And the devastation was real enough. However, once I read the the town of Cockermouth was worst hit, and the Suck River overflowed, well I just couldn't take it any longer, and burst out laughing. HLG
Devastating Floods Swamp U.K. Lake District, Ireland
Friday, November 20, 2009
COCKERMOUTH, England — Military helicopters winched dozens of people to safety and emergency workers in inflatable boats rescued scores more as floods on Friday swamped northern England's picturesque Lake District. One police officer died after a bridge was swept away by the surging waters.
British soldiers conducted house-to-house searches for those trapped by floods as deep as 8 feet. Troops also dropped down on lines from air force helicopters, breaking through rooftops to pluck people to safety.
Emergency services said more than 200 people were rescued in the hardest-hit town, Cockermouth. At least 960 homes were flooded after a day of unprecedented rain, police in the northern region of Cumbria said.
Heavy rain and gales also brought widespread flooding to Ireland, as more than 3 feet (1 meter) of water shut down the center of the country's second-largest city, Cork, and more than a dozen towns and villages.
Cockermouth, a market town 330 miles (530 kilometers) northwest of London, lies at the junction of the Cocker and Derwent rivers and is known for being the birthplace of poet William Wordsworth.
"It has devastated the town," said Michael Dunn, manager of the Bitter End pub in Cockermouth. "There is a lot of properties in Main Street, private shops, that have had their windows smashed in by the force of the water and by debris in the water.
"There were cars floating down the street. It will be a long time before Cockermouth recovers from this."
The rain stopped and floodwaters began to ease Friday, giving rescuers a chance to reach trapped people by boat. Debris swirled around the boats as they pulled people to safety.
Tony Walker of Cockermouth told BBC radio he was on the top floor of his house and the water on the ground floor was chest-high.
"I've had better mornings," Walker said. "I've been here all night and I've run out of water now, so I'm thinking of making a break for it, really. The water is still pretty deep, it's going down, but at this rate it's going to be hours before it's clear."
Forecasters said the rainfall was unprecedented. The Environment Agency recorded 12.3 inches (314.4 millimeter) of rain in 24 hours in one spot — one of the wettest days ever recorded in England.
"It looks like a very historical event," said Julian Mayes, a forecaster with MeteoGroup UK.
Environment Secretary Hilary Benn told the BBC that flood defenses were meant to withstand a one-in-100-years flood — but could not cope with the volume of water.
"What we dealt with last night was probably more like one-in-a-1,000, so even the very best defenses, if you have such quantities of rain in such a short space of time, can be over-topped," Benn said.
Police urged people not to travel, as many roads were impassible. Two bridges collapsed in the town of Workington, including a main one over the River Derwent. Cumbria Police said Constable Bill Barker, 45, died after he was knocked into the water when the structure gave way.
"This is a stone bridge — to wash away a bridge of that size and dimension is incredible," said lawmaker Tony Cunningham.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown that he had spoken to Cumbria Chief Constable Craig Mackey to offer help.
"Our thoughts are with all those who have been impacted by these floods," Brown said.
The Irish army deployed more than 100 soldiers, two dozen trucks and several flat-bottomed boats to evacuate people trapped by waist-deep floodwaters in cars and homes. A helicopter also winched to safety a County Galway family of five, including the 87-year-old grandmother.
The floods caused transport chaos along Ireland's western coast, with many major roads blocked and train services canceled.
The water caused extensive damage to the Lake Hotel on the shores of the fabled Killarney Lakes in County Kerry. About 170 guests at the Victorian period building had to be evacuated by tractor as dozens of staff carried period furniture upstairs.
The hotel's 12th-century castle, normally a floodlit tourist's highlight on the lake vista, was almost completely under water Friday.
"You can just see the top of the castle and everything else is covered," said the hotel's general manager, Niall Huggard.
The River Suck burst its banks in County Leitrim near the Northern Ireland border, flooding the town of Ballinasloe and cutting off major roads to Ireland's northwest. About 40 families had to be evacuated by boat.
The Irish weather forecasting service, Met Eireann, said parts of southern and western Ireland suffered their most intense and sustained rainfall in 30 years.
Friday was mostly sunny but more rain and gales were forecast for the weekend.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Martian Dust-Devil Trails
The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows twisting dark trails criss-crossing light-colored terrain on the Martian surface. Newly formed trails like these had presented researchers with a tantalizing mystery but are now known to be the work of miniature wind vortices known to occur on the red planet — in other words, Martian dust devils. - NASA via HLG
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Thank Goodness it Wasn't BLUE!
Huge Chunk of Ice Crashes Through Roof of Colorado Home
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
BRUSH, Colo. — A basketball-sized chunk of ice crashed through the roof of a family's Colorado home after apparently falling from an airplane passing overhead.
Danelle Hagan and her 9-year-old daughter were at home in Brush on Saturday when they heard the kitchen ceiling come crashing down. They were not injured.
