Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Costa Rica's Arenal Volcano Erupts

Costa Rica's Arenal volcano has erupted, spewing geysers of lava, ash and toxic gases from its crater and forcing the evacuation of the national park where it is located.

The 1633-metre-tall cone-shaped mountain in northern Costa Rica shuddered into activity at 4am this morning issuing eight successive rivers of lava that flowed down its steep slopes, National Volcanology and Seismology Observatory expert Elicer Duarte said.

He said nobody was at risk from the eruptions but authorities as a precaution evacuated the Arenal National Park, 80km north-east of San Jose.

The Arenal Volcano is one of Costa Rica's major tourist attractions and the park has scores of hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and shopping centres.

No estimates were given of how many people were inside the park when the eruption began.

Arenal's last major eruption in July 1968 killed 89 people. Smaller eruptions have occurred at least six times over the past 35 years.

Arrow Up

Flashback Deep sea methane: Energy Saviour Or Impending Disaster?

Image
© Juna Kurihara
Methane trapped under the oceans can save us or destroy us.

In December 2003, an international team of geologists announced that they had successfully tapped a new energy source. Methane hydrate, a solidified form of natural gas bound into ice, lurks under the seafloor along the margins of every continent and under the Arctic permafrost. On the Mackenzie River delta in the Canadian Northwest Territories, engineers drilled hundreds of meters below the permafrost into the hydrate deposits. They punched fractures into the layers of sediment and pumped hot water into the earth, releasing the natural gas from its icy prison.

This first harvest of methane hydrate could mark a new direction for the energy industry. Engineers once assumed that the energy costs of melting the frozen fuel would outweigh the gains. But rising oil and gas prices and creative uses of existing technology, like the recent test in the Canadian Arctic, are beginning to change their minds. The United States Geological Survey estimates that the total amount of natural gas in methane hydrates surpasses all of the known oil, coal, and gas deposits on Earth in energy content, although only a fraction of the frozen fuel will be extractable. The hydrates can form at any latitude on Earth if temperature and pressure conditions are right, and are usually mixed with sediment under the ocean floor.

Bizarro Earth

US: Earthquake Magnitude 3.7 - Arizona

Image
© USGS
Date-Time:
Monday, May 24, 2010 at 07:27:06 UTC

Monday, May 24, 2010 at 12:27:06 AM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
33.386°N, 109.150°W

Depth:
5 km (3.1 miles) set by location program

Region:
ARIZONA

Distances:
41 km (25 miles) NNE (20°) from Clifton, AZ

41 km (25 miles) NNE (24°) from Morenci, AZ

51 km (32 miles) SW (225°) from Reserve, NM

210 km (131 miles) NE (51°) from Tucson, AZ

636 km (395 miles) ESE (118°) from Las Vegas, NV

Bizarro Earth

Brazil: Earthquake Magnitude 6.5 - Acre

Image
© USGS
Date-Time:
Monday, May 24, 2010 at 16:18:29 UTC

Monday, May 24, 2010 at 11:18:29 AM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
8.072°S, 71.569°W

Depth:
580.5 km (360.7 miles)

Region:
ACRE, BRAZIL

Distances:
125 km (75 miles) ESE of Cruzeiro do Sul, Acre, Brazil

330 km (205 miles) E of Pucallpa, Peru

460 km (285 miles) SSW of Tabatinga, Amazonas, Brazil

2715 km (1680 miles) WNW of BRASILIA, Distrito Federal, Brazil

Bizarro Earth

Iceland volcano eruption ceases activity

Image
© Unknown
A geophysicist says Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano is no longer in activity raising hopes the eruption which has heavily disrupted European flights for more than a month could be over.

Magnus Gudmundsson of Iceland University says he can confirm the activity of the crater has stopped and no magma is coming up.

However he's cautioned it's too early to tell whether this is the end of the eruption or just a temporary stop in activity.

The volcano began erupting on April 14 and during its highest activity peak in the week after it began erupting it released enough ash to cause the biggest aerial shutdown in Europe since World War II affecting more than 100-thousand flights and eight million passengers.

Bizarro Earth

Indonesian Volcano Spews Ash and Lava

Lombok - An active volcano has erupted in Indonesia, spewing ash and lava at least 1,500 metres into the sky, damaging crops but not threatening villagers, an official said today.

Mount Baru Jari on Lombok island, near Bali, has been active for several months but yesterday's eruption was "big," the island's volcano monitoring official Mutaharlin told AFP.

