Natural Disasters captured from Space

Hurricane Ike -- September 13, 2008

As a category 2 Hurricane, it made landfall on Galveston, Texas on September 13, 2008. It is categorized as the third worst hurricane in US history.

Total fatalities : 195
Cost of Damage : USD 32 Billion

Natural Disasters captured from Space 1

Satellites have been responsible for providing weather news for the past 50 years, and they heralded an era of global communication. From commercial communication satellites to spy satellites to weather satellites, they are awe inspiring in all forms. Natural disasters strike in many forms, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, avalanches and floods. Today, we present a portfolio of natural disasters as photographed from the Space.

Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004

Horrific pictures of people running away from towering waves flashed across newspapers across the globe on Christmas 2004. An earthquake of magnitude 9.1 triggered the Tsunami which travelled from Indonesia to Somalia and Seychelles. The scale of destruction was massive and the videos of the tsunami were horrific.

Total fatalities : 230,000
Cost of Damage : exceeds USD 25 Billion

Hurricane Katrina -- August, 2005

It was not the strongest hurricane ever recorded, yet it was the costliest. The failure of the levee system in New Orleans led to widespread damage and loss of life. The rest as most of us know, is history.

Total fatalities : 2000+
Cost of Damage : USD 90.9 Billion

Katrina at Peak Intensity

Eyewall of Hurricane Katrina captured on August 28, 2005, from a NOAA WP-3D "Orion" Hurricane Hunter

Chandeleur Islands before and after Hurricane Katrina

Most Dangerous Volcanoes in the World

Volcanoes are usually less dangerous than other natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes. But there is no good answer if you don’t limit it into a specific context, which volcano, Dangerous to what: people, property, etc.

Volcanoes have a serious of hazards like lava flows, ash fall, pyroclastic flows, and climate changes on a global scale that relate into different dangers or risks. The risks when visiting an active volcano depend on which risk zones of the volcano are visited and for how long.

Here are some of the most dangerous volcanos of the world.

Ojos del Salado Volcano

Ojos del Salado 6,893 meters is on Argentina-Chile border. It is the second highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere and the highest in Chile.

Llullaillaco Volcano

Llullaillaco 6,739 meters is also located on Argentina-Chile border. It lies in Atacama Desert, one of the driest places in the world. Llullaillaco is the second highest active volcano in the world,

Guallatiri Volcano

Guallatiri lies just west of the border with Bolivia and Chile. It is a symmetrical 6071 m high ice-clad stratovolcano.

Licancabur Volcano

Licancabur 5,920 meters is located on Bolivia-Chile Range Andes .The 70 by 90 meter crater lake at the summit is believed to be the highest lake in the world, and despite air temperatures of -30 °C it contains numerous living creatures.

Cotopaxi Volcano

Cotopaxi 5,897 meters is located in Ecuador. There have been more than 50 eruptions of Cotopaxi since 1738. Experts believe another eruption may come soon from this famous volcano.

San José Volcano

San José 5850 meters is located in Chile in the mountain Range Andes. Eruptions of San Jose Volcano occurred in years 1960, 1959, 1895-97, 1889-90, 1881, and 1838.

El Misti Volcano

El Misti is located in Peru. With its snow-capped, perfect cone, El Misti stands at 5,822 m and lies between the mountain Chachani and the volcano Pichu-Pichu. This impressive mountain is visible almost year-round, but especially during winter.

Antisana Volcano

Antisana 5,753 Meters is located in Ecuador. The village near it is unique in that the inhabitants cook over pits of magma, and are one of the only cultures to live without ovens.

Ubinas Volcano

Ubinas 5,672 meters located in Moquegua Region of Peru.It is the Peru’s most active volcano. Debris-avalanche deposits from the collapse of the SE flank of Ubinas extend 10 km from the volcano.

Lascar Volcano

Lascar 5,592 meters is located in Northern Chile and is the most active volcano of the Chile. Frequent small-to-moderate explosive eruptions have been recorded but the largest historical eruption of Lascar took place in 1993, producing pyroclastic flows to 8.5 km NW of the summit and ash fall in Buenos Aires.

