Chile quake moved Earth's axis, shortened days: scientist
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AFP - Wednesday, March 3
A gap in a road caused by Saturday's earthquake and the ensuing tsunami in Pulluhue, 320 km south of Santiago. The powerful earthquake that shook Chile on Saturday probably shifted the Earth's axis and made days slightly shorter, a NASA scientist said.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - – The powerful earthquake that shook Chile on Saturday probably shifted the Earth's axis and made days slightly shorter, a NASA scientist said.
Richard Gross, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, calculated that the planet's axis would have shifted by eight centimeters (three inches) during the 8.8 magnitude quake, NASA said in a statement.
Earth days are 24 hours long because that's the amount of time it takes the planet to make one full rotation on its axis, so shifting the axis would affect rotation.
If, indeed, the planet's axis did shift by eight centimeters during the Chilean quake, days would have shortened by 1.26 microseconds, Gross calculated.
A microsecond is one-millionth of a second, so no need to adjust watches just yet.
The Chilean quake shifted the Earth's axis by even more than the 9.1-magnitude temblor off Indonesia that set off the deadly tsunami in Asia in 2004, Gross worked out.
That's partly because the faultline responsible for the earthquake in Chile "dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle than does the fault responsible for the 2004 Sumatran earthquake" and is more effective at moving Earth's mass vertically and shifting the planet's axis.
The 2004 quake in Asia caused the Earth to move by around seven centimeters and chopped an estimated 6.8 microseconds off the length of a day, NASA said.
From Yahoo.SG News; original article is found here
JAKARTA - Some Indonesian envoys based in embassies abroad are so weak in English language skills that they take sick leave to avoid meeting foreign officials, a senior Indonesian official said.
Mr Imron Cotan, the No 2 Foreign Ministry official, told a parliamentary committee that the problem lies not with his own diplomats, but with attachs sent to embassies by other ministries including defence, trade and finance.
"I found that a number of our attaches are not fluent in English," The Jakarta Post newspaper reported Mr Cotan telling the committee investigating the performance of Indonesian diplomats.
"Every time their counterparts from the home government want to meet them, they freak out and seek ways to avoid the meetings," he added.
Sick leave was the favourite excuse for missing such meetings, Mr Cotan said. He did not give an estimate of how many attachs had substandard English.
Mr Cotan - who has represented Indonesia in New York, Geneva and Australia - suggested that all attach candidates pass a written test in English.
Most Indonesians speak Bahasa Indonesia, the official language in a country that also has hundreds of other dialects. Though English is a compulsory part of the public school curriculum, most Indonesians are not proficient in it.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizahsyah declined to identify which of the 119 embassies had been affected by the language deficiencies. He said his ministry was not responsible for the language skills of attachs sent by other departments. AP
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Scientists scouring the ocean floor to study the nature of tsunamis discovered a massive underwater volcano off Indonesia's western coast.
The 15,000-foot- (4,600-meter-) high mountain spans 30 miles (50 kilometers) at its base, Yusuf Surachman Djajadihardja, a marine geologist with the government's Agency for Assessment and Application Technology, said Friday. Its discovery was "completely unexpected," he said.
It was not immediately clear if the volcano is active, but he said if it were and it erupted, it would be "very, very dangerous."
An international team of scientists discovered the volcano 205 miles (330 kilometers) west of Sumatra island while carrying out a survey of the Indian Ocean floor earlier this month, Djajadihardja said. The tip of the volcano is 1,380 meters (1,260 yards) below the water's surface.
The goal of their research was to better understand the cause of disasters like the 2004 Asian tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen nations, more than half of them in Indonesia, which was closest to the epicenter.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Scientists scouring the ocean floor to study the nature of tsunamis discovered a massive underwater volcano off Indonesia's western coast.
The 15,000-foot- (4,600-meter-) high mountain spans 30 miles (50 kilometers) at its base, Yusuf Surachman Djajadihardja, a marine geologist with the government's Agency for Assessment and Application Technology, said Friday. Its discovery was "completely unexpected," he said.
It was not immediately clear if the volcano is active, but he said if it were and it erupted, it would be "very, very dangerous."
An international team of scientists discovered the volcano 205 miles (330 kilometers) west of Sumatra island while carrying out a survey of the Indian Ocean floor earlier this month, Djajadihardja said. The tip of the volcano is 1,380 meters (1,260 yards) below the water's surface.
The goal of their research was to better understand the cause of disasters like the 2004 Asian tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen nations, more than half of them in Indonesia, which was closest to the epicenter.
Various kinds of corals grow in the marine protected area of Honda Bay located in Palawan island in western Philippines, 2008. Environmental group WWF said that climate change could wipe out the world's richest ocean wilderness by the end of the century without drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
MANADO, Indonesia (AFP) - - Climate change could wipe out the world's richest ocean wilderness by the end of the century without drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, environmental group WWF said Wednesday.
