Earth Science
A major earthquake just offshore rattled Chileans, killing five people and shaking the Earth so strongly the tremor was felt in places across South America. …several coastal towns… saw flooding from small tsunami waves…
Indicates Newport-Inglewood fault more important than previously thought
Risk in the next 30 years of 'big one' increased from about 4.7% to 7.0%
However, study says risk of smaller quakes has actually gone down
…"We stumbled on these things completely by chance," says Susannah Maidment of Imperial College London, whose team was trying to study bone fossilisation by cutting out tiny fragments of fossils.
Instead, they found blood-like cells and collagen from 75-million-year-old dinosaur fossils – 10 million years before T. rex appeared.
Although the cells are unlikely to contain DNA, those extracted from better preserved fossils using the same technique may do so, she says. …
Scientists say they've discovered Washington state's first dinosaur fossil… 80 million-year-old bone fragment probably belonged to an older, smaller cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex. …Researchers have been examining the nearly 17-inch-long, 9-inch-wide fragment for about three years. They say it probably came from a 3-foot thigh bone.…
At least 42 people were killed Tuesday and 1,117 have been injured after a major earthquake struck Nepal, triggering landslides and toppling buildings less than three weeks after the Himalayan nation was ravaged by its worst quake in decades.
Tuesday's magnitude-7.3 earthquake was centered near the Chinese border between Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, and Mt. Everest. It was followed closely by at least five aftershocks measuring from magnitude-5.6 to magnitude-6.3. …
Among newly discovered, 160-million-year-old, fossils in northeastern China is one of Yi qi (“Yi” meaning “wing” and “qi” meaning “strange”), a pigeon-sized dinosaur without feathered wings. Instead, Yi qi has a long bone extending from the wrist, which resembles the structure of bat wings. …completely new to dinosaurs, and only by comparing it to bats, flying squirrels and the like could the researchers, published in Nature, even guess as to its function.…
…planet Earth is in the process of forming one monumental supercontinent… [land masses imaged from 150M years ago to 175M years from now]
Fossil hunters in Chile have unearthed the remains of a bizarre Jurassic dinosaur that combined a curious mixture of features from different prehistoric animals. The evolutionary muddle of a beast grew to the size of a small horse and was the most abundant animal to be found 145 million years ago, in what is now the Aysén region of Patagonia. … one of the most remarkable dinosaur finds of the past 20 years, and promises to cause plenty of headaches for paleontologists hoping to place the animal in the dinosaur family tree. … “I don’t know how the evolution of dinosaurs produced this kind of animal, what kind of ecological pressures must have been at work…” a horny beak, flatter teeth for chomping plants, a small head and slender neck. “It’s a therapod that turned vegetarian….”
At least 876 people are known to have died in a powerful earthquake in Nepal, with many more feared trapped under rubble, officials say. The 7.8 magnitude quake struck an area between the capital, Kathmandu, and the city of Pokhara… Tremors were felt across the region, with further loss of life in India, Bangladesh, Tibet and on Mount Everest.…
Climate change is a moral challenge threatening the rights of the world’s poorest people and those who deny it are not using God’s gift of knowledge, says presiding [US Episcopal]] bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori…
…8,000 fans at a concert in Leipzig jumped so energetically that they set off a "mini-earthquake".… strong enough to rip the wall paper in houses in the Waldstrassen neighbourhood. …Geophysical Observatory in nearby Collm was alerted.…
Before throwing the snowball, Inhofe said, "In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, 'You know what this is?' It's a snowball. Just from outside here. So it's very, very cold out, very unseasonal. So here Mr. President, catch this."
Holland, Oklahoma’s seismology chief, is determined to find the cause of an unprecedented earthquake epidemic in the state. And he suspects pumping wastewater from oil and gas drilling back into the Earth has a lot to do with it.
“If my research takes me to the point where we determine the safest thing to do is to shut down injection -- and consequently production -- in large portions of the state, then that’s what we have to do,” Holland said. “That’s for the politicians and the regulators to work out.”
[Of course, confirmation bias could not be possible when he's looking for confirmation of his theory.]
Republican congressional candidate Lenar Whitney released a video Friday calling global warming "the greatest deception in the history of mankind." Calling Al Gore and other liberal politicians pushing global warming "delusional," Whitney reminds viewers that "The earth has done nothing but get colder each year since the film's release." Whitney then goes on to cite a litany of other scientific facts to rebut and mock global warming believers, including President Obama, whom she calls "foolish" for blaming his lousy economy on warming. [Watch on YouTube]
…found seven partial skeletons, amounting to around 150 bones…. "Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth…. Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m. Standing with its neck up, it was about 20m high - equal to a seven-storey building." …lived in the forests of Patagonia between 95 and 100 million years ago….
Pterodaustro guinazui… lived about 100 million years ago… had about 1,000 teeth… had a diet similar to that of flamingos: small crustaceans like brine shrimp… flamingos do get their pink color from what they eat…
It appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency…. We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate…
334 . 700 million years ago the Earth was completely encased in ice and it wasn't the first time.
There's a long cycle periodicity of hundreds of millions of years for the whoppers. We're at the extreme tail end of a warm period between them right now.
Everything from Lucy onward for the past several million years has been a "warm" period that's due to end very soon.
The long period Ice ages come on hard/fast too, like within 50-200 years and you're in the shit. Its like flipping a light switch. You don't ease into them.
