32,4 million people were forced to flee their homes last year due to natural disasters such as floods, storms and earthquakes, according to a report released by Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre on May 13, 2013. According to the report, 98% of those uprooted were displaced by climate- and weather-related events. Climate change is believed to play an increasingly significant role in global disasters. 2012 Special Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that, “disasters associated with climate extremes influence population mobility and relocation, affecting host and origin communities.”
This map shows internal displacement worldwide in 2012 by state and number of displaced people. CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW (Credit: NRC/IDMC)
Floods in India and Nigeria were responsible for 41 % of displacement worldwide last year. Monsoon floods in India uprooted about 6.9 million people, while in Nigeria some 6.1 million were newly displaced. While Asia and Africa were hardest affected, some 1.3 million people were displaced in wealthy nations, especially the United States. Last year, the U.S. was among the 10 countries that experienced the most new displacement. Following Hurricane Sandy, most of those displaced were able to find refuge in adequate temporary shelter while displaced from their own homes.
The largest regional increase in the number of internally displaced people in 2012 was in the Middle East and North Africa, where 2.5 million people were forced to flee their homes. There were almost 6 million affected in the region at the end of 2012, a rise of 40 % on the 2011. Asia showed the second highest increase in new displacement after the Middle East and North Africa, with 1.4 million people forced to flee their homes during 2012.
by Staff Writers Cancun, Mexico (SPX) May 15, 2013
A new study finds a decline in snow and ice on Mount Everest (second peak from left) and the national park surrounding it. (Credit: Pavel Novak)
Researchers taking a new look at the snow and ice covering Mount Everest and the national park that surrounds it are finding abundant evidence that the world’s tallest peak is shedding its frozen cloak. The scientists have also been studying temperature and precipitation trends in the area and found that the Everest region has been warming while snowfall has been declining since the early 1990s.
Members of the team conducting these studies will present their findings on May 14 at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico – a scientific conference organized and co-sponsored by the American Geophysical Union.
Glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years and the snowline has shifted upward by 180 meters (590 feet), according to Sudeep Thakuri, who is leading the research as part of his PhD graduate studies at the University of Milan in Italy.
Glaciers smaller than one square kilometer are disappearing the fastest and have experienced a 43 percent decrease in surface area since the 1960s. Because the glaciers are melting faster than they are replenished by ice and snow, they are revealing rocks and debris that were previously hidden deep under the ice.
These debris-covered sections of the glaciers have increased by about 17 percent since the 1960s, according to Thakuri. The ends of the glaciers have also retreated by an average of 400 meters since 1962, his team found.
The researchers suspect that the decline of snow and ice in the Everest region is from human-generated greenhouse gases altering global climate. However, they have not yet established a firm connection between the mountains’ changes and climate change, Thakuri said.
The World Meteorological Organisation revealed in Statement on the Status of the Global Climate, that during the August to September 2012 melting season, the Arctic’s sea ice cover was just 3.4 million square kilometres (1.32 million square miles). That is equal to 18% less than record low set in 2007. Last year was the ninth warmest year since recorded history and the 27th consecutive year that the global land and ocean temperatures were above the 1961–1990 average.
The 2012 global land and ocean surface temperature during January–December 2012 is estimated to be 0.45°C (±0.11°C) above the 1961–1990 average of 14.0°C. The years 2001–2012 were all among the top 13 warmest years on record. Last year’s warming came despite a cooling La Nina at the beginning of the year.
Above-average temperatures were observed across most of the globe’s land surface areas, most notably North America, southern Europe, western Russia, parts of northern Africa and southern South America while cooler than average conditions were observed across Alaska, parts of northern and eastern Australia, and central Asia.
Global land and ocean surface temperature anomalies with respect to the 1961-1990 base period (Source: WMO)
Precipitation also varied, with drier-than-average conditions across much of the central United States, northern Mexico, northeastern Brazil, central Russia, and south-central Australia. Northern Europe, western Africa, north-central Argentina, western Alaska, and most of northern China were meanwhile wetter than average.
Annual precipitation anomalies for global land areas for 2012; gridded 1.0-degree rain gauge-based analysis as percentages of average focusing on the 1951–2000 base period (Source: Global Precipitation Climatology Centre, Deutscher Wetterdienst, Germany)
According to data from the Global Snow Laboratory, snow coverextent in North America during the 2011/2012 winter was below average. The previous two winters (2009/2010 and 2010/2011) had the largest and third largest snow cover extent, respectively, since records began in 1966.
On the other side, the Eurasian continent snow cover extent during the winter was above average, resulting in the fourth largest snow cover extent on record. Overall, the northern hemisphere snow cover extent was above average – 590000 km2 above the average of 45.2 million km2.
Antarctic sea ice drift caused by changing winds are responsible for observed increases in Antarctic sea ice cover in the past two decades according to new study by British Antarctic Survey and NASA. While Arctic experienced dramatic record ice loss due the climate change, Antarctic sea ice cover has increased due the climate change. Antarctic ice cover expands to an area roughly twice the size of Europe during the winter season. By the end of winter the ice covers an area of 19 million square kilometres, more than doubling the size of the continent.
Monthly sea ice extent for October 2012 – Blue Marble view (Image courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado, Boulder and NASA Earth Observatory)
More than five million daily ice-motion measurements by four U.S. Defense Meteorological satellites, over a period of 19 years, were mapped by JPL and used in research. Scientists Paul Holland of the Natural Environment Research Council’s British Antarctic Survey and Ron Kwok of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, analysed data which show long-term changes in sea ice drift around Antarctica for the first time. Before that, researchers used computer models of Antarctic winds.
“We are facing the first clear evidence of a dangerous climate change. However, some of the researchers and some of the Media are plunged into a semantic debate about whether the Arctic Sea-Ice has reached a tipping point or not. This all is distracting the attention on the need to develop indicators that warn about the proximity of abrupt changes in the future, as well as on the policymaking to prevent them”, prof. Carlos Duarte, Director of the Oceans Institute at The University of Western Australia and Research Professor with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA) in Mallorca, Spain.
Tipping points are defined as critical points within a system, of which future condition may be qualitatively affected by small perturbations. On the other hand, tipping elements are defined as those components of the Earth system that may show tipping signs.
According to the experts, the Arctic shows the largest concentration of potential tipping elements in Earth’s Climate System: Arctic Sea-Ice; Greenland Ice-Sheet; North Atlantic deep water formation regions; boreal forests; plankton communities; permafrost; and marine methane hydrates among others.
Duarte maintains: “Due to all of this, the Arctic region is particularly prone to show abrupt changes and transfer them to the Global Earth System. It is necessary to find rapid alarm signs, which warn us about the proximity of tipping points, for the development and deployment of adaptive strategies. This all would help to adopt more preventive policies”.
In an article, published in the latest number of ‘AMBIO’, Duarte and other CSIC researchers detail the tipping elements present in the Arctic. They also provide evidence to prove that many of these tipping elements have already entered into a dynamic of change that may become abrupt in most of the cases. According to the study, it is possible to observe numerous tipping elements that would impact on the Global Climate System if they were perturbed.
CSIC scientist explains: “In this work, we provide evidence showing that many of these tipping elements have already started up. We also identify which are the climate change thresholds that may accelerate the global climate change. The very human reaction to climate change in the Arctic (dominated by the increase of activities such as transportation, shipping, and resource exploitation) may contribute to accelerate the changes already happening”. CSIC website
Arctic – 2011 in review
Map of the Arctic (Source: The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection)
According to US National Snow and Ice Data Center, Arctic sea ice extent for December 2011 was the third lowest in the satellite record. The five lowest December extents in the satellite record have occurred in the past six years. Including the year 2011, the linear rate of decline ice December ice extent over the satellite record is -3.5% per decade. The Arctic gained 2.37 million square kilometers (915,000 square miles) of ice during the month. The average ice gain for December was 1.86 million square kilometers (718,000 square miles). On December 31, Arctic sea ice extent was 13.25 million square kilometers (5.12 million square miles), 561,000 square kilometers (217,000 square miles) more than the ice extent on December 31, 2010, the lowest extent on December 31 in the satellite record.
Arctic sea ice extent remained unusually low through December, especially in the Barents and Kara seas. In sharp contrast to the past two winters, the winter of 2011 has so far seen a generally positive phase of the Arctic Oscillation, a weather pattern that helps to explain low snow cover extent and warmer than average conditions over much of the United States and Eastern Europe. In Antarctica, where summer is beginning, sea ice extent is presently above average.
In 1958, military application of Tesla’s little known methods of electromagnetic manipulation of earth’s atmosphere was already underway. White House advisor on weather modification to President Eisenhower reported the DoD was studying ways to manipulate electrical charges of the earth and sky in order to manipulate the weather for purposes of national defense. Source
1) The climate change is real, and there is more to it than CO2 and ‘global warming’ – it is all extremes.
2) The entire solar system appears to be changing simultaneously.
3) The magnetic changes on earth began hundreds of years ago, and need to be tracked more effectively.
4) Weather modification appears to be implemented, and IMHO it is a zero-sum game.
Fact vs Opinion: The ‘Weather Modification’ segment contains many statements of my personal opinion on the negative aspects of the various applications. I have nothing but my humble opinion on those matters; humans survived this event before, and we can do it again now.
HAARP comments are meant to help focus our efforts to properly identify these various machines of modification. While auroral modulation has it’s benefits, my negative comments about weather modification applies to HAARP as well.
Music: Instrumentals by HOT100, version of ‘Ambition’ by Wale, Meek Mill & Rick Ross
Winter doesn’t officially begin until December 21, but winter has a mind of its own as does all of nature. While the United Nations charlatans gathered in Doha, Qatar to try to save its global warming hoax by first calling it “climate change” and then by fashioning a funding mechanism to transfer the wealth of developed countries to those who are not, winter has arrived “early” around the world.
That might just have something to do with the cooling cycle that has been active for the past sixteen years, “inconveniently” blowing a big hole in the global warming lies we’ve been hearing and reading since the late 1980s.
From IceAgeNow.info, a site by Robert W. Felix, the author of a book about ice ages (the Earth has been through quite a few in its 4.5 billion years), here are some recent news stories:
On December 1, “Heavy snowfall severs Russia” told of “Hundreds of drivers (who) were caught by surprise in a 40km traffic jam after an unexpected snowfall and heavy winds.”
On November 30, “Finland snowstorm causes blackouts” reported that “Tens of thousands of households were without electricity on Friday as the result of a storm that dumped heavy snow across southern Finland and sent winds gusting up to 27 meters per second, felling trees and downing power lines.” That same day, across the former land bridge between Russia and North America, “Fairbanks – Coldest back-to-back November on record” was a news item that reported “The mercury hit 30 below for the first time this winter at Fairbanks International Airport.”
On November 29, the news was about a “Severe snow storm hits northern Japan” during which it was “blasted by an intense snow storm causing widespread havoc to residents of Hokkaido and Northern Honshu.”
On November 28, “Snowfall paralyzes life in China” was the headline of a report that “China has experienced the biggest snowfall in 52 years. Snow caused power outages in 57 villages, brought down thousands of trees and killed numerous domestic animals. Temperatures fell by as much as 14 degrees below zero in some areas.”
You don’t have to be a meteorologist to connect the dots. It is getting colder in the northern hemisphere of the world. To those who would dismiss this, saying that Russia has always been famous for its winters, that is the equivalent of whistling passed the graveyard.
In England, a November 29 report in The Telegraph, reported that “Councils are gearing up for what could be Britain’s coldest winter in 100 years, as sub-zero temperatures and snow follow days of downpours that have devastated large parts of the country.” The Met Office, England’s equivalent of the U.S. Weather Bureau, warned that “The forthcoming cold snap, caused by clear skies and northerly winds, could herald the start of a freezing winter.”
This was not unforeseen, however. In late January 2012, the British daily, The Mail, reported that “The supposed “consensus” on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planning has not warmed for the past 15 years. The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th century.” England and much of the northern Europe and North America was gripped by a mini ice age that lasted from 1300 to 1850.
It is no secret to climate scientists that the sun is in what they call a “grand minimum” by way of describing relatively few magnetic storms, also known assun spots. Few storms means less solar radiation and, since the sun is the primary source of heat for the Earth that means things get colder here. This is worth keeping in mind when the Secretary General of the United Nations or any other lying politician or alleged scientist tells you otherwise.
In a new book worth reading, “The Whole Story of Climate” by E. Kirsten Peters, the author brings a wealth of knowledge to the subject from the standpoint of a geologist. As to the claim that carbon dioxide emissions are the “cause” of a warming that is not happening, she points out that “The fact is, if human beings had remained hunter-gatherers throughout our entire history, never producing a single molecule of greenhouse gases through agriculture or industry, climate today would still be changing. It would be lurching toward higher temperatures, crashing toward vastly colder temperatures, or at least swinging toward something different from what has been. That’s just the nature of Earth’s climate.”
Preceding the introduction and rise of humans was an age known as the Pleistocene Epoch about 1.8 million years ago. It “was not a time of only monotonous cold. In fact, it alternated between long periods of cold – lasting roughly 100,000 years – and short periods of considerably warming times – lasting about 10,000 years.”
We humans are the result of the Holocene Epoch, a much more temperate, warmer period that followed the Pleistocene and, writes Peters, “From the Earth’s point of view, the Holocene is no different at all from other brief, warm intervals in the Pleistocene.”We are now about 11,500 years into this warmer cycle and, if the current cooling cycle continues and gets colder, we are knocking on the door of the next ice age.
Nor is this a problem only for the northern hemisphere. Southern hemisphere polar sea ice expanded in September 2012 to its greatest extent since satellites began measuring the Antarctic ice cap in 1979.
That’s what Robert W. Felix has been warning about in his book, “Not by Fire, But by Ice”, published initially in 2005. He’s not alone. Habibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences predicts that there will be a sharp drop in the temperature of the Earth starting in 2014. He’s predicting it will last about 200 years.
We are well past when the next ice age – mini or not – should have begun and, if all the global warming charlatans are right, we can actually THANK heightened levels of carbon dioxide for delaying it! However, the truth is that higher or lower levels of carbon dioxide show up centuries after any shift in the Earth’s temperature.
Just as the recent weather reports indicate, lower temperatures, greater snowfall, and other miseries of a colder Earth are in the future of the billions who live in the northern hemisphere. Bundle up.
Sightings of balls of lightning have been made for centuries around the world – usually the size of a grapefruit and lasting up to twenty seconds – but no explanation of how it occurs has been universally accepted by science. Even more mysterious are sightings of balls of lightning forming on glass and appearing in homes and in airplanes.
CSIRO scientist John Lowke has been studying ball lightning since the sixties. He’s never seen it, but has spoken to eye witnesses and in a new scientific paper, he gives the first mathematical solution explaining the birth of ball lightning – and how it can pass through glass.
Previous theories have cited microwave radiation from thunderclouds, oxidizing aerosols, nuclear energy, dark matter, antimatter, and even black holes as possible causes. John disputes these theories.
He proposes ball lightning is caused when leftover ions (electric energy), which are very dense, are swept to the ground following a lightning strike. As for how they pass through glass, he says this is a result of a stream of ions accumulating on the outside of a glass window and the resulting electric field on the other side excites air molecules to form a ball discharge.