A Fluke of Nature

As the sun rises over a grassy pasture, and the morning light glints from the countless clinging drops of dew, a single snail resolutely inches toward a mound of steaming nourishment. But unbeknownst to the armored gastropod, this seemingly ordinary heap of cow dung conceals a legion of tiny Dicrocoelium dendriticum eggs, each of which contains the embryo of a sinister mind-controlling parasite. As the snail gorges itself on the fibrous feast, it unwittingly sets the collection of unborn lancet flukes on a miniature adventure which will lead them through slime, zombies, and bile to ultimately find their own unique kind of utopia.

As the ingested eggs slide into the snail’s belly, the moisture and digestive juices coax the occupants from their shells. Propelled by the minuscule hairs that line the flukes’ bodies, the infant parasites grope their way through the darkness to the hapless host’s digestive gland. There they establish a makeshift home as they mature into tadpole-like adolescence.

Once they’re ready to venture out on their own, the young flukes leave the warm comfort of the snail-gut. They make their way to their host’s respiratory chamber, where they gather in groups along the inner wall and wait. Their presence irritates the inner lining of the breathing cavity, which tries to rid itself of the foreign invaders by coating them with a thick mucus. When these slime-pearls reach a sufficient size, the snail coughs them out, ejecting the sticky groups of flukes out into the world. Lying there, sealed in their moist protective cocoon, the young parasites bide their time alongside hundreds of mucus-mates. The snail meanders off on its own, having suffered no harm aside from a particularly phlegmy cough.

A nearby ant which is foraging for food stumbles upon one such slime ball in a bed of vegetation. The sweet snail-mucus pheromones present an irresistible treat for the ant, and it totes the treasure back to the colony. As the slime is savored by the insects, the clandestine flukes infiltrate the ants’ anatomies. Most of the parasites make their way to the abdomen, but a few take a detour which leads them to the insect’s nerve center, where they use mysterious methods to establish overpowering influence.

The next evening, as the armies of ants file back to their colony after a long day’s work in the hot sun, those who partook of the sweet slime uncharacteristically break ranks to wander away in a daze. Acting out the demands of the unwelcome guests lodged in its head, an infected ant penetrates the jungle of foliage and selects a random blade of grass. It clambers up the long, thin leaf and crawls out to the tip, where it obeys a powerful urge to secure itself in position with its clamp-like mandibles.

Each dangling, stupefied ant-zombie remains paralyzed on its perch throughout the night. When the light and warmth of dawn reappear, the compromised insect comes to its senses and climbs back down to return home. During the day it rejoins its working comrades as though nothing happened; but as evening approaches, and temperatures cool, the parasitic flukes will once again urge their host to venture alone into the wilderness. A new blade of grass is selected and scaled, and the ant once again positions itself upon the tip.
This bizarre modified existence continues until one day the dangling insect is sucked into the jaws of a beast. As a grazing cow plucks the occupied grass from the ground, it is oblivious to the zombie ant and its evil masters.

Once the fluke warriors have succeeded in entering this, their final quarry, they burst from their trojan ant and use their mighty tails to swim through the maze of organs. Eventually they arrive at the quiet suburbia of cow guts– the bile duct– where the well-traveled adults settle down and abandon their host-hopping ways. The lancet flukes live in quiet parasitic happiness within the wet tubing, and before long the little bundles of joy begin to arrive. The mothers’ eggs are released into the bile duct, and they are whisked along through the cow’s plumbing. Eventually they are deposited into the intestines, where the eggs hitch a ride out on the slow-moving train of digested grass fibers.

There, as the sun rises over the grassy pasture and the light glints from the countless clinging drops of dew, a single snail resolutely inches toward a mound of steaming nourishment.

