Tuesday 25 December 2012

How the tsunami happened

Q&A: How the tsunami happened

Thousands of people have died after an earthquake sent huge waves crashing into coastal resorts across south and east Asia. Dr Brian Baptie, a senior seismologist with the British Geological Survey, explained how the wave, or tsunami, was created.In geological terms, what has happened?
Sumatra, or north-western Indonesia, is right on a plate boundary. The earth's surface is made up of lots of different tectonic plates and they are all moving around.
The plate that has the Indian Ocean on it is moving roughly north-east and colliding with Sumatra. And as that collision takes place, the Indian Ocean plate gets subducted underneath Sumatra, and as that plate is subducted it breaks up and that is what causes the earthquake.
This earthquake been one of the largest ever, one of the great earthquakes. There has been a rupture along a fault about 1,000km long, and that has generated a vertical displacement of about 10m. The displacement in the sea floor has generated this huge tsunami.
How does the wave develop?
There's a huge vertical displacement in the sea floor as a result of the earthquake and that displaces a huge volume of water.
You can imagine, if the rupture is 1,000km long with a 10m displacement in the sea floor you get hundreds of cubic kilometres of water and that results in a wave that travels through the ocean.

GIANT EARTHQUAKES

1960 - Chile, 9.5 magnitude

1964 - Alaska, 9.2

1957 - Alaska, 9.1

1952 - Russia, 9.0

2004 - Indonesia, 9.0

In the deep ocean the height of the wave can be a few metres, maybe 5-10m, and it travels at a few hundred kilometres per hour.
That means it travels relatively slowly compared with the seismic waves from the earthquake, and it has arrived quite a few hours later at surrounding coastal areas all around the Indian Ocean.
As the tsunami wave approaches the shore it slows down, because the water gets shallower and what that means is the wave increases dramatically.
When it hits the shoreline it can be 10-20m, and that is probably what has happened in this case.
Why was there no warning this was happening?
There is a tsunami warning system in place in the Pacific Ocean because there is a historical precedent of lots of earthquakes causing tsunamis like this, throughout the 20th Century.
But there is no real precedent for a tsunami like this in the Indian Ocean. So this is the first time this has happened, and there is no warning system as far as I know in the Indian Ocean.
Could there be more waves on a similar scale?
Unlikely there will be further tsunamis of the same size. What normally happens when you get a very large earthquake is you get aftershocks that continue for many days.
They are usually a bit smaller than the main shock, although it is not impossible that there could be another one. But there may be aftershocks and they may generate smaller tsunamis.

Friday 7 December 2012

whale

Beached whale at Carlyon Bay 'too sick to save'

The animal was reported to coastguards as thrashing about in the shallow water

A whale washed up on the beach in Cornwall will be put down after vets said it was too sick to be refloated.

Rescuers were called to the scene in Carlyon Bay where the 65ft (20m) whale was reported stranded at 04:45 BST.

Emergency services cordoned off the area to avoid causing the fin whale more distress.

But vets from the British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) said there was no hope of refloating the animal which was stranded on an outgoing tide.

Insp Dave Meredith, of Devon and Cornwall Police, tweeted: "Sadly the whale at Carlyon bay is too sick for recovery. It is going to be humanely destroyed. Very sad."

'Distressing scene'

Coastguards said the animal was reported to them as thrashing about in the shallow water at the beach near St Austell.

Brixham Coastguard watch manager Paul Myers said: "It's obviously a very distressing scene and we would ask the public to stay away from the beach to allow the rescue unit to do their work and save the whale from further distress."

The fin whale, the second largest animal on the planet, is a globally endangered species.

The BDMLR is a voluntary network of trained experts who respond to calls by the public and emergency services when whales are stranded.

7.3 magnitude quake

The BBC's Rupert Wingfield Hayes said he felt his building shake "violently"

A 7.3 magnitude quake has struck off Japan's eastern coast, triggering a small tsunami and sparking evacuations.

