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Bizarro Earth

Oil Spill? Just Nuke It

Charles W. Moore
Telegrph Journal Canada
Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:55 UTC
Image
© The Associated Press
The winning sand sculpture in the Fiesta of Five Flags sand sculpture contest at Pensacola Beach, Fla., on Sunday, displays a can of BP oil being poured over a pelican. Several oil spill-themed sculptures were built by angry residents.
I figured there were probably all sorts of technical reasons why this was a fanciful notion, but it turns out not so much. Apparently the former Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) used nuclear weapons on five separate occasions between 1966 and 1981 to successfully cap blown-out gas and oil surface wells (there was also one attempt that failed), which have been documented in a U.S. Department of Energy report on the U.S.S.R.'s peaceful uses of nuclear explosions.

Russia is now urging the United States to consider doing the same. Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily newspaper, asserts that although based on Soviet experience there's a one-in-five chance a nuke might not seal the well, it's "a gamble the Americans could certainly risk."

Reportedly, the U.S.S.R. developed special nuclear devices explicitly for closing blown-out gas wells, theorizing that the blast from a nuclear detonation would plug any hole within 25 to 50 meters, depending on the device's power. Much as I had idly imagined, massive explosions can be employed to collapse a runaway well on itself, thus plugging, or at least substantially stanching, the flow of oil.
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Cloud Lightning

Malaysia: Lightning Struck Two Teenagers in Klang


The Star
Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:00 UTC
Two members of a funeral band cheated death when they were struck by lightning while standing under a tree.

M. Gunaseelan, 18, and V. Jeevanesan, 16, were waiting for a funeral procession to start at about 2.30pm yesterday when the incident occurred.

According to witnesses, there was a thunderclap, followed by a bolt of light and the youths screamed.

Gunaseelan and Jeevanesan were thrown several metres away by the impact of the lightning.

The lightning bolt caused the base of the tree to be charred.

Several cars in the area were also covered in soil flung up from the ground where the bolt of lightning had hit.

At the time of the incident, it was cloudy but not raining.
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Bizarro Earth

Russian Volcano Releases Plume of Smoke


All Voices
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:00 UTC
Klyuchevskaya Volcano
© All Voices
Klyuchevskaya Volcano

Piercing a layer of clouds, the summit of Klyuchevskaya Volcano on the Russian Federation's Kamchatka Peninsula released a faint plume in early June 2010. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image on June 7. A faint brown-gray plume blows toward the north (image right), contrasting with the bright clouds below. Debris flows - evidence of earlier volcanic activity - darken the volcano's slopes.

Klyuchevskaya(or Kliuchevskoi) is a stratovolcano that reaches a height of 4,835 meters (15,863 feet). It is both the highest and most active volcano on Kamchatka. Klyuchevskaya's 700-meter- (2,300-foot-) wide summit crater has been modified by numerous geologically recent eruptions, including eruptions recorded since the late seventeenth century.
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Bizarro Earth

Magnitude 6.0 - Vanuatu


USGS
Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:23 UTC
Vanuatu Quake_100610
© USGS
Earthquake Location
Date-Time:
Wednesday, June 09, 2010 at 23:23:19 UTC

Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 10:23:19 AM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in Other Time Zones

Location:
18.586°S, 169.471°E

Depth:
17.8 km (11.1 miles)

Region:
VANUATU

Distances:
110 km (70 miles) NNE of Isangel, Tanna, Vanuatu

155 km (95 miles) SE of PORT-VILA, Efate, Vanuatu

365 km (230 miles) NNE of Tadine, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia

1950 km (1210 miles) ENE of BRISBANE, Queensland, Australia
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Blackbox

12,000 endangered saiga antelope found dead in Kazakhstan

Bryan Nelson
Mother Nature Network
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:52 UTC
Image
© Wiki Commons/GNU
SAIGA: These unique animals, which have distinct bulbous noses, once roamed over a vast area of the Eurasian steppe zone.
Mysterious deaths are a devastating blow to the unique-looking animal, which has seen its population decline by 95% since 1995.