Posted by: @PurpAv at September 30, 2012 11:32 AM
246 But at cruise altitude, flying in the lower stratosphere at 35,000’ or higher, switching to tanks with high-sulfur jetfuel would create denser, wider contrails with sulfate aerosols serving as cloud condensation nuclei, mimicking the effect of cosmic rays. The clouds so created would be long-lasting, and brighter with a high albedo reflecting more sunlight back into space.
Thousands of jetliners flying high over the planet every day would create a cooler earth, and no more global warming. The sulfate aerosols are high enough in the stratosphere not to precipitate and cause acid rain - and high-sulfur jetfuel is less expensive than low-sulfur.
This solution to global warming isn’t just cost-free, it saves money. It’s perfectly designed to drive human-hating eco-fascists completely nuts.
-- Jack Wheeler
Posted by: Up with people! at September 30, 2012 10:47 AM
The evidence suggests that the Indo-Australian plate began to be ripped apart between 8 million and 10 million years ago. The 2012 earthquake is just one of many that have likely ripped along the same region since this process began.
After millions more years of similar earthquakes, the ruptures will begin to favor a particular path, giving rise to a new plate boundary, and separating today's existing plate into two.
Delescluse said that the singular earthquake measured in 2012 offers a glimpse of this process in unprecedented detail.
On June 27, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement saying it had "complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), the group created by the world's science academies to provide advice to international bodies."
Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world's most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming… cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as "proof" that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.
The "recommendations" issued by the IAC were not minor adjustments to a fundamentally sound scientific procedure. Here are some of the findings of the IAC's 2010 report. … In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed. … authors are selected from a "club" of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.… The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report "too political" (p. 25).
Plenary sessions to approve a Summary for Policy Makers last for several days and commonly end with an all-night meeting. Thus, the individuals with the most endurance or the countries that have large delegations can end up having the most influence on the report (p. 25).
How can such a process possibly be said to capture or represent the "true consensus of scientists"?
Another problem documented by the IAC is the use of phony "confidence intervals" and estimates of "certainty" in the Summary for Policy Makers (pp. 27-34). Those of us who study the IPCC reports knew this was make-believe when we first saw it in 2007. Work by J. Scott Armstrong on the science of forecasting makes it clear that scientists cannot simply gather around a table and vote on how confident they are about some prediction, and then affix a number to it such as "80% confident." Yet that is how the IPCC proceeds.
The IAC authors say it is "not an appropriate way to characterize uncertainty" (p. 34), a huge understatement. Unfortunately, the IAC authors recommend an equally fraudulent substitute, called "level of understanding scale," which is more mush-mouth for "consensus."
… The news release means that the IAC report was right. That, in turn, means that the first four IPCC reports were, in fact, unreliable. Not just "possibly flawed" or "could have been improved," but likely to be wrong and even fraudulent.
It means that all of the "endorsements" of the climate consensus made by the world's national academies of science -- which invariably refer to the reports of the IPCC as their scientific basis -- were based on false or unreliable data and therefore should be disregarded or revised. It means that the EPA's "endangerment finding" -- its claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat to human health -- was wrong and should be overturned.
Now add to that three more potentially dangerous faults in the Bellingham Basin, a tectonically active area along the coast of Washington, near the Canadian border. A team of researchers has discovered active tectonic faults in this region nearly 40 miles (60 kilometers) north of any previously known faults. ... capable of triggering magnitude-6.0 to -6.5 earthquakes ... "...if they ruptured again along their entire length, some of that rupture would be out in the water, and there might be a tsunami hazard related to that...."
Just as Jim Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has recently likened man-made global warming to “a great moral issue” like “slavery,” a group of 49 former NASA scientists issued a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolton asking for the administration refrain from including “unproven and unsupported remarks” about climate science in its communications.
a new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China that lived 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil record preserved remains of fluffy down, making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever found.
If a T. rex relative had feathers, why not T. rex? Scientists said the evidence is trending in that direction
[h/t Ace of Spades]
The Washington Monument, which is slated for repairs after it was damaged in an earthquake last year, appears to be sinking, according to preliminary data collected by the National Geodetic Survey.
The earthquake Tuesday in the Eastern United States was felt at 13 locations with nuclear power plants, from North Carolina to Michigan, but reactors shut down at only one, North Anna in Virginia, 10 miles from the epicenter. There was no damage to nuclear systems at any of the sites, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. [And we believe them! They're from the government!]
The Federal Communications Commission says it is looking into the failures of cell phone service that occurred Tuesday afternoon after the East Coast earthquake. For as long as an hour after the quake, wireless customers in Washington and elsewhere reported being unable to get calls through. Jamie Barnett, chief of the FCC's Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau, said that when the cell phone networks get overloaded by call volume, crucial calls might fail to go through. "We were very concerned with the fact that 9-1-1 calls were also congested," he said. "We want to make sure that people who need emergency help are able to get it."
Shortly after the rare 5.8 earthquake in Virginia rattled Washington D.C. Tuesday, a Park Service spokesman said there was "absolutely no damage" to the Washington Monument. A more thorough assessment discovered a crack in the landmark. Not long after, additional damage was found, including three or four "significant" cracks. The monument has been closed indefinitely for further inspection and repairs, which will take at least a few weeks
A little nature lesson for ya, bubala; these people were camping amid wild animals.Wild animals have three tasks in life — eat, defecate, procreate. Been doing it a long time. The bear was underweight because midsummer is not peak feeding season.... —Pistol Pete at PoliNation