A one-metre wave hit Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture and many people heeded calls to move to higher ground before all alerts were later lifted.

The quake epicentre was about 245km (150 miles) south-east of Kamiashi at a depth of about 36km, the US Geological Survey said.

Miyagi was hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

Swaying violently

The US-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center had said there was no threat to the wider Pacific Ocean but had warned a local tsunami could be destructive for local coastlines.

There have been no reports of deaths or injuries, and all tsunami warnings were cancelled at 19:20 local time (10:20 GMT), broadcaster NHK said.

Warnings of the tsunami height had varied between 50cm and 2m.

The BBC's Rupert Wingfield Hayes in Tokyo says any such height would represent a far lower risk of devastation than the 10-11 metre tsunami that struck in 2011 but that, since then, the country has clearly become jittery about any shaking of the earth.

The tsunami warnings had extended from the top of the main island of Honshu down towards Tokyo and evacuations were ordered from some of the affected areas.

With Japan's early warning system, NHK was able to break off its regular programming and issue an alert about the earthquake shortly before it struck.

A presenter on state broadcaster NHK then told viewers: "Remember last year's quake and tsunami. Call on your neighbours and flee to higher ground now!"

Buildings swayed violently in Tokyo.

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We're now at an official evacuation centre with about 50 other people waiting to hear what to do next”

John HeritageTeacher, Miyagi Prefecture

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda cancelled campaigning for the 16 December election to return to his office.

Communications to Miyagi have proven difficult, with the high volume of telephone calls. Trains in the prefecture have been halted and the runway at Sendai airport closed.

English teacher John Heritage, who is in Tagajo in Miyagi Prefecture, told the BBC the earthquake was not as powerful as some he had experienced but was worrying as it went on so long.

"We're now at an official evacuation centre with about 50 other people waiting to hear what to do next," he said.

Other people reported being alerted to the earthquake prior to its arrival by Japan's mobile phone-based warning system.

One tweeted that he was given 10 seconds and was able to slow his car before the shaking struck.

The USGS reported three aftershocks in the same area, of 6.2, 5.5 and 4.7 magnitudes.

The 9.0 magnitude quake that struck on 11 March 2011 caused a devastating tsunami and left more than 15,000 people dead, with more than 3,200 missing.

That quake triggered a meltdown of fuel rods at the Fukushima nuclear plant, causing radiation leaks and mass evacuations.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power, told Agence France-Presse there were no reports of problems there this time, although workers had moved to higher ground.

Sunday 2 September 2012

Eyeless goby fish 10,000km apart share common ancestor

By Jonathan BallBBC News

Blind cave fish Typhleotris madagascariensis

Eyeless and colourless, Madagascan cave goby relatives were living "down-under".

A pair of eyeless, cave-dwelling fish species, separated millions of years ago, have turned up on either side of the Indian Ocean.

A study published in PLoS One showed that blind Madagascan and Australian cave fish share a common ancestor.

Their forebears probably lived in caves on the prehistoric southern super-continent Gondwanaland.

Then continental drift tore this family apart - transporting them to their current locations.

On his voyages of discovery, Darwin noted eyeless, colourless cave-dwelling creatures whose appearance was so bizarre and primitive he thought they were "wrecks of ancient life".

Prosanta Chakrabarty, assistant professor and curator at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, and his colleagues were particularly interested in two populations of goby fish living in Madagascar and north-western Australia.

Gobies form one of the largest families of fish, containing about 2,000 different species.

Though living in different parts of the world the cave fish shared important features: they were small - under 10 cm in length - eyeless, colourless and lived in freshwater, limestone caves.

How such similar fishes came to be living on different sides of the world was the question the researchers wanted to answer.

In the genes

One possibility was that the cave fishes had evolved independently, from terrestrial counterparts.

