Get ready for some solar action. Earth is entering a period where potentially damaging solar storms can wreak havoc on communications and satellites. That's what the experts at the Space Weather Prediction Center tell us.
But how do scientists know what the sun is going to dish out at us?
"We do just what you think we do — we watch the sun and watch for eruptive activity at coronal mass eruptions," said Joe Kunches of the Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado, and run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Skywatchers in East Asia and the western United States should circle this upcoming Sunday on their calendars. That's when a solar eclipse will block out most of the sun, leaving a spectacular "ring of fire" shining in the sky for observers located along the eclipse's path.
The event is what's known as an annular solar eclipse — from the Latin "annulus," meaning "little ring" — and its full glory should be visible from much of Asia, the Pacific region and some of western North America, weather permitting. At its peak, the eclipse will block about 94 percent of the sun's light. [msnbc]
The world's biodiversity is down 30 percent since the 1970s, according to a new report, with tropical species taking the biggest hit. And if humanity continues as it has been, the picture could get bleaker.
Humanity is outstripping the Earth's resources by 50 percent — essentially using the resources of one and a half Earths every year, according to the 2012 Living Planet Report, produced by conservation agency the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Colby Loucks, the director of conservation sciences at WWF, compared humanity to bad houseguests. [LS]
Authorities across the south-western United States were braced for a summer season of wildfire destruction on Monday after an outbreak of five serious blazes in Arizona.
In the first serious wildfires of the 2012 season, hundreds of firefighters, backed up by air support, struggled to contain five separate blazes in northern Arizona. The authorities ordered 300 homes evacuated in the historic mining town of Crown King, said Cliff Pearlberg, a spokesman for the state's forestry division.
By late Sunday night, the fires had devoured about nine square miles of terrain, and the billowing smoke from the fires threatening Crown King could be seen in Phoenix, about 50 miles away. It was unusually early for such a serious outbreak and experts said the timing as well as prevailing dry conditions in Arizona and other parts of the south-west suggested a season of serious fire destruction was ahead. [guardian]
The fear that a solar storm may erupt and disrupt the Earth's electrical grids is a legitimate one, but until that day arrives, we can sit back and enjoy the view.
This is an image taken by NASA of the sun erupting on Wednesday, May 9th, with a solar flare appearing almost like a sparkling diamond glittering on the surface of our star.
A flare is caused when the sun's electromagnetic field twists and bends, shooting out a mind-bogglingly hot - around 100,000,000C - burst of energy particles into space. Luckily, this flare was short-lived, with no 'coronal mass ejections', so NASA is not expecting any geomagnetic storms on Earth. [DM]
For those who study earthquakes, one major challenge has been trying to understand all the physics of a fault -- both during an earthquake and at times of "rest" -- in order to know more about how a particular region may behave in the future. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed the first computer model of an earthquake-producing fault segment that reproduces, in a single physical framework, the available observations of both the fault's seismic (fast) and aseismic (slow) behavior.
"Our study describes a methodology to assimilate geologic, seismologic, and geodetic data surrounding a seismic fault to form a physical model of the cycle of earthquakes that has predictive power," says Sylvain Barbot, a postdoctoral scholar in geology at Caltech and lead author of the study. [SCIDAY]
Huge city in Guatemala finally reveals its secrets
A vast city built by the ancient Mayan civilisation and discovered nearly a century ago in modern day Guatemala is finally starting to yield its secrets - including a hint that apocalyptic predictions around the 'end' of the Mayan Calendar may be wrong.
Excavating for the first time in the sprawling complex of Xultzn in Guatemala's Peten region, archaeologists have uncovered a structure that contains what appears to be a work space for the town's scribe.
Its walls are adorned with unique paintings - one depicting a line-up of men in black uniforms, and hundreds of scrawled numbers - many calculations relating to the Mayan calendar, and stretching up to 7,000 years into the future. [DM]
Mexico's Popocatepetl volcano spewed out huge clouds of ash and fiery rock overnight, closing a local airport on Saturday and frightening nearby villagers, already on edge after weeks of increased activity.
Popocatepetl, 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Mexico City, shook with tremors that belched out four large plumes of ash on Friday night and Saturday morning, the National Center for Disaster Prevention said in a statement on Saturday.
The biggest expulsion shot an ash cloud 2.5 miles (4 km) into the air and launched glowing rocks more than half a mile (1 km) from the crater, the statement said. [reuters]
Space weather forecasters are keeping a close watch on a large collection of sunspots that could unleash blasts of energy or charged particles toward Earth in the coming days.
Sunspot region 1476, the dark patch resembling the Hawaiian Islands in the photo at left, is located near the center of the sun’s face as seen from Earth but has yet to act out in any major way. Sunspots are concentrations of magnetic flux on the sun’s surface, which often give rise to eruptive phenomena such as solar flares (releases of radiation) or coronal mass ejections (great belches of plasma). [SCIAM]
Parts of Japan's Mount Fuji could collapse if a newly-discovered fault line under the mountain shifts, a government report warned Friday.
A three-year study by seismologists discovered a previously-unknown active fault under the mountain, a Japanese national symbol and key tourist attraction located 60 miles (100km) west of Tokyo.
Yashuhiro Yoshida, director for earthquake investigation at the science ministry, said, "It's possible that [parts of] the mountain could collapse with mudslides flowing to Gotenba." [FOXNY]
A huge sunspot that dwarfs the Earth is unleashing a series of powerful solar flares as it moves across the surface of the sun, NASA scientists say.
Sunspot AR 1476 was detected by space telescopes on May 5. The huge sunspot is 60,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) across, so large that when it was first seen in views from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft, mission scientists dubbed it a "monster sunspot."
Earlier this week, space weather scientists predicted the sunspot would erupt with powerful solar flares, and those predictions have since come true. So far, the sunspot has fired off several flares, including a strong solar storm early Thursday, May 10. [FOX]
We never really have a need for it outside of turning on the tap, so what happens when you can no longer do that? Where will you get more water? The most obvious place is the store right? Come on now, that’s to easy! What about when you live out in the country and your water gets shut off? Or your well water is contaminated?
What if we suddenly get hit with an EMP and lose all electricity? (Our water pumps are electric) Then what will you do? How will you collect water if you don’t have your water purified and stored properly? In this article, my goal is to teach you a few ways to collect water outside of the norm. [APN]
Just two weeks after the huge "supermoon" wowed skywatchers around the world, the heavens will offer up another observing treat — a solar eclipse on May 20 that should be visible from much of western North America.
The May 20 event is what's known as an annular solar eclipse, in which the moon blocks out most of the sun but leaves a ring of light visible around its circumference.
It should be quite a spectacular sight for favorably placed — and appropriately careful —skywatchers throughout Asia, the Pacific region and parts of North America. [msnbc]
A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt.
This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England.
Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms. But the world is still not prepared for a truly damaging solar storm, Hapgood argues in a recent commentary published in the journal Nature. [phys]
Waterspouts are one of my favorite meteorological phenomena. They combine the swirling power of a tornado with a large body of body of water to create an entrancing sight. We gathered some of the best waterspout photos uploaded to our iWitness weather page and we asked Tornado Expert Dr. Greg Forbes to weigh in on them. We came up with 5 surprising facts you may not have known about waterspouts. Read and enjoy! [weather]
Scientists have created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in British laboratories.
The hybrids have been produced secretively over the past three years by researchers looking into possible cures for a wide range of diseases.
The revelation comes just a day after a committee of scientists warned of a nightmare ‘Planet of the Apes’ scenario in which work on human-animal creations goes too far. [DM]