Details from the University of Alberta

The Nature of Matter and Mass

The nature of matter and mass: One of the Greatest Mysteries of Modern Science

40 years ago, an unknown physicist in Edinburgh, Scotland, came up with a theory of how the universe holds together - sparking a multibillion dollar race to find the key particle. Is the most sought after prize in modern physics about to be won at last?

Amid 800 acres of landscaped grounds a mile from Princeton, New Jersey, stands the Institute for Advanced Study, one of the world’s most prestigious centers of scientific thought. Within this intellectual microcosm, many of the most accomplished physicists in history, from Oppenheimer to Einstein, have wrestled with the deepest puzzles of the universe. To be invited to talk at Einstein’s former lab remains among the highest honors a scientist can receive. And it was with this terrifying thought in mind that in March 1966 Peter Higgs, a 36-year-old physicist from Edinburgh University, loaded up his car and headed up the freeway.

Tucked into Higgs’s luggage was the reason he had been invited. The notes for his highly contentious lecture overturned some of the most deeply-held beliefs of the resident experts. They proposed something remarkable, that an invisible field, which stretches throughout the entire universe, holds the key to one of the greatest mysteries of modern science - the nature of matter and mass.

Higgs was pondering the talk and how it would go down among the biggest brains in physics, when it all suddenly became too much for him. Out of the window, he glimpsed a roadsign to Princeton. It was enough to trigger a fit of panic. Shaking, Higgs pulled into a rest area and sat there panting, waiting to regain his composure.

More than 40 years later, Higgs is still largely unknown beyond his field, but that is about to change. The multibillion dollar race to discover if his theory is right is finally nearing its climax. Either way, the answer will propel 21st-century physics into a new and uncertain era. Higgs, who turned 78 in May, is clearly a Nobel prizewinner in waiting. “I have to ask my GP (general pracitioner) to keep me alive,” he says, when we met in his Edinburgh apartment.

Higgs rarely gives interviews; it’s not so much that he refuses as lets the requests gather dust until it’s too late. The phone goes unanswered, pleas through friends come to nothing, emails evaporate in the ether. Good old letters are his preferred means of communication. Luckily, Higgs has found a few hours to spare before rushing off to join his wife for another round of Monteverdi madrigals at the festival that first attracted him to the city in 1949. He tells the story of his unwitting discovery of something in the emptiness that surrounds us. “It has consequences,” says Higgs, pausing to fold his arms so that each hand can rub the opposite’s elbow. “If it wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be here.”

Higgs was born in Newcastle in 1929, but the family moved around with his father’s job, as a sound engineer with the BBC. He missed a lot of early schooling. Bouts of serious asthma drifted into pneumonia (”not funny when there aren’t any drugs”) and he was kept home and taught by his parents. As a young boy, Higgs was raised by his mother in Bristol while his father relocated to Bedford. “She was very motivated to push me,” he says. “My father, I think he was just rather scared of children.”

At Cotham Grammar School in Bristol, Higgs would stand at the back of morning assembly, reading the names of the school’s most honored alumni. Appearing more times than any other was the Nobel prize-winning physicist and founding father of quantum mechanics, Paul Dirac, who, like Stephen Hawking, took the seat at Cambridge that was once occupied by Sir Isaac Newton. It was Dirac’s work that enthralled Higgs and put him on the path to study theoretical physics. “It’s about understanding! Understanding the world!” Higgs says, his voice full of excitement.

When illness wasn’t disrupting Higgs’ education, the war was. Bristol had already been thumped by German bombers, the old center almost completely flattened, but the outskirts where he lived and went to school took hits, too, from bombs shed by planes almost as an afterthought as they turned home from raids on the oil storage depots and ports at Avonmouth. “One of the first things I did on arriving at school was to break my left arm falling into a bomb crater,” Higgs says. Later, the family was forced to leave home when a cluster of unexploded bombs was discovered across the road.

