WEATHER PHENOMENON: High Winds Invert Waterfall In Catalonia, Spain - Freezing Nearby Vegetation! [PHOTOS + VIDEOS]

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March 9, 2016 - CATALONIA, SPAIN - Strong winds sweeping through Capafonts, Spain have created this amazing inverted waterfall on March 5, 2016.

Due to the frigid temperatures in the region, the water instantly freezes, covering the nearby vegetation with icicles despite any signs of winter around.

According to gravity water falls down. However, if you add an additional factor, such as strong wind, the water can start flowing upwards.

This was actually the case in the municipality of Capafonts, earstern Spain, when an inverted waterfall appeared in the ravine Barranc de La Pixer.

© Twitter meteoprades ‏@meteoprades

© Twitter meteoprades ‏@meteoprades

But it is also known that this waterfall can freeze. In other words, the water, which rises to the top, immediately vaporizes.

Here are videos of this strange natural phenomenon:


WATCH: High winds invert waterfall in Catalonia, Spain.

Consequently, the vegetation ice covered by ice and that despite any signs of winter around.  - Strange Sounds.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: "These Things Are Just Humongous" - Monster Galaxy Almost As Old As The Universe Creating Stars 1,000 Times Faster Than The Milky Way; Produces 5 Of Our Suns Daily; 1,800 Solar Masses Annually!

Image credits: Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF

November 15, 2014 - SPACE - The Milky Way galaxy – our own cosmic neighborhood – forms one star the mass of Earth’s own sun each year. Massive AzTEC-3, the second-most-distant one of its kind known to humanity, produces about five of our suns each Earth day, churning out a total of 1,800 solar masses annually. Such ancient massive star-bursting galaxies can be found by astronomers using modern, mountaintop telescopes like the National Science Foundation-funded Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile. This exceptional galaxy, which at present day is only slightly younger than the 13.8 billion-year-old universe, is named after the AzTEC-millimeter-wave camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope – through which it was initially found.

“These things are just humongous,” said Dominik Riechers, Cornell assistant professor of astronomy. “That’s why we call them ‘monsters.’ Essentially, thanks to telescopes like the ALMA, we’re looking back in time to the childhood, the toddler years of the universe, and are trying to discern how these galaxies form.”Squinting close to the beginning of time, Riechers, discovered an association of gas-rich galaxies near the infancy of cosmic time. It’s an early epoch – some 12.7 billion years ago – telling a tale that revolves around an exceptionally dusty galaxy called AzTEC-3.

“AzTEC-3 is a massive galaxy that already contains billions of stars at this early epoch, but has the potential to form many more by present day. It produces a thousand times more stars each year than what our own Milky Way galaxy produces,” said Riechers. “Think about a star factory that puts out 50 billion objects the mass of our sun.

The NASA image at the top of the page shows the formation of a galaxy during the first 2bn years of the universe. The supercomputer-generated image displays hydrogen gas in grey, young stars appearing in blue, and older stars as red. The simulation reveals that gas flows into galaxies along filaments akin to cosmic bendy, or swirly, straws.

AzTEC-3, together with its gang of calmer galaxies may represent the best evidence yet that large galaxies grow from the merger of smaller ones in the early Universe, a process known as hierarchical merging.

New ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) data reveals that AzTEC-3 is a very compact, highly disturbed galaxy that is bursting with new stars at close to its theoretically predicted maximum limit and is surrounded by a population of more normal, but also actively star-forming galaxies," said Riechers, lead author of a new paper published today  on Nov. 10 in the Astrophysical Journal. "This particular grouping of galaxies represents an important milestone in the evolution of our Universe: the formation of a galaxy cluster and the early assemblage of large, mature galaxies."

In the early Universe, starburst galaxies like AzTEC-3 were forming new stars at a monstrous pace fueled by the enormous quantities of star-forming material they devoured and by merging with other adolescent galaxies. Over billions of years, these mergers continued, eventually producing the large galaxies and clusters of galaxies we see in the Universe today.

Evidence for this hierarchical model of galaxy evolution has been mounting, but these latest ALMA data show a strikingly clear picture of the all-important first steps along this process when the Universe was only 8 percent of its current age.

"One of the primary science goals of ALMA is the detection and detailed study of galaxies throughout cosmic time," said Chris Carilli, an astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico. "These new observations help us put the pieces together by showing the first steps of a galaxy merger in the early Universe."

AzTEC-3, which is located in the direction of the constellation Sextans, is what astronomers refer to as a submillimeter galaxy, since it shines brightly in that portion of the spectrum, but is remarkably dim at optical and infrared wavelengths. This is due to light from its stars being absorbed by dust in the star-forming environments of the galaxy and then re-emitted by the dust at far-infrared wavelengths. As this light travels across the cosmos, it becomes stretched due to the expansion of the Universe, so by the time it arrives at Earth, the far-infrared light has shifted to the submillimeter/millimeter portion of the spectrum.

Artist's impression below of the protocluster observed by ALMA shows the central AzTEC-3 along with its labeled cohorts of smaller, less active galaxies. New ALMA observations suggest that AzTEC-3 recently merged with another young galaxy and that the whole system represents the first steps toward forming a galaxy cluster.

