Earth Changes
Friday, March 04, 2011 at 15:46:12 UTC
Saturday, March 05, 2011 at 02:46:12 AM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location:
49.828°S, 164.042°E
Depth:
20.4 km (12.7 miles)
Region:
AUCKLAND ISLANDS, NEW ZEALAND REGION
Distances:
178 km (110 miles) WNW of Auckland Island, New Zealand
498 km (309 miles) SW of Invercargill, New Zealand
637 km (395 miles) SSW of Queenstown, New Zealand
1263 km (784 miles) SW of WELLINGTON, New Zealand
Bathed in an eerie light, this strange image of Dunluce Castle hasn't been digitally enhanced - whatever you may think. The windswept fortification perched on the cliffs of the north Antrim coast isn't catching the dawn light nor the last of the evening sunshine.
The reason for its peculiar appearance is that the landmark site is drenched in the rarely sighted illumination of the aurora borealis - or the northern lights.
Indeed, this particular snap is the handiwork of Maghera photographer Conor McDonald, who waited patiently for hours to capture perfection.
"I was following the path of the aurora so I headed up to Dunluce Castle and waited for it to get dark," said the 21-year-old.
There have been sightings of the startling natural phenomenon in recent weeks as the Earth sweeps through clouds of electrically charged particles blasted out from the sun, just as we emerge from the slowest point of an 11-year Sun cycle.
Meanwhile, 25-year-old Reed Ingram Weir, a professional photographer from Ballycastle, also took some impressive pictures.
"I go around the world trying to shoot the northern lights, but these are the best shots I've ever taken in the UK because they don't normally come this far south," he said.

Stephanie Kadletz, animal care specialist with Bayside Hospital for Animals in Fort Walton Beach, examines a baby bottlenose dolphin that was found on Perdido Key earlier this week.
The number of deaths has peaked three times in the past 13 months for all dolphins and whales along the northern Gulf Coast. Normally, one to two dolphins wash up in each state in January and February.
"We don't know what the cause is," Amendola said. "Everything has an equal playing field, from a virus, weather to the oil spill."
Steve Shippee, Marine Mammal Stranding team coordinator, offered another possibility. He said the increase could be because more people have been monitoring beaches since April 20 spill.
The epicenter of the tremor, which occurred at 11:00 pm local time (0500 GMT Monday), was located six kilometers (four miles) northeast from the town of Greenbrier, according to the US Geological Survey.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or major damage. But KARK 4 TV said that callers to its newsroom from the Greenbrier area reported pictures and decorations being shaken off the walls.
The reading was based on the open-ended Moment Magnitude scale, now used by US seismologists, which measures the area of the fault that ruptured and the total energy released.
But in examining bright spots found at the bottom of the Antarctic ice sheet, Bell and colleagues have since discovered water is interacting with over a quarter of the bottom of the ice sheet - freezing and pushing the entire ice sheet up in a way that is surprisingly similar to the lake effect. "In fact, I'd forgotten the connection until last night," she said in an interview today.
The new discovery is adding an unknown dimension to the overall layer-cake growth model for ice sheets: that ice sheets gain height one layer at a time as the amount of snow falling on the top outpaces the amount of ice melting at the bottom. Bell and her team using ice-penetrating radar atop Antarctica have just turned this idea upside down.
"In some places up to half the ice thickness has been added from below," Bell and her international team of colleagues, reported in the new issue of the online journal Sciencexpress.

Researchers used satellite data to measure the surface temperature of 167 lakes around the world and found some lakes warming as much as 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.
The Earth's largest lakes have warmed up over the past 25 years in response to climate change, NASA said Tuesday, announcing the first such global study of its kind.
Scientists Philipp Schneider and Simon Hook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California used satellite data to measure the surface temperature of 167 lakes around the world, NASA said.
"They reported an average warming rate of 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, with some lakes warming as much as 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit per decade," NASA said in a statement.

Thus far many researchers have attempted to explain historical Earth climate data from Antarctica on the basis of Milankovitch's classic hypothesis. "To date, it hasn't been possible to plausibly substantiate all aspects of this hypothesis, however," states Laepple. "Now the game is open again and we can try to gain a better understanding of the long-term physical mechanisms that influence the alternation of ice ages and warm periods."
In the current issue of the journal Nature three physicists from AWI's working group "Dynamics of the Palaeoclimate" present new calculations on the connection between natural insolation and long-term changes in global climate activity. Up to now the presumption was that temperature fluctuations in Antarctica, which have been reconstructed for the last million years on the basis of ice cores, were triggered by the global effect of climate changes in the northern hemisphere.
"We usually think of ice sheets like cakes -- one layer at a time added from the top," said Robin Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who co-authored the study in the journal Science.
"This is like someone injected a layer of frosting at the bottom -- a really thick layer."
The team flew over the vast East Antarctic ice sheet, setting out to unravel the mystery of the so-called "ghost mountains" hidden underneath. Known formally as the Gamburtsev Mountains, the range buried in the ice pack near the South Pole spans an area larger than the European Alps.
The north-central Arkansas cities of Greenbrier and Guy have been affected by more than 30 earthquakes since Sunday ranging in magnitude from 1.8 to 3.8.
Geologists are still trying to discover the exact cause of the recent seismic activity but have identified two possibilities.
Geohazards supervisor for the Arkansas Geological Survey Scott Ausbrooks, said: 'The quakes are part of what is now called the Guy earthquake swarm - a series of mild earthquakes that have been occurring periodically since 2009.

Kiteboarders at Crescent Beach take advantage of southeasterly gusts of 70 to 100 km-h.
Environment Canada had forecast sustained southerly winds of 70 to 100 km/h, with peak gusts from 100 to 140 km/h. The predictions were off by about 20 km/h, said Environment Canada meteorologist Dave Wray.
"It was definitely one of the stronger storms of the season but it wasn't busting any kind of records," Wray said. "The system was just a little further offshore and north than expected."
The strongest winds on the coast were on Solander Island, off the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, where gusts were clocked at 90 knots (160 km/h).
In Greater Victoria, the storm's peak time was between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., with sustained winds of 50 km/h and gusts of about 70 km/h. By mid-morning the warm, southeasterly winds had driven the temperature up to 9.4 C