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That they're 6,000 km apart in Madagascar and Australia is pretty remarkable”

Prosanta ChakrabartyLouisiana State University Museum of Natural Science

Species adapt to environmental challenges and opportunities and - through a process of natural selection - only the fittest survive.

When separate species are exposed to the same selective pressures they often come up with the same solutions - a process known as convergent evolution.

For example, the elongated fingers of both the aye aye lemur of Madagascar and the striped opossum of Australia evolved so they could probe nooks and crannies for their favourite insect food.

In the case of the cave fishes, an alternative possibility was that the cave-fishes' odd features - or traits - were adaptations inherited from an ancestor common to both.

To determine which scenario was most likely, Dr Chakrabarty and his team used phylogenetic analysis - a study of the historical record held deep within their DNA sequences - to rebuild the goby family tree.

The researchers compared DNA sequences from more than 100 different goby species, including those from Australian and Madagascan cave fish that the researchers had collected.

Though separated by thousands of kilometres of ocean, the cave-dwelling fish of Madagascar and north-western Australia were genetically more similar to each other than to any other goby: they shared a common ancestor.

"That they're 6,000 km apart in Madagascar and Australia is pretty remarkable," observed Dr Chakrabarty.

Lost continents

But when and where did their ancestors live?

To answer this, the researchers used goby fossil records to calibrate their trees.

The newly chronicled evolutionary history of the fish showed that their shared ancestor was swimming in subterranean pools 45 - 110 million years ago, when the Earth looked very much different to how it looks today.

Underground caves on either side of the Indian Ocean hide a fishy secret

Australia and Madagascar formed part of a super-continent, called Gondwanaland, which also included what are now Antarctica, Africa, South America and India.

Around 180 million years ago, America and Africa broke away from this super-continent. Then, about 60 million years later in the early Cretaceous period, Australia-Antarctica started to split from India-Madagascar.

It was this separation that ultimately led to the descendants of the Gondwanaland cave fish living on opposite sides of the Indian Ocean.

Dr John Sparks, a co-author from the American Museum of Natural History explained: "The sister-group relationship between obligate cave fish from Madagascar and Australia is a remarkable example of Gondwanan vicariance - a split dating back to the Late Cretaceous."

But the study threw up some anomalies.

The authors believe that the common ancestor was dispersed throughout eastern Gondwanaland - which would include India - yet this country is devoid of similar gobies.

"Antarctica could have provided the connection [between Gondwanaland-locked Madagascar and Australia], or gobies could have been present in India but became extinct," suggests Dr Chakrabarty.

A more controversial possibility is that our knowledge of Gondwanaland might need updating - the kind of change to geology that very recently saw the presumed history of the isthmus of Panama adjusted by millions of years.

The study also threw up another surprise: one of the Australian caves explored by the team contained a fish that had developed pigment.

John Sparks, another curator at the museum, observed: "Our results, and the fact that we have recently discovered new cave fish species in both Madagascar and Australia belonging to these genera, in particular a fully pigmented form from Madagascar, are intriguing from another perspective - they show that caves are not evolutionary dead-ends."

Thursday 30 August 2012

World Water Week

World Water Week: It's Not Just About Water

Available in: 中文, العربية, Français, Español

Sanitation. Photo by Almud Weitz/World Bank

Aug. 24, 2012

Often neglected, the world’s sanitation crisis needs urgent attention across multiple sectors to meet the basic needs of 2.5 billion people without access. Creating demand for sanitation and behavior change will be critical.

While food and water top the list of essentials for health and human development, around 1 billion people still go hungry, and nearly 1 billion still lacked access to an improved water source.
The opportunity to explore the relationship between these two essentials is drawing thousands of academics and practitioners from the food and water sectors to Stockholm for World Water Week, August 26-31. This year, the annual conference will focus on “Water and Food Security.” It’s an important topic. Access to food and safe, clean water is critical to every aspect of human life—agriculture, education, energy, health, and many others. However, there is another urgent issue that gets less attention but is equally critical: sanitation.

