Earth ChangesS


Attention

Flashback Hunters kill bear after it mauls man in Niigata, Japan

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Hunters shot and killed a bear on Monday after it attacked a man in Murakami, Niigata Prefecture.

According to police, the 64-year-old man was gathering edible wild plants at around 6:15 a.m. on Monday morning when he was attacked and bitten by the bear. TBS reported that he suffered injuries to his hands and face but managed to walk two kilometers to a shopping area where he sought help.

Police alerted members of a local hunting society who found and shot the white-chested bear on Monday afternoon. It was about 1.47 meters long and weighed 92 kilograms.

Police said there had been four sightings of the bear in the same area since April 18.

Snowflake Cold

Warm Gulf Stream water continued to flow into icy Nordic seas during last Ice Age

The warm Atlantic water continued to flow into the icy Nordic seas during the coldest periods of the last Ice Age.
Fossil foraminifera
© en.wikipedia.orgFossil foraminifera measure temperature.
An Ice Age may sound as a stable period of cold weather, but the name can be deceiving. In the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, the period was characterized by considerable climate changes. Cold periods (stadials) switched abruptly to warmer periods (interstadials) and back.

It is considered by many that during cold periods of the last Ice Age the warm Atlantic water had terminated its flow into the Nordic Seas during the glacial period, says Mohamed Ezat, PhD at Centre for Arctic Gas hydrate, Environment and Climate (CAGE) at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway.

The study, published in Geology, documented that bottom water actually grew to a temperature of up to 5⁰C at 1200m depth in the Nordic seas during the cold stadials. Cold bottom water temperatures of 0.5⁰C was detected during the warm interstadials, which is not dissimilar to what we experience today.

How was this possible?

So the air was getting colder, but the deep ocean water was getting warmer during some of the coldest periods of the Ice Age. How is this possible?

Colloquially referred to as the Gulf Stream, the warm North Atlantic Current is partly to blame for our mild North European winters. It flows into the Nordic seas, where it cools down in winter and releases heat into the atmosphere. It becomes denser and sinks to the bottom of the Nordic seas. It creates a significant part of the global circulatory system of ocean currents.

Cold, deep water from the small area of the Nordic seas, less than 1% of the global ocean, travels the entire planet and returns as warm surface water. This has remained a fairly stable process for the last 10,000 years. The events here are significant for the entire ocean system. However, if we go back to the Ice Age things were quite different, says professor Tine Rasmussen from CAGE. The reason is that ice sheets across Scandinavia and North America produced a substantial amount of fresh melt water from icebergs. This means that the surface water could not reach the required density to sink‒ this is a process that relies on salinity. The warm Atlantic water was saltier, and thus heavier and subducted at depth and reached to the bottom, actually heating up beneath a lid of ice and melt water, that prevented the release of heat into the atmosphere.

Warm water was present, but deep under the cold, icy surface. So the climate experience was colder, as the atmospheric records from Greenland ice cores display. But what eventually happened, is that warm water reached a critical point, surged upwards to the surface, and contributed to the abrupt warming of the surface water and atmosphere, says, Ezat.

Comment:
Methane Hydrate
© www-ner.office.kitami-it.ac.jp

Methane hydrates belong to a group of substances called clathrates - substances in which one molecule type forms a crystal-like cage structure and encloses another type of molecule. If the cage-forming molecule is water, it is called a hydrate. If the molecule trapped in the water cage is a gas, it is a gas hydrate, in this case methane hydrate.

Methane hydrates can only form under very specific physical, chemical and geological conditions. High water pressures and low temperatures provide the best conditions for methane hydrate formation. Methane hydrates primarily occur on the continental slopes, those areas where the continental plates meet the deep-sea regions. With rising ocean temperatures, methane is increasingly escaping from deep ocean floors. Methane is also 21 more times capable of trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Recent discoveries verify trapped methane is now being released from many areas of the globe, both in oceans and on land, and at a faster rate than anticipated. This is part of a natural earth cycle and a possible contributing precursor to ice age rebound.

See also: Hundreds of methane plumes erupting along U.S. Atlantic coast


Bug

Los Angeles: Yellow fever mosquitoes spread fear of deadly viruses

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© Image from wikipedia.org
Ebola may not be the only cause of fear to arrive in the US recently. Yellow fever mosquitoes ‒ which can transmit dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever itself ‒ have been found in the Los Angeles region, officials announced Wednesday.

These mosquitoes can spread the three deadly tropical viruses to humans through their bites. They were found Oct. 7 and 8 in Commerce and Pico Rivera, respectively, according to the Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District (GLACVCD) and San Gabriel Valley Mosquito & Vector Control District (SGVMVCD).

Dengue virus is a leading cause of illness and death in the tropics and subtropics, mostly in urban and semi-urban areas, with as many as 400 million people infected yearly, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. The infection causes flu-like illness, and occasionally develops into a potentially lethal complication called severe dengue (also known as Dengue Haemorrhagic Fever), according to the WHO.

Boat

Sea lion throws fisherman across trawler like a rag-doll

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‘It’s my ship now!’
You can add sea lions to the top of the list of animals you shouldn't mess with.

One Russian fisherman found out the hard way the sheer strength of an angry sea lion, when he was hurled onto his ship's deck by the creature.

The sea mammal had been caught in the nets and the fishermen were quick to cut it free.

But the moment the sea lion gets its head and neck free it grabs one of the fishermen in its teeth and throws him across the deck.

As the huge creature breaks free the fishermen and a very frightened dog keep their distance.

But the sea lion pounces on the dog as it takes a few tentative steps forward, the canine barking as it tries to break free.


