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POPSDeep-Sea Volcano Seen By Scientists For First Time The eruption was a spectacular sight: Bright-red lava bubbles shot out of the volcano, releasing a smoke-like cloud of sulfur. The lava froze almost instantly as it hit the cold sea water, causing black rock to sink to the sea floor. The submersible hovered near the blasts, its robotic arm reaching into the lava to collect samples. Earth and ocean scientists said the eruption allowed them to see for the first time the creation of a material called boninite, which had previously been found only in samples at least a million years old.
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POPSSpectacular Sea Eruption Filmed -- Deepest Ever
One of the lead scientists called it, an underwater Fourth of July. Images show large molten lava bubbles about three feet across; glowing red vents ejecting lava into the sea, and lava flows across the seafloor. This West Mata volcano stands more than a mile high off the ocean floor. Its eruptive area is about the length of a football field. It is producing Boninite lavas, believed to be among the hottest erupting on Earth in modern times. Researchers believe they have a unique chance to study magma formation and how the Earth recycles material where tectonic plates slide against each other. A microbiologist on the team found diverse microbes in the extreme conditions, and they observed a small species of shrimp thriving. Its believed to be the same shrimp species found at eruptive sites more than 3,000 miles away. Mission scientists believe 80 percent of eruptive activity on Earth occurs in the ocean, and most volcanoes are in the deep sea.
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POPSSeven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense Although CO2 makes up only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, that small number says nothing about its significance in climate dynamics. Even at that low concentration, CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and acts as a greenhouse gas, as physicist John Tyndall demonstrated in 1859. The chemist Svante Arrhenius went further in 1896 by estimating the impact of CO2 on the climate; after painstaking hand calculations he concluded that doubling its concentration might cause almost 6 degrees Celsius of warming—an answer not much out of line with recent, far more rigorous computations. Contrary to the contrarians, human activity is by far the largest contributor to the observed increase in atmospheric CO2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, anthropogenic CO2....click link for more.
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POPSAppalachian Mountains Rock Ice Age, 460 Million Years Ago By the time humans first walked their slopes, the Appalachian mountains had worn down from prehistoric peaks over 16,000 ft (5,000 m) high to 6,500 ft (2,000 m) today. Today, the plant and animal life of the Northern Appalachians is still recovering from the last glacial period, which ended 10,000 years ago. The Southern Appalachians were never buried beneath the great ice-sheets of that frigid time, providing refuge for native species. Often spreading a couple hundred miles wide, the chain's north-south alignment allowed easy migration of animals fleeing the glaciers. Had these mountains been aligned east-west, like the European Alps, they would have presented a barrier to migration, a trap that would have ensured mass extinctions. The Appalachian Mountains are a long system of mountains, stretching from Newfoundland in Canada all the way to Alabama in the southern United States. (the full trail in the United States is 2,174 miles long)
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POPSScientist: CO2 Not Causing Climate Change the world has experienced three periods of cooling since 1850 and furthermore carbon dioxide was increasing during many of those cooler periods. "If we had only had warming, then there would be a connect between co2 and temperature, there is not," he added. Prof Plimer has come under attack as a "denialist poster boy" whose theories are in danger of stopping the world from tackling the grave dangers of climate change. But he said the scientists "frightening people witless by following the party line" are motivated by politics and research funding. "They are taking advantage of the current situation. That is understandable. In previous times people got wonderful research grants in a war against cancer and they achieved a lot of money for that. Now we have a war on climate change and we have a huge number of people out there who have their career staked on it and are beneficiaries of this process."
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POPSI am become Death, destroyer of worlds The story surrounding the end of the dinosaurs has become increasingly complicated as more evidence emerges. In nothing else, they seem to have suffered from some very bad luck.
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POPSMore facts on mud volcanoes In 2001, an eruption of a large underwater mud volcano off Baku created a new island, which is now almost one sq. km in size. Another volcano not far from Baku have erupted at least ten times since 1980, with flames reaching 300 m (1000') height.
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POPSTsunami Threat Looms Over Pacific Northwest To get out of the popular tourist town of Seaside, Ore., for example, people need to cross two bridges that could fail in a quake. Children, seniors and the disabled will have the hardest time evacuating
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POPSMoon Survives Unprovoked Attack! In defense of science. Still worry that we allow rubbish to litter the moon. To prove there is water. So, don't we have enough brands of bottled water already? Maybe so that astronauts can stop off and have a shower on their 10 thousand year journey to the nearest exoplanet which may support life.
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