Sanitation—a fundamental means for preventing disease and elevating quality of life—has long been considered neglected in the sector. Since 2002, when sanitation was added to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), sanitation activities and practitioners have increased global awareness of the role sanitation plays in improving human health and well-being.
"The issue of sanitation is about health and economic loss, but it’s also an issue of equity and human rights," said Lead Sanitation Specialist Eddy Perez of the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) of the World Bank. "It’s the poorest people who do not have basic access, which contributes to keeping them poor."
An estimated 1.7 million people die each year because of unsafe water, lack of sanitation, and unhygienic practices; about 90 percent of those deaths are children under age five. Improvements to sanitation and access to clean drinking water could reduce diarrheal disease by nearly 90 percent. The economic toll of poor sanitation is equally staggering, as high as 7 percent of GDP in some countries. And while sanitation has received more attention in recent years, there is still more learning needed on the most effective approaches and at-scale service delivery models.
Old problem, new solutions
The solutions can’t happen in silos or with business-as-usual models. New approaches are being tested, and they show tremendous promise. The current World Bank sanitation portfolio is about US$1.7 billion, with approximately 7.4 million people expected to benefit in more than 30 countries.
WSP is working with governments on national-scale rural sanitation programs targeted at increasing access to and use of sanitation facilities. The Scaling up Rural Sanitation Project is credited with contributing to around 9 million people gaining access in India, Indonesia, and Tanzania.

A hardware store in Peru sells sanitation supplies. Photos: Water & Sanitation Program.

More emphasis has been placed on the idea that ownership begins when people invest time, effort, and resources into building a latrine. The importance of changing behaviors and the factors that influence behaviors, such as pride, convenience, well-being, and status, is now recognized. Increasingly, a combination of approaches that ultimately lead to changing behaviors and increasing demand and supply are understood as critical for success.
In the past five years, the Scaling Up Rural Sanitation Project has focused on learning what works to scale up access to sanitation.
Among the lessons:

Efforts to improve sanitation should target community-wide behavior change, stimulate demand for sanitation products and services, and increase supply to ensure that new demands are met.
Scaling innovative programmatic approaches requires an effective and sustainable service delivery model in which national, state, and local governments; communities; the local private sector; and development partners all participate.
Changing social norms around open defecation and latrine use through sanitation and hygiene promotion is important for long-term sustainability of behaviors.

Across sectors
With water and sanitation at the nexus of so many areas, the water and sanitation crises have implications for the entire development community. We encourage you to follow us on Twitter @wspworldbank to join the discussion in Stockholm at World Water Week. Share your ideas, ask the hard questions, tell us how your work is affected by the crises, and work with us towards the solutions.

RELATED RESOURCES

Monday 13 August 2012

Gloucestershire gets new rapid response water rescue centre

A new water rescue centre in Gloucestershire will enable rescue teams to attend incidents anywhere in the county within 30 minutes, Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service (GFRS) said.

The centre at Moreton Fire Station "completes the provision of strategically-placed water rescue teams in Gloucestershire".

The need for such a facility was highlighted in the service's Integrated Risk Management Plan (IRMP) and DEFRA provided £56,000 funding for it.

The IRMP advised an improved water rescue response was necessary in the event of further major flooding in the area.

A similar centre was set up at Tewkesbury Fire Station in 2011.

Deputy chief fire officer Geoff Sallis said: "Since the floods in 2007, we have significantly increased the number of swift water rescue technicians located around the county."

Firefighters have completed specialist water and mud rescue training and now have technical rescue equipment designed to perform rescues from water.

The water response team is also trained to support the large animal rescue team and to work alongside the rescue boats and the GFRS hovercraft.