Attention

Pet dog chases off bear to save Japan boy from attack

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The dog took on the metre-high (three-feet) bear after it attacked the young boy.
A placid pet dog was being hailed a hero after saving a five-year-old boy from a mauling by a wild bear in northern Japan, police and media said Tuesday.

The dog, a six-year-old shiba inu, took on the metre-high (three-feet) bear after it attacked the young boy during a riverside walk with his great-grandfather.

The dog barked "unusually loud" and chased off the animal on Saturday evening in Odate, some 550 kilometres (340 miles) north of Tokyo, a local police spokesman said.

"The boy suffered slight bruises and was taken to hospital but he was released on the same day," the spokesman said.

The boy s 80-year-old great-grandfather, who was a short distance away near his car, raised the alarm.

Local media identified the dog as a six-year-old bitch named "Mego" ("Cute").

Bizarro Earth

Study finds 400 micro-earthquakes in Ohio were triggered by fracking

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© AFP Photo / Mladen Antonov
A new study on the practice of hydraulic fracturing has found a direct connection to some 400 micro-earthquakes in an Ohio town. This is the second report on the Utica Shale this year. The town is one of very few where the quakes took place on a fault.

The new study, published Tuesday in the journal Seismological Research Letters, focuses on the eastern town of Canton, Harrison County, and three particular wells. It has found that the three wells operated in September-October 2013 in the Utica Shale caused 10 quakes of magnitude 1.7-2.2, among others.

But the case of Harrison County is one of a very few where, according to seismologist and lead author Paul Friberg, the quakes happened on a fault line.

Other locations where this happened included the United Kingdom, British Columbia in Canada and Poland Township, Ohio, according to LiveScience.

An earlier March study led to scientists with Ohio's Department of Natural Resources to shut down seven other wells in the Poland Township after fracking there led to two small quakes.

The current spate of Harrison County quakes struck less than 1.4km (1 mile) below ground, with tremors starting to be felt 26 hours after fracking started on September 29, 2013. This was followed by a total of 190 earthquakes in the 39 hours just two days later. When the pressure stopped, so did the quakes, according to the study.


Comment:
There's plenty of evidence that fracking and earthquakes are linked:

Getting more fracking obvious: Study shows hydraulic fracturing linked to earthquakes in Ohio
Fracking: 14 earthquakes recorded in Oklahoma since Friday
US: Fracking Operations Cause Thousands of Earthquakes in Arkansas
Seismologists say fracking-linked earthquakes likely to worsen
More fracking headaches as earthquake evidence grows


Ice Cube

Hmm...Water temperature of the Great Lakes is over 6 degrees colder than normal - threatening earlier and colder winter in Midwest

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Michigan residents may see a cold and icy winter arrive sooner this year, reportedly due to lower temperatures in the Great Lakes. Average surface temperatures for both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan have dropped: Superior's went from from 53.7 degrees on October 11, 2013 to 47.6 degrees Saturday, while Michigan's went from 62.1 degrees to 56.0 degrees, MLive.com reported. That means both lakes experienced temperature drops of 6.1 degrees, the news site explained.

Michigan residents may need to bundle up sooner to brace both November and December chilly weather as a result of cooler lakes, MLive.com reported. Lakes may also ice up sooner because of the extra chilly water temperatures, the news site reported. Despite these potential effects, there may be less lake effect snow, the website explained.

'Lake effect snow is heaviest when the lake waters are warm, and the air above is very cold,' MLive.com said. 'The bigger the difference in lake to air temperature, the more intense the snow can fall. Colder lake waters would mean lake effect snow could be not as intense. That is not to say we won't still have what some would call heavy snow. It means the 24 to 36 inch lake effect snows in one to two days would be harder to achieve.'

Igloo

Austrian daily reports: "Huge ice growth surprises climate scientists" ... "Like one not seen in decades"!

Iceage
© Kronen Zeitung/EPA
The Austrian online Kronen Zeitung here has an article about something most German-language media outlets have been too red-faced to report on: The sudden growth in polar sea ice.

The Kronen Zeitung opens with:
A huge growth in ice at the poles has surprised scientists and is casting questions. Is global warming taking a break? [...] For the prophets of climate change the new figures pose questions: At the poles of Mother Earth, in complete contradiction to prognoses of a complete polar melt, there is an ice growth like one not seen in decades."
Almost the entire mainstream media has been quiet about this development. So it is refreshing to see that some media are reporting the "good" news that the planet is not warming alarmingly.

Attention

Camel escapes from cage and kills owner of wildlife sanctuary

Richard Mileski
Richard Mileski
The American owner of a Mexican wildlife center was killed by a camel after the animal escaped its pen and attacked him.

Richard Mileski was walking through Tulum Monkey Sanctuary in Tulum on Tuesday when the camel escaped. The animal dragged Mileski to the ground and kicked, bit and trampled him before sitting on top of the 60-year-old.

One park employee was in another part of the park when he heard Mileski scream, then rushed to the scene and attempted to beat the camel away with a stick. Despite employee efforts, Mileski died on the scene.

Following the incident, the camel was taken to Mexico's federal agency of environmental protection Profepa.

"We had to tie a rope around the animal's neck and pull him with a pick-up truck to remove him," one employee said.

Attention

Rare deep sea dwelling beaked whale washes up on beach near Newcastle, Australia

ORRCA
Marine biologists said it was too early to tell what killed the 4m beaked whale.
Marine experts are examining a rare beaked whale that has washed up on a New South Wales beach.

The three to four-metre-long animal was found dead on Redhead Beach, south of Newcastle, this morning.

Marine experts have been called in to examine the whale and take specimens.

Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORCCA) president Ronny Ling said the find was extremely rare.

"It's a deep sea animal called a beaked whale," he said.