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Orange dwarf star on a collision course with… Earth.

14 March 201014 March 2010 Richard 2 Comments

MIT’s Technology Review recently published this relatively unnerving finding (it would be more unnerving if the hypothetical event wasn’t 1.5 million years in the future):

An orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will
arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.

Of course, trajectories are difficult to calculate when the data is
poor so nobody has really been sure about what’s going to happen.

What the new data has allowed Bobylev to do is calculate the
probability of Gliese 710 smashing into the Solar System. What he’s
found is a shock.

He says there is 86 percent chance that Gliese 710 will plough
through the Oort Cloud of frozen stuff that extends some 0.5 parsecs
into space.

That may sound like a graze but it is likely to have serious
consequences. Such an approach would send an almighty shower of comets
into the Solar System which will force us to keep our heads down for a
while. And a probability of 86 percent is about as close to certainty as
this kind of data can get.

The article is a bit sparse on details, but you can read the rest here.

British grandmother takes the European nightclub scene by storm

13 March 201013 March 2010 Richard

This just came in over the Atlantic wires via ABC News (and was helpfully spotted by Olivia):

Ruth Flowers is certainly not your typical grandmother. At 69, Flowers is a real phenomenon and the latest sensation on the European nightclub scene.

69-year-old Ruth Flowers is a big deal on the European nightclub scene.

Wearing large black sunglasses (a fashion statement, there is nothing
wrong with her eyesight), flashy clothes, bling jewelry, fake
diamond-incrusted DJ headphones on her white hair, the British granny
makes crowds go wild, spinning records behind the decks of the most prestigious nightclubs in Paris, Cannes and other European cities.

DJ Ruth Flowers, a.k.a Mamy Rock, began her new career when, four years ago, she attended her grandson’s birthday party. “Kids don’t play games anymore. They have discos after they eat,” she told ABC News.

You can see some YouTube clips of her below. She does indeed rock.

Look at this crab.

12 March 201012 March 2010 Richard

Its scientific name is Dromia personata, and it typically lives in underwater caves. Creepy, isn’t it? Sinister, you might even say. There’s something menacing about it’s gaze.

In keeping with our ongoing coverage of all things Antarctic, we ask this pressing question: is Antarctica falling apart? (Judging by our last few posts, it certainly seems wounded). From LiveScience:

Recent news of mammoth icebergs the size of small U.S. states
breaking off Antarctica may sound dire. But those events mostly
represent business as usual at the world’s southernmost continent,
scientists say.

A massive iceberg the size of the state of Rhode Island collided with Antarctica’s Mertz Glacier in mid-February, and caused a huge new iceberg
with an estimated mass of 860 billion metric tons to break off the
glacial tongue. Scientists note that such dramatic examples have not
been uncommon over the past decade.

“I need to stress that the event in the Mertz area, and indeed most of the iceberg calving
in Antarctica is a completely normal, expected activity for a stable
ice sheet,” said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and
Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

So perhaps not. Icebergs do break off all the time, although this one is of an unusually large size. LiveScience goes on to note, however, that “a new report by
the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that every ice front in the
southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula — the coolest part of the
peninsula — has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009. The most
dramatic changes have taken place since 1990.” You can read the whole article here.

Antarctica’s “Blood Falls”

8 March 20108 March 2010 Richard

Image via Wikipedia

Talk about unnerving. Via Mental Floss:

There is a glacier in Antarctica that seems to be weeping a river of
blood. It’s one of the continent’s strangest features, and it’s located
in one of the continent’s strangest places — the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a
huge, ice-free zone and one of the world’s harshest deserts.

Discovered in 1911 by a member of Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition
team, its rusty color was at first theorized to be caused by some sort
of algae growth. Later, however, it was proven to be due to iron
oxidation. Every so often, the glacier spews forth a clear, iron-rich
liquid that quickly oxidizes and turns a deep shade of red. Even weirder: scientists think that the bacteria responsible for Blood
Falls might be an Earth-bound approximation of the kind of alien life
that might exist elsewhere in the solar system, like beneath the polar
ice caps of Mars and Europa.

You can read more here.

Continents of floating garbage

7 March 20107 March 2010 Richard

Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how large of an impact mankind has on the earth – all the more so when we’re talking about the ocean.But we do have an effect. Take, for instance, the massive patches of floating garbage that are drifting in the oceans, trapped in ocean conveyors and vortexes (we’re talking hundreds of millions of tons of trash). Via The Daily Galaxy:

Ocean currents have collected massive amounts of garbage into a sort of
plastic “soup” where countless bits of discarded plastic float
intertwined just beneath the surface. Indeed, the human race has really
made its mark. One enormous plastic patch is estimated to weigh over 3
million tons altogether and cover an area roughly twice the size of
Texas.
[…]

The trash collects in this remote area, known as the North Pacific
Gyre, due to a clockwise trade wind that encircles the Pacific Rim.
According to Moore the trash accumulates the same way bubbles clump at
the center of hot tub.

