A video of a Humpback Whale being rescued from being entangled in a fishing net, and the spectacular way he shows his thankfulness for being saved

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Dire warnings about the health
of the world's fish stocks

  

Huffpost Green  — On June 20, 2011

Journalist Travis Donovan, of Huffpost Green, summarized “State Of The Ocean: 'Shocking' Report Warns Of Mass Extinction From Current Rate Of Marine Distress.” If the current actions contributing to a multifaceted degradation of the world's oceans aren't curbed, a mass extinction unlike anything human history has ever seen is coming, an expert panel of scientists warns in an alarming new report. The preliminary report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) is the result of the first-ever interdisciplinary international workshop examining the combined impact of all of the stressors currently affecting the oceans, including pollution, warming, acidification, overfishing and hypoxia. 

“The findings are shocking," Dr. Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director, said in a statement released by the group. "This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children's and generations beyond that."
 

The scientific panel concluded that degeneration in the oceans is happening much faster than has been predicted, and that the combination of factors currently distressing the marine environment is contributing to the precise conditions that have been associated with all major extinctions in the Earth's history. According to the report, three major factors have been present in the handful of mass extinctions that have occurred in the past: an increase of both hypoxia (low oxygen) and anoxia (lack of oxygen that creates "dead zones" ) in the oceans, warming and acidification. The panel warns that the combination of these factors will inevitably cause a mass marine extinction if swift action isn't taken to improve conditions.
 

The report is the latest of several published in recent months examining the dire conditions of the oceans. A recent World Resources Institute report suggests that all coral reefs could be gone by 2050 if no action is taken to protect them, while a study published earlier this year in BioScience declares oysters as "functionally extinct" their populations decimated by over-harvesting and disease. Just last week scientists forecasted that this year's Gulf "dead zone" will be the largest in history due to increased runoff from the Mississippi River dragging in high levels of nitrates and phosphates from fertilizers.
 

A recent study in the journal ‘Nature,' meanwhile, suggests that not only will the next mass extinction be man-made, but that it could already be underway. Unless humans make significant changes to their behavior, that is. The IPSO report calls for such changes, recommending actions in key areas: immediate reduction of CO2 emissions, coordinated efforts to restore marine ecosystems, and universal implementation of the precautionary principle so "activities proceed only if they are shown not to harm the ocean singly or in combination with other activities." The panel also calls for the UN to swiftly introduce an "effective governance of the High Seas."
 

"The challenges for the future of the ocean are vast, but unlike previous generations we know what now needs to happen," Dan Laffoley of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) and co-author of the report said in a press release for the new report. "The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is
now, today and urgent."
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Cardboard Core Surfboard

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Video of a Waterspout off of San Francisco

A funnel cloud is a tornado that touches water, and this one can be seen from the Richmond in this popular YouTube video. The water spout gains steam, but never makes land, luckily. It eventually weakens and disappears.

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Have you ever looked to the sky to see if the waves may be good?

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• NEW: It's the scariest thing that's ever happened to her, the woman says
• Jenny Hausch was taking pictures of the rays as they flew out of the water
• The ray slammed her several times as it tried to get away
• Eagle rays can weigh up to 500 pounds

The woman, Jenny Hausch, was on the chartered boat Friday with her husband and three children, taking pictures of a group of eagle rays as they flew out of the water.

"These eagle rays, they were flying through the air," said Kelly Klein of Two Chicks Charters, the captain of the boat. "These giant things go out of the water and slam back down."

Hausch said she was in the front of the boat, snapping away.

"The first picture I took of the ray jumping was 50 feet in front of us," she said.

When the ray jumped again, Hausch said she was readying her camera.

"Next thing I know, it hit me square in the chest. I fell backwards and fell down," she said.

Klein said the ray kept "slamming and slamming on top of (Hausch), trying to swim away."

Hausch said the incident happened so fast that she didn't have time to react.

"I was just trying to push it off me as I was scooting backwards," she said.

Hausch's husband and children watched in horror.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Officers Aja Vickers and Bret Swensson were patrolling the water near the tour boat when they heard screams.

"We turned around and looked and saw the eagle ray thrashing around in the boat and at that point we realized we had a problem," said Vickers.

As the officers made their way to the boat, Vickers said, "shoes were getting thrown off the boat, towels were going everywhere."

By the time officers made it to the boat Hausch had freed herself from under the ray.

Klein said the animal measured 8-feet across, and probably weighed a good 300 pounds.

"It's just massive, it has a 10-foot tail," she added.

Klein said everyone thought that Hausch was dead, but when she was freed she didn't have a scratch on her. Hausch said it was the scariest thing that's ever happened to her, and she's thankful she didn't get hurt.

Hausch's children were hysterical, but she and her husband decided to continue the charter in hopes that the incident wouldn't make them afraid of the water.

Eagle rays can measure as much as 10 feet across and 17 feet long -- from their snout to the end of their barbed tails -- and weigh up to 500 pounds, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History. The spines on the tails are venomous and can inflict serious wounds.

In 2008, a woman died from the impact when a ray jumped out of the water and hit her as she boated in the Keys, but Vickers said both incidents were freak accidents.

"This is a total one-in-a-million chance," she said. "These animals aren't attacking by any means. One theory is these animals jump during mating season."

Previous article update:

Toxic algae found in dead fish in Redondo Beach

Incredible swarms of fish form off coast of Acapulco: But was surge caused by tsunami thousands of miles away?

The shores of Acapulco's beaches were this weekend teeming with masses of fish packed so tightly they looked like an oil slick from above.

Thousands of sardines, anchovies, stripped bass and mackerel surged along the coast of the Mexican resort in an event believed to be linked to the devastating Japanese tsunami.

Delighted fishermen rushed out in wooden motor boats, abandoning their rods and nets and simply scooping the fish up with buckets.

The fishermen attributed the strange phenomenon to the unusual currents unleashed by tsunami that followed the earthquake in Japan.

Million dead fish swamp L.A.-area marina

Local television news footage showed the mass of dead fish, said by a police spokesman to be about a foot deep on the surface, choking the waters in and around dozens of private boat slips in the King Harbor Marina.

Biologists have tentatively concluded that the fish died from oxygen deprivation after being driven by a storm into a closed-off pier area, California Department of Fish and Game spokesman Andrew Hughan told Reuters.

"It looks like they just swam in the wrong direction and ended up in a corner of the pier that doesn't have any free-flowing oxygen in it," Hughan said.

"There's nothing that appears to be out of sorts, no oil sheen no chemicals, no sign of any kind of illegal activity," Hughan said. "As one fisherman just told me, this is natural selection."

While biologists investigated, authorities were beginning the job of removing the fish from the water, using buckets and nets.

A skip loader then carried them to big trash bins. Officials initially estimated there were millions of fish, but Fish and Game roughly estimated about a million.

City officials estimated the cleanup would cost $100,000. Fire Chief Dan Madrigal said the fish would be taken to a landfill specializing in organic materials.

On the water, nature was tackling the problem in other ways.

"The seals are gorging themselves," Hughan said.

Large groups of other fish could be seen nibbling at the floating mats of dead creatures.

"The sea's going to recycle everything. It's the whole circle-of-life thing," Hughan said.

Trudy Padilla, the marina's tenant services coordinator, said the dead fish suddenly began showing up overnight, and that one end of the marina was blocked off as cleanup operations got organized.

She said the smell of decay has not become so strong yet, "but it's going to if they don't clean up the fish."

King Harbor Marina provides 850 boat slips to private vessels.

Will March 19 'Supermoon' Trigger Natural Disasters?

Webmaster:This article came out before the 3/11 Japan earthquake

On March 19, the moon will swing around Earth more closely than it has in the past 18 years, lighting up the night sky from just 221,567 miles (356,577 kilometers) away. On top of that, it will be full. And one astrologer believes it could inflict massive damage on the planet.

