Earth ChangesS


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Undersea River Discovered Flowing on Sea Bed

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© University of LeedsA 3-D radar image, using false colour, of the undersea river channel where it enters the Black Sea from the Bosphorus Strait.
Massive underwater rivers that flow along the bottom of the oceans have been discovered by scientists.

Researchers working in the Black Sea have found currents of water 350 times greater than the River Thames flowing along the sea bed, carving out channels much like a river on the land.

The undersea river, which is up to 115ft deep in places, even has rapids and waterfalls much like its terrestrial equivalents.

If found on land, scientists estimate it would be the world's sixth largest river in terms of the amount of water flowing through it.

The discovery could help explain how life manages to survive in the deep ocean far out to sea away from the nutrient rich waters that are found close to land, as the rivers carry sediment and nutrients with them.

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India: 23 Pilgrims Killed as Truck Falls into Gorge, Lashed by Torrential Rains, in Uttarakhand

Twenty-three pilgrims from Haryana were today killed when a truck in which they were travelling fell into a gorge in Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand, which has been lashed by torrential rains during the last two days.

The incident took place at Dabrani on Rishikesh-Gangotri national highway about 70 kms from here when the truck, which was on its on way to Gangotri, fell into the 150 meter-deep gorge killing 23 'Kanwarias'( shiv devotees), Uttarkashi District Magistrate Saurabh Jain told PTI.

20 bodies have been fished out by the police and ITBP personnel, he said, adding efforts are on to extricate three more bodies from the accident site.

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Ramesh Pokhariyal Nishank has also ordered a magisterial probe into the incident.

Bizarro Earth

More than 800 dead in Pakistani floods

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© AP Photo/Mohammad SajjadA woman sits outside her house flooded by heavy monsoon rains in Peshawar, Pakistan on Friday, July 30, 2010. Boats and helicopters struggled to reach hundreds of thousands of villagers cut off by floods in northwest Pakistan on Friday as the government said it was the deadliest such disaster to hit the region since 1929.
Flooding in Pakistan has killed more than 800 people in a week, a government official said Saturday as rescuers struggled to reach marooned victims and some evacuees showed signs of fever, diarrhea and other waterborne diseases.

The flooding caused by record-breaking rainfalls caused massive destruction in the past week, especially in the northwest province, where officials said it was the worst deluge since 1929. The U.N. estimated Saturday that some 1 million people nationwide were affected by the disaster, though it didn't specify exactly what that meant.

The information minister for the northwest province, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, said reports coming in from various districts across the northwest showed that more than 800 people had died due to the flooding. Many people remain missing.

Floodwaters were receding in the northwest, officials said, but fresh rains were expected to lash other parts of the country in the coming days.

Bizarro Earth

Study changes picture of U.S. quake hazards

The New Madrid Fault
© USGSNew Madrid's Violent Past
In the central and eastern U.S., earthquakes are felt over a broader area than comparable-size quakes in the western United States because of differences in geology. Although only of magnitude 6, the earthquake that occurred near Saint Louis in 1895 affected a larger area than the 1994 magnitude 6.7 Northridge, California, quake, which caused $40 billion in damage and economic losses and killed 67 people. A repeat of the 1895 earthquake could prove disastrous for the Midwest, where structures are not as earthquake resistant as those in California.
The risk of earthquakes in the U.S. Midwest may be more widespread than geologists have believed, but a "big one" may be less likely at Missouri's New Madrid fault, researchers said on Wednesday.

They found that rivers that swept away sediments at the end of the last ice age could have triggered a series of large earthquakes that began in 1811 in the New Madrid seismic zone.

This suggests that these fault segments are unlikely to fail again soon, but the same process could trigger earthquakes on nearby fault segments, they reported in the journal Nature.

When glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age between 16,000 and 10,000 years ago, monstrous rivers formed and washed away 40 feet of sediment.

Eric Calais of Purdue University in Indiana and colleagues developed a computer model that shows this could have caused the crust underneath to slowly lift and cause the magnitude 7 and greater quakes that shook the Missouri-Arkansas border region in 1811 and 1812, causing the Mississippi River to run backwards and ringing church bells as far away as Boston.

"Models indicate that fault segments that have already ruptured are unlikely to fail again soon, but stress changes from sediment unloading and previous earthquakes may eventually be sufficient to bring to failure other nearby segments that have not yet ruptured," Calais and colleagues wrote.

Areas such as Charleston, South Carolina, hit by a highly damaging quake in 1886, may be susceptible to more activity cased by the processes described by Calais, geophysicist Mark Zoback of Stanford University in California wrote in a commentary.

Scientists have a good understanding of earthquakes at major faults where one of the Earth's tectonic plates touches another one -- such as in California, Indonesia and Haiti.

Less well understood are intraplate faults -- faults in the middle of a plate -- like the New Madrid fault.

