After the loss of a Florida man in a sinkhole collapse last week, another man, this time in Waterloo, Illinois, was swallowed by the Earth into a 18-foot deep hole under the Fairway of the Annbriar Golf Course.
Course workers were able to rescue him from the hole, but he did dislocate his shoulder, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Tuesday. He was on the 14th hole when he suddenly disappeared.
When the rest of his foursome rushed up to where he had been, they saw a sinkhole a few feet wide — the ground had caved in and Mark had fallen 18 feet into the Earth.
"I felt the ground start to collapse and it happened so fast that I couldn’t do anything," Mark said later. "I reached for the ground as I was going down and it gave way, too. It seemed like I was falling for a long time. The real scary part was I didn’t know when I would hit bottom and what I would land on."
Mark landed in mud at the bottom of the sinkhole, which was approximately 10’ wide.
"Looking up, it appeared to be shaped like a bell," he said.
Lori reports that Mark was beginning to panic, because he is claustrophobic and the news story about the Florida man who was recently swallowed when a sinkhole opened under his bedroom. (That man hasn't been found and is presumed dead).
Mark was underground for about 20 minutes as they rescued him using a ladder. One of his golfing buddies, Ed Magaletta, climbed down to secure his arm and help him up the ladder.
"It reminds me of the movie Space Jam when Michael Jordan was playing golf and disappeared into the ground,"Lori Mihal wrote on Golfmanna.com. "We’re very fortunate that Mark wasn’t injured worse than he was – or even killed."
Philip Moss, a geologist who has examined the void, said sinkholes are usually visible. But in this case, Mihal said he was standing still as the ground gave way beneath him.
"This guy just really was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Moss said.
Sinkholes are common in the St. Louis region, he said, because the bedrock here is limestone.
Caverns are carved out by water in the ground, sometimes from heavy rains.
They are found throughout the world, but are more common in areas where the ground is made of soft rocks like limestone, gypsum or salt beds, called "Karst Terrain." The rain dissolves these rocks and creates giant caverns.
About 20 percent of the U.S. is underlain by this kind of ground, according to the USGS.
Usually sinkholes are slow forming and end up just making divots in the ground where the earth is being washed away under it. Like in this image:
But some can be catastrophic, the top layer of the ground remaining intact while a huge cavern is carved out underneath, like the image below:
When the cavern gets too big and the "crust" can't support itself anymore, it falls into the earth forming a sudden hole in the ground. These are the ones that make the news. Here are some areas where they are likely to happen.
The team had been drilling through the ice for more than 20 years before it finally reached the surface of the isolated lake and brought back water samples, buried under two miles of Antarctic ice. Scientists think the lake has been isolated from the surface of the Earth for as long as 25 million years.
They had high hopes it might reveal some previously unknown species of life — one that's been evolving without access to sunlight or energy sources from the surface of the Earth.
Last week, in a tiny sample of fresh lake water, they thought they had something: A strain of bacteria with DNA that did not resemble any other bacteria they could find in global data banks.
They quickly announced they had found a new species of life through the Russian state-owned news service, RIA Novosti. Their "mystery" life was about an 86 percent match with known organisms.
But they spoke too soon.
It turned out that that the reason it did not resemble anything was that it was just incomplete DNA from a contaminant — pieces of DNA from microorganisms that came from the lab environment, the researchers, or even the kerosene used to drill down into the ice.
Mix and match pieces from the different contaminating bacteria could have made it look like a new species when the sequences were searched together.
This setback does not mean there isn't any life in the lake. Scientists found specimens of bacteria and other microorganisms as they slowly drilled through the ice to the lake. These discoveries have led them to believe that there may be life down in the lake itself.
The hole is at the 1900 block of Biltmore Street NW, according to a tweet by the Official Twitter Account for the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Engagement & Community Relations. They first warned the sinkhole could be huge, tweeting earlier today:
MPD reports Sink hole in the 1900 block of Biltmore Street NW. The sink hole is described as 25 feet deep and expanding from east to west.
D.C. residents received an alert that says "1900 block of biltmore street closed- please avoid," according to Gayatri Murthy. There are about four or five officers on the scene.
Initial reports of the hole being 25-feet deep are most likely inaccurate. If the cavern below the street had been large, it could have been a potential danger.
The secretive election process to select the next Pope officially began on Tuesday at the Vatican's Sistine Chapel.
To those watching in the Vatican Square, the results of each vote are announced by smoke that emanates from the Sistine Chapel's chimney. The smoke is black if no pope has been elected. The smoke is white if a pope has been elected.