The family was not reunited until the end of the war, when Peter, aged 17, joined City of London School, specializing in mathematics. Among the gifted, he was the odd one out. He alone had no desire to go to Oxford or Cambridge, the thought enough to make him shudder. “They all wondered why I wasn’t going to do the same,” he says. “I think some of the family attitude to Oxford and Cambridge had rubbed off on me, which was that those places were all very well for the children of the idle rich to go and waste their time and that of their tutors, but if you were serious about university, you went somewhere else.”

In Higgs’ case, somewhere else was King’s College, London, and it was there that it became clear he was hopeless at experiments. “There were accidents,” he says, refusing to elaborate.

In his early 30s, Higgs moved to Edinburgh University, where he became interested in what must be one of the most curious puzzles in physics: why the objects around us weigh anything.

Until recently, few even questioned where mass comes from. Newton coined the term in 1687 in his famous tome, Principia Mathematica, and for 200 years scientists were happy to think of mass as something that simply existed. Some objects had more mass than others - a brick versus a book, say - and that was that. But scientists now know the world is not so simple. While a brick weighs as much as the atoms inside it, according to the best theory physicists have - one that has passed decades of tests with flying colors - the basic building blocks inside atoms weigh nothing at all. As matter is broken down to ever smaller constituents, from molecules to atoms to quarks, mass appears to evaporate before our eyes. Physicists have never fully understood why.

While working on the conundrum, Higgs came up with an elegant mechanism to solve the problem. It showed that at the very beginning of the universe, the smallest building blocks of nature were truly weightless, but became heavy a fraction of a second later, when the fireball of the big bang cooled. His theory was a breakthrough in itself, but something more profound dropped out of his calculations.

Higgs’s theory showed that mass was produced by a new type of field that clings to particles wherever they are, dragging on them and making the heavy. Some particles find the field more sticky than others. Particles of light are oblivious to it. Others have to wade through it like an elephant in tar. So, in theory, particles can weigh nothing, but as soon as they are in the field, they get heavy.

Scientists now know that Higgs’s extraordinary field, or something very similar to it, played a key role in the formation of the universe. Without it, the cosmos would not have exploded into the rich, infinite galaxies we see today. The spinning disc of cosmic dust that collapsed 4.5 billion years ago to form our solar system would never have been. No planets would have formed, nor a sun to warm them. Life would not have stood a chance.

In late summer 1964, two years before he would give his Princeton lecture, Higgs rushed out a succinct letter, packed with mathematical formulae that backed his discovery and sent it to a leading physics journal run from Cern, the European nuclear research organization in Geneva. The paper was published almost immediately, but went largely unnoticed. Higgs planned a second paper, to emphasize his discovery, but for now that would have to wait.

Through CND meetings in Edinburgh - Higgs had been an activist while studying in London - he had met Jo, an American linguist and his future wife. The two had planned a weekend’s camping in the west Highlands, on the recommendation of a friend who’d read the place had the lowest rainfall in Scotland. As it happened, the trip was a disaster. “It turned out she’d misread it. It was the highest rainfall in all of Scotland,” Higgs says.

The scientist took the chance to retreat to Edinburgh and write his second paper, this time elaborating on the true implications of his work. In autumn 1964, he sent it to the same journal for publishing, but astonishingly the Cern editors rejected it. Evidently, it was considered “of no obvious relevance to physics”. He quickly sent it to America’s leading physics journal, where it appeared later that year.

Despite Cern’s misgivings, Higgs’s ideas now exploded into the world of theoretical physics and thousands wanted to be first to prove Higgs right. Detecting the field itself is thought to be impossible with modern technology, but Higgs also predicted a particle that is created in the field, and finding this would be the proof they sought. Officially, the particle is called the Higgs boson, but its elusive nature and fundamental role in the creation of the universe led a prominent scientist to rename it the God particle.

The name has stuck, but makes Higgs wince and raises the hackles of other theorists. “I wish he hadn’t done it,” he says. “I have to explain to people it was a joke. I’m an atheist, but I have an uneasy feeling that playing around with names like that could be unnecessarily offensive to people who are religious.”

