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Flashback Asphalt volcanoes discovered in Gulf of Mexico

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© RCOM/ScienceThe foot of an asphalt flow offers ideal conditions for tubeworms. To the left you can see undisturbed ocean floor.
Asphalt flows from deep-sea volcanoes

New kind of volcano discovered in the Gulf of Mexico


Underwater volcanoes that spew asphalt instead of lava: they were discovered in the Gulf of Mexico during an expedition of the research vessel Sonne, led by Prof. Gerhard Bohrmann of the DFG Research Center Ocean Margins. On these volcanoes the multinational team of scientists encountered a previously unknown highly diverse ecosystem at a water depth of 3,000 meters. The prominent scientific journal Science reports the spectacular discovery in its issue of 14 May 2004.

Asphalt, commonly known to us as the material that covers our streets, has been found flowing out of mounds that rise 450 to 800 meters above the desert-like floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Researchers discovered the asphalt volcanoes during a cruise of the research vessel Sonne. First observed in video footage, the structures were confirmed by bottom samples taken during the expedition. "We were actually only searching for the presence of methane at the seafloor, instead we found a new kind of volcano associated with a complex ecosystem," relates Prof. Gerhard Bohrmann enthusiastically.

The researchers surmise that such asphalt volcanoes only occur in the Gulf of Mexico, but that they are abundant there, because the conditions required for their formation - deep water, salt diapirs below the seafloor, and the presence of oil deposits - are found only here.

Comment: Asphalt volcanoes were discovered off the Californian coast last month.

Propaganda

Propaganda Alert! ABC News Attempts to Align Climate Change Skeptics with White Supremacists


At first, Michael Mann, a Penn State professor and a central figure in the Climategate scandal, but best known for his discredited "hockey stick graph" didn't like being mocked in a YouTube video. Now Mann is alleging he's a victim of hate groups.

On ABC's May 23 "World News Sunday," a segment from anchor Dan Harris alleged that threatening e-mails Mann received were part of a "spike" in violence aimed at the global warming alarmist community.

"The ongoing oil spill crisis in the Gulf is keeping the debate over climate and energy very much in the headlines and that debate is becoming increasingly venomous with many prominent scientists now saying that they are being severely harassed," Harris said.

Curiously Harris makes no mention of the real violence in the form of eco-terrorism that has come from the environmental left or Greenpeace repeatedly targeting the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Chris Horner, by stealing his garbage on a weekly basis, as his Web site points out. Instead, this "severe harassment" ABC warned about were e-mails from fringe Internet elements sent to Mann.

Fish

Sharks Can Become Invisible

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© Jérôme MallefetIn this photo, we can see the velvet belly lantern shark's glowing underside.
Avoiding the attention of both predators and prey is a little easier for some sharks who can hide in plain sight.

In open water, there is often no place to hide. Some sharks have overcome this problem by making themselves invisible to both prey and predators, according to a new study.

Light trickery permits the optical illusion, described in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. The findings represent the first experimental tests of shark luminescence.

Lead author Julien Claes explained to Discovery News that about 50 different shark species, or more than 10 percent of all known sharks, are luminous. This means they can produce and emit light from their bodies.

Claes and his colleagues chose to focus on one particular luminous shark, nicknamed "the phantom hunter of the fjords": the velvet belly lantern shark.

Bizarro Earth

Warnings of giant Gulf oil leak 'underwater plumes'

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© Unknown
Scientists have found huge underwater plumes of what they think is oil in the Gulf of Mexico, which may be evidence far more oil is leaking from BP's broken well than current estimates suggest.

The discovery may also explain why so little has come ashore, even though the thin surface slick is over 100 miles long and 40 miles wide.

The researchers from the University of Southern Mississippi on board the RV Pelican abandoned their original mission, which was to map methane hydrates in the seabed, to sample the ocean at various depths.

"There is a shocking amount of oil in the deep water", one of the scientists, Samantha Joye, told the New York Times.

The team found evidence for oil in three or four deep layers, including one 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in places. They found them in the deeper water - the shallowest at around 2,300 feet, the deepest, near the sea floor at about 4,200 feet.