Richard Nolle, a noted astrologer who runs the website astropro.com, has famously termed the upcoming full moon at lunar perigee (the closest approach during its orbit) an "extreme supermoon."

When the moon goes super-extreme, Nolle says, chaos will ensue: Huge storms, earthquakes, volcanoes and other natural disasters can be expected to wreak havoc on Earth. (It should be noted that astrology is not a real science, but merely makes connections between astronomical and mystical events.)

But do we really need to start stocking survival shelters in preparation for the supermoon? [Photos: Our Changing Moon]

The question is not actually so crazy. In fact scientists have studied related scenarios for decades. Even under normal conditions, the moon is close enough to Earth to make its weighty presence felt: It causes the ebb and flow of the ocean tides.

The moon's gravity can even cause small but measureable ebbs and flows in the continents, called "land tides" or "solid Earth tides," too. The tides are greatest during full and new moons, when the sun and moon are aligned either on the same or opposite sides of the Earth.

According to John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, particularly dramatic land and ocean tides do trigger earthquakes. "Both the moon and sun do stress the Earth a tiny bit, and when we look hard we can see a very small increase in tectonic activity when they're aligned," Vidale told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com.

At times of full and new moons, "you see a less-than-1-percent increase in earthquake activity, and a slightly higher response in volcanoes."

The effect of tides on seismic activity is greatest in subduction zones such as the Pacific Northwest, where one tectonic plate is sliding under another. William Wilcock, another seismologist at the University of Washington, explained: "When you have a low tide, there's less water, so the pressure on the seafloor is smaller. That pressure is clamping the fault together, so when it's not there, it makes it easier for the fault to slip."

According to Wilcock, earthquake activity in subduction zones at low tides is 10 percent higher than at other times of the day, but he hasn't observed any correlations between earthquake activity and especially low tides at new and full moons. Vidale has observed only a very small correlation.

What about during a lunar perigee? Can we expect more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on March 19, when the full moon will be so close?

The moon's gravitational pull at lunarperigee, the scientists say, is not different enough from its pull at other times to significantly change the height of the tides and thus the likelihood of natural disasters. [Infographic:  Phases of the Moon Explained]

"A lot of studies have been done on this kind of thing by USGS scientists and others," John Bellini, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told Life's Little Mysteries. "They haven't found anything significant at all."

Vidale concurred. "Practically speaking, you'll never see any effect of lunar perigee," he said. "It's somewhere between 'It has no effect' and 'It's so small you don't see any effect.'"

The bottom line is, the upcoming supermoon won't cause a preponderance of earthquakes, although the idea isn't a crazy one.

"Earthquakes don't respond as much to the tides as you'd think they would. There should actually be more of an effect," said Vidale.

Most natural disasters have nothing to do with the moon at all. The Earth has a lot of pent up energy, and it releases it anytime the buildup gets too great. The supermoon probably won't push it past the tipping point, but we'll know for sure, one way or the other, by March 20.

This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site of SPACE.com.

New system can warn of tsunamis within minutes

March 4, 2011



Webmaster: This article came out before the 3/11 earthquake in Japan.  See the new permanent link to the West Coast tsunami warning center on the "Club News" page

"We developed a system that, in real time, successfully identified the magnitude 7.8 2010 Sumatran earthquake as a rare and destructive tsunami earthquake. Using this system, we could in the future warn local populations, thus minimizing the death toll from tsunamis," said Andrew Newman, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

Typically, a large subduction zone earthquake ruptures at a rate near 3 kilometers/second and anywhere from 20 kilometers to 50 kilometers below the earth's surface. Because of the depth, vertical deformation of the crust is horizontally smoothed, causing the size of uplift to remain rather small. When these earthquakes occur in the ocean, the resulting waves may only measure about 20 centimeters high for a magnitude 7.8 event.

Tsunami earthquakes, however, are a rare class of earthquakes that rupture more slowly, at 1-1.5 kilometers /second and propagate up to the sea floor, near the trench. This makes the vertical uplift much larger, resulting in nearby wave heights up to 10- 20 meters in nearby coastal environments. Such is the case of the Sumatran earthquake with reported wave heights of up to 17 meters, causing a death toll of approximately 430 people.

"Because tsunami earthquakes rupture in a shallow environment, we can't simply use a measurement of magnitude to determine which ones will create large waves," said Newman. "When they occur, people often don't feel that they're significant, if they even feel them in the first place, because they seem like they're an order of magnitude smaller than they actually are."

Here's how it works. Usually within four minutes, RTerg gets a notification from one of the tsunami warning centers that an earthquake has occurred. This notice gives the system the quake's location, depth and approximate magnitude. If the earthquake is determined to be of magnitude 6.5 or higher, it takes about a minute to request and receive data from around 150 seismic stations around the world. Once it collects this data, it uses its algorithm to run through every second of the rupture and determine the incremental growth of energy and ascertain whether the quake was a tsunami earthquake.

Newman and his team have used seismology readings from previous tsunami earthquakes, such as the one in Nicaragua in 1992 and the one that hit Java in 2006, but the Sumatran event was the first tsunami quake that occurred when RTerg was online in real time. With that quake, the system identified the event as a potential tsunami earthquake after eight and a half minutes, and sent a notification out shortly thereafter. When applied to a production warning system, the tool will be most valuable, since analysts are available 24/7 to evaluate the algorithm results.

"For most tsunami earthquakes, inundation of the coastal environment doesn't occur until about 30-40 minutes after the quake. So we'll have about 20-30 minutes to get our information to an automatic warning system, or to the authorities," said Newman. "This gives us a tangible amount of time to get people out of the way."

Currently, Newman and his team are working to test and implement a technique for RTerg that could shave another minute or more from the warning time. In addition, they are planning to rewrite the algorithm so that it can be used at all U.S. and international warning centers.

Provided by Georgia Institute of Technology (news : web)

California Cap-and-Trade Faces Potential Hurdle

From the Wall Street Journal, 3/3/11

By CASSANDRA SWEET

SAN FRANCISCO—California's cap-and-trade program is being threatened by groups of local residents, even after the ambitious climate plan survived an electoral challenge in November.

Communities For A Better Environment, California Communities Against Toxics, Society For Positive Action and other groups and individuals have sued state regulators, claiming the climate plan won't reduce pollution. The plaintiffs argue that industrial facilities should cut their actual emissions, rather than trade rights to pollute.

"All the evidence showed that cap-and-trade programs have failed environmental justice communities," said Alegria de la Cruz, an attorney with the Center on Race, Poverty & The Environment, who is representing the plaintiffs. Ms. De la Cruz said the Air Resources Board must "do some deep thinking on alternatives to the cap-and-trade system."

The status of the cap-and-trade program, which is part of a plan to lower greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels within a decade, was thrown into doubt after Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith agreed with the plaintiffs in a Jan. 27 ruling. He said the Air Resources Board, which is tasked with lowering air pollution, hadn't conducted an adequate environmental review before it approved the plan.

Judge Goldsmith is scheduled to issue a final ruling in the next few weeks.

The legal challenge to the state's implementation of the climate law, known as AB 32, comes despite California's strong support for environmental legislation. In November, California voters defeated a ballot initiative backed by some oil refiners that sought to delay implementation of the climate law, including the cap-and-trade program, which is scheduled to start in January 2012.

Some of the plaintiffs have had success with environmental lawsuits in the past. For example, Communities For A Better Environment has represented low-income residents in dozens of California administrative proceedings and lawsuits over the years, including a legal action in 2009 that derailed Chevron Corp.'s plans to expand its oil refinery in Richmond, Calif.

