enable partner capacity building,” according to AFRICOM’s Chuck Prichard. They have also played a vital role in conflicts from Yemen to Iraq, Nigeria to Somalia. With the Trump administration escalating its wars in Africa and the Middle East, and the potential for more crises—from catastrophic famines to spreading wars—on the horizon, there’s every reason to believe the US military’s footprint on the continent will continue to evolve, expand, and enlarge in the years ahead, outpost by outpost and base by base.
The secret expansion of U.S. military bases and special operations in Africahas initiated a new and lightweight style of warfare and welcomes the next phase of American military imperialism. Unlike the highly publicized U.S. military “pivot to Asia,” the proliferation of drones, special ops, mercenary spies, classified bases, proxy fighters and cyber warfare constitute what the journalist Nick Turse calls a “new light-footprint Obama doctrine” that “seems to be making war an ever more attractive and seemingly easy option.”
Wars conventionally fought by large infantry forces and full-scale invasions of foreign countries have made way for a new style of fighting — one that has become increasingly dependent on special forces, drones and private defense contractors. Because of the confidential nature of special ops, the Pentagon can essentially keep foreign military involvement secret from the American public. The U.S. has always had troops in Africa since the Cold War but the rate of its expansion dangerously indicates a lack of public accountability.
A NAIVE CLAIM
The shadow wars in Africa are now fought by members of the U.S. Special Operations Command and JSOC — a clandestine organization that carries out kill/capture missions. JSOC has been called “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine” by counterinsurgency advisor John Nagl and many have described it as the president’s “private assassination squad.” The group reports directly to the White House. It is the military’s secret military.
The notion the U.S. would someday pull its troops out of the Middle East is a rather naive claim considering the fact we have nothing short of a permanent war economy. From main operating bases that house thousands of soldiers to single airstrips used by the C.I.A. to taxi their blacked-out turboprops, the U.S. continues to maintain over 800 to 1,000 bases around the world — making us the most expansive military empire in history. Nobody really knows the exact figure — not even the military experts. The late scholar Chalmers Johnson wrote in his book, “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic” on how the Pentagon and an uncontrollable military-industrial complex have turned the U.S. into “a new kind of military empire — a consumerist Sparta.” Chalmers declares, “Another crucial characteristic that distinguished the American empire from empires of the past is that bases are not needed to fight wars but are instead pure manifestations of militarism and imperialism.”
GLOBAL INSTABILITY
Military expansion does not make us safe since it cultivates global instability. The uncontrollable growth into Africa has resulted in the funding and training of proxy armies with atrocious human-rights records and has attracted mercenaries such as Erik Prince — founder of the infamous Blackwater private army hired by the D.O.D to provide security to high-level diplomats during the Iraq war.
Ancient Rome was a dangerous place to be an emperor. During its more than 500-year run, about 20 percent of Rome’s 82 emperors were assassinated while in power. So, what led to their downfalls?
According to a new study, we can blame it on the rain.
Here’s the reasoning: When rainfall was low, troops in the Roman military — who depended on the rain to water crops grown by local farmers — would have starved. “In turn, that would have pushed them over the edge to potentially mutiny,” said study lead researcher Cornelius Christian, an assistant professor of economics at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. [In Photos: Ancient Home and Barracks of Roman Military Officer]
“And that mutiny, in turn, would collapse support for the emperor and make him more prone to assassination,” Christian told Live Science.
Christian, who considers himself an economic historian, made the discovery by using ancient climate data from a 2011 study in the journal Science. In that study, researchers analyzed thousands of fossilized tree rings from France and Germany and calculated how much it had rained there (in millimeters) every spring for the past 2,500 years. This area once comprised the Roman frontier, where military troops were stationed.
Then, Christian pulled data on military mutinies and emperor assassinations in ancient Rome. From there, “it was really just a question of piecing together these different pieces of information,” Christian said. He plugged the numbers into a formula and found that “lower rainfall means that there’s more probability of assassinations that are going to take place, because lower rainfall means there’s less food.”
Make it rain
Take, for instance, Emperor Vitellius. He was assassinated in A.D. 69, a year of low rainfall on the Roman frontier, where the troops were stationed. “Vitellius was an acclaimed emperor by his troops,” Christian said. “Unfortunately, low rainfall hit that year, and he was completely flabbergasted. His troops revolted, and eventually he was assassinated in Rome.”
But, as is often the case, many factors can lead to an assassination. For example, Emperor Commodus was assassinated in A.D. 192 because, in part, the military got fed up when he began acting above the law, including making gladiators purposely lose to him in the Colosseum.
There wasn’t a drought leading up to Commodus’ assassination, “but usually there is a drought preceding the assassination of the emperor,” Christian said. “We’re not trying to claim that rainfall is the only explanation for all these things. It’s just one of many potential forcing variables that can cause this to happen.”
