The Quickening
Showing posts with label Tsunami. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tsunami. Show all posts
The End of the World as We Know It? An Internal or External Shift?
(Click link if embedded url does not work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kHHZkUiRP30)
The Quickening
The Quickening
Arctic Ice Melt 'Alarming'
03 May 2011
Ocean could be ice-free in summers within 40 years and sea levels could rise by 1.6 metres by 2100, says new study.
Ice in Greenland and the rest of the Arctic is melting dramatically faster than was earlier projected and could raise global sea levels by as much as 1.6 metres by 2100, says a new study.
The study released on Tuesday by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) said there is a "need for greater urgency" in fighting global warming as record temperatures have led to the increased rate of melting.
The AMAP report said the correspondending rise in water levels will directly threaten low-lying coastal areas such as Florida and Bangladesh, but would also affect islands and cities from London to Shanghai. The report says it will also increase the cost of rebuilding tsunami barriers in Japan.
"The past six years (until 2010) have been the warmest period ever recorded in the Arctic," said the report.
"In the future, global sea level is projected to rise by 0.9 metres to 1.6 metres by 2100 and the loss of ice from Arctic glaciers, ice caps and the Greenland ice sheet will make a substantial contribution," it added.
The rises had been projected from levels recorded in 1990.
Dramatic rise from projections
In its last major study in 2007, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that sea levels were likely to rise by only between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100, though those numbers did not include any possible acceleration due to a thaw in the polar regions.
The new AMAP assessment says that Greenland lost ice in the 2004-2009 period four times faster than it did between 1995-2000.
The AMAP is the scientific arm of the eight-nation Arctic Council.
Foreign ministers from council nations - the United States, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland -- are due to meet in Greenland on May 12, and will discuss the AMAP report's findings.
The report will first be discussed by about 400 international scientists at a conference this week in Copenhagen, Denmark.
"The increase in annual average temperature since 1980 has been twice as high over the Arctic as it has been over the rest of the world," the report said. Temperatures were higher than at any time in the past 2,000 years."
In its report, the IPCC had said that it was at least 90 per cent probable that emissions of greenhouse gases by human beings, including the burning of fossil fuels, were to blame for most of the warming in recent decades.
"It is worrying that the most recent science points to much higher sea level rise than we have been expecting until now," Connie Hedegaard, the European Climate Commissioner, told the Reuters news agency.
"The study is yet another reminder of how pressing it has become to tackle climate change, although this urgency is not always evident neither in the public debate nor from the pace in the international negotiations," she said.
UN talks on a global accord to combat climate change have been making slow progress, and the organisation says national promises to limit greenhouse gas emissions are now insufficent to avoid possibly catastrophic consequences of global temperature rises.
Arctic could be ice-free
The AMAP study, which drew on the work of hundreds of experts, said that there were signs warming in the Arctic was accelerating, and that the Arctic Ocean could be nearly free of ice in the summers within 30 or 40 years. This, too, was higher than projected by the IPCC.
While the thaw would make the Arctic more accessible for oil exploration, mining and shipping, it would also disrupt the livelihoods of people who live there, as well as threaten the survival of creatures such as polar bears.
"There is evidence that two components of the Arctic cryosphere - snow and sea ice - are interacting with the climate system to accelerate warming," the report said.
The IPCC estimate was based largely on the expansion of ocean waters from warming and the runoff from
melting land glaciers elsewhere in the world.
The AMAP report says that Arctic temperatures in the past six years have been at their highest levels since measurements began in 1880, and the rises were being fed by "feedback" mechanisms in the far north.
One such mechanism involves the ocean absorbing more heat as a result of not being covered by ice, as ice reflects solar energy. While the effect had been predicted by scientists earlier, the AMAP report says that "clear evidence for it has only been observed in the past five years".
Temperature rises expected
It projected that average fall and winter temperatures in the Arctic will climb by roughly 2.8 to 6.1 degrees Celsius by 2080, even if greenhouse gas emissions are lower than in the past decade.