According to John ball lightning is rare, but it has been witnessed in Australia many times. People just don’t realize what it is when they see it.
In recent years, scientists, first responders and utilities have been preparing for “The Big One,” that inevitable quake that will rock Southern California to its core. It’s coming. For sure. They just don’t know when.
But the U.S. Geological Survey and Caltech have been on the ball, working from a likely scenario, a simulated “Shakeout” (see video after the jump) that would have a 7.8 quake hitting greater L.A. It would be deadly, destructive and put us in the dark for days, if not weeks.
Unfortunately, a 7.8 might now be too low of an estimate for The Big One:
Simulations for the magnitude 7.8 “ShakeOut” earthquake on the southern San Andreas fault, developed by the Southern California Earthquake Center ShakeOut Simulation workgroup. Simulation by Rob Graves, URS/SCEC. Visualization by Geoff Ely, USC/SCEC.
Scientists said the Indonesian rocker was larger than they ever thought such a quake “could be,” according to Caltech. It was a “intraplate strike-slip quake,” similar to what would happen at San Andreas, where much of California, from Baja to San Francisco, is moving north as the rest of America moves south.
In Sumatra, scientists found that this was not only the biggest strike-slip fault temblor ever, but that it set of a series of right-angle ruptures that amplified the shaking, like a block of ice cracking up in the heat.
And yes, it could happen here. The research, published last week in the journal Science Express, argues:
The new details provide fresh insights into the possibility of ruptures involving multiple faults occurring elsewhere–something that could be important for earthquake-hazard assessment along California’s San Andreas fault, which itself is made up of many different segments and is intersected by a number of other faults at right angles.
Lingsen Meng, lead author of the Caltech research:
If other earthquake ruptures are able to go this deep or to connect as many fault segments as this earthquake did, they might also be very large and cause significant damage.
The USGS, of course, is begging Southern Californians to prepare for our “mega-earthquake,” as academics called the Indonesian shaker. You know, flashlights, batteries, radios, water, nonperishable food. All that good stuff.
A volcano in Sakurajima in southern Japan has erupted, spewing volcanic ash onto Kagoshima City. The eruption at one of Japan’s most active volcanoes caused ash to cover roads. Residents of Kagoshima donned face masks to protect themselves while sweeping away the ash. The volcano has erupted over 600 times this year and is expected to continue its intermittent eruptions. Currently, the volcano warning there is at level three out of a possible five levels. A level five would mean that the residents living near the crater would have to be evacuated, while level three warns people not to approach the volcano.
ST LOUIS MO
TULSA OK
PEACHTREE CITY GA
MOUNT HOLLY NJ
CHARLESTON SC
GREENVILLE-SPARTANBURG SC
WILMINGTON NC
NEWPORT/MOREHEAD CITY NC
JACKSONVILLE FL
WAKEFIELD VA
BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC
RALEIGH NC
The number of people taken to hospitals by ambulance due to heatstroke in the week through Sunday more than doubled from the preceding week to 5,467, preliminary data showed Tuesday. The figure, up from 2,622 in the week to July 15, hit the highest for a single week this summer, according to the data released by the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. Deaths caused by heatstroke increased to 13 from five in the preceding week. Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture had the most victims, with ambulances called for 388 people each. They were followed by 382 in Aichi Prefecture and 372 in Osaka Prefecture. People aged 65 or older accounted for 45.9 percent of the total. Since the agency started this year’s survey on May 28, 11,116 people were taken to hospitals as of Sunday. Twenty-three people have died. The rise in heatstroke cases reflects the smothering heat wave, with temperatures of 35 degrees or higher observed in many places for the four days from July 16, agency officials said. In Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture, the mercury shot up to 37.6 on July 16 and to 39.2 the following day, according to the Meteorological Agency.
WASHINGTON — From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms.
On a single day this month here, a US Airways regional jet became stuck in asphalt that had softened in 100-degree temperatures, and a subway train derailed after the heat stretched the track so far that it kinked — inserting a sharp angle into a stretch that was supposed to be straight. In East Texas, heat and drought have had a startling effect on the clay-rich soils under highways, which “just shrink like crazy,” leading to “horrendous cracking,” said Tom Scullion, senior research engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. In Northeastern and Midwestern states, he said, unusually high heat is causing highway sections to expand beyond their design limits, press against each other and “pop up,” creating jarring and even hazardous speed bumps.
Excessive warmth and dryness are threatening other parts of the grid as well. In the Chicago area, a twin-unit nuclear plant had to get special permission to keep operating this month because the pond it uses for cooling water rose to 102 degrees; its license to operate allows it to go only to 100. According to the Midwest Independent System Operator, the grid operator for the region, a different power plant had had to shut because the body of water from which it draws its cooling water had dropped so low that the intake pipe became high and dry; another had to cut back generation because cooling water was too warm.
The frequency of extreme weather is up over the past few years, and people who deal with infrastructure expect that to continue. Leading climate models suggest that weather-sensitive parts of the infrastructure will be seeing many more extreme episodes, along with shifts in weather patterns and rising maximum (and minimum) temperatures.
“We’ve got the ‘storm of the century’ every year now,” said Bill Gausman, a senior vice president and a 38-year veteran at the Potomac Electric Power Company, which took eight days to recover from the June 29 “derecho” storm that raced from the Midwest to the Eastern Seaboard and knocked out power for 4.3 million people in 10 states and the District of Columbia.
In general, nobody in charge of anything made of steel and concrete can plan based on past trends, said Vicki Arroyo, who heads the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, a clearinghouse on climate-change adaptation strategies.
Highways, Mr. Scullion noted, are designed for the local climate, taking into account things like temperature and rainfall. “When you get outside of those things, man, all bets are off.” As weather patterns shift, he said, “we could have some very dramatic failures of highway systems.”
Adaptation efforts are taking place nationwide. Some are as huge as the multibillion-dollar effort to increase the height of levees and flood walls in New Orleans because of projections of rising sea levels and stronger storms to come; others as mundane as resizing drainage culverts in Vermont, where Hurricane Irene damaged about 2,000 culverts. “They just got blown out,” said Sue Minter, the Irene recovery officer for the state.
In Washington, the subway system, which opened in 1976, has revised its operating procedures. Authorities will now watch the rail temperature and order trains to slow down if it gets too hot. When railroads install tracks in cold weather, they heat the metal to a “neutral” temperature so it reaches a moderate length, and will withstand the shrinkage and growth typical for that climate. But if the heat historically seen in the South becomes normal farther north, the rails will be too long for that weather, and will have an increased tendency to kink. So railroad officials say they will begin to undertake much more frequent inspection.
Some utilities are re-examining long-held views on the economics of protecting against the weather. Pepco, the utility serving the area around Washington, has repeatedly studied the idea of burying more power lines, and the company and its regulators have always decided that the cost outweighed the benefit. But the company has had five storms in the last two and a half years for which recovery took at least five days, and after the derecho last month, the consensus has changed. Both the District of Columbia and Montgomery County, Md., have held hearings to discuss the option — though in the District alone, the cost would be $1.1 billion to $5.8 billion, depending on how many of the power lines were put underground.
Even without storms, heat waves are changing the pattern of electricity use, raising peak demand higher than ever. That implies the need for new investment in generating stations, transmission lines and local distribution lines that will be used at full capacity for only a few hundred hours a year. “We build the system for the 10 percent of the time we need it,” said Mark Gabriel, a senior vice president of Black & Veatch, an engineering firm. And that 10 percent is “getting more extreme.”
Even as the effects of weather extremes become more evident, precisely how to react is still largely an open question, said David Behar, the climate program director for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. “We’re living in an era of assessment, not yet in an area of adaptation,” he said.
He says that violent storms and forest fires can be expected to affect water quality and water use: runoff from major storms and falling ash could temporarily shut down reservoirs. Deciding how to address such issues is the work of groups like the Water Utility Climate Alliance, of which he is a member. “In some ways, the science is still catching up with the need of water managers for high-quality projection,” he said.
Some needs are already known. San Francisco will spend as much as $40 million to modify discharge pipes for treated wastewater to prevent bay water from flowing back into the system.
Even when state and local officials know what they want to do, they say they do not always get the cooperation they would like from the federal government. Many agencies have officially expressed a commitment to plan for climate change, but sometimes the results on the ground can be frustrating, said Ms. Minter of Vermont. For instance, she said, Vermont officials want to replace the old culverts with bigger ones. “We think it’s an opportunity to build back in a more robust way,” she said. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency wants to reuse the old culverts that washed out, or replace them with similar ones, she said.
Ms. Arroyo of Georgetown said the federal government must do more. “They are not acknowledging that the future will look different from the past,” she said, “and so we keep putting people and infrastructure in harm’s way.”
Matthew L. Wald reported from Washington, and John Schwartz from New York.
Residents were asked to evacuate from a rural area in southern Montana Thursday as a 5-square-mile wildfire approached the edge of a spread-out subdivision. County workers and firefighters were going door to door asking people to leave along a five-mile stretch of Shane Creek Road south of Columbus, officials said. The voluntary evacuation covered roughly 10 houses in Stillwater County, according to a hotline set up by the county. Shane Creek resident Shane Fouhy said he was packing some belongings, setting out sprinklers to water down his house and yard and heading into Columbus to stay with relatives. “I’ve been out all morning watering and the wind is kind of whirling,” he said. “It’s burning in all directions.” Paula Short with the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation said the Skibstad Fire was burning in grass and timber and had approached within two miles of houses along Shane Creek Road. Residents of more than 100 houses were put on notice that they, too, might have to go. Firefighters were trying to hold the fire along a nearby ridge top to keep it from reaching the houses, Short said. But they were braced for the blaze to spread amid hot, dry conditions and winds of 5 to 10 miles per hour. Columbus High School was set up as a shelter for evacuees. Some structures were confirmed burned; how many and whether any were houses remained unclear. The fire started Wednesday evening in a secondary building on Skibstad Road and quickly spread across the surrounding landscape. It was pushed to the south by the wind, eventually reaching into areas of Carbon County. A heavy air tanker and several smaller aircraft were providing support to at least 60 firefighters with more personnel en route, Short said.
More federal firefighters were being deployed to bone-dry Nebraska, where a huge wildfire is threatening more structures and two smaller fires are still out of control. The handful of people living in Sparks, a gateway to canoeing and tubing on the Niobrara River, were on alert for possible evacuation. A 14-mile stretch of the valley already has been evacuated. While a cold front is expected to provide some relief, highs Wednesday will still be in the mid-90s. The front may also bring some rain, but major storms aren’t likely to develop near the fire. Plus, storms could also bring lightning and spark new fires. Hot, windy weather on Monday helped the main Fairfield Creek Fire expand to 58,000 acres, or nearly 92 square miles. Two other smaller fires about 20 miles east of the main fire had burned more than six square miles. And Tuesday’s high temperature again topped Officials estimate the fires, which have already destroyed at least 10 homes, are about 25 percent contained. Some 200 federal firefighters were being sent to join the more than 300 crews already on the front lines. Four helicopters are also fighting the fires, and three firefighters have been injured. Much of the fire-swept land near the river is rugged, forested and populated with cabins, so only 17 residences had been evacuated as of Tuesday morning.
A much expected downpour bypassed Beijing Wednesday but battered the neighboring city of Tianjin, flooding many downtown streets and vehicles. As of 11 a.m. Thursday, the maximum precipitation had exceeded 300 millimeters, Tianjin’s meteorological center said in a press release. It said the city proper received an average rainfall of 147 mm, while the outer Xiqing district, one of the worst-battered areas, received 309.8 mm. The local fire prevention bureau sent 190 fire engines and 1,140 rescuers to help rescue flood stranded vehicles and pedestrians. The rain had largely stopped by midday, but the center issued another orange alarm at 11:10 a.m., warning residents of a further rainstorm. The downpour has paralyzed traffic in downtown Tianjin, drowning many roads. Dozens of vehicles were stranded on Baidi road in Nankai district after their engines died in the flood. Many pedestrians complained they had to trek in knee-deep water. In some sections of Xianyang Street, flood water was waist deep. On the badly flooded Friendship Road in Hexi district, five workers kept watch next to sewage wells whose manholes had been removed for faster drainage.The rain disrupted air traffic at Tianjin’s airport, where 20 flights were canceled and 34 delayed.8 The first flight, an incoming flight from Shanghai, landed in Tianjin after the rain subsided at 11:32 a.m., and the first departing flight took off at 12:08 p.m., according to the airport’s official website. Railway transportation, however, was largely unaffected, including the express rail link to Beijing, the city’s railway authorities confirmed. Vegetable prices were up at the city’s major wholesale markets Thursday. “Each kilo is at least 0.4 yuan — about 30 percent — more expensive than yesterday,” said Cui Hongqing, a wholesaler at Hongqi Market. Cui predicted further price hikes Friday as the rain devastated crops and increased transportation costs. China’s capital Beijing was on guard against heavy rain Wednesday, fearing a repeat of Saturday’s mayhem. Saturday’s downpour, which the local weather bureau described as the “heaviest in 61 years,” killed at least 37 people — some were drowned in private cars. Many office workers were allowed to go home early Wednesday for safety considerations, and city authorities bombarded mobile phone subscribers with text message warnings of an imminent downpour. The much expected rain, however, did not fall in Beijing. The capital was still overcast Thursday, as the central weather bureau has forecast rain in seven northern China provinces and municipalities, including Beijing, over the coming three days.
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Summer Storms to Create New Ozone Holes as Earth Warms?
More storms may trigger ozone depletion in populated areas far from the Poles.
A thunderstorm rumbles through Kansas (file picture).
Summer storms may create new holes in our protective ozone layer as Earth heats up—bringing increased solar ultraviolet radiation to densely populated areas, a new study says.
What’s more, if more sunlight reaches Earth, skin cancer could become the new marquee risk of global warming.
In a recent series of research flights over the United States, Harvard University atmospheric chemist James Anderson and colleagues found that summer storms often loft water vapor into the stratosphere.
“It was an unequivocal observation,” he said. “We had a number of flights, and this was an abiding feature” of the storms.
Under the right conditions, this water vapor could trigger chemical reactions that deplete the ozone layer, which prevents harmful ultraviolet rays from reaching Earth’s surface, the study says.
Even small reductions in the ozone layer can make people more susceptible to skin cancer and eye damage, experts say.
The finding concerned Anderson, whose research in the 1980s and ’90s played a pivotal role in establishing the Montreal Protocol. The international treaty phased out the production of ozone-depleting chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were found in a variety of products, including hairsprays and refrigerators.
CFCs produce a form of chlorine that degrades ozone particles in the stratosphere, most signifcantly over the Arctic and Antarctic.
Subsequent studies in the Arctic and in the laboratory revealed that both temperature and water vapor concentrations are crucial in a chemical reaction that makes chlorine attack ozone.
Now, the new observations over the United States suggest summer storms create the same combination of temperature and water vapor conditions at mid-latitudes. (Interactive Map: Global Warming Effects.)
“We essentially have the chemistry that’s present in the Arctic that is clearly very potent for destroying ozone,” Anderson said.
The findings, published today in the journal Science, calculate ozone loss at a rate between 4 and 6 percent per day in water vapor-rich areas of the stratosphere. The effect could persist for several weeks after a storm, he added.
