5.4 Magnitude Earthquake Rocks Alaska
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A 5.4-magnitude earthquake struck near Anchorage today, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. It did not cause any injuries or major damage, according to officials in the city, Alaska’s largest.
The quake hit at 11:28 a.m. local time, the survey said. Its epicenter was about 60 miles northwest of Anchorage.
“It was a good one,” said Jennifer Collins, a spokeswoman for the Anchorage Fire Department. “Oh, yeah, we definitely felt it. It shook and then it subsided a bit and then it shook again.”
Collins said the fire department has not received calls related to the earthquake. Hendrik Van Hemert, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said the city had no reports of major damage.
The earthquake was felt as far away as Fairbanks, a spokeswoman for the Alaska Earthquake Information Center said.
Something Different Happening With New Flu
The new strain of H1N1 flu is causing “something different” to happen in the United States this year — perhaps an extended year-round flu season that disproportionately hits young people, health officials said on Thursday.
An unusually cool late spring may be helping keep the infection going in the U.S. Northeast, especially densely populated areas in New York and Massachusetts, the officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
And infections among healthcare workers suggest that people are showing up at work sick — meaning that workplace policies may be contributing to its spread, the CDC officials said.
The new strain of swine flu is officially a pandemic now, according to the World Health Organization.
So far the virus is causing mild to moderate disease, but it has killed at least 167 people and been confirmed in nearly 40,000 globally.
The United States has been hardest hit, with upward of 100,000 likely cases and probably far more, with 44 deaths and 1,600 hospitalized.
“The fact that we are seeing ongoing transmission now indicates that we are seeing something different,” the CDC’s Dr. Daniel Jernigan told a news briefing.
“And we believe that that may have to do with the complete lack of immunity to this particular virus among those that are most likely affected. And those are children,” Jernigan added.
Freak Beijing Storm Turns Day Into Night
“It was pitch black outside and you could see people looking out from the office towers across the road from us,” McDonell said.
“In a couple of the photos you can see a clock in the distance showing it was around 11:30 am local time.”
The storms were expected to affect western and northern Xinjiang, most part of Inner Mongolia, north-east China and north China.
Today’s extreme weather follows yesterday’s hail storms across eastern China’s Anhui province, which killed 14 people and injured more than 180, AFP reports.
Anhui’s Civil Affairs Bureau said that more than 10,000 people were evacuated and nearly 9,700 houses collapsed in yesterday’s severe storm.
via Freak Beijing storm turns day into night - Yahoo!7 News.
A Time Bomb For The World Wheat Crop
The spores arrived from Kenya on dried, infected leaves ensconced in layers of envelopes.
Working inside a bio-secure greenhouse outfitted with motion detectors and surveillance cameras, government scientists at the Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn., suspended the fungal spores in a light mineral oil and sprayed them onto thousands of healthy wheat plants. After two weeks, the stalks were covered with deadly reddish blisters characteristic of the scourge known as Ug99.
Crop scientists fear the Ug99 fungus could wipe out more than 80% of worldwide wheat crops as it spreads from eastern Africa. It has already jumped the Red Sea and traveled as far as Iran. Experts say it is poised to enter the breadbasket of northern India and Pakistan, and the wind will inevitably carry it to Russia, China and even North America — if it doesn’t hitch a ride with people first.
“It’s a time bomb,” said Jim Peterson, a professor of wheat breeding and genetics at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “It moves in the air, it can move in clothing on an airplane. We know it’s going to be here. It’s a matter of how long it’s going to take.”
Super Volcano May Be Brewing Beneath Mount St. Helens
A team of scientists say they have evidence that a “super volcano” may be brewing underneath Mount St. Helens, NewScientist.com reports.
Researchers say indicators suggest Mount St. Helens and other northwest volcanoes are plugged into a huge subterranean pool of magma that could one day burst to the surface in a “super” eruption.
If what they believe is true, the structure beneath the mountain would be comparable in size to the biggest magma chambers ever discovered, such as the one below Yellowstone National Park.
Scientist Graham Hill led a team of researchers that set up magnetotelluric sensors around Mount St Helens. The measurements revealed a column of conductive material that extends downward from the volcano which they found to connect to a much bigger zone of conductive material.