Strictly, the particle should bear the names of three scientists. Unknown to Higgs at the time, two Belgian physicists at the Free University in Brussels were working on the same problem. Using completely different maths, they reached the same staggering conclusion - that a never-seen field must pervade the universe and confer mass on almost everything in it. Robert Brout and Fran?§ois Englert didn’t doubt their discovery, but checked and checked for mistakes before publishing. Their paper was published in August 1964, a few weeks before Higgs’ first paper, which was in press at the time.

It makes for an awkward situation, not least for Higgs, who agrees all three should share credit for the discovery. He recounts a tale when a colleague referred to the “Higgs mechanism” in a lecture in Germany more than two decades ago. In the front row, a look of displeasure flushed over one of the men in the audience. Realizing his mistake, the speaker said, “Of course, I know this was also discovered by others, but I refer to it by the person with the shortest name.” “My name has five letters, too,” piped Brout.

A few months ago, Brout and Englert, who are close as brothers and finish each other’s sentences, talked to me about the events long ago. After publishing their work, the two were having a beer on the balcony of a 17th-century cafe overlooking a Brussels park. “In the spring of 1964 we were both extremely excited,” said Brout. “For the first time in my life, I felt what it might be to be a great physicist.” Neither, he says, blames Higgs for their work being sidelined.

Whatever name it takes, many scientists believe that finding the particle will not only reveal the origin of mass, but will nudge open the door to a new realm of unknowns. We can see only 4% of the matter that makes up the universe. The Higgs particle may shed light on the rest - the dark matter in which galaxies form, and the dark energy that drives the expansion of the universe, for example. The particle may also shed light on string theory, an ambitious but powerful way of viewing the universe that sees every particle not as a point, but as a vibrating string of energy, where different frequencies create different particles.

A Giant Breach in Earth's Magnetic Field

Dec. 16, 2008: NASA's five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth's magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. Solar wind can flow in through the opening to "load up" the magnetosphere for powerful geomagnetic storms. But the breach itself is not the biggest surprise. Researchers are even more amazed at the strange and unexpected way it forms, overturning long-held ideas of space physics.

"At first I didn't believe it," says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This finding fundamentally alters our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction."

The magnetosphere is a bubble of magnetism that surrounds Earth and protects us from solar wind. Exploring the bubble is a key goal of the THEMIS mission, launched in February 2007. The big discovery came on June 3, 2007, when the five probes serendipitously flew through the breach just as it was opening. Onboard sensors recorded a torrent of solar wind particles streaming into the magnetosphere, signaling an event of unexpected size and importance.


"The opening was huge—four times wider than Earth itself," says Wenhui Li, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire who has been analyzing the data. Li's colleague Jimmy Raeder, also of New Hampshire, says "1027 particles per second were flowing into the magnetosphere—that's a 1 followed by 27 zeros. This kind of influx is an order of magnitude greater than what we thought was possible."

The event began with little warning when a gentle gust of solar wind delivered a bundle of magnetic fields from the Sun to Earth. Like an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a big clam, solar magnetic fields draped themselves around the magnetosphere and cracked it open. The cracking was accomplished by means of a process called "magnetic reconnection." High above Earth's poles, solar and terrestrial magnetic fields linked up (reconnected) to form conduits for solar wind. Conduits over the Arctic and Antarctic quickly expanded; within minutes they overlapped over Earth's equator to create the biggest magnetic breach ever recorded by Earth-orbiting spacecraft. Above: A computer model of solar wind flowing around Earth's magnetic field on June 3, 2007. Background colors represent solar wind density; red is high density, blue is low. Solid black lines trace the outer boundaries of Earth's magnetic field. Note the layer of relatively dense material beneath the tips of the white arrows; that is solar wind entering Earth's magnetic field through the breach. Credit: Jimmy Raeder/UNH. [larger image]

The size of the breach took researchers by surprise. "We've seen things like this before," says Raeder, "but never on such a large scale. The entire day-side of the magnetosphere was open to the solar wind."