What worries Anderson most is where and when this phenomenon appears to occur.
“It is not ozone loss in Antarctica and the Arctic under winter conditions. It is an attack on the ozone layer in the summer over populated regions of the Northern Hemisphere,” he said.
Simone Tilmes, an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, views the new findings with caution.
Research does indicate that more water vapor in the stratosphere will lead to greater ozone loss under the right conditions, said Tilmes, who was not involved with the current research.
But the study found no direct evidence of a simultaneous observation of water vapor and the presence of destructive chlorine, she said.
“This raises attention,” she said, emphasizing that more research is needed to determine if such ozone depletion will occur.
Study leader Anderson and colleagues acknowledged that they haven’t yet measured the ozone-destroying chlorine in the North American stratosphere.
However, he noted that, though chlorofluorocarbons are no longer released into the atmosphere, the compounds already there can persist for decades.
If there’s a silver lining to the research, it’s that the results could have a tangible impact on people’s behavior, Anderson said.
Unlike with the “out of sight, out of mind” nature of melting glaciers and carbon dioxide and methane emissions, he said, “most people know that skin cancer is highly prevalent and increasing its frequency.”
If the new findings are confirmed, people may see a direct link between climate change and their health.
That, he said, “might spur them to “step up and take responsibility for what is actually occurring.”
A possible tornado touched down in Elmira, N.Y., late Thursday, damaging buildings, toppling trees and bringing down power lines. The authorities said some people were trapped in their cars when the storm struck around 4 p.m. There were no reports of serious injuries. Emergency officials in Chemung County said there was “significant damage” in Elmira. The National Weather Service said that there were unconfirmed reports that a tornado had touched down. Severe weather moved across Ohio and Pennsylvania on Thursday afternoon, and into New York and New England, bringing heavy rain and in some cases, strong winds and hail. In the New York metropolitan area, weather officials said that the storm moved in shortly after 7 p.m. The hardest hit areas were northwest of the city in Westchester County and in parts of Connecticut, where there were multiple reports of downed trees and power lines. The highest measured wind gusts in the area were 60 miles per hour, near the Tappan Zee Bridge, officials said. Around 8 p.m., wind gusts of up to 54 miles per hour were reported at Kennedy International Airport, weather officials said. Hundreds of flights were delayed because of the storm. Amtrak also reported delays. Late Thursday, tens of thousands of people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were without power.
Today
Landslide
Vietnam
MultiProvinces, [Provinces of Tuyen Quang and Ha Giang]
Disaster officials and state media in Vietnam say landslides and flash floods triggered by Typhoon Vicente have killed seven people, including three in a single family, and left three others missing. Official Lai Thanh Huyen of Tuyen Quang province in northern Vietnam said Friday that landslides following heavy rains buried a 28-year-old woman, her five-year-old daughter and four-month-old son early Thursday while they were sleeping in their home. The Tuoi Tre newspaper reported that landslides killed four people in the neighboring province of Ha Giang. It says flash floods have left three other people missing elsewhere in the region. Vicente injured dozens and grounded planes in Hong Kong earlier in the week.
Minister of Local Government and Community Development Dato Sri Wong Soon Koh yesterday confirmed that there is a cholera outbreak in Bintulu. Speaking to reporters after a briefing by officers from the state Health Department at his office here yesterday, he said the department detected the outbreak on July 14 after a case was confirmed positive with Vibrio Cholerae. “Since July 14, the state Health Department declared there is an outbreak detected in Bintulu. Since then, the state Health Department initiated its investigation to trace all the suspected symptomatic cases. Anyone coming down with diarrhoea and vomiting will be investigated to check whether it is cholera or not,” he added. Based on investigation by the department, the outbreak was believed to have started when three groups of regatta participants from Rumah Gawan, Kampung Jepak and Kampung Hilir in Sebauh, Bintulu used water from Kemena River to wash plates, fish and their hands. “The bacteria from the river had contaminated the food and the hands of the people during the regatta and then continuously spread from person to person and contaminated food and drinks. Now the state Health Department is also suspecting that it is spread from Ramadan Bazaar due to contaminated food and drinks,” he added. He noted that as of yesterday, the department had received 140 cases – 33 positive for cholera, 55 negative and 52 cases still pending result. The youngest patient was one year 11 months old while the oldest was 84 years old. The department also detected nine cases with Vibrio Cholerae but without any symptom. As of yesterday, 177 people had been screened for signs and symptoms of acute gastroenteritis and were given doxycycline, an antibiotic.On the outbreak, Wong said it was still spreading in Bintulu with 11 localities declared positive for cholera; Rumah Panjang Gawan at Sungai Sebauh, Kampung Jepak, Kampung Sebauh Hilir in Sebauh, Rumah Usah in Sungai Segan, Setinggan Mozako, Kampung Assyikirin, Kampung Sinong in Jalan Masjid, Setinggan Hock Peng Tanjung Kidurong, Batu 10, Jalan Bintulu/Miri, Kampung Baru and Kirana Palm Oil/Brightwood Quarters, Kemena Industrial Estate. “The state Health Department will continue to take all samples from Sungai Kemena and its tributaries as well as food sampling from Ramadan Bazaar and houses. Besides that, the state Health Department will intensify diarrhoea and vomiting surveillance in all health facilities in Bintulu and issue cholera alert to all government, private health facilities in the state whereby when there is increase in number of admission, the state Health Department will investigate whether it is cholera or not,” he said. Wong said attention would also be given to all food handlers in the Ramadan Bazaar in Bintulu to ensure that they meet the department’s health standards, which also requires them to go for cholera screening. “Once they are cleared from the disease, they will be issued health cards and they must bring the health cards with them when they operate the stalls. If they refuse to go for screening, they will be asked to close down their stalls,” he added. For the convenience of the public, a screening centre is opened at the old Bintulu health clinic from 8am to 10pm every day. The department is also using Bintulu Hospital for isolation of severe cases while mild cases and asymptomatic cases would be treated at the national service camp in Samalaju in Bintulu. Wong appealed to the public to give their fullest cooperation to the department to ensure that the outbreak could be contained.
Biohazard name:
Vibrio Cholera Outbreak
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
Sixteen people are reported dead in Uganda from a mystery illness. The Uganda publication UG Pulse reports that a strange illness, cause unknown, is spreading in the Kibaale district in western Uganda. The District Health Officer, Dr. Dan Kyamanwa, stated that 11 of the deaths were from the same family in the Nyamarunda Sub County. A twelfth death was a health officer. There are also reports of the illness appearing in the clinical officer who treated the family from Nyamarunda and a driver who transported the deceased. Kyamanwa says that symptoms of the illness include high fever, vomiting, diarrhea and systems failure. Death occurs within four to seven days.The Ugandan government is reportedly sending a team of experts to investigate the outbreak.
Biohazard name:
Unidentified fatal disease
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
Lifeguard services provided by the department of tourism were called upon to carry out a multiple rescue operation on Thursday at Benaulim after a fishing boat with 12 crew members ventured out to the sea and capsized. The incident report stated that lifeguards were continuously observing the boat that had left at 7.20am when they saw it suddenly capsize when it was hit by a huge wave about 200m from the shore. Nine crew members were secured by the lifeguards on jet-ski boats and brought to shore while three managed to swim to safety. No injuries were reported. But as two victims Santan Fernandes and Menino Fernandes had shallow breathing, they were shifted to Hospicio hospital, Margao.
Hundreds of fish have gone belly-up in the Swan River and others are slowly dying as the latest toxic algal bloom to hit the river takes it toll. The Swan River Trust is responding to sightings of the dead and sluggish fish near the Ascot Waters marina. Elevated levels of the microalgae Karlodinium veneficum, which is potentially toxic to fish, have been detected in the area over the past few weeks. A similar outbreak in June killed more than 2,500 fish in a 13km stretch of the river from Bassendean to West Swan. Principal scientist with the trust Kerry Trayler said the free-floating microalgae were known to affect the capacity of fish to extract oxygen from the water. She said while the algae was not toxic to humans precautions should be taken in relation to the dead or dying fish. “The Department of Health advises that people should not swim in, or fish in, water with dead and decomposing fish. They should also keep pets and other animals away from the fish because they may contain high levels of bacteria,” she said. “Sluggish and dead fish should also not be collected and used for bait or consumption because of the risk of high levels of bacteria.”
Biohazard name:
Karlodinium veneficum (HAB)
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Symptoms:
Status:
Today
Biological Hazard
USA
State of Kansas, Overland Park [South Lake Park, 7601 W. 86th St]
Kansas health officials have strengthened their alert about toxic blue-green algae in the pond at South Lake Park, 7601 W. 86th St. City officials said an earlier “advisory” has been upgraded to a “warning,” so people and pets should not drink the water. Any fish caught there should be rinsed with clean water, and only the filet portion should be eaten. Pets should not eat dried algae, and people and animals should be rinsed with clean water if they come in contact with lake water.
Biohazard name:
Blue-Green (cyanobacteria) Algae bloom
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Health authorities are warning residents and visitors to Kitsap Lake in West Bremerton that high levels of a toxic blue-green algae have been discovered in the water. If ingested in sufficient quantities, a toxin produced by the algae can make people sick and potentially kill pets, fish, waterfowl and livestock, said Jim Zimny, water quality specialist with the Kitsap Public Health District. Water samples taken Tuesday from Kitsap Lake showed levels of the toxic compound to be 6.7 micrograms per liter. Warnings are posted when the level exceeds 6.0. Signs have gone up at public access areas and on roads around the lake, Zimny said. Weekly tests will be conducted until the algae blooms subside. People are advised to avoid drinking the water or swimming in the lake, especially in areas where the algae have concentrated. Avoid eating any fish caught during the bloom. Pets should be kept back from the water. Zimny asks people to call the health district if they see large numbers of dead fish, unexplained illness in a dog or cat or if someone entering the water suffers a physical reaction, such as a rash or illness.
Biohazard name:
Blue-Green (cyanobacteria) Algae bloom
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Symptoms:
Status:
Today
Biological Hazard
Malaysia
State of Preak, loc:Kampung Sg Dua [Sungai Bentong River]
Residents in Kampung Sg Dua near here are worried after finding dozens of fish in Sungai Bentong dead. Village chief Wong Fan Chong said they believed it was due to pollution and hazardous waste from an industrial estate nearby. “We are not alleging that the factories are dumping their waste into the river but surely, there is a reason why the fish are dead,” he said. He urged the authorities to conduct an investigation into the matter, adding that if test results showed it was due to waste pollution, guilty parties must be punished. Wong said there were previously cases of fish dying in the river but of late, the number had increased. “For the time being, I have told all villagers to stop fishing or swimming in Sungai Bentong which flows into Sungai Dua near our village. “We are not sure whether the fishes are safe to eat,” he added. State Health, Environment and Local Government Committee chairman Datuk Hoh Khai Mun said he had instructed officers from the Environment Department to investigate the issue. “We will reveal the findings of the probe in due course,” he said, adding that the state government would not compromise on the safety of the people.
Biohazard name:
Mass. Die-off (fishes)
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Dozens of beaches in Malaga province have played host to swarms or ‘blooms’ of jellyfish this summer, closing several beaches in Marbella and Estepona and administering more than 1,000 stings within a three-day period. Many bathers have been on the wrong end of the gelatinous varmint, whose sting causes a painful rash that can last for up to three days. According to Spain’s tourist office, the marine stingers are the venomous purple striped jellyfish. Their stings, although almost never fatal, have been known to cause severe allergic reactions. Here, the Olive Press looks at the different types of stingers in the Mediterranean, why they are becoming such a problem for bathers on the Costa del Sol and what can be done to protect yourself from eye-watering stings. Purple-striped jellyfish- aka mauve stingers: These increasingly common creatures have wreaked havoc on the Costa del Sol, causing the closure of a number of beaches. They are usually small but pack a powerful punch. Portuguese man o’ war – aka blue bottle: Although not technically jellyfish, these critters can deliver an agonising sting causing vomiting and fainting in some cases. They are usually found floating at the surface of the water with long, thin tendrils extending 10 metres. Fried egg jellyfish: A small but beautiful jellyfish which gets its name from its fried-egg shaped body. Its sting has little effect on humans. Moon jellyfish: One of the most common jellyfish in the world, these translucent creatures are often sold commercially as pets. The sting is harmless to humans. Compass jellyfish: With brown spots and a saucer-shaped bell, this jellyfish can often be found drifting on the sea surface. It can deliver a nasty sting.
Biohazard name:
Jellyfish invasion
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Blackleg normally kills livestock within 12 to 48 hours and is caused by the spore foaming, rod shaped and gas producing bacteria Clostridium chauvoei, which can live in soil for many years. The bacteria gains entrance to the animal through small punctures in the mucous membrane of the digestive tract. Animals begin showing signs of lameness, rapid breathing, loss of appetite and high fever. Shingairai Gudyanga said the spread of the disease has been fuelled by lack of adequate grazing caused by poor rainfall. This caused cattle to eat the roots of plants, a haven for the bacteria. “Most farmers in this area are reluctant to bring their livestock for vaccination and they do not report disease outbreaks,” she added. Blackleg is almost entirely preventable by vaccination. The department’s efforts to control disease are hampered because people eat the animals before tests can be done. “We fail to take smear samples because by the time we find out about deaths, only the bones of the dead animal are left, with the rest of the meat either sold or dried for consumption,” she said. “Our office is almost sure that two of the cattle died due to anthrax because when we examined the carcases, there was blood in the openings of the cattle, the mouth, ears and nose and they decayed faster than the others,” she said. “The community did not consume one of the cattle that I am referring to because it was in a terrible state, but ate the other one before it had rotted.” The District Head for Veterinary Services for Buhera South, Mr Mavhima, could not confirm nor deny the anthrax outbreak and said he would visit Mutiusinazita this week -end. “If it is anthrax, we will look into it and act on it swiftly,” he said.