The other stove releases either white or black smoke, which combines with the smoke from the burning paper ballots before it comes out of the chimney.
The conclave uses cartridges filled with different chemicals to produce either white or black smoke, according to the Times. It is still not known what those chemicals are.
The director of a smoke-machine supplier in England, Ben Baxter, gave the Times a few suggestions as to what the chemicals are:
The principal chemical was most likely potassium chlorate, which ignites easily — a 9-volt battery will do — and produces fine white particles as it burns. “That’s what we sell in our smoke pellets and smoke grenades,” Baxter said.
A black cartridge probably uses potassium chlorate too, he said, along with a dye to coat the particles. “It’s less nasty than anything that would create black smoke in the olden days,” he said.
A two-thirds plus one majority is required to elect the Pope. The whole process is extremely well-guarded. The Cardinals are completely cut off from the outside world, locked inside the Sistine Chapel until a decision is made. No TV, radio, newspapers or texts are allowed. We assume the mystery of the chemical mix that gives the smoke its color is to maintain that policy of secrecy.
The possible sources of the carcasses are still under investigation.
Clean-up workers are moving fast to remove the dead animals to prevent water pollution. Most of the dead pigs are whole, which is good because it means the inside parts aren't falling out into the water.
The Huangpu river is a critical source of drinking water for Shanghai's 23 million residents. Authorities are conducting hourly water quality tests, according Shanghai's official website, and say the city's tap water is still safe to drink, despite the rising death toll.
Tags on the pigs' ears show that the animals came from Jiaxing, a neighboring province of Shanghai. This suggests that the corpses were dumped into local rivers by farmers. It's not clear what the pigs died from to begin with. There's no evidence that they jumped in the river and drowned.
Jiaxing authorities said that the pigs were dumped, but the tags only point to the animals' birthplace, Xinhua reported.
The smoke indicates whether or not a decision on the next pope has been made.
The smoke is black if no pope has been elected. The smoke is white if a pope has been elected.
Yesterday we reported that the white and black smoke is produced from cartridges filled with different chemicals. The practice of using chemicals to color the smoke began in 2005, but until now, the Vatican would not say what those chemicals were.
For a black “fumata” the chemical compound is made of potassium perchlorate, anthracene, and sulphur. The white “fumata” is a mixture of potassium chlorate, lactose, and rosin. The rosin is a natural amber resin obtained from conifers. Prior to 2005 the black smoke was obtained by using smoke black or pitch and the white smoke by using wet straw.
The chimney installed on the roof of the Sistine Chapel is connected to two stoves inside the chapel. One stove burns the paper ballots. The other stove releases the colored smoke. The colored smoke mixes with the smoke from the paper ballots before it exits the chimney for everyone to see in St. Peter's Square.
There are a flurry of tweets that a dolphin has been spotted in the East River near 96th street.
At least one person saw the dolphin this morning "swimming in circles between the Randall’s Island pedestrian bridge and Mill Rock,"according to the blog Out Walking The Dog.
Sadly for everyone involved, a dolphin recently died in the Gowanus Canal after being trapped and confused there for the better part of a day. That one seemed to be injured and sick, observers said.
Apparently people are supposed to contact the Riverhead Foundation in these types of situations and they send out their wildlife experts to assess the dolphin's health and decide whether or not it needs help getting out of the river back to where it came from, probably New York Harbor. Passers-by should not try to feed or touch the dolphin, the organization warns.
A new trend is emerging, where researchers, designers, and everyone in between are starting to ask, "how can we be more like nature — more renewable, more constructive and more sustainable?"
In a world filled with 7 billion people crammed into mega cities, human kind will have to adapt before we can continue to grow, or else we will destroy the only home we've ever known. We need to look to nature for instructions on how to survive on this planet in ways that are "conductive to life," according to biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus.
Benyus's Biomimicry 3.8 workshops have spawned dozens of groups at local levels, bringing together people from all over the world to discuss, talk to scientists, and learn about biomimcry.
Adiel Gavish attended one of these workshops in Costa Rica in 2007, and set up the BiomimicryNYC group in December of 2011.
"Our network is really just here to create a community, to connect these people who are really excited about this next frontier of sustainability," Gavish said. The program brings people together "to inform one another of all the exciting things we are doing and to catalyze some biomimcry projects and programs in the New York City metro region."
