Earth ChangesS


Bad Guys

Clipping wings when volcanoes erupt


CORDIS
Wed, 18 May 2011 12:21 UTC
Image
© Shutterstock
Air transport officials launched a no-fly zone when Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano reared its ugly head last year. But was the move justified? Flying through an ash cloud would have been a dangerous maneuver, if not deadly. This is where a team of researchers comes in.

Scientists from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Iceland have created a protocol to give traffic authorities the help they need to quickly determine if planes should be grounded when ash threatens airspace safety. The results of the study are presented in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

Researchers say volcanic ash could put planes, and the lives of passengers, in grave danger, particularly if particles are small enough to travel high and far. These particles could sandblast the bodies and windows of airplanes, and they could even melt inside jet engines.

Red flags went up when ash from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption materialized. The researchers say officials were right to ground all airplanes in April 2010. For her part, Professor Susan Stipp from the Nano-Science Center of the University of Copenhagen says the team's latest method to quickly evaluate future ash is a key development.
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Cloud Lightning

US: Heavy rainfall may be linked to sharks' deaths

Kelly Zito
San Francisco Chronicle
Wed, 18 May 2011 14:36 UTC
shark
© Rosemary La PumaHundreds of leopard sharks have been found dead or dying around the bay, including this one at Swede's Beach in Sausalito.
This winter's heavy rains - beneficial to so many species - may, in fact, be diluting saltwater in San Francisco Bay so dramatically that leopard sharks are dying in the very spots where they prefer to give birth and search for food, scientists said Tuesday.

State biologists investigating a rash of leopard shark casualties around the region over the past month think the torrents of freshwater flowing into shoreline lagoons may be throwing the body chemistry of the fish fatally off balance.
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Bad Guys

Bogota Cut off From Northeast Colombia

Adriaan Alsema
Columbia Reports
Wed, 18 May 2011 06:11 UTC
Landslide
© Santander Hoy
Colombia's capital Bogota has been cut off from a large part of the northeast of the country after a landslide destroyed a bridge connecting the capital with the city of Bucaramanga Tuesday evening.

According to media reports, the landslide took place 15 miles south of Bucaramanga and has disconnected Bogota to Bucaramanga, Cucuta and forces travelers to the Caribbean city of Barranquilla to take a large detour.

The landslide reportedly did not only destroy the bridge, but also a police post and swept away a motorbike and a car. Media reports are contradictory about injuries. According to newspaper El Espectador no injures were reported, while Caracol Radio reported 15 people were injured.
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Bizarro Earth

Eruption at Nicaraguan Volcano


Monster&Critics.com
Tue, 17 May 2011 22:34 UTC
Telica Volcano
© Lee Siebert (Smithsonian Institution)Telica volcano, seen here from the León-Chinandega highway, is one of a group of interlocking cones and vents along a NW trend. The summit of Telica, which is one of Nicaragua's most active volcanoes, is unvegetated, and deep erosional gulleys have been dissected into the lower flanks of the cone. Frequent historical eruptions have been recorded at Telica since the 16th century.
Managua - Nicaragua's Telica volcano spewed a massive cloud of gas and ash into the air Tuesday following several strong explosions.

Material was ejected 1.2 kilometres into the air above the crater of the 1,060-metre volcano, the seismological institute Ineter said. A total of 50 explosions were recorded.

Since May 9, Ineter has recorded 59 seismic shocks in the area, and Telica had ejected a large amount of sand on nearby cities since Friday.

Sixty nearby villages were evacuated as a precautionary measure.

The volcano is located in Leon province, some 130 kilometres north-west of Managua. It last erupted in 1948.
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Alarm Clock

US: Scientists seek sleepy volcano's wake-up call

Kathie Durbin
The Columbian
Tue, 17 May 2011 12:00 UTC
Clues studied to predict when peak will erupt again
Image
© Columbian filesMount St. Helens shook itself awake in October 2004 after eight years of relative quiet. Eruptions and dome-building continued until January of 2008, when the volcano entered a new period of hibernation. Scientists are now reading signals from deep within the mountain and rocks dating back thousands of years to try to predict when the mountain will recharge and become active again. This view from 2005 looks east, showing lobes of new domes formed within the crater during its 2004-08 eruptive stage.

Mount St. Helens has been mostly quiet since its most recent dome-building eruptions ended in January 2008. But scientists say it's a sure thing the volatile volcano in our backyard will reawaken.

The question they hope to answer is when.

Clues to the volcano's future lie in the faint signals of magma moving in a cigar-shaped chamber deep within the mountain, in the eruptive history of a similar volcano on Russia's remote Kamchatka Peninsula, and in the long geological record contained within Mount St. Helens itself.

Cynthia Gardner, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, predicts the mountain will resume rebuilding itself sooner rather than later.

"Mount St. Helens will probably erupt again within the next several decades," she says. "As we look at its eruptive history, we know there was a flank collapse 2,500 years ago. We saw the cone rebuild itself over a century or a century and a half."

