In 1946 the first aerial ice patrol took place using a Catalina flying boat. Reconnaissance flights continue to the present day, and mariners who heed the warnings sent out by the patrol have never collided with an iceberg.

The patrol takes in data from aerial patrols, reported sightings from ships, and Earth Observation (EO) satellite data to feed a large database that tracks the movement of ice moving south into the Atlantic from the Greenland ice sheet where it breaks off. This is a considerable amount of data that requires a lot of processing power to predict the position of icebergs in advance.

The efficiency of the process has now been improved thanks to the adoption of a single cloud platform provided by Polar View, a project originally undertaken by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Canadian Space Agency, and the European Commission. Polar View was incorporated as a company in the UK 2011 and now provides cloud computing services to maritime industries such as oil and gas, shipping, fishing, tourism, as well as helping with emergency management and scientific research.

Traditionally, EO data is downloaded by users who analyze it using their own computing resources. Polar View’s platform, originally developed for the ESA, allows users to access EO data and the analytics algorithms remotely without having to download vast quantities of data. This greatly simplifies and speeds up the process of turning a mountain of data into human-readable warnings that are digestible and useful to ship captains.

The technology will become even more important in the coming years. The Northwest Passage, a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific north of the coast of Canada, was long closed off to shipping by Arctic ice. Now ocean temperatures are rising twice as fast in the Arctic than at lower latitudes, making the passage navigable for longer periods of time each year. According to some sources it could soon become viable as a commercial shipping route, knocking 5000 nautical miles off the trip from Europe to East Asia via the Suez Canal.

Passenger-carrying Ocean Liners like Titanic were eventually made obsolete by jet aircraft. However commercial cargo shipping in the North Atlantic is as busy as ever.  With more traffic making its way into these relatively uncharted waters, captains will need all the help they can get in steering clear of stray ice.

It was almost impossible to scroll past the bottom of any online news article covering the event without seeing at least one comment complaining about the €1.4 billion spent on the mission and lamenting that the money would have been better spent on social programs, the starving children of Africa still hanging in there as the most popular object of concern.

Aside from Africa’s problems being a tad more complex than a simple lack of money handed over by rich countries, this attitude highlights two popular misunderstandings about pure scientific research.  One is  the scale of the investment. Reading out the financial numbers involved in any government-sponsored program is going to sound like a lot of money, since it will always be in the millions or billions.  This is what governments do, they work on large scale activities that by their nature cost a lot, so it is easy to read out a large price tag and turn it into an accusatory soundbite.  However to put it in perspective, the Rosetta mission cost just over the price of four Airbus A380 super jumbo airliners, and it cost each European citizen €3.50, less than half the cost of a movie ticket to see films like Interstellar.  Considering the benefits that we will reap and add to the invaluable store of human knowledge, this is pretty good value for money.

The second misunderstanding is how basic research benefits society. By tackling the most complex challenges out there, no matter how obscure they might seem, scientists have to overcome incidental problems along the way.  This is where unexpected commercial spin-offs emerge. The people protesting about money “wasted” on this kind of basic research were ironically posting their comments on the World Wide Web.  The web, which has transformed society as we know it in the space of a few decades, is a by-product of particle physics research at CERN in Switzerland that seeks answers to questions that not many people can understand.  If Tim Berners Lee did not decide to make his research easier by developing a way of conveniently storing large volumes of information in an easy-to-navigate system accessible from any computer, entire industries that we now take for granted would not exist.

The late William Proxmire, a US senator from Wisconsin, once denounced “wasteful spending” on research into the sex life of a parasitic fly. However the US cattle industry saved $20 billion thanks to that study which enabled them to control the pest, and Proxmire eventually apologized.

The practical spinoffs from NASA’s space program, many of which have benefited the developing world and saved countless lives, are too numerous to list here.

Basic research, also known as “blue sky” research, is by its nature unclear in what the outcome is going to be.  Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the Irish government’s department responsible for investing in research, has historically been used as a job creation engine, and has been pushed to focus its attentions on areas that are more likely to produce immediate commercial benefits. This is shortsighted.  The benefits of blue sky research may not be immediately obvious, but we still need to invest in it, and invest more. Ireland invests 1 percent of GDP in research, but Professor Mark Ferguson , the Director General of SFI and Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government, insists that this must increase to 2 percent if Ireland is to be competitive with other countries.