Elegance of the natural world
We talked to Gavish about how this "nature-inspired" and "bio-designed" movement can be applied to the world around us. There are three general ways that people can learn from nature:
1. We can mimic its natural form — the physical features of a finished product.
2. We can watch how things come together in nature and mimic that natural process — for example, how our cells use proteins and enzymes in groups.
3. We can look to entire communities in nature — ecosystems — to lean how to better design our cities.
In the past, designers and inventors have used nature sporadically — for example, the design of velcro was inspired by the hooks on burrs that catch on hair and clothing. Biomimicry enthusiasts think this that there's almost no limit to how the natural world can inspire new design principles and methods.
"We don’t see humans and nature as separate; we see it as life. If life creates conditions conducive to life it’s both people and planet together," Gavish said. "It’s definitely not separated in any way. That’s our philosophy and the guiding principle. Really let nature serve as mentor, model and measure."
The organisms all around us — from bacteria and fungi to trees and primates — manage to solve many of the tough parts of living in the world while working with a very small tool box of common chemical components. They use these components at body temperature and pressure in water-based solutions. Many human-made materials need to be processed at very high or low temperatures, and use uncommon, expensive materials.
Benyus writes: "Their models are organisms that manufacture without 'heat, beat, and treat,' and ecosystems that run on sunlight and feedback, creating opportunities rather than waste."
There are many ways that we can integrate natural design into our lives. Here are some main examples:
Materials
Knowledge gained from the study of natural materials, like spider silk and keratin (the protein that makes up our hair, nails and animal horns), can be applied to man-made structures. For example, in the toucan's beak, keratin and other proteins work together to form a incredibly light but also structurally sound and strong "foam."
A group of researchers at University of California, San Diego, have been studying these kinds of natural materials for decades. Two of these bio-inspired engineers, Joanna McKittrick and Marc Meyers, recently wrote a paper, published in the journal Science in February, about some of the transformative work inspired by studies of natural materials.
Nature is filled with great examples of materials that have extraordinary properties: extremely tough, very lightweight, or super strong. Harnessing the methods that are used to make these materials can help researchers develop better body armor, lighter aircraft and stronger, more flexible materials.
"It's a huge challenge because the way nature manufactures them it works from the bottom up. It lays structures from the bottom up," Meyers told Business Insider. "Conventional processes work from the top down so we have to change our way of producing things."
Lessons from these materials could be used in the lab using 3D printing, even, to build products from the ground up instead of top down.
"An abalone doesn't grow a shell overnight,"McKittrick said in a press release. "But you could build a material similar to the abalone shell using principles we learned from nature by printing layer upon layer of mineral deposits — and do it much faster than nature would."
Design
Physical properties of the natural world, like shark's skin — which has a special texture to help it glide through the water — can be applied to design. Shark skin ripples inspired the now-banned swimsuits created and worn by competitive swimmers because they reduce drag on the body in the water.
Another example, Lotuson paint, was inspired by the Lotus flower, which, though it lives in a swamp, is always clean. The plant's petals have nodules that collect rain water and wash the plant. This same nodule approach can be used in house paint, which saves time in washing down your house, and it also means you don't need to use hazardous chemicals.
Other natural inspirations, like the toucan's beak, can show us how to build things that are both lighter and stronger.
It was actually the toucan's beak that got Meyers interested in bio-inspired engineering to begin with, he said.
"I was walking in the jungle and I found the skull of a toucan, it was so light and so strong," he said. "It's something that stayed with me and that inspired me."
Color
Many of the colors found in nature come from physical structure of proteins, instead of pigments. These compounds aren't toxic like pigments, Gavish said.
"If you looked at a butterfly wing microscopically, you would see there’s this really incredible structure to it that allows light to reflect off of the butterfly wing thus creating these incredible structures you see, and that’s without toxins, that’s without chemicals," Gavish told Business Insider.
"So nature has this really awesome way of taking structure, and then utilizing it to create things like color and these amazing patterns that serve multiple functions."
The Mirasol display by Qualcomm use these natural structural colors to make colorful displays with long battery life that are readable in low and bright lights. These displays are made without the toxic heavy metals and manufacturing methods currently used in creation of many pigments and dyes.
Sustainability
Watching how nature works — say, in a coral reef — could help design more sustainable communities and better ways of working.
For example, in an ecosystem, when an animal dies, it provides food for other, smaller animals. These animals (usually bacteria and other microbes) make sure that the dead animal doesn't end up as "garbage"— they break it down and use it as a source of energy, what we typically call rotting. This may seem gross to you, but it means that all the chemicals go back into the Earth and support more life.