Biohazard name:
Anthrax
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
They may seem like furry little friends, those little squirrels, as they skitter through the forests, but researches have discovered otherwise. A bacterium known to cause ‘Q-Fever’ in humans has been detected in a high percentage rodents in Algonquin Park. A team of Laurentian University biology researchers, led by Canada Research Chair Dr. Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde have found evidence of the spread of the zoonotic bacterium Coxiella bernetii in wildlife in the park and say their findings suggest that some visitors to the park could be at risk of infection. According to a Laurentian University press release the bacterium was “detected in six out of seven species of wild rodents tested within the boundaries of Algonquin Park, including red squirrels, flying squirrels and deer mice. It was also found in flying squirrels in the Peterborough area, indicating that the bacteria may be widespread among these animal populations in Ontario.” The bacterium is a cause of Query fever, also known as Q-Fever, in humans.According to the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) website, “Human Q fever is primarily an occupational disease of farmers, abattoir workers, veterinarians, and laboratory workers.” The disease is a flu-like illness that often remains undiagnosed. In a minority of cases it can cause a clinical atypical pneumonia or hepatitis. If the disease becomes chronic, endocarditis and chronic hepatitis can develop. Chronic Q fever can be fatal, and is more likely to develop in immuno-compromised individuals and pregnant women. The OMAFRA website states, “In Ontario, Q-fever has occasionally been diagnosed as a cause of abortion in sheep and goats. Reported human cases have been associated with exposure to abortions in sheep and goats, and drinking unpasteurised goat’s milk.” “It can be transmitted reasonably easily among wildlife,” he said. “The suggestion is that people can get it from, like the Hantavirus, inhaling feces. Let’s say you have a cottage or a camp and sweep the corners. Any fecal material will dry and aerosolize, it goes up in the air and you inhale some of it.” In 2007, an outbreak in the Netherlands resulted in the infection of more than 2,000 people.Thousands of goats were culled. “There is a lot of interest in Europe now on how this pathogen is transmitted in the natural environment,” said Schulte-Hostedde. He says there is a hypothesis that ticks may be a cause of the spread of this pathogen. Schulte-Hostedde says he has spoken intensively to an Algonquin Park biologist who has indicted there have been no reports of people becoming ill with Q-Fever. “In terms of mortality I don’t think it’s going to kill anybody. There are no huge numbers of people reporting being ill,” he said. “We put the press release out not to alarm people but so that the public health authorities know that this bug is out there.” He says this might be quite large spread, and there are different strains of the infection, some that may be more dangerous than others. “We don’t know anything about the strain that we found versus what might be found on farms,” he said. He says after discussions with Public Health Ontario and the Public Health Agency of Canada, they are aware that it is out there and it is reportable at some levels. “They are aware that it happens on farms but there is no real work that is being done on Coxiella bernetii in the natural environment,” he said. “My point with the whole thing… it is just providing an awareness that there is a microbrobe that can make you sick so you should take some precautions.”
Schulte-Hostedde says he is in the process of returning to his initial studies and a zoonotics expert at the University of Guelph is hoping to attain OMAFRA funding to study this bacterium in a natural environment because there are still many questions to be answered, including whether this is being transferred from farm to the natural environment or vice versa; and whether the strains are the same. “It has an interesting history because it has been the subject of weaponization research in the United States,” he said. “That’s part of the sexy thing about this thing. It actually can infect people relatively easily, which is part of the history of human relationships with this bacteria.” He says in order to get the real story beyond the initial findings and the hundreds of animals tested, there is much more work to be done.
Biohazard name:
Q Fever (squirrels)
Biohazard level:
3/4 Hight
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that can cause severe to fatal disease in humans, but for which vaccines or other treatments exist, such as anthrax, West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, SARS virus, variola virus (smallpox), tuberculosis, typhus, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, yellow fever, and malaria. Among parasites Plasmodium falciparum, which causes Malaria, and Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes trypanosomiasis, also come under this level.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo is meeting with utility officials and state regulators as a wave of severe storms cross the state. The National Weather Service gave Cuomo a pre-emptive warning about the possibility that severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. Cuomo says he will meet Thursday with the leadership of Con Edison, the New York Power Authority, and the state Public Service Commission to make sure the New York City area is prepared. About 10,000 utility customers in western New York and Sullivan County northwest of New York City have lost power as New Yorkers are being warned of the possibility of severe weather. The power losses Thursday morning came as thunderstorms move eastward across the state. Most of the outages are in the Rochester area and in Cattaraugus County, south of Buffalo.
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San Diego – The shaking from a magnitude 4.6 earthquake in northern Mexico was lightly felt in the San Diego area, seismologists said.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake hit at 8:25 p.m. PDT Saturday about 100 miles east-southeast of Tijuana, Mexico and was felt throughout San Diego County as far north as the Orange County line.
U-T San Diego said the epicenter was along the Laguna Salada fault in a sparsely populated area of Baja California.
The USGS said a larger 4.8 quake was recorded a few hours later in the same area. There were no reports of any damage in Mexico or shaking north of the border.
Northern California was also shaking overnight. A smaller 3.5 quake was recorded before dawn Sunday about 132 miles outside Sacramento.
The Los Angeles Times said it was the second quake in the area in the past 10
While we did not feel the quake here in NW Calif, Facebook is abuzz with the strange bloody-red rainbow around the moon as very low clouds pass by. Both Friday and Saturday nights. The red rainbow is almost touching the moon and extends 3-4 moon diameters out. It has a deathly look about it, and folks are talking.
BOGOTA: Colombia began evacuating people from communities close to the Nevado del Ruiz volcano after an eruption on Saturday that spewed smoke and ash from its crater, bringing back memories of avalanches that in 1985 buried tens of thousands under rocks.
President Juan Manuel Santos said on his Twitter account that the area around the Nevado del Ruiz, in the central spine of Colombia’s Andean mountain range, had been put on red alert and people should leave the area.
Emergency services urged 4,800 residents in Caldas and nearby Tolima province to get to safety, according to Carlos Ivan Marquez, who heads the security effort. The volcano is about 110 miles (180 km) west of the capital Bogota.
“It’s fundamental that communities near to the volcano follow all security recommendations; that means preventative evacuations and that people remain calm,” Marquez said.
Communities around the volcano, also known as by the indigenous name Kumanday, usually heed government warnings to flee as memories remain fresh of the 1985 tragedy that killed as many as 25,000 and injured 5,000.
Back then, as the 17,400-feet (5,300-metre) volcano erupted, mud, rocks and lava exploded from the mountain and collapsed onto the valley town of Armero as residents slept, killing almost all who lived there.
The country’s 81 cantons and all the municipalities have their own emergency commissions to keep eyes out for potential disasters.
Rescue teams search for victims after a devastating earthquake at Cinchona, 45 kilometers north of San José, in January 2009. Yuri Cortéz | AFP
From the print edition
In case of emergency, it’s good to know that help is on the way. The National Emergency Commission’s (CNE) rapid-response system is prepared to take on any situation, including forest fires, chemical spills, earthquakes, landslides, flash floods and tsunamis. Added to that, the commission works to educate the public in emergency procedures and prevention.
Following a magnitude-6.2 earthquake on Jan. 8, 2009, which eradicated the mountain town of Cinchona, north of San José, the commission had immediate radio communication with the area, and within an hour, a helicopter was on its way to the town to analyze needs and begin emergency aid. The CNE coordinated with agencies involved in relief work, including the Red Cross, the Health Ministry, the Public Works and Transport Ministry, police and local hospitals.
Earthquakes are in a class of their own, the CNE’s Douglas Salgado said. In other types of emergencies, such as hurricanes and floods, the commission can prepare for action because it receives weather reports and briefs from local emergency commissions. An early-warning system is also in place for weather-related events: green alerts as an advisory, yellow alerts signaling the need for evacuation preparation and red alerts to initiate evacuation protocols.
During Hurricane César in 1996, the commission broadcast alerts to the entire country by radio, TV and through local branches.
“We knew what areas would be hit the hardest and could respond. The Public Works and Transport Ministry closed the highway to the Southern Zone. Red Cross and health personnel were standing by,” Salgado said. “Shelters were set up in schools, community centers and in churches, and people were evacuated from flood zones.”
Headquartered next to the Tobías Bolaños Airport in Pavas, a western district of San José, the CNE is a not a group of experts waiting for emergencies to happen. It is a nucleus with a web that includes engineers, geologists and seismologists at universities, the Red Cross, firefighters, hospitals, the ministries of health, environment, and public works and transport, the National Electricity Institute, the National Oil Refinery, national hospitals, the Civil Aviation Authority and others. The commission also can call in help from other countries, as it did during recent forest fires in which helicopters and other aid came from Colombia, Panama and the United States.
The country’s 81 cantons and all the municipalities have their own emergency commissions to keep eyes out for potential disasters, report to the national office and begin organizing help during emergencies. In areas subject to flooding, for example, local commissions keep watch on river levels and rainfall, and are ready to report potential dangers.
In case of a major fire, such as the March forest fires that occurred in Chirripó National Park and Buenos Aires, in the Southern Zone, the Environment Ministry evaluates needs and recruits firefighters and emergency workers, while the CNE helps with logistics and getting helicopters from other countries. Such situations require significant coordination, including securing food, lodging and transportation.
Crowd control may not call up visions of emergency aid, but when millions of people take to the roads during the annual pilgrimage to the national shrine of the Virgin of Cartago on Aug. 2, prevention is put into action. The Public Works and Transport Ministry monitors roads, the Red Cross sets up health stations along the route, and police and sanitation crews keep accidents and problems to a minimum.
Airplane crashes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, tropical storms and major chemical spills all tap into the commission’s web. Tsunamis, however, are not a serious threat, according to Salgado. “They come from far away, and we would have about 18 hours to evacuate people,” he said.
Nor would a magnitude-9.0 earthquake hit Costa Rica, according to seismologists, although the country experiences a lot of smaller ones, some of them potentially deadly.
The need for emergency response became evident in the 1960s, when the eruption of Irazú Volcano, east of San José, rained ashes over the country for months, creating health and economic problems. People used facemasks and stayed indoors. The coffee-based economy in the region was devastated and crops were ruined. In response, an office of civil defense was set up in 1964.
That office was expanded several times in subsequent years, and in 1986 it was replaced by the newly formed CNE. Changes and improvements are ongoing, and prevention and education are now priorities, CNE officials said.
The CNE publishes books and materials on setting up shelters, emergency plans for businesses, preparation for local emergencies and special materials for schools. CNE personnel visit local branches to evaluate problems and find solutions.
Preventive measures also include building dikes in flood areas, rebuilding bridges and roads and keeping people from building and living in areas subject to landslides and flood
The pressure of the magma detected in El Hierro has caused in the past four days on the island deformation of four to five inches vertically and three to four horizontal, as reported by the Security Directorate of the Canary Islands.
The energy released has reached 420,000 million joules, a fact which, together with the ground deformation evidence magmatic process acceleration on the Canary Island, where there is an inflation process is centered in the area which earthquakes occur.
The General Directorate of Security, who coordinates the Civil Protection Plan Risk Volcanic Islands, said that since the beginning were found in magmatic process, last Sunday, have occurred in El Hierro over 750 earthquakes.
The earthquake with greater magnitude of 4.0 degrees on the Richter scale, occurred on Wednesday at 18.55 hours in the Sea of Calm, 2 km from the coast and 20 kilometers deep.
The seismic activity began in the Sea of the Gulf (north of El Hierro) and then move to the center of the island, coinciding with the point of intersection of the ridges, to subsequently migrate to the west.
From noon on June 25 the seismicity is concentrated in an area that includes the west and the dorsal side of the Julan, and from 1200 hours on June 27 the focus of the earthquake begins to migrate towards the Sea of Calm.
Nabro is an Eritrean volcano with NO historic eruption record. Earthquake-Report.com was one of the first publishers in the world detecting and describing this unexpected eruption. Our very extensive reports were also the work of our many readers who gave a lot of input.
Update 18:32 UTC
As far as we could see on this afternoon weather and Modis satellite images, NO eruption has taken place. Certainly to be followed closely the following days.
Update 18:14 UTC
EMSC has decreased the initial depth to a new shallow 5 km, but due to the error margins even this new value will not be very accurate. We hope to receive the normally very accurate Djibouti data later today.
The border area in between Eritrea and Ethiopia is an absolute NO GO zone controlled by the army. A lot of people were killed when the volcano erupted on June 12 2011. The erupted was detected by a M5.1 earthquake.
Update 01-07-2012 at 17:35 UTC
We have just received a USGS Notification of a new M4.8 earthquake in the immediate vicinity of the Nabro volcano. M4.8 is a very strong earthquake for volcanic circumstances. A new eruption cannot be excluded but we will have to wait until satellite images and SO2 satellite pictures are available and this can take a couple of hours.
The reported depths and epicenters have a too big error margin and can’t be trusted at this point
Addis Abeba – Apres un an de suivi dans la corne d’Afrique , j’ai pu deduire que dans 80% des cas , apres un seisme en Iran a proximite de la plaque tectonique , une repercution avait lieu dans les 4 jours sur la corne d’Afrique. j’espere que cette info vous sera utilite
Satellite imagery suggests that the eruption of Nabro Volcano, which began in June 2011, continues. The volcano is located on the edge of the Danakil Desert, a remote and sparsely populated area on the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and few eyewitness accounts of the eruption are available. Orbiting instruments such as the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard Earth Observing-1 (EO-1), which acquired these images, may be the only reliable way to monitor Nabro.
The images show the volcano in false-color (first) and natural-color (lower second) on September 28, 2011. Heat from vents in Nabro’s central crater is visible as a red glow in the false-color image. Another hotspot about 1,300 meters (4,600 feet) south of the vents reveals an active lava flow. A pale halo surrounding the vents indicates the presence of a tenuous volcanic plume. South of Nabro’s crater, the dark, nearly black areas are coated with ash so thick it completely covers the sparse vegetation. On either side of this region is a thinner layer of ash with some bright green vegetation (exaggerated in false-color) poking through.
In the natural-color image, the arid landscape is light brown where it is not covered by ash. The ash is black, while a fresh lava flow, spewed out in the last two weeks of June, is dark brown. More fresh lava flows surround the active vents. On either side of Nabro’s caldera, ephemeral streams have washed away the ash, leaving light-colored channels behind—a first sign of the erosion that will reshape, and eventually remove, what the eruption built.
CHARLESTON WV
WILMINGTON OH
JACKSONVILLE FL
PEACHTREE CITY GA
CHARLESTON SC
BISMARCK ND
ABERDEEN SD
LOUISVILLE KY
TWIN CITIES/CHANHASSEN MN
BIRMINGHAM AL
INDIANAPOLIS IN
MORRISTOWN TN
TALLAHASSEE FL
HUNTSVILLE AL
ST LOUIS MO
NORTH PLATTE NE
RALEIGH NC
RAPID CITY SD
SIOUX FALLS SD
Authorities say a Black Hills forest fire is 10% contained and has burned about 3,000 acres. The White Draw Fire is about five miles northeast of Edgemont, primarily in a mix of grasslands and timber. Officials say crews started early Sunday morning ahead of expected unfavorable winds and hot temperatures. Rains on Saturday briefly slowed the advance of the fire. More than 180 personnel are assigned to the fire. Workers are battling the blaze with the help of 4 helicopters and three air tankers. More crews and equipment have been ordered. Officials say firefighters are facing additional hazards with the steep terrain and rattlesnakes. Residents of 5 homes near Edgemont were given voluntary evacuation notices Saturday.
Today
Forest / Wild Fire
Spain
Province of Valencia, [Around 30km to the west of Valencia]
Two thousand people have been evacuated from Spain’s popular tourist region of Valencia as the worst forest fires in more than a decade raged out of control, causing a huge cloud of ash to pour into the country’s third-largest city. Media reports on Sunday said between 20 000 and 45 000 hectares of land had been destroyed in two forest fires around 30km to the west of Valencia on Spain’s eastern coast. No official estimates have been given of how much land has been destroyed by the fires, but Nasa images show smoke covering a vast area of the region famous for its beaches. The majority of people in the Valencia region were not at risk, according to emergency services. The city’s airport was still operating and it was not known how many tourists were affected by the fires. Spain’s tourism sector represents around 10 percent of the country’s economic output, and has been one of the few drivers of growth as the economy slides back into a heavy recession. Authorities in the Valencia region told Reuters that in the three days since the fires started around 2 000 people have been forced to leave their homes, though many have since been able to return. The fires, which are still not under control, began after a week in which temperatures in many parts of Spain soared to close to 40 degrees Celsius, leading authorities to raise to maximum the level of forest fire risk in the Valencia region. Authorities said preliminary investigations showed one of the fires had been accidentally started by workers in the hillsides around Valencia, and the other by agricultural burning that could not be controlled. The country has seen 10 big forest fires this year, and around 50 000 hectares of land destroyed in the first five months of 2012, the worst since 2002, according to data from the Environment Ministry.