Attention

Did Deepwater methane hydrates cause the BP Gulf explosion?

Strange and dangerous hydrocarbon offers no room for human error

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© KPA/Zuma/Rex FeaturesThe deadly explosion caused 3 million gallons of crude oil to pour into the Gulf.
The vast deepwater methane hydrate deposits of the Gulf of Mexico are an open secret in big energy circles. They represent the most tantalizing new frontier of unconventional energy - a potential source of hydrocarbon fuel thought to be twice as large as all the petroleum deposits ever known.

For the oil and gas industry, the substances are also known to be the primary hazard when drilling for deepwater oil.

Methane hydrates are volatile compounds - natural gas compressed into molecular cages of ice. They are stable in the extreme cold and crushing weight of deepwater, but are extremely dangerous when they build up inside the drill column of a well. If destabilized by heat or a decrease in pressure, methane hydrates can quickly expand to 164 times their volume.

Comment: It's interesting that just before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, a methane gas leak forced hundreds to evacuate from their homes in Louisiana:
Louisiana Well Blowout Forces Hundreds From Homes
This report from our database shows that scientists were warning of the dangers presented by methane in the Gulf of Mexico at least 5 years ago:
Charlie Paull and a group of MBARI and USGS scientists spent two weeks in 2002 in the Gulf of Mexico on the French research ship Marion Dufresne. They were there to map methane hydrate — and assess the potential for a landslide triggered by oil drilling. “"Ten years ago, we asked: Where can we find methane hydrate?”" Paull says. "“Now, it's more: How can we figure out where it is not?”"
They can forget about trying to harness this gas this as it is highly volatile and is responsible for numerous mining accidents all over the world:
Methane gas leak responsible for Sago Mine Blast

Methane blast kills 41 at Mittal mine in Kazakhstan

Methane gas explosion kills 35 in Siberian mine

Seven dead, four injured as methane ignites in Russian coal mine

Ukraine mine methane blast leaves 63 dead, 37 still missing

One miner dead, six missing in east Ukraine methane blast

Workers trapped in Kazakh mine may have died in accident caused by methane leak

Forty feared dead in Indonesia coal mine blast
And in just the last month:
12 killed, 10 missing in West Virginia methane mine blast

Methane blast hits Russia's largest coal mine, 8 dead

12 dead, 32 trapped in latest China mine disaster
It's also thought to be responsible for mysterious explosions and leaves a distinct smell over a wide area as it comes to the surface and expand:
Volatile Gas Could Turn Rwandan Lake Into a Freshwater Time Bomb

New York gas smell shuts trains, forces evacuations
If there is a significant "greenhouse gas", methane is it. Methane is strongly correlated with climate change events in the past:
Deep sea methane: Energy Saviour Or Impending Disaster?

James Kennett, a geologist at University of California, Santa Barbara, who discovered evidence of the 55-million-year-old extinction event, warns that "the melting and release of methane hydrate on a global scale “is the right mechanism to propel climate change,"” he says. "“It happens very fast geologically —over a few decades. But the climate fluctuations in the last few thousand years are small compared to the big events 55 million years ago.”"
The fact if the matter is that "big events" are not limited to millions and millions of years ago. Catastrophic climate change from cometary bombardment on a global scale took place as recently as 13,000 years ago. Regional catastrophism took place as recently as 1500 years ago. These scientists are not asking the right questions.

What if the release of methane from below the oceans is part of the mechanism to propel climate change but is not the causal factor of this mechanism? Could there be an external catalyst that periodically opens up the planet's surface to release methane? What if the quantity of methane released depends on the degree to which cometary bombardment is taking place?
Cosmic Climate Change is Underway
We are overdue the Big One and the Deepwater Horizon explosion is another sign that the planet is opening up and all humanity can do is help it along towards a mass extinction event.
Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!



Fish

Nine Fish With "Hands" Found To Be New Species

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© Karen Gowlett-Holmes
New, Pink, and Rare

Using its fins to walk, rather than swim, along the ocean floor in an undated picture, the pink handfish is one of nine newly named species described in a recent scientific review of the handfish family.