Igloo

Giant South Dakota hailstone breaks US records

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© AP Photo/National Weather ServiceThis photo taken July 24, 2010 provided by the NOAA National Weather Service shows a hailstone that was found by a ranch hand in Vivian, S.D., on June 23, 2010. The hailstone has set U.S records. It measured 8 inches in diameter and weighed 1 pound, 15 ounces. The previous record for diameter was 7 inches for a hailstone found in Aurora, Neb., in 2003. The previous record for weight was 1.67 pounds for a stone in Coffeyville, Kan., in 1970.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says a giant hailstone that fell in central South Dakota has broken U.S. records, even though the man who found it says it melted somewhat while waiting to be evaluated.

The NOAA's National Climate Extremes Committee says the hailstone found in the town of Vivian on July 23 measures 8 inches in diameter and weighs 1 pound, 15 ounces. The committee says the South Dakota ice chunk breaks records set by hailstones discovered in Nebraska and Kansas.

Ranch hand Leslie Scott says the hailstone was about 3 inches larger when he found it. Scott says he put it in the freezer but that he couldn't prevent some melting because of an hours-long power outage that followed the storm.

Camera

Northern lights and noctilucent clouds over Alberta, Canada

A high speed solar wind stream is buffeting Earth's magnetic field, and this is causing geomagnetic activity around the poles. Zoltan Kenwell of Edmonton, Alberta, witnessed this display on July 27th:

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© Zoltan Kenwell/InFocus Imagery Inc.
"It was a beautiful night on the Alberta prairies," says Kenwell. "Aurora activity was subtle, but definitely present. The full Thunder Moon was lighting up the canola fields and the arrival of a few noctilucent clouds just put the icing on the cake!"

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© Zoltan Kenwell/InFocus Imagery

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Five Killed as Wildfires Sweep Central Russia

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© Mikhail Voskresensky/ReutersMen walk in front of a burning building outside the town of Vyksa, some 150 km (93 miles) southwest of the Volga city of Nizhny Novgorod, July 29, 2010.
Forest fires swept across central Russia on Friday, killing at least five people and forcing the evacuation of thousands during the hottest summer since records began 130 years ago, officials said.

Fanned by strong winds, raging fires ripped through woods and fields already scorched by the heatwave, complicating the efforts of firefighters.

"We don't know where to go," said Galina Shibanova, 52, standing outside the charred remains of her family home in the town of Maslovka in the Voronezh region, about 500 kilometers (300 miles) south of Moscow.

"We called the emergency services, and not one person answered the phone," she said, adding at least 50 homes had been destroyed.

Bizarro Earth

Floods Kill 100 People in Pakistan as Monsoon Hits

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© Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesLocal residents remove wood from their collapsed huts in a flood-hit area of Nowshera
At least 100 people have been killed by rivers bursting their banks in north-west Pakistan as the country was hit by its worst floods for 80 years.

Floodwater destroyed a dam and washed away countless bridges in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, leaving an estimated 400,000 people stranded, after two days of monsoon rains.

Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the regional information minister, said the deluge made it difficult to reach people in need of shelter and clean drinking water.

"A rescue operation using helicopters cannot be conducted due to the bad weather, while there are only 48 rescue boats available for rescue," he said.

The province's deputy health director, Ali Khan, added that he feared there may be as many as 500 casualties. Medical workers had launched a programmed to immunise people against cholera and typhoid, he said.

Ten of the victims died when their homes collapsed in the provincial capital Peshawar.

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China: Zoo Accidentally Gasses Giant Panda to Death

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© Getty ImagesWorkers had been disinfecting an air raid shelter inside the zoo when the gases leaked through the ventilation system into the panda house.
A Chinese zoo accidentally killed one of its giant pandas after a faulty ventilation system pumped toxic gas into its enclosure.

Quan Quan, a 21-year-old panda at Jinan Zoo in Shandong province, in eastern China, died after inhaling a mixture of chlorine, chlorine hydride and carbon monoxide, according to a spokesman.

The panda, which had given birth to seven cubs, arrived on loan at the zoo in 2007 from the Wolong panda reserve in Sichuan province. Quan Quan was one of the zoo's star attractions, helping to boost visitor numbers to around 30,000 a day.

Workers had been disinfecting an air raid shelter inside the zoo when the gases leaked through the ventilation system into the panda house.

"The ventilation system was built in 1995," said a spokesman. "It was used to keep the panda house cool, but it fed large amounts of smoke into the panda enclosure."

Binoculars

World's Most Ancient Creatures Found in Scottish Field

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© Edmund Fellowes/Press AssociationThe tadpole shrimp, Triops cancriformis, which was part of two colonies found at Caerlaverock on the Solway Coast of Dumfriesshire.
Two colonies of age-old and endangered tadpole shrimps discovered alive and well near Solway coast

A field near Gretna in Dumfriesshire might not be an obvious place to find the world's oldest living creatures, but a team of scientists has done just that.

Two colonies of a prehistoric shrimp that evolved when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth have been found alive and well in the Caerlaverock nature reserve on the Solway coast.

The discovery has led experts to think there could be more of the little crustaceans, which are listed as endangered species, elsewhere in the area.

The ancient creatures, known as Triops cancriformis or tadpole shrimps, are thought to have the oldest pedigree of any living animal. Fossil evidence suggests they have hardly changed in the more than 200m years that they have been around.