Earth ChangesS


Igloo

US: Arizona - Dividends of a Real Winter - 144 inches of snow in Flagstaff

Image
© Jake Bacon/Arizona Daily SunA Blue Heron flies lazily across Marshall Lake beneath the snow-capped San Francisco Peaks on Thursday. After a winter of heavy snowfall, area lakes are at, or near, capacity.
Northern Arizona is seeing the dividends of this winter in area reservoirs and damp forests. What's less certain is this year's fire season. Despite this past week's wildfire in Timberline, firefighters expect the fire season to be moderate or light, because the big logs lying on the ground are still saturated from the snow.

But the finer fuels like grasses and twigs are beginning to dry, leading to the expectation of severe fires in grasslands and deserts at lower elevations. Depending on the weather and the wind, as seen last week in Timberline, the bigger fuels could dry, too.

"The future weather is what will determine whether it will be a moderate or severe fire season," said Buck Wickham, division chief of the Peaks Ranger District on the Coconino National Forest.

Frog

Bahamas islands were giant labs for lizard experiment

Image
© Danita Delimont/AlamyThink that'll save you?
Wrapping entire islands in the Bahamas with netting, introducing snakes to two other islands and measuring the fitness of hundreds of lizards using treadmills: one of the most ambitious ecological field experiments ever conducted has resolved a long-standing question about the evolution of lizards.

Lizards of the genus Anolis are found throughout the American tropics, where they vary widely in size and shape depending on ecological conditions. It has long been thought that predation is the most important evolutionary force for continental lizard populations, whereas on islands competition between lizards themselves is more important. Until now, though, no one had tested this experimentally.

Ryan Calsbeek and Robert Cox of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, cut no corners in their experiment. They excluded predators from two small, uninhabited islands in the Bahamas by wrapping the islands - about 1000 square metres each - with netting to keep out predatory birds. Meanwhile, they enhanced predation on two other islands by introducing lizard-eating snakes.

Bizarro Earth

Mercury high in Japanese town that hunts dolphins

Image
© AP Photo/Shizuo KambayashiDolphin sashimi, raw slices from the breast of a striped dolphin, is served during lunch at Moby Dick, a hotel run by the local government, in Taiji, southwestern Japan, Sunday, May 9, 2010.
Taiji - Residents of the dolphin-hunting village depicted in Oscar documentary The Cove have dangerously high mercury levels, likely because of their fondness for dolphin and whale meat, a government lab said Sunday.

The levels of mercury detected in Taiji residents were above the national average, but follow-up tests have found no ill effects, according to the National Institute for Minamata Disease. The tests were done on hair samples from 1,137 volunteers of the town's roughly 3,500 residents.

"The results suggest there is a connection between hair mercury levels and eating cetaceans," Director Koji Okamoto told reporters at town hall.

Mercury accumulates up the food chain, so large predators such as dolphins, tuna and swordfish tend to have the highest levels. The latest studies published by the Japanese government show that meat from bottlenose dolphins had about 1,000 times the mercury content of that from sardines.

Fetuses and small children are particularly vulnerable to mercury, which affects the development of the nervous system. The Health Ministry recommends that pregnant women eat at most 2.8 ounces (80 grams) of bottlenose dolphin per two months.

Binoculars

BP's First Attempt to Divert Gulf Oil Leak Fails

Image
On the Gulf of Mexico - It could be at least a day before BP can make another attempt at putting a lid on a well spewing thousands of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, as a big box meant to siphon the oil away sat idle and encased in ice crystals.

The company's first attempt to divert the oil was foiled, its mission now in serious doubt. Meanwhile, thick blobs of tar washed up on Alabama's white sand beaches, yet another sign the spill was worsening.

It had taken about two weeks to build the box and three days to cart it 50 miles out and slowly lower it to the well a mile below the surface, but the frozen depths were just too much. BP officials were not giving up hopes that a containment box - either the one brought there or another one being built - could cover the well.

But they said it could Monday or later before they decide whether to make another attempt to capture the oil and funnel it to a tanker at the surface would be tried. The box was moved hundreds of feet away while officials tried to figure out their next move.

Attention

Environmentalists, Lawyers, and Fishermen Go After BP

Image
© U.S. NavyMembers of Elastec/American Marine Inc. inspect a fire boom containing collected oil prior to conducting a controlled burn in the Gulf of Mexico, May 5, 2010.
Reporting from New Orleans

Even though a 4-story, 100-ton metal box, also known as a "Coffer Dam," has been placed on a gushing wellhead of crude deep in the Gulf of Mexico, the disaster here is far from over.

