Activity at Stromboli volcano in Italy has been at exceptionally high levels recently. We observed several active vents inside the crater terrace w
ith near-continuous lava spattering and strombolian explosion at intervals of 10-30 minutes. The northeastern vent in particular has very powerful and bright explosions of very liquid lava, with ejections into all directions reaching several hundred meters in height. These explosions are accompanied by loud detonations that rattle doors and windows in the village.
Ruins left over from the 2004 temblor that nearly destroyed Banda Aceh.
The Nation/Asia News Network
Friday, Apr 13, 2012
A fierce earthquake from the Nicobar Islands could strike over Songkran, sending a tsunami crashing into the Andaman Coast, an expert warned yesterday after finding that the 8.6magnitude Sumatran tremor three days ago was exceptionally deep.
“Whenever there is a quake rooted in the [Earth's] mantle, a following quake will be likely in the next few days,” said Professor Thanawat Jaruphongsakul, a senior seismologist at Chulalongkorn University.
Fear of another devastating tsunami panicked Thailand and Southeast Asia on Wednesday.
An underwater quake, with its epicentre at the Nicobar Islands, about 150 kilometres north of Aceh on Sumatra, would affect six coastal provinces of Thailand on the Andaman Sea, especially Ranong, which lies closest to a fault line connecting with the Nicobar Islands, he said.
The quakes on Wednesday originated from mantlelevel crust, 20 kilometres below the Earth’s surface, which is regarded as a layer that would cause very high magnitude tremblers.
The quake that hit Japan in March came from a shallower layer, so it would take up to 100150 years for the next quake. However Wednesday’s quakes, with their epicentre at Aceh, followed just eight years after the massive one that triggered a continentwide tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in many countries, he said.
“Why did Wednesday’s quakes emerge just eight years afterwards? This is new to most seismologists and geologists, who are unfamiliar with quakes with depth rooting to the mantle layer,” he said.
Seismologists were closely watching and cautiously studying the 9.0 quake that devastated Sendai in Japan on March 11 last year. The first tremor on March 9 was recorded at 7.3 on the Richter scale. That one was understood by seismologists as the main shock, but there were two aftershocks on an even greater scale at 9.0 on March 11 that followed, he said.
The tsunamis created on Wednesday were not powerful or harmfully high because the quake was the horizontal dipslide type. But a mantlebased quake at an island with active underwater volcanoes located north of the Nicobar Islands would probably be a vertical strikeslip type, which would directly impact the six Thai coastal provinces, and possibly deluge them with tsunamis, he added.
Professor Michio Hashzume, a wellknown Japanese seismologist, said Wednesday’s quakes were a new type known to have started in the mantle. It was difficult to tell whether a new quake would follow within a few days, like the Sendai quakes, which were similar to Wednesday’s quakes. Then there was a 7.3, followed by a 9.0 two days later.
If there are quakes near the Nicobar Islands, they may cause huge collapses in the seabed and outer crust. The seabed may rise and form new islands, he said.
A 4.3 MAGNITUDE earthquake has struck in the sea off Italy’s Sicily, sending residents into the streets but with no immediate reports of victims or injuries, officials said.
Thursday morning the Turrialbla volcano unleashed a new series of eruptions, with experts converging on the colossus to take a close look at the smoke emanations coming from its centre.
For a live view of the volcano (photos update every 10 seconds) click here.
According to the Red Sismológica Nacional (RSN) and the Observatorio Vulcanologio y Sismologico de Costa Rica (OVISCORI) the activity does not present any danger, but will continue to monitor the volcano much closer.
The alert followed reports by area residents of hearing a large rumble and then the sighting of dark coloured smoke, produced by gas fumes from the volcano.
Last January the volcano became a concern for residents and experts following the emanation of white gas fumes.
Several RSN experts are on their way to the top of the volcano and the OVISCORI is keeping the national park closed and under a green alert.
