Category: Environment & Weather

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, written by Jared Diamond in 1987.

Fascinating reading.

Did you see the nearly full moon rise last evening and think how large it seemed when near the horizon? Here’s a fascinating photo of Moonrise Over Seattle with an attempt at explaining why the moon appears larger to us when near the horizon. (It’s an illusion.)

Another great moonrise photo.

The full moon in June is called the Strawberry Moon or the Rose Moon.

An earthquake shook a wide area of Southern California today but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

It was the third significant quake to affect California since Sunday when a magnitude-5.2 quake shook the Anza area of Riverside County. A 7.0 quake struck Tuesday night 90 miles off Northern California. …

The 1:53 p.m. [PDT] quake had a preliminary magnitude of 5.3 and was centered near Yucaipa in San Bernardino County east of Los Angeles….

Los Angeles Times

At 1,645 feet deep, Lake Tahoe ranks as the world’s 10th deepest lake. Twenty-two miles long and 12 miles wide, it harbors many legends. But perhaps most persistent is the myth of a humped-backed, scaly serpentine the locals call Tessie.

What do you think? Real or myth?

Read more from the Los Angeles Times.

The New Yorker has put online the first two parts of Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part series on climate change.

Part I

Part II

Part III is in this week’s issue and, one hopes, will be online soon.

This photo was taken last week from the attic of John Muir’s home, directly above his study, or what he called his “scribble den.” Muir lived in the home in Martinez, California, from 1890 until his death in 1914. Most of his most important work was done while living and working here, though of course he travelled widely.

The service station appears to be a more recent addition to the neighborhood. One imagines that the conservationist would appreciate the convenience of being able to walk across the street for a half-gallon of milk or a Slushee, or to fill up the family SUV.

(The photo was taken through a window pane.)

John Muir National Historic Site

It’s Jupiter shining brightly, followed by the moon, followed by the star Spica.

Jupiter is the third-brightest object in the night sky, after the Moon and Venus. But Venus isn’t in view right now, so there’s nothing to compete with Jupiter.

Spica is a true star — one of the brightest in the night sky, even from its distance of 260 light-years.

Look for Spica, the Moon, and Jupiter lining up atop the southeastern horizon in early evening. The Moon will move closer to Spica during the night, and appear quite close to the star at dawn tomorrow.

StarDate Online

The moon will be full Sunday.

Each day…
• 25 tons of dust and sand-size particles burns up entering the atmosphere.

About once a year…
• A car-size asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere but typically burns up before reaching the surface.

Every thousand years or so…
• An object the size of a football field hits Earth and causes significant damage to the impact area.

Every few million years…
• If an object larger than 0.6 miles across struck Earth, it could cause mass extinction and threaten civilization.

From a graphic accompanying an article in The Washington Post on scientists keeping a lookout.

Paleontologists have recovered what appear to be soft tissues from the thighbone of a 70 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex, potentially enabling dinosaur research to make a leap into the study of the animals’ actual physiology and perhaps even their cell biology, they said today.

Working with the remains of a T. rex unearthed in northeast Montana’s celebrated Hell Creek formation, the research team systematically removed minerals and fossilized deposits from the thighbone, exposing blood vessels, bone cells and possibly intact blood cells with nuclei.

The Washington Post

Democratic Senators Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka of Hawaii and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana voted to permit drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (along with 48 Republicans).

Thought you’d want to know.

From CNN.com:

John and Jackie Knill of Vancouver, British Columbia, pose at a resort in Khao Lak, Thailand, on December 12, 2004. The couple were killed when the December 26 tsunami struck the resort. Their digital camera was found, and though the camera was destroyed, searchers were able to recover photos of the tsunami from its memory card.

Among the most dramatic photos NewMexiKen has scene. Take a look.

Link via kottke.

Bob Whitson’s Howling At A Waning Moon is a superb summary of things related to the environment and environmental politics. NewMexiKen hasn’t linked to the site that much, but it is one I follow and I recommend.

It’s also beautifully redesigned (though it was always pretty).

“By 4 p.m. [Monday], 32.03 inches of rain had fallen in downtown Los Angeles since the season began July 1. That’s more than three times the normal total for the date, and almost eight times the amount that had fallen by this time last year.”

Los Angeles Times

From The New York Times:

Once allied, the administration and the oil industry are now far apart on the issue. The major oil companies are largely uninterested in drilling in the refuge, skeptical about the potential there. Even the plan’s most optimistic backers agree that any oil from the refuge would meet only a tiny fraction of America’s needs.

From Space.com:

A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.

The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.

What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.

Must be part of that intelligent design thing.