Image credits: Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF

              
ALMA, with its remarkable sensitivity and high resolving power, was able to observe this system at these wavelengths in unprecedented detail. It also was able to study, for the first time, the star-forming gas in three additional, extremely distant members of an emerging galactic protocluster.

The ALMA data revealed that the three smaller, more normal galaxies are indeed producing stars from their gas at a relatively calm and steady pace. Unlike its neighbors, however, AzTEC-3 is burning through star-forming fuel at breakneck speed. Indeed, AzTEC-3 appears to form more new stars each day than our Milky Way galaxy forms in an entire year -- outpacing the normal galaxies in its proximity by about a factor of 100.

The researchers also observed very little rotation in AzTEC-3's dust and gas -- suggesting that something had disrupted its motion. Taken together, these two characteristics are strong indications that AzTEC-3 recently merged with another galaxy.

"AzTEC-3 is currently undergoing an extreme, but short-lived event," said Riechers. "This is perhaps the most violent phase in its evolution, leading to a star formation activity level that is very rare at its cosmic epoch."

Artist's impression below of the protocluster shows the AzTEC-3 along with its labeled cohorts of smaller, less active galaxies. New ALMA observations suggest that AzTEC-3 recently merged with another young galaxy and that the whole system represents the first steps toward forming a galaxy cluster.

Image credits: Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF

                 
The astronomers believe that AzTEC-3 and the other nearby galaxies appear to be part of the same system, but are not yet gravitationally bound into a clearly defined cluster. This is why the astronomers refer to them collectively as a protocluster.

The starburst galaxy was originally observed with and named after the AzTEC millimeter-wavelength camera, which was installed at the time on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, a single-dish radio telescope located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Only with ALMA has it become possible to understand the nature of this exceptional galaxy and those in its immediate environment. - Daily Galaxy.

MONUMENTAL SOLAR SYSTEM CHANGES: NASA Captures Incredible Eruption Of Jupiter's Moon Io - The Most Volcanic Place In The Solar System; Volcanoes Produce Plumes As High As 1.6 MILLION FEET! [PHOTOS+VIDEO]

March 08, 2014 - JUPITER - Incredible footage of an eruption on Io, Jupiter’s third moon, considered the most volcanic place in the solar system, has been released by the US space agency.

Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. At 2,263 miles in diameter, it is slightly
larger than Earth’s moon (Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

The video, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft, pictures a drama that unfolded more than 6.2 million km away from Earth back in 2007. NASA only made it public on Tuesday.

Some 400 active volcanoes are situated on Io and they produce plumes as high as 500 kilometers (1,640,040 feet) above Io’s surface.

The latest eruption captured by the spacecraft saw plumes over 300 kilometers in height, according to NASA’s website.

Lava spills onto the surface of Io during a volcanic eruption
(Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Collapsed volcanoes form large, dark spots on Io’s surface
(Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

The reason for the extreme volcanic activity on Io is that it’s “locked in a perpetual tug of war between the imposing gravity of Jupiter and the smaller, consistent pulls of its neighboring moons,” NASA explains.

As a result, Io’s orbit is distorted and it stretches. This causes friction and intense heat inside the moon, which in turn triggers eruptions across its surface. - RT.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Unknown Galaxy Clusters Have Been Discovered - "What We Are Seeing Are Giant Ellipticals In The Process Of Being Formed"!

February 13, 2014 - SPACE - Four previously unknown galaxy clusters each potentially containing thousands of individual galaxies have been discovered some 10 billion light years from Earth. Most clusters in the universe today are dominated by giant elliptical galaxies in which the dust and gas has already been formed into stars. "What we believe we are seeing in these distant clusters are giant elliptical galaxies in the process of being formed," says David Clements, from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London.

The Daily Galaxy via imperial.ac.uk

An international team of astronomers, led by Imperial College London, used a new way of combining data from the two European Space Agency satellites, Planck and Herschel, to identify more distant galaxy clusters than has previously been possible. The researchers believe up to 2000 further clusters could be identified using this technique, helping to build a more detailed timeline of how clusters are formed.

Galaxy clusters are the most massive objects in the universe, containing hundreds to thousands of galaxies, bound together by gravity. While astronomers have identified many nearby clusters, they need to go further back in time to understand how these structures are formed. This means finding clusters at greater distances from the Earth.

The light from the most distant of the four new clusters identified by the team has taken over 10 billion years to reach us. This means the researchers are seeing what the cluster looked like when the universe was just three billion years old.

"Although we're able to see individual galaxies that go further back in time, up to now, the most distant clusters found by astronomers date back to when the universe was 4.5 billion years old," explains Clements. "This equates to around nine billion light years away. Our new approach has already found a cluster in existence much earlier than that, and we believe it has the potential to go even further."

The clusters can be identified at such distances because they contain galaxies in which huge amounts of dust and gas are being formed into stars. This process emits light that can be picked up by the satellite surveys.