Only four specimens of the elusive four-inch (ten-centimeter) pink handfish have ever been found, and all of those were collected from areas around the city of Hobart, on the Australian island of Tasmania.

Though no one has spotted a living pink handfish since 1999, it's taken till now for scientists to formally identify it as a unique species.

All of the world's 14 known species of handfish are found only in shallow, coastal waters off southeastern Australia, say review authors Daniel Gledhill and Peter Last of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO.

Even among the previously known species, the fish are poorly studied, the scientists add, and little is known about their biology or behavior.

Bizarro Earth

Costa Rica's Arenal Volcano Erupts

Costa Rica's Arenal volcano has erupted, spewing geysers of lava, ash and toxic gases from its crater and forcing the evacuation of the national park where it is located.

The 1633-metre-tall cone-shaped mountain in northern Costa Rica shuddered into activity at 4am this morning issuing eight successive rivers of lava that flowed down its steep slopes, National Volcanology and Seismology Observatory expert Elicer Duarte said.

He said nobody was at risk from the eruptions but authorities as a precaution evacuated the Arenal National Park, 80km north-east of San Jose.

The Arenal Volcano is one of Costa Rica's major tourist attractions and the park has scores of hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and shopping centres.

No estimates were given of how many people were inside the park when the eruption began.

Arenal's last major eruption in July 1968 killed 89 people. Smaller eruptions have occurred at least six times over the past 35 years.

Arrow Up

Flashback Deep sea methane: Energy Saviour Or Impending Disaster?

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© Juna Kurihara
Methane trapped under the oceans can save us or destroy us.

In December 2003, an international team of geologists announced that they had successfully tapped a new energy source. Methane hydrate, a solidified form of natural gas bound into ice, lurks under the seafloor along the margins of every continent and under the Arctic permafrost. On the Mackenzie River delta in the Canadian Northwest Territories, engineers drilled hundreds of meters below the permafrost into the hydrate deposits. They punched fractures into the layers of sediment and pumped hot water into the earth, releasing the natural gas from its icy prison.

This first harvest of methane hydrate could mark a new direction for the energy industry. Engineers once assumed that the energy costs of melting the frozen fuel would outweigh the gains. But rising oil and gas prices and creative uses of existing technology, like the recent test in the Canadian Arctic, are beginning to change their minds. The United States Geological Survey estimates that the total amount of natural gas in methane hydrates surpasses all of the known oil, coal, and gas deposits on Earth in energy content, although only a fraction of the frozen fuel will be extractable. The hydrates can form at any latitude on Earth if temperature and pressure conditions are right, and are usually mixed with sediment under the ocean floor.

Bizarro Earth

US: Earthquake Magnitude 3.7 - Arizona

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© USGS
Date-Time:
Monday, May 24, 2010 at 07:27:06 UTC

Monday, May 24, 2010 at 12:27:06 AM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
33.386°N, 109.150°W

Depth:
5 km (3.1 miles) set by location program

Region:
ARIZONA

Distances:
41 km (25 miles) NNE (20°) from Clifton, AZ

41 km (25 miles) NNE (24°) from Morenci, AZ

51 km (32 miles) SW (225°) from Reserve, NM

210 km (131 miles) NE (51°) from Tucson, AZ

636 km (395 miles) ESE (118°) from Las Vegas, NV

Bizarro Earth

Brazil: Earthquake Magnitude 6.5 - Acre

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© USGS
Date-Time:
Monday, May 24, 2010 at 16:18:29 UTC

Monday, May 24, 2010 at 11:18:29 AM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
8.072°S, 71.569°W

Depth:
580.5 km (360.7 miles)

Region:
ACRE, BRAZIL

Distances:
125 km (75 miles) ESE of Cruzeiro do Sul, Acre, Brazil

330 km (205 miles) E of Pucallpa, Peru

460 km (285 miles) SSW of Tabatinga, Amazonas, Brazil

2715 km (1680 miles) WNW of BRASILIA, Distrito Federal, Brazil