Nothing is wasted in these systems, a theme that we could take and apply in our ecosystems — like cities.
"Right now we are taking material from the natural world and we are downcycling it — a tree that is used as a piece of paper once and thrown away. The natural capital that you gain is now lost," Gavish said.
Robotics
Using animals as their muses, roboticists have been working to develop robots that can run and fly and jump as efficiently, if not more efficiently than animals in nature.
There's a snake-like robot that can snuggle through debris to find people after an earthquake, and there's the big dog developed by DARPA and Boston Dynamics to carry large loads for soldiers. The researchers at MIT's robotics lab are even developing a running "cheetah" robot based on how a cheetah really runs.
The cheetabot will soon be running faster than its natural counterpart. It wastes very little energy while it trots along at a steady 5 miles per hour for hours.
"With our system, we can make our robotic leg behave like a spring or damper without having physical springs, dampers or force sensors," researcher Sangbae Kim said in a press release.
It's a little creepy, but see it here in action:
As you can see, biomimcry isn't just one thing, it's applicable everywhere. It's a thought process and a way of seeing the world around you as a teacher, not a warehouse. And it's going to change everything, Gavish thinks.
"It’s now just how can we take X and how can we apply it to one thing," Gavish said, "it’s how we fundamentally change how we view the natural world."
Greenland is slowly, but surely, melting. And though we aren't sure of all the varied effects that this will have on local and global climate, the iron within this ice could cause a boom of tiny plants and animals in our oceans, a new study suggests.
Global warming has many climate scientists worried that rising ocean temperatures and acidity will kill off all kinds of marine life, but these tiny algae, called phytoplankton, form the base of the food chain in the Ocean, and increasing their numbers could have a large impact on ocean life.
That's according to research published March 10 in the journal Nature Geoscience. In the study researcher Maya Bhatia from the University of British Columbia and her colleagues found that melting glaciers near the Arctic are releasing significant amounts of iron.
"Glacial runoff has only recently been considered a potentially important source of nutrients that are usable, or bioavailable, to downstream ecosystems,"Bhatia said in a press release from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "We believe our study now adds iron to that list of nutrients, and underscores the potential for a unique but as-yet-undetermined chemical impact from increasing ice sheet meltwater runoff."
In the paper the scientists theorized that the high levels of iron running off of the Ice Sheet may be connected to recent phytoplankton blooms near Greenland. As the climate warms and ice continues to melt, the ice sheet could continue to release iron.
It is not certain what the long-term effects will be, but it is known that phytoplankton — tiny drifting algae, are at the very bottom of the ocean’s food chain, which means that larger creatures need these small guys to survive.
Previous studies published in journals such as Nature, had suggested that phytoplankton levels had begun to decrease over the last century, which has had many scientists worried about whether much of the other life in the ocean would vanish along with it.
When they examined water samples taken from streams and rivers running off the ice sheet, the scientists found about half of the iron was bioavailable — meaning it came in a form that could be used as a nutrient for budding phytoplankton.
Microscopic algae use this iron along with other minerals to grow and reproduce. Other tiny "animal" plankton consume the phytoplankton that grows, larger creatures in turn eat those plankton, and so on.
The researchers estimated that the increasing meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet could double the amount of iron entering the ocean currently — and could be an important source of bigger phytoplankton blooms. Currently, iron in the water is a limiting factor for how much plankton can grow.
If melting glacial ice sheets can produce enough iron to boost plankton growth in the ocean, there could be downstream effects on all ocean species.
"We don’t have enough historical measurements to say that this iron contribution is an increase over past conditions, but if it is working the way we think it is, the contribution would be greater as meltwater discharge increases," Bhatia says. "It is interesting to think that, as ice sheets melt, there are biogeochemical considerations beyond changing sea level."
Large plankton blooms have been known to suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and some have even proposed adding iron to the ocean as a way to mediate the effects of climate change. Researchers can't be sure how big the effects of Greenland's iron melt may be, but it's possible the plankton bloom could mediate climate change in a small way.
Researchers have found thriving microbial life at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest site on Earth.
The Mariana trench sits seven miles below sea level in the Pacific ocean. It's a cold, dark, desolate environment long thought too harsh for life to exist.
But it turns out organisms can thrive at this incredible depth, according to a new study published Sunday, March 17, in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Sediment tested in the deep ocean trench revealed that it contains almost 10 times more bacteria than the sediments at a shallower, nearby site that's about 4 miles deep.
