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Residents of the southwestern town of Carcassonne slipped and slid over centimetres of snow on Tuesday as an unusually late cold snap hit France.
© Photo courtesy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee CouncilThe massive clean-up efforts for the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound.
As oil gushes from the Gulf sea bottom, it's interesting to ponder what past spills have done to ecosystems. Under the right - or, better said, the wrong - conditions, oil can linger for decades and longer, causing permanent damage. How is Prince William Sound, site of the Exxon Valdez disaster, doing these days?
From MSNBC:
Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil in Alaska's Prince William Sound, oil persists in the region and, in some places, "is nearly as toxic as it was the first few weeks after the spill," according to the council overseeing restoration efforts.
"This Exxon Valdez oil is decreasing at a rate of 0-4 percent per year," the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council stated in a report marking Tuesday's 20th anniversary of the worst oil spill in U.S. waters. "At this rate, the remaining oil will take decades and possibly centuries to disappear entirely."
... Moreover, surveys "have documented lingering oil also on the Kenai Peninsula and the Katmai coast, over 450 miles away," according to the council.
None of that was expected "at the time of the spill or even ten years later," it added. "In 1999, beaches in the sound appeared clean on the surface. Some subsurface oil had been reported in a few places, but it was expected to decrease over time and most importantly, to have lost its toxicity due to weathering. A few species were not recovering at the expected rate in some areas, but continuing exposure to oil was not suspected as the primary cause."
It turns out that oil often got trapped in semi-enclosed bays for weeks, going up and down with the tide and some of it being pulled down into the sediment below the seabed.
© Norbert Wu/Minden Pictures/FLPATo die for
Habitat: Deep in the seas around Japan, and the north-west Pacific; fish tanks in sushi restaurants, looking nervous
If you were looking for an animal to take the title of "most kick-ass fish in the sea", then the tiger puffer would have to be a strong contender.
Not only is it lethally poisonous - though that doesn't stop people trying to eat it - and able to scare off predators by inflating itself to become much larger than normal, when it is young it munches on its own brothers and sisters.
Tiger puffers attach their eggs to rocks near the bottom of the sea, often at the mouths of bays. The larvae hatch, then move to estuaries or mudflats once they have grown a little. Having put on a lot more weight, they head out to sea.
It's no innocent childhood for the pufferfish, though, as Shin Oikawa of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, and colleagues found when they hatched tiger puffer larvae in the lab and monitored them for two months.
© Japan Stock/AlamyWhat's going on below?
A team led by Takayuki Kaneko at the University of Tokyo's Volcano Research Center has found that over the centuries the magma's silica levels have gradually increased. High silica tends to indicate large explosions, suggesting eruptions have become more violent. Large amounts of basalt rich in aluminium oxide were also found, which can trigger an eruption when it collides with silica.
Based on the pressures required to form both materials, Kaneko believes the two mineral composites are housed in separate chambers under Fuji: one deep chamber 20 kilometres below the volcano, rich in basaltic magma, and a shallower chamber housing the silica 9 kilometres underground.
He says the deep rumble of low-frequency earthquakes beneath Fuji in 2000 and 2001 suggests movement inside the basaltic magma chamber, and adds he would not be surprised if Fuji erupts in the very near future.
© USGSEarthquake Location
Wednesday, May 05, 2010 at 16:29:02 UTC
Wednesday, May 05, 2010 at 11:29:02 PM at epicenter
Location:
4.081°S, 101.069°E
Depth:
18.1 km (11.2 miles) (poorly constrained)
Distances:
135 km (85 miles) WSW of Bengkulu, Sumatra, Indonesia
215 km (135 miles) WSW of Lubuklinggau, Sumatra, Indonesia
355 km (220 miles) SSE of Padang, Sumatra, Indonesia
680 km (420 miles) WNW of JAKARTA, Java, Indonesia
© AFP / VALERY HACHE
France's Côte d'Azur was struggling today to retain its seasonal spirit after huge waves and strong winds left the coastline badly damaged a week before the world's rich and famous are due to arrive for the 63rd Cannes film festival.
Waves between four and 10 metres high crashed into the Promenade des Anglais in Nice and the Croisette in Cannes yesterday afternoon, overturning cars and battering seafront restaurants.
As teams of workers laboured through the night to sweep away the displaced sand, clean the pavements and clear the detritus, the deputy mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, said the cost of the damage would run into millions of euros.
But, he insisted, the freak weather would not be allowed to disrupt the film festival, which is due to open next Wednesday. "There will be a few days of putting things right but everything will be ready, clean, impeccable and sunny," he said.
The winter after this one?
While Arctic ice has always varied greatly, expanding and contracting during the course of a year and also from year to year and decade to decade, the expansion of the Arctic ice this decade is significant in one respect: It acts to disprove the models that had predicted that the Arctic ice in this century would not recover as it had in previous centuries.
The expansion of the Arctic ice also acts to support a growing number of reports that Earth could be in for a period of global cooling. In one recent example, on April 14 New Scientist in an article entitled "Quiet Sun Puts Europe on Ice" warned its readers as follows: "BRACE yourself for more winters like the last one, northern Europe. Freezing conditions could become more likely: winter temperatures may even plummet to depths last seen at the end of the 17th century, a time known as the Little Ice Age. That's the message from a new study that identifies a compelling link between solar activity and winter temperatures in northern Europe."
© Unknown
An Arctic cold snap that began in 1998 could last for years, freezing the northern marine passage and making it impassable without icebreaking ships, said Oleg Pokrovsky of the Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory.
"I think the development of the shelf will face large problems," Pokrovsky said Thursday at a seminar on research in the Polar regions.
Scientists who believe the climate is warming may have been misled by data from U.S. meteorological stations located in urban areas, where dense microclimates creates higher temperatures, RIA Novosti quoted Pokrovsky as saying.
"Metres of snow every day for months on end", as seems to have occurred before, would kill everyone in northern countries - Russia, Poland, Germany, Scandinavia, northern Britain, Canada, northern USA - from Moscow to Seattle - in just a few days.
Elementary risk analysis shows that, at the very least, detailed studies of possible counter-measures and even preparations for a "crash program" are URGENTLY needed.
Governments have already spent hundreds of millions, supposedly to avert global warming, yet even the worst-case risk is decades away.
The coming ice age could be just one winter away.
Nobel Laureate Al Gore purchased a $9 million mansion in the luxurious hills of Montecito, California, recently, and with the exception of the Los Angeles Times and Fox News, America's media couldn't care less.
You think it might be because the Gore-loving press wouldn't want people to consider the possibility that all of his global warming hysteria was really about lining his wallet and not saving the planet?
Formulate a response to that question as you look at what all that money the former Vice President is making off of spreading this myth can buy (h/t Doug Ross):
You think it might be because the Gore-loving press wouldn't want people to consider the possibility that all of his global warming hysteria was really about lining his wallet and not saving the planet?
Formulate a response to that question as you look at what all that money the former Vice President is making off of spreading this myth can buy (h/t Doug Ross):
