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Earth ChangesS
Here is something you don't see every day, a satellite image showing a sizable amount of snow cover on the big island of Hawaii. While snowfall on the big island is nothing new, commonly seen on the mountains on Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, (top and bottom arrows respectively in the photo) seeing snow this early in the season on the mounatins is somewhat rare.
McIDAS images of GOES-15 (GOES-West) 6.5 µm water vapor channel data showed an upper-level low that moved from east to west over the Hawaiian Islands during the 13 October - 14 October 2014 period. This low forced the development of widespread showers and thunderstorms, especially over the Big Island of Hawai'i - and even produced some snowfall in the highest elevations around the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.
© Mihai Barbu/Corbis Bears’ normal diet of nuts and acorns has been scarce leading to more frequent cases of bears venturing into towns in search of food.
In the depths of Transylvania, Romania, a war against one of Europe's largest brown bear populations is looming.
Following a string of cases involving damage to private property from bears in recent months, Csaba Borboly, a senior politician from the Transylvanian region, has called for the army to be brought in. "The [bear] problem needs the involvement of specialised state institutions such as the police, the paramilitary and even the army."
© Nordjyllands PolitiCollapsed road after floods in North Jutland, Denmark.
North Jutland police are reporting a road near Sindal has been completely closed after parts of it collapsed as a result of the heavy rain and flooding.
Other roads, including the E39 motorway, as well as parts of the railway network have also been badly affected. Earlier today police advised motorists to avoid travel where possible. Some roads looked more like lakes after the prolonged rainfall. Extra water pumps have been brought in to help alleviate the flooding. Several houses in Lendum are said to have been completely flooded.
Microfossils reveal warm oceans had less oxygen, according to Syracuse geologists
Researchers from Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences are pairing chemical analyses with micropalaeontology - the study of tiny fossilized organisms - to obtain a better understanding of how global marine life was affected by a rapid warming event over 55 million years ago.
Their findings are the subject of an article published in the journal Paleocenography (John Wiley & Sons, 2014).
"Global warming impacts marine life in complex ways, of which the loss of dissolved oxygen [a condition known as hypoxia] is a growing concern," says Zunli Lu, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences and a member of Syracuse's Water Science and Engineering Initiative. "Moreover, it's difficult to predict future deoxygenation that is induced by carbon emissions, without a good understanding of our geologic past."
Lu says this type of deoxygenation results in larger and thicker oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) in the world's oceans. An OMZ is the layer of water in an ocean where oxygen saturation is at its lowest.
Much of Lu's work revolves around the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a well-studied analogue for modern climate warming. Documenting the expansion of OMZs during the PETM is problematic due to the lack of a sensitive, widely applicable indicator of dissolved oxygen.
© coolgeochem.syr.eduForaminiferas registers iodine ratio to calcium, determining oxygen levels.
Their findings are the subject of an article published in the journal Paleocenography (John Wiley & Sons, 2014).
© www.sciencecodex.comAsst. Professor of Earth Sciences Zunli Lu among those researching oxygen saturation.
Lu says this type of deoxygenation results in larger and thicker oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) in the world's oceans. An OMZ is the layer of water in an ocean where oxygen saturation is at its lowest.
Much of Lu's work revolves around the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a well-studied analogue for modern climate warming. Documenting the expansion of OMZs during the PETM is problematic due to the lack of a sensitive, widely applicable indicator of dissolved oxygen.
Get ready: Winter will arrive without delay, according to Accuweather.com, with frigid air from another polar vortex seeping down into the country's midsection and Northeast as early as November
Now, with a month-and-a-half left of fall, the forecasts are in, and another polar vortex looks set to hit the Northeast from January and not let up for months.
Accuweather are reporting that New York will again experience above-average snow and freezing temperatures, however neither is expect to hold out as long as the brutal winter of 2013/14.
'I think, primarily, we'll see that happening in mid-January into February but again, it's not going to be the same type of situation as we saw last year, not as persistent,' AccuWeather.com Expert Long-Range Forecaster Paul Pastelok said.
Additional images
Members of the army pulling dead bodies of trekkers from the Thorung La mountain pass on the Annapurna Circuit, near Muktinath, in Mustang district
The route, 100 miles north-west of the capital, Kathmandu, was filled with international hikers during the peak October trekking season, when the air is generally clear and cool. Government administrator Yama Bahadur Chokhyal said rescuers recovered 10 more bodies from the Thorong La pass area - which lies at over 17,000 feet - where they had been caught in a sudden blizzard on Tuesday.