A forest fire in eastern Spain forced 700 people to evacuate their homes and indirectly caused a brief power cut at a nuclear plant, authorities said Friday.
The fire had burned 10 square kilometres (3.8 square miles) of land in the Valencia region, its government said in a statement.
“This is one of the biggest fires in recent years,” regional president Alberto Fabra said after visiting the affected area.
“The weather conditions are adverse, with high temperatures, little moisture and lots of wind.”
An electrical plant was evacuated in Cortes de Palla and the resulting loss of current forced a nuclear plant in nearby Cofrentes to briefly switch to generator power before normal functions resumed, a spokeswoman for the region said.
“The nuclear plant is not in any danger. The fire is not coming near it,” she said.
The fire was started by an act of negligence during the installation of solar panels in a home, the regional government statement said.
Since Thursday about 700 people had been evacuated from Dos Aguas and other surrounding villages and were being housed by local families or in shelters, the spokeswoman said.
Around 1,000 emergency personnel were working to fight the blaze, along with 28 helicopters and airplanes.
“The number of hectares burnt is more than 1,000 and all the work is focussing on preventing the fire from spreading and on channeling it towards an area where it is easier to extinguish,” the government said.
It was one in a series of bush fires around Spain this year that have followed one of the driest winters for decades.
In neighbouring Catalonia to the north, the fire service said Friday it had evacuated 90 people due to a fire that had burned 700 hectares (7.0 square kilometers, 2.7 square miles) in Prats de Rei, near Barcelona.
Spanish media reported at least two other smaller fires, in the north of the Valencia region and southern Catalonia.
A scary scene developed during the Joliet Slammers and Southern Illinois Miners Frontier League game on Friday night (6/29/2012) when a severe thunderstorm with heavy rain and hurricane strength wind gusts moved through the Joliet area just prior to the seventh inning.With the severe weather bearing down, the Silver Cross Field grounds crew sprung into action, and seemed to have a solid plan in place to keep their diamond protected from the oncoming onslaught. Not only did they cover the field with the basic tarpaulin, they also loaded it with heavy sandbags and then parked the four-wheel drive that delivered the sandbags on top of the tarp around home plate.Unfortunately, though, Mother Nature was not going to be denied that easily. As wind gusts began to inch the tarp ever so slightly off the infield, several crew members ran in to help get it repositioned, but were quickly overwhelmed by heavier gusts. As more members (and front office staff) rushed in for the save, they too were swallowed up and pushed all the way across the infield.
As someone who lives just north of the path this storm took through northern Illinois and eventually into Chicago’s southern suburbs, I can tell you there were several tense moments as that particular cell that made it’s way through Joliet developed around Rockford, Illinois, even leading to the issuing of tornado warnings in several surrounding counties.Thankfully, the storm never reached that level of severity at its peak, but as you can see in the video, it still packed a dangerous punch.By the way, as you probably guessed, the Slammers and Miners were not able to finish Friday night’s game, which gave Southern Illinois a 7-4 victory and series sweep. We’re also happy to report that no members of the grounds crew (or front office) were injured during this incident, and that Aaron Morse, the voice attached to this video, safely retreated away from the electronics in the broadcast booth.
Sizzling high temperatures punished much of the eastern United States again on Saturday, one day after hurricane-like thunderstorms killed at least 11 people and cut power supply to millions.
Thermometers brushed the 100 degree Fahrenheit (37.7 Celsius) mark from the Mississippi River to the Mid-Atlantic coast as a vast area of high pressure squatted over the southern states with no signs of moving on soon.
The storms delayed third-round play at the USPGA Tour’s AT&T National in the suburbs of the US capital Washington for several hours, and organizers barred golf fans from attending, creating a surreal atmosphere for the players.
At least 11 people died in storms triggered by the heat wave, CNN reported, and four states — Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio — declared states of emergency. Some 3.7 million homes in nine states lost power.
President Barack Obama telephoned the four states’ governors to express concern for the loss of life and property, and to pledge federal government help, the White House said.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell said it would take several days for his state to recover from what he called the biggest non-hurricane-related power outage in its history.
On Saturday, those without power — and hence without air conditioning — had no respite from the punishing heat.
“High temperatures this afternoon will exceed 100 degrees across the mid/lower Mississippi River Valley eastward through the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast today,” the National Weather Service said.
“In fact, some locations are expected to break record high temperatures,” it said, as it issued excessive heat warnings for areas stretching from Illinois to Georgia.
Five of the reported fatalities occurred in and around Washington, where storms packing winds of up to 80 miles (130 kilometers) an hour barreled into the area Friday night.
Two of the dead were elderly women, aged 90 and 71, who were in their beds when trees fell on their respective homes, the Washington Post reported. Another victim died after touching a downed, live electrical wire.
In many communities Saturday, local authorities set up “cooling centers” in schools, libraries and other public buildings to give refuge to those without air conditioning.
Crowds also flocked to relatively cool shopping malls, or lined up at gas stations that still had electricity to power their filling pumps. Screenings at air-conditioned movie theaters sold out.
“If you have air conditioning and have not lost power, consider opening your home to family members or friends who may not have air conditioning and may not tolerate the heat well,” Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley said.
Pepco, the electric utility that serves Washington and some of its suburbs, said in an automated telephone message Saturday that 440,000 of its customers were still without power.
“Due to widespread damage, we expect power restoration efforts to take about a week,” it said.
At the White Flint shopping mall in Maryland, visitors sat on floors and chairs and plugged their computers and mobile devices into electrical sockets to take advantage of precious free power.
In Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, organizers delayed the start of the third round of the US PGA Tour’s AT&T National for six hours at the Congressional Country Club.
“There are trees and tents down all over the course and roads leading to the course. Clean-up has begun. Electricity is out at the course,” the PGA said, adding that fans and volunteers would be kept off the course Saturday.
Even social media took a hit, with servers in Virginia that host the popular photography social media site Instagram getting knocked out for several hours, tech blog Mashable reported.
Torrential monsoon rains triggered floods which swamped villages in eastern India and forced at least 1.3 million people to leave their homes for higher ground, officials said Friday.
The death toll from flood-related accidents in worst-hit Assam rose to 31 with five more deaths reported overnight from the northeastern state, regional Agriculture Minister Nilamoni Sen Deka told AFP.
An estimated 1.3 million people have been displaced from their homes due to the flooding, Deka said in Guwahati, Assam’s largest city.
“We have opened makeshift relief camps for the displaced,” he said as 21 of Assam’s 27 districts faced floods which began last weekend when annual monsoon rains lashed the tea and oil-rich state bordering Bangladesh.
In the adjoining northeastern Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, pounding rains brought flash floods, local officials said by telephone.
There were no casualties reported from Arunachal Pradesh, which borders China, and Manipur which is adjacent to Myanmar.
“The situation is very critical as floods have destroyed property and crops,” Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Nabam Tuki told AFP from capital Itanagar.
In Manipur, state disaster management official A. Singh said major rivers were “flowing menacingly” above danger marks.
“We are taking all precautionary measures to ensure safety of the locals,” Singh said.
Authorities were also keeping a close watch on swollen rivers in rain-lashed West Bengal state in eastern India.
“Heavy rains in northern districts of the state have raised concerns of flooding in many areas as most rivers are in spate,” Gautam Dev, a regional minister, told AFP in state capital Kolkata.
In neighbouring Bihar state, people fled their homes in two districts as the Kosi river threatened to overflow its banks, officials said.
“Flood waters have already entered dozens of villages following incessant rains in catchment areas,” one official said.
The annual monsoon, crucial to India’s food production and economic growth, hit the tropical country earlier in the month.
Thousands of Sri Lankan troops Friday joined a massive clean up operation to eliminate mosquito-breeding grounds as part of a national effort to contain the dengue virus, officials said.
Soldiers removed garbage piles and helped clear blocked drains in public schools to fight dengue, which is spread by mosquitoes, after more than 75 deaths from the disease this year.
“The clean up operation began in schools with the help of the military,” health ministry spokesman Dharma Wanninayake said. “The programme is being extended across the country in the coming days.”
Official figures show that 15,000 people were infected with dengue in the first five months of this year compared to 10,300 in the corresponding period last year.
However, health officials say the numbers could be much higher because many sufferers are not counted or seek treatment from private hospitals.
Dengue fever causes severe flu-like symptoms and there are no specific medications available to treat the disease.
Most people recover within two weeks, but it can be fatal if it leads to haemorrhaging.
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We’re sure going to miss Don Pettit’s and Andre Kuipers’ reports and images from the International Space Station. Pettit, Kuipers and Russian Commander Oleg Kononenko undocked from the International Space Station and returned safely to Earth on July 1, wrapping up their six-and-a-half-month mission in orbit.
They landed in their Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft in Kazakhstan at 08:14 a.m. UT (2:14 p.m. local time) after undocking from the space station’s Rassvet module at 04:47 UT. This video shows a great view of the Soyuz slowly drifting down (it’s interesting to see the parachute undulate, looking almost like a jellyfish!) and then visible are the breaking thrusters firing just a second before the hard landing.
The trio originally arrived at the station back on Dec. 23, 2011, and during this mission spent a total of 193 days in space, 191 of which were aboard the station.
During their expedition, the crew supported more than 200 scientific investigations involving more than 400 researchers around the world. The studies ranged from integrated investigations of the human cardiovascular and immune systems to fluid, flame and robotic research. They also were part of the team that successfully berthed the first commercial spacecraft to visit the ISS, the SpaceX Dragon capsule.
Before leaving the station, Kononenko handed over command of Expedition 32 to the Russian Federal Space Agency’s Gennady Padalka, who remains aboard the station with NASA astronaut Joe Acaba and Russian cosmonaut Sergei Revin. NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide will join them July 17. Williams, Malenchenko and Hoshide are scheduled to launch July 14 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
During Expedition 31, Pettit used household objects aboard the station to perform a variety of unusual physics experiments for the video series “Science Off the Sphere,” like his recent video showing water balloons in space. Through these demonstrations, Pettit showed more than a million Internet viewers how space affects scientific principles.
On June 25, Pettit reached a milestone: spending one cumulative year in space, combining his time in orbit on Expedition 6, Expedition 30/31 and the STS-126 space shuttle Endeavour flight to the station in November 2008. Pettit now has 370 days in space, placing him fourth among U.S. space fliers for the longest time in space.
Kuipers conducted over 50 scientific experiments for ESA, and shared, almost daily, images and reports of his stay in space. The next ESA astronaut to board the Space Station is Luca Parmitano of Italy, who will fly on Soyuz TMA-09M in 2013 as member of Expedition 36/37.
A small amount of radioactive cesium was found in the urine samples from 141 infants and young children living in Fukushima Prefecture, where the crippled nuclear power plant is located, among 2,022 of those surveyed, a Japanese research group has said. Three urine samples contained more than 10 becquerels of cesium per kilogram, including a case with 17.5 becquerels. Ten becquerels or less of cesium was found in the samples of the other 138, the Yokohama-based Isotope Research Institute said yesterday. The urine samples also contained about an average 64 becquerels of radioactive potassium. “The level of cesium is lower than that of potassium, and it definitely has no effect on the human body,” said Hideaki Karaki, honorary professor of food safety at the University of Tokyo. “But we still need to know how cesium was taken into those infants’ bodies.” The research institute said those children with over 10 becquerels of cesium were eating home-grown vegetables. The survey, conducted from last November to January, covered infants and children up to age 7. According to Fukushima Prefecture, the cesium testing covered the largest number of citizens since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011
The seasonal swarm of jellyfish which arrived on Israeli beaches over the last weekend, made their way to the north of the country. According to reports by the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute, jellyfish were sighted one kilometer off the beach of Hadera on Sunday. On Saturday, blooms were sighted west of Mikhmoret beach, and near Netanya only a day earlier. The first report of jellyfish arrived last week, when fishermen reported a bloom of jellyfish in an area between 500 meters and two and half kilometers from Ashkelon beach. Some Ashkelon bathers complained of stinging. Yesterday similar complaints were made among Tel Aviv bathers. The species of jellyfish arriving annually at Israel’s beaches originally entered the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal several decades ago, and have since reproduced. Apart from their sting, the jellyfish harm fisherman by stuffing their nets, and have been known to block cooling system openings of power plants. They are estimated to be between 20-60 cm long.
Biohazard name:
Jellyfish invasion
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
India’s crucial monsoon rains should pick up in July after a slow start over vast swathes of the country, which has threatened crops from rice to sugar, forecasters said.
Some 26 out of India’s 36 weather zones received “deficient” or “scanty” rains in the past week from the monsoon which typically sweeps the subcontinent from June to September, according to the weather office’s website on Saturday.
“The monsoon rains are expected to pick up in the latter half of next week,” Swati Basu, acting Director General of the India Meteorological Department (IMD), told the semi-official news agency Press Trust of India late on Friday.
Basu forecast good rains in July which along with August are key months for planting and when India usually receives the maximum amount of rain.
For the past week, monsoon rains were 18 percent below average while for June as a whole they have been 23 percent below average — fanning worried murmurs about a repeat of a drought that devastated Indian farmers in 2009.
“The monsoon has definitely started off on a sour note,” economist Indranil Pan from the Indian investment house Kotak said in a note to clients.
The monsoon is dubbed an “economic lifeline” in the country of 1.2 billion people that is one of the world’s leading producers of rice, sugar, wheat and cotton.
India’s 235 million farmers still rely on the erratic rains to soak around 60 percent of the country’s farmland — despite calls for the government to improve irrigation and water-harvesting methods to ensure more stable crop output.
The rains have been abundant in India’s northeast where raging floods have forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee homes but weak in the vital northwestern grain bowl and oil seed-growing central regions.
“Meteorological conditions indicate an increase in rainfall activity over east, central and also over northwest India” in coming days, said the weather office forecast.
But still, authorities have told India’s 29 states to draft plans to shift from thirsty crops such as rice and sugarcane to others such as beans and wheat which require less water if the monsoon does not become stronger by mid-July.
The uncertain start to the rainy season means more worries for the beleaguered Congress government, already buffeted by corruption scandals and an economy growing at its slowest pace in nine years.
The monsoon season “will be crucial given the existing challenges to the economy,” said Kotak’s Pan.
Farming’s contribution to India’s gross domestic product has fallen from 50 percent in the 1950s to around 15 percent. But it remains vital to the economy by supporting 700 million rural Indians and fuels demand for everything from TVs and refrigerators to motorcycles and gold.
India this month said it would maintain its forecast for an average monsoon.
But the meteorological department was spectacularly wrong in its forecast in 2009 when it predicted a normal monsoon and the country suffered its worst drought in 37 years.
The drought sent food prices rocketing, causing huge hardship for the country’s hundreds of millions of poor.
MessageToEagle.com – The Swedish news agency Rapport is offering new unique images of the mysterious underwater object that many refer to as the “Baltic UFO”.
