5 Ways to Create a Natural Disaster

Surprisingly, humans have the capacity to create natural disasters, by interfering a little. And these are accidental disasters, who knows what we could cause if we really put our mind to it?

Drilling for gas or oil can cause mud volcanoes, disappearing lakes and earthquakes.

Cloud seeding can create flooding and hurricanes.

Ready how it all works at New Scientist

Earthquakes getting worse

The analysis of more than 386,000 earthquakes between 1973 and 2007 recorded on the US Geological Survey database proved that the global annual energy of earthquakes on Earth began increasing very fast since 1990.

Dr Chalko said that global seismic activity was increasing faster than any other global warming indicator on Earth and that this increase is extremely alarming.

"The most serious environmental danger we face on Earth may not be climate change, but rapidly and systematically increasing seismic, tectonic and volcanic activity," said Dr Chalko.

"Increase in the annual energy of earthquakes is the strongest symptom yet of planetary overheating.

For more read Dr Chalko's scientific article published at NU Journal of Discovery.

Tsunami to Destroy Major City in Next 70 Years

According to Professor Bill McGuire, of London's Benfield Hazard Research Centre, within the next 70 years we will be due for a tsunami massive enough to wipe out a major city. He also says that before 2075 there are the following odds:

35% - earthquake to kill hundreds of thousands in a major city
35-70% - major submarine earthquake
7% - volcano big enough to effect our climate
0.7% - mega-tsunami killing 10s of millions, triggered by coastal or submarine landslide
0.15% - super-volcano
0.14% - 200m or better asteroid
0.001% - 1km wide asteroid, wiping out 25% of humans

Yay!

Asteroid might hit Mars on Jan. 30

164-foot chunk of space rock, racing along at 30,000 miles per hour, heading for a Mars rendezvous.

They are giving it odds of 75/1. If there is an impact, that'll be the very first time we have been able to witness an asteroid hitting a solid planet.

Sydney - Uninhabitable in 50 Years?

Within less than the span of a lifetime, Sydney could resemble a desert town like Alice Springs, or even the apocalyptic landscape from Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road.

Scorched by temperatures five degrees higher than today, lacking drinking water and yet battered by rising seas and ravaged by bush fires of the ferocity that last month blackened huge areas of Victoria and Tasmania, one of the world's most spectacular cities could be virtually uninhabitable.

So suggests a scientific report on climate change commissioned by the New South Wales government.

The report, which forecasts a 40 per cent drop in rainfall by 2070, presses hard on the heels of the shock announcement by Queensland's Premier that from next December state residents stand to drink recycled sewerage.

More at The First Post

Yellowstone Alert

This just in from the University of Utah:

The upward movement of the Yellowstone caldera floor - almost 3 inches (7 centimeters) per year for the past three years - is more than three times greater than ever observed since such measurements began in 1923, says the study in the Nov. 9 issue of Science by Smith, geophysics postdoctoral associate Wu-Lung Chang and colleagues.

"Our best evidence is that the crustal magma chamber is filling with molten rock," Smith says. "But we have no idea how long this process goes on before there either is an eruption or the inflow of molten rock stops and the caldera deflates again," he adds.

...Calderas such as Yellowstone, California's Long Valley (site of the Mammoth Lakes ski area) and Italy's Campi Flegrei (near Naples) huff upward and puff downward repeatedly for decades to tens of thousands of years without catastrophic eruptions.

Melting ice cap is causing earthquakes

...the quakes were triggered because ice had broken away after being fused to the rock for hundreds of years. The quakes were not vast - on a magnitude of 1 to 3 - but had never happened before in north-west Greenland and showed the potential for the entire ice sheet to collapse.

Prof Correll said: "These earthquakes are not dangerous in themselves but the fact that they are happening shows that events are happening far faster than we ever anticipated."

More...

New means of deflecting course of dangerous asteroids

Proposals for deflecting NEAs have included blasting them with nuclear explosives, tugging them with nuclear-powered spacecraft or painting them white on one side so that reflected solar energy will nudge the asteroid off course. Blowing up the asteroid could leave vast fragments still Earthbound, however, and tugging and painting can only push the asteroid a few kilometres off course, says Fargion.

He proposes an alternative, inspired by the way rockets are propelled forward as they eject mass when burning fuel. He suggests dropping nuclear-powered rockets, each tipped with a screw-shaped drill, onto the asteroid from a mother ship. After latching onto the asteroid’s surface - not easy in almost zero gravity - each “screw rocket” will drill deep into the asteroid, projecting the rocky spoil behind it into space at high speed and pushing the asteroid off course. More...