Dolphins Save Stranded Dog During Family Vacation

Published March 02, 2011 / Dow Jones Newswires

A Pennsylvania woman on vacation in Florida took a tip from two dolphins to save a lost Doberman Pinscher that got stranded on a sandbar.

When Audrey D'Alessandro and her husband, Sam, walked out of their home on Marco Island, near Naples, Fla., to go fishing, "we saw these two dolphins, and they were splashing and making this big commotion" in a canal behind their vacation home, she said.

Although it is not uncommon to see dolphins swimming through the canal on their way to the Gulf of Mexico, Audrey D'Alessandro said that this time, "they were just there, in one place, splashing water against the canal wall."

When the D'Alessandros went to investigate, they saw that an 80-pound Doberman Pinscher was standing on a sandbar, half-submerged even at low tide. The dog, which disappeared from a nearby home some 12 hours before, was too weak to bark, she added, and could not get back onto land because of a several-foot-high canal wall.

By the time the nurse lowered herself into the canal to get onto the sandbar, the dutiful dolphins were gone, but her husband called firefighters, who helped Audrey D'Alessandro hoist the dog out of the water. Turbo, who was shaking and unable to stand after being rescued, was quickly reunited with his owner -- who got the happy news while putting up lost-dog posters.

A few days later, a thankful Turbo and his owner made the eight-block trip to visit the D'Alessandros, who have a yellow Labrador of their own.

But Audrey D'Alessandro brushed off the island-wide praise the couple received afterward, saying that while "people pulled up to us when were driving and said, 'You're the couple that saved that dog,' I said, 'Yeah, sure.' But I think it was really those dolphins."

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Current La Niña Could be Strongest Ever Recorded

This year's La Niña event, a cyclical cooling of the Pacific Ocean, could be one for the record books, according to new satellite data from NASA.

Satellite images of the Pacific Ocean reveal La Niña stayed strong in the final two months of 2010.

"The solid record of La Niña strength only goes back about 50 years and this latest event appears to be one of the strongest ones over this time period," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Patzert said this powerful La Niña's effects can be felt around the world, and researchers say it is partially responsible for the floods now devastating Australia.

"The copious rainfall is a direct result of La Niña’s effect on the Pacific trade winds and has made tropical Australia particularly rainy this year," said David Adamec, an oceanographer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md.

"Although exacerbated by precipitation from a tropical cyclone, rainfalls of historic proportion in eastern Queensland, Australia have led to levels of flooding usually only seen once in a century," Adamec said.

The new NASA satellite image depicts sea surface height, which is linked to sea temperature as water expands when it heats up and becomes more compact as it cools. The cooler-than-normal pool of water that stretches from the eastern to the central Pacific Ocean is a hallmark of a La Niña event.

"This La Niña has strengthened for the past seven months, and is one of the most intense events of the past half century," Patzert said.

Full article:

http://www.livescience.com/9289-current-la-nina-strongest-recorded.html

Lake Vostok drilling in Antarctic 'running out of time'

          
Webmaster:
Possibly the most pristine water on the planet.  Should the scientists even be doing this?  Hopefully this controversial action will not destroy one of the few earthly environments still untouched by man.

With only about 50m left to drill, time is running out for the Russian scientists hoping to drill into Vostok - the world's most enigmatic lake.

Vostok is a sub-glacial lake in Antarctica, hidden some 4,000m (13,000ft) beneath the ice sheet.

With the Antarctic summer almost over, temperatures will soon begin to plummet; they can go as low as -80C.

Scientists will leave the remote base on 6 February, when conditions are still mild enough for a plane to land.

The team has been drilling non-stop for weeks.

"It's like working on an alien planet where no one has been before," Valery Lukin, the deputy head of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which oversees the project, told BBC News.

"We don't know what awaits us down there," he said, adding that personnel at the station have been working shifts, drilling 24 hours a day.

But some experts remain concerned that probing the lake's water - thought by some to be isolated from everything else on Earth - could contaminate the pristine ecosystem and cause irreversible damage.

The sub-glacial lake is located underneath the remote Vostok station in Antarctica.

Overlaid by nearly 4km of ice, it has been isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years. Some scientists think the ice cap above and at the edges has created a hydrostatic seal with the surface, preventing lake water from escaping or anything else from getting inside.

And if the Russian team gets through to the pristine waters, they hope to encounter life forms that have never been seen.

It was at the Vostok station that the coldest temperature ever found on Earth (-89°C) was recorded on 21 July 1983.

Normally, water in such extreme conditions exists only in one state: ice. And when, in the 1970s British scientists in Antarctica received strange radar readings at the site, the presence of a liquid, freshwater lake below the ice did not instantly spring to mind.

It was not until 1996 that the discovery was formally acknowledged, after satellites sent in the images outlining the lake's contours.

Space radar revealed that the sub-glacial body of fresh water was one of the largest lakes in the world - and one of some 150 subglacial lakes in Antarctica.

At 10,000 square km and with depths reaching 800m, it is similar to Lake Baikal in Siberia or Lake Ontario in North America.

Since the lake has remained sealed off from the rest of the world, scientists estimate that conditions in it have probably remained unchanged for some 15 million years.

For liquid water to exist in Antarctica, glaciologists suggest that the ice cap serves as a giant insulating blanket, able to capture the Earth's geothermal heat to melt the bottom of the ice sheet.

Eager to explore the ancient lake, scientists started drilling and managed to go as deep as about 3,600m - but when the untouched waters were only some 130m away, in 1998, the project ground to a halt.

"We had to stop because of the concerns of possible contamination of the lake," explained Alexey Ekaikin, a member of the current expedition, who spoke to the BBC Russian Service from Vostok station.

He said that drilling was resumed in 2004, when the team came up with new, ecologically safe methods of probing the lake.

In November 2010, the scientists submitted a final environmental evaluation of the project to the Antarctic Treaty's environmental protection committee and were given the go-ahead to sample the ancient waters.

They said that instead of drilling into the lake, they would go down until a sensor on the drill detects free water.

Then they would take the drill out without going any further and adjust the pressure so that instead of any liquid in the borehole falling down into the lake, water in the lake would be sucked up.

Then the drill would be taken away and left for quite some time to freeze, creating a plug of frozen ice in the bottom of the hole.

Finally, next season, the team would drill down again to take a sample of that ice and analyse it.

But the work has not been going very smoothly, being repeatedly delayed because of technical difficulties.

"Up until three km down, drilling is usually relatively easy - it has been done in Greenland and here in Antarctica. But after three km and as we near the bottom [of the ice sheet], the ice temperature gets very close to the ice melting point, and all sorts of problems begin," said Dr Ekaikin.

Dr Lukin added that additional difficulties arise from the changing structure of the ice - after about 3,600m, it is pure frozen lake water, composed of huge round monocrystals of a metre or more in diameter and as hard as glass.

That is why for the past few weeks, the team had been advancing at a snail's pace - about 1.6m a day.

They have already reached the 3,700m mark and have just some 50m more to go.

Dr Ekaikin said that having analysed the ice cores obtained so far, the scientists have already discovered some bacteria that are likely to be living at the bottom of the lake, where the water is warmer because of the heat coming from the Earth.

Besides possibly discovering new microorganisms, sampling the waters could also move us a step closer to the understanding of similar glacial conditions at one of Jupiter's moons, Europa.

Its surface, researchers suspect, is covered by a huge ocean, hidden within a thick shell of ice.

Despite all the precautions, some international observers still dub the project a threat to the ancient sub-glacial lake.

"It's probably almost impossible to make something absolutely, utterly and totally clean," said Dr Andy Smith, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey.

"It's worth [sampling the waters], as even though originally it seemed a really wild thing to expect, there will be life there - anywhere we go on the planet where there's an extreme environment, we always find life.

