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A third of U.S. is waterlogged and ripe for flooding

Brian K. Sullivan
Bloomberg News
Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:22 EDT

One-third of the United States faces the possibility of "historic flooding" in coming weeks, especially the upper Midwest states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa, government forecasters said.

"Once again we are delivering an urgent message to get ready," John Hayes, director of the National Weather Service, said in a conference call yesterday. "The flood risk is above-average over one-third of the country."

The flood potential is driven in part by El Nino, a warming in the Pacific Ocean, which steered storms that have left the ground saturated from record rains and heavy snows. The area designated for above-average risk stretches from New Mexico to Maine, federal maps show.

"We are looking at potentially historic flooding in some parts of the country this spring," Jane Lubchenco, administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in the conference call.

Many areas of the eastern U.S. have received twice the normal amount of rain in the past three months, said Tom Graziano, a weather service hydrologist.

Yellow snow falls in Russia's Far East

RIA Novosti
Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:49 EST

Valeriy Melnikov

The Amur region in Russia's Far East was hit by yellow snow, Elena Pechkina, a regional meteorologist, told RIA Novosti on Friday.

High winds in Mongolia mixed the clouds from a front with dust and sand, crossed northern China, and then dumped the unique-colored snow in Russia.

Joanne Nova
JoNova
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:36 EDT

Human emissions of carbon dioxide began a sharp rise from 1945. But, temperatures, it seems, may have plummeted over half the globe during the next few decades. Just how large or how insignificant was that decline?

Frank Lansner has found an historical graph of northern hemisphere temperatures from the mid 70's, and it shows a serious decline in temperatures from 1940 to 1975. It's a decline so large that it wipes out the gains made in the first half of the century, and brings temperatures right back to what they were circa 1910. The graph was not peer reviewed, but presumably it was based on the best information available at the time. In any case, if all the global records are not available to check, it's impossible to know how accurate or not this graph is. The decline apparently recorded was a whopping 0.5°C.

But, three decades later, by the time Brohan and the CRU graphed temperatures in 2006 from the same old time period, the data had been adjusted (surprise), so that what was a fall of 0.5°C had become just a drop of 0.15°C. Seventy percent of the cooling was gone.

Maybe they had good reasons for making these adjustments. But, as usual, the adjustments were in favor of the Big Scare Campaign, and the reasons and the original data are not easy to find.

Husna Haq
The Christian Science Monitor
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:48 EDT

More than a third of the US faces a high risk of flooding this spring, and Midwesterners may get the brunt of it, according to government forecasters.

Heavy rains last fall, thaw from an unusually wet winter, and a potentially wet spring due to El Nino could produce record flooding in some areas, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced late Tuesday.

"We are looking at potentially historic flooding," said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco. "It's a terrible case of déjà vu, but this time the flooding will likely be more widespread," she said, referring to the record floods of 2009 in Fargo, N.D.'s Red River valley.

Magnitude-4.4 quake shakes Alaska

Associated Press
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:50 EDT

Rampart -- A small earthquake shook north-central Alaska on Tuesday.

The Alaska Earthquake Information Center says a magnitude-4.4 temblor struck at 4:23 a.m. about 31 miles north of Rampart and 36 miles west of Stevens Village.

The center said Tuesday it has not received any reports of the quake being felt or causing damage.

Aishwarya Bhatt
Thaindian News
Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:18 EDT

Los Angeles - - The United States Geological Survey said that Los Angeles had witnessed a small earthquake of magnitude 4.4 on the Richter scale. The earthquake shook the region, at around 4am local time, or 7 are Eastern Time. It happened around 10 miles east of Los Angeles. It was said to be a shallow earthquake, as the depth of the earthquake was measured by the United Stares Geological Survey, to be around 11 miles.

The USGS also divulged that people felt the impact of the earthquake from San Diego to Santa Clarita. There have been no reports of casualties or any damage to property, as the earthquake was a small one. However the county's fire and rescue officials are still not taking things easy, and they are doing their job diligently, and surveying the area to make sure, that there are no earthquake victims who need their help.

PITA LIGAIULA
Associated Press
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:28 EDT

© AFP/Graphic
Map showing the path of Cyclone Tomas in Fiji. Fiji's government has declared a state of disaster as the first deaths were reported in the cyclone-ravaged Pacific nation where 17,000 people have fled to evacuation centres.

The South Pacific island nation of Fiji has suffered overwhelming damage from a powerful cyclone that battered its shores for more than three days, the prime minister said Wednesday as relief operations were launched in the country's northern regions.

Fiji sent naval patrol boats laden with supplies and support staff sailing for the northern islands that bore the full brunt of the storm, while Australian and New Zealand air force planes began airlifting emergency supplies to the island group.

Only one death has been reported, but the full extent of the damage has yet to be determined because communications to the hardest hit areas were cut off for days.

"It is evident that wherever (Cyclone) Tomas has struck, the damage has been overwhelming," Commodore Frank Bainimarama, Fiji's prime minister and military chief, said Wednesday as the first reports began to roll in.

Seth Borenstein
C News / Associated Press
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:46 EDT

© AP/NASA
This video frame grab image provided by NASA, taken in Dec. 2009, shows a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is related to a shrimp, where a NASA team lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet and a curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then even parked itself on the cable attached to the camera.

In a surprising discovery about where higher life can thrive, scientists for the first time found a shrimp-like creature and a jellyfish frolicking beneath a massive Antarctic ice sheet.

Six hundred feet (183 metres) below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist.

That is why a team from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera's cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

"We were operating on the presumption that nothing's there," said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. "It was a shrimp you'd enjoy having on your plate."

"We were just gaga over it," he said of the 3-inch-long (76-millimeter, orange critter starring in their two-minute video. Technically, it's not a shrimp. It's a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is distantly related to shrimp.

Mind-reading gorillas love a good game

Jessica Hamzelou
New Scientist
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:56 EDT

Cajoling bored friends to keep playing with you is not limited to humans. A gorilla that wants to continue a game will also try to do this, and will even deliberately lose if necessary. This hints that gorillas may have "theory of mind" - the capacity to attribute mental states to others.

The mysterious case of the frogs' legs

Jessica Griggs
New Scientist
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:43 EDT

In 1995, a group of schoolchildren from Minnesota discovered that half of the frogs they found in a pond were deformed. Some had bent, truncated legs, some had extra legs, while others had none at all. Photos of the frogs caught the attention of journalists, who blamed chemical pollution.

Since then, American artist Brandon Ballengée has found similarly deformed frogs and toads all over the world when working with the biologist Stanley Sessions from Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York state. Ballengée documents their field trips photographically. He also brings back dead specimens, which he uses to create artistic images like this one of an extra-limbed Pacific treefrog from Aptos, California.

Ballengée says he's attracted to the frogs because he finds them uncanny, almost other-worldly. To heighten this effect, he stains the frogs with dyes that turn cartilage blue, bones red and flesh translucent. He then scans them using a high-resolution scanner to produce a detailed, ghostly image. "I wanted to find a way to exhibit what I was finding without being scary or exploitative."

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