The study is part of a burgeoning field that examines how climate affected ancient societies, said Joseph Manning, a professor of classics and history at Yale University who wasn’t involved with the new research. Last fall, Manning and his colleagues published a study in the journal Nature on how volcanic activity may have led to the drier conditions that doomed the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, Live Science previously reported.
However, while the new study lays a “good groundwork” for the rainfall-assassination hypothesis, the researchers have a long way to go to support this idea, Manning said. For starters, it’s relatively simple to find a correlation between two things using statistics, he said. “They do some pretty good statistical work, but how do you know you’ve got the right mechanism?” [Photos: Gladiators of the Roman Empire]
In other words, correlation does not equal causation, Manning said. But, given the promise of this preliminary research, it’s worth the effort to dig into this hypothesis to determine whether climate data actually jibes with assassination dates, from the empire’s start in 27 B.C. to its end in A.D. 476, Manning said.
The hypothesis “sounds plausible,” said Jonathan Conant, an associate professor of history at Brown University who wasn’t involved with the study. But while rain may have played a role, so did other factors, Conant said. For instance, most of Rome’s assassinations happened in the third century A.D. At this time, the Roman Empire had massive inflation, disease outbreaks and external wars, all of which took a toll on the empire’s stability, Conant said.
“For me, [the rainfall-assassination hypothesis] adds another layer of complexity and nuance to our understanding of the political history of the Roman Empire, especially in the third century,” Conant told Live Science.
Next month, NASA will give the sun its close-up. The Parker Solar Probe will begin a seven-year mission to examine the sun’s energy, in an effort to better protect people and spacecraft from the star’s potentially devastating effects. A particularly lofty milestone for the probe? “Touching the sun,” NASA says.
Considering the sun is a ball of sizzling gas — with no solid surface — what, exactly, does that mean?
Even more bizarre, the sun’s corona is 300 times hotter than the photosphere — the lowest layer of the sun’s atmosphere, where solar flares belch and sunspots form. (Why that’s the case is still a mystery – that’s one question Parker is designed to answer.) And as the corona billows out into space as a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind, the superheated gas cools. [See Gorgeous Images of the Sun’s Corona in Simulations]
Because of the extreme temperatures, sun-observing spacecraft have trouble getting close enough to get a complete picture of the corona’s activity. So, the Parker Solar Probe, equipped with special shielding, will zoom in to just 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) from the sun’s photosphere to get close-up views. That’s more than 14 times closer than Mercury is to the sun — a distance that averages of 58 million miles (93 million km). And it will be the closest that any human-made object has been to the sun — essentially, Parker will “touch the sun.”
“Parker is going to be the first time where we’re going to get close enough to the sun to see where the action is happening, where the corona is heated and where the solar wind is being accelerated,” Eric Christian, a research scientist on the Parker mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told Live Science.
Parker’s main science goals are to understand how the solar wind is accelerated and why the corona is superhot. These are important science and exploration questions, Christian said. The sun periodically sends out solar flares and, along with them, coronal mass ejections that can carry dangerous charged particles across the solar system.
Parker’s heat shield is a lightweight, 4.5-inch thick carbon foam core that is 97 percent air, according to NASA. Surrounding it is two panels of superheated carbon-carbon composite. The side closest to the sun was spray-coated to reflect the star’s energy, allowing the spacecraft to stay as cool as possible.
The spacecraft will be so close to the sun that it won’t be able to take pictures while looking straight at it, because otherwise it will be damaged. So NASA will depend on its fleet of other sun spacecraft to show how the sun looks while Parker collects information about the star’s activity. The Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory already do regular observations of the star from afar to monitor its sunspots, flares and other indications of solar activity, so they’ll continue doing that job while Parker gets its close-up view.
Parker’s first glimpse of the sun from up close will happen just four months after launch. First, it will do a quick flyby of Venus. However, Christian said science observations at the planet are unlikely because Parker’s instruments are designed to pick up charged particles, and Venus doesn’t have much of a magnetic field. Then, Parker will dip as close as 17 million miles (27 million km) from the sun in this particular flyby, autonomously collecting observations and then slowly transmitting them back to Earth the following year, Christian said.[
Why the delay? The sun is a powerful source of radio waves, and it can interfere with Parker’s communications. While Parker is close to the sun and orbiting near the sun (relative to Earth’s view), NASA will avoid getting in touch with the probe, so that the space agency’s commands don’t confuse the spacecraft. NASA is already used to such situations, such as when Mars gets close to the sun (from Earth’s perspective) and the agency suspends conversations with rovers on the surface.
Christian said he can’t wait to see what Parker will show us about the sun. Compared with terrestrial weather forecasting, he said, our solar weather predictions “are way behind … We can’t forecast when the sun will give off these storms,” he said. But with more data, scientists may someday understand solar weather as well as they do tornado formation on Earth today, he said.
