Human activity is changing the climate in unprecedented and sometimes irreversible ways, a major UN scientific report has said.
The landmark study warns of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts and flooding, and a key temperature limit being broken in just over a decade.
The report "is a code red for humanity", says the UN chief.
But scientists say a catastrophe can be avoided if the world acts fast.
There is hope that deep cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases could stabilize rising temperatures.
Echoing the scientists' findings, UN Secretary General António Guterres said:
"If we combine forces now, we can avert climate catastrophe. But, as today's report makes clear, there is no time for delay and no room for excuses. I count on government leaders and all stakeholders to ensure COP26 is a success."
The sober assessment of our planet's future has been delivered by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of scientists whose findings are endorsed by the world's governments.
Their report is the first major review of the science of climate change since 2013. Its release comes less than three months before a key climate summit in Glasgow known as COP26.
In strong, confident tones, the IPCC's document says
"It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, oceans and land".
According to Prof Ed Hawkins, from the University of Reading, UK, and one of the report's authors, the scientists cannot be any clearer on this point.
It is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet."
Donald Trump's Mar O Lago Golf Club will experience devastating flooding by the year 2100, but this will probably happen much earlier if temperatures increase by 1.5 degrees centigrade (IPCC)
Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, said:
"By using sports terms, one could say the atmosphere has been exposed to doping, which means we have begun observing extremes more often than before."
The authors say that since 1970, global surface temperatures have risen faster than in any other 50-year period over the past 2,000 years.
This warming is "already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe".
Whether it's heatwaves like the ones recently experienced in Greece and western North America, or floods like those in Germany and China, "their attribution to human influence has strengthened" over the past decade.
Rising sea levels due to melting ice from the polar regions due to global warming will have devastating consequences for the entire planet as many coastal areas will experience massive flooding (Click to view coastal flooding)
Global surface temperature was 1.09C higher in the decade between 2011-2020 than between 1850-1900.
The past five years have been the hottest on record since 1850
The recent rate of sea level rise has nearly tripled compared with 1901-1971
Human influence is "very likely" (90%) the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s and the decrease in Arctic sea-ice
It is "virtually certain" that hot extremes including heatwaves have become more frequent and more intense since the 1950s, while cold events have become less frequent and less severe
The new report also makes clear that the warming we've experienced to date has made changes to many of our planetary support systems that are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia.
The oceans will continue to warm and become more acidic. Mountain and polar glaciers will continue melting for decades or centuries.
Professor Hawkins says,
"The consequences will continue to get worse for every bit of warming. And for many of these consequences, there's no going back."
Water levels are at historic lows due to drought conditions in California. Oroville Dam had to suspend electrical power generations because water levels reached historic lows due to global warming (IPCC)
When it comes to sea level rise, the scientists have modelled a likely range for different levels of emissions.
However, a rise of around 2m by the end of this century cannot be ruled out - and neither can a 5m rise by 2150.
Such outcomes, while unlikely, would threaten many millions more people in coastal areas with flooding by 2100.
One key aspect of the report is the expected rate of temperature rise and what it means for the safety of humanity.
A peaceful demonstration of young Americans to bring attention to our elected representatives about the severity of global warming (IPCC)
Almost every nation on Earth signed up to the goals of the Paris climate agreement in 2015.
This pact aims to keep the rise in global temperatures well below 2C this century and to pursue efforts to keep it under 1.5C.
This new report says that under all the emissions scenarios considered by the scientists, both targets will be broken this century unless huge cuts in carbon take place.
If the IPCC's estimates are correct we have about 12-13 years before we will know if the planet can keep temperatures 1.5 degrees centigrade below 1910 levels or we could experience consequences we don't even want to go through. (IPCC)
The authors believe that 1.5C will be reached by 2040 in all scenarios. If emissions aren't slashed in the next few years, this will happen even earlier.
Prof Malte Meinshausen, an IPCC author from the University of Melbourne in Australia, said,
"We will hit one-and-a-half degrees in individual years much earlier. We already hit it in two months during the El Niño in 2016. The new report's best estimate is the middle of 2034, but the uncertainty is huge and ranges between now and never."
The consequences of going past 1.5C over a period of years would be unwelcome in a world that has already experienced a rapid uptick in extreme events with a temperature rise since pre-industrial times of 1.1C.
Dr Friederike Otto, from the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the IPCC report's authors, says.
"We will see even more intense and more frequent heatwaves. And we will also see an increase in heavy rainfall events on a global scale, and also increases in some types of droughts in some regions of the world."
Prof Carolina Vera, vice-chair of the working group that produced the document, said:
"The report clearly shows that we are already living the consequences of climate change everywhere. But we will experience further and concurrent changes that increase with every additional beat of warming."
So what can be done?
While this report is more clear and confident about the downsides to warming, the scientists are more hopeful that if we can cut global emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero by the middle of this century, we can halt and possibly reverse the rise in temperatures.
Reaching net zero involves reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible using clean technology, then burying any remaining releases using carbon capture and storage, or absorbing them by planting trees.
Another co-author, Professor Piers Forster from the University of Leeds, UK, said.
"The thought before was that we could get increasing temperatures even after net zero. But we now expect nature to be kind to us and if we are able to achieve net zero, we hopefully won't get any further temperature increase; and if we are able to achieve net zero greenhouse gases, we should eventually be able to reverse some of that temperature increase and get some cooling."
Temperatures will reach 1.5C above 1850-1900 levels by 2040 under all emissions scenarios
The Arctic is likely to be practically ice-free in September at least once before 2050 in all scenarios assessed
There will be an increasing occurrence of some extreme events "unprecedented in the historical record" even at warming of 1.5C
Extreme sea level events that occurred once a century in the recent past are projected to occur at least annually at more than half of tidal gauge locations by 2100
There will be likely increases in fire weather in many regions
While the future projections of warming are clearer than ever in this report, and many impacts simply cannot be avoided, the authors caution against fatalism.
Dr Otto said.
"Lowering global warming really minimises the likelihood of hitting these tipping points. We are not doomed."
A tipping point refers to when part of the Earth's climate system undergoes an abrupt change in response to continued warming.
For political leaders, the report is another in a long line of wake-up calls, but since it comes so close to November's COP26 global climate summit, it carries extra weight.
COMMENTARY: The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2021 Report on Climate Change is a wakeup call for the entire planet. We have been hearing catastrophic warnings about the effects of global warming for years now, but this new IPCC report on climate change makes things abundantly clear -- if the inhabitants of planet Earth fail to take global warming seriously and do nothing, we will experience repeated hot temperatures, drought, arid and unusable land, rising seas and weather storms. Many areas of our planet will be affected with devastating consequences for all of us. I just downloaded all 900+ pages of the Climate Change 2021 report and do not look forward to reading something this huge. If you are interested in a copy of this report, you will find it HERE.
The No.3 nuclear reactor of the Fukushima Di-Ischi nuclear power plant is seen burning after a blast following an earthquake and tsunami in this handout satellite image taken March 14, 2011 (Click Image To Enlarge)
On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Sendai, Japan, triggering a large tsunami. The earthquake and ensuing damage resulted in an immediate shutdown of 12,000 MW of electric generating capacity at four nuclear power stations. Other energy infrastructure such as electrical grid, refineries, and gas and oil-fired power plants were also affected by the earthquake, though some of these facilities were restored. Between the 2011 earthquake and May 2012, Japan lost all of its nuclear capacity due to scheduled maintenance and the challenge facilities face in gaining government approvals to return to operation. Japan is substituting the loss of nuclear fuel for the power sector with additional natural gas, low-sulfur crude oil, and fuel oil.
Image of the massive tidal wave that slammed into the Fukushima Dai-Ischi nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011 (Click Image To Enlarge)
Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) Co.'s crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant No. 3 reactor in Fukushima prefecture, northern Japan is seen in this still image taken from a video shot by an unmanned helicopter on April 10, 2011 (Click Image To Enlarge)
Click HERE to view some impressive images of the destruction of the Fukushima Dai-Ischi nuclear power plant one month after the nuclear plant disaster of March 11, 2011.
The sociological and economic aftershocks from the devastation of Fukushima will reverberate through Japan for decades. Of the 52 nuclear plants operating before the disaster, only two continue to run, and the consensus is that Japan will not again resort to nuclear generation for the foreseeable future. That puts enormous pressure on utilities to replace lost capacity with other fuel sources and to better manage demand.
Japan's Nuclear Power Plants - Operating, Under Construction and Pre-Construction - Prior to the Great Fukushima Earthquake (Click Image To Enlarge)
Because Japan has always depended on imported fossil fuels, especially liquefied natural gas and oil, there is now a surge in interest in renewables, particularly solar and wind.And in order to manage demand and integrate intermittent and distributed generation, it is suddenly essential to rethink the grid.
The challenge is not to improve reliability. The Japanese grid is among the most reliable in the world. If the average American loses power for eight hours a year, the average Japanese endures just five minutes of darkness, according to Matt Wakefield, senior program manager, information and communications technology at EPRI.
But the Japanese grid isn’t very smart. Meters, especially residential meters, are still mostly read by meter readers, and while some level of smart metering is deployed, it’s mainly been to establish consumer-to-utility communication to replace these human meter readers. There are a number of pilot projects, but the two-way communication capability that we associate with smart, AMI metering in the United States is at a very early stage of deployment in Japan. The challenge, then, is to deploy the components of a truly smart grid in order to enable integration of intermittent renewable resources and the ability to dynamically manage demand.
Japan Total Energy Consumption by Source - Year 2010 - EIA International Energy Statistics (Click Image To Energy)
The challenge is urgent. With the sudden loss of virtually all of its nuclear generation, a significant amount of total generating capacity disappeared. Estimates range as high as 30 percent, according to the World Nuclear Association, and as low as 13 percent to 18 percent by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), but whatever the absolute figure, the loss is very serious. And while some demand was also lost in the wake of Fukushima, much of the industrial capacity that was destroyed has been rebuilt.
Since the earthquake, Japan has handled the loss of capacity mainly through voluntary usage curtailment. The country’s utilities have always relied on a voluntary program with their industrial customers to reduce usage on an emergency basis, but such requests were rare. During the first summer after Fukushima, they asked for reductions and demand decreased significantly, according to EPRI’s Wakefield. That says a lot about the ability of utility companies in Japan to communicate with their customers, but it also speaks to what Clyde Prestowitz, the founder and president of the Economic Strategy Institute and a former counselor to the Secretary of Commerce in the Reagan administration, calls Japan’s homogeneity. Prestowitz said.
“Everyone is on the same team and everyone is part of the same village. So they work hard to get electricity to the whole village in a way that simply wouldn’t happen in our society.”
But voluntary curtailment of electric usage is a stopgap measure. Lost capacity must be replaced and then keep pace with expected industrial expansion. Although much of the now dormant nuclear capacity is probably safe, restarting those plants is unlikely. There was, naturally, a high level of concern about nuclear energy from the beginning in Japan, but citizens basically trusted the government and utility executives, who championed it. As the facts about the failure to protect against an eventuality like Fukushima emerged, as well as the lack of transparency about the extent of the disaster, that trust was lost, according to Prestowitz. The result is profound ground-level opposition to nuclear power. Because nuclear was seen as the answer to Japan’s long dependence on imported carbon-based fuel, the obvious alternative now is renewable sources, and any move toward greater efficiency and renewable, distributed generation depends on deploying advanced, smart grid technology.
Japan’s former ruling party, which was replaced in December by the center-right Liberal Democratic Party, conducted a wide-ranging re-examination of national energy policies. According to Jeffrey A. Miller, the energy attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, a key concern has been to replace nuclear with other fuels, especially renewables. To hasten the move toward renewables, the government enacted a feed-in tariff as an incentive for new investments in solar, wind, biomass, geothermal and small-scale hydroelectric. At the same time, Miller says, Japan is fully committed to creating more agile power grid configurations that enable real-time monitoring, control and demand response capabilities, and distributed power generation and energy storage by way of fuel cells and batteries.