"From yesterday evening to early today, the volcano erupted three times and was accompanied by tremors. The first eruption spewed ash and lava 1,500 to 2,000 metres high," he added.

Lava flowed into a lake, pushing its temperature to 35 degrees Celsius, up from 21 degrees Celsius, Mutaharlin said.

"The smoke had spread as far as 12 kilometres and dozens of acres of crop land were covered in ash," he said.

"But the eruptions haven't reached dangerous levels yet, so we're not evacuating villagers," he added.

Arrow Down

At Least 10 Killed as Landslide Cause Passenger Train to Derail in China

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© Maria Chapligina/RIA NovostiRescuers fear the death toll might further rise.
At least 10 people were killed when a landslide caused a train from Shanghai to the tourist city of Guilin in south China, to derail on Sunday, Xinhua said citing rescue sources.

At least 55 people were injured, two severely, as the locomotive and eight carriages of the train went off tracks in the southeastern Jiangxi province.

Rescuers fear the death toll might further rise.

"We are afraid the casualty may soon rise, as four of the derailed train cars were severely deformed in the accident," a police officer told Xinhua.

"Each of the train carriages has 118 seats. It is not yet immediately known how many passengers were on board," he added.

Fish

Cracking Down on the Ocean's Pirate Fishermen

overfishing
© Reuters/Pichi Chuang A fisherman carries a yellowfin tuna out of his boat at the fishing port of Donggang, Pingtung county, southern Taiwan May 19, 2010. The UN Environment Program's green economy initiative warned on Monday that the world might be fishless by 2050 unless fishing fleets are slashed and stocks allowed to recover
The oceans are being emptied of fish. A forthcoming United Nations report lays out the stark numbers: only around 25% of commercial stocks are in a healthy or even reasonably healthy state. Some 30% ocf fish stocks are considered collapsed, and 90% of large predatory fish - like the bluefin tuna so prized by sushi aficionados - have disappeared since the middle of the 20th century. More than 60% of assessed fish stocks are in need of rebuilding, and some researchers estimate that if current trends hold, virtually all commercial fisheries will have collapsed by mid century.

"Fisheries across the world are being plundered, or exploited at unsustainable rates," said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme.

In some respects, Steiner could have stopped at "plundered," because as much damage as the legal, commercial fishing trade has wrought on the oceans, it's the illegal trade that could spell their doom. Legal fishermen - the everyday farmers of the seas - have licenses they must protect and laws they must obey. But illegal fishing - often done on the high seas where regulations are lax and catch limits can be exceeded with impunity, or in the coastal waters of developing nations, which lack the ability to fight back - abides by rules of its own. Now, a team led by Stefan Flothmann of the Pew Environment Group has published a study in the May 20 issue of Science showing just how hard stopping the illegal fishing scourge will be.

Question

Sri Lanka: Frogs Signalling Possible Earthquake?

Environmentalists are dismissing rumours of an impending earthquake in the country that were sparked off after thousands of small frogs swarmed residences in Moratuwa last week.

Residents of Indibeda, Moratuwa panicked when thousands of frogs converged in the area, entering the houses and roaming the streets. A similar phenomenon had occurred in China a couple of years back and was dismissed as a natural migration but just a few days later, the region was rocked by a 7.8 magnitude quake. This information resulted in several wild theories of an earthquake in Sri Lanka within the next couple of days.

Noted environmentalist Jagath Gunewardene dismissed these rumours and assured that investigations had been carried out into the phenomenon. Environmentalists have now come to the conclusion that it was the drastic climate change that was the cause for the incident.

"It is really a climate change that triggers this sort of thing - this sort of phenomenon has been recorded before in other countries where a large number of amphibians come out their habitats and go in search of new habitats in anticipation of a weather change. This occurred early in the morning and sure enough, torrential downpours in Colombo followed just a couple of hours later", Gunewardene explained.

There have been no reports of any more swarming occurring after the initial report last week.

Alarm Clock

A New Oil Rush Endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the Planet

earth, oil
Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources.

Make no mistake: we're entering the danger zone. And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake.

It may never be possible to pin down the precise cause of the massive explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20th, killing 11 of its 126 workers. Possible culprits include a faulty cement plug in the undersea oil bore and a disabled cutoff device known as a blow-out preventer. Inadequate governmental oversight of safety procedures undoubtedly also contributed to the disaster, which may have been set off by a combination of defective equipment and human error.

But whether or not the immediate trigger of the explosion is ever fully determined, there can be no mistaking the underlying cause: a government-backed corporate drive to exploit oil and natural gas reserves in extreme environments under increasingly hazardous operating conditions.