"The observed changes in sea ice on the Arctic Ocean, in the mass of the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic ice caps and glaciers over the past 10 years are dramatic and represent an obvious departure from the long-term
patterns," AMAP said.
"The changes that are emerging in the Arctic are very strong, dramatic even," said Mark Serreze, director of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and a contributor to the report.
"But this is not entirely a surprise. We have known for decades that, as climate change takes hold, it is the Arctic where you are going to see it first, and where it is going to be pronounced," he said by phone.
Japan Nuclear Disaster Put on Par With Chernobyl
12 April 2011
TOKYO — Japan has decided to raise its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said on Tuesday.
The decision to raise the alert level to 7 from 5 on the scale amounts to an admission that the accident at the nuclear facility, brought on by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, is likely to have substantial and long-lasting consequences for health and for the environment. Some in the nuclear industry have been saying for weeks that the accident released large amounts of radiation, but Japanese officials had played down this possibility.
The new estimates by Japanese authorities suggest that the total amount of radioactive materials released so far is equal to about 10 percent of that released in the Chernobyl accident, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
Mr. Nishiyama stressed that unlike at Chernobyl, where the reactor itself exploded and fire fanned the release of radioactive material, the containments at the four troubled reactors at Fukushima remained intact over all.
But at a separate news conference, an official from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric and Power, said, “The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl.”
On the International Nuclear Event Scale, a Level 7 nuclear accident involves “widespread health and environmental effects” and the “external release of a significant fraction of the reactor core inventory.”
The scale, which was developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and countries that use nuclear energy, leaves it to the nuclear agency of the country where the accident occurs to calculate a rating based on complicated criteria.
Japan’s previous rating of 5 placed the Fukushima accident at the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Level 7 has been applied only to the disaster at Chernobyl, in the former Soviet Union.
“This is an admission by the Japanese government that the amount of radiation released into the environment has reached a new order of magnitude,” said Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University. “The fact that we have now confirmed the world’s second-ever level 7 accident will have huge consequences for the global nuclear industry. It shows that current safety standards are woefully inadequate.”
Mr. Nishiyama said “tens of thousands of terabecquerels” of radiation per hour have been released from the plant. (The measurement refers to how much radioactive material was emitted, not the dose absorbed by living things.) The scale of the radiation leak has since dropped to under one terabecquerel per hour, the Kyodo news agency said, citing government officials.
The announcement came as Japan was preparing to urge more residents around the crippled nuclear plant to evacuate, because of concerns over long-term exposure to radiation.
Also on Monday, tens of thousands of people bowed their heads in silence at 2:46 p.m., exactly one month since the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami brought widespread destruction to Japan’s northeast coast.
The mourning was punctuated by another strong aftershock near Japan’s Pacific coast, which briefly set off a tsunami warning, killed a 16-year-old girl and knocked out cooling at the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi power station for almost an hour, underscoring the vulnerability of the plant’s reactors to continuing seismic activity.
On Tuesday morning, there was another strong aftershock, which shook Tokyo.
The authorities have already ordered people living within a 12-mile radius of the plant to evacuate, and recommended that people remain indoors or avoid an area within a radius of 18 miles.
The government’s decision to expand the zone came in response to radiation readings that would be worrisome over months in certain communities beyond those areas, underscoring how difficult it has been to predict the ways radiation spreads from the damaged plant.
Unlike the previous definitions of the areas to be evacuated, this time the government designated specific communities that should be evacuated, instead of a radius expressed in miles.
The radiation has not spread evenly from the reactors, but instead has been directed to some areas and not others by weather patterns and the terrain. Iitate, one of the communities told on Monday to prepare for evacuation, lies well beyond the 18-mile radius, but the winds over the last month have tended to blow northwest from the Fukushima plant toward Iitate, which may explain why high readings were detected there.
Yukio Edano, the government’s chief cabinet secretary, said that the government would order Iitate and four other towns to prepare to evacuate.