"But we have to make a huge effort not to spoil the environment by being interested in it," he added.

But the Russians working in Antarctica believe that the risks are virtually non existent and that the possibility of a great discovery makes it entirely worthwhile.

In 2006, researchers reported evidence for a network of rivers under the ice which connect Antarctica's sub-glacial lakes. Some scientists think this could spell trouble for the prospects of finding microbial life that has evolved "independently".

Nevertheless, some of those on the team working at Lake Vostok have been waiting for a eureka moment for decades, and have been coming to the base to drill since the discovery of the lake in the 1970s.

Now they are hoping the technology will not fail them and they will be able to reach the waters before the season ends on 6 February.

Because if not, they will have to stay patient for yet another long year

Full article and related topics: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12275979

Some places saw the ground rise by ten inches, experts report.

Brian Handwerk

for National Geographic News

Published January 19, 2011

Yellowstone National Park's supervolcano just took a deep "breath," causing miles of ground to rise dramatically, scientists report.

The simmering volcano has produced major eruptions—each a thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helens's 1980 eruption—three times in the past 2.1 million years. Yellowstone's caldera, which covers a 25- by 37-mile (40- by 60-kilometer) swath of Wyoming, is an ancient crater formed after the last big blast, some 640,000 years ago.

(See "When Yellowstone Explodes" in National Geographic magazine.)

Since then, about 30 smaller eruptions—including one as recent as 70,000 years ago—have filled the caldera with lava and ash, producing the relatively flat landscape we see today.

But beginning in 2004, scientists saw the ground above the caldera rise upward at rates as high as 2.8 inches (7 centimeters) a year. (Related: "Yellowstone Is Rising on Swollen 'Supervolcano.'")

The rate slowed between 2007 and 2010 to a centimeter a year or less. Still, since the start of the swelling, ground levels over the volcano have been raised by as much as 10 inches (25 centimeters) in places.

"It's an extraordinary uplift, because it covers such a large area and the rates are so high," said the University of Utah's Bob Smith, a longtime expert in Yellowstone's volcanism.

Scientists think a swelling magma reservoir four to six miles (seven to ten kilometers) below the surface is driving the uplift. Fortunately, the surge doesn't seem to herald an imminent catastrophe, Smith said. (Related: "Under Yellowstone, Magma Pocket 20 Percent Larger Than Thought.")

"At the beginning we were concerned it could be leading up to an eruption," said Smith, who co-authored a paper on the surge published in the December 3, 2010, edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

"But once we saw [the magma] was at a depth of ten kilometers, we weren't so concerned. If it had been at depths of two or three kilometers [one or two miles], we'd have been a lot more concerned."

Studies of the surge, he added, may offer valuable clues about what's going on in the volcano's subterranean plumbing, which may eventually help scientists predict when Yellowstone's next volcanic "burp" will break out.

Yellowstone Takes Regular Breaths

Smith and colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Yellowstone Volcano Observatory have been mapping the caldera's rise and fall using tools such as global positioning systems (GPS) and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), which gives ground-deformation measurements.

Ground deformation can suggest that magma is moving toward the surface before an eruption: The flanks of Mount St. Helens, for example, swelled dramatically in the months before its 1980 explosion. (See pictures of Mount St. Helens before and after the blast.)

But there are also many examples, including the Yellowstone supervolcano, where it appears the ground has risen and fallen for thousands of years without an eruption.

According to current theory, Yellowstone's magma reservoir is fed by a plume of hot rock surging upward from Earth's mantle. (Related: "New Magma Layer Found Deep in Earth's Mantle?")

When the amount of magma flowing into the chamber increases, the reservoir swells like a lung and the surface above expands upward. Models suggest that during the recent uplift, the reservoir was filling with 0.02 cubic miles (0.1 cubic kilometer) of magma a year.

When the rate of increase slows, the theory goes, the magma likely moves off horizontally to solidify and cool, allowing the surface to settle back down.

Based on geologic evidence, Yellowstone has probably seen a continuous cycle of inflation and deflation over the past 15,000 years, and the cycle will likely continue, Smith said.

Surveys show, for example, that the caldera rose some 7 inches (18 centimeters) between 1976 and 1984 before dropping back about 5.5 inches (14 centimeters) over the next decade.

"These calderas tend to go up and down, up and down," he said. "But every once in a while they burp, creating hydrothermal explosions, earthquakes, or—ultimately—they can produce volcanic eruptions."

Yellowstone Surge Also Linked to Geysers, Quakes?

Predicting when an eruption might occur is extremely difficult, in part because the fine details of what's going on under Yellowstone are still undetermined. What's more, continuous records of Yellowstone's activity have been made only since the 1970s—a tiny slice of geologic time—making it hard to draw conclusions.

"Clearly some deep source of magma feeds Yellowstone, and since Yellowstone has erupted in the recent geological past, we know that there is magma at shallower depths too," said Dan Dzurisin, a Yellowstone expert with the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory in Washington State.

"There has to be magma in the crust, or we wouldn't have all the hydrothermal activity that we have," Dzurisin added. "There is so much heat coming out of Yellowstone right now that if it wasn't being reheated by magma, the whole system would have gone stone cold since the time of the last eruption 70,000 years ago."

The large hydrothermal system just below Yellowstone's surface, which produces many of the park's top tourist attractions, may also play a role in ground swelling, Dzurisin said, though no one is sure to what extent.

"Could it be that some uplift is caused not by new magma coming in but by the hydrothermal system sealing itself up and pressurizing?" he asked. "And then it subsides when it springs a leak and depressurizes? These details are difficult."

And it's not a matter of simply watching the ground rise and fall. Different areas may move in different directions and be interconnected in unknown ways, reflecting the as yet unmapped network of volcanic and hydrothermal plumbing.

The roughly 3,000 earthquakes in Yellowstone each year may offer even more clues about the relationship between ground uplift and the magma chamber.

For example, between December 26, 2008, and January 8, 2009, some 900 earthquakes occurred in the area around Yellowstone Lake.

This earthquake "swarm" may have helped to release pressure on the magma reservoir by allowing fluids to escape, and this may have slowed the rate of uplift, the University of Utah's Smith said. (Related: "Mysterious 'Swarm' of Quakes Strikes Oregon Waters.")

"Big quakes [can have] a relationship to uplift and deformations caused by the intrusion of magma," he said. "How those intrusions stress the adjacent faults, or how the faults might transmit stress to the magma system, is a really important new area of study."

Overall, USGS's Dzurisin added, "the story of Yellowstone deformation has gotten more complex as we've had better and better technologies to study it."

Full article:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110119-yellowstone-park-supervolcano-eruption-magma-science/

For two winters running, an Arctic chill has descended on Europe, burying that continent in snow and ice. Last year in the United States, historic blizzards afflicted the mid-Atlantic region. This winter the Deep South has endured unusual snowstorms and severe cold, and a frigid Northeast is bracing for what could shape into another major snowstorm this week.

Yet while people in Atlanta learn to shovel snow, the weather 2,000 miles to the north has been freakishly warm the past two winters. Throughout northeastern Canada and Greenland, temperatures in December ran as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Bays and lakes have been slow to freeze; ice fishing, hunting and trade routes have been disrupted.

Iqaluit, the capital of the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut, had to cancel its New Year’s snowmobile parade. David Ell, the deputy mayor, said that people in the region had been looking with envy at snowbound American and European cities. “People are saying, ‘That’s where all our snow is going!’ ” he said.

The immediate cause of the topsy-turvy weather is clear enough. A pattern of atmospheric circulation that tends to keep frigid air penned in the Arctic has weakened during the last two winters, allowing big tongues of cold air to descend far to the south, while masses of warmer air have moved north.