Composite photo of the planets worthy of a click — The Solar System – Planetary Scale

From the Los Angeles Times:

GILLETTE, Wyo. — When he turned Mt. Rushmore into his granite canvas, sculptor Gutzon Borglum wrote that the faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln would remain visible, Lord willing, “until the wind and the rain alone shall wear them away.”

Borglum’s vision endures in the Black Hills of South Dakota about 130 miles from here, but for nearly a month every year, it may soon become harder to see the famous faces through the man-made haze generated by the addition of 50,000 gas wells in northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana.

It is just one of several ways in which the largest expansion of natural gas drilling approved by the federal government is expected to degrade air quality in the region that today has the clearest skies in the lower 48 states.

The federal Bureau of Land Management, under pressure from the White House to fast-track energy production, approved the drilling plan two years ago without incorporating any requirements to reduce the resulting air pollution.

Government scientists expect that the drilling expansion, combined with a planned increase in coal mining and oil drilling in the northern Great Plains, will nearly double smog-forming emissions and greatly increase particulate matter pollution in a thinly populated region that has produced less than 3% of the amount of unhealthful air found in Los Angeles.

The BLM moved forward with the project despite its own air quality analysis, which concluded that the pollution would cloud views at more than a dozen national parks and monuments, exceed federal air quality standards in several communities and cause acid rain to fall on mountain lakes, where it could harm fish and wildlife.

The Environmental Protection Agency, National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service expressed similar concerns to the BLM.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, on each of those few cold, rainy nights in southern California supermarkets sell 1 million-plus bundles of firewood.

For ten years in Orange County, NewMexiKen got by splitting and burning lumber scraps from nearby housing developments.

Also from The New York Times an article on whether the Anchorage Zoo should keep a solo elephant — mostly indoors.

From DisasterRelief.org:

The Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Canary Islands’ La Palma island may not erupt again for centuries, but when it does disaster could spread across oceans. Shaken loose by the eruption, a gigantic chunk of the mountain’s western flank could slide into the Atlantic – shoving massive tsunamis toward the coasts of Africa, Europe, South America, Newfoundland and possibly even the United States.

In the worst-case scenario (detailed in an article in the Sept. 1 issue of Geophysical Research Letters by geophysicists Steven Ward of the University of California at Santa Cruz and Simon Day of University College, London) half a trillion tons of volcanic rock would slip into the ocean.

Within five minutes, a wall of water would rise to 1,500-feet high and travel at high-speed 30 miles out to sea. The wave would weaken before it reached land, but it still could be 900 feet high when it would slam into nearby islands.

Over the next five to 45 minutes, a series of waves would ripple outward, their crests reaching 150 feet before barreling into the African coast, Spain and England.

Six hours after the eruption, waves reaching 30 feet would arrive in Newfoundland and 45- to 60-foot waves would bombard South America, swamping large parts of land. Nine hours after the eruption, crests reaching 30 to 70 feet would collide into the East Coast of the United States.

From the BBC via various blogs:

Hidden deep beneath the Earth’s surface lie one of the most destructive and yet least-understood natural phenomena in the world – supervolcanoes. Only a handful exist in the world but when one erupts it will be unlike any volcano we have ever witnessed. The explosion will be heard around the world. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.

Normal volcanoes are formed by a column of magma – molten rock – rising from deep within the Earth, erupting on the surface, and hardening in layers down the sides. This forms the familiar cone shaped mountain we associate with volcanoes. Supervolcanoes, however, begin life when magma rises from the mantle to create a boiling reservoir in the Earth’s crust. This chamber increases to an enormous size, building up colossal pressure until it finally erupts.

The last supervolcano to erupt was Toba 74,000 years ago in Sumatra. Ten thousand times bigger than Mt St Helens, it created a global catastrophe dramatically affecting life on Earth. Scientists know that another one is due – they just don’t know when… or where.

It is little known that lying underneath one of America’s areas of outstanding natural beauty – Yellowstone Park – is one of the largest supervolcanoes in the world. Scientists have revealed that it has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago… so the next is overdue.

And the sleeping giant is breathing: volcanologists have been tracking the movement of magma under the park and have calculated that in parts of Yellowstone the ground has risen over seventy centimetres this century. Is this just the harmless movement of lava, flowing from one part of the reservoir to another? Or does it presage something much more sinister, a pressurised build-up of molten lava?

Scientists have very few answers, but they do know that the impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend. Huge areas of the USA would be destroyed, the US economy would probably collapse, and thousands might die.

And it would devastate the planet. Climatologists now know that Toba blasted so much ash and sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere that it blocked out the sun, causing the Earth’s temperature to plummet. Some geneticists now believe that this had a catastrophic effect on human life, possibly reducing the population on Earth to just a few thousand people. Mankind was pushed to the edge of extinction… and it could happen again.