Countless gallons of crude has covered over 2000 miles of water and there is no guarantee that the Coffer Dam will stop the leak 100 percent, which means that more crude will spill into Gulf.

Environmentalists are worried that the damage could be irreversible, saying that the shrimp and fishery industry that people in Louisiana and lower Mississippi have depended on for generations may be coming to an end.

Arrow Down

Is Gulf Oil Rig Disaster Far Worse Than We're Being Told?

Image
© NaturalNews
Reports about the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill have been largely underestimated, according to commentators, including Paul Noel, a Software Engineer for the U.S. Army at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. He believes that the pocket of oil that's been hit is so powerful and under so much pressure that it may be virtually impossible to contain it. And Noel is not the only person questioning the scope of this disaster.

A recent story from the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) reports that many independent scientists believe the leak is spewing far more than the 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, per day being reported by most media sources. They believe the leak could be discharging up to 25,000 barrels (more than one million gallons) of crude oil a day right now.

The riser pipe that was bent and crimped after the oil rig sank is restricting some of the flow from the tapped oil pocket, but as the leaking oil rushes into the well's riser, it is forcing sand with it at very high speeds and "sand blasting" the pipe (which is quickly eroding its structural integrity).

Bizarro Earth

Magnitude 7.2 - Northern Sumatra, Indonesia

Indon earthquake_090510
© USGSEarthquake Location
Date-Time:
Sunday, May 09, 2010 at 05:59:44 UTC

Sunday, May 09, 2010 at 12:59:44 PM at epicenter

Location:
3.728°N, 96.081°E

Depth:
61.4 km (38.2 miles)

Distances:
200 km (125 miles) SW of Lhokseumawe, Sumatra, Indonesia

220 km (135 miles) SSE of Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia

625 km (390 miles) W of KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia

1620 km (1010 miles) NW of JAKARTA, Java, Indonesia

Hourglass

Oil catcher dome hits snag near leak site -BP exec

BP says will take 48 hours to assess new solution

Robert, Louisiana - London-based BP Plc's plan to lower a giant containment dome to trap oil from a blown-out Gulf of Mexico oil well on the sea floor hit a technical obstacle on Saturday in the form of methane hydrates, or flammable ice, a BP (BP.L) executive said on Saturday.

BP officials are scrambling for a solution after methane hydrates stopped up the 98-ton containment dome as they were maneuvering it into place, Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, told reporters at a briefing in Robert.

"As we were placing the dome over the leak source a large volume of hydrates formed inside the top of the dome, requiring us to move the dome to the side of the leak point," Suttles said. "I wouldn't say it's failed yet."

Bizarro Earth

Volcanic Sunset

Clouds of ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano are blowing across Europe again, closing airports and causing fantastic sunsets. Vincent Phillips sends this picture, taken May 7th from Hale Village near Liverpool, England:

Image
© Vincent Phillips Hale Village near Liverpool, England
"Volcanic ash from Iceland continues to influence our skies here in the UK, and as a massive ash cloud now gathers off the coast of Ireland, there could be many more fantastic volcanic sunsets and sunrises in the days ahead," says Phillips.

Bad Guys

Investigation: Rule Change Helped BP Dodge Preparedness Reporting on Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico Project

containment for oil spill
© The Associated PressThe containment vessel is lowered into the Gulf of Mexico at the site of the Deepwater Horizon rig collapse, Thursday, May 6, 2010
A rule change two years ago by the federal agency that regulates offshore oil rigs allowed BP to avoid filing a plan for handling a major spill from a blowout at its Deepwater Horizon project - exactly the kind of disaster now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil rig operators generally are required to submit a detailed "blowout scenario." But the federal Minerals Management Service issued a notice in 2008 that exempted some drilling projects in the Gulf under certain conditions.

BP met those conditions, according to MMS, and as a result, the oil company had no plan written for the Deepwater Horizon project, an Associated Press review found.

In a series of interviews, BP spokesman William Salvin insisted the company was nevertheless prepared to handle a blowout because it had a 582-page regional plan for dealing with a catastrophic spill anywhere in the central Gulf.

"We have a plan that has sufficient detail in it to deal with a blowout," Salvin said.

MMS has long been criticized as too cozy with the industry it regulates.