The deeper issue is whether this pattern is linked to the rapid changes that global warming is causing in the Arctic, particularly the drastic loss of sea ice. At least two prominent climate scientists have offered theories suggesting that it is. But others are doubtful, saying the recent events are unexceptional, or that more evidence over a longer period would be needed to establish a link.

Since satellites began tracking it in 1979, the ice on the Arctic Ocean’s surface in the bellwether month of September has declined by more than 30 percent. It is the most striking change in the terrain of the planet in recent decades, and a major question is whether it is starting to have an effect on broad weather patterns.

Ice reflects sunlight, and scientists say the loss of ice is causing the Arctic Ocean to absorb more heat in the summer. A handful of scientists point to that extra heat as a possible culprit in the recent harsh winters in Europe and the United States.

Their theories involve a fast-moving river of air called the jet stream that circles the Northern Hemisphere. Many winters, a strong pressure difference between the polar region and the middle latitudes channels the jet stream into a tight circle, or vortex, around the North Pole, effectively containing the frigid air at the top of the world.

“It’s like a fence,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a researcher in Camp Springs, Md., with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

When that pressure difference diminishes, however, the jet stream weakens and meanders southward, bringing warm air into the Arctic and cold air into the midlatitudes — exactly what has happened the last couple of winters. The effect is sometimes compared to leaving a refrigerator door open, with cold air flooding the kitchen even as warm air enters the refrigerator.

This has happened intermittently for many decades. Still, it is unusual for the polar vortex to weaken as much as it has lately. Last winter, one index related to the vortex hit its lowest wintertime value since record-keeping began in 1865, and it was quite low again in December.

James E. Overland, a climate scientist with NOAA in Seattle, has proposed that the extra warmth in the Arctic Ocean could be heating the atmosphere enough to make it less dense, causing the air pressure over the Arctic to be closer to that of the middle latitudes. “The added heat works against having a strong polar vortex,” he said.

But Dr. Overland acknowledges that his idea is tentative and needs further research. Many other climate scientists are not convinced, saying that a two-year span, however unusual, is not much on which to base a new theory. “We haven’t got sufficient insight to make definitive claims,” said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at a company called Atmospheric and Environmental Research
in Lexington, Mass., has spotted what he believes is a link between increasing snow in Siberia and the weakening of the polar vortex. In his theory, the extra snow is creating a dense, cold air mass over northern Asia in the late autumn, setting off a complex chain of cause and effect that ultimately perturbs the vortex.

Dr. Cohen said in an interview that the rising Siberian snow might, in turn, be linked to the decline of Arctic sea ice, with the open water providing extra moisture to the atmosphere — much as the Great Lakes produce heavy snows in cities like Buffalo and Syracuse. He is publishing seasonal forecasts based on his work, supported by the National Science Foundation. Those forecasts correctly predicted the recent harsh winters in the midlatitudes. But Dr. Cohen acknowledges, as does Dr. Overland, that some of his ideas are tentative and need further research.

The uncertainty about what is causing the strange winters highlights a core difficulty of climate science. While mainstream researchers are sure that greenhouse gases released by humans are warming the Earth, they acknowledge being on shakier ground in trying to predict the regional effects of that change. It is entirely possible, they say, that some regions will cool temporarily, because of disruption of the atmospheric and oceanic circulation, even as the Earth warms over all.

Bloggers who specialize in raising doubts about climate science have gleefully pointed to the recent winters in the United States and Europe as evidence that climatologists must be mistaken about a warming trend. These commentators have not been as eager to write about the strange warmth in parts of the Arctic, a region that scientists have long predicted will warm more rapidly than the planet as a whole.

Without doubt, the winter weather that began and ended 2010 was remarkable. Two of the 10 largest snowstorms in New York City history occurred last year, including the one that disrupted travel right after Christmas. The two snowstorms that fell on Washington and surrounding areas within a week in February had no known precedent in their overall impact on the region, with total accumulations of 40 inches in some places.

But the winters were not the whole story. Even without them, 2010 would have gone down as one of the strangest years in the annals of climatology, thanks in part to a weather condition known as El Niño, which dumped heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere early in the year. Later, the ocean surface cooled, a condition known as La Niña, contributing to heavy rainfall in many places.

Despite cooling from La Niña, newly compiled figures show that 2010 was among the two warmest years in the historical record. It featured a heat wave in Russia, all-time high temperatures in at least 17 countries, the hottest summer in New York City history, and devastating floods in Pakistan, China, Australia, the United States and other countries.

“It was a wild year,” said Christopher C. Burt, a weather historian for Weather Underground, an Internet site.

Still, however erratic the weather may have become, it is not obvious to most people how global warming could lead to frigid winters. Many scientists are hesitant to back such assertions, at least until they gain a better understanding of what is going on in the Arctic.

In interviews, several scientists recalled that in the decade ending in the mid-1990s, the polar vortex seemed to be strengthening, not weakening, producing mild winters in the eastern United States and western Europe.

At the time, some climate scientists wrote papers attributing that change to global warming. Newspapers, including this one, printed laments for winter lost. But soon after, the apparent trend went away, an experience that has made many researchers more cautious.

John M. Wallace, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, wrote some of the earlier papers. This time around, he said, it will take a lot of evidence to convince him that a few harsh winters in London or Washington have anything to do with global warming.

“Just when you publish something and it looks like you’re seeing a connection,” Dr. Wallace said, “nature has a way of humbling us.”

Full article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/science/earth/25cold.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2

AQMD Launches Voluntary “Check Before You Burn” Program

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If Quakes Weren’t Enough, Enter the ‘Superstorm’

The potential for such a storm was described at a conference of federal and California officials that ended Friday. Combining advanced flood mapping and atmospheric projections with data on California’s geologic flood history, over 100 scientists calculated the probable consequences of a “superstorm” carrying tropical moisture from the South Pacific and dropping up to 10 feet of rain across the state.

“Floods are as much a part of our lives in California as earthquakes are,” said Lucy Jones, the chief scientist for the United States Geological Survey’s multi-hazards initiative, adding, “We are probably not going to be able to handle the biggest ones.”

The geological survey estimates that such a storm could cause up to $300 billion in damage. The scientists’ models estimate that almost one-fourth of the houses in California could experience some flood damage from one.

The conference was convened by the geological survey, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the California Emergency Management Agency to help disaster-response planners draft new strategies to limit the storms’ impact.

Climate scientists have for years noted that the rising temperature of the earth’s atmosphere increases the amount of energy it stores, making more violent and extreme weather events more likely.

Californians have learned to expect earthquakes the way Floridians expect hurricanes. (A minor earthquake, with a preliminary magnitude of 4.1, rattled windows in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay area about a week ago.)

The existing engineering systems that dispose of floodwater are so efficient that the effects of moderate storms often go unnoticed, Dr. Jones said. So while many Californians know whether they live or work close to an earthquake-prone fault and what to do should there be a serious quake, few realize that the state could be hit by storms that at their worst could rival the largest hurricanes that devastate the Gulf Coast and the southeastern Atlantic Seaboard.

Yet vast floods have also been documented, both through tree-ring data and more modern historical records. Marcia K. McNutt, the director of the geological survey, said that 150 years ago, over a few weeks in the winter of 1861-62, enough rain fell to inundate a stretch of the Central Valley 300 miles long and 20 miles wide, from north of Sacramento south to Bakersfield, near the eastern desert.

The storms lasted 45 days, creating lakes in parts of the Mojave Desert and, according to a survey account, “turning the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea, forcing the state capital to be moved from Sacramento to San Francisco for a time, and requiring Gov. Leland Stanford to take a rowboat to his inauguration.”

Just like a major earthquake, a superstorm could be a severe blow to the state’s agriculture and to the water-supply system that now diverts water from the north to Southern California.