Mr. Nishiyama stressed that unlike at Chernobyl, where the reactor itself exploded and fire fanned the release of radioactive material, the containments at the four troubled reactors at Fukushima remained intact over all.
But at a separate news conference, an official from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric and Power, said, “The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl.”
On the International Nuclear Event Scale, a Level 7 nuclear accident involves “widespread health and environmental effects” and the “external release of a significant fraction of the reactor core inventory.”
The scale, which was developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and countries that use nuclear energy, leaves it to the nuclear agency of the country where the accident occurs to calculate a rating based on complicated criteria.
Japan’s previous rating of 5 placed the Fukushima accident at the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Level 7 has been applied only to the disaster at Chernobyl, in the former Soviet Union.
“This is an admission by the Japanese government that the amount of radiation released into the environment has reached a new order of magnitude,” said Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University. “The fact that we have now confirmed the world’s second-ever level 7 accident will have huge consequences for the global nuclear industry. It shows that current safety standards are woefully inadequate.”
Mr. Nishiyama said “tens of thousands of terabecquerels” of radiation per hour have been released from the plant. (The measurement refers to how much radioactive material was emitted, not the dose absorbed by living things.) The scale of the radiation leak has since dropped to under one terabecquerel per hour, the Kyodo news agency said, citing government officials.
The announcement came as Japan was preparing to urge more residents around the crippled nuclear plant to evacuate, because of concerns over long-term exposure to radiation.
Also on Monday, tens of thousands of people bowed their heads in silence at 2:46 p.m., exactly one month since the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami brought widespread destruction to Japan’s northeast coast.
The mourning was punctuated by another strong aftershock near Japan’s Pacific coast, which briefly set off a tsunami warning, killed a 16-year-old girl and knocked out cooling at the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi power station for almost an hour, underscoring the vulnerability of the plant’s reactors to continuing seismic activity.
On Tuesday morning, there was another strong aftershock, which shook Tokyo.
The authorities have already ordered people living within a 12-mile radius of the plant to evacuate, and recommended that people remain indoors or avoid an area within a radius of 18 miles.
The government’s decision to expand the zone came in response to radiation readings that would be worrisome over months in certain communities beyond those areas, underscoring how difficult it has been to predict the ways radiation spreads from the damaged plant.
Unlike the previous definitions of the areas to be evacuated, this time the government designated specific communities that should be evacuated, instead of a radius expressed in miles.
The radiation has not spread evenly from the reactors, but instead has been directed to some areas and not others by weather patterns and the terrain. Iitate, one of the communities told on Monday to prepare for evacuation, lies well beyond the 18-mile radius, but the winds over the last month have tended to blow northwest from the Fukushima plant toward Iitate, which may explain why high readings were detected there.
Yukio Edano, the government’s chief cabinet secretary, said that the government would order Iitate and four other towns to prepare to evacuate.
Officials are concerned that people in these communities are being exposed to radiation equivalent to at least 20 millisieverts a year, he said, which could be harmful to human health over the long term.
Evacuation orders will come within a month for Katsurao, Namie, Iitate and parts of Minamisoma and Kawamata, Mr. Edano said.
People in five other areas may also be told to evacuate if the conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant grow worse, Mr. Edano said. Those areas are Hirono, Naraha, Kawauchi, Tamura and other sections of Minamisoma.
“This measure is not an order for you to evacuate or take actions immediately,” he said. “We arrived at this decision by taking into account the risks of remaining in the area in the long term.” He appealed for calm and said that the chance of a large-scale radiation leak from the Fukushima Daiichi plant had, in fact, decreased.
Mr. Edano also said that pregnant women, children and hospital patients should stay out of the area within 19 miles of the reactors and that schools in that zone would remain closed.
Until now, the Japanese government had refused to expand the evacuation zone, despite urging from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United States and Australia have advised their citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the plant.
The international agency, which is based in Vienna, said Sunday that its team measured radiation on Saturday of 0.4 to 3.7 microsieverts per hour at distances of 20 to 40 miles from the damaged plant — well outside the initial evacuation zone. At that rate of accumulation, it would take 225 days to 5.7 years to reach the Japanese government’s threshold level for evacuations: radiation accumulating at a rate of at least 20 millisieverts per year.