This is unexpected since the farther down you go, the less food you expect to find.
The microbes are able to survive on the remains of dead animals, algae and other microbes that float down the trench slopes, making it a surprisingly rich place for organic matter, scientists learned.
Scientists used an unmanned robot to measure the distribution of oxygen in trench sediment in 2010. Sensors onboard the robot were inserted directly into the seabed since samples can't be brought back to the surface because the microorganisms might die due to extreme changes in temperature and pressure.
Videos from the bottom of the Mariana Trench confirm that "there are very few large animals at these depths," lead researcherRonnie Glud from the University of Southern Denmark said in a statement. "Rather, we find a world dominated by microbes that are adapted to function effectively under conditions too inhospitable for most higher organisms.”
Greetings from North Carolina, where our legislature gets to more crazy in a week than yours does in an entire session. You’re probably sick of hearing about it, but Plugged In wants to keep you plugged in.
Okay, legislative dumbassery the first: the legislature would like to ban greenhouse gas laws. Yep – NC Senate Bill 171, filed March 5, prohibits "state agencies and local governments from adopting, implementing, or enforcing a rule or ordinance that regulates greenhouse gas emissions." Which is good because it does more than merely prevent the state’s many sensible communities — Asheville, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Raleigh, and Durham, and many others are all energy-forward-thinking municipalities, offering free electric car charging stations and the like — from implementing strategies overtly addressing one of the greatest challenges of our time, clogging up the channels of science.
No, by outlawing "enforcing" any such legislation it virtually guarantees that any such regulation on the federal level will clog up the courts as backwards-thinking types have a state law giving them an excuse for pernicious legal action that will surely climb to the highest courts.
One has to be impressed. Even during the Civil War, "states’ rights" was used only to justify the enslavement of one particular group. Now, 150 years later, it’s being used to justify refusal to address physical reality and provide protective cover to attack all those who do.
Anyhow, the NC legislators also made sure that wind power was removed from the "renewable energy resource" list. Not terribly surprising from North Carolina, where our secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources believes that oil might be a renewable energy resource. Seriously — he said he believed that, and North Carolina is sponsoring legislation that removes wind from the list of renewable energy sources.
In other North Carolina news, down is now up, black is now white, and I’m drinking again. One of those is true. Als0: ignorance is strength. Szdly that’s true too.
P.S. Many thanks to the admirable @sarapeach for making sure I stayed reminded on this topic.
Sinkholes are formed when water washes out soft rocks— like limestone, gypsum, or salt beds — making underground holes covered in a thin layer of ground. These sinkhole-susceptible areas are areas called "karst terrain," which covers about 20 percent of the U.S.
We asked USGS geologist David Weary for his thoughts. He told Business Insider in an email on Friday:
In my opinion it is possible for irrigation and landscaping to affect the risk of sinkhole development on golf courses over karst areas. Normal irrigation of the grass would probably not put enough water on the surface to cause sinkholes directly. It is possible that over-irrigation over time could cause some movement of sediment in the subsurface (through caves) and result in eventual localized sinkhole development. Also, if landscaping resulted in a spot where the surface drainage ponds its possible that the combination of heavy standing water and enhanced drainage of that water to the subsurface could move sediment and initiate a collapse. Golf courses are usually graded to avoid standing water, so the chances of this should be pretty low.
The most likely causes of collapse sinkholes in areas like golf courses, are leaking irrigation pipes or leaking stormwater handling structures like drain pipes and retention ponds. Chronic water leaks can, over time, erode the subsurface soils and cave fills leading to creation of void spaces and subsequent collapse of the surface into them.
We don't have enough site-specific information about the Illinois golf course sinkhole to comment as to whether it is purely natural, or man-induced.
Prior explorations of the Mariana Trench, including James Cameron's recent manned exploration of the trench and a 2011 expedition by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, have revealed that other, larger deep-sea species manage to survive at unimaginable depths.
Although there's an endless number of creatures waiting to be discovered since only a very small fraction of the sea floor has been explored, here's a look at what scientists have found so far.
Giant, single-celled Xenophyophores: The sponge-like animals were found in 2011 at a depth of 6.6 miles by footage from National Geographic's Dropcams. The organisms are about four inches long.
Last year's devastating flooding in New York City from Hurricane Sandy was the city's largest storm surge on record. Though Hurricane Sandy was considered a 100-year-event — a storm that lashes a region only once a century — a new study finds global warming could bring similar destructive storm surges to the Gulf and East Coasts of the United States every other year before 2100.