Dr. Jones said in an interview that improved satellite imagery available in recent years allowed scientists to clearly identify what they call “atmospheric rivers” — moisture-filled air currents up to 200 miles wide and 2,000 miles long, which flow from tropical regions of the Pacific Ocean to the West Coast.

The West Coast winter weather systems popularly known as the Pineapple Express, air currents carrying moisture from the Hawaiian Islands are just one moderate subset of these rivers, Dr. Jones said. The abbreviation for atmospheric river, A.R., gave the geological survey the root of its name for these major weather events, which they call ARk storms.

Scientists see climate change link to Australian floods

"I think people will end up concluding that at least some of the intensity of the monsoon in Queensland can be attributed to climate change," said Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

"The waters off Australia are the warmest ever measured and those waters provide moisture to the atmosphere for the Queensland and northern Australia monsoon," he told Reuters.

The Queensland floods have killed 16 people since the downpour started last month, inundating towns, crippling coal mining and are now swamping the state's main city of Brisbane.

The rains have been blamed on one of the strongest La Nina patterns ever recorded. La Nina is a cooling of ocean temperatures in the east and central Pacific, which usually leads to more rain over much of Australia, Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia.

This is because the phenomena leads to stronger easterly winds in the tropics that pile up warm water in the western Pacific and around Australia. Indonesia said on Wednesday it expected prolonged rains until June.

WEATHER SWITCH

The Pacific has historically switched between La Nina phases and El Ninos, which have the opposite impact by triggering droughts in Australia and Southeast Asia.

"We've always had El Ninos and we've had natural variability but the background which is now operating is different," said David Jones, head of climate monitoring and prediction at the Australia Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne.

"The first thing we can say with La Nina and El Nino is it is now happening in a hotter world," he told Reuters, adding that meant more evaporation from land and oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere and stronger weather patterns.

"So the El Nino droughts would be expected to be exacerbated and also La Nina floods because rainfall would be exacerbated," he said, though adding it would be some years before any climate change impact on both phenomena might become clear.

He said the current La Nina was different because of the warmest ocean temperatures on record around Australia and record humidity in eastern Australia over the past 12 months.

Prominent U.S. climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said the floods and the intense La Nina were a combination of factors.

He pointed to high ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean near Indonesia early last year as well as the rapid onset of La Nina after the last El Nino ended in May.

"The rapid onset of La Nina meant the Asian monsoon was enhanced and the over 1 degree Celsius anomalies in sea surface temperatures led to the flooding in India and China in July and Pakistan in August," he told Reuters in an email.

He said a portion, about 0.5C, of the ocean temperatures around northern Australia, which are more than 1.5C above pre-1970 levels, could be attributed to global warming.

"The extra water vapor fuels the monsoon and thus alters the winds and the monsoon itself and so this likely increases the rainfall further," said Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

"So it is easy to argue that 1 degree Celsius sea surface temperature anomalies gives 10 to 15 percent increase in rainfall," he added.

Some scientists said it was still too soon to draw a definite climate change link to the floods.

"It's a natural phenomena. We have no strong reason at the moment for saying this La Nina is any stronger than it would be even without humans," said Neville Nicholls of Monash University in Melbourne and president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.

But he said global atmospheric warming of about 0.75C over the past half century had to be having some impact.

"It has to be affecting the climate, regionally and globally. It has to be affecting things like La Nina. But can you find a credible argument which says it's made it worse? I can't at the moment."

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Global Warming?

Snow present in 49 of the 50 U.S. states

Article submitted by Jim Coshland

After big snow and ice events in the Southeast, Plains, and Midwest this week, 49 out of the 50 states currently have snow on the ground –  yes, even Hawaii, where snow falls in Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea all winter. 

The only state that has avoided this icy blast is Florida.  Does that make you want to go on a nice, warm vacation to the Sunshine State?  You're not alone.

Put another way, that means snow is present in 69.4 percent of the lower 48, which is more than double than December.  This is extremely unusual, though it's hard to put a date on when this last happened because records aren't kept on this kind of event.

The National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center combines ground reports and images from satellites in space to determine how much of the country is covered in snow.  That's what you see in the image above.  The images tell how deep and widespread the snow is, and that's important not only for images like this one, but also for computer weather models, which use the data to generate accurate forecasts. Such forecasts were very useful in predicting this week's winter storms.

Earlier this week, two storms began to churn: one in the northern Plains and Midwest, and one in Texas.  The southern winter storm took a track across the Gulf Coast, pulling warm, moist air over an extreme arctic blast that set up over the eastern half of the United States late last week.  This provided fuel for the storm to carve a path of snow, sleet, and freezing rain from Texas to the Carolinas. 

Here in Atlanta, we're still coated in snow and ice and probably will be for the next couple of days.  No one in the Southeast escaped the wrath except, of course, Florida.

But it's not over.  Now that the southern-track storm has moved into the Atlantic and is moving north, the other Midwest storm is going to merge with it, creating a Nor'easter event that could dump up to two feet of snow in the Northeast.  Winter storm warnings and advisories have been posted for the event - 32 states have winter storm advisories issued, by the way.

Here's how the snow forecast breaks down for some major cities:

Washington DC: 2-4 inches
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 4-6 inches
New York, N.Y.: 6-12 inches
Hartford, Connecticut: 15-20 inches
Boston, Massachusetts: 12-16 inches

The snow and cold started early this winter and has been extreme for most of the country.  Usually the Southeast avoids the blast, but not in 2011.  We're all feeling a little "snowed in" this winter.

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What Is Killing Portugal's Octopuses?

Article submitted by Jim Coshland       

What is killing the octopus of Vila Nova de Gaia? That question has obsessed the Portuguese city — located just across the Douro River from Porto — since Jan. 2, when 1,100 lb. (500 kg) of dead octopus were found on a 1.8-mile (3 km) stretch of local beach. The following day, another 110 lb. (50 kg) appeared; later there was just one expired creature. "It's very strange that so many should be killed, and in such a confined area," says Nuno Oliveira, director of the Gaia Biological Park, a nature refuge on the outskirts of Vila Nova de Gaia. "There's nothing in the scientific literature for this kind of mass mortality among octopus."

Twelve hundred pounds is a lot of dead cephalopod, especially when no one seems to know for sure what killed them. Local biologists have ruled out pollution or contamination because no other species were affected. And although some suggest that perhaps a boat, illegally fishing the multilegged creatures, threw them overboard in a panicked attempt to avoid detection, that possibility also seems unlikely. "The sea has been very rough," says Oliveira. "No one has been out fishing for days."

After issuing multiple warnings that no townspeople should take the carcasses home for dinner (boiled octopus — perhaps sprinkled with a touch of paprika — is a Portuguese delicacy), Vila Nova de Gaia's municipal government had firefighters gather up the dead animals; many will be sent to Lisbon's veterinary lab for testing, a process that is expected to take up to two weeks.

Until then, evidence points to some sort of disease: a parasite, bacteria or powerful virus. "It affected octopus of all ages and sizes," says Mike Weber, director of the Aguda coastal station, an aquarium and biological research institute in Gaia. "That suggests that it wiped out the entire local population." 

There is one other option. In December 2007, Portuguese police confiscated 9.4 tons of cocaine in a shipment of frozen octopus from Venezuela. "I suppose it's possible that someone defrosted the animals, took out the cocaine, then threw their bodies overboard," says Weber. Still, like Oliveira, Weber is betting on a biological cause. "We've had swine flu, bird flu," he says, not completely in jest. "Why not octopus flu?"

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Follow up article responding to the article below about scientists "making rain" in the desert

Scientists Make Dozens of Storms in the Abu Dhabi Desert?