In other words, only the areas with the highest readings would qualify for the new evacuation ordered by the government.
Masataka Shimizu, the president of Tokyo Electric, visited the tsunami-stricken area on Monday for the first time since the crisis began. He called on the governor of Fukushima Prefecture, Yuhei Sato, but was refused a meeting. He left his business card instead.
Evacuation orders will come within a month for Katsurao, Namie, Iitate and parts of Minamisoma and Kawamata, Mr. Edano said.
People in five other areas may also be told to evacuate if the conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant grow worse, Mr. Edano said. Those areas are Hirono, Naraha, Kawauchi, Tamura and other sections of Minamisoma.
“This measure is not an order for you to evacuate or take actions immediately,” he said. “We arrived at this decision by taking into account the risks of remaining in the area in the long term.” He appealed for calm and said that the chance of a large-scale radiation leak from the Fukushima Daiichi plant had, in fact, decreased.
Mr. Edano also said that pregnant women, children and hospital patients should stay out of the area within 19 miles of the reactors and that schools in that zone would remain closed.
Until now, the Japanese government had refused to expand the evacuation zone, despite urging from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United States and Australia have advised their citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the plant.
The international agency, which is based in Vienna, said Sunday that its team measured radiation on Saturday of 0.4 to 3.7 microsieverts per hour at distances of 20 to 40 miles from the damaged plant — well outside the initial evacuation zone. At that rate of accumulation, it would take 225 days to 5.7 years to reach the Japanese government’s threshold level for evacuations: radiation accumulating at a rate of at least 20 millisieverts per year.
In other words, only the areas with the highest readings would qualify for the new evacuation ordered by the government.
Masataka Shimizu, the president of Tokyo Electric, visited the tsunami-stricken area on Monday for the first time since the crisis began. He called on the governor of Fukushima Prefecture, Yuhei Sato, but was refused a meeting. He left his business card instead.
Tsunami Alert Triggers Indonesian Panic
The Telegraph UK
April 4, 2011
Hundreds of Indonesians fled to higher ground on Monday morning when an earthquake struck south of Java, triggering a tsunami alert.
Indonesia’s earthquake agency later lifted the warning after the 7.1 magnitude quake struck off Cilacap on the south coast of Java island.
“This quake roused people from their sleep,” he said. “We have not received any reports of damage or casualties so far.”
The US Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre had said that there was no risk of a widespread destructive wave, but there was a “very small possibility of a local tsunami”.
The earthquake epicentre was 150 miles from the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island, and seismologists said the tremor was felt there, but no tsunami warning alert was issued for Australia.
“We had reports from there that they felt it,” Geoscience Australia seismologist David Jepson said, adding that it was described as a “moderate type quake”.
Geoscience Australia put the quake at 6.7 magnitude
Kitzhaber Declares Disaster Following Tsunami
March 16, 2011
SALEM -- Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber declared a state of emergency Tuesday for coastal Curry County, which was ravaged by a tsunami that buckled docks and sank boats when water surged in last week.
Kitzhaber is sending disaster teams today to begin assessing the damage to the county's three ports and determine whether there is enough destruction to trigger federal assistance.
The tsunami rolled in Friday morning following an earthquake in Japan. It caused the most severe damage in Oregon to the port in Brookings, taking out much of its infrastructure. "There is a real sense of urgency to get the dock facilities back up so the recreational and commercial fleets can continue to operate," Kitzhaber said at a Salem news conference Tuesday.
Port of Brookings-Harbor manager Ted Fitzgerald said he had not completed a detailed estimate of the damages but felt it would be a year before the harbor was repaired after the tsunami.
About 80 percent of the docks have been destroyed, some 80 pilings broken off or bent over, a public hoist for unloading fishing boats was severely damaged and a seawall made of sheets of steel driven into the harbor bottom now is gone, ripped out and possibly lying somewhere on the ocean bottom, he said.