Military Covering Up Fireballs From Space
For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth’s atmosphere — but no longer.
A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned.
The satellites’ main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists.
The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified.
Nearby Star May Be Getting Ready to Explode
The nearby, well-known and very bright star may soon explode in a supernova, according to data released by U.C. Berkeley researchers Tuesday.
The red giant Betelgeuse, once so large it would reach out to Jupiter’s orbit if placed in our own solar system, has shrunk by 15 percent over the past decade in a half, although it’s just as bright as it’s ever been.
“To see this change is very striking,” said retired Berkeley physics professor Charles Townes, who won the 1964 Nobel Prize for inventing the laser. “We will be watching it carefully over the next few years to see if it will keep contracting or will go back up in size.”
Betelgeuse, whose name derives from Arabic, is easily visible in the constellation Orion. It gave Michael Keaton’s character his name in the movie “Beetlejuice” and was the home system of Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
Lightening Storm Leaves 2 dead, 7 Injured In California
A woman walking under a tree was struck and killed by lightning, one of thousands of strikes that touched off spot fires and injured seven others as a gusty storm pounded California. Another woman was killed by a falling tree.
Authorities said Tina Bond, 40, was killed by a bolt Wednesday afternoon as she walked along a sidewalk in Fontana, in San Bernardino County east of Los Angeles.
Police Sgt. Jeff Decker said the bolt blew out the bottoms of the victim’s shoes and hurled some of her clothing 30 feet away.
National Weather Service meteorologist James Oh said there was at least one lightning strike every minute for a couple of hours Wednesday in San Bernardino County, where both deaths and most of the injuries occurred.
Northern California received more than 1,000 lightning strikes from Wednesday night into Thursday morning, the weather service said.
Apocalypse Sun Creates Stir Among Scientists
It’s the sort of news that makes one’s eyes glaze over and if our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78,” said Doug Biesecker of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
Yes, space has weather, in the form of solar radiation that varies with solar activity in the form of sunspots and solar flares. Biesecker heads an NOAA panel that keeps an eye on such things and released this latest report.
But this dry statistic has more significance for the earth and its climate than all of Al Gore’s gloom and doom about tailpipe emissions and rising sea levels. Whether the warm-mongers like it or not, the sun rules earth’s climate — always has and always will.
First noticed in the 1800s, solar activity runs in roughly 11-year cycles. Some are as short as nine years or as long as 14. The valleys are usually brief, a couple of years, but sometimes, for reasons not fully understood, they stretch out for decades.
In the 17th century, a 70-year period of little or no sunspot activity known as the Maunder Minimum spawned what has become known as the Little Ice Age, which extended from roughly the 16th century to the 19th.
Washington’s famous winter at Valley Forge was part of that natural phenomenon. So was Napoleon’s bitter retreat from Moscow. During the winter of 1779-1780, the Hudson River was solid ice for five weeks. Early settlers going West crossed a frozen Mississippi near present-day St. Louis in 1799.
Deadly “Lujo’ Virus Discovered In Africa
Scientists have identified a lethal new virus in Africa that causes bleeding like the dreaded Ebola virus. The so-called “Lujo” virus infected five people in Zambia and South Africa last fall. Four of them died, but a fifth survived, perhaps helped by a medicine recommended by the scientists.
It’s not clear how the first person became infected, but the bug comes from a family of viruses found in rodents, said Dr. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist involved in the discovery.
“This one is really, really aggressive” he said of the virus.
A paper on the virus by Lipkin and his collaborators was published online Thursday on in PLoS Pathogens.
Giant Blob Found Deep Beneath Nevada
Hidden beneath the U.S. West’s Great Basin, scientists have spied a giant blob of rocky material dripping like honey.
The Great Basin consists of small mountain ranges separated by valleys and includes most of Nevada, the western half of Utah and portions of other nearby states.
While studying the area, John West of Arizona State University (ASU) and his colleagues found evidence of a large cylindrical blob of cold material far below the surface of central Nevada. Comparison of the results with CAT scans of the inside of Earth taken by ASU’s Jeff Roth suggested they had found a so-called lithospheric drip. (Earth’s lithosphere comprises the crust or outer layer of Earth and the uppermost mantle.)