Rising water temperatures, sea levels and acidity are threatening to destroy the vast region of Southeast Asia known as the Coral Triangle, labelled the ocean's answer to the Amazon rainforest, the WWF said in a new report.
Collapse of the reefs would send food production in the region plummeting by 80 percent and imperil the livelihoods of over 100 million people.
With too little action on climate change, "you get a world in which you have perhaps tens of millions of people homeless by the inundation of coastlines through rapid sea level rises," report lead author Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said.
"You see the erosion of food security and you see a world by the end of this century which is, I think, pretty much a nightmare."
WWF Coral Triangle Initiative Network head Lida Pet Soede said the seas in the triangle -- bordered by East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands -- were vital sources of biodiversity.
"Some of the locations in the Coral Triangle are really important areas for all sorts of fish. The migration of tuna and turtles that spawn in the Coral Triangle are not going to have a next generation," she told AFP.
Saving the Coral Triangle will require countries to commit to deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Heat-trapping carbon gases -- notably from burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas -- are blamed for warming Earth's atmosphere and driving changes to weather patterns, as well as creating acidic seas hostile to much marine life.
The warnings come ahead of tough negotiations over a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol in the Danish capital Copenhagen in December.
Emissions cuts of 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 will be needed to avert the worst effects on the region, home to more than half the world's coral reefs and a lynchpin for ocean life, the WWF said.
Local communities and governments will also have to curb over-fishing and pollution, the report said.
"If you continue down the path of the over-exploitation of resources, even if you get an incredible reduction in emissions, there will still be a threat," WWF climate campaigner Richard Leck said.
The report was released as ministers and officials from over 70 countries meet in the Indonesian city of Manado for the World Ocean Conference, the first global meeting on the relationship between oceans and climate change.
Nations at the conference hope to pass a joint declaration aimed at influencing the direction of the Copenhagen talks.
A meeting Friday will also see leaders from the six Coral Triangle nations pass a joint plan on conserving the region.
Leck said that despite the gloomy forecasts he was impressed by the response from littoral states.
"What is amazing is the level of political commitment we are seeing this week," he said.
However, report author Hoegh-Guldberg warned: "If we don't get decisive action in Copenhagen, then doing all the enormously important things that we're doing with the Coral Triangle Initiative will be pointless."
Various kinds of corals grow in the marine protected area of Honda Bay located in Palawan island in western Philippines, 2008. Environmental group WWF said that climate change could wipe out the world's richest ocean wilderness by the end of the century without drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
MANADO, Indonesia (AFP) - - Climate change could wipe out the world's richest ocean wilderness by the end of the century without drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, environmental group WWF said Wednesday.
Rising water temperatures, sea levels and acidity are threatening to destroy the vast region of Southeast Asia known as the Coral Triangle, labelled the ocean's answer to the Amazon rainforest, the WWF said in a new report.
Collapse of the reefs would send food production in the region plummeting by 80 percent and imperil the livelihoods of over 100 million people.
With too little action on climate change, "you get a world in which you have perhaps tens of millions of people homeless by the inundation of coastlines through rapid sea level rises," report lead author Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said.
"You see the erosion of food security and you see a world by the end of this century which is, I think, pretty much a nightmare."
WWF Coral Triangle Initiative Network head Lida Pet Soede said the seas in the triangle -- bordered by East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands -- were vital sources of biodiversity.
"Some of the locations in the Coral Triangle are really important areas for all sorts of fish. The migration of tuna and turtles that spawn in the Coral Triangle are not going to have a next generation," she told AFP.
Saving the Coral Triangle will require countries to commit to deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Heat-trapping carbon gases -- notably from burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas -- are blamed for warming Earth's atmosphere and driving changes to weather patterns, as well as creating acidic seas hostile to much marine life.
The warnings come ahead of tough negotiations over a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol in the Danish capital Copenhagen in December.
Emissions cuts of 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 will be needed to avert the worst effects on the region, home to more than half the world's coral reefs and a lynchpin for ocean life, the WWF said.
Local communities and governments will also have to curb over-fishing and pollution, the report said.
"If you continue down the path of the over-exploitation of resources, even if you get an incredible reduction in emissions, there will still be a threat," WWF climate campaigner Richard Leck said.
The report was released as ministers and officials from over 70 countries meet in the Indonesian city of Manado for the World Ocean Conference, the first global meeting on the relationship between oceans and climate change.
Nations at the conference hope to pass a joint declaration aimed at influencing the direction of the Copenhagen talks.
A meeting Friday will also see leaders from the six Coral Triangle nations pass a joint plan on conserving the region.
Leck said that despite the gloomy forecasts he was impressed by the response from littoral states.
"What is amazing is the level of political commitment we are seeing this week," he said.
However, report author Hoegh-Guldberg warned: "If we don't get decisive action in Copenhagen, then doing all the enormously important things that we're doing with the Coral Triangle Initiative will be pointless."
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