"I hear a huge, what sounded like an explosion. And I look over and my kitchen is basically in shambles," Hagan told KMGH-TV in Denver. "It was very terrifying."
The Federal Aviation Administration was sending investigators to the home to investigate whether the ice came from an airplane. The Hagans put some of the ice in their freezer.
FAA spokesman Mike Fergus said Wednesday the ice chunk appears to be "Rime ice," which can build up on the outside of a plane's fuselage when it flies through cold and wet air.
Fergus says that it doesn't appear the ice was "blue ice," which comes from an airplane's toilet.
After investigators determine whether the ice came from a plane, Fergus said they'll look at which planes are in the area at the time to see if it's possible to tell which craft dropped the ice.
Fergus said that in cases of falling blue ice, FAA investigators would inspect any plane that was in the area to make sure it doesn't have a dangerous pressure leak. He said that ice falls from airplanes are alarming, but extremely rare.
He said the chances of getting hit by ice from a plane is "on the magnitude of a lightning strike."
Hagan's family is staying out of the house until it's repaired because the crash loosened some asbestos. She says people were in the kitchen just before the ice fell, so they're just glad to be OK.
"If we had been in that kitchen, it would have been devastating," Hagan said
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
BRUSH, Colo. — A basketball-sized chunk of ice crashed through the roof of a family's Colorado home after apparently falling from an airplane passing overhead.
Danelle Hagan and her 9-year-old daughter were at home in Brush on Saturday when they heard the kitchen ceiling come crashing down. They were not injured.
"I hear a huge, what sounded like an explosion. And I look over and my kitchen is basically in shambles," Hagan told KMGH-TV in Denver. "It was very terrifying."
The Federal Aviation Administration was sending investigators to the home to investigate whether the ice came from an airplane. The Hagans put some of the ice in their freezer.
FAA spokesman Mike Fergus said Wednesday the ice chunk appears to be "Rime ice," which can build up on the outside of a plane's fuselage when it flies through cold and wet air.
Fergus says that it doesn't appear the ice was "blue ice," which comes from an airplane's toilet.
After investigators determine whether the ice came from a plane, Fergus said they'll look at which planes are in the area at the time to see if it's possible to tell which craft dropped the ice.
Fergus said that in cases of falling blue ice, FAA investigators would inspect any plane that was in the area to make sure it doesn't have a dangerous pressure leak. He said that ice falls from airplanes are alarming, but extremely rare.
He said the chances of getting hit by ice from a plane is "on the magnitude of a lightning strike."
Hagan's family is staying out of the house until it's repaired because the crash loosened some asbestos. She says people were in the kitchen just before the ice fell, so they're just glad to be OK.
"If we had been in that kitchen, it would have been devastating," Hagan said
Major Global Warming Event in Colorado
,but I guess Al Gore was busy flying around the world in his private jet, spending the 100 plus million he has made on "Global Warming" to notice. - HLG
Where did the Moon's Water Originate?
Where Is Water on Moon From--Volcanoes, Sun ... Earth?
for National Geographic News
November 17, 2009
For many, 2009 will be remembered as the year water on the moon was confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt.
"You're seeing the culmination of a whole bunch of missions that were instrumented specifically to address this question," said Paul Spudis of the NASA-funded Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, Texas.
Earlier this year, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft detected possible chemical traces of lunar water. And just last week NASA announced that their LCROSS moon crashes had kicked up "significant" amounts of water from a crater.
But where did the moon's water come from?
"Was it deposited in a single big event that was recent? Or is this stuff that has been around for billions of years?" said Peter Schultz, an LCROSS scientist at Brown University in Rhode Island. "We don't know."
Right now there are three major scientific theories of how the moon got its water—and a "wildly speculative" fourth idea that can't be ruled out just yet.
THEORY ONE
Ancient Volcanoes Pushed Moon's Water to Surface
The moon's water was there from the start, one theory goes—water was an ingredient in the moon's creation, as it was for Earth's.
According to this idea, the water is concentrated in the moon's interior. In the distant past, when the now "dead" moon had a hot core, volcanic eruptions or gaseous "belches" slowly pushed water to the surface, where it's been frozen ever since, said LPI's Spudis, explaining the theory.
THEORY TWO
Water is "Home Brewed" on the Surface
Lunar water could be home-brewed, with some help from the sun, some scientists speculate.
The sun constantly emits a stream of particles called solar wind. Positively charged hydrogen ions, or protons, in the solar wind may strike the moon and interact with oxygen-rich minerals in lunar soil to form H2O, aka water, according to this theory.
(Find out how charged particles from Jupiter could be feeding enough oxygen into the "ocean moon" Europa to support fish-size life.)
Forming water via solar wind would be a slow process, Brown University's Schultz said. But "even if you're only accumulating a molecule [of water] a day this way, over billions of years you can do a lot of things."
THEORY THREE
Comets and Asteroids Delivered Water to the Moon
Some say the moon's water may be a gift from water-bearing comets and wet asteroids that struck the moon in the distant past. (Related: "Comet Swarm Delivered Earth's Oceans?")