Cumulative PV Solar Energy Capacity Installed Worldwide by Country - Year Ending 2012 - EPIA (Click Image To Enlarge)
The Japanese plan is very aggressive; the goal for solar alone is 28 gigawatts by 2020 and 53 gigawatts by 2030,with about 80 percent of that being rooftop installations, according to EPRI’s Wakefield. That compares with U.S. solar capacity of about 2 gigawatts today. The goal by 2020 is to produce 20 percent of total capacity with renewables.
Global Installed Wind Power Installation by Region - Year Ending 2010 - GWEC (Click Image To Enlarge)
The pace at which they want to move creates real challenges, notes Jack Azagury, managing director of smart grid s0ervices for Accenture, one of the global firms Japan is working with in its efforts to upgrade the system, and so does the scale involved. “Tepco alone [the utility that serves Tokyo] has 27 million meters. No AMI system operating in the world has that many. So the question is, can they scale the hardware, the network, the software to drive performance of 27 million meters?” said Azagury. He also thinks utilities and the government need to launch an education campaign in order to avoid possible consumer resistance, such as that which has met some smart-meter initiatives in the United States.
While the feed-in tariff is helping support the move to renewables, full smart grid deployment depends to a large extent on being able to make a good business case for the investment in infrastructure and developing smart appliances that could drive down peak and overall consumption. Azagury believes that sustained, broad consumer acceptance depends on set-it-and-forget-it solutions, because consumers don’t want to interact with their energy provider every day. They want something that is convenient and works and gives them the savings they want. International standards for smart appliances adopted this past December by the Consumer Electronics Association should encourage manufacturers to make more of their appliances smart-grid ready, and the communications technologies to integrate appliances with either a WiFi or cellular system are actually evolving a bit more rapidly than the appliances themselves, says EPRI’s Wakefield. But appliances are long-term investments for most people, so even when smart-grid-enabled appliances are widely available it will take time for them to be deployed.
The twin goals of integrating renewables and managing demand hinge on a smartly upgraded and expanded grid, which requires discipline and serious financial investment. But to flourish today — and tomorrow — depends on meeting the demands of a new energy economy. Japan has clearly articulated its commitment to greener, cheaper, more efficient energy, and while the new government will no doubt revisit the issue, it’s likely the country will continue to vigorously move forward to implement what is likely to be the most sophisticated national grid in the world.
COMMENTARY: As we approach the two-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011 Great Earthquake, Japan has not yet adopted a new national energy policy after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 that devastated the country, and destroyed the nuclear facility in Fukushima causing the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.
This, however, is not surprising given that developments in energy capacity and infrastructure are normally measured in decades, and not in years and months. Also, Japan does not move quickly on substantive issues like this.
The new Japanese government that took office following a lower house election on Dec 16 now expects a new national energy policy to evolve over the next three years.
Following the Fukushima disaster there have been no significant power blackouts in Japan due principally to higher than forecast excess generation capacity, significant efforts around energy conservation by households and industries, and re-starting older fossil-fuel based generation plants.
Forty-eight of Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors remain off-line today. The new independent Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) is expected to finalize revised safety standards by early summer, that the operators of the reactors must comply with. A period where all reactors may be off-line again may emerge in late summer.
The implications of the Fukushima disaster continue to be felt around the world particularly for the nuclear energy industry.
Lithuania rejected nuclear power through a recent national referendum and Bulgarians also refused to endorse the further development of nuclear energy in their country due to a low turnout in another national referendum. Costs have escalated dramatically for new nuclear facilities, in some cases doubling, and in other cases taking over 10 years to construct twice the original planned time-scales.
France recently completed an assessment indicating that the economic cost of an accident similar to Fukushima at any of its 58 reactors might be in excess of $500 billion (almost 20% of French GDP).
Nevertheless, other countries, many close neighbors of Japan, continue to pursue civilian nuclear strategies such as China, India, Russia, South Korea. Several Mideast countries are also using their petro-dollars to finance alternative energy sources in preparation for oil and gas depletion that may in the long run be inevitable.
Its natural gas imports have now risen to almost 90 million metric tons annualized or over $70 billion with much of the pre-3.11 increase used to make up for its lost nuclear capacity.
Two new receiving liquefied natural gas terminals are now planned for Fukushima and Aomori prefectures. Costs for construction of these facilities can run up to $5 billion.
Japanese gas importers have for the most part contracted to import natural gas at prices that are linked to crude oil prices. As oil prices have continued to rise and the Japanese currency has recently weakened, this has resulted in significantly higher local currency import costs.
Japan may now be spending $250 billion per year on imported oil, gas, and coal. Increased use of fossil fuels may over time undermine Japan’s GHG emissions reduction targets that are now under review with a new Japanese CO2 emissions reduction policy position expected to be announced in November 2013 by the Ministry of Environment (MoE).
It remains to be seen whether Japan’s considerable investments in overseas oil and gas exploration assets by its large trading companies and its exploration and development companies can bring these fuels back to its own shores at reasonable prices given the recent very large escalation of exploration and development costs globally.
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Today
Radiation levels in the abandoned communities near Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have fallen 40% in the past year. Inside the wrecked facility, construction workers rush to complete state-of-the-art equipment that will remove dozens of dangerous radioactive nuclides from cooling water. Soon, a steel shield will be driven into the seabed to prevent contamination from the plant from leaking into the Pacific Ocean.
Almost two years after a deadly tsunami crashed into the plant, crippling its backup power supply and triggering the world's worst nuclear crisis for a quarter of a century, the gravest danger posed by Fukushima Daiichi has passed.
The pipes, cables and other equipment strewn across the plant's grounds this time last year are now functioning components in a complex, technologically fraught mission to cool the crippled reactors, while experts struggle to figure out how to extract the melted nuclear fuel lying deep inside their basements.
The three reactors struck by meltdown and hydrogen explosions two years ago were brought to a safe state known as "cold shutdown" in December 2011, nine months after the tsunami left almost 20,000 dead or missing along Japan's north-east coast.
Now, Japan is about to embark on a clean-up that could cost at least $100bn – on top of the cost of compensating evacuees and decontaminating their abandoned homes.
Fukushima Daiichi's manager, Takeshi Takahashi, conceded that decommissioning the plant could take 30 to 40 years.
Mr. Takahashi told a small group of visiting foreign journalists on Wednesday.
"Even though we are still faced with a difficult task, we'll keep pushing on with the decommissioning process. It will take a long time to complete our work, especially on the three reactors that suffered meltdown, but we'll do our best to keep them stable."
The clean-up operation will begin at building No 4, where the fuel rods inside survived unscathed after it was hit by the tsunami, then badly damaged by a hydrogen explosion.
By the end of this year, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) says it will begin removing fuel assemblies from the reactor building's storage pool and placing them in a nearby cooling pool, where they will remain for four years before being stored in even safer dry casks in a purpose-built facility on higher ground.
In total, workers will have to extract more than 11,000 new and used fuel assemblies from seven badly damaged storage pools. Work to remove melted fuel won't begin until 2021, and the entire decommissioning project is expected to take up to 40 years.
Picture of the meteorite as it explodes into a huge fireball and sends a huge shockwave and rains debris down on Chelyabinsk in the Russian Urals (Click Image To Enlarge)
Russia’s Urals region has been rocked by a meteorite explosion in the stratosphere. The impact wave damaged several buildings, and blew out thousands of windows amid frigid winter weather. Hundreds have sought medical attention for minor injuries.
Around 950 people have sought medical attention in Chelyabinsk alone because of the disaster, the region's governor Mikhail Yurevich told RIA Novosti. Over 110 of them have been hospitalized and two of them are in heavy condition. Among the injured there are 159 children, Emergency ministry reported.
Army units found three meteorite debris impact sites, two of which are in an area near Chebarkul Lake, west of Chelyabinsk. The third site was found some 80 kilometers further to the northwest, near the town of Zlatoust. One of the fragments that struck near Chebarkul left a crater six meters in diameter.
Servicemembers from the tank brigade that found the crater have confirmed that background radiation levels at the site are normal.
A hole in Chebarkul Lake made by meteorite debris. Photo by Chebarkul town head Andrey Orlov. (Click Image To Enlarge)
Police officers, environmentalists and EMERCOM experts examine small 0.5-1 cm pieces of black matter left by the meteorite at the site of a meteorite hit in the Chelyabinsk Region (Click Image To Enlarge)
Experts working at the site of the impact told Lifenews tabloid that the fragment is most likely solid, and consists of rock and iron.
A local fisherman told police he found a large hole in the lake’s ice, which could be a result of a meteorite impact. The site was immediately sealed off by police, a search team is now waiting for divers to arrive and explore the bottom of the lake.
Samples of water taken from the lake have not revealed any excessive radioactivity or foreign material.
Russian space agency Roskosmos has confirmed the object that crashed in the Chelyabinsk region is a meteorite:
“According to preliminary estimates, this space object is of non-technogenic origin and qualifies as a meteorite. It was moving at a low trajectory with a speed of about 30 km/s.”
According to estimates by the Russian Academy of Sciences, the space object weighed about 10 tons before entering Earth’s atmosphere.
A bright flash was seen in the Chelyabinsk, Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions, Russia’s Republic of Bashkiria and in northern Kazakhstan.
The Russian army has joined the rescue operation. Radiation, chemical and biological protection units have been put on high alert. Since the explosion occurred several kilometers above the Earth, a large ground area must be thoroughly checked for radiation and other threats.
According to preliminary reports, the worst damage on the ground in Chelyabinsk was at a zinc factory, the walls and roof of which were partially destroyed by an impact wave. The city's Internet and mobile service were reportedly interrupted because of the damage inflicted near the factory.
Chelyabinsk administration’s website said nearly 3,000 buildings were damaged to varying extents by the meteor shower in the city, including 34 medical facilities and 361 schools and kindergartens. The total amount of window glass shattered amounts to 100,000 square meters, the site said, citing city administration head Sergey Davydov. The ministry also said that no local power stations or civil aircraft were damaged by the meteorite shower, and that “all flights proceed according to schedule.”
Buildings were left without gas because facilities in the city had also been damaged, an Emergency Ministry spokesperson said, according to Russia 24 news channel.
The Emergency Ministry reported that 20,000 rescue workers are operating in the region. Three aircraft were deployed to survey the area and locate other possible impact locations.
The trail of a falling object is seen above a residential apartment block in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, on February 15, 2013.(AFP Photo - Oleg Kargopolov) (Click Image To Enlarge)
The regional Emergency Ministry denied previous unconfirmed reports by local media that the meteorite was shot by the military air defenses.
Witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it seemed like an earthquake and thunder had struck at the same time, and that there were huge trails of smoke across the sky. Others reported seeing burning objects fall to earth.
A spokesperson for the Urals regional Emergency Ministry center claimed it sent out a mass SMS warning residents about a possible meteorite shower. However, eyewitnesses said they either never received it, or got the message after the explosion had occurred. The Emergency Ministry has since denied sending out the SMS warning, and said the spokesperson that spread the false information “will be fired.”
Picture of windows damaged right after the impact of meteorite in Chelyabinsk (Click Image To Enlarge)
This picture taken by Pavel Berlet shows office damage in the city of Chelyabins (Click Image To Enlarge)
Classes for all Chelyabinsk schools have been canceled, mostly due to broken windows. Institute students have been dismissed until next Monday. Authorities also ordered all kindergartens with broken windows to return children to their families.
Police in the Chelyabinsk region are reportedly on high alert, and have begun ‘Operation Fortress’ in order to protect vital infrastructure.
Office buildings in downtown Chelyabinsk have been evacuated. An emergency message published on the website of the Chelyabinsk regional authority urged residents to pick up their children from school and remain at home if possible.
This picture shows exterior window damage to a building in Chelyabinsk. Photo courtesy Pavel Berlet (Click Image To Enlarge)
A man walks past a building with shattered windows after a meteorite shock wave in Chelyabinsk, Urals, Russia (Click Image To Enlarge)
The shockwave from the meteorite blast was so powerful that n some cases the entire window frames were torn from the windows (Click Image To Enlarge)
Those in Chelyabinsk who had their windows smashed are scrambling to cover the openings with anything available – the temperature in the city is currently -6°C.
Chelyabinsk regional governor Mikhail Yurevich said that preserving the city’s central heating system is authorities’ primary goal.
The governor said in and address to city residents.
“Do not panic, this is an ordinary situation we can manage in a couple of days.”