Claims of Manmade Rain Clouds Spark Skepticism

Article submitted by Jim Coshland

  

Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News

Published January 18, 2011

This story is part of a special National Geographic News series on global water issues.

In arid lands, the ability to create freshwater out of thin air would be priceless.

Now a Swiss company, Meteo Systems, is poised to earn a pretty penny in Abu Dhabi with a controversial weather modification system said to be responsible for dozens of rain showers in the desert last summer.

The claim is difficult to verify but certainly has raised a storm of skepticism among many leading weather modification experts.

“As far as I’m concerned I don’t believe these claims,” said Roelof Bruintjes, who heads the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s international weather modification programs. “There’s no scientific basis for this; the physics doesn’t support it.”

(Related: “Planes Create Weird Clouds—And Snow, Rain Fall Out.”)

While typical weather modification efforts—which began in the mid-20th century and continue in nations from the United States to China—make use of natural clouds and attempt to “seed” them to produce precipitation, Meteo Systems purports to create the clouds themselves.

Their system uses arrays of 33-foot (10-meter) electric towers that produce negatively charged ions, according to the company. These ions bind with tiny solid and liquid particles, supercharging the particles’ ability to form clouds and precipitation.

Joseph Golden, a weather modification expert who once chaired the now-defunct Atmospheric Modification Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also has serious doubts that the technique could work.

“This method is inherently incapable of producing clouds out of thin air,” Golden said.

(Related: “China’s Rain-Free Olympics Plan Met With Skepticism.”)

A Long History of Ionization

The Technical University of Munich’s Peter Wilderer, winner of the 2003 Stockholm Water Prize, said people have been attempting ionization techniques for decades.

"The ionization technology was first mentioned in 1890 by [Nikola] Tesla. In 1946 General Electric executed some field trials under the leadership of [Bernard] Vonnegut [brother of novelist Kurt Vonnegut]. Later the technology was used for military purposes in the former Soviet Union."

Wilder added that reviews of radar images suggested to him that ionization could possibly have some effect, under proper meteorological conditions. Despite press reports to the contrary, he has never personally witnessed any rainfall events produced by Meteo Systems.

Show Me the Data

NOAA’s Golden is interested in hearing much more from the scientists trying to make it rain in the desert.

“I put out a challenge to any of those that are involved in this project and making these claims. Show me the data,” he said.

There may be little chance of such transparency in the near-term, however, as Meteo Systems is closely guarding the secrets of the potentially valuable technology the company has dubbed “WEATHERTEC.”

Meteo Systems did not respond to calls and emails from National Geographic News.

The directors of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, who have been erroneously linked to the project via media reports, released a statement expressing “distress” that the scientific organization had been associated in any way with the work of Meteo Systems. They added that rainstorms were part of unusual weather patterns in the Middle East last summer.

“Our institute has no connection whatsoever to this work, nor have we been privy to the underlying evidence that the company is using to support its claims,” the statement said.

“We also note that many people have a financial stake in seeing these claims being credibly reported by the media, and that to the extent rain showers in the region were unusual this summer, they accompanied rather unusual weather patterns over the broader region, which certainly had nothing to do with the very localized experiments in Abu Dhabi. One only needs to be reminded of the terrible flooding over neighboring Pakistan.”

Playing God

NCAR’s Bruintjes noted that the UN-based World Meteorological Organization’s expert team on weather modification research met in Abu Dhabi in March 2010, and issued a report on the state of the science that cautioned against just this type of technology.

“The energy involved in weather systems is so large that it is impossible to create cloud systems that rain,” the WMO report read. “Weather modification technologies that claim to achieve such large-scale or dramatic effects do not have sound scientific basis (e.g. hail cannons, ionization methods) and should be treated with suspicion.”

Golden said people who are simply desperate to fool Mother Nature often pay for modification techniques that are unproven at best, including the hail cannons mentioned in the WMO report. “Farmers invest thousands of dollars in those cannons to suppress hail even though the scientific evidence is that they don’t work,” he said.

Bruintjes put his point bluntly: “The rotation of the Earth, the energy of the sun, and moisture from the oceans cause these things. None of us can change that, and it’s actually good that none of us can change that because we’d likely make a mess of it.”

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Vandenberg launches its tallest rocket

The 235-foot-tall Delta IV Heavy rocket is believed to be carrying a top-secret spy satellite for the U.S. government. The blastoff is expected to shake up nearby Lompoc.

Article submitted by jim Coshland

The three-engine Delta IV Heavy rocket, the tallest ever to be launched from the base, will be carrying a top-secret spy satellite for the U.S. government capable of snapping pictures detailed enough to distinguish the make and model of an automobile hundreds of miles below, analysts say.

           Picture of rocket exhaust trail taken from the top of Signal Hill

As early as Thursday afternoon, the massive rocket will lift off from the base's Space Launch Complex 6, leaving a thick white plume over the Pacific Ocean as it cuts across the afternoon sky. At 235 feet tall, it's so large that base officials have studied whether the thunderous blastoff will shatter windows nearby.

"We got the word out to people, so they don't think it's an earthquake," said Lt. Ann K. Blodzinski, an Air Force spokeswoman. "Even if you don't see it, you're definitely going to feel it. It's significantly more powerful than our typical launches at Vandenberg."

The Air Force has closed nearby locations, such as Jalama Beach County Park, as a precaution. But that won't stop townspeople from coming out to see the show, said Lompoc Mayor John Linn. The base is the city's largest employer.

"Everyone will be in their front yards for this one," he said. "Living here, you get used to launches. But this is different. This is the big kahuna."

About 10 seconds after the rocket hurtles toward the sky, a sound wave "as loud as a freight train" will sweep over Lompoc, a town of about 43,000, Linn said. "It'll rattle windows and make dogs bark, that's for sure."

Southland residents eager to see the blastoff set for 1:08 p.m. can head to the beaches or the mountains for a glimpse. But it may be difficult to see because it's a daytime launch.

The Space Launch Complex 6 is known on base as "Slick Six." The launch pad built in 1969 was once intended to accommodate space shuttle launches, but they remained in Florida. Since then, the launch pad has gone through many renovations. Most recently, Vandenberg spent $100 million on upgrades over three years.

The rocket was built by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and the Boeing Co. It is the nation's largest unmanned rocket.

Three hydrogen-fueled engines — each roughly the size of a semi-truck — provide 17 million horsepower.

When the engines roar to life Thursday, more than 350 Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne engineers and technicians will be watching. It took them five years to develop and four years to assemble the engines at the company's sprawling Canoga Park facility, said Steve Bouley, the company's vice president of launch vehicle and hypersonic systems.

"It's a very complex product," he said.

Because the launch is closer to home, many Rocketdyne employees will be able to attend the liftoff, Bouley said.

The rocket made its maiden flight in 2004 and is capable of lifting payloads of up to 24 tons into low Earth orbit. All four of the previous Delta IV Heavy launches took place at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Although little is known about what exactly the rocket will be lifting into space — because it is classified — analysts say it is probably a high-powered $1-billion spy satellite. Their speculation is based on the customer being identified as the National Reconnaissance Office, the secretive federal umbrella agency that operates spy satellites.

While Cape Canaveral is the launch site for NASA's civilian space program, Vandenberg has been the site of military space projects for more than half a century.

The 98,000-acre base situated along the Pacific Ocean has been the primary site for launching spy satellites since the beginning of the Cold War because of its ideal location for putting satellites into a north-to-south orbit.

