Hot Line for Passing Events

For a few seconds one night last spring, the blinding flash of a huge meteor lit up the sky over central Mexico. A short time later, a B57 sped to the scene from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N. Mex. Its mission was to collect any debris that might still be adrift after the fireball's searing entry into the earth's atmosphere. For the second time in history, investigators had been alerted quickly enough to seek such dust, which provides invaluable clues to the origin and chemical makeup of meteorites.

The attempt demonstrated the extraordinary efficiency of a pioneering early-warning system that is called the Center for Short-Lived Phenomena. Based at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., the center uses volunteer observers and the Smithsonian's satellite-tracking communications network to inform the world's scientists about important natural events. It has one extraordinary requirement: like the meteor over Mexico, the phenomena that it reports must be so fleeting that they can be successfully studied only while they occur or very shortly thereafter.

At any moment the center's situation room may be monitoring events as varied as an outbreak of leaf-cutting ants in Peru, an unusual polar bear kill in the Arctic, or the drift of a floating island in the Caribbean. After the flight of Apollo 11, it reported the lunar rumblings recorded by the seismometer left behind at Tranquillity Base. Even the recent discovery of a primitive jungle tribe in Surinam fell within the category of passing phenomena. Reason: the Indians' Stone Age culture will change so rapidly under the impact of civilization that anthropologists may lose a rare opportunity to study man's past.

Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the center is the brainchild of Biologist Sidney Galler, who argued that scientists had not learned quickly enough of the birth of a volcanic island off Iceland in 1963. Other scientists agreed. In only 18 months, the center's cadre of voluntary observers has grown from a handful of people to more than 2,000 scientists in 120 countries. The Russians (though not the Chinese) find participation useful; last month the center flashed word of an event taking place right on the Soviet Union's Siberian doorstep: the eruption of long-dormant Kiska volcano in the Aleutians.

Sea Monster. To score a beat on nature, the center operates at press-agency speed. With nine telephone lines and 15 Teletypes at his disposal, Center Director Robert Citron, 37, can reach investigators almost anywhere in the world within minutes after an alert. By last week the center had reported more than 199 major short-lived phenomena, including 41 earthquakes, 26 volcanic eruptions, 29 fireballs, 20 major oil spills, ten animal migrations and one red tide (a strange discoloration of the seas caused by a sudden spread of tiny marine organisms). Fifty-one of these events were important enough to warrant full-scale scientific investigations.

Not all of the center's activities have been unqualified triumphs. Citron still blushes over Report No. 452: based on a U.P.I. dispatch, it said that a weird, 35-ton sea monster, possibly a survivor from the age of dinosaurs, had washed ashore at Tecolutla, Mexico. A few days later the center conceded that the "living fossil" was an ordinary whale.

Scientists forgive such occasional lapses. More important is the center's swift spotting of usually overlooked events, ranging from a mysterious migration of millions of moths in Panama to a recent boom in the squirrel population of Appalachia--a biological puzzle that occurs only a few times a century. Scientists hope that the Center for Short-Lived Phenomena itself will be long-lived.

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