Professor Ferguson says that in 2014 SFI added five research centers to the existing seven covering areas such as medical devices, software, applied geosciences, the Internet of Things and digital content.  One of SFI’s objectives is to have an Irish-based scientific Nobel Prize winner by 2020.  This might seem like flag-flying, but it is important that Ireland demonstrates its capacity to be a center of science and innovation, a reputation that can go on to attract the best talent from around the world.  Other initiatives aimed at attracting top scientists are also in the pipeline.

Damien English, the Minister for Skills, Research and Innovation, has conceded that more will have to be spent on research, and has promised that the government’s new science strategy will be published in the middle of the year, and it will clarify ways of accessing more funding for basic research.  It had better.  There is pressure from some people on the continent to reduce the research budget, but it would be very unwise to cave into it. Cutting research would not be trimming fat, it would be trimming the most important muscle in Ireland’s body.

There has been too much emphasis on creating jobs by way of attracting outside investment. Ribbon-cutting ceremonies at new foreign-owned facilities might make for great PR, but only scientific research is going to produce the home-grown high value-added jobs of the future and create companies that will always remain based in Ireland.  The powerhouse companies of Silicon Valley did not come about thanks to foreign investment, they emerged from a culture of innovation and progress. Ireland has to create a similar culture, and all available resources should be thrown at it.

Pistons gave way to more efficient turbines, and we often think of steam as an antiquated technology that last saw its use in ocean-going ships. However the steam turbine cycle is still widely used in the generation of electricity. There is no other more practical way of converting heat to useful electrical power, and most of the world’s electricity comes through steam be it in coal-fired power stations, gas-fired power stations, or nuclear power.

However the cycle involves several stages in which there is plenty of scope for energy loss. Other methods of generating steam have been tried using solar power where light is concentrated into a transparent container to heat water, but again there are losses since not all of the light will penetrate the container no matter how clear it is.

A study published in the journal Nature Communications claims that a technique has been found that generates steam from solar energy with up to 85 percent efficiency. Researchers have developed a simple but effective porous material consisting of graphite on top and carbon foam on the bottom, forming a sponge which sits on top of water in a container. Solar energy strikes the graphite heating it up. This creates a pressure differential that draws the water up from below, creeping into the heated upper layer of the sponge where it evaporates.

The advantage of the materials used is that they are inexpensive and easy to come by. While the scientists say that the process cannot yet be used to generate electricity, it can definitely find other applications where the evaporation of water is useful. Developing countries that could use distilled water but have a lack of an electrical supply are one that springs to mind. Access to fresh water is an overlooked but significant contributor to conflict in multiple locations in history including Africa and the Middle East. Technology like this holds the potential to neutralize such conflicts and have as profound an effect in the twenty-first century as the steam turbine cycle did in the nineteenth century.

During June, the extent of Arctic sea ice was smaller than average while the extent of Antarctic sea ice during the southern hemisphere winter was larger than average.  No region of the globe observed a record cold temperature.  Temperatures in the Arctic were above average, and with the Arctic Oscillation in air pressure this resulted in lower than average temperatures in many population centers in northern Europe and North America.

These figures are all gravely concerning, but it can sometimes be hard to communicate the importance of the issue to the public which in turn can undermine political will to deal with the issue.  Global warming deniers always come out in force whenever it snows in Chicago, illustrating a gap between climate science and public understanding of it.

While any high school geography student should be able to know the difference between climate and weather, the visible effects of climate change can be difficult to explain because of the nature of the science.  Climate does not deal with specific weather events but with averages and statistics.  Not every individual shower of rain can be directly attributable to global warming, but we can say that extreme weather events are becoming more violent, more frequent, and increasingly taking place outside of their usual areas.  Tropical storms are no longer confined to the tropics, as residents of New Jersey are all too aware.

Ocean currents are also susceptible to disruption from the phenomenon, which should be of grave concern to people in countries like Ireland where the climate is kept mild by the Gulf Stream that whisks heat from the Caribbean to northern Europe.

There is one measurable effect that is much more understandable: sea level rise.  This results from thermal expansion due to rising temperatures as well as melting ice pouring into oceans from ice floes and glaciers.  From 1870 to 2004 global average sea levels rose by 1.46 mm (0.057in) per year.  Current sea level rise is 3 mm per year worldwide.  The NOAA says “this is a significantly larger rate than the sea-level rise averaged over the last several thousand years” and could be increasing.  Estimates of twenty-first century sea level rise range from 20 cm to a meter (7.8 to 39.3 in).