Background radiation levels in Chelyabinsk remain unchanged, the Emergency Ministry reported.
Local zinc factory was damaged the severest, some of its walls collapsing (Photo from Twitter.com user @TimurKhorev) (Click Image To Enlarge)
Screenshot from YouTube user Gregor Grimm (Click Image To Enlarge)
Residents of the town of Emanzhilinsk, some 50 kilometers from Chelyabinsk, said they saw a flying object that suddenly burst into flames, broke apart and fell to earth, and that a black cloud had been seen hanging above the town. Witnesses in Chelyabinsk said the city’s air smells like gunpowder.
Many locals reported that the explosion rattled their houses and smashed windows. “This explosion, my ears popped, windows were smashed… phone doesn’t work,” Evgeniya Gabun wrote on Twitter.
Twitter user Katya Grechannikova reported.
“My window smashed, I am all shaking! Everybody says that a plane crashed.”
Bukreeva Olga wrote on Twitter.
“My windows were not smashed, but I first thought that my house is being dismantled, then I thought it was a UFO, and my eventual thought was an earthquake.”
The Mayak nuclear complex near the town of Ozersk was not affected by the incident, according to reports. Mayak, one of the world’s biggest nuclear facilities that used to house plutonium production reactors and a reprocessing plant, is located 72 kilometers northwest of Chelyabinsk.
NASA scientists said that the incident is not connected to the approach of 2012 DA14, which measures 45 to 95 meters in diameter and will be passing by Earth tonight at around 19:25 GMT, at the record close distance of 27,000 kilometers.
Photo from Twitter.com user @varlamov (Click Image To Enlarge)
COMMENTARY:
Another Tunguska event?
The incident in Chelyabinsk bears a strong resemblance to the 1908 Tunguska event – an exceptionally powerful explosion in Siberia believed to have been caused by a fragment of a comet or meteor.
According to estimates, the energy of the Tunguska blast may have been as high as 50 megatons of TNT, equal to a nuclear explosion. Some 80 million trees were leveled over a 2,000-square-kilometer area. The Tunguska blast remains one of the most mysterious events in history, prompting a wide array of hypotheses on its cause, including a black hole passing through Earth and the wreck of an alien spacecraft.
Trees were flattened from the blast and shockwave from the meteorite that exploded above Tunguska in northern Siberia in 1908 (Click Image To Enlarge)
It is believed that if the Tunguska event had happened 4 hours later, due to the rotation of the Earth it would have completely destroyed the city of Vyborg and significantly damaged St. Petersburg.
When a similar, though less powerful, unexplained explosion happened in Brazil in 1930, it was named the ‘Brazilian Tunguska.’ The Tunguska event also prompted debate and research into preventing or mitigating asteroid impacts.
Courtey of an article dated February 15, 2013 appearing in RT.com
Satellite image of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant spews highly radioactive contaminated smoke from fires after the great earthquake and tidal wave that hit the plant (Click Image To Enlarge)
You may have entertained the idea of an improbable civilization ending events such as a ‘global killer’ asteroid, earth crust displacement or massive solar storms, but what if there existed a situation right now that was so serious that it literally threatened our very existence?
According to a host of scientists, nuclear experts and researchers, were are facing exactly such a scenario – and current efforts may not be able to stop it.
When the Fukushima nuclear plants sustained structural damage and a catastrophic failure of their spent fuel cooling systems in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami in 2011, it left the government of Japan, Tokyo Power and nuclear regulatory agencies around the world powerless to contain the release of deadly radiation. A year on, the battle for control of Fukushima continues to no avail.
Fukushima nuclear reactors on March 17, 2011 (Click Image To Enlarge)
Reactor #4 is the most dangerous of all six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power complex because it is the most heavily damaged. It contains the most nuclear fuel, enough in fact, that should those nuclear fuel rods catch fire due to lack of cooling water, those fires could not be put out, and the fires would continue to burn until all the fuel has been consumed.
Aerial view of Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant. Note that the roofs of two of the reactors have been completely blown off (Click Image To Enlarge)
In the meantime, the burning fuel rods would release more Cesium 137 nuclear fallout than was released in all above ground nuclear tests since World War II. This would be a catastrophe for Japan. It would mean the evacuation of all cities and towns near to the Fukushima nuclear power plants, including the city of Tokyo and its over 40 million people. Easterly tradewinds would also carry all that Cesium 137 across the Pacific Ocean to the west coast of North America. Just watch the following video:
Here's a video broadcast in Japan in April 2012 that was translated into English, but for some reason did not get widespread news circulation in the U.S. If you listen to the narrator closely, it paints a truly horrific picture of just what could happen if 11,000 nuclear fuel rods in and around nuclear reactor #4 at Fukushima were to catch on fire. It would make Chernobyl look small by comparison. According to a highly secret study by the Russian government. Nearly 1 million Russians have either died from the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. Be prepared to be scared out of your wits.
It’s estimated that tens of thousands of people in Japan and the whole of North America have been affected, with reports indicating that children in Japan and the U.S. are already being born with birth defects, as well as thousands who have already succumbed to radiation related illness.
Most Contaminated food areas of North America (based on fallout wind spread patterns charted by European scientific research agencies) in order of likely intensity of contamination, starting with the most contaminated:
Entire Pacific Coast (note that much of the produce in North America comes from this region, especially California)
Northern U.S. States close to Canada, and Canadian areas close to the U.S. (including Toronto etc.)
Eastern States
Central States of the U.S., and Far Northern areas of Canada
As we initially followed the breaking news during the first thirty days of the accident, we suggested the Fukushima disaster would be worse than Chernobyl. Not even we could have imagined how much worse it would be.
If current estimates are correct, Fukushima has already released as much radiation into the atmosphere and Pacific Ocean as Chernobyl, and the potential for a disaster at least ten times worse is highly probable in the event of another earthquake or accident that leads to a collapse of the cooling structures which are above ground and have already suffered significant damage.
According to U.S. Army General Albert N. Stubblebine (ret.) of the Natural Solutions Foundation, the situation is extremely serious and poses a significant danger to our entire civilization. Since TEPCO and the Japanese government have refused the entombment option (as the Russians did with Chernobyl) the world is at the mercy of nature. A mistake here would cause the deaths of tens of millions of people across the globe.
If there ever existed a threat that could cause the end of the world as we know it, it’s the ongoing and unresolved nuclear saga in Japan:
When the highly radioactive Spent Fuel Rods are exposed to air, there will be massive explosions releasing many times the amount or radiation released thus far. Bizarrely, they are stored three stories above ground in open concrete storage pools. Whether through evaporation of the water in the pools, or due to the inevitable further collapse of the structure, there is a severe risk. United States public health authorities agree that tens of thousands of North Americans have already died from the Fukushima calamity. When the final cataclysm occurs, sooner rather than later, the whole Northern Hemisphere is at risk of becoming largely uninhabitable.
Fact. On March 11, 2011, Fukushima Daichi nuclear power station with six nuclear reactors suffered cataclysmic damage that some believe was a man made event,and the resulting Tsunami. Hydrogen explosions…at least one nuclear explosion… and then subsequent deterioration of the visible plants at five of those reactors have created a threat situation unparalleled in human history.
Fact. Despite denial and cover-up, the reality has emerged, that enormous amounts of radioactive material has been spewing into the atmosphere, polluting the groundwater, and the food of Japan, and entering by the tens of millions of gallons the waters of the Pacific.
There’s no way to sugarcoat these facts. Denying them, blocking them out, pretending that they are not real is of no help to you and your family, and it leaves you totally unprepared for a danger that the Natural Solutions Foundation has been warning about since the first day. As of three weeks ago the levels of radiation inside of the spent fuel pools of unit no. 2 are too high to measure. Get that… too high to measure. And, the water there is evaporating, meaning that heat and radiation could easily build to very high levels.
Very simply put, if this much Cesium 137 is released, it will destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugulistic debate over nuclear power plants.
This is an issue of human survival.
We can play the denial game all day long and pretend that, because the mainstream media is not reporting on it, there is no threat, but the facts are quite clear.
This is, without a doubt, the most immediate threat faced by the world. It’s so serious, in fact, that the Japanese government has considered and put into place evacuation plans for the whole of Tokyo – some 40 million people. Reports are also emerging that suggest a collapse of the spent fuel pools would be so serious that the entire country of Japan may have to be evacuated. The entire country – that’s 125 million refugees that will cause an unprecedented humanitarian disaster.
Before you argue that these are the ravings of just alternative media conspiracy theorists and fearmongers, consider the assessment put forth by Robert Alvarez , a senior policy adviser to the Secretary for National Security and the Environment for the US Department of Energy:
The No. 4 pool is about 100 feet above ground, is structurally damaged and is exposed to the open elements. If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident.
The infrastructure to safely remove this material was destroyed as it was at the other three reactors. Spent reactor fuel cannot be simply lifted into the air by a crane as if it were routine cargo. In order to prevent severe radiation exposures, fires and possible explosions, it must be transferred at all times in water and heavily shielded structures into dry casks.. As this has never been done before, the removal of the spent fuel from the pools at the damaged Fukushima-Dai-Ichi reactors will require a major and time-consuming re-construction effort and will be charting in unknown waters.
The total spent reactor fuel inventory at the Fukushima-Daichi site contains nearly half of the total amount of Cs-137 estimated by the NCRP to have been released by all atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, Chernobyl, and world-wide reprocessing plants (~270 million curies or ~9.9 E+18 Becquerel).
It is important for the public to understand that reactors that have been operating for decades, such as those at the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site, have generated some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet.
Regulatory agencies all over the world are warning of the potentiality of a further degradation of the Fukushima nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools, and the subsequent nuclear fallout that would follow.
If these reactors go – and they could at any moment for any number of reasons – we’re looking at a situation for which you simply cannot stock enough food, or water, or supplies. Radiation would spread across the entire northern hemisphere and would be impossible to contain.
While we’ve argued in the past that there is no place we’d rather be than in the United States of America in the event of a socio-economic collapse or global conflict, if these spent fuel pools collapse, then an international exit strategy may be the only option.
Because details are sparse and research limited, it is difficult to predict what nuclear fall out from Japan may look like. The following map may be of some help, as it details the estimated fallout pattern resulting from a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. You’ll note that, while most of the world would be irradiated, the southern hemisphere would be your best bet to avoid the brunt of it:
Beachfront property in Antarctica sounds quite appealing right about now.
COMMENTARY:
A NUCLEAR WAR WITHOUT A WAR
The Fukushima disaster in Japan has brought to the forefront the dangers of Worldwide nuclear radiation.
The crisis in Japan has been described as "a nuclear war without a war". In the words of renowned novelist Haruki Murakami:
"This time no one dropped a bomb on us ... We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives."
While the long-term repercussions of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are yet to be fully assessed, they are far more serious than those pertaining to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine, which resulted in almost one million deaths (New Book Concludes - Chernobyl death toll: 985,000, mostly from cancer Global Research, September 10, 2010.
All eyes are now riveted on the Fukushima Daiichi plant, with news coverage both in Japan and internationally failing to fully acknowledge the impacts of a second catastrophe at TEPCO's (Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc) Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant.
The shaky political consensus both in Japan, the U.S. and Western Europe is that the crisis at Fukushima has been contained.
The realties, however, are otherwise. Fukushima 3 was leaking unconfirmed amounts of plutonium. According to Dr. Helen Caldicott,
"One millionth of a gram of plutonium, if inhaled can cause cancer".