Most of the water from such an impact would have been ejected into space, but some sluggish molecules could have been captured by the moon's gravity.
"The idea is that comets or water-bearing asteroids hit the moon and create a cloud of water vapor that hangs around the vicinity of the moon's surface," LPI's Spudis said.
"Some of the water eventually migrates to the polar areas, where it might find its way into a cold trap"—a permanently frigid area, such as a polar crater where sunlight never reaches.
A cold trap is too chilly to allow ice to sublimate—turn directly into gas—and the airless moon is inhospitable to liquid water. As a result, the water would theoretically remain frozen for eons.
THEORY FOUR
The Moon's Water Came From Earth
There are two ways Earth water could have ended up on the moon, and both would have been possible only when Earth and the moon were much closer, billions of years ago, Brown's Schultz said.
For starters, during prehistoric periods when Earth's magnetic field was absent or weak, solar wind could have stripped water vapor from our planet's atmosphere and deposited it on the moon.
Or perhaps catastrophic asteroid or comet impacts on Earth ejected seawater into space, and the orbiting moon passed through the vapor cloud, emerging somewhat soggier.
Both of these two scenarios are theoretically possible, though Schultz admits, "we're in speculation land." But then, that's exactly where lunar water lived until a few short days ago
for National Geographic News
November 17, 2009
For many, 2009 will be remembered as the year water on the moon was confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt.
"You're seeing the culmination of a whole bunch of missions that were instrumented specifically to address this question," said Paul Spudis of the NASA-funded Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, Texas.
Earlier this year, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft detected possible chemical traces of lunar water. And just last week NASA announced that their LCROSS moon crashes had kicked up "significant" amounts of water from a crater.
But where did the moon's water come from?
"Was it deposited in a single big event that was recent? Or is this stuff that has been around for billions of years?" said Peter Schultz, an LCROSS scientist at Brown University in Rhode Island. "We don't know."
Right now there are three major scientific theories of how the moon got its water—and a "wildly speculative" fourth idea that can't be ruled out just yet.
THEORY ONE
Ancient Volcanoes Pushed Moon's Water to Surface
The moon's water was there from the start, one theory goes—water was an ingredient in the moon's creation, as it was for Earth's.
According to this idea, the water is concentrated in the moon's interior. In the distant past, when the now "dead" moon had a hot core, volcanic eruptions or gaseous "belches" slowly pushed water to the surface, where it's been frozen ever since, said LPI's Spudis, explaining the theory.
THEORY TWO
Water is "Home Brewed" on the Surface
Lunar water could be home-brewed, with some help from the sun, some scientists speculate.
The sun constantly emits a stream of particles called solar wind. Positively charged hydrogen ions, or protons, in the solar wind may strike the moon and interact with oxygen-rich minerals in lunar soil to form H2O, aka water, according to this theory.
(Find out how charged particles from Jupiter could be feeding enough oxygen into the "ocean moon" Europa to support fish-size life.)
Forming water via solar wind would be a slow process, Brown University's Schultz said. But "even if you're only accumulating a molecule [of water] a day this way, over billions of years you can do a lot of things."
THEORY THREE
Comets and Asteroids Delivered Water to the Moon
Some say the moon's water may be a gift from water-bearing comets and wet asteroids that struck the moon in the distant past. (Related: "Comet Swarm Delivered Earth's Oceans?")
Most of the water from such an impact would have been ejected into space, but some sluggish molecules could have been captured by the moon's gravity.
"The idea is that comets or water-bearing asteroids hit the moon and create a cloud of water vapor that hangs around the vicinity of the moon's surface," LPI's Spudis said.
"Some of the water eventually migrates to the polar areas, where it might find its way into a cold trap"—a permanently frigid area, such as a polar crater where sunlight never reaches.
A cold trap is too chilly to allow ice to sublimate—turn directly into gas—and the airless moon is inhospitable to liquid water. As a result, the water would theoretically remain frozen for eons.
THEORY FOUR
The Moon's Water Came From Earth
There are two ways Earth water could have ended up on the moon, and both would have been possible only when Earth and the moon were much closer, billions of years ago, Brown's Schultz said.
For starters, during prehistoric periods when Earth's magnetic field was absent or weak, solar wind could have stripped water vapor from our planet's atmosphere and deposited it on the moon.
Or perhaps catastrophic asteroid or comet impacts on Earth ejected seawater into space, and the orbiting moon passed through the vapor cloud, emerging somewhat soggier.
Both of these two scenarios are theoretically possible, though Schultz admits, "we're in speculation land." But then, that's exactly where lunar water lived until a few short days ago
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
China Up to their Wing-Wangs in Global Warming
That's past knee-deep to you non-Mandarin speakers! - HLG
Monday, November 16, 2009
TC "ANJA" in Southern Indian Ocean
If a TC forms in an ocean where no humans live, does it make a sound? - HLG
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