The launch is slated to be webcast beginning at 12:43 p.m. at the rocket maker's website, http://www.ulalaunch.com.

william.hennigan@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

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A Is for Armageddon: 12 Ways to Destroy the Planet

Here's a link to an interesting article about 12 environmental challenges that the country and world is facing today, how bad it already is and what can possibly be done about it.  See the article at:
http://www.fastcompany.com/pics/armageddon-12-ways-destroy-planet#13
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Shark Conservation Act signed into law

Washington, DC  —   On January 4, 2011, H. R. 81 – THE SHARK CONSERVATION ACT OF 2009 – was signed into law by the President. Madeleine Bordallo, the Chair of the Insular Affairs Oceans and Wildlife subcommittee, and one of the original sponsors of the bill, worked tirelessly for passage of this legislation. The bill was introduced on January 6, 2009. It passed by voice vote the House of Representatives on March 2, 2009 and was then given to the Senate on March 3, 2009. The following Action Report shows activity by the Congress during the 356 days between introduction and passage. The effectiveness of this legislation will be tested over the next decade. Strict enforcement might reduce some of the pressure on dozens of shark species that are currently on the Endangered and Threatened Species lists of numerous organizations. Only time will tell. Please do your part to help – ‘Save the Sharks – Save the Oceans.' 

For more information about this new law and the most recent shark sightings in our area go to the Shark Research Committee's website:

http://www.sharkresearchcommittee.com/pacific_coast_shark_news.htm

Hi,

My name is Jamie A. Lennard and I'm one of dohosurf.org's readers.

I have written this article and thought it may be helpful to your members and family members with Diabetes.

Top tricks for a secure trip when you have diabetic issues

When you have diabetes, get yourself ready for even day to day activities can require advanced planning. So how do you plan your travel?

Listed below are 10 strategies for traveling if you have diabetes.

1° Maintain your supplies readily available. Whether you're traveling by plane, train, or automobile, be sure your diabetes supplies are easily accessible.

If you're flying, be sure you put all of your supplies inside your carry-on bags. Back-up insulin also need to be placed within your carry-on, because checked baggage may be subjected to extreme cold or heat that may spoil insulin, and ruin glucometers.

If you are employing a device to help keep your insulin cool, be sure it's a cold pack, and never a freezer pack--freezing insulin destroys its effectiveness. The identical rules apply for storing supplies while driving or on the train.

2° Attempt to stick to your routine. Traveling will surely throw those with diabetes off schedule, and also at no-fault of their own. The delay of the flight may mean sitting on the runway all night, or if you're traveling out of your time zone, it may well mean feeling hungry whenever you needs to be asleep.

In case you pack extra snacks for the plane, you might want to store them within an insulated bag through an ice pack.

3° Get documentation. Carry a note from the doctor proclaiming that you've diabetes, and require to get your medication along with you constantly. If you're visiting a country where they speak a language other than your, translate the note into that language.

Create a few copies of the note and distribute to the people vacationing with you, that means you could have documentation constantly.

4° Inform airport security you've diabetes. When flying, be sure you put your diabetes supplies inside a quart size plastic container that's separate from your other non-diabetes liquids you're bringing aboard; using this method, screeners can immediately separate diabetes medications from other liquid items in your carry-on baggage.

5° Be continually ready to treat low glucose. Whenever you travel, you might disrupt your normal routine for both eating and dosing insulin; you may even be sightseeing or upping your physical activity.

As a consequence of these changes, you'll need to be prepared for low glucose whenever it strikes, so pack a lot of glucose tablets - these are often the very best simply because they won't melt, explode in heat, or leak and become sticky.

6° Investigate foods. For mealtime insulin, do your very best to determine the carbohydrate grams inside foods you're eating so that you can go ahead and take the right pre-meal insulin.

Furthermore, test out your blood sugar before and after meals to view how new foods are affecting your control. It's important to maintain glucose numbers under control to stop problems.

7° Enhance your stash of supplies. You could be planing a trip to Hawaii for just a week, but it's a good idea to pack diabetes supplies just like you were staying two times as long.

8° Consider time zone changes. If you're wearing an insulin pump and will also be visiting an area which is in another time zone, make sure you adjust your insulin pump's clock to reflect the progress.

9° Test out your blood glucose. Travel may have a number of effects on diabetes management. Remember that deficiency of activity may prompt your blood sugar levels to become elevated; conversely, sightseeing along with other physical activity may lower glucose.

Due to modifications in your schedule, it is vital to check glucose before and after meals.

Have scientists discovered how to create downpours in the desert?

Technology created 50 rainstorms in Abu Dhabi's Al Ain region last year

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OCBeachInfo.com
Orange County Health Care Agency's Ocean Water Quality website

Up to the minute water quality information for our local beaches with lists of closures and advisories.  There is now a permenant link with the Surf Report and Tide Chart at the top of the "Club News" page.
You can also go to the website here: http://www.ocbeachinfo.com/
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Sun Pictures:

A Full Year in a Single Frame

Can a single picture sum up all of 2010? In a way, yes. The above multiple-exposure photo shows the figure-eight path of the sun over the course of the entire year, known as an analemma.

Analemma photographs are made by taking a picture of the sun from the same place at the same time of day once or twice a week, generating 30 to 50 frames. This picture, made in Veszprem, Hungary, combines 36 photos of the sun taken at 10 a.m. local time between January and December. A separate picture of the neighborhood taken from the same location but at a different time of day was digitally composited into the foreground.

The sun makes this shape over a year because Earth rotates on a slightly different axis than the sun, and our planet also travels on an elliptical orbit. As one hemisphere of Earth tilts farther from the sun, the arc of the sun's daily path seen from that location lowers toward the horizon. The sun's arc then gets higher in the sky as the tilt reverses. The sun's highest point in the sky, seen in this analemma, occurs during the summer solstice, while its lowest point is during winter solstice. (Find out about a lunar eclipse that happened on the 2010 winter solstice.)

Because of the time and precision involved, photographs of analemmas can be very difficult to produce. So far, only about 20 people worldwide have released successful analemma photos, according to Babak Tafreshi, founder of the astrophotography website The World at Night (TWAN).

Orange County Coastkeeper, an organization that shares our philosophy for clean oceans, healthy sea life and sea life populations.

The following is some information about one of their causes.
See the link below for the Coastkeeper website and all of their information

Article submitted by Rachael Calkins

Link to the Coaskeeper website
http://coastkeeper.org/index.asp
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Some important information about the health of your eyes and the harsh beach environment
Submitted by Steve Ryan


Hi Everybody,
For your consideration:

Most people I have talked to have no idea what Pterygium  (pronounced Ter-i-gium) is. I knew about it before I even had it and now I realize how common it is.
I had developed pterygium many years ago and just ignored it. For me though, it became a problem when it spread over my cornea and obscured my vision. I had surgery to remove it. The procedure was simple and took only 8 minutes. I was left with bright red eye for a month but well worth it. My vision was restored. Mickey Munoz had the same procedure done last year.
Pterygium a growth of raised tissue, often triangular shaped, that usually starts in one corner of the eye and can grow onto the cornea.
Pterygium can occur in both eyes and although they can look unsightly and cause some discomfort, they are benign lesions and are usually not dangerous.
The most common cause of pterygium is UV radiation, usually from sunlight. Harsh condtions such as heat, dryness, wind, dust and smoke can cause inflammation and irritation of existing ptyerygium and heredity is thought to play a role in its development.
The best way to reduce your risk of developing a ptyerygium is to wear sunglasses whenever you are outdoors.
In cases where the pterygium grows onto the cornea and distorts vision, the only effective treatment is surgical removal. Fortunately, this requires relatively minor surgery, which is usually performed under a local anesthetic. As pterygium can grow back after surgery, prevention is better than cure. With new surgical techniques though, the reoccurrence rate drops from 50% to 5%
If you have an area of raised tissue on or around your eyes, have it checked out by your Optometrist.
For more information, go to www.harvardeye.com, select "Other Topics" and click on "Pterygium" to watch a short video (It has surfing in it).
Steve Ryan
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