An opinion poll in May 2011 confirmed that more than 80 per cent of the Japanese population do not believe the government's information regarding the nuclear crisis. (quoted in Sherwood Ross, Fukushima: Japan's Second Nuclear Disaster, Global Research, November 10, 2011)
THE IMPACTS IN JAPAN
The Japanese government has been obliged to acknowledge that "the severity rating of its nuclear crisis ... matches that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster". In a bitter irony, however, this tacit admission by the Japanese authorities has proven to been part of the cover-up of a significantly larger catastrophe, resulting in a process of global nuclear radiation and contamination:
"While Chernobyl was an enormous unprecedented disaster, it only occurred at one reactor and rapidly melted down. Once cooled, it was able to be covered with a concrete sarcophagus that was constructed with 100,000 workers. There are a staggering 4400 tons of nuclear fuel rods at Fukushima, which greatly dwarfs the total size of radiation sources at Chernobyl." ( Extremely High Radiation Levels in Japan: University Researchers Challenge Official Data, Global Research, April 11, 2011)
WORLDWIDE CONTAMINATION
The dumping of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a potential trigger to a process of global radioactive contamination. Radioactive elements have not only been detected in the food chain in Japan, radioactive rain water has been recorded in California:
"Hazardous radioactive elements being released in the sea and air around Fukushima accumulate at each step of various food chains (for example, into algae, crustaceans, small fish, bigger fish, then humans; or soil, grass, cow's meat and milk, then humans). Entering the body, these elements - called internal emitters - migrate to specific organs such as the thyroid, liver, bone, and brain, continuously irradiating small volumes of cells with high doses of alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation, and over many years often induce cancer". (Helen Caldicott, Fukushima: Nuclear Apologists Play Shoot the Messenger on Radiation, The Age, April 26, 2011)
While the spread of radiation to the West Coast of North America was casually acknowledged, the early press reports (AP and Reuters) "quoting diplomatic sources" stated that only "tiny amounts of radioactive particles have arrived in California but do not pose a threat to human health."
"According to the news agencies, the unnamed sources have access to data from a network of measuring stations run by the United Nations’ Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. Greg Jaczko, chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told White House reporters on Thursday (March 17) that his experts “don’t see any concern from radiation levels that could be harmful here in the United States or any of the U.S. territories”.
JAPAN IS NOW A PUBLIC HEALTH DISASTER
Japan as a nation state has been destroyed. Its landmass and territorial waters are contaminated. Part of the country is uninhabitable. High levels of radiation have been recorded in the Tokyo metropolitan area, which has a population of 39 million (2010) (more than the population of Canada, circa 34 million (2010)) There are indications that the food chain is contaminated throughout Japan:
"Radioactive cesium exceeding the legal limit was detected in tea made in a factory in Shizuoka City, more than 300 kilometers away from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Shizuoka Prefecture is one of the most famous tea producing areas in Japan.
A tea distributor in Tokyo reported to the prefecture that it detected high levels of radioactivity in the tea shipped from the city. The prefecture ordered the factory to refrain from shipping out the product. After the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, radioactive contamination of tea leaves and processed tea has been found over a wide area around Tokyo." (See 5 More Companies Detect Radiation In Their Tea Above Legal Limits Over 300 KM From Fukushima, June 15, 2011)
Japan's industrial and manufacturing base is prostrate. Japan is no longer a leading industrial power. The country's exports have plummeted. The Tokyo government has announced its first trade deficit since 1980.
While the business media has narrowly centered on the impacts of power outages and energy shortages on the pace of productive activity, the broader issue pertaining to the outright radioactive contamination of the country's infrastructure and industrial base is a "scientific taboo" (i.e the radiation of industrial plants, machinery and equipment, buildings, roads, etc). A report released in January 2012 points to the nuclear contamination of building materials used in the construction industry, in cluding roads and residential buildings throughout Japan.(See FUKUSHIMA: Radioactive Houses and Roads in Japan. Radioactive Building Materials Sold to over 200 Construction Companies, January 2012)
A "coverup report" by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (May 2011), entitled "Economic Impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Current Status of Recovery"presents "Economic Recovery" as a fait accompli. It also brushes aside the issue of radiation. The impacts of nuclear radiation on the work force and the country's industrial base are not mentioned. The report states that the distance between Tokyo -Fukushima Dai-ichi is of the order of 230 km (about 144 miles) and that the levels of radiation in Tokyo are lower than in Hong Kong and New York City.(Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Current Status of Recovery, p.15). This statement is made without corroborating evidence and in overt contradiction with independent radiation readings in Tokyo (se map below). In recent developments, Sohgo Security Services Co. is launching a lucrative "radiation measurement service targeting households in Tokyo and four surrounding prefectures".
"A map of citizens' measured radiation levels shows radioactivity is distributed in a complex pattern reflecting the mountainous terrain and the shifting winds across a broad area of Japan north of Tokyo which is in the center of the of bottom of the map."
Radiation contamination readings map by Japanese "citizens" of localities within 144 miles of Fukushima (Levels of radiation contamination: red = very high, yellow = high, light blue = moderate, dark blue = above normal) Click Image To Enlarge
AREAS WHOSE FOOD PRODUCTS MAY NOW CARRY RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT
According to Dr. Robert J. Gilbert, a former U.S. Marine Corps Instructor in Nuclear-Biological-Chemical Warfare Survival, since leaving the service in 1985 he has conducted independent research into the Geometric basis of modern science and new technologies.
Clearly, in light of his background, Robert Gilbert is someone worth listening to on the subject of radiation dangers from the recent nuclear disaster in Japan. Here’s an excerpt from a page on his Vesica.org website, dealing with the subject:
The Entirety of the Northern Hemisphere around the world is affected by fallout, as well as the Pacific Ocean.
Most Serious: Japan, Pacific Ocean, and Pacific Rim States
Expected spread of nuclear fallout from Fukushima nuclear catastrophe (Click Image To Enlarge)
Most Contaminated food areas of North America (based on fallout wind spread patterns charted by European scientific research agencies) in order of likely intensity of contamination, starting with the most contaminated:
Entire Pacific Coast (note that much of the produce in North America comes from this region, especially California)
Northern U.S. States close to Canada, and Canadian areas close to the U.S. (including Toronto etc.)
Eastern States
Central States of the U.S., and Far Northern areas of Canada
SAFEST AREAS OF ORIGIN FOR FOOD PRODUCTS
The majority of contamination is in the northern hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean region. Most of the Southern Hemisphere has little to no fallout (the exception is the Southern Hemisphere in the Pacific; Australia for example is finding radioactive fish in the ocean, so although they may not get much atmospheric fallout they are affected by the massive contamination of the Pacific Ocean.)
Also note that radioactive contamination is being found on non-food products being imported from Japan.
Safest Areas of Origin for food products:
Central America (avoid items from the Pacific Coast area of Mexico)
South America
Africa
Europe is also far less contaminated that North America, although it is also experiencing significant fallout; so it is a better source for products than North America, however not as good as Southern Hemisphere sources. (However some South American produce may contain high levels of pesticides not allowed to be used in the U.S. or Canada.)
ITEMS OF SPECIAL CONCERN FROM AFFECTED AREAS
Most affected:
All Ocean-Derived Products from the Pacific Ocean: the Fukushima accident dumped millions of times the normal background levels of radiation into the Pacific, where it is affecting the entire ocean (most toxic near Japan and bordering areas, but now reaching to the US West Coast: debris from the Tsunami in Japan is also expected to start washing up on the West Coast in the near future.) There are already reports of Pacific Fish showing radioactive contamination. This indicates a need to be cautious regarding:
All Pacific Ocean Fish
Sea Salt or Ocean Minerals derived from the Pacific
All Pacific Seaweed and Sea Vegetables (order Atlantic Ocean seaweed at www.theseaweedman.com )
Milk and all Dairy Products (butter, cheese etc.) from all animals: Cows, Goats, and Sheep (Dairy products have the most intense immediate absorption of radiation from fallout). Radioactive contamination of milk has been found throughout the United States, especially on the West Coast.
Any plant with a large surface area exposed to the air while growing: The most intense radiation absorption in plants is through rain falling directly on the leaves of the plant, where it is directly absorbed. Rainwater absorbed through the earth into the plant is already of much lower radiation intensity due to the filtering affect of the soil. All broad leaf plants and plants with large surface areas grown in the open air (rather than in greenhouses) are the most contaminated, for instance Salad Greens, Spinach, Cabbage etc. Contaminated crops in California (carrying radioactive iodine and cesium) have already been confirmed by UC Berkeley. [Carrots and other root vegetables are less contaminated due to growing underground.]
Water from Rainwater or Open Lake type catchments: instead drink bottled water, or water from underground wells or other underground sources (radiation is greatly reduced when the particles have to travel through the ground.)
If the extent of radioactive fallout in the Northern Hemisphere worsens due to exposing the fuel rods in some of the Fukushima reactors to air, then even more Cesium 137 will be released into the environment. Cesium 137 is really bad because once it gets into the soil or water supply, the radioactivity can be passed onto the entire food chain as plants absorb the radioactivity from water and meat producing animals become radioactive as well. As humans we will absorb radioactivity from the air we breath and that's pretty bad just by itself, but allowing additional radioactivity to get into our bodies through the food chain means a catastrophe. Let's hope that the Japanese finally dome the affected damaged reactors ala Chernobyl, and take proper measures to insure that the remaining nuclear reactors are protected against lost of cooling water.
Radiation readings taken earlier this year show that so far the nuclear fallout from Fukushima is "minimal" or "within safe limits," and that water, dairy and agricultural crops, although containing higher levels of radiation contamination, are not sufficiently high enough to cause a health hazard to humans. However, what these readings do not disclose is the ticking timebomb from reactor #4 that exists at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
On May 28, 2012, it was reported that Blue Fin tuna, which annually migrate over 6,000 miles from the coastal waters off of Japan to the west coast of the U.S., had radiation levels 10 times normal for Cesium 134 and 137. This is still considered safe for food consumption, but the evidence is clear: the Fukushima nuclear fallout has contaminated the oceans and all sea life could be in peril of radiation contamination.
Courtesy of an article dated May 25, 2012 appearing in SHTFPlan.com and an article dated April 20, 2012 appearing in InfoWars.comand an article dated January 25, 2012 appearing in GlobalResearch.ca
Of all of the Steve Jobs interviews, and believe me, there are not many videos of the King of Magical Devices being interviewed and put under the hot seat. Steve Jobs would never subject himself to that, or admit any wrong doing. However, Steve agreed to be interviewed by All Things Digital at the D8 Conference in 2010, about accusations of horrible sweatshop working conditions, unsafe working conditions, and 13 plant worker suicides at Foxconn International's plant in China, the company that manufacturer's Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod.
I would've loved to have had Steve Jobs "wired" at the time of the interview. And just to prove that I have balls, I would've wired the other end to myself. Everytime Steve lied, it would send a fiew volts of electricity that would give me a nice jolt. It would've been like the 4th of July. I would've litup like a candle, and I am sure Apple Evangelists would enjoy the spectacle. I wonder what other wonderful tidbits of information we could've learned about Time's "Person of the Year for 2010?"
Here's the video. Please, no more hateful mail or nasty comments.
Don't get me wrong. I love Apple products, I think they are beautifully designed and engineered products that people absolutely lust for. Steve Jobs is without any doubt the greatest entrepreneur and technology innovator of the modern era even though he did get some help from alien technology along the way.
In a blog post dated March 29, 2012, I reported that Apple CEO Tim Cook had visited Foxconn International's plant in China, and he looked dapper in that yellow rubberized plant worker outfit, don't you think? I love it when the CEO of a major company "grabs the bull by the horns," and personally takes the time to visit the site of all the carnage and widespread pollution. If anybody knew what was going on over in China it was Tim, the architect of Apple's outsourced manufacturing model.
Click Image to view the first-ever views of the complete remains of the ship in full profile appearing in the April 2012 edition of National Geographic Magazine
At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic disappeared beneath the waves, taking with her 1,500 souls. One hundred years later, new technologies have revealed the most complete—and most intimate—images of the famous wreck.
The wreck sleeps in darkness, a puzzlement of corroded steel strewn across a thousand acres of the North Atlantic seabed. Fungi feed on it. Weird colorless life-forms, unfazed by the crushing pressure, prowl its jagged ramparts. From time to time, beginning with the discovery of the wreck in 1985 by Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, a robot or a manned submersible has swept over Titanic’s gloomy facets, pinged a sonar beam in its direction, taken some images—and left.
In recent years explorers like James Cameron and Paul-Henry Nargeolet have brought back increasingly vivid pictures of the wreck. Yet we’ve mainly glimpsed the site as though through a keyhole, our view limited by the dreck suspended in the water and the ambit of a submersible’s lights. Never have we been able to grasp the relationships between all the disparate pieces of wreckage. Never have we taken the full measure of what’s down there.