Severe storms generate both high waves and storm surge, which can combine to erode beaches and dunes and flood coastal communities. Storm surge is seawater pushed ahead of a storm, mainly by strong winds. Onshore, the surge can rise several feet in just a few minutes. High waves travel on top of the surge, and cresting waves raise the sea's height even more.
Looking at extreme events, which researchers called "Katrinas" after the 2005 hurricane that flooded the Gulf Coast, a new model predicts Katrina-like storm surges will hit every other year if the climate warms 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).
That would be 10 times the rate seen since 1923, after which there has been a Katrina-magnitude storm surge every 20 years, the study, published in the March 18 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,found.
In 2009, the world's nations agreed to try to limit climate change to a 2 C increase by 2100, but recent studies show temperatures could rise 7.2 F (4 C) before the century ends.
But the tenfold increase in Katrina-like storm surges does not have to translate into a tenfold increase in disasters, said Aslak Grinsted, a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the lead study author. "Every Katrina-magnitude event is not necessarily going to be a Katrina-magnitude disaster. It's all about planning smartly," he told OurAmazingPlanet.
Warmer seas spin stronger storms
Scientists know that warmer oceans will change how the Atlantic Ocean spawns hurricanes. More heat means more energy, and many models predict global warming will bring bigger, stronger storms, though the details between the model scenarios differ. But the models could be biased by changes in hurricane observational methods, such as the switch to satellites from planes and ships, which may impact records of wind speed and other storm data, Grinsted said.
Many studies have looked at how the frequency and size of hurricanes will change as global warming raises ocean temperatures, but few have investigated their impact on the Atlantic coast.
To better assess which model does the best job of divining the future, Grinsted and his colleagues constructed a record of storm surges from tide gauges along the Atlantic coast dating back to 1923. "Big storm surges give me a new view of hurricane variability in the past," Grinsted said.
Grinsted weighed each statistical model according to how well they explained past extreme storm surges. One way scientists test climate models is by seeing how well they predict the weather in the past.
Of the competing models, the top performer was one of the simplest. It relied on regional sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean hurricane birthing ground. The researchers also created a new global "gridded" model, incorporating ocean temperatures around the world. Grinsted said the top models agree roughly on the magnitude of the increase in storm surges, giving him confidence in the results. [Hurricanes from Above: See Nature's Biggest Storms]
A 0.4 C warming corresponded to doubling of the frequency of extreme storm surges, the study found. "With the global warming we have had during the 20th century, we have already crossed the threshold where more than half of all 'Katrinas' are due to global warming," Grinsted said.
James Elsner, a climate scientist at the University of Florida, said he agrees with the study's main finding, but thinks the modeling underestimates the effects of climate factors such as the El Niño/ La Niña Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index, and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Studies have shown that the warm El Niño events mean fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic, while the NAO influences storm tracks across the ocean basin.
"As the planet warms up and the oceans get warmer, the chances of stronger storms goes up," Elsner said. "I think it's an interesting exercise, but I think statistically, it's got some issues," he told OurAmazingPlanet.
Storm surges and sea level rise
Grinsted is concerned about the combined effects of future storm surge flooding and sea level rise, which adds to the base of the storm surge.
"I think what will be even more important is the background sea level rise, and that is something that is very hard to model," he said.
Hurricane Sandy brought an 11.9-foot (3.6 meters) surge to southern Manhattan, plus a boost from the high tide, creating a storm tide as high as 13.88 feet (4.2 m).
Hurricane Katrina caused storm surge flooding of 25 to 28 feet (7.6 to 8.5 m) above normal tide level along portions of the Mississippi coast and 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6.1 m) above normal tide levels along the southeastern Louisiana coast.
A total of 86 elephants — including 33 pregnant females and 15 young — were killed in Chad last week. The 50 or so Arabic-speaking poachers shot the animals with machine guns while riding on horses, then hacked out their tusks and left the animals to die.
These are probably the same group of poachers who killed 300 elephants in February of last year, Bas Huijbregts, head of WWF's campaign against illegal wildlife trade in the region said to the AFP.
Cameroon has deployed military helicopters and troops to its national parks to protect the animals, Reuters's reports.
"The killing of 86 elephants, including pregnant cows, is evidence of the callous brutality demanded to feed the appetite of the ivory trade," Celine Sissler-Bienvenu, head of IFAW in France and Francophone Africa, said in a statement.