The port remained closed until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could survey the port entrance at the Chetco River Bar with sonar for obstructions left behind by the surges, Fitzgerald said.
Kitzhaber said he's focused on reopening the port as soon as possible to minimize economic damage to the county. He said the state has found temporary floating docks at the Port of Arlington on the Columbia River and a tug boat from the Port of Portland that could be used in Curry County if needed. State housing officials were looking for temporary homes for about 20 people whose houseboats were damaged.
Curry County Commissioner Dave Itzen said sport and commercial fishing took on new importance for the county's economy after the timber industry dwindled in the 1980s because of logging cutbacks on federal lands. Unemployment in Curry County has been running at 13 percent throughout the Great Recession.
Echoing statements from state health officials, Kitzhaber downplayed the threat of radiation leaking from nuclear reactors in Japan, saying radiation poses no risk to the West Coast of the United States. Oregon has radiation equipment in Portland and Corvallis that are monitoring air quality.
Kitzhaber urged Oregonians to make donations for disaster relief in Japan, where a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the resulting tsunami killed thousands and left thousands more homeless.
(Local Expert Predicts Oregon Tsunami http://kezi.com/news/local/206823)
US Widens Tsunami Warning to Most of Pacific, Including Australia, New Zealand, South America
11 March, 2011
WASHINGTON: The US tsunami monitoring center on Friday widened a warning to virtually the entire Pacific coast, including Australia and South America, after a massive earthquake in Japan.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center expanded a previous alert to include the US state of Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and the entire coast of Central and South America.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center expanded a previous alert to include the US state of Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and the entire coast of Central and South America.
The center had earlier said the tsunami would hit Hawaii at around 2:45 am (1245 GMT) and the US West Coast at 7:45 am (1545 GMT).
60 Killed in Major Tsunami After 8.9 Japan Quake
11 March, 2011
TOKYO: A ferocious tsunami spawned by one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded slammed Japan's eastern coast on Friday, killing at least 60 people as it swept away boats, cars and homes while widespread fires burned out of control. Tsunami warnings blanketed the entire Pacific, as far away as South America, Canada, Alaska and the entire US West Coast.
The magnitude 8.9 offshore quake unleashed a 23-foot (7-meter) tsunami and was followed by more than 20 aftershocks for hours, most of them of more than magnitude 6.0.
Police said at least 60 people were killed and 56 were missing. The death toll was likely to continue climbing given the scale of the disaster.
Dozens of cities and villages along a 1,300-mile (2,100-kilometer) stretch of coastline were shaken by violent tremors that reached as far away as Tokyo, hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the epicenter.
"The earthquake has caused major damage in broad areas in northern Japan," Prime Minister Naoto Kan said at a news conference.
Japan issued a state of emergency at a nuclear power plant after its cooling system had a mechanical failure. Trouble was reported at two other nuclear plants as well, but there was no radiation leak at any.
Chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano said the measure at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima was a precaution and that the facility was not in immediate danger. ( Japan nuclear plants shut after quake )
Even for a country used to earthquakes, this one was of horrific proportions because of the tsunami that crashed ashore, swallowing everything in its path as it surged several miles (kilometers) inland before retreating.
Large fishing boats and other sea vessels rode high waves into the cities, slamming against overpasses or scraping under them, snapping power lines along the way. Upturned and partially submerged vehicles were seen bobbing in the water. Ships anchored in ports crashed against each other. ( US widens tsunami warning to most of Pacific )
A tsunami warning was extended to a number of Pacific, Southeast Asian and Latin American nations, including Japan, Russia, Indonesia, New Zealand and Chile. In the Philippines, authorities said they expect a 3-foot (1-meter) high tsunami.
In downtown Tokyo, large buildings shook violently and workers poured into the street for safety. TV footage showed a large building on fire and bellowing smoke in the Odaiba district of Tokyo. The tremor bent the upper tip of the iconic Tokyo Tower, a 333-meter (1,093-foot) steel structure inspired by the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
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