Until now. In a tricked-out trailer on a back lot of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), William Lange stands over a blown-up sonar survey map of theTitanic site—a meticulously stitched-together mosaic that has taken months to construct. At first look the ghostly image resembles the surface of the moon, with innumerable striations in the seabed, as well as craters caused by boulders dropped over millennia from melting icebergs.
Sonar images of the forward (bow) and rear sections (stern) of the RMS Titanic and the entire debris field of the Titanic lying at the bottom of the Northern Atlantic Ocean (Click Images To Enlarge)
On closer inspection, though, the site appears to be littered with man-made detritus—a Jackson Pollock-like scattering of lines and spheres, scraps and shards. Lange turns to his computer and points to a portion of the map that has been brought to life by layering optical data onto the sonar image. He zooms in, and in, and in again. Now we can see the Titanic’s bow in gritty clarity, a gaping black hole where its forward funnel once sprouted, an ejected hatch cover resting in the mud a few hundred feet to the north. The image is rich in detail: In one frame we can even make out a white crab clawing at a railing.
Here, in the sweep of a computer mouse, is the entire wreck of the Titanic—every bollard, every davit, every boiler. What was once a largely indecipherable mess has become a high-resolution crash scene photograph, with clear patterns emerging from the murk. Lange says.
“Now we know where everything is. After a hundred years, the lights are finally on.”
Bill Lange is the head of WHOI’s Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory, a kind of high-tech photographic studio of the deep. A few blocks from Woods Hole’s picturesque harbor, on the southwestern elbow of Cape Cod, the laboratory is an acoustic-tiled cave crammed with high-definition television monitors and banks of humming computers. Lange was part of the original Ballard expedition that found the wreck, and he’s been training ever more sophisticated cameras on the site ever since.
Sonar images of the forward half of the RMS Titanic at the bottom of the Northern Atlantic Ocean and image of the ship showing the application forward section (Click Image To Enlarge)
This imagery, the result of an ambitious multi-million-dollar expedition undertaken in August-September 2010, was captured by three state-of-the-art robotic vehicles that flew at various altitudes above the abyssal plain in long, preprogrammed swaths. Bristling with side-scan and multibeam sonar as well as high-definition optical cameras snapping hundreds of images a second, the robots systematically “mowed the lawn,” as the technique is called, working back and forth across a three-by-five-mile target area of the ocean floor. These ribbons of data have now been digitally stitched together to assemble a massive high-definition picture in which everything has been precisely gridded and geo-referenced.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) archaeologist James Delgado, the expedition’s chief scientist said.
“This is a game-changer. In the past, trying to understand Titanic was like trying to understand Manhattan at midnight in a rainstorm—with a flashlight. Now we have a site that can be understood and measured, with definite things to tell us. In years to come this historic map may give voice to those people who were silenced, seemingly forever, when the cold water closed over them.”
What is it about the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic? Why, a century later, do people still lavish so much brainpower and technological ingenuity upon this graveyard of metal more than two miles beneath the ocean surface? Why, like Pearl Harbor, ground zero, and only a few other hallowed disaster zones, does it exert such a magnetic pull on our imagination?
These new photos, shot using state-of-the-are technology by independent research group Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, provide viewers with a greater understanding of what happened on that fateful April 15, 1912.
RMS Titanic bucked as it blowed nose-first into the seabed, leaving the forward hull buried deep in mud--obscuring, possibly forever, the damage inflicted by the iceberg (Click Image To Enlarge)
RMS Titanic's battered stern is captured overhead here. Making sense of this tangle of metal presents endless challenges to experts. (Click Image To Enlarge)
RMS Titanic's battered stern, captured here in profile, bears witness to the extreme trauma inflicted upon it as it corkscrewed to the bottom (Click Image To Enlarge)
Ethereal views of Titanic's bow (modeled) offer a comprehensiveness of detail never seen before (Click Image To Enlarge)
Researchers Kirk Wolfinger, top left, Rushmore DeNooyer, and Tony Bacon put together the 100,000 sonar images of the RMS Titanic for a History Channel documentary (Click Image To Enlarge)
For some the sheer extravagance of Titanic’s demise lies at the heart of its attraction. This has always been a story of superlatives: A ship so strong and so grand, sinking in water so cold and so deep. For others the Titanic’s fascination begins and ends with the people on board. It took two hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to sink, just long enough for 2,208 tragic-epic performances to unfold, with the ship’s lights blazing. One coward is said to have made for the lifeboats dressed in women’s clothing, but most people were honorable, many heroic. The captain stayed at the bridge, the band played on, the Marconi wireless radio operators continued sending their distress signals until the very end. The passengers, for the most part, kept to their Edwardian stations. How they lived their final moments is the stuff of universal interest, a danse macabre that never ends.
But something else, beyond human lives, went down with the Titanic: An illusion of orderliness, a faith in technological progress, a yearning for the future that, as Europe drifted toward full-scale war, was soon replaced by fears and dreads all too familiar to our modern world. James Cameron told me.
“The Titanic disaster was the bursting of a bubble. There was such a sense of bounty in the first decade of the 20th century. Elevators! Automobiles! Airplanes! Wireless radio! Everything seemed so wondrous, on an endless upward spiral. Then it all came crashing down.”
A portion of RMS Titanic's steel hull that broke off when she sunk. Shows several portals and hundreds of rivets (Click Image To Enlarge)
The mother of all shipwrecks has many homes—literal, legal, and metaphorical—but none more surreal than the Las Vegas Strip. At the Luxor Hotel, in an upstairs entertainment court situated next to a striptease show and a production of Menopause the Musical, is a semipermanent exhibition of Titanic artifacts brought up from the ocean depths by RMS Titanic, Inc., the wreck’s legal salvager since 1994. More than 25 million people have seen this exhibit and similar RMST shows that have been staged in 20 countries around the world.
I spent a day at the Luxor in mid-October, wandering among the Titanic relics: A chef’s toque, a razor, lumps of coal, a set of perfectly preserved serving dishes, innumerable pairs of shoes, bottles of perfume, a leather gladstone bag, a champagne bottle with the cork still in it. They are mostly ordinary objects made extraordinary for the long, terrible journey that brought them to these clean Plexiglas cases.
I passed through a darkened chamber kept as cold as a meat locker, with a Freon-fed “iceberg” that visitors can go up to and touch. Piped-in sighs and groans of rending metal contributed to the sensation of being trapped in the belly of a fatally wounded beast. The exhibit’s centerpiece, however, was a gargantuan slab of Titanic’s hull, known as the “big piece,” that weighs 15 tons and was, after several mishaps, hoisted by crane from the seabed in 1998. Studded with rivets, ribbed with steel, this monstrosity of black metal reminded me of a T. rex at a natural history museum: impossibly huge, pinned and braced at great expense—an extinct species hauled back from a lost world.
The RMST exhibit is well-done, but over the years many marine archaeologists have had harsh words for the company and its executives, calling them grave robbers, treasure hunters, carnival barkers—and worse. Robert Ballard, who has long argued that the wreck and all its contents should be preserved in situ, has been particularly caustic in his criticism of RMST’s methodologies. Ballard told me.
“You don’t go to the Louvre and stick your finger on the Mona Lisa. You don’t visit Gettysburg with a shovel. These guys are driven by greed—just look at their sordid history.”
In recent years, however, RMST has come under new management and has taken a different course, shifting its focus away from pure salvage toward a long-term plan for approaching the wreck as an archaeological site—while working in concert with scientific and governmental organizations most concerned with the Titanic. In fact, the 2010 expedition that captured the first view of the entire wreck site was organized, led, and paid for by RMST. In a reversal from years past, the company now supports calls for legislation creating a protected Titanic maritime memorial. Late in 2011 RMST announced plans to auction off its entire $189 million collection of artifacts and related intellectual property in time for the disaster’s hundredth anniversary—but only if it can find a bidder willing to abide by the stringent conditions imposed by a federal court, including that the collection be kept intact.
I met RMST’s president, Chris Davino, at the company’s artifacts warehouse, tucked next to a dog grooming parlor in a nondescript block on the edge of Atlanta’s Buckhead district. Deep inside the climate-controlled brick building, a forklift trundled down the long aisles of industrial shelving stacked with meticulously labeled crates containing relics—dishes, clothing, letters, bottles, plumbing pieces, portholes—that were retrieved from the site over the past three decades. Here Davino, a dapper, Jersey shore-raised “turnaround professional” who has led RMST since 2009, explained the company’s new tack. Davino said.
“For years, the only thing that all the voices in the Titanic community could agree on was their disdain of us. So it was time to reassess everything. We had to do something beyond artifact recovery. We had to stop fighting with the experts and start collaborating with them.”
Which is exactly what’s happened. Government agencies such as NOAA that were formerly embroiled in lawsuits against RMST and its parent company, Premier Exhibitions, Inc., are now working directly with RMST on various long-range scientific projects as part of a new consortium dedicated to protecting the wreck site. Dave Conlin, chief marine archaeologist at the National Park Service, another agency that had been vehemently critical of the company says.
“It’s not easy to thread the needle between preservation and profit. RMST deserved the flak they got in years past, but they also deserve credit for taking this new leap of faith.”
Scholars praise RMST for recently hiring one of the world’s preeminent Titanic experts to analyze the 2010 images and begin to identify the many unsorted puzzle pieces on the ocean floor. Bill Sauder is a gnome-like man with thick glasses and a great shaggy beard that flexes and snags on itself when he laughs. His business card identifies him as a “director of Titanic research,” but that doesn’t begin to hint at his encyclopedic mastery of the Titanic’s class of ocean liners. (Sauder himself prefers to say that he is RMST’s “keeper of odd knowledge.”)
When I met him in Atlanta, he was parked at his computer, attempting to make head or tail of a heap of rubbish photographed in 2010 near the Titanic’s stern. Most Titanic expeditions have focused on the more photogenic bow section, which lies over a third of a mile to the north of most of the wreckage, but Sauder thinks that the area in the vicinity of the stern is where the real action will likely be concentrated in years to come—especially with the new RMST images providing a clearer guide. Sauder said.
“The bow’s very sexy, but we’ve been to it hundreds of times. All this wreckage here to the south is what I’m interested in.”
In essence Sauder was hunting for anything recognizable, any pattern amid the chaos around the stern. He told me.
“We like to picture shipwrecks as Greek temples on a hill—you know, very picturesque. But they’re not. They’re ruined industrial sites: piles of plates and rivets and stiffeners. If you’re going to interpret this stuff, you gotta love Picasso.”
Sauder zoomed in on the image at hand, and within a few minutes had solved at least a small part of the mystery near the stern: Lying atop the wreckage was the crumpled brass frame of a revolving door, probably from a first-class lounge. It is the kind of painstaking work that only someone who knows every inch of the ship could perform—a tiny part of an enormous Where’s Waldo? sleuthing project that could keep Bill Sauder busy for years.
In late October I found myself in Manhattan Beach, California, inside a hangar-size film studio where James Cameron, surrounded by dazzling props and models from his 1997 movie, Titanic, had assembled a roundtable of some of the world’s foremost nautical authorities—quite possibly the most illustrious conclave of Titanic experts ever gathered. Along with Cameron, Bill Sauder, and RMST explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, the roundtable boasted Titanic historian Don Lynch and famed Titanic artist Ken Marschall, along with a naval engineer, a Woods Hole oceanographer, and two U.S. Navy architects.
Cameron could more than hold his own in this select company. A self-described “rivet-counting Titanic geek,” the filmmaker has led three expeditions to the site. He developed and piloted a new class of nimble, fiber-spooling robots that brought back never before seen images of the ship’s interior, including tantalizing glimpses of the Turkish bath and some of the opulent staterooms.
Cameron has white hair and a close-clipped white goatee, and when he’s wound up on Titanic matters, a certain Melvillean intensity weighs on his brow. Cameron has also filmed the wreck of the Bismarck and is now building a submarine to take him and his cameras to the Mariana Trench. But the Titanic still holds him; he keeps swearing off the subject, only to return. He told me at his Malibu compound.
“There’s this very strange mixture of biology and architecture down there—this sort of biomechanoid quality. I think it’s gorgeous and otherworldly. You really feel like this is something that’s gone to Tartarus—to the underworld.”