The bodies were not yet identified. Rescuers recovered the bodies of four other hikers - two Poles, an Israeli and a Nepalese - from the area on Wednesday.
Additional images
© AP Photo/NOAAThis image provided by NOAA Thursday Oct. 16, 2014 shows Hurricane Gonzalo, lower right. At 2 a.m. EDT Thursday the storm had top sustained winds near 125 mph (205 kph) and was centered about 555 miles (1,075 kilometers) south south-west of Bermuda early Thursday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. It was moving north at 9 mph (20 kph).
The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami says conditions in Bermuda, where a hurricane warning is in effect, will begin deteriorating later Friday morning. Gonzalo is about 240 miles (385 kilometers) south-southwest of Bermuda and packing top sustained winds of 130 mph (215 kph)s.
Forecasters say Gonzalo is moving north-northeast at 15 mph (24 kph) and its eye is expected near Bermuda by Friday afternoon or evening.
Bermuda residents have been rushing to make preparations for Gonzalo, days after Tropical Storm Fay damaged homes and knocked down trees and power lines there.
"Tropical Storm Ana is currently moving to the west and is expected to turn toward the northwest by Friday, taking it in the direction of the Hawaiian Islands," said weather.com meteorologist Linda Lam. "Ana is expected to gradually strengthen and could still become a hurricane. Bands of rain may reach the Big Island as soon as late Friday and large swells are expected to begin to reach Hawaii late Thursday."
As a result, Gov. Neil Abercrombie has declared an emergency for the state, according to the Associated Press. The proclamation will last through Oct. 24, allowing the state to access state and federal resources for preparation and recovery, if needed, the report adds.
Residents on the Big Island and Oahu have been urged to prepare for serious weather conditions that could be life-threatening if the proper precautions aren't taken, KITV.com reports.
© Discovery NewsBasket Star
While several international news outlets had identified the angler as a Mr Ong Han Boon, Mr Ramlan said on Wednesday morning that this was a case of mistaken identity.
"He must have been one of the people that shared the video, and they thought he was the fisherman that caught it," said Mr Ramlan, 53, an assistant project manager.
He said he caught the basket star - a distant relative of the starfish - at one of his usual fishing spots off Pulau Ubin late last month.
Yes, you can laugh that California's epic drought is even hitting people who spend their time in the water. Or that, finally, urban dwellers are feeling the pinch of an environmental catastrophe that has devastated the state's farms and ranches.
Yet the move by Pacifica to shut off showers at popular surf spots is a sign that coastal cities, where the bulk of California's population resides, are belatedly getting serious about saving water. And a new report from the California Water Resources Control Board shows that such efforts are making a difference.
For instance, the North Coast County Water District, which serves Pacifica's 39,000 residents, has cut its water consumption 26 percent in August compared with the previous year. That means on average, each Pacifica resident used about 2,434 gallons of water in August, compared with 3,283 gallons in August 2013.
That helped California cut statewide water consumption by 11.5 percent in August, up from 7.5 percent in July, and 4 percent in June compared to the previous year, according to the report.
Comment: These little foraminiferas seem to be the hot ticket item in oceanic research of late. They are also being studied for ocean temperature variants (see Warm Gulf Stream water continued to flow into icy Nordic seas during last Ice Age)
Even with the iodate application analyzing iodine-to-calcium ratios, the findings are first and foremost still estimates. It is unclear from this article as to whether the foraminiferas are the only defining edge considered in this comparison. It is also unlikely that this research could historically stretch the findings to broad-stroke a human influence on global warming, since this would "theoretically" be the first-of-its-kind "climate alteration" along with the falsely maligned culprit CO2. (Unbiased research shows global warming is happening at this time to all the planets in the solar system.) If the OMZs are present, and have been periodically for eons, it may be due to repeated cycles of a grander nature than the comparatively recent meddling of human activity.
It is more likely that methane released into the oceans (increasingly happening NOW) would overwhelm any influence added CO2 could have to produce a warming effect. Methane is 21 times more potent a greenhouse gas and, by the way, greatly affects the level of oxygenation in both deep and shallow ocean waters since the aerobic oxidation of methane consumes oxygen. Methane-caused oxygen depletion has been proven to create or expand OMZs.