Here’s how it works: “The Earth’s mantle, which lies below the thin outer crust we live on, consists of rock which deforms plastically on very long time scales due to the heat and pressure at depth,” West said. “In any material which can flow (including the mantle), a heavy object will tend to sink through lighter material.”
And this is what the scientists think is happening with the lithospheric drip. A region of heavier material trapped in the lithosphere gets warmed up and begins to sink into the lighter, less dense mantle beneath, pulling a long tail of material after it.
“Honey dripping off of a spoon is a visual aid to what we think the drip looks like,” West told LiveScience. “Dripping honey tends to lead with a large blob of honey, with a long tail of material following the initial blob.”
He said the blob is between about 30 miles and 60 miles in diameter and extends from a depth of about 47 miles to at least 310 miles beneath Earth’s surface.
The team thinks this drip started some 15 million to 20 million years ago and probably detached from the overlying plate only recently.
At first, it was hard for the team to reconcile their discovery with what scientists knew about the region. Over the past tens of millions of years, the Earth’s crust in the Great Basin has undergone extension, or stretching.
Earthquake Fault Much Larger,Dangerous Than Thought
An earthquake fault previously believed to be limited to an area south of Washington state’s Whidbey Island actually stretches 250 to 300 miles, from Victoria, B.C., to Yakima, Wash., crossing the Cascade Mountains and capable of producing a major earthquake, new research shows.
Many of the other faults in western Washington could be connected to the South Whidbey Island Fault in a network similar to the San Andreas Fault system in California, Craig Weaver, the regional earthquake coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey based in Seattle, said in an interview Wednesday.
Suzette Kimball, the USGS acting director, told Congress on Thursday that there was “strong evidence” other faults in western Washington were connected to the South Whidbey fault.
“It appears there is a very large (fault) system in the Cascade arc,” she told the House interior appropriations subcommittee.
Weaver said scientists are trying to determine whether the South Whidbey Island Fault extends as far east as the Hanford nuclear reservation and if it could also be connected to the highly unstable Cascadia subduction zone off the coast.
“This is big stuff,” said Weaver, adding the South Whidbey fault was “most dangerous. A lot of people are looking over our shoulder.”
The fault could be capable of producing a maximum earthquake registering 7.5 on the Richter scale, which is used to measure the strength of earthquakes, he said. An earthquake that size is capable of causing serious damage over large areas.
via Earthquake fault much larger, more dangerous than thought | McClatchy.
Magnitude-4.1 Quake Shakes Already-shaken L.A.
Los Angeles has been shaken by another moderate earthquake, a few miles from the epicenter of Sunday’s shaker. No immediate reports of injuries or damage.
The U.S. Geological Survey says it’s not certain whether it’s an aftershock from Sunday’s magnitude-4.7 temblor or a separate quake.
The magnitude-4.1 quake was centered about 2 miles from Hawthorne and 10 miles from downtown L.A., at a depth of 7.5 miles.
U.S. Health Officials Troubled By New Flu Pattern
The new influenza strain circulating around most of the United States is putting a worrying number of young adults and children into the hospital and hitting more schools than usual, U.S. health officials said on Monday.
The H1N1 swine flu virus killed a vice principal at a New York City school over the weekend and has spread to 48 states. While it appears to be mild, it is affecting a disproportionate number of children, teenagers and young adults.
This includes people needing hospitalization — now up to 200, said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“That’s very unusual, to have so many people under 20 to require hospitalization, and some of them in (intensive care units),” Schuchat told reporters in a telephone briefing.
“We are now experiencing levels of influenza-like illness that are higher than usual for this time of year,” Schuchat added. “We are also seeing outbreaks in schools, which is extremely unusual for this time of year.”
New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden agreed with Schuchat.
“We’re seeing increasing numbers of people going to emergency departments saying they have fever and flu, particularly young people in the 5 to 17 age group, ” Frieden, who has been named by U.S. President Barack Obama as the new CDC director, told a news conference.
About half of all cases of influenza are being diagnosed as the new H1N1 strain, while the rest are influenza B, or the seasonal H1N1 and H3N2 strains. Flu season in the United States is usually almost over by May.