At Cameron’s request, the two-day roundtable would concentrate entirely on forensics: Why did the Titanic break up the way she did? Precisely where did the hull fail? At what angle did the myriad components smash into the seabed? It was to be a kind of inquest, in other words, nearly a hundred years after the fact.
Cameron said.
“What you’re looking at is a crime scene. Once you understand that, you really get sucked into the minutiae. You want to know: How’d it get like that? How’d the knife wind up over here and the gun over there?”
Perhaps inevitably, the roundtable took off in esoteric directions—with discussion of glide ratios, shearing forces, turbidity studies. Listeners lacking an engineering sensibility would have extracted one indelible impression from the seminar: Titanic’s final moments were hideously, horrifically violent. Many accounts depict the ship as “slipping beneath the ocean waves,” as though she drifted tranquilly off to sleep, but nothing could be further from the truth. Building on many years of close analysis of the wreck, and employing state-of-the-art flooding models and “finite element” simulations used in the modern shipping industry, the experts painted a gruesome portrait of Titanic’s death throes.
The ship sideswiped the iceberg at 11:40 p.m., buckling portions of the starboard hull along a 300-foot span and exposing the six forward watertight compartments to the sea. From this moment onward, sinking was a certainty. The demise may have been hastened, however, when crewmen pushed open a gangway door on the port side in an aborted attempt to load lifeboats from a lower level. Since the ship had begun listing to port, they could not reclose the massive door against gravity, and by 1:50 a.m., the bow had settled enough to allow seawater to rush in through the gangway.
By 2:18, with the last lifeboat having departed 13 minutes earlier, the bow had filled with water and the stern had risen high enough into the air to expose the propellers and create catastrophic stresses on the middle of the ship. Then the Titanic cracked in half.
Cameron stood up and demonstrated how it happened. He grabbed a banana and began to wrench it in his hands:
“Watch how it flexes and pooches in the middle before it breaks—see that?”
The banana skin at the bottom, which was supposed to represent the doubly reinforced bottom of the hull, was the last part to snap.
Once released from the stern section, the bow shot for the bottom at a fairly steep angle. Gaining velocity as it dropped, parts began to shear away: Funnels snapped. The wheelhouse crumbled. Finally, after five minutes of relentless descent, the bow nosed into the mud with such massive force that its ejecta patterns are still visible on the seafloor today.
The stern, lacking a hydrodynamic leading edge like the bow, descended even more traumatically, tumbling and corkscrewing as it fell. A large forward section, already weakened by the fracture at the surface, completely disintegrated, spitting its contents into the abyss. Compartments exploded. Decks pancaked. Hull plates ripped out. The poop deck twisted back over itself. Heavier pieces such as the boilers dropped straight down, while other pieces were flung off “like Frisbees.” For more than two miles, the stern made its tortured descent—rupturing, buckling, warping, compressing, and gradually disintegrating. By the time it hit the ocean floor, it was unrecognizable.
Sitting back down, Cameron popped a pinched piece of banana in his mouth and ate it. He said.
“We didn’t want the Titanic to have broken up like this. We wanted her to have gone down in some kind of ghostly perfection.”
Listening to this learned disquisition on the Titanic’s death, I kept wondering: What happened to the people still on board as she sank? Most of the 1,496 victims died of hypothermia at the surface, bobbing in a patch of cork life preservers. But hundreds of people may still have been alive inside, most of them immigrant families in steerage class, looking forward to a new life in America. How did they, during their last moments, experience these colossal wrenchings and shudderings of metal? What would they have heard and felt? It was, even a hundred years later, too awful to contemplate.
St. John’s, Newfoundland, is another of Titanic’s homes. On June 8, 1912, a rescue ship returned to St. John’s bearing the last recovered Titanic corpse. For months, deck chairs, pieces of wood paneling, and other relics were reported to have washed up on the Newfoundland coast.
I had hoped to pay my respects to the people who literally went down with the ship by flying to the wreck site from St. John’s with the International Ice Patrol, the agency created in the disaster’s aftermath to keep watch for icebergs in the North Atlantic sea lanes. When a nor’easter canceled all flights, I found my way instead to a tavern in the George Street district, where I was treated to a locally made vodka distilled with iceberg water. To complete the effect, the bartender plopped into my glass an angular nub of ice chipped from an iceberg, supposedly calved from the same Greenlandic glacier that birthed the berg that sank Titanic. The ice ticked and fizzed in my glass—the exhalations, I was told, of ancient atmospheres trapped inside.
I could still get a little closer, physically and figuratively, to those who rest forever with the ship. A few years before the disaster, Guglielmo Marconi built a permanent wireless station on a desolate, wind-battered spit south of St. John’s, called Cape Race. Locals claim that the first person to receive the distress signal from the sinking ship was Jim Myrick, a 14-year-old wireless apprentice at the station who went on to a career with the Marconi Company. Initially, the transmission came in as a standard emergency code, CQD. But then Cape Race received a new signal, seldom used before: SOS.
One morning at Cape Race, amid the carcasses of old Marconi machines and crystal receivers, I met David Myrick, Jim’s great-nephew, a marine radio operator and the last of a proud line of antique communicators. David said his uncle never spoke about the night the Titanic sank until he was a frail old man. By that point, Jim had lost his hearing so completely that the only way the family could converse with him was through Morse code—manipulating a smoke detector to produce high-pitched dots and dashes. David said.
“A Marconi man to the end. He thought in Morse code—hell, he dreamed in it.”
We went out by the lighthouse and looked over the cold sea, which crashed into the cliffs below. An oil tanker cruised in the distance. Farther out, on the Grand Banks, new icebergs had been reported. Farther out still, somewhere beyond the bulge of the horizon, lay the most famous shipwreck in the world. My mind raced with thoughts of signals bouncing in the ionosphere—the propagation of radio waves, the cry of ages submerged in time. And I imagined I could hear the voice of the Titanic herself: A vessel with too much pride in her name, sprinting smartly toward a new world, only to be mortally nicked by something as old and slow as ice.
COMMENTARY: Everytime I watch the movie "Titanic," I get goosebumps. It's such an incredible love story emersed with the grandeur of the RMS Titanic on her maiden voyage that would end so tragically. Let's hope we never have to experience another tragedy like the Titanic.
Director/Producer John Cameron did an incredible job filming the events of that terrible night in the original film "Titanic." Cameron is bringing back "Titanic" in all her glory in 3D this time, and the film will be shown for a limited engagement beginning in April 2012. Hope to see you there. Now the Titanic 3D Official Trailer.
For an authentic history of the RMS Titanic, check out the Titanic Stories , RMS Titanic, Inc and Titanic Historical Society websites. These sites are the best of several and include some incredible content including images and videos of the ship, her passengers, the survivors and many other interesting facts about Titanic.
Courtesy in an article of the April 2012 issue of National Geographic Magazine and an article dated March 9, 2012 appearing in the Daily Mail and an article dated March 21, 2012 appearing in the Daily Mail
If a fast food chain once owned in part by McDonald’s can make us cry, then maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that a new campaign by Greenpeace--a well-intentioned group that can come off as both abrasive and extremist--can simply kick us in the gut with imagery.
Greenpeace ads versus coal and nuclear power generating plants (Click Image To Enlarge)
Greenpeace ad versus the whale fishing industry
Because when I look at these new ads by DraftFCB Switzerland, I don’t think about the mixed environmental implications of, say, Greenpeace rejecting all nuclear energy technology. In the gothic-industrial ink line drawings, I can only consider what Man has done wrong: built an infrastructure that is bigger and more devastating than he can control. And at least for a moment, I can’t find a single reason to disagree with their worldview.
Greenpeace ad versus the oil industry's offshore oil drilling (Click Image To Enlarge)
Greenpeace ad versus companies involved in de-forestation or destruction of forests
But why are they so powerful? I can’t help but wonder if Greenpeace’s messaging was more honest than they intended, conveying that in the face of the global machine, the environmental movement finds itself hopelessly outgunned. We see, not a scrappy underdog fight, but an unavoidable slaughter in the making.
David never looked so small.
COMMENTARY: Greenpeace is a global environmental organization, consisting of Greenpeace International (Stichting Greenpeace Council) in Amsterdam, and 27 national and regional offices around the world, providing a presence in 41 countries.
2011 was the year the bottom shook the top and "The Protestor" was named Time Magazine person of the year. The faces in our Year in Pictures pay tribute to our contribution and to the benefit of standing up and taking action. Check out Greenpeace 2011 in pictures in the video below:
These national and regional offices are largely autonomous in carrying out jointly agreed global campaign strategies within the local context they operate in, and in seeking the necessary financial support from donors to fund this work. National and regional offices support a network of volunteer-run local groups. Local groups participate in campaigns in their area, and mobilise for larger protests and activities elsewhere. Millions of supporters who are not organised into local groups support Greenpeace by making financial donations and participating in campaigns as citizens and consumers.
National and Regional Offices
Greenpeace is present in the following countries and regions, as of March 2007:
Argentina, Australia-Pacific region (Australia, Fiji, Papua New-Guinea, Solomon Islands),Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greenpeace Nordic (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden), Greece, Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe (Austria, Hungary, Slovak Republic, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia (no permanent campaign presence in the latter five states)) India, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Greenpeace Mediterranean (Israel, Cyprus, Lebanon, Malta, Tunisia, Turkey), Mexico, the Netherlands, Greenpeace Aotearoa New Zealand (New Zealand), Russia, South -East Asia (Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand), Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Priorities and Campaigns
Greenpeace runs campaigns and projects which fit into the "Issues" (as campaign areas are called within Greenpeace) categories below. Besides exposing problems such as over-fishing or threats linked to nuclear energy such as harmful radiation and proliferation, Greenpeace campaigns for alternative solutions such as marine reserves and renewable energy.
The organisation currently addresses many environmental issues with a primary focus on efforts to stop global warming and the preservation of the world's oceans and ancient forests. In addition to conventional environmental organisation methods, such as lobbying businesses and politicians, and participating in international conferences, Greenpeace uses nonviolent direct action in many of its campaigns.
Greenpeace uses direct action to attract attention to particular environmental problems. For example, activists place themselves between the whaler's harpoon and their prey, or invade nuclear facilities dressed as barrels of radioactive waste. Other initiatives include the development of a fuel-efficient car, the SmILE.
Current Priorities
Below is a list of Greenpeace's current priorities, as of March 2007:
Eliminating toxic chemicals (including from E-waste), many of which are carcinogens.
You have to applaud the courage and worldwide activities of Greenpeace. Here they are fighting off Japanese whaling ships in the Arctic ocean.
Some people don't agree with the aggressiveness and tactics of Greenpeace ships, including trying to get those Japanese whaling ships away from the whales and in the above video, you saw the consequences. Unfortunately, the Japanese whaling ships carry more fuel or are re-fueled by tankers, so Greenpeace had to leave to be refueled.
I think it's time that Japan and other countries stop killing the whales. The whales don't harm anyone and they are beautiful and majestic mammals of the sea. Stay away from the whales!! See, I got myself all worked up.
What the Statue of Liberty and New York City skyline would look like after a massive storm surge by the end of the 21st Century due to global warming and rising sea levels. (Click Image To Enlarge)
As the Earth's climate changes, the worst inundations from hurricanes and tropical storms could become far more common in low-lying coastal areas, a new study suggests. Researchers from Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that regions such as the New York City metropolitan area that currently experience a disastrous flood every century could instead become submerged every one or two decades.
The researchers report in the journal Nature Climate Change that projected increases in sea level and storm intensity brought on by climate change would make devastating storm surges — the deadly and destructive mass of water pushed inland by large storms — more frequent. Using various global climate models, the team developed a simulation tool that can predict the severity of future flooding an area can expect.
Simulation map shows flooding to Long Island and New York City due to storm surges resulting from global warming and rising sea levels with hurricane storms of different magnitudes by the New York State Emergency Management Office (Click Image To Enlarge)
The researchers used New York City as a test case and found that with fiercer storms and a 3-foot rise in sea level due to climate change, "100-year floods" — a depth of roughly 5.7 feet above tide level that occurs roughly once a century — could more likely occur every three to 20 years. What today are New York City's "500-year floods" — or waters that reach more than 9 feet deep — could, with climate change, occur every 25 to 240 years, the researchers wrote.
