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First pictures of endangered Saharan cheetah

Rowan Hooper
New Scientist
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:53 UTC
Saharan cheetah
© Farid Belbachir / ZSL / OPNA
This is one of the first set of camera-trap photographs of the Saharan cheetah.

The first camera-trap photographs of the critically endangered Saharan cheetah have been taken in Algeria.

Estimates put the numbers of the animal, also known as the Northwest African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus hecki) as low as 250, but, says Sarah Durant of the Zoological Society of London, this is guesswork. "Virtually nothing is known about the population," she says.

Durant, working with staff from the Office du Parc National de l'Ahaggar (OPNA), says the photographs were taken as part of the first systematic camera trap survey across the central Sahara, covering an area of 2,800 square kilometres.

The survey identified four different Saharan cheetahs, using spot patterns unique to each individual. The two photographs released to the media show extremely thin, hungry-looking cats.
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Better Earth

US: Peregrine falcons making Minnesota comeback


KXMC
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:32 UTC
Peregrine falcon
© Unknown
St. Paul - The rare peregrine falcon is making a comeback in Minnesota.

The peregrine, which is the fastest bird in the world, was nearly extinct by the 1960s. But after intense restoration projects in the 1970s and 80s, Minnesota now has more than 50 peregrine pairs that raised 93 young last year.

Lori Naumann of the Minnesota DNR calls it a "great success story." It was removed from the U.S. endangered species list in 1999, and Naumann says it could come off Minnesota's threatened species list in the next few years.
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Better Earth

Alpine mountain range revealed beneath Antarctic ice

Catherine Brahic
New Scientist
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:33 UTC
Image
© BAS
Remote sensing reveals the profile of the ice-locked peaks (lower graph).

A series of prefabricated buildings perched on stilts create a boxy but unremarkable hamlet on the Antarctic ice. What is astonishing about this research base is that it is set 500 metres above the peaks of a 3500-metre mountain range.

The Gamburtsev mountains are not a new discovery - they were first located 50 years ago by a team of Russian scientists. But little was known about their scale and morphology. Now, an international team has returned with data revealing that if you could strip away the ice, the view would look rather like the European Alps.

The team set up camp in two locations near to Dome A - the highest point on the ice sheet, where temperatures average -30 °C.

For weeks they flew two aircraft over the ice, exploring the hidden peaks with radar and aeromagnetic sensors, and covering a distance equivalent to three trips around the globe. Gravity sensors on the surface of the ice collected yet more data.
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Better Earth

Are Planets Living Super-Organisms? World's Leading Expert Says "Yes"


Daily Galaxy
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:11 UTC
mt

Japan's Maruyama Shigenori, one of the world's leading geophysicists, is working on a global formula for a vast new field of study that would include dozens of disciplines collaborating to produce an overall picture of the Earth.

Maruyama is creating a new institute called the Center for Bio-Earth Planetology will be launched in 2009 and fully dedicated to creating a new conception of life in space.He wants to find out if the continents will merge again in 250 million years to form a single super-continent; how meteorites change the chemical composition of the Earth; and what the connection is between the temperature of a planet and its magnetic field, which protects plants and animals from being bombarded with cosmic radiation, which in turn influences the rate of mutations and thus the development of new forms of life.

As he connects the dots from astronomy to life sciences, the outlines emerge of an all-encompassing image of entire planets, which appear as living super-organisms.

He believes that expanding the study of life sciences to the core of our world and the depths of outer space will help us find distant relatives of our own Earth -- planets that could also sustain life.
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Magnet

Northern lights are quietest in decades

Tim Mowry
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:44 UTC
Fairbanks - Ester photographer LeRoy Zimmerman made the switch to digital cameras this year to better capture the phenomenon known as the aurora borealis.

Now he just needs some aurora to work with.
Aurora Borealis
© Bob Martinson / The Associated Press
Aurora Borealis near Palmer, Alaska, on Feb. 29, 2008.

"There's nothing; it's really disappointing," Zimmerman said. "I've got my digital camera. I'm ready. Let's go."

Zimmerman isn't the only one wondering where the aurora borealis, commonly referred to as northern lights, are this winter. The Interior's normal wintertime light show has been noticeably absent this winter.

"I talk to people in town and everybody who knows what I do asks me, 'Where is the aurora? What's happening?'" said Dirk Lummerzheim, a research professor who studies the aurora borealis for the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

It's a legitimate question, and Lummerzheim has the answer.

"We are at the solar minimum," the UAF professor said. "When solar activity dies down like this, the aurora activity also diminishes in the north."
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Hourglass

Chile's Chaiten volcano spews molten rock, ash

Monica Vargas
Reuters
Fri, 20 Feb 2009 05:29 UTC
Chaiten Volcano
© Reuters/Cristian Brown / Intendencia Region de los Lagos/Handout
The Chaiten volcano spews a cloud of ash in Chaiten, some 1,220 km (760 miles) south of Santiago February 19, 2009.