But there is more! Further mystery surrounds the discovery of what some are calling a crashed flying saucer in the Baltic Sea.
There is without doubt a lot of speculation as to what the object may be.Some think it is a World War relic, or rocks, other think it could be an alien vessel.For the time being no-one, not even the divers can say anything with certainty about the nature of this object.
“I cannot reveal the truth before I have all the facts, till then everything is pure speculation, even from my side.
I have not thought about if the object can be hollow.
I have not even penetrated the surface yet. What is inside, I wonder? says professional diver Peter Lindberg who is part of the Ocean Explorer team investigating the underwater object.
Image credit: SVT
Image of the underwater object taken by the team’s robot camera. Image credit: SVT
The Ocean Explorer team underwater. Image credit: SVT
A Second Object was also found but has not been explored yet. There is hope that the second object will reveal some clues about the first object. The divers did not explore the second object but a return trip is planned in the next couple of weeks. Image credit: SVT
During the second expedition divers felt somewhat uneasy when they investigated the object.
“When we went out and saw the walls which were straight and smooth, it was frightening, as in a science fiction film,” says Lindberg.
What ever is down there appears to be old, and the team is now considering the possibility that the circle is of pre-ice age.
Almost just as odd as the underwater object itself is the information coming from remote viewers. According to the Ocean Explorer team, weeks before the second expedition set off, several remote viewers described the anomaly in blind sessions. All they were given was a target reference number. The preliminary findings of the Ocean X expedition have confirmed some remarkable similarities and details which were amazingly predicted by the remote viewers.
It is very demanding to dive at 80 meters. If you spend 20 minutes at that depth, it will take two hours to reach the surface again.
“We are just wreck hunters who are trying to figure out what we have discovered,” says Peter Lindberg and point out a real scientific team should go down there and investigate the object-
When Peter Lindberg was asked if there was the possibility of bringing the object to the surface? he quickly replied “God no! It must weight tremendous much, like thousands of tons”.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
6.1 magnitude earthquake strikes near the east coast of Kamchatka, Russia.
Magnitude
6.1
Date-Time
Sunday, June 24, 2012 at 03:15:02 UTC
Sunday, June 24, 2012 at 04:15:02 PM at epicenter
Location
57.601°N, 163.218°E
Depth
17.4 km (10.8 miles)
Region
NEAR THE EAST COAST OF KAMCHATKA, RUSSIA
Distances
268 km (166 miles) SSW (192°) from Il’pyrskiy, Russia
317 km (197 miles) NNW (329°) from Nikol’skoye, Komandorskiye Ostrova, Rus.
586 km (364 miles) NNE (28°) from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia
2994 km (1860 miles) NNE (28°) from TOKYO, Japan
Eruptive activity remains at low levels at volcanoes we have been watching in the Americas.
Nevado del Ruiz volcano (Colombia) seems to have settled into producing banded (alternating periods of higher and lower amplitude) tremor along with occasional volcanic earthquakes (station OLLE).
Low level tremor and small earthquakes have become apparent again on seismograms at nearby Galeras volcano (Colombia) (station ANGV).
Popocatepetl volcano (Mexico) continues to simmer with pulses of spasmodic tremor, small earthquakes and low level exhalations of gas and some ash.
At El Hierro, Canary Islands, Spain, a new earthquake swarm seems to have started late tonight. The strongest earthquake being a M3.1
Popocatepetl volcano, Mexico
Sporadic earthquakes at Galeras volcano, Colombia
Start of an new earthquake swarm at El Hierro, Canary Islands, Spain
Strong 3.1 earthquake (for local conditions at least) at El Hierro, Canary Islands, Spain
BALTIMORE CANYON TO HATTERAS CANYON OUT TO 36N 70W TO 34N 71W
HATTERAS CANYON TO CAPE FEAR OUT TO 34N 71W TO 32N 73W
CAPE FEAR TO 31N OUT TO 32N 73W TO 31N 74W
JUNEAU AK
PUEBLO CO
BILLINGS MT
MISSOULA MT
GRAND JUNCTION CO
NORTH PLATTE NE
RIVERTON WY
GREAT FALLS MT
DENVER CO
GOODLAND KS
RENO NV
LAS VEGAS NV
SALT LAKE CITY UT
ELKO NV
BOISE ID
A massive, out of control wildfire on Lake Mountain prompted evacuations Friday morning and was bearing down on an explosives factory. “It’s close enough to where we’re really worried,” BLM spokeswoman Cami Lee said of the explosives plant. An evacuation of the Benches subdivision in Saratoga Springs has now begun. Officials have begun notifying residents door to door and through reverse 911 telephone calls. The evacuation area is everything south of Pony Express Parkway, east of Smith Ranch Road and east to Redwood Road. The affected subdivisions in Eagle Mountain include Kiowa Valley, Eagle Top, Fremont Springs and SilverLake. Highway 68 also was closed south of 400 North in Saratoga Springs. A shelter is being set up at West Lake High School. Just after 11 a.m. the temperature was already 90 degrees and the wind was blowing at 15 mph with gust up to 19 mph. Authorities were scrambling around 10 a.m. to notify residents of at least 250 homes in Saratoga Springs and Eagle Mountain that they needed to leave the area. Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Teresa Rigby said that a change in wind was driving the Dump Fire east and it had come within a quarter of a mile of a neighborhood. The thick brown smoke was filling the air over much of northern Utah County and drifting east over the valley. An air tanker was flying overhead, visible only occasionally before it disappeared into the smoke. In Saratoga Springs the city’s water department has shut off irrigation wast er to all location where culinary water is being used for irrigation, according to the city’s Facebook page, so water tanks can fill and provide water and water pressure if the fire reaches homes. The city also is asking residents to turn off their irrigation systems this weekend. According to the BLM, the fire was being fought Friday morning by four hand crews, various fire engines, and a handful of helicopters. Additional hand crews were en route.
The fire burning behind Lake George in Park County is now 200 acres, and it is 0% contained. According to a park ranger for the Pike National Forest, the 11 mile canyon has been evacuated. That is between 150 and 200 homes. Everyone else in that area is under pre-evacuation orders. That means they must be ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice. County road 96 and 92 at Highway 24 are both shut down right now. That fire started around noon on the Indian Paintbrush Ranch. We’ve heard several reports from witnesses who say they saw someone fire shots, and that may have hit a propane tank causing an explosion. But, Park Rangers say they are still investigating what caused this fire. Among the evacuees, about 500 campers with Camp Alexander. They were at 11 mile canyon. The Camp Director tells us they are all safely out of the fire’s reach. Those campers are from all over Colorado, and out of state. They will have to stay the night at Woodland Park High School and/or Middle School. There are more than 40 firefighters fighting this fire, and witnesses say they have also seen drops from helicopters.
25.06.2012
Forest / Wild Fire
USA
State of Colorado, [Fort Collins (Paradise Park) area]
Crews on Saturday battled a fast-moving wildfire in northern Colorado that has scorched about 8,000 acres and prompted several dozen evacuation orders. Larimer County Sheriff’s Office spokesman John Schulz said the fire was reported just before 6 a.m. Saturday in the mountainous Paradise Park area about 25 miles northwest of Fort Collins. The blaze expanded rapidly during the late afternoon and evening and by Saturday night, residents living along several roads in the region had been ordered to evacuate and many more were warned that they might have to flee. An evacuation center has been set up at a Laporte middle school. Officials didn’t specify how many residents had evacuated but said they had sent out 800 emergency notifications alerting people to the fire and the possibility that might have to flee. “Right now we’re just trying to get these evacuations done and get people safe,” Schulz told Denver-based KMGH-TV, adding that “given the extreme heat in the area, it makes it a difficult time for (the firefighters).” Temperatures near Fort Collins reached the mid-80s Saturday afternoon with a humidity level of between 5 percent and 10 percent. Ten structures have been damaged, although authorities were unsure if they were homes or some other kind of buildings. No injuries have been reported. The cause of the fire was unknown. Aerial footage from KMGH-TV showed flames coming dangerously close to what appeared to be several outbuildings and at least one home in the area, as well as consuming trees and sending a large plume of smoke into the air. Two heavy air tankers, five single-engine air tankers and four helicopters were on the scene to help fight the blaze, which appeared to be burning on private and U.S. Forest Service land and was being fueled by sustained winds of between 20 and 25 mph. “It was just good conditions to grow,” National Weather Service meteorologist Chad Gimmestad told The Associated Press. “The conditions today were really favorable for it to take off.”
Today
Forest / Wild Fire
USA
State of New Mexico, [Community of La Puebla, Santa Fe County ]
Two wildfires broke out in the northern Santa Fe County community of La Puebla on Sunday evening, causing electricity to be cut off to some homes and other residences to be evacuated. The first, called the Rio Vista Fire, began about 6 p.m. with a vehicle that caught fire for unknown reasons at a residence near Rio Vista Run and Santa Fe County Road 88B. The car fire quickly spread to about 3 acres in the bosque on both sides of the Rio Santa Cruz near Camino de Flores, where it reportedly was crowning in cottonwood trees. A state Forestry Division spokesman said residents in a 2-mile radius were being advised to head south and that roadways in the area were expected to be congested. John Wheeler, a public information officer for the Santa Fe County Fire Department, said five residences were evacuated. He said county animal-control officers were removing some dogs from the residences. Fifty firefighters from various jurisdictions responded and “had a good handle” on the Rio Vista Fire by 8:30 p.m., he said. About 8 p.m., however, a second fire, dubbed the Alamo Fire, was reported about two miles away near Calle Alamo, causing most of the firefighters to be shifted to the second site. The Alamo Fire’s origin is unknown, but by 9:30 p.m., it had grown to about 3 acres and was threatening five structures, Wheeler said. “We’re going to have to cut power to a few houses out here,” he said. “It looks like [electric power transmission lines] are going to catch fire.” Wheeler said he didn’t know how many residences would be without power, but he said the outage was likely to last overnight. Hot and dry conditions have made much of New Mexico a tinderbox. Calmer winds Sunday night were helping firefighters contain the La Puebla wildfires, but Wheeler cautioned New Mexicans to be “hypervigilant” of wildfires, at least until the summer rains begin.
(CNN) — The expansive, stalled Tropical Storm Debby lashed Florida on Sunday, spawning apparent tornadoes in the central part of the state that killed one woman, a county spokeswoman said.
Gloria Rybinski, emergency operations spokeswoman for Highland County, said two twisters destroyed four homes in the southern end of the county and damaged others.
The woman was found dead in a home in Venus, located in the middle of the state roughly between Port St. Lucie and Sarasota, Rybinski said. In addition, a child in one of the affected homes was injured and transported to a hospital for treatment.
Packing 60 mph winds, Debby’s eye was still 115 miles south-southwest of Apalachiocola, Florida (and 195 miles east-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana) according to the National Hurricane Center’s 7 p.m. (8 p.m. ET) Sunday update.
Even so, it’s already made a big impact — and is likely to cause damage, flooding and worse for days to come. In fact, the heart of the storm was churning but not moving in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday evening, and forecasters still don’t know where it will end up.
“Little movement is expected during the next couple of days, but this forecast remains uncertain due to weak steering currents,” the Miami-based center said. “Some gradual strengthening is possible during the next 48 hours.”
Offshoot tornadoes, like the ones that seemed to hit Highland County, are one major concern. The National Weather Service had tornado warnings out, indicating a high likelihood of a twister strike, in spots off-and-on throughout the day Sunday, and a less severe tornado watch is in effect for much of western Florida through 5 a.m. Monday.
And even if tornadoes don’t occur, the combination of relentless rains and strong winds has proven enough to cause big problems.
The sprawling system’s tropical storm force winds of 39 mph or stronger extend out 200 miles from its center. Such sustained winds were recorded early Sunday evening in several spots on the Florida Panhandle, west of Apalachicola.
Debbie Ponceti said wind was pushing run underneath the door to her home in Madeira Beach, about 10 miles east of St. Petersburg, while her front lawn has been reduced to mush and waters in a lagoon near her house are steadily rising. There was been no let up in the powerful rain, which is forecast to continue through Tuesday.
“Typically when a thunderstorm happens, it is over in 20 minutes,” Ponceti told CNN iReport. “But this has been going on all day.”
In nearby Redington Beach, fellow iReporter Keri Ann Eversole said winds appeared to be blowing between 40 to 50 miles per hour.
“The rain was coming down sideways,” Eversole said. “(It) felt like glass.”
Fire and rescue personnel in nearby Clearwater responded to 30 calls in an hour, as of 6 p.m. Sunday, to help people stranded in their cars due to the flooding or needing urgent medical help, the city’s public safety spokeswoman Elizabeth Watts said. Beach areas were “basically underwater,” as were many side streets and at least two major thoroughfares — U.S. Highway 19 and Gulf to Bay Boulevard.
Mandatory evacuation orders were issued for Alligator Point. St. George Island and other low-lying areas in Franklin County on the Florida Panhandle, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said in a Sunday night news release. Just to the east and also on the Gulf coast, voluntary evacuations are being encouraged in parts of Taylor and Wakulla counties.
And high winds have prompted authorities to shut down the Sunshine Skyway bridge on Interstate 275 connecting St. Petersburg and Bradenton, Florida, said Elizabeth LaRotonda with St. Petersburg police.
The hurricane center said tropical storm conditions will extend for the entire area from the Mississippi-Alabama line eastward to the Suwannee River, Florida, by night’s end.
Beyond that, the new forecast track showed Debby remaining a tropical storm as it moves northward and makes landfall, possibly Thursday, on the Florida Panhandle. However, forecasters warned Debby’s track remained uncertain and said the “new official track remains a low-confidence forecast.”
Debby should dump 10 to 15 inches of rain in the Florida Panhandle and elsewhere in northern Florida before it’s done, the hurricane center said, with as much as 25 inches possible in spots. Central Florida and southeast Georgia will likely be drenched with 5 to 10 inches, with smaller but still significant precipitation amounts in parts of coastal Alabama, southeastern Louisiana and south Florida.
“Given the recent heavy rainfall and wet soil conditions, these additional amounts will exacerbate the threat of flooding across portions of the central and eastern Gulf coast,” the weather service said.
The combination of a storm surge and the high tide could cause 4 to 6 feet of flooding at Florida’s Apalachee Bay to Waccasassa Bay, forecasters said. Parts of Florida’s west coast and coastal Mississippi could see 2 to 4 feet deep waters.
The storm has raised concerns for those working on 596 manned oil and gas production platforms throughout the Gulf, run by various companies.
One of them, Shell, said in a statement Sunday morning that it had evacuated 360 staff the previous day and was planning further evacuations. ExxonMobil said it has “evacuated nonessential personnel” from its offshore facilities and is preparing to evacuate the rest.
And BP spokesman Brett Clanton said early Sunday evening that “we’ve evacuated the majority of our offshore personnel in the Gulf of Mexico” due to Tropical Storm Debby. “Those unable to be evacuated will shelter in place for the storm,” he said.
Even though it was far from clear it would hit Louisiana, officials in that state weren’t taking any chances — with Terrebonne Parish and Lafourche Parish among those issuing precautionary states of emergency, after the governor did the same.