The circumstances were even more surprising. Space physicists have long believed that holes in Earth's magnetosphere open only in response to solar magnetic fields that point south. The great breach of June 2007, however, opened in response to a solar magnetic field that pointed north.

"To the lay person, this may sound like a quibble, but to a space physicist, it is almost seismic," says Sibeck. "When I tell my colleagues, most react with skepticism, as if I'm trying to convince them that the sun rises in the west."
Here is why they can't believe their ears: The solar wind presses against Earth's magnetosphere almost directly above the equator where our planet's magnetic field points north. Suppose a bundle of solar magnetism comes along, and it points north, too. The two fields should reinforce one another, strengthening Earth's magnetic defenses and slamming the door shut on the solar wind. In the language of space physics, a north-pointing solar magnetic field is called a "northern IMF" and it is synonymous with shields up!

"So, you can imagine our surprise when a northern IMF came along and shields went down instead," says Sibeck. "This completely overturns our understanding of things."

Northern IMF events don't actually trigger geomagnetic storms, notes Raeder, but they do set the stage for storms by loading the magnetosphere with plasma. A loaded magnetosphere is primed for auroras, power outages, and other disturbances that can result when, say, a CME (coronal mass ejection) hits.

The years ahead could be especially lively. Raeder explains: "We're entering Solar Cycle 24. For reasons not fully understood, CMEs in even-numbered solar cycles (like 24) tend to hit Earth with a leading edge that is magnetized north. Such a CME should open a breach and load the magnetosphere with plasma just before the storm gets underway. It's the perfect sequence for a really big event."

Sibeck agrees. "This could result in stronger geomagnetic storms than we have seen in many years."

A video version of this story may be found HERE . For more information about the THEMIS mission, visit http://nasa.gov/themis

A Strange Phenomenon in Jordan; The Land That Burns All

Jordan :

A team of researchers from the Geologists Association as well as scientists from the University of Jordan will be assigned to examine a strange phenomenon that was noted in a piece of land in the area of Um Jaozeh in Jordan.

The phenomenon was observed when a shepherd let his sheep enter the land in concern, looking for grass to feed on, and watched his sheep burn and completely disappear due to the extraordinary heat of that land.

“The ground in the area was still unusually hot until late Tuesday, and once any material was thrown into the area, it burned quickly and smoke and flames came out.” –The Jordan Times.

The director of Natural Resources Authority (NRA), Maher Hijazin reported that organic materials might have collected below that area and caused that overheating, knowing that sewage pipelines underlie that land. Hijazin seemed pretty certain about the cause of the overheating when he said that the answer to the phenomenon is “simple”.

So, we surely could use something as interesting and exciting to talk about in Jordan (we’re bored of swine flu stories, and stories of funny politics in neighboring countries). We however would rather stick to “talking” about fire, rather than actually experience the act of “burning” with fire. So yes, the answer could be simple, as simple as Mr. Hijazin had explained, but further investigations are definitely required to find out the exact reason behind it, in order to make sure that whatever reason it is, it doesn’t extend to surrounding areas!!!

Magical Views

Some Awful Sceneries

Patagonia - To The End Of The World

Patagonia is the southernmost portion of South America. Mostly located in Argentina and partly in Chile, it comprises the Andes mountains to the west and south, and plateaux and low plains to the east. The name Patagonia comes from the word patagon used by Magellan to describe the native people who his expedition thought to be giants. It is now believed the Patagons were actually Tehuelches and Aonikenk with an average height of 1.80 m compared to the 1.55 average for Spaniards of the time.
To the east of the Andes, it lies south of the Neuquén River and Colorado rivers, and, to the west of the Andes, south of (39°S), excluding the Chiloé Archipelago. East of the Andes the Argentine portion of Patagonia includes the provinces of Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz, and Tierra del Fuego, as well as the southern tips of the provinces of Buenos Aires, Mendoza and La Pampa. The Chilean portion embraces the southern part of the region of Los Lagos, and the regions of Aysen and Magallanes. It excludes those portions of Antarctica claimed by both countries.