Fiery lava and ash spew from Italy’s Mount Etna volcano
Published on Apr 13, 2012 by itnnews
Mount Etna has begun spewing blood-red lava and grey and white ash into the air, the volcano’s 24th eruption in a series that started this year. Report by Sophie Foster.
TORNADO WATCH OUTLINE UPDATE FOR WT 164
NWS STORM PREDICTION CENTER NORMAN OK
340 AM CDT SAT APR 14 2012
OKLAHOMA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE
CRAIG CREEK DELAWARE
KAY LINCOLN LOGAN
MAYES NOBLE NOWATA
OSAGE OTTAWA PAWNEE
PAYNE ROGERS TULSA
WAGONER WASHINGTON
About 12 tonnes of radioactive water has leaked at Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, with the facility’s operator saying Thursday that some may have flowed into the Pacific Ocean.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the leak was found early Thursday from a pipe attached to a temporary decontamination system, and the water had already gone through some of the cleansing process.
The water, once it has been used to cool the reactors, contains massive amounts of radioactive substances and is put into the water-processing facility so it can be recycled for use as a coolant.
“Our officials confirmed that cooling water leaked at a joint in the pipes,” a TEPCO spokesman told AFP, adding that “it is possible that part of the water may have flowed outside the facility and poured into the ocean”.
The leak has since been plugged, the spokesman added, saying the utility was probing the cause of the accident and how much, if any, water flowed into the Pacific.
The accident was the latest of several leaks of radioactive water at the troubled plant, undermining the government’s claim made in December that the shuttered Fukushima reactors were now under control.
In one incident last month, about 120 tonnes of radioactive water leaked at the plant’s water decontamination system and about 80 litres (21 gallons) seeped into the ocean, according to TEPCO.
The plant about 220 kilometres (135 miles) northeast of Tokyo was crippled by meltdowns and explosions caused by Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami in March last year.
Radiation was scattered over a large area and made its way into the sea, air and food chain in the weeks and months after the disaster.
Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes around the plant and swathes of this zone remain badly polluted. The clean-up is proceeding slowly, amid warnings that some towns could be uninhabitable for three decades.
A vast ice shelf in the Antarctic peninsula, a hotspot for global warming, has shrunk by 85 percent in 17 years, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.
Images taken by its Envisat satellite show that the so-called Larsen B ice shelf decreased from 11,512 square kilometres (4,373 square miles) in 1995, an area about the size of the Gulf state of Qatar, to only 1,670 sq km (634 miles) today.
Larsen B is one of three ice shelves that run from north to south along the eastern side of the peninsula, the tongue of land that projects towards South America.
From 1995 to 2002, Larsen B experienced several calving events in which parts of the shelf broke away. It had a major breakup in 2002 when half of the remainder disintegrated.
Larsen A broke up in January 1995.
“Larsen C so far has been stable in area, but satellite observations have shown thinning and an increasing duration of melt events in summer,” the agency said in a press release.
Ice shelves are thick floating mats of ice, attached to the shore, that are created by the runoff into the sea from glaciers.
Scientists say they are extremely sensitive to changes in atmospheric temperature and can be hollowed out from below by warmer ocean currents.
The northern Antarctic peninsula has been subject to atmospheric warming about 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) over the last 50 years, a figure that is several times greater than the global average.
Ice shelves are not the same as ice sheets, the vast blanket of frozen water that covers Antarctica.
If these melted, even partially, they would drive up sea levels, threatening small island states and coastal cities. But the scientific evidence is that the icesheets so far are stable.
“These observations are very relevant for measuring the future behaviour of the much larger ice masses of West Antarctica if warming spreads further south,” ESA quoted Helmut Rott, a professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, as saying.