Sea level rise may have been an ongoing process over thousands of years, but human civilization did not exist for much of that time, and there was certainly less human settlement in low-lying and coastal regions.

Island nations now under threat include Bermuda, the Bahamas, and many more.  The Marshall Islands, population 55,000, are no higher than two meters above sea level and could face obliteration. Large population centers in larger nations are also at risk.  Miami, population over 400,000, is in one of the least defended but highly populated low-lying coastal areas in North America.  The Nile Delta could be rendered infertile if agricultural land is overrun by even a thin coating of seawater.  Average global flood losses in 2005 have been estimated at approximately US$ 6 billion per year, and this could increase to US$ 52 billion by 2050.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in 2002, and in 2010 its signatories agreed to limit annual global warming to 2°C (3.6 °F).  Some analysts warn that this would require greenhouse gas emissions to peak in 2020 and decline thereafter, but current policies are not going to deliver that objective.  Others suggest that even the 2°C limit is not enough.

Perhaps more flooding and more violent storms are needed to concentrate the minds of policymakers.

The majestic rings of Saturn, first seen by Galileo through his telescope in 1610, were eventually explained as bands of chunks water ice encircling the planet in unimaginably huge quantities. Even as we speak, long after they have passed the orbit of Pluto never to return, the venerable probes continue to educate us about the extent of the heliosphere, the vast bubble of energy being pushed outwards by the sun’s radiation, protecting us from the violent solar winds of interstellar space, and how far one has to travel before the influence of our star begins to wane.

However because the Voyagers and Pioneers were designed to fly past the planets, they only got to spend a few weeks near each one. They will now spend the rest of eternity making their way across the vast distances between stars, but a younger probe is staying closer to home and keeps on feeding us with juicy information about Saturn and its moons. Cassini was launched in 1997 and has been orbiting the ringed giant since 2004. The information sent back on a regular basis has been staggering, steadily accumulating more into the invaluable store of human knowledge.

The latest discovery is an embryonic moon beginning to take shape in Saturn’s A ring, as the rocky material clumps under a slow, natural process driven by gravity, just like it happened during the formation of the planets 4.6 billion years ago. This nebular theory of the origin of the planets has plenty of evidence to back it up in the form of radiometric dating of rocks on Earth and meteorites, but this is the first time this process of accretion has ever been observed.

We now know that Saturn has at least 53 moons. We have learned that its largest moon, Titan, is more similar to Earth than any other world in the solar system. Thanks to the Huygens probe that Cassini parachuted onto Titan’s surface in 1995, we know that it has lakes of liquid methane, and an active atmosphere with wind, occasional rain, and a history of erosion on the surface, below which there may even be salt water oceans. The icy moon Enceladus has been shown to be the most likely candidate for harboring primitive life, with its vast geysers of salt water erupting from its south pole.

This is not to say that everything we know about Saturn has been learned through Cassini. The composition of the planet’s rings as millions of independently orbiting objects was confirmed by spectroscopic observations in 1895. As recently as 2013, ground-based studies at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii found that Saturn’s magnetic field is causing material to “rain” from the rings into the planet’s upper atmosphere. Indeed the dark bands in the atmosphere that were first seen by the Voyager mission were not seen again until the Keck Observatory made its spectroscopic observations in near infrared wavelengths.

Nonetheless, Cassini has been one of the most successful space missions ever, and will conclude in spectacular fashion with a series of maneuvers beginning in 2016. The probe will make repeated dives between Saturn and its innermost ring through the course of a year, before swinging over the planet’s north pole and then taking a close pass by the plumes ejecting from Enceladus. Finally, in September 2017, Cassini will conclude its grand finale by plunging into Saturn’s atmosphere.

Cassini’s discoveries raise a possibility that is as profound as it is thought provoking. If primitive life is found to exist on these icy worlds far from the sun, it changes our view of what is meant by the “habitable zone.” The small, rocky and metallic worlds within 142 million miles (225 million km) of the sun have long been thought of as being the only planets in the solar system with a chance of supporting life.    Earth is traditionally thought of in Goldilocks terms. To put it crudely, the perception is that Mars is too far away from the sun and is too cold, while Venus is too close and is too hot. Of course there are more complex reasons for those planets not being more Earth-like. In any case Cassini has given us the possibility that our geocentric ideas about a “habitable zone” may be way off.