Ian Kiernan, the Australian founder of Clean Up the World, started
his environmental campaign two decades ago after being shocked by the
incredible amount of rubbish he saw on an around-the-world solo yacht
race. He’ll says he’ll never be able the wipe the atrocious site from
his memory.

“It was just filled with things like furniture, fridges, plastic
containers, cigarette lighters, plastic bottles, light globes,
televisions and fishing nets,” Kiernan says. “It’s all so durable it
floats. It’s just a major problem.”

A brief but satisfying roundup

6 March 20106 March 2010 Richard

Hello everyone. Following are some strange, interesting, and bizarre things from around the internet:

What’s left behind when glaciers melt?
Along those lines, apparently the equator was once covered with ice.
Cell phone data shows that human behavior is predictable. Apparently, most people generally stay within a six-mile radius of their home.
The art of Gustave Doré
100 Russian tanks were found abandoned in the Ural Mountains. This creeps me out, to be honest – does it have anything to do with the Dyatlov Pass incident?

Vast iceberg threatens ocean life, global climate

4 March 20104 March 2010 Richard 1 Comment

Image by orvaratli via Flickr

BBC News reports that a gigantic iceberg – at 2,500 km^2, larger than Greater London – could threaten marine life and disrupt key ocean cycles.

They say the iceberg, which is 78km long and up to 39km wide, could have
consequences for the area’s colonies of emperor penguins.
…
The calving of the iceberg, which has an estimated mass of 700-800bn
tonnes, has changed the shape of the local geography, Dr Young
explained.
…

He added that the new iceberg had shortened the length of the Mertz
Glacier Tongue, which could result in pack ice entering the area and
disrupting the polynia.

“That means that the bottom water
production rate… will decrease.

“The bottom water spills over
the continental shelf, flows down the continental slope into the deep
ocean.”

This process helps drive the “conveyor belt” of currents
in the Southern, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Any disruption to
the net flow of bottom water could result in a weakening in the deep
ocean circulation system, which plays a key role in the global climate
system.

Are the Chile and Haiti quakes related?

3 March 20103 March 2010 Richard 1 Comment

We bring you the latest in our ongoing coverage of earthquakes. To recap what’s happened recently: An magnitude 8.8 earthquake – one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded – struck Chile on February 27. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti on January 12, killing upwards of 200,000 people. And in the meantime (as we reported earlier), scientists’ fears that the Haiti quake forewarns increased seismic activity seem to have been realized. In light of the Chile quake, too, reports of the hundreds of small tremors that have been rocking Yellowstone National Park over the past few weeks are more troubling. As if all this wasn’t enough, the United States Geological Survey is reporting that it recorded a magnitude 3.8 earthquake in northern Illinois (see also the NY Times article) – an area normally free of seismic activity.

One question on everyone’s mind, then, is this: are the Chile and Haiti earthquakes in any way related? The answer is this:

They may have the same parent. Most seismologists agree that the
Haitian quake didn’t cause Saturday’s event in Chile. Earthquakes occur
when the stress on a tectonic plate overcomes the friction holding it
in place. The last stress-relieving earthquake at this location in
Chile occurred in 1835. Since then, friction has held the edge of the Nazca plate in place while the rest of it slid 10 to 12 meters underneath the neighboring South American plate.
As a practical matter, that displacement was the sole cause of
Saturday’s earthquake. But displacement isn’t the only thing stressing
a tectonic plate. Tides, dammed-up rivers,
and pressure from other shifting plates can play a supporting role.
Major earthquakes may shift plates slightly and thus increase the
stress along fault lines. If another earthquake was poised to happen at
some point soon, the added stress from a first quake could serve as a
catalyst. While the Haitian earthquake really wasn’t big enough to have
that effect in Chile, some seismologists believe the much stronger
Sumatran quake of 2004–and maybe even the 1960 Chilean quake, the most
powerful ever recorded–may have set the stage for both of them.

Unsettling (forgive the pun – it’s probably not appropriate, to be honest). You can read more here.

Edit: Update: I neglected to mention that the Chile quake altered the earth’s axis and shortened the length of the day.

An interesting look at Galactic Civil War-era propaganda

2 March 20102 March 2010 Richard

Laughing Squid highlights a great brief gallery of Star Wars propaganda:

You can check out the rest here.

One island, one hundred million crabs.

25 February 201025 February 2010 Richard

Christmas Island is a territory of Australia in the Indian Ocean. It’s pretty small (52 square miles, or about three-quarters of the size of Washington, D.C.), sparsely populated (it’s home to only 1,402 people), and relatively distant from Australia itself (1,600 miles, or 3,000 kilometers, northwest of the Western Australian City of Perth).

Christmas Island is a very special, interesting place, though (and not just because of its name – which it got because it was discovered on Christmas Day, 1643). Every November, something amazing happens. More than 100 million red crabs migrate to and through Christmas Island to spawn. Words don’t do this phenomenon justice. For the full effect, see the video below:

Christmas Island Red Crabs