Santiago - Chile's Chaiten volcano, which erupted spectacularly last year, spewed a vast cloud of ash as well as gas and molten rock on Thursday in a partial collapse of its cone, prompting a fresh evacuation.

Television footage showed a cloud of ash billowing into the sky over the town of Chaiten, which lies about six miles from the crater.

Authorities evacuated 160 people from the area. Around 7,000 nearby residents were evacuated last year after the volcano, dormant for thousands of years, erupted. The government is planning to relocate the town.

Officials from Chile's national emergency office, Onemi, flew over the volcano and saw a kilometer-long crack in the cone of ash that has steadily grown in the crater, part of which has collapsed.

"Large quantities of gases and pyroclastic material were observed," Onemi said in a statement, adding that rains in the area combined with the ash could cause flooding in and around the town of Chaiten, located 760 miles south of the capital Santiago.
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Network

Ice Ages and Sea Level

Dr. David Archibald
Watts Up With That
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:59 UTC
The Earth is currently in an interglacial period of an ice age that started about two and a half million years ago. The Earth's current ice age is primarily caused by Antarctica drifting over the South Pole 30 million years ago. This meant that a large area of the Earth's surface changed from being very low-albedo ocean to highly reflective ice and snow. The first small glaciers were formed in Antarctica perhaps as long ago as 40 million years. They expanded gradually until, about 20 million years ago, a permanent ice sheet covered the whole Antarctic continent. About 10 million years later, glaciers appeared on the high mountains of Alaska, and about 3 million years ago, ice sheets developed on lower ground in high northerly latitudes.
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Better Earth

Basic Geology Series - CO2 in the Atmosphere and Ocean

Steven Goddard
Watts Up With That
Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:17 UTC
Ice cores clearly demonstrate the close relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature, as seen below.
Ice cores and co2
© unknown

This relationship has been well understood by geologists for longer than Al Gore has been alive.

As ocean temperatures rise, the solubility of CO2 in seawater declines. Thus increasing ocean temperature moves CO2 from the ocean into the atmosphere, and decreasing ocean temperatures move CO2 out of the atmosphere and back into the ocean. As you can see in the graph below, a 10C shift in temperature causes about 30% reduction in dissolved CO2. Closely corresponding to what we see in the measured ice core graph above.
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Better Earth

Basic Geology Series - Vacationing on Venus

Steven Goddard
Watts Up With That
Sun, 08 Feb 2009 04:05 UTC
Magellan radar imaged Venus
© NASA
Magellan radar imaged Venus

In some ways, Venus is similar to earth. It is about the same size as the earth, has a nickel-iron core, and has volcanic activity due to radioactive heating in the interior. But that is where the similarities end. Venus has some serious problems as a vacation spot - mainly that it is extremely hot and the atmosphere is a thick cloud of sulfuric acid, CO2 and other unpleasant chemicals.

So how did Venus get to be like that, and why is the earth different?
  1. Venus is closer to the sun, which makes it hotter and prevents formation of oceans due to excessive evaporation.
  2. Venus suffered a traumatic collision in it's early days, which causes it to rotate very slowly and parallel to the ecliptic. This makes for long afternoons (thousands of hours long) which get extremely hot.
  3. Because of 1 and 2, Venus was never able to sequester CO2 in limestones like the earth.
For the last few billion years, volcanoes on earth have been spewing out the greenhouse gases H2O, CO2 and CH4, as well as, H2SO4, SO2, H2S, HCl and Cl2. If not for the oceans and limestone sequestration, we would have a very thick, hot acidic atmosphere like Venus which could not support life. Fortunately, temperatures and other conditions on earth were just right to allow huge volumes of CO2 to move into the oceans and precipitate carbonate rock layers, where the CO2 became sequestered. This makes earth the pleasant place which we all enjoy.
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Sun

The heliospheric current sheet as solar cycle proxy

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That
Tue, 17 Feb 2009 03:45 UTC
Heliospheric current sheet
© Public Domain
Heliospheric current sheet

Many readers are familiar with a number of solar proxies used to gauge the activity of the sun, the most familiar being sunspot counts and type. However they aren't the only metric you can use to determine when one cycle ends and another begins. The Heliospheric Current Sheet sounds a bit like a "newsletter" and in a sense it is, because it can announce the true end of solar cycle 23.

From Wikipedia:
The heliospheric current sheet (HCS) is the surface within the Solar System where the polarity of the Sun's magnetic field changes from north to south. This field extends throughout the Sun's equatorial plane in the heliosphere.The shape of the current sheet results from the influence of the Sun's rotating magnetic field on the plasma in the interplanetary medium (Solar Wind). A small electrical current flows within the sheet, about 10−10 A/m². The thickness of the current sheet is about 10,000 km.

The underlying magnetic field is called the interplanetary magnetic field, and the resulting electric current forms part of the heliospheric current circuit.[4] The heliospheric current sheet is also sometimes called the interplanetary current sheet.
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