Indeed any discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system, no matter how primitive, would be a turning point for the human race, much more so than the first moon landing. The idea that Earth is the only world capable of supporting life is central to many people’s ideas about our place in the universe. Are we the one and only, or one among many? The answers that were thought to lie on Mars could well lie on the icy worlds around Saturn, now under intense scrutiny from a very curious observer.

One of the Hubble’s predecessors was called the Leviathan of Parsonstown, or the Great Telescope at Birr. Built in 1845 in the grounds of Birr Castle in County Offaly, Ireland, it was the most powerful telescope in the world for seventy years, peering deeper into the cosmos than anyone had seen before. It was here that nebulous objects that were previously identified by Charles Messier and John Herschel were seen in enough detail to discern their spiral forms. This was the discovery of how stars are gathered by gravity into spiral galaxies. The Leviathan attracted large numbers of visitors who came to gaze at these never-before understood objects.

It was dismantled in 1908 but its supporting walls remained. A replica of the telescope was constructed in 1997 and a working modern aluminum mirror was installed later to make the instrument useful for observation.

Telescopes like the Leviathan use visible light to make sense of the universe, but there is plenty of information to be gleaned from elsewhere on the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio telescopes, large dish-shaped instruments, are even more informative when pointed at the sky. They detect a wide range of radio waves emitted from distant stars and help to build a more complete picture of the universe.

It is therefore fitting that Birr Castle could become a site for the €150 million LOFAR network of radio telescopes that is being mooted for construction across Europe. Led by Professor Peter Gallagher from Trinity College Dublin, a group of scientists is pushing for €1.6 million to be raised to fund the proposed Irish part of the project. Donations totaling €0.2 million have already been pledged by three Irish businessmen and several academic institutions. Meanwhile the Polish government plans to invest €6 million in three LOFAR sites, the Dutch government has already invested €100 million, and the UK government has pledged €120 million on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

If the Irish government were to step in and fund this project, the spin-off possibilities are enormous. The historic and scientific value of the restored Leviathan is already a strong tourist attraction to the area, and the enhanced educational possibilities of LOFAR would further strengthen it. Ireland’s reputation as a place to do business in today’s world would be strengthened if the country were seen to be an enthusiastic participant in cutting edge science, with an advanced economy, a far-sighted government that understands the importance of furthering our knowledge, and a scientific heritage that continues to the present day.

The genesis of the web is a classic example of how innovation works.  The process of setting out to solve the most complex problems known to man very often has unexpected side benefits.  The complexity and amount of information being handled at CERN required a convenient and efficient means of sharing and accessing it, enough technical expertise was on hand to solve the problem, and the resulting solution produced a spin-off benefit the impact of which is incalculable.  The original intent was nuclear research, but just one incidental outcome was a new communications medium that has become the engine of massive social, economic, technological, and even political change.

This concept of uncertain outcomes from fundamental research is sometimes lost on policymakers who insist on only funding projects that are likely to produce more immediate benefits.  However fundamental research into such esoteric and complex areas as particle physics, while not being immediately obvious in their economic impact, have by far the biggest potential.

The multi-billion euro European Research Council (ERC) finances exploratory basic research. Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, ERC president, recently reiterated a criticism made two years ago that Ireland is too focussed on research aimed at immediate job creation and as a result is missing out on potential funding.  He is also quoted as saying that basic science must be left to flourish before people move to exploit it to create jobs.

For all of its claims to be a center of technology and innovation, Ireland is conspicuous by its absence from some important international scientific research institutes.  It is not a member of CERN, even though countries with a comparable population like Bulgaria and Slovakia are, while Turkey, Pakistan, Brazil and Ukraine have declared an intent to join.  The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, focuses on research into uses of X-ray radiation which has many applications.  This world-leading facility is supported by twenty countries, but Ireland is not one of them.

To give credit where due, Ireland does contribute to international scientific research through its membership of organizations such as the European Space Agency and EURATOM.  However there is room for improvement in the country’s contribution to human progress.

The Irish government could do well to heed Professor Bourguignon’s warning.  There is more to funding science than earning political brownie points while announcing the creation of research jobs.  Science deserves to be funded because it spurs innovation and creates opportunities for entrepreneurs further down the line.  Above all, expanding the invaluable store of human knowledge is the right thing to do.