Monday 16 July 2012

Greenpeace said they intended to close about a dozen stations across the capital

Protesters draped a Greenpeace banner over the Dalry Road petrol stationRio summit jargon buster

Use the dropdown for easy-to-understand explanations of key terms:

Brundtland Commission and Report

Commission chaired by Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland that published report in 1987 concluding that humanity was on an unsustainable development track. Coined the most commonly used definition of sustainable development.

Environmental campaigners are threatening to shut down every Shell petrol station in Edinburgh in a protest against the company's plans to drill in the Arctic region.

Greenpeace said they intended to close about a dozen stations across the capital.

One of the first to be targeted was in Dalry Road, in the west of the city.

Shell said it recognised the right of individuals to express their point of view.

Activists said they were using the emergency shut-off switch, which stops petrol going to the pumps, to close the stations.

They also draped a large banner showing images of animals Greenpeace believes are threatened by oil exploration in the Arctic, and used tape carrying the slogan Save the Arctic to close access to the station.

Protesters could be seen on the roof of the Shell station in Dalry Road early on Monday morning, and a man in a polar bear outfit chained himself to a pump before being cut free and led away by police.

Greenpeace also claimed to have shut the Maybury Shell station in ‪Edinburgh‬, and said five of its activists had been arrested in the city by 09:00.

The protesters said they planned to spend the rest of the day touring the city using a combination of low-emission cars, bikes and public transport while shutting off the petrol supply to other Shell pumps.

Blocked access

Greenpeace also said it would broadcast live video of the protest on its website.

A similar direct action protest is being carried out in London, where Greenpeace activists said they were aiming to shut about 100 Shell stations.

Greenpeace's Sara Ayech said: "The oil giant Shell is preparing, for the first time, to unleash a drilling fleet of huge vessels upon the fragile and beautiful Arctic, home of the polar bears.

"It's time to draw a line in the ice and tell Shell to stop. That's why today we're going to shut down all of Shell's petrol stations in the capital cities of London and Edinburgh. We've got dozens of people who will hit over 100 Shell garages throughout the day.

"An oil spill in the Arctic would be catastrophic for wildlife such as walruses and whales, and Shell knows full well that it would be impossible to clean up after such devastation. The Arctic must be saved, and made a global sanctuary where oil drilling is banned."

The protest comes after more than a dozen people were detained as Greenpeace activists blocked access to Shell's headquarters in The Hague in the Netherlands on Friday.

A spokesman for Shell said: "Shell recognises that certain organisations are opposed to our exploration programme offshore Alaska, and we respect the right of individuals and organisations to engage in a free and frank exchange of views about our operations.

"Recognising the right of individuals to express their point of view, we only ask that they do so with their safety and the safety of others, including the general public and Shell personnel in mind.

"Shell has met with numerous organisations and individuals who oppose drilling offshore Alaska. We respect their views and value the dialogue. We have extended this same offer for productive dialogue to Greenpeace."

A man dressed as a polar bear chained himself to a pump

Greenpeace launched a Save The Arctic campaign last month to preserve the land mass from oil exploration and industrial fishing.

The group has called for an agreement to ban environmentally damaging activities in the Arctic region, just as they were banned in the Antarctic 21 years ago under a protocol added to the Antarctic Treaty.

In May, the Greenpeace's activists temporarily halted several icebreakers heading for the Arctic in a bid to block Shell's plans to drill for oil in the region.

And last month the environmental group called for more use of renewable energy and greener cars in what it said would help protect the Arctic and other areas from being spoiled by oil drilling.

According to the US Geological Survey, the Arctic is believed to hold 13% of the planet's undiscovered oil reserves and 30% of its undiscovered natural gas.

Tuesday 25 December 2012

Friday 7 December 2012

Beached whale at Carlyon Bay 'too sick to save'

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Sunday 2 September 2012

Eyeless goby fish 10,000km apart share common ancestor

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Thursday 30 August 2012

World Water Week: It's Not Just About Water

Monday 13 August 2012

Gloucestershire gets new rapid response water rescue centre

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Monday 16 July 2012

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