Ten Ways the World Might End

From Discover Magazine comes a table of 10 events from space that could kill humans.

They suggest that solar flares and coronal mass ejections are not worth worrying about (I disagree). You have a 1 in 700,000 of being killed due to an asteroid impact (agree). Supernova - 1 in 10 million (they are either very right or very wrong).

The rest are either crazy (alien attack), or will not happen in the near future (death of the Sun).

Wrap Up That Asteroid!

An Australian PhD student has won top prize in an international contest to figure out how to save us from a tragic asteroid impact.

Mary D'Souza suggests that wrapping an asteroid in mylar film will cause it to receive more solar radiation, therefore altering its course.

Mylar film covering just half of the asteroid would change its surface from dull to reflective.

"What happens then is light from the sun shines on the body [of the asteroid] so more of it is reflected ... and it actually acts to move it away from the sun and the earth."

Space Explorers: Prepare for Killer Asteroids

The Association of Space Explorers (ASE) currently comprises of over 300 individuals from 32 countries who have completed at least one orbit of the Earth in space. They have recently suggested that the United Nations should prepare an international response for when a dangerous object is detected heading towards our planet.

Astronaut Rusty Schweickart says: “Until we have a response in place, we’re as vulnerable as the dinosaurs”.

Discover magazine lists some ways we could survive such a situation...

C'mon Earthlings! Don't have egg on your face when our amazingly advanced civilisation is so apathetic that when one is heading our way, there is no time to formulate a solution.

Quiet Sun = Ice Age?

Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. But so far nothing is happening. “It’s a dead face,” Tsuneta said of the sun’s appearance.

In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700.
http://blog.r4nt.com/2008/08/29/the-sun-is-dead-long-live-the-sun/

Glance at the chart above and understand that we really still have no way of predicting what the sun will do, and consequently all of our efforts to warm up the planet might be wasted if the Sun stays quiet, as it has done not too long ago.

Wacky Tides in Maine

I'm hoping this is just a little glitch, and not an indicator of the world in peril:

Meteorologists are baffled by rapid tidal changes along the Maine coast, which damaged some boats and piers.

Witnesses say low tide turned and became high within a matter of minutes on Tuesday afternoon. The changes occurred six or seven times. The National Weather Service says reports from several locations indicated that water levels fell and rose from 4 feet to as much as 12 feet during the event.

In a public information statement, the weather service says the cause "remains a mystery and may never be known."

It said significant rapid rises and falls in tide levels were observed around 3 p.m. in Boothbay Harbor, Southport and Bristol. The statement said rapid surges can be caused by the underwater movement of land, most often due to an earthquake, or due to slumping of sediments along a steep canyon or shelf, but no earthquakes were reported in the area Tuesday.

A similar event occurred on Jan. 9, 1926, in Bass Harbor, the statement said.

Found here.

One Man Nearly Fried Us All

CFC, the refridgerant that is reponsible for holes in our ozone layer, and is now banned, was the discovery of one man. In 1930 fridges used toxic chemicals, and Thomas Midgely (who also put came up with the idea of putting lead in petrol) decided to find an alternative, non-toxic substance:

...Midgley began with the periodic table. A quick survey of known refrigerants showed that they all were compounds of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and the halogens. Within this set of compounds, flammability decreased from left to right on the table, while toxicity decreased from bottom to top. The two trends pointed to fluorine as a promising candidate.
americanheritage.com

The rest is history, but it could have almost been every living thing on the planet that was history:

Indeed, back in 1930, Thomas Midgley might as easily have chosen bromine instead of chlorine as his active ingredient. Had he done so, the ozone hole would today cover the planet.

"More by luck than wisdom this catastrophic situation did not develop," said Nobel laureate, Paul Crutzen.
climatechange.ie

North Pole could be ice-free this year

The trend has been towards an ice-free Arctic for a while, but the speed of change appears to be accelerating:

It's a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen in autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said.

The ice retreated to a record level in September when the Northwest Passage, the sea route through the Arctic Ocean, opened briefly for the first time in recorded history.

..."If you talked to me or other scientists just a few years ago, we were saying that we might lose all or most of the summer sea ice cover by anywhere from 2050 to 2100," Serreze said. "Then, recently, we kind of revised those estimates, maybe as early as 2030. Now, there's people out there saying it might be even before that. So, things are happening pretty quick up there."

Microsoft Software for Petabyte NEO Database

I'd rather they used tried and tested specialized software, for such an important task... Still, the new Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS might just save us all.

Rather than turning to an expensive supercomputer equipped with hundreds or thousands of processors, Pan-STARRS will use a cluster of 50 PC servers connected to 1.1 petabytes of disk storage via fast Infiniband networking gear, says Alex Szalay, a physics and astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University and one of the architects of Pan-STARRS' database.

And rather than using a database management program better-known for ultra-large data warehouses, such as IBM's DB2, TeraData, or Oracle Database, Pan-STARRS will use Microsoft's just-released SQL Server 2008.
http://computerworld.co.nz

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!