Weird Weather Keeps on Happening

Floods in Australia...

Heatwaves in China & Greece, which reached 46C (114.80F)

500 people dead in storms/floods in England, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan

(and that's just this week!)

Save Earth! Win $50,000!

American scientists are offering a $50,000 prize to the person who designs a system for tagging and tracking the potentially Earth-threatening asteroid, Apophis.

There is a tiny possibility that it might collide with Earth in 2036. The Planetary Society is offering the prize thanks to a donation from Dan Geraci. You'd like to think that governments would be funding such prizes - isn't one of their tasks to protect us??

Confused about climate change?

New Scientist isn't - they've compiled 26 of the most common climate myths and misconceptions.

Global Warming creates an Island

A new island has appeared off the coast of Greenland. It has separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland's enormous ice sheet.

The US Geological Survey has confirmed its existence with satellite photos, that show it as an integral part of the Greenland coast in 1985, but linked by only a small ice bridge in 2002, and completely separate by the summer of 2005. It is now a striking island of high peaks and rugged rocky slopes plunging steeply to a sea dotted with icebergs.

Anti-Radiation Drug

In an experiment (they used monkeys) it reduced the fatality rate by half, so it might have a potential use in a radiation disaster (war, accident). It is called 5-androstenediol (AED), an adrenal gland hormone that stimulates marrow-cell growth.

Lets hope they fast-track their experiments on this one!

Sunspots at an all-time high

It's still a possibility - our planet is quite capable of coping with the pollution we create, and global warming is totally due to the sun being a bit more active...

Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.

They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.

This trend is being amplified by gases from fossil fuel burning, they argue.

Giant ice shelf breaks free

We are used to hearing about this happening in Antarctica, but this time it is in Canada.

The shelf is 66 square kilometres, one of 6 major ice shelves in Canada. More at The Age

10 Fun Ways to Destroy Planet Earth

Every one of these 10 Ways to Destroy Earth is scientifically plausible, although highly, highly unlikely. This is a doomsday list like no other, and something that should be kept out of the hands of geek terrorists... Example:

Essentially, anything can be destroyed if you hit it hard enough. ANYTHING. The concept is simple: find a really, really big asteroid or planet, accelerate it up to some dazzling speed, and smash it into Earth, preferably head-on but whatever you can manage. The result: an absolutely spectacular collision, resulting hopefully in Earth (and, most likely, our "cue ball" too) being pulverized out of existence

Tiny tremors may foreshadow catastrophic seismic events

Tiny tremors and temblors recently discovered in fault zones from California to Japan are generated by slow-moving earthquakes that may foreshadow catastrophic seismic events.

This insight may open new avenues of research for predicting earthquake hazards, Shelly said. "We now understand that tremor is generated directly by slip on the deep extension of the fault," he said. "Combining this understanding with our new ability to locate tremor precisely in time and space, we can now track the details of how slip evolves during a weeklong slow-slip event. This could also improve our ability to predict the effects on the shallower, earthquake-generating portion of the subduction fault and potentially lead to an improved ability to forecast a major earthquake there."

More...

NASA lacks asteroids funds

NASA does not have the $1 Billion required to track potentially disastrous asteroid stikes on our planet. If all ends due to an asteroid, blame the accountants of the US White House.

The cost to find at least 90 percent of the 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets by 2020 would be about $1 billion, according to a report NASA will release later this week.

"We know what to do, we just don't have the money," said Simon "Pete" Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center

Asteroid Collision in 2036 - UN to help?

"You have to act when things look like they are going to happen - if you wait until you know for certain, it's too late," Dr Russell Schweickart, an Apollo 9 astronaut, told a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

"We believe there needs to be a decision process spelled out and adopted by the United Nations."

Let's hope they pull their finger out, in case a colission happens prior to 2036

Megafires

They burn like fire hurricanes on fronts stretching sometimes thousands of kilometres and with a ferocity that explodes trees and makes them impossible to extinguish short of rain or divine intervention.

Happenning in Australia and around the world...

"These fires can't be controlled by any suppression resources that we have available anywhere in the world."

An inhabited island has disappeared!

If ever there was evidence of the direct effect of global warming on our lives, it is this.

Once upon a time 10,000 people live there. Now Lohachara has disappeared beneath the waves. Learn why.