Massive Solar Flare rocked Earth with Earthquakes & Volcano eruptions this week! (April 13, 2012)
Published on Apr 13, 2012 by adrinilinjunky
A massive Earth directed Solar Flare that launched off the Sun on (April 9th 2012). The expected arrival date was 2 days later which was (April 11th 2012). This was also the day; the Earth just got rocked by all the magor Earthquakes such as a 8.6 off the coast of Sumatra, 7.0 Michoacan Mexico, 6.2 the off the coast of Oregon, 4.3 Utah, 5.0 North Indian Ocean, 6.9 in the Gulf of California & many other less magnitude quakes. So it clearly shows that Solar Flares/CME affect & have a magor impact on our Seismic activity dealing in reguards to Earthquakes & volcano eruptions.
Ecosystems are changing worldwide as a result of shrinking sea ice, snow, and glaciers, especially in high-latitude regions where water is frozen for at least a month each year-the cryosphere.
Scientists have already recorded how some larger animals, such as penguins and polar bears, are responding to loss of their habitat, but research is only now starting to uncover less-obvious effects of the shrinking cryosphere on organisms.
An article in the April issue of BioScience describes some impacts that are being identified through studies that track the ecology of affected sites over decades.
An article in the April issue of BioScience describes some impacts that are being identified through studies that track the ecology of affected sites over decades.
The article, by Andrew G. Fountain of Portland State University and five coauthors, is one of six in a special section in the issue on the Long Term Ecological Research Network. The article describes how decreasing snowfall in many areas threatens burrowing animals and makes plant roots more susceptible to injury, because snow acts as an insulator.
And because microbes such as diatoms that live under sea ice are a principal source of food for krill, disappearing sea ice has led to declines in their abundance-resulting in impacts on seabirds and mammals that feed on krill. Disappearing sea ice also seems, unexpectedly, to be decreasing the sea’s uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
On land, snowpack changes can alter an area’s suitability for particular plant species, and melting permafrost affects the amount of carbon dioxide that plants and microbes take out of the atmosphere-though in ways that change over time. Shrinking glaciers add pollutants and increased quantities of nutrients to freshwater bodies, and melting river ice pushes more detritus downstream.
Disappearing ice on land and the resulting sea-level rise will have far-reaching social, economic, and geopolitical impacts, Fountain and his coauthors note. Many of these changes are now becoming evident in the ski industry, in infrastructure and coastal planning, and in tourism. Significant effects on water supplies, and consequently on agriculture, can be predicted.
Fountain and his colleagues argue that place-based, long-term, interdisciplinary research efforts such as those supported by the Long Term Ecological Research Network will be essential if researchers are to gain an adequate understanding of the complex, cascading ecosystem responses to the changing cryosphere.
Other articles in the special section on the Long Term Ecological Research Network detail further notable scientific and societal contributions of this network, which had its origins in 1980 and now includes 26 sites.
The achievements include contributions to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, to ecological manipulation experiments, to bringing decision makers and researchers together, and to mechanistic understanding of long-term ecological changes.
Deadly March Tornadoes Were First Billion-Dollar Disaster of 2012
The swarms of March caused more than $1.5 billion in damage and killed 40. However, the drama is difficulty to qualify because tornadoes are ‘atypical events’ by nature
Tornado damage in Henryville, Ind., after a tornado swept through the small community on March 2, 2012. Image: Michael Raphael/FEMA
A swarm of tornadoes that tore through the Midwest and Southeast in early March has earned the grim title of the nation’s first billion-dollar weather disaster of 2012.
From March 2 through the early hours of March 3, 132 tornadoes were reported across nine states. Although those numbers are preliminary, and will undoubtedly decrease once overlapping reports are eliminated, their aftermath was devastating, causing more than $1.5 billion in damage and killing 40 people.
The storms killed four people in Ohio, but they took the greatest toll in Indiana, killing 13, and Kentucky, where 23 people died.
The costly disaster follows on the heels of a record-breaking year for devastation wrought by the vagaries of the weather and longer-term climate conditions. Last year, the United States experienced 14 separate events that caused $1 billion or more in damage. Five of those events were tornado outbreaks.
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