Yet since the 1980 eruption, she said, the mountain has rebuilt only 7 percent of its pre-eruption mass. "If we look at patterns from St. Helens' past history, and from volcanoes around the world, we come to the conclusion we are likely to see more eruptions."
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Bizarro Earth

Australia: Unusual Tropical Fish Washes up on Albany Beaches


ABC News, Australia
Tue, 17 May 2011 12:29 UTC
Dead Sunfish
© Rebecca DolleryDozens of sunfish have washed up on Goode Beach and Frenchman's Bay.
The Department of Fisheries says a strong Leeuwin Current is causing an unusual species of fish to wash up on Albany's shores.

Dozens of oceanic sunfish have been found dead on Goode Beach and at Frenchman's Bay.

The sunfish is native to tropical and temperate waters.

The department's senior research scientist Dr Kim Smith says a strong current is dragging large numbers of sunfish to cooler, southern waters.

"This time of year is associated with the Leeuwin Current flowing across the South Coast at its strongest," she said.
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Phoenix

Russian wildfires double in size


UPI
Wed, 18 May 2011 12:10 UTC
Wildfires raging in Siberia doubled in size from 1,400 to 3,700 acres over a 24 hour period, Russia's Emergencies Ministry reported Sunday.

"There are 106 hotbeds of wildfires on a total area of 1,492.6 hectares (3,688.2 acres) in Siberia," the ministry said.

Ministry officials said the forest fires are the result of local resident activity, RIA Novosti reported.

It was unclear exactly what kind of activity they were referring to.
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Extinguisher

U.S.: 1 Injured In underground transformer vault explosion


CBS
Tue, 17 May 2011 22:26 UTC
Image

Westwood - An explosion occurred Tuesday morning near UCLA in Westwood, injuring one person.

Officials say that around 9:25 a.m., an explosion occurred in an underground electrical transformer vault at Westwood Boulevard and Weyburn Avenue.

According to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the blast sent a manhole cover into the back of a Metro bus, slightly injuring the driver, and reportedly blowing out some nearby windows. The explosion also caused minor damage to a nearby building and closed surrounding streets.

Electrical service was momentarily disrupted in and around Westwood and West Los Angeles. The Department of Water and Power was a sending a crew to investigate the problem.

Officials do not know what caused the explosion.
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Phoenix

SOTT Focus: Exploding Transformers - More than meets the eye?

Ryan X
Sott.net
Tue, 17 May 2011 15:15 UTC
Transformer Explosion
© Brian LuenserTransformer explosion witnessed in Ft. Worth, Texas

Between the mass animal deaths, the deadly earthquakes and tsunamis in the Pacific rim, the record-setting extreme weather across the US, and the once meandering gulf-stream now shutting down, clearly something is up on the big blue marble this year. And now we may have a new one to add to the list: exploding transformers.

In the last couple weeks numerous electrical transformers have malfunctioned or exploded, in some cases causing major fires. Many of these are not your usual explosions either; some consisted of an almost fireworks-like display of electrical arcing as shown in some of the videos below. Given the sheer number of out-of-control transformers, this appears to be a new phenomena, or perhaps a sign of things to come.

With the connections we've noted between electrical activity in space and major events such as tornadoes, cyclones, volcanoes and earthquakes, one might suspect that the same electrical phenomena responsible for these displays of nature's fury could be responsible for these exploding transformers too. Typically large spikes in electrical current are the cause of transformer explosions. It seems that, like the exploding transformers, our planet is being electrically overloaded in ways it can't properly handle either, causing all manner of weather and ground-shaking chaos. Perhaps what we've seen so far this year in terms of crazy weather and earthquakes is only the start of things to come.
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Nuke

TEPCO admits nuclear meltdown occurred at Fukushima reactor 16 hours after quake


The Mainichi Daily News
Tue, 17 May 2011 20:30 UTC
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) admitted for the first time on May 15 that most of the fuel in one of its nuclear reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant had melted only about 16 hours after the March 11 earthquake struck a wide swath of northeastern Japan and triggered a devastating tsunami.

According to TEPCO, the operator of the crippled nuclear power plant, the emergency condenser designed to cool the steam inside the pressure vessel of the No. 1 reactor was working properly shortly after the magnitude-9.0 earthquake, but it lost its functions around 3:30 p.m. on March 11 when tsunami waves hit the reactor.

Based on provisional analysis of data on the reactor, the utility concluded that the water level in the pressure vessel began to drop rapidly immediately after the tsunami, and the top of the fuel began to be exposed above the water around 6 p.m. Around 7:30 p.m., the fuel was fully exposed above the water surface and overheated for more than 10 hours. At about 9 p.m., the temperature in the reactor core rose to 2,800 degrees Celsius, the melting point for fuel. At approximately 7:50 p.m., the upper part of the fuel started melting, and at around 6:50 a.m. on March 12, a meltdown occurred.
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