In Plaquemines Parish, the state’s southernmost parish, authorities were using baskets and tubes to keep Highway 23 — the parish’s main evacuation and emergency route — free of water should the 4-foot levees be topped, said Billy Nungesser, parish president. The levees were being sandbagged as an additional precaution
“We want to be ahead of that as a precautionary measure,” Nungesser said. The area is forecast to get a storm surge of 2 to 4 feet, he said — “with a direct hit, if it goes up a little bit more, we’ll have those levees topped.”
BEIJING — Chinese state media say torrential rains have killed at least 16 people and affected 1 1/2 million people in southern and northern parts of the country.
The official Xinhua News Agency said Monday that the heavy rains over the past three days had affected 450,000 people and wiped out crops in the southern Guangxi region. Another more than 730,000 people were affected in the southern province of Jiangxi, and 312,000 were affected in the adjacent manufacturing powerhouse province of Guangdong.
Xinhua quoted a local government official as saying the direct economic losses so far were $20.3 million, and that water levels in 10 reservoirs and several major rivers had risen above warning levels.
Xinhua said rainstorm-triggered floods have also hit areas of Inner Mongolia in the north of China.
At least 14 people were killed and more than 11 lakh people affected after downpours triggered flash floods and mudslides in China’s southwestern regions and some parts in the north over the past three days. Floods triggered by the rainstorms have killed six people, affected the lives of more than 450,000 people, destroyed some 1,000 houses and inundated almost 17,000 hectares of cropland in southern Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, a spokesman with the Regional Department of Civil Affairs said. Direct economic losses were estimated at 128 million yuan (USD 20.3 million), the spokesman said, adding local authorities have launched relief operations. Local meteorological authorities forecast that more heavy rainfalls will hit parts of Guangxi tomorrow.
As a flood watch continues around B.C., residents were urged to “evacuate when emergency officials request it” by minister of justice and attorney general Shirley Bond Saturday. “We understand how difficult it might be for families to leave their homes, but they are only asked to do that when there is an imminent potential safety risk. When an evacuation order is given, it is essential that everyone consider their safety and that of first responders and leave as requested,” Bond said in a statement. “Emergency management officials don’t want to see the forcible removal of anyone from a property – rather, we depend on individuals to heed the advice of public safety professionals, whose decisions and directions are made with the highest regard for the safety of you and your loved ones,” Bond said. Swollen by melting snow and rain, the Fraser River has reached levels not seen for 40 years and has caused flooding from the province’s interior to the Fraser Valley. Early Sunday, Environment Canada said that a slow-moving low pressure system situated off the coast of Oregon state was expected to drop between 10 to 20 mm on the Arrow Lakes, Slocan Lake and East Kootenay regions. It also forecasted potential development of severe thunderstorms with large hail and damaging winds Sunday afternoon.
The Village of Kaslo has issued a red alert to residents after a mudslide on Josephine Creek, which empties into Kemp Creek, severely compromised water flows to the main reservoir said Chief Administrative Officer Rae Sawyer Sunday. Fact is the mudslide completely wiped out the main water dam to the village. “It’s completely gone,” Sawyer told The Nelson Daily Sunday night. “The dam on Kemp Creek Kemp Creek is gone and the reservoir is not filling up.” The slide occurred sometime around noon Sunday. A contractor working in the area of the reservoir alerted village officials, which went into damage control. “Right now we’ve switched over to emergency water supplies from the Kaslo River but we’re having a hard time keeping up with the demand,” Sawyer explained. The slide had destroyed the dam, built of concrete and steel, which holds the intake to the main reservoir so no water is draining into the system. “We don’t know yet if we can rebuild the dam at the same site . . . we’re still assessing that,” Sawyer explained. “At this time we’re running on emergency systems from the Kaslo River that drains into a small reservoir in the water treatment plant. “It’s a small reservoir that can’t handle the normal demands of the village and that’s what we’re concerned about.” Sawyer is hopeful residents comply with the village alert to conserve water. “We’re asking residents to simply use extreme water conservation,” Sawyer said. “Restrict water consumption to interior household use and set drinking water aside.” Sawyer said the staff is still assessing the situation and is hopeful a plan will be put into place to fix the problem in a few days.
A group of Emperor penguin adults make their way across sea ice in Terre Adelie in East Antarctica. In December, the adults return to the colony to provide food for the chicks. They can be observed walking in groups to the nearest open water areas where they feed. Disappearing sea ice may also affect the penguins’ food source. The birds feed primarily on fish, squid, and krill, a shrimp like animal, which in turn feeds on zooplankton and phytoplankton, tiny organisms that grow on the underside of the ice. (Stephanie Jenouvrier, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution).
At nearly four feet tall, the Emperor penguin is Antarctica’s largest sea bird-and thanks to films like “March of the Penguins” and “Happy Feet,” it’s also one of the continent’s most iconic. If global temperatures continue to rise, however, the Emperor penguins in Terre Adelie, in East Antarctica may eventually disappear, according to a new study by led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The study was published in the June 20th edition of the journal Global Change Biology.
“Over the last century, we have already observed the disappearance of the Dion Islets penguin colony, close to the West Antarctic Peninsula,” says Stephanie Jenouvrier, WHOI biologist and lead author of the new study.
“In 1948 and the 1970s, scientists recorded more than 150 breeding pairs there. By 1999, the population was down to just 20 pairs, and in 2009, it had vanished entirely.” Like in Terre Adelie, Jenouvrier thinks the decline of those penguins might be connected to a simultaneous decline in Antarctic sea ice due to warming temperatures in the region.
Unlike other sea birds, Emperor penguins breed and raise their young almost exclusively on sea ice. If that ice breaks up and disappears early in the breeding season, massive breeding failure may occur, says Jenouvrier.
“As it is, there’s a huge mortality rate just at the breeding stages, because only 50 percent of chicks survive to the end of the breeding season, and then only half of those fledglings survive until the next year,” she says.
Disappearing sea ice may also affect the penguins’ food source. The birds feed primarily on fish, squid, and krill, a shrimplike animal, which in turn feeds on zooplankton and phytoplankton, tiny organisms that grow on the underside of the ice.
If the ice goes, Jenouvrier says, so too will the plankton, causing a ripple effect through the food web that may starve the various species that penguins rely on as prey.
To project how penguin populations may fare in the future, Jenouvrier’s team used data from several different sources, including climate models, sea ice forecasts, and a demographic model that Jenouvrier created of the Emperor penguin population at Terre Adelie, a coastal region of Antarctica where French scientists have conducted penguin observations for more than 50 years.
Combining this type of long-term population data with information on climate was key to the study, says Hal Caswell, a WHOI senior mathematical biologist and collaborator on the paper.
“If you want to study the effects of climate on a particular species, there are three pieces that you have to put together,” he says. “The first is a description of the entire life cycle of the organism, and how individuals move through that life cycle.
The second piece is how the cycle is affected by climate variables. And the crucial third piece is a prediction of what those variables may look like in the future, which involves collaboration with climate scientists.”
Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is one such scientist. She specializes in studying the relationship between sea ice and global climate, and helped the team identify climate models for use in the study.
Working with Julienne Stroeve, another sea ice specialist from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Holland ultimately recommended five distinct models. “We picked the models based on how well they calculated the sea ice cover for the 20th century,” she says.
“If a model predicted an outcome that matched what was actually observed, we felt it was likely that its projections of sea ice change in the future could be trusted.”
Jenouvrier used the output from these various climate models to determine how changes in temperature and sea ice might affect the Emperor penguin population at Terre Adelie.
She found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at levels similar to today-causing temperatures to rise and Antarctic sea ice to shrink-penguin population numbers will diminish slowly until about 2040, after which they would decline at a much steeper rate as sea ice coverage drops below a usable threshold.
“Our best projections show roughly 500 to 600 breeding pairs remaining by the year 2100. Today, the population size is around 3000 breeding pairs,” says Jenouvrier.
The effect of rising temperature in the Antarctic isn’t just a penguin problem, according to Caswell. As sea ice coverage continues to shrink, the resulting changes in the Antarctic marine environment will affect other species, and may affect humans as well.
“We rely on the functioning of those ecosystems. We eat fish that come from the Antarctic. We rely on nutrient cycles that involve species in the oceans all over the world,” he says.
“Understanding the effects of climate change on predators at the top of marine food chains-like Emperor penguins-is in our best interest, because it helps us understand ecosystems that provide important services to us.”
Also collaborating on the study were Christophe Barbraud and Henri Weimerskirch of the Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chize, in France, and Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the United States.
Titanium-44 Could Solve The Mystery Of Exploding StarsMessageToEagle.com – Somewhere in the Milky Way, a massive old star is about to die a spectacular death. As its nuclear fuel runs out, the star begins to collapse under its own tremendous weight. Crushing pressure triggers new nuclear reactions, setting the stage for a terrifying blast. And then… nothing happens.
At least that’s what supercomputers have been telling astrophysicists for decades.
Many of the best computer models of supernovas fail to produce an explosion. At the end of the simulation, gravity wins the day and the star simply collapses.
Clearly, physicists are missing something.
“We don’t fully understand how supernovas of massive stars work yet,” says Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology.
To figure out what’s going on, Harrison and colleagues would like to examine the inside of a real supernova while it’s exploding. That’s not possible, so they’re doing the next best thing.
Launched over the Pacific Ocean on June 13, 2012, by a Pegasus XL rocket, NuSTAR is the first space telescope that can focus very high-energy X-rays, producing images roughly 100 times sharper than those possible with previous high-energy X-ray telescopes.
When NuSTAR finishes its check-out and becomes fully operational, scientists will use it to scan supernovas for clues etched into the pattern of elements spread throughout the explosion’s debris.“The distribution of the material in a supernova remnant tells you a lot about the original explosion,” says Harrison.
An element of particular interest is titanium-44. Creating this isotope of titanium through nuclear fusion requires a certain combination of energy, pressure, and raw materials.
Inside the collapsing star, that combination occurs at a depth that’s very special. Everything below that depth succumbs to gravity and collapses inward to form a black hole.
Everything above that depth will be blown outward in the explosion. Titanium-44 is created right at the cusp.
So the pattern of how titanium-44 is spread throughout a supernova remnant can reveal a lot about what happened at that crucial threshold during the explosion. And with that information, scientists might be able to figure out what’s wrong with their computer simulations.
A supercomputer model of a spinning core-collapse supernova. NuSTAR observations of actual supernova remnants will provide vital data for such models. Credit: Fiona Harrison Some scientists believe the computer models are too symmetrical. Until recently, even with powerful supercomputers, scientists have only been able to simulate a one-dimensional sliver of the star. Scientists just assume that the rest of the star behaves similarly, making the simulated implosion the same in all radial directions.
But what if that assumption is wrong?
“Asymmetries could be the key,” Harrison says. In an asymmetrical collapse, outward forces could break through in some places even if the crush of gravity is overpowering in others. Indeed, more recent, two-dimensional simulations suggest that asymmetries could help solve the mystery of the “non-exploding supernova.”
If NuSTAR finds that titanium-44 is spread unevenly, it would be evidence that the explosions themselves were also asymmetrical, Harrison explains.
Cassiopeia A Light Echoes in Infrared Credit: O. Krause (Steward Obs.) et al., SSC, JPL, Caltech, NASATo detect titanium-44, NuSTAR needs to be able to focus very high energy X-rays. Titanium-44 is radioactive, and when it decays it releases photons with an energy of 68 thousand electron volts. Existing X-ray space telescopes, such as NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, can focus X-rays only up to about 15 thousand electron volts.
Normal lenses can’t focus X-rays at all. Glass bends X-rays only a miniscule amount—not enough to form an image.
X-ray telescopes use an entirely different kind of “lens” consisting of many concentric shells. They look a bit like the layers of a cylindrical onion.
Incoming X-rays pass between these layers, which guide the X-rays to the focal surface. It’s not a lens, strictly speaking, because the X-rays reflect off the surfaces of the shells instead of passing through them, but the end result is the same.
The NuSTAR team has spent years perfecting delicate manufacturing techniques required to make high-precision X-ray optics for NuSTAR that work at energies as high as 79 thousand electron volts.
Their efforts could end up answering the question, “Why won’t the supernova explode?”
Black hole, neutron stars and gamma-ray bursts. Expert Dr. Fiona Harrison talks about her latest mission at CalTech, building the first on-orbit focusing telescope. She explains how it will work and what it will be used for.
Meteor reports of the latest worldwide meteors, fireballs and bolides worldwide. Report a Meteor/fireball/bolide worldwide and join the worldwide community of nightsky meteor fireball and bolide reporters and watchers. Owner LunarMeteorite*Hunter, Dirk Ross, Tokyo, Japan. All Rights Reserved – Copy allowed with link citation ONLY http://lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.com/ .
The mysterious death of 22 green turtles, a protected species, is puzzling experts in North Queensland. The experts have not ruled out poisoning and even drowning as a cause. The Department of Environment and Heritage Protection is investigating the deaths of the turtles found at Wunjunga Beach, about 100 kilometres south of Townsville. The department’s director of threatened species, Wolf Sievers, said the vulnerable animals have been washing up on the beach for over a week. “It is very unusual for this many turtles to have stranded on one beach and we will be making every effort to establish what may have happened,” Mr Sievers said. Senior turtle expert Dr Ian Bell said that initial investigations found no injuries, no obvious signs of malnutrition or illness. “It’s a bit like turtle CSI, it’s all about ruling out possible alternatives,” Dr Bell said. “We’re ruling out starvation. It doesn’t look like it’s any infectious type of disease, and it leaves us with two possibilities. “One is potential poisoning, and we’re also looking at the possibility of a drowning. “At this stage we really don’t know.” The department hopes they will be able to establish the causes of death after performing further necropsies. The entire Great Barrier Reef is an important feeding area for green turtles, which are classified as a vulnerable species nationally under legislation. All of the green turtles, except one, have been large adult female green turtles. Adults have a shell length of about 1m and average about 130 kg, although some nesting females can weigh more than 180 kg. A loss of just one breeding size individual can have an impact on the species.
Biohazard name:
Mass Die-off (turtles)
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Symptoms:
Status:
confirmed
Today
HAZMAT
Chile
Provincia de Cachapoal , Codegua [Cristo del Parque school]
20 children were affected after an accidental inhalation of certain chemical compounds, and they developed symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. It is not clear how these children became intoxicated with chemicals. Apparently, some chemical substances might have been dispersed in a premise next to Cristo del Parque school in Codegua community, and these may be the causative agents of the symptoms described in affected children. More than 20 children started their usual school activities in the morning, but soon they developed symptoms such as dizziness, headache, and nausea, and some children developed vomiting. Facing this situation, authorities from Cristo del Parque school decided to call parents of affected children, and they brought the most severely affected children to the nearest local health care facility. One of the children had to be brought to the Rancagua Regional Hospital because he developed intense abdominal pain. Ms. Ana Maria Silva, Mayor of the local community, added that the local Health Commission should investigate this occurrence, since some health-related complications have been recently described in this community because of the use of pesticides, such as high numbers of cases of cancer, congenital malformations, and problems in pregnant women, and this event is not the 1st of its kind. Codegua has been one of the communities in this region that has been significantly affected because of the excessive use of pesticides, and chemical spill emergencies have also been reported. We have to remember that last January [2012], one person died after being poisoned with ammonia fumes from a local packing shed in the area.