The booming ivory trade — mostly in jewelry and ornamental items — is driving an increase in elephant poaching. According to NBC News:
From about 11,500 elephants illegally killed in 2010 in areas observed by the Monitoring Illegal Killing of Elephants programme, estimates for 2011 and 2012 rose to around 17,000.
The money from this illegal ivory trade is possibly being used to fund armed groups, according to the WWF.
None of these species are described formally yet, but we do have information on the genera or families of some, lead author Diva Amon tells Business Insider.
A whale carcass found on the ocean floor is known as a whale fall. They are found using underwater vehicles, but their discovery is extremely rare (only six whale falls have been discovered worldwide so far).
Whale falls are important because they can tell scientists a lot about how marine mammals decompose, and ultimately fossilize, as well as how nutrients are recycled in the ocean, Amon said in a statement.
Researchers used high-definition cameras to examine the whale, and collected samples of the specimen. The bones belonged to an Antarctic Minke whale, based on DNA tests. Researchers estimate that the whale skeleton is anywhere from 4 to 64 years old.
Whale falls typically decompose in four stages. With each stage, the kind of sea life that feeds or finds shelter on the carcass changes. In the first stage, lasting from four months to two years, animals like sharks, hagfish, and crustaceans gnaw away at the dead whale's soft tissue. By the last stages, a bunch of animals and other species will begin to live on the exposed whale bones.
The entire decomposition process can take more than 100 years depending on the size of the carcass, according to the study's authors. That's why an older carcass, like the one researchers found, is particularly telling about the evolution of the deep-sea sea life.
Osedax: This species is also known as the ‘"bone-eating zombie worm."
Jaera: So far, all other species in this genus have been found in intertidal areas in the Northern Hemisphere, but this species was found in the deep Antarctic.
Lepetodrilus: This genera of limpets are commonly found on hydrothermal vents and cold seeps, but researchers have now found them on whale falls, suggesting they love chemosynthetic habitats.
Lately, around this time of year, I often get letters from people wondering why spring begins early this year. Many folks assume the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere — also known as the vernal equinox — has always come on March 21. But this year seems to be an exception, for in 2013 the first day of spring comes on Wednesday, March 20 at 11:02 UT, or 7:02 a.m. EDT/4:02 a.m. PDT.
Now this doesn't seem right. When many of us were growing up, the first day of spring was always on March 21, not March 20, right? Now, all of a sudden, spring comes on March 20. How did that happen?
While it's true that we've tended to celebrate the beginning of spring on March 21 in recent years, astronomers and calendar manufacturers alike say that this year, the spring season starts one day earlier, March 20, in all time zones in North America.
Unheard of, you might think. But not if you look at the statistics.
In fact, did you know that during the 20th century, March 21 was actually the exception rather than the rule for the first day of spring? The vernal equinox landed on March 21 only 36 out of 100 years. And from 1981 to 2102, Americans have (and will) celebrate the first day of spring no later than March 20. [Earth's Equinoxes & Solstices (Infographic)]
In 2016, those living in Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific, Mountain and Central time zones will see spring begin even earlier: on March 19. And in 2020, it will start on March 19 for the entire United States.
There are a few reasons why seasonal dates can vary from year to year.
1) A year is not an even number of days and neither are the seasons. Earth's year — the length of time it takes to circle the sun once — lasts about 365.25 days. To try to achieve a value as close as possible to the exact length of the year, our Gregorian Calendar was constructed to give a close approximation to the tropical year, which is the actual length of time it takes for the Earth to complete one orbit around the sun. It eliminates leap days in century years not evenly divisible by 400, such as 1700, 1800, and 2100, and millennium years that are divisible by 4000, such as 8000 and 12000.
2) Another reason is that the Earth's elliptical orbit is changing its orientation relative to the sun (it skews), which causes the Earth's axis to constantly point in a different direction — a process called precession. Since the seasons are defined as beginning at strict 90-degree intervals, these positional changes affect the time Earth reaches each 90-degree location in its orbit around the sun.
3) The pull of gravity from the other planets also affects the location of the Earth in its orbit.
The current seasonal lengths for the Northern Hemisphere are:
Winter:88.99 days
Spring: 92.76 days
Summer: 93.65 days
Autumn: 89.84 days
As you can see, the warm seasons, spring and summer, combined are 7.573 days longer than the colder seasons, fall and winter (good news for warm weatheradmirers).
However, spring is currently being reduced by approximately one minute per year, and winter by about one-half minute per year. Summer is gaining the minute lost from spring, and autumn is gaining the half-minute lost from winter.