Nearly 12,000 critically endangered saiga antelope have been found dead within a 17 square-mile area of the Ural region of western Kazakhstan, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The cause of the mysterious mass loss is still unclear, though initial investigators believed the animals may have been poisoned.

"This is a tragic and shocking event. It's particularly unfortunate that the population was just emerging from an unusually harsh winter, and that those struck down are mostly females and this year's calves," said professor E.J. Milner-Gulland, chair of the Saiga Conservation Alliance.
      Read More...
Bizarro Earth

BP's latest containment effort INCREASES oil leak flow


Press TV
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:59 UTC
Image

The oil is still gushing into the sea.
The US says the latest containment technique employed by BP to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may have increased the oil flow rate by up to five percent.

Speaking at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee hearing on Wednesday, US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that BP's capping tactic may have intensified the flow of gushing oil.

"The rate of increase may have been somewhere between 4 and 5 percent over what it was before," Salazar was quoted by AFP as saying.

The London-based company has managed to insert a loose-fitting containment cap over the well. But the oil still is gushing and BP says the containment operation won't be completed until it drills a relief well -- a process that is expected to last until August.

"I am still disgusted with the lack of leadership and no one stepping up to take charge and say, 'We're not going to let the oil hit the beaches,'" said Tony Kennon, mayor of Orange Beach, Alabama, who on Saturday confronted a top BP official at a news conference, CNN reported.
      Read More...
Cloud Lightning

US: Woman Killed by Lightning Just Before Boyfriend Was to Propose in North Carolina

Paul Thompson
The Daily Mail
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:48 UTC
Image
© The Daily Mail
Bethany Lott was killed by lightning while hiking in North Carolina - just minutes before her boyfriend proposed
A grieving fiancé has spoken of his grief after his girlfriend was struck and killed by lightning as he was about to propose.

Richard Butler was able to slip the engagement ring on his girlfriend's finger as paramedics battled to save her life.

But they were unable to save 25-year-old Bethany Lott, who had been struck twice by bolts of lightning as she hiked with her boyfriend in the mountains of North Carolina.

Mr Butler, who suffered burns in the strike, said he had been minutes away from proposing to his girlfriend of a year when tragedy struck.

He said: 'The lightning came on quick, a matter of a minute.

'Her final words, she turned and looked at me and said: "Baby, look, isn't it so beautiful."'
      Read More...
Cloud Lightning

US: Man Struck by Lightning in Alabama


WAFF 48
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:05 UTC
A man was struck by lightning in DeKalb County while working on phone lines.

Assistant General Manager of Farmers Telecommunications Chris Bryant said a technician was struck by lightning just after 11:30 Wednesday morning.

Bryant said the man was working to repair a line at 315 County Road 595.

He was taken to DeKalb Regional Medical Center where he was treated and released.
      Read More...
Cloud Lightning

Tornado rips central Illinois, kills 7 in Ohio


Chicago Sun-Times
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:08 UTC
Amateur video footage:


A tornado unleashed a "war zone" of destruction, destroying homes and an emergency services building as a line of storms killed at least seven people in Ohio and damaged a swath of central Illinois.

Storms collapsed a movie theater roof in Downstate Elmwood and ripped siding off a building at a Michigan nuclear plant, forcing a shutdown. But most of the worst was reserved for a 100-yard-wide, 7-mile-long strip southeast of Toledo now littered with wrecked vehicles, splintered wood and family possessions.
      Read More...
Laptop

BP 'manipulating search results' on Google following oil spill

Murad Ahmed
Times Online
Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:17 UTC
BP is being accused of trying to manipulate the search results on sites like Google and Yahoo, as it attempts to salvage its battered image following the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company is purchasing terms such as "oil spill", "Deepwater Horizon" and "Gulf of Mexico", so that when a user types these words into the search engines, the results prominently feature a "sponsored link" to BP's official page on its response to the spill.

Critics have described BP's move as unethical. Maureen Mackey, a writer on the Fiscal Times, an online news site, said: "What it effectively does is that it bumps down other legitimate news and opinion pieces that are addressing the spill... and [BP are] paying big money for that."
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