Wednesday, October 9, 2013
octopus exhibit in Monaco's Oceanographic museum
Huang Yong Ping (b. 1954 in Xiamen, Fujian province, China) - Wu Zei, 2010. A 25 meters wide Octopus from the exhibition Mediterranean Seaat Monaco’s Oceanographic museum.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Oregon's Mile Of Glacier Caves: A Hidden, And Disappearing, World
In the past two years, explorers Eddy Cartaya and Brent McGregor have used ropes, ice screws, wet suits and flashlights to map out more than a mile of passages underneath a glacier on Oregon's Mount Hood, in what are thought to be America's largest known glacier caves outside Alaska.
The caves are in the Sandy Glacier, which clings to Mount Hood's western slope, thousands of feet above the ground.
Some of the shafts are tight; others balloon out into spaces measuring 80 feet wide. In the caves, they sometimes scale waterfalls that were frozen in place. And along the way, they measure how the caves are changing.
Cartaya and McGregor took Oregon Public Broadcasting's Amelia Templeton and others into the caves at the end of this past summer, showing off astounding caves that look like sets from a sci-fi movie.
The striking scenes inspired Templeton and her OPB colleagues to create Thin Ice, a stand-alone presentation about the caves. OPB is also devoting an upcoming episode of its Oregon Field Guide to the find.
In addition to yielding jaw-dropping images of a world hidden from plain view, exploring the caves could also bring valuable information to scientists who study glaciers and climate change.
"Most glacier caves are seasonal. They form during the melting season. And disappear in the winter, crushed underneath the weight of the ice," Templeton reports. "But the caves in the Sandy Glacier appear to be growing larger every year. And as they grow, the glacier shrinks."
In the past 100 years, Sandy Glacier has shrunk by about 50 percent, she says.
As glaciologist Andrew Fountain of Portland State University tells Templeton, "This could be an important insight into how these glaciers are decaying,"
Cartaya and McGregor say that their awareness that the caves and the glacier will all disappear someday is part of what drives them to keep exploring and documenting.
"These are short-lived treasures, and once they're gone they're gone forever; they'll never be back," Cartaya tells Templeton.
Supervolcanoes Rocked Early Mars
by Dan Vergano
Massive “supervolcanoes” erupted across the northern face of Mars some 3.7 billion years ago, planetary scientists suggest. The eruptions likely blasted lava, sulfur, and ash across the red planet, altering its atmosphere and surface.
The planets of the inner solar system—Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury—started their lives as boiling-hot balls of rock, which cooled to feature thin crusts battered by asteroid and comet impacts. On Mars, that early crust was perhaps also punctured by supersize volcanoes with calderas more than 30 mi (50 km) wide, a newly identified kind of volcanism on the red planet…
(read more: National Geo)
Monday, October 7, 2013
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Saturday, September 28, 2013
rossota millsae
Read more: Encyclopedia of Life
Photo: Kevin Raskoff via Arctic Ocean Diversity
The 1/2 Ton Giant Freshwater Stingray With a 15-Inch Poison Barb
by Matt Simon
Scientists first described Southeast Asia’s giant freshwater stingray in 1990, which can grow to more than 16 feet long and 1,300 pounds. And while it packs a 15-inch, poisonous, serrated stinger, it’s actually a gentle, inquisitive creature, an endangered titan that researchers are scrambling to understand before humans drive it to extinction.
Though this could be the largest freshwater fish on the planet, accounts of its existence only emerged in Thai newspapers in the early 1980s. It’s exceedingly rare to see one, in part because it destroys all but the strongest fishing rods and lines. Even if you have the right equipment, the giant freshwater stingray tends to take exception to being hunted and buries itself in the river bottom when hooked.
In 2010, 15 anglers working in shifts reportedly spent six hours reeling one in, which either says something about the stingray’s strength or the group’s collective fishing skills. The fish can drag boats for miles, and even pull them under…
(read more: Wired Science)
photo: Zeb Hogan, University of Nevada
Fabian Oefner’s Magnetic Watercolor Photographs
(See more of his projects here: Juxtapoz)
Friday, September 27, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Sunday, September 22, 2013
How much longer can Earth survive?
(read more: Live Science)
SEE-THROUGH SNAIL DISCOVERED DEEP UNDERGROUND
A new snail species with a beautifully translucent shell was recently discovered more than 3,000 feet (914 meters) underground in a Croatian cave.
A team of cavers and biologists with the Croatian Biospeleological Society discovered Zospeum tholussum in the Lukina Jama-Trojama cave systems of western Croatia — one of the 20 deepest cave systems in the world — on an expedition to determine the cave’s depth. The team collected all animal specimens found along the way, since deep cave crevices are often promising places to find new species, and happened upon one live sample of the new snail, along with eight empty shells.
Find out what we know about this new little species here…
Saturday, September 21, 2013
monkey skeleton
nearly bombing north carolina
"One simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe."
That is the blunt 1969 assessment of Parker F. Jones, the then supervisor of the nuclear weapons safety department at Sandia National Laboratories, in a newly declassified document that sheds light on a 1961 accident in which the United States almost nuked North Carolina.
The document was given to The Guardian today by author Eric Schlosser, who came upon the document doing research for a new book.
The story of Goldsboro, N.C. is well known. It was the Cold War and the U.S. had B-52 bombers in the air as a precaution, ready to strike if the Soviet Union made a move. As Rudolph Herzog explained it in his book A Short History of Nuclear Folly, one of the B-52s was carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs, which are many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Like the others, the B-52 flew huge circles around the U.S. and the Atlantic, needing to be refueled along the way.
The plane had reported an oil leak in its left motor.
"The third time [it was filled up], a filler neck broke off the plane ... and kerosene began pouring from its right wing," Herzog writes.
To make a long story short, the plane disintegrated and the two bombs fell from the sky onto American soil.
But this document says that in the Goldsboro incident, the U.S. was one step away from a massive nuclear disaster.
To be fair, as Herzog notes in his book, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did say in 1983 that the bomb had gone through six of the seven steps needed for detonation.
Of course, in his memo, Jones puts it more dramatically.
"The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for airborne alert role in the B-52," Jones wrote.
In its review of Schlosser's new book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety, Bloomberg reports that the North Carolina accident was one of many. npr
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