The research is not only the first to examine the future intensity of storm surges, but also to offer a tool for estimating an area's vulnerability, said co-author Michael Oppenheimer, the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geoscienes and International Affaris at Princeton. He said.
"Coastal managers in cities like New York make daily decisions about costly infrastructure that would be affected by such storms. They need a reliable indicator of the risk."
Oppenheimer said.
"Our modeling approach is designed as a key step in this direction. As the world warms, risks will increase across a variety of fronts, and the threat to coastal infrastructure in the face of an already-rising sea level and potentially stronger hurricanes could be one of the most costly unless we are able to anticipate and reduce vulnerability."
Simulations by researchers from Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that projected increases in sea level and storm intensity brought on by climate change could make devastating storm surges more frequent. Using the New York City area as a model, the researchers found that floods experienced every century could instead occur every one or two decades. The worst simulated flood (left) was a 15.5-foot storm surge at Manhattan's Battery (black star) that stemmed from a high-intensity storm (black line) moving northeast and very close to the city. A weaker but larger northwest-bound storm (right) that was further from the city would result in floodwater nearly 15 feet deep as its strongest winds pushed water toward the Battery. The colored contours represent the maximum surge height, from 0 (blue) to 5 (violet) meters. (Image by Ning Lin)
Lead author Ning Lin, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, said that knowing the frequency of storm surges may help urban and coastal planners design seawalls and other protective structures. Lin, who received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2010, began the project at Princeton then continued it at MIT; the current report is based on her work at MIT.
Nothing that Manhattan's seawalls now stand a mere 5 feet high, Lin said.
"When you design your buildings or dams or structures on the coast, you have to know how high your seawall has to be. You have to decide whether to build a seawall to prevent being flooded every 20 years."
An atmospheric image of Hurricane Irene on the U.S. east coast in August 2011 - NOAA
Lin and Oppenheimer worked with study co-authors Kerry Emanuel, an MIT atmospheric science professor, and Erik Vanmarcke, a Princeton professor of civil and environmental engineering. Lin, Vanmarcke and Emanuel also co-wrote a 2010 report on the project published in the Journal of Geophysical Research that was based on Lin's work at Princeton.
Carol Friedland, an assistant professor of construction management and industrial engineering at Louisiana State University, sees the latest results as a useful tool to inform coastal design — particularly, she notes, as most buildings are designed with a 60- to 120-year "usable lifespan."
Friedland said.
"The physical damage and economic loss that result from storm surge can be devastating to individuals, businesses, infrastructure and communities. For current coastal community planning and design projects, it is essential that the effects of climate change be included in storm-surge predictions."
The researchers ran a total of 45,000 storm simulations for the New York City region under two scenarios: current climate conditions from 1981 to 2000 based on observed data and four global climate models; and projected climate conditions for the years 2081 to 2100 based on the four climate models, as well as future carbon dioxide output as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Oppenheimer is a longtime participant in the IPCC.
Storms in the simulations occurred within a 125-mile (200-kilometer) radius of the Battery, at the southern tip of Manhattan, and generated a maximum wind speed of at least 50 miles per hour. Hurricanes are classified as having a maximum wind speed of at least 74 miles per hour.
Once the researchers simulated storms in the region, they then simulated the resulting storm surges using three different methods, including one used by the National Hurricane Center (NHC). In the days or hours before a hurricane hits land, the NHC uses a storm-surge model to predict the risk and extent of flooding from the impending storm. Such models, however, have not been used to evaluate multiple simulated storms under a scenario of climate change.
Again, the group compared results from multiple methods: one from the NHC that simulates storm surges quickly, though coarsely; another method that generates more accurate storm surges, though more slowly; and a method in between, developed by Lin and her colleagues, that estimates relatively accurate surge floods, relatively quickly.
The researchers found that the frequency of massive storm surges would go up in proportion to an increase in more violent storms and a rise in sea level, the researchers reported. They noted that climate models predict that the sea level around New York City could rise by 1.5 to nearly 5 feet by the end of the 21st century.
Flooding was amplified by the storm's wind direction and proximity to the city. The worst simulated flood, a 15.5-foot storm surge at Manhattan's Battery, stemmed from a high-intensity storm moving northeast and very close to the city. On the other hand, a weaker but larger northwest-bound storm that was further from the city resulted in floodwater nearly 15 feet deep as its strongest winds pushed water toward the Battery.
A storm surge modeling system developed by New York Sea Grant scientists predicted flood levels during storm surges that strike New York City due to global warming and rising sea levels. (Click Image To Enlarge)
Floods of this magnitude outstrip the most devastating storm surges in the city's recorded history, Lin said. The worst accompanied the 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane, which packed winds of 135 miles per hour and is one of only four hurricanes known to have made landfall in New York City since pre-Columbian times.
Lin said.
"The highest [surge flood] was 3.2 meters [10.4 feet], and this happened in 1821. That's the highest water level observed in New York City's history, which is like a present 500-year event."
The study was published online Feb. 14 by the journal Nature Climate Change, and was supported by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Princeton Environmental Institute through a fellowship from the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy based in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
COMMENTARY: The Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers concentrated their storm surge and flooding study to the New York Metropolitan area. It should be kept in mind that extensive coastal flooding would be experienced along the entire Atlantic coastline due to global warming and rising sea levels. Massive flooding would also affect all of the Gulf states, including low-lying areas along the Pacific coast.
If you would like to see how global warming and rising sea levels accompanied by massive storm surges from hurricanes could affect areas where you live in the U.S., please check the National Hurrican Center's Storm Surge Interactive Risk Maps HERE.
Scientific evidence gathered by climatologists around the world clearly shows that worldwide carbon dioxide levels have been rising since the Industrial Revolution and that Earth's average temperatures are rising at an alarming rate. Carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles, manufacturing plants and coal fired energy plants get most of the blame. Global warming is happening as I write this.
There will be some among you who still don't believe in global warming, and that it is something concocted by crazy liberals. That's just fine. You are entitled to your opinion. Peace brother.
Courtesy of an article dated February 21, 2012 appearing in Research at Princeton and an article dated February 13, 2012 appearing in MIT News
An artist's illustratino of asteroids, or near-Earth objects, that highlight the need for a complete Space Situational Awareness system. Credit: ESA - P. Carril (Click Image To Enlarge)
Scientists are keeping a close eye on a big asteroid that may pose an impact threat to Earth in a few decades.
The space rock, which is called 2011 AG5, is about 460 feet (140 meters) wide. It may come close enough to Earth in 2040 that some researchers are calling for a discussion about how to deflect it.
Talk about the asteroid was on the agenda during the 49th session of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), held earlier this month in Vienna.
A UN Action Team on near-Earth objects (NEOs) noted the asteroid’s repeat approaches to Earth and the possibility — however remote — that 2011 AG5 might smack into our planet 28 years from now.
The object was discovered in January 2011 by Mount Lemmon Survey observers in Tucson, Ariz. While scientists have a good bead on the space rock's size, its mass and compositional makeup are unknown at present.
Gravity Simulator image of 2011 AG5 passing the Earth-Moon system in February 2040. Earth is the blue dot, the moon’s orbit is gray, and 2011AG5 is green. Simulation created with JPL Horizons data. CREDIT: Tony Dunn
An asteroid desktop exercise
Detlef Koschny of the European Space Agency’s Solar System Missions Division in Noordwijk, The Netherlands said.
"2011 AG5 is the object which currently has the highest chance of impacting the Earth … in 2040. However, we have only observed it for about half an orbit, thus the confidence in these calculations is still not very high."
Koschny told SPACE.com.
"In our Action Team 14 discussions, we thus concluded that it not necessarily can be called a ‘real’ threat. To do that, ideally, we should have at least one, if not two, full orbits observed."
Koschny added that the Action Team did recommend to the NEO Working Group of COPUOS to use 2011 AG5 as a "desktop exercise" and link ongoing studies to the asteroid.
Koschny said.
"We are currently also in the process of making institutions like the European Southern Observatoryaware of this object. We hope to make the point that this object deserves the allocation of some special telescope time."
Non-zero impact probability
The near-Earth asteroid 2011 AG5 currently has an impact probability of 1 in 625 for Feb. 5, 2040, said Donald Yeomans, head of the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
This impact probability isn't set in stone, however. So far, researchers have been able to watch the asteroid for just a short time — the first nine months of 2011 — and the numbers may change after further observation, Yeomans told SPACE.com.
Yeomans said.
"Fortunately, this object will be observable from the ground in the 2013-2016 interval."
He added.
"In the very unlikely scenario that its impact probability does not significantly decrease after processing these additional observations, there would be time to mount a deflection mission to alter its course before the 2023 keyhole."
Keyholes are small regions in space near Earth through which a passing NEO's orbit may be perturbed due to gravitational effects, possibly placing it onto a path that would impact Earth.
Video of a NASA Mission to intercept and deflect an asteroid
Prudent course of action
2011 AG5 may zip through such a keyhole on its close approach to Earth in February 2023, which will bring the asteroid within 0.02 astronomical units (1.86 million miles, or 2.99 million kilometers) of Earth. One astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and sun, which is approximately 93 million miles (150 million km).
According to a JPL estimate, the 2023 keyhole — through which 2011 AG5 must pass in order for there to be a real chance of an Earth impact in 2040 – is roughly 62 miles (100 km) wide.
Yeomans noted, referring to the asteroid Apophis, which could threaten Earth in 2036 if it zips through a keyhole in 2029.
"Although this keyhole is considerably larger than the Apophis keyhole in 2029, it would still be a straightforward task to alter the asteroid’s trajectory enough to miss the keyhole – and hence the impact in 2040. The prudent course of action is then to wait at least until the 2013 observations are processed before making any preliminary plans for a potential deflection mission."
He added.
"Processing additional observations in the 2013-2016 time period will almost certainly see the impact probability for 2011 AG5 significantly decrease."
An artist's impression of a giant space rock slamming into Earth 65 million years ago near what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. A consortium of scientists now says this was indeed what caused the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. CREDIT: NASA/Donald E. Davis
Wanted: Higher-fidelity assessment
Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Near Earth Objects (NEO) Observations Program Executive in Washington, D.C. said.
"Yes, the object 2011 AG5 was much discussed at the AT 14 meetings last week, but perhaps prematurely."
Johnson said NEO watchers have flagged the asteroid "as one we should keep an eye on." At present, he said, while researchers have better preliminary orbit data for 2011 AG5 than for many other asteroids in the NEO catalog,
Johnson told SPACE.com.
"We have only medium confidence in the derived orbital parameters. Fortunately, we are confident our uncertainties in the current orbit model will be reduced when we will have good observation opportunities in September 2013 with the larger follow-up assets."
Observing opportunities are even better, he added, starting in November 2015 and for several months thereafter.
Johnson said.
"This, in turn, will enable us to better assess the likelihood of any ‘keyhole’ passage in 2023 and therefore a much higher fidelity assessment of any impact probability for the 2040 time frame. So, rather than a need to immediately jump to space mission solutions, the situation with 2011 AG5 shows the value of finding potentially hazardous objects early enough so that there is time for a methodical approach of observation and assessment as input to any need for an expensive spacecraft mission. A more robust survey capability would improve the data available to make such assessments."
A concept spacecraft could use gravity to tow asteroids away from a collision course with earth. CREDIT: Dan Durda - FIAAA / B612 Foundation
Decision challenge
Long-time NEO specialist and former Apollo astronaut Russell Schweickart played an active role in the dialogue about 2011 AG5. He represented the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) Committee on Near Earth Objects and presented to the Action Team an analysis of the situation with 2011 AG5.
Schweickart suggested.
"The space rock presents a decision challenge to the international community, in the unlikely chance that its current low, but significant probability of impacting Earth in 2040 continues to increase after additional tracking becomes available."
Schweickart spotlighted a rough Association of Space Explorers analysis of the options to deflect the asteroid in the future, in the unlikely scenario that the Earth impact probability continues to increase.
He also provided to the Action Team several new appraisals of options for deflection of asteroid 2011 AG5 to avoid a potentially dangerous Earth encounter in 2040.