Less oxygen dissolved in the water is often referred to as a “dead zone” (in red above) because most marine life either dies, or, if they are mobile such as fish, leave the area. Habitats that would normally be teeming with life become, essentially, biological deserts. Image credit: NOAA.
A dry spring in portions of the Midwest is expected to result in the second-smallest Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” on record in 2012, according to a University of Michigan forecast released last week. The U-M prediction calls for a 2012 Gulf of Mexico dead zone of about 1,200 square miles, an area the size of Rhode Island. If the forecast is correct, 2012 would replace 2000 (1,696 square miles) as the year with the second-smallest Gulf dead zone.
The smallest Gulf oxygen-starved, or hypoxic, zone was recorded in 1988 (15 square miles).
“While it’s encouraging to see that this year’s Gulf forecast calls for a significant drop in the extent of the dead zone, we must keep in mind that the anticipated reduction is due mainly to decreased precipitation in the upper Midwest and a subsequent reduced water flow into the Gulf,” said aquatic ecologist Donald Scavia, professor at the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment.
“The predicted 2012 dead-zone decline does not result from cutbacks in nitrogen use, which remains one of the key drivers of hypoxia in the Gulf.”
The U-M prediction is one of two Gulf dead zone forecasts released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which funds the research. The other NOAA-supported team, from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University, predicts a 2012 Gulf dead zone of 6,213 square miles.
The Michigan forecast model is based solely on 2012 spring nutrient inputs from the Mississippi River, which are significantly lower than average due to drought conditions throughout much of the watershed.
The Louisiana State University forecast model takes into account last year’s above-normal nutrient load, which the Louisiana researchers say can remain in bottom sediments and can result in a “carryover effect” that increases the size of the 2012 dead zone.
Last year, the Gulf dead zone measured 6,765 square miles. The largest Gulf hypoxic zone measured to date occurred in 2002 and encompassed more than 8,400 square miles. The Gulf dead zone has averaged about 6,000 square miles over the past five years.
This year, for the first time, Scavia’s U-M team was able to forecast the volume of hypoxic water contained in the dead zone. The most likely 2012 scenario corresponds to a volume of 2.6 cubic miles, according to the U-M team.
Scavia, director of the Graham Sustainability Institute and special counsel to the U-M president for sustainability, also released his annual Chesapeake Bay dead zone forecast today. It calls for an average-size dead zone in the Bay this year, down significantly from last summer’s record-setter.
“These dead zones are ecological time bombs,” he said. “Without determined local, regional and national efforts to control nutrient loads, we are putting major fisheries at risk.”
In 2009, the dockside value of commercial fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico was $629 million. Nearly 3 million recreational anglers further contributed more than $1 billion to the Gulf economy, taking 22 million fishing trips.
Farmland runoff containing fertilizers and livestock waste-some of it from as far away as the Corn Belt-is the main source of the nitrogen and phosphorus that cause the annual Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone. Each year in late spring and summer, these nutrients flow down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf, fueling explosive algae blooms there.
When the algae die and sink, bottom-dwelling bacteria decompose the organic matter, consuming oxygen in the process. The result is an oxygen-starved region in bottom and near-bottom waters: the dead zone.
“This forecast is a good example of NOAA, USGS and university partnerships delivering ecological forecasts that quantify the linkages between the watershed and the coast,” said NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco.
“While the occurrence of a low-flow year following a year with major flooding will help us to evaluate any carryover effect from prior years, we should not lose sight of the ongoing need to reduce the flow of nutrients to the Mississippi River and thus the Gulf.”
According to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers transported 58,100 metric tons of nitrogen (in the form of nitrite plus nitrate) to the northern Gulf in May 2012, an amount that is 56 percent lower than average May nitrogen loads estimated in the last 33 years.
“These forecasts are the product of decades of research, monitoring and modeling on how decisions we make in the vast drainage basin of the Mississippi and its tributaries translates into the health of the coastal zone of the Gulf of Mexico,” said U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt.
“Comparing the actual hypoxic zone against the predictions will help scientists better understand the multiyear memory of this complex land-sea system, and ultimately better inform options for improving ecosystem productivity.”
About a thousand miles northeast of the Gulf of Mexico in Chesapeake Bay, this year’s hypoxic zone is expected to measure about 1.5 cubic miles, Scavia said. That’s about average compared to measured volumes since 2000 but much smaller than last year’s record-setter of 2.75 cubic miles, which was due to spring storms that washed large amounts of nutrients into rivers that feed the Bay.
So far in 2012, rainfall in the Chesapeake Bay watershed has been 50-to-75 percent of normal, Scavia said.
The actual size of the 2012 Gulf hypoxic zone will be announced following a NOAA-supported monitoring survey led by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium between July 27 and Aug. 3.
The amount of nitrogen entering the Gulf of Mexico each spring has increased about 300 percent since the 1960s, mainly due to increased agricultural runoff. The Gulf of Mexico/Mississippi River Watershed Nutrient Task Force has targeted 1,900 square miles as a long-term goal for the size of the Gulf dead zone.
The profilers on deck, ready to be launched. Credit: Tom Sanford
(Phys.org) — Some might say that University of Washington oceanographers did well to only lose one of 21 underwater probes, given that they were deployed near the notorious Bermuda Triangle, where boats and airplanes have been known to disappear without a trace.
The scientists chose the location to research its swirling whirlpools via a pioneering experiment that repeatedly sent the probes deep into the ocean and back to the surface in unison.
“Nothing like this has ever been done,” said Tom Sanford, an oceanographer at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “It will be the paradigm for future experiments.”
Typically, oceanographers may deploy an instrument in one place and then travel by boat to another spot to launch it again.
“You make observations that are a few kilometers apart but also a few hours apart. During that time, the tides change things and the wind blows. Yet you make measurements and treat them as if there was just a spatial change and not a temporal one,” Sanford said.
His group invented the velocity sensors that were added to commercial autonomous profilers, so called because they take measurements as they travel vertically through the water creating a profile of the water’s characteristics. They also changed the software to synchronize the path of the profilers, or underwater probes, which were programmed to dive to a specific depth and rise to the surface at scheduled intervals. When they reached the surface, they communicated their GPS positions and a small set of other data via satellites.
UW graduate student Nathan Lauffenburger and John Dunlap, APL principal engineer, launch one of the profilers. Credit: Tom Sanford
During the deployment, the profilers traveled within about a minute of each other.
The new velocity sensor on the profilers picked up electric current in the ocean to track the velocity of moving water. The sensors measure electric current generated when ocean water flows through the Earth’s magnetic field. The higher the voltage the faster the water is moving.
The profilers were deployed during a three-week period last summer in the Sargasso Sea, which encompasses the so-called Bermuda Triangle, and placed in arrays covering areas of around 10 kilometers in diameter, a little more than 6 miles.
While Sanford deployed the 21 profilers, researchers from UW and many other organizations used a number of other technologies at the same time to collect a vast amount of data. The other technologies included four gliders, 42 drifters, three equipment-towing boats and an airplane. The equipment gathered data about ocean characteristics such as temperature, salinity and velocity to describe flow structure and mixing.
The researchers built such a sophisticated expedition because of the subject they are studying: internal waves and whirlpools, known as vortices.
“What’s mysterious are these vortices that exist due to various processes and float around for a long life, banging into each other. They may be responsible for ocean mixing,” Sanford said.
A vortex is a swirl of water that can be created in several ways, including water being pushed between land masses and then released into the open ocean. The subsurface features are hard to measure, Sanford said, because when they pass an underwater sensor they appear to be waves. Only by locating other sensors nearby at the same moment can researchers identify that movement as a swirl and not a wave.
Scientists are interested in ocean mixing in part so they can learn more about how climate change might affect the deep ocean. Researchers know that the atmosphere, tides, sunlight, and surface and internal waves affect the temperature of the top few meters of the ocean. They also have some understanding of large-scale eddies and ocean dynamics, visible via satellite images, that cause broader ocean mixing.
“What we have difficulty doing is identifying and tracking some of the smaller-scale features, particularly well below the surface. We know they’re there but we don’t know enough about their role in maintaining the ocean structure,” Sanford said. Those features, like deep waves and vortices, mix upper water, which is warmer and has more carbon dioxide, deeper into the ocean.
Now that the expedition is complete, the researchers have started analyzing the data. Their initial graphs simply plot the raw data, with a squiggly vertical red line depicting the upward trajectory of each profiler and a blue line their downward paths. But they hope to be able to draw conclusions by more closely studying the data.
A stormy Atlantic ocean hits the coast of Buxton, North Carolina. Photographer: Ted Richardson/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Sea level rise is accelerating three to four times faster along the densely populated east coast of the US than other US coasts, scientists have discovered. The zone, dubbed a “hotspot” by the researchers, means the ocean from Boston to New York to North Carolina is set to experience a rise up a third greater than that seen globally.
Asbury Sallenger, at the US geological survey at St Petersburg, Florida, who led the new study, said: “That makes storm surges that much higher and the reach of the waves that crash onto the coast that much higher. In terms of people and communities preparing for these things, there are extreme regional variations and we need to keep that in mind. We can’t view sea level rise as uniform, like filling up a bath tub. Some places will rise quicker than others and the whole urban corridor of north-east US is one of these places.”
The hotspot had been predicted by computer modelling, but Sallenger said: “Our paper is the first to focus on using real data to show [the acceleration] is happening now and that we can detect it now.”
The rapid acceleration, not seen before on the Pacific of Gulf coasts of the US, may be the result of the slowing of the vast currents flowing in the Altantic, said Sallenger. These currents are driven by cold dense water sinking in the Arctic, but the warming of the oceans and the flood of less dense freshwater into the Arctic from Greenland’s melting glaciers means the water sinks less quickly. That means a “slope” from the fastest-moving water in the mid-Atlantic down to the US east coast relaxes, pushing up sea level on the coast.
“Coastal communities have less time to adapt if sea levels rise faster,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute Germany, who published a separate study in the same journal, Nature Climate Change, on Sunday. Rahmstorf’s team showed that even relatively mild climate change, limited to 2C, would cause global sea level to rise between 1.5 and 4 metres by the year 2300. If nations acted to cutting carbon emissions so the temperature rise was only 1.5C, the sea level rise would be halved, the researchers found.
The impacts of the rising seas are potentially devastating, said the scientists. “As an example, 1 metre of sea level rise could raise the frequency of severe flooding for New York City from once per century to once every three years,” said Rahmstorf, adding that low lying countries like Bangladesh are likely to be severely affected. His colleague Michiel Schaeffer, at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, said: “Sea level rise is a hard to quantify, yet a critical risk of climate change. Due to the long time it takes for the world’s ice and water masses to react to global warming, our emissions today determine sea levels for centuries to come.”
Sallenger’s work on the hotspot off the US east coast showed that the extreme acceleration in sea level rise could add 20-30% to the rise seen globally. “If this turns out to be a metre by 2100, it would add 20 to 30cm.” In May, North Carolina legislators drew ridicule from experts by proposing a law that would require estimates of sea level rise to be based solely on historical data and to rule out any acceleration in future rises.
Rahmstorf said: “Sallenger’s paper shows that, far from being spared accelerating sea level rise, [the coast here] has been over the past decades a hotspot of accelerating sea level rise.” But he added that the cause of the hotspot was not fully understood, meaning it was uncertain whether the acceleration would continue.
Sallenger said: “We came up with a very clear correlation between the acceleration of sea level rise and rising temperature in the hotspot area. That suggests to me that as long as temperature continues to rise the hotspot will continue to grow.”
APOCALYPTIC LIKE WEATHER PHENOMENON JUNE 2012 …………………………………….PLAGUES PESTILENCE AND BIZARRE WEATHER PHENOMENON JUNE 2012
CREDIT…….music Epic Score – 08 Prepare for the End – Epic Action & Adventure, Vol. 7 – ES018…………………………………………………………………
The Dry Valleys of Antarctica are remarkable in many ways.
A journey through this otherworldly landscape reveal incredible rock sculptures. Strangely, one of them happen to be very similar to the Easter Island statues!
Conditions here are similar to those on Mars, which is the reason why NASA did testing there for the Viking mission.
Dry Valley, Antarctica – Image credit: Peter West, National Science FoundationThe most important dry valleys include the Taylor, Wright, McKelvey, Balham, Victoria, and Barwick Valleys. Farther south along the coast of McMurdo there are some smaller similar valleys.
Lenticular clouds hover over Mount Erebus volcano – US Coast Guard photoMcMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica. This area is in Victoria Valley, west of Lake Vida. Polygonal ice patterns have formed as ice fills cracks produced in the ground by the freeze-thaw cycle. The McMurdo Dry Valleys are a dry, relatively ice-free region of Antarctica. The valleys are kept mostly ice-free by natural rock barriers that reduce the influx of glacier ice, and by a lack of snowfall. Credit: Georger Steinmetz/Science photo Library
It is not correct to say that these valleys are completely ice-free, because in some areas there is actually not much but at least little ice. Still, there is almost no snowfall in these valleys.
Lake Vanda in Wright Valley, with extremely salty water underneath thick layer of incredibly clear ice.The lakes in the Dry Valleys are intriguing and so are the ventifacts, geologic formations shaped by the wind, which are scattered across the areas.
A rock sculpture in Dry Valley. Image credit: George SteinmetzCompare the above image with Easter Island Statue below.
Another rock sculpture in the Dry Valley. Image credit: Kristan HutchisonImage credit: Kristan Hutchison*************************************************************************************************************
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MessageToEagle.com – The Swedish news agency Rapport is offering new unique images of the mysterious underwater object that many refer to as the “Baltic UFO”.
Image credit: SVT
Image of the underwater object taken by the team’s robot camera. Image credit: SVT
The Ocean Explorer team underwater. Image credit: SVT
MessageToEagle.com – Somewhere in the Milky Way, a massive old star is about to die a spectacular death. As its nuclear fuel runs out, the star begins to collapse under its own tremendous weight. Crushing pressure triggers new nuclear reactions, setting the stage for a terrifying blast. And then… nothing happens.
A supercomputer model of a spinning core-collapse supernova. NuSTAR observations of actual supernova remnants will provide vital data for such models. Credit: Fiona Harrison Some scientists believe the computer models are too symmetrical. Until recently, even with powerful supercomputers, scientists have only been able to simulate a one-dimensional sliver of the star. Scientists just assume that the rest of the star behaves similarly, making the simulated implosion the same in all radial directions.
MessageToEagle.com – Antarctica is not entirely covered with ice. There are a few places which are cold and dry.
Dry Valley, Antarctica – Image credit: Peter West, National Science FoundationThe most important dry valleys include the Taylor, Wright, McKelvey, Balham, Victoria, and Barwick Valleys. Farther south along the coast of McMurdo there are some smaller similar valleys.
Lenticular clouds hover over Mount Erebus volcano – US Coast Guard photo
Lake Vanda in Wright Valley, with extremely salty water underneath thick layer of incredibly clear ice.The lakes in the Dry Valleys are intriguing and so are the ventifacts, geologic formations shaped by the wind, which are scattered across the areas.
Another rock sculpture in the Dry Valley. Image credit: Kristan Hutchison
Image credit: Kristan Hutchison*************************************************************************************************************
