Computer-generated snapshot of lines of force in the Earth's magnetic field beginning at the Earth's surface from where they penetrate smoothly into the insulating mantle. The structure changes dramatically in the liquid core below the mantle where the magnetic field is generated by the convection of the core's melted iron. Graphic courtesy Gary A. Glatzmaier, EE-IGPP, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Paul Roberts, University of California-Los Angeles.
April 27, 2002 Cambridge, Massachusetts - Deep beneath our feet as we walk around in fact, 4,000 miles down is the center of the earth where an iron core is so hot it is liquid and boils around like cooking porridge. That moving, melted iron also produces the magnetic fields that surround the earth and upon which much of earth's surface life, satellites and space technology depend upon for orientation, and for protection. If magnetic fields did not trap highly energetic particles racing from the sun, all kinds of damage could be done to living organisms and space technologies. For nearly a million years, magnetic field lines have been coming out of the south pole and entering the north pole of the earth. That is called the magnetic dipole.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
A 20th Century photograph of the Sphinx showing weathering and damage from deliberate attacks over the ages, Cairo, Egypt. The Sphinx was carved, method unknown, from one single ridge of stone that was 240ft long. Its length is 150 feet and the paws alone are 50 feet. Its height is 66 feet. The head measures 30 feet long and 14 feet wide.
April 23, 2002 Athens, New York - In 1991, Egypt researcher John Anthony West joined Boston University geologist, Robert Schoch, Ph.D., to study the weathering on the base of the Sphinx. Dr. Schoch's academic opinion was water damage at least eight thousand years ago and the two men announced their theory which made worldwide headlines. Since then, two British geologists named David Coxill and Colin Reader have independently traveled to Cairo to study the Sphinx and each has supported Dr. Schoch's conclusion that the weathering is from water. But no one yet has definitively proved how long ago there was enough rain to weather the Sphinx.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
April 6, 2002 Madison, Wisconsin - On February 28th, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) confirmed three cases of deadly chronic wasting disease (CWD) in free ranging white-tailed deer in the Mount Horeb area of western Dane County. This week that number jumped to ten. Since March 5, 2002, the DNR has collected 197 deer samples from that region and plans to collect 300 more. CWD is a prion disease that attacks brains and nervous systems similar to mad cow in cattle, scrapie in sheep and new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob and kuru in humans. The culprit in both animals and humans is called a prion. Prion stands for proteinaceous infectious particles. More simply, prions start out as normal proteins that mysteriously change shape and then destroy brain and nerve tissue. To this date, no one knows what caused the proteins to change shape in the first place or how misshapen proteins are transmitted. There is no blood test to find prions while animals are alive and no cure after prions are confirmed. Death usually occurs within weeks or months.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
NASA showed this March 21, 2002 Goddard Space Flight Center SeaWiFS image captioned, "Mysterious black water blankets Florida Bay." The dark water between Naples and the Florida Keys was first reported by fishermen and pilots back in January. By the middleof March, the dark waters had spread to an estimated 100 miles and scientists began to take and analyze water samples. Satellite image courtesy NASA.
April 1, 2002 Marathon, Florida - Fishermen who have spent their lives catching marine life in the waters between Naples and the Florida Keys began calling news media in January to report massive areas of water so dark and dense it was eerie and many said they had never seen anything like it before. By the middle of March, NASA satellite images clearly showed dark waters that at one point spanned an estimated 100 miles. Fishermen also noted that dead plants from the ocean floor seemed to rise up and follow the movement of the dark water through Florida Bay and the Keys. Fish seemed to turn away from the dark currents and eventually scientists discovered that coral and sponges had died or were dying in certain channels where the dark waters had been.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
"If we don't have replenishing rains that really begin to fill the reservoirs and ... start refilling some of the groundwater tables, then we're going to continue to deplete our water resources and the economic and environmental impacts of that are going to just be devastating."
- Don Wilhite, Director, National Drought Mitigation Center, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, March 29, 2002
Graphic of intensifying drought in the U.S., February 9 - March 15, 2002, courtesy National Drought Mitigation Center, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska.
March 30, 2002 Narrowsburg, New York - Since the dry, warm fall and winter of 2001-2002, rivers on the East Coast of the United States have reached the lowest levels on record. In December, it was so bad in the Cannonsville Reservoir of the Delaware River watershed that its muddy bottom was exposed for the first time since it was built. That reservoir, which helps provide water to Manhattan, had only 3% of its water capacity. In fact, half the drinking water for New York City comes from three reservoirs in the Delaware River watershed and all three right now have less than half their normal water levels.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
"This was the warmest summer (2002) in the Antarctic Peninsula to date. The Antarctic Peninsula has one of the steepest warming trends of anywhere on earth and this event, the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf, was the largest event of its kind in the last 30 years."
- Ted Scambos, Ph.D., Glaciologist,
Univ. of Colorado
The Antarctic South Pole is covered by a continent the size of the United States. The Antarctic ice sheet which is 1.5 miles thick in some places, contains over 90% of the world's fresh water. The Antarctic Peninsula ice sheets that extend into the surrounding seas are melting rapidly, whether from global warming or local climate variations.
March 21, 2002 Boulder, Colorado - Scientists have been warning since 1997 that the Antarctic Peninsula and its Larsen B ice shelf were melting, but no one expected that by March 2002 the Larsen B would have disintegrated to only 40% of the size it was five years ago. But it has and in its collapse, one of the largest floating ice masses of the past thirty years has broken off. Nearly twice the size of Rhode Island covering 2,160 square miles (3,250 square kilometers) and 750 miles thick, iceberg B-22 was photographed on March 11, 2002 by the AVHRR satellite and reported by NOAA, the National Ice Center (NIC) and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center. The ice shelf has existed since the last ice age 12,000 years ago, and yet it disintegrated suddenly over a 35 day period that began the end of January 2002.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
El Nino means "the little boy" or "Christ child" in Spanish. South American fishermen used the name years ago to designate periodic cycles of unusually warm water in the Pacific ocean which appear around Christmas time. El Nino conditions occur once water temperatures have warmed enough (.5 degrees Celsius or more above normal) to alter normal cloudiness and rainfall in the Pacific basin. The cycle is every four or five years and can last up to eighteen months. The last El Nino was 1997-1998.
Pacific Ocean temperatures near the South American coast in February 2002 had warmed 2 degrees Celsius (4 Fahrenheit) indicating that El Nino conditions are developing. Map courtesy National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
March 9, 2002 Washington, D. C. - Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on March 7 that ocean surface temperatures near the South American coast had already warmed 2 degrees Celsius (4 Fahrenheit) by February 2002.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
March 9, 2002 New York City, New York - This week I talked to a scientist who is confident that many dinosaurs had feathers, including the fierce Tyrannosaurus rex "monster" meat-eater, - or at least when it was young. Dr. Mark Norell, Chairman of the Paleontology Division at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, published photographs and information about a new fossil discovery from the Liaoning Province in northeast China in the March 7th journal, Nature.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
An artist's rendering of the Pioneer spacecraft in deep space courtesy NASA.
February 24, 2002 Los Alamos, New Mexico - Thirty years ago on March 2, 1972, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 spacecraft from Cape Kennedy aboard an Atlas Centaur rocket. According to officials, it was the "fastest spacecraft ever to leave Earth." Its mission was to travel through the asteroid belt, be the first manmade machine to pass Jupiter and be the first spacecraft to use planetary gravity to change course and to reach escape velocity from the solar system. Pioneer 10 is powered by electricity derived from the warmth of decaying plutonium 238 and was intended to last only 21 months. Thirty years later, it is still going and sending signals.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