The key moment of the Don Quijote mission: the Impactor spacecraft (Hidalgo) smashes into the asteroid while observed, from a safe distance, by the Orbiter spacecraft (Sancho). CREDIT: ESA - AOES Medialab
Delayed Deflection Campaign
A decision date for a keyhole deflection is very soon, if not now, Schweickart suggested. Asteroid 2011 AG5 represents an actual threat that underscores the need for a NEO hazard decision-making structure within the UN COPUOS, he said.
Based on the latest analysis, Schweickart reported, a deflection campaign delayed until after the 2023 close approach appears marginally possible, as long as a decision to commit is made immediately thereafter.
"Should a keyhole deflection campaign be foregone — for whatever reason — the international community may be faced with the difficult decision of choosing between an expensive multikinetic impactor or a nuclear explosive to prevent an impact should the NEO indeed pass through the keyhole."
The timelines that would be required to mount a successful deflection of the asteroid, Schweickart told SPACE.com, might be challenging.
But first things first — researchers stress that more study of the asteroid’s trajectory is called for. The next tracking opportunities of 2011 AG5 will occur in September 2013, and then again in November 2015.
NASA chief: We still have time
In response to a letter from Schweickart regarding 2011 AG5, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said.
"2011 AG5 is high on NASA’s list of NEOs to monitor for impact hazard potential. We take these duties very seriously."
Bolden also noted the opportunities for highly accurate ground-based observations in the near future.
He said.
"Based on these observations, a more informed assessment can then be made on the need for any type of mitigation."
Bolden also remarked that the asteroid makes an apparition in 2015, more than seven years before the close keyhole passage in 2023 that could set in motion an Earth impact in the 2040 time frame.
Bolden said.
"As a point of comparison, NASA’s Deep Impact mission [the Deep Impact probe smashed into comet Tempel 1 in July 2005] was conducted in six years from selection to impact under much less urgency, demonstrating the adequacy of a seven-year period for any necessary response."
Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of last year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999.
COMMENTARY: Since 1999, NASA has developed more powerful space telescopes capable of searching into deep space and locating Near Earth Objects (NEOS) like asteroids and comets which could present a danger of colliding with Earth.
In a blog post dated September 24, 2011, I reported that NASA’s Near Earth Object Program, or NEO, celebrated a milestone earlier in 2011 by announcing that current search programs have discovered more than 90 percent of near-Earth objects more than six-tenths of a mile in diameter. A larger number of smaller objects have yet to be found, however. At the end of August 2011, NEO had discovered over 8,000 near-Earth objects. Over 450 of known near-Earth asteroids discovered to date are 1 kilometer in size or greater. The following graphs shows NEOs by year discovered, large asteroids and known NEOs.
Spacewatch, a program created to discover and track all large asteroids crossing the Earth’s orbit, discovered YU55 in 2005. This close approach had been expected since then, he said.
The majority of these NEOs do not present any eminent danger to Earth, but their discovery helps us keep track of them in case they ever do.
In a blog post dated June 25, 2011, I told you about near Earth object 2005 YU55, an astroid the size of an aircraft carrier that came within 201,000 miles of Earth on November 8, 2011. 2005 YU55 will return in 2028.
In a blog post dated November 8, 2011, Purdue University researchers determined what would've happened if 2005 YU55 had impacted earth. Let's put it this way, the asteroid that hit Earth near Flagstaff, Arizona and is the same size as asteroid 2011 AG5, created a Meteor Crater, a crater over 2.4 miles in diameter and 550 feet deep. If 2005 YU55 had hit Earth, it would've created a crater 4 miles in diameter and 1,700 feet deep.
Courtesy of an article dated February 27, 2012 appearing in Space.com and an article dated October 4, 2011 appearing in Space.com
This blooming plant was regenerated by Russian scientists from 32,000 year-old seeds from the Ice Age that were discovered in a frozen squirrel burrow next in Siberia
Fruits in my fruit bowl tend to rot into a mulchy mess after a couple of weeks. Fruits that are chilled in permanent Siberian ice fare rather better. After more than 30,000 years, and some care from Russian scientists, some ancient fruits have produced this delicate white flower.
These regenerated plants, rising like wintry Phoenixes from the Russian ice, are still viable. They produce their own seeds and, after a 30,000-year hiatus, can continue their family line.
David A. Gilchinsky, Head of Soil Cryology Laboratory, Institute for Physiochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science, Russian Academy of Sciences (Click Image To Enlarge)
The plant owes its miraculous resurrection to a team of scientists led by David Gilichinsky, and an enterprising ground squirrel. Back in the Upper Pleistocene, the squirrel buried the plant’s fruit in the banks of the Kolyma River. They froze.
The 30,000 year-old Silene stenophylla seeds that were regenerated into plants by Russian scientists were discovered in a fossilized squirrel burrow in permafrost along the banks of the Kolmya River in Russian Siberia
Over millennia, the squirrel’s burrow fossilised and was buried under increasing layers of ice. The plants within were kept at a nippy -7 degrees Celsius, surrounded by permanently frozen soil and the petrifying bones of mammoths and woolly rhinos. They never thawed. They weren’t disturbed. By the time they were found and defrosted by scientists, they had been buried to a depth of 38 metres, and frozen for around 31,800 years.
Regenerated Silene stenophylla plants were potted from seeds over 30,000 years old by Russian scientist Svetlana Yashina and two years later bloomed flowers (Click Image To Enlarge)
People have grown plants from ancient seeds before. In 2008, Israeli scientists resurrected an aptly named Phoenix palm from seeds that had been buried in the 1st century. But those seeds were a mere 2,000 years old. Those of the new Russian flower – Silene stenophylla – are older by an order of magnitude. They trump all past record-holders.
Russian researcher Svetlana Yashina extracted the placentas from the recovered fruit, she was able to coas the tissue into producing roots and shoots (Click Image To Enlarge)
Svetlana Yashina from the Russian Academy of Sciences grew the plants from immature fruits recovered from the burrow. She extracted their placentas – the structure that the seeds attach to – and bathed them in a brew of sugars, vitamins and growth factors. From these tissues, roots and shoots emerged.
Yashina potted the plants and two years later, they developed flowers. She fertilised the ancient flowers with each other’s pollen, and in a few months, they had produced their own seeds and fruits, all viable. The frozen plants, blooming again after millennia in the freezer, seeded a new generation.
S.stenophylla is still around, but Yashina found that the ancient plants are subtly different to their modern counterparts, even those taken from the same region. They’re slower to grow roots, they produce more buds, and their flower petals were wider.
This is the first time that anyone has grown plants form seeds deeply buried within permanently frozen burrows. But it’s not the first time that someone has tried. In 1967, Canadian scientists claimed that they had regenerated Arctic lupin from 10,000 year old seeds that had been buried by lemmings. But in 2009, another team dated those same seeds and found that they were actually modern ones, which had contaminated the ancient sample.
Mindful of this mistake, Yashina carefully checked that her plants were indeed ancient ones. She dated the seeds directly, and her results matched age estimates from other samples from the same burrow. The burrows have been buried well below the level that animals dig into, and the structure of the surrounding ice suggests that they have never thawed. Their sediments are firmly compacted and totally filled with ice. No water infiltrates these chambers, much less plant roots or modern rodents. There are a few pores, but they are many times narrower than the width of any of Yashina’s seeds.
This closed world provided shelter, a continuous chill, and an effectively dry environment, that allowed the fruits to persist. At subzero temperatures, their chemical reactions slowed to a crawl. Extreme age was no longer a problem. A fruit’s placenta is also chemically active, and is loaded with several chemicals that might have protected these specific tissues against the cold.
But the burrows weren’t completely benign environments. The underground rocks contain naturally radioactive elements, which would have bombarded the seeds with low but accumulating doses of radiation. The ones that Yashina regenerated would have amassed 70 Grays of radiation – that’s more than any other plant has absorbed while still producing viable seeds.
S.stenophylla’s resurrection shows how many treasures lie buried within the world’s permafrost. This soil, defined as that which stays below freezing for two years or more, covers a fifth of the planet’s land. It is home to bacteria, algae, fungi, plants and more. In the fossil burrows that Yashina has studied, scientists have found up to 600,000 to 800,000 seeds in individual chambers.
In Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, scientists have frozen thousands of seeds in an underground cavern, as a back-up in case of agricultural crises. But nature has already produced similar frozen seed banks. Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon could act as one massive freezer, where ancient life has been stored, waiting to greet the world again.
COMMENTARY: This is an amazing scientific breakthrough if the regeneration of the 32,000 year-old seeds can be confirmed by other scientists.
UPDATE: Tragedy has now struck the Russian team that was involved in the discovery of the 32,000 year-old seeds and the successful regeneration of a living plant from those seeds. Dr. David Gilichinksy, its leader, was hospitalized with an asthma attack and unable to respond to questions, his daughter Yana said on Friday. On Saturday, Dr. Price reported that Dr. Gilichinsky had died of a heart attack.
According to The New York Times, this incredible scientific breakthrough in plant regeneration from seeds that were carbon dated to be 32,000 years-old, is by a team led by Svetlana Yashina and David Gilichinsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences research center at Pushchino, near Moscow, and appears in Tuesday’s issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Grant Zazula of the Yukon Paleontology Program at Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, Canada said.
“This is an amazing breakthrough. I have no doubt in my mind that this is a legitimate claim.”
It was Dr. Zazula who showed that the apparently ancient lupine seeds found by the Yukon gold miner were in fact modern.
But the Russians’ extraordinary report is likely to provoke calls for more proof. Alastair Murdoch, an expert on seed viability at the University of Reading in England said.
“It’s beyond the bounds of what we’d expect.”
When poppy seeds are kept at minus 7 degrees Celsius, the temperature the Russians reported for the campions, after only 160 years just 2 percent of the seeds will be able to germinate, Dr. Murdoch noted.
Some of the storage chambers in the squirrel burrows contain more than 600,000 seeds and fruits. Many are from a species that most closely resembles a plant found today, the narrow-leafed campion (Silene stenophylla).
Working with a burrow from the site called Duvanny Yar, the Russian researchers tried to germinate the campion seeds, but failed. They then took cells from the placenta, the organ in the fruit that produces the seeds. They thawed out the cells and grew them in culture dishes into whole plants.
Many plants can be propagated from a single adult cell, and this cloning procedure worked with three of the placentas, the Russian researchers report. They grew 36 ancient plants, which appeared identical to the present day narrow-leafed campion until they flowered, when they produced narrower and more splayed-out petals. Seeds from the ancient plants germinated with 100 percent success, compared with 90 percent for seeds from living campions.
The researchers suggest that special circumstances may have contributed to the remarkable longevity of the campion plant cells. Squirrels construct their larders next to permafrost to keep seeds cool during the arctic summers, so the fruits would have been chilled from the start. The fruit’s placenta contains high levels of sucrose and phenols, which are good antifreeze agents.
The Russians measured the ground radioactivity at the site, which can damage DNA, and say the amount of gamma radiation the campion fruit accumulated over 30,000 years is not much higher than that reported for a 1,300-year-old sacred lotus seed, from which a plant was successfully germinated.
The Russian article was edited by Buford Price of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Price, a physicist, chose two reviewers to help him. But neither he nor they are plant biologists. He said.
“I know nothing about plants.”
Ann Griswold, a spokeswoman for PNAS, as the journal is known, said the paper had been seen by an editorial board member who is a plant biologist.
Eske Willerslev, an expert on ancient DNA at the University of Copenhagen, said the finding was “plausible in principle,” given the conditions in permafrost. But the claim depends on the radiocarbon date being correct:
“It’s all resting on that — if there’s something wrong there it can all fall part.”
If the ancient campions are the ancestors of the living plants, this family relationship should be evident in their DNA. Dr. Willerslev said that the Russian researchers should analyze the DNA of their specimens and prove that this is the case. However, this is not easy to do with plants whose genetics are not well studied, Dr. Willerslev said.
If the claim is true, then scientists should be able to study evolution in real time by comparing the ancient and living campions. Possibly other ancient species can be resurrected from the permafrost, including plants that have long been extinct.
Courtesy of an article dated February 20, 2012 appearing in Discover Magazine blog, an article dated February 21, 2012 appearing in The New York Times, an article dated February 21, 2012 appearing in The Guardianand an article dated February 21, 2012 appearing in io9.com
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