Winter is the shortest astronomical season, and with its seasonal duration continuing to decrease, it is expected to attain its minimum value — 88.71 days — by about the year 3500.
The situation for different parts of the world, being in different time zones and hemispheres, varies. For Europe, the last time spring began on March 21 was in 2007, and it won't happen again until 2102.
For places much farther to the east, such as Tokyo, Japan (nine hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time), spring will fall on March 21 in two out of every four years from 2014 through 2023 (2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, etc.), then once every four years from 2027 through 2055. But then that's it until 2101.
Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com.
Sometime in April or May of this year, a swarm of insects called Brood II Cicadas will rise from the earth and fill the skies all across the Northeast, from Virginia to Connecticut.
It sounds like a horror film, but Magicicada Brood II is a relatively harmless — though massive — legion of cicadas scheduled to venture above ground and mate this year, as they do every 17 years.
This year's brood will emerge in the following states: Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. You can find when the cicadas are coming to your region on Magicicada.org.
Periodical cicadas spend most of their lives underground, surfacing only for the last few months of their lives to produce the next generation. As soon as they hatch, young "nymph" cicadas dig their way underground, where they live for the next 16 years by sucking the sap out of tree roots and moving very little, according to AAAS's Science NetLinks.
In the Spring of the 17th year the adult cicadas come up from the earth. The warmer the weather is, the earlier they come, according to Cicadamania. When the ground eight inches down warms to 64F they start to emerge from their slumber in droves.
And when they do dig their way out of the ground, they flood the skies numbering in the tens of millions. Per acre, populations are usually in the tens to hundreds of thousands, which is much higher than most other cicada species.
Some have observed numbers as high as 1.5 million cicadas per acre, according to website Magicicada.org, run by cicada researcher John Cooley.
These insects only leave their subterranean burrows every 17 years, so they have few natural predators. They are easy to catch, but animals that do hunt them will likely find themselves full-to-bursting well before they even make a dent in the swarm.
Apart from their sheer numbers, their impressive size (around three inches), beady red eyes, and black shell of a body might spook or startle you, especially if they start landing on you. They are so dense in places, the ground will crunch underneath your feet, according to Caitlyn Kim of WNYC.
During the day, they also make an incessant sound that resembles a whirring buzz. They are often confused with locusts, which are also known to swarm in large numbers, but they aren't related. A second type of cicada has a similar lifestyle but only stays underground for 13 years.
There are also multiple "broods" of cicadas, based on where they are located. Last year Brood I cicadas emerged in Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee.
Cicadas don't sting or bite, aren't poisonous, and aren't known to transmit disease. They do, however, feed on trees by piercing branches and sucking out the fluid inside. Orchard keepers or nurseries with many young, vulnerable trees should think about waiting to plant them or keep them indoors until the swarm dies down in late July.
Areas with lots of deciduous trees and shrubs should expect to see many more cicadas than treeless grasslands or suburbs. You can track the cicadas' arrival by building a cicada sensor to detect their approach.
In parts of the country where cicada swarms occur, the flying insects are known to besiege outdoor events. So anyone thinking of getting married anywhere in the Eastern United States this Spring might want to consult this cicada wedding planner, or consider having the party indoors.
On the morning of March 17, Korb discovered that a sinkhole had opened up under his man-made pond on this property, emptying the whole thing in a matter of hours.
Sinkholes usually develop in areas where the ground is "karst terrain"— a generic name for dissolvable rock, like limestone or salt deposits. Water under the ground wears away at these rocks, creating holes in the ground over time. When there is a thin layer of ground above the whole, it can cave in all at once.
In this case, Sierra Collage geologist Alex Amigo told KRCA that he thinks the sinkhole could have been related to man-made caves from the gold rush:
"There was such a lot of mining activity going on we almost never know when there was some man-made type of cavity underground. And then any way that the water can make it there, maybe there was a pre existing fracture, or a fracture formed, that water could have drained very fast. "
This setback does not mean there isn't any life in the lake. Scientists found specimens of bacteria and other microorganisms as they slowly drilled through the ice to the lake. These discoveries have led them to believe that there may be life down in the lake itself. 
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There are three general ways that people can learn from nature:
To better assess which model does the best job of divining the future, Grinsted and his colleagues constructed a record of storm surges from tide gauges along the Atlantic coast dating back to 1923. "Big storm surges give me a new view of hurricane variability in the past," Grinsted said.
However, 