Observations were recorded by the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) instrument as part of Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES). Seb Oliver, Head of the HerMES survey said: "The fantastic thing about Herschel-SPIRE is that we are able to scan very large areas of the sky with sufficient sensitivity and image sharpness that we can find these rare and exotic things. This result from Dr. Clements is exactly the kind of thing we were hoping to find with the HerMES survey"

The researchers are among the first to combine data from two satellites that ended their operations last year: the Planck satellite, which scanned the whole sky, and the Herschel satellite, which surveyed certain sections in greater detail.

The researchers used Planck data to find sources of far-infrared emission in areas covered by the Herschel satellite, then cross referenced with Herschel data to look at these sources more closely. Of sixteen sources identified by the researchers, most were confirmed as single, nearby galaxies that were already known. However, four were shown by Herschel to be formed of multiple, fainter sources, indicating previously unknown galaxy clusters.

The team then used additional existing data and new observations to estimate the distance of these clusters from Earth and to determine which of the galaxies within them were forming stars. The researchers are now looking to identify more galaxy clusters using this technique, with the aim of looking further back in time to the earliest stage of cluster formation.

NGC 7049 shown at the top of the page is a giant galaxy on the border between spiral and elliptical galaxies that spans about 150,000 light-years. It is located about 100 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Indus. NGC 7049 is the “brightest” galaxy of the Indus Triplet of galaxies (NGC 7029, NGC 7041, NGC 7049), and its structure might have arisen from several recent galaxy collisions.

Bright Cluster Galaxies are among the most massive galaxies in the universe and are also the oldest. They provide astronomers the opportunity of studying the many globular clusters contained within them. NGC 7049 has far fewer such clusters than other similar giant galaxies in very big, rich groups. This indicates to astronomers how the surrounding environment influenced the formation of galaxy halos in the early Universe.

The globular clusters in NGC 7049 are seen as the sprinkling of small faint points of light in the galaxy’s halo. The halo – the ghostly region of diffuse light surrounding the galaxy – is composed of myriads of individual stars and provides a luminous background to the remarkable swirling ring of dust lanes surrounding NGC 7049′s core.

NGC 7049′s striking appearance is primarily due to this unusually prominent dust ring, seen mostly in silhouette. The opaque ring is much darker than the millions of bright stars glowing behind it. Generally these dust lanes are seen in much younger galaxies with active star forming regions. Not visible in this image is an unusual central polar ring of gas circling out of the plane near the galaxy’s center.

The image was taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope, which is optimised to hunt for galaxies and galaxy clusters in the remote and ancient Universe, at a time when our cosmos was very young.

The research involved scientists from the UK, Spain, USA, Canada, Italy and South Africa. It is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and was part funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Research Council and the UK Space Agency. - Daily Galaxy.

MONUMENTAL EARTH CHANGES: Planet Earth's Gravity Altered By The 2011 Japanese Tohoku Earthquake!

December 04, 2013 - EARTH - Japan’s devastating earthquake in 2011 left its mark on more than the town of Fukushima. The European Space Agency (ESA) says that it had an impact on Earth’s gravity as well.

Scientists used data from ESA’s GOCE satellite to show the effects of the 9.0 earthquake that struck east of Japan’s Honshu Island on March 11, 2011.

The strength of gravity varies from place to place on Earth, and earthquakes can deform our planet’s crust and cause tiny changes in local gravity. GOCE spent four years mapping out Earth’s gravity with unrivaled precision.

One reason values of gravity differ on Earth is because the materials within Earth are inhomogenous and are unevenly distributed. Since earthquakes shift around rock and other material tens of miles below the surface, they cause small changes in the local gravity. Earthquakes under oceans can also change the shape of the sea bed, displacing water and changing the sea level.

GOCE data is helping scientists understand how oceans transport huge quantities of heat around the planet and develop a global height reference system. Earlier this year, the satellite’s accelerometer and ion thrusters revealed GOCE had “felt” sound waves in space from the Japanese quake.

Scientists from the German Geodetic Research Institute (DGFI) and from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands analyzed the high-resolution vertical gravity gradients measured over Japan by GOCE. The team found the quake had clearly ruptured the gravity field in the area.

The latest research marks the first example that GOCE was able to find changes over time. The gravity change measured by GOCE differs in size and location, compared to those predicted by standard models.

GOCE's orbit is so low that it experiences drag from the outer edges of Earth's atmosphere. The satellite's
streamline structure and use of electric propulsion system counteract atmospheric drag to ensure that
the data are of true gravity. Credit: ESA/ AOES Medialab

The results, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, are consistent with coarser observations using NASA’s Grace satellite, which measures changes over time. This suggests GOCE data will be important in improving models and it will help contribute to understanding earthquakes.

“Thus, we see that GOCE gravity gradients complement other types of data such as seismic, GPS and GRACE satellite gravimetry,” Martin Fuchs, from DGFI and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “We are now working in an interdisciplinary team to combine GOCE data with other information to obtain a better picture of the actual rupture in the gravity field than is currently available.”

GOCE ran out of fuel earlier this year and reentered Earth’s atmosphere, largely disintegrating in the process. The satellite more than doubled its planned life in orbit, and its data will continue to be used by scientists for years to come to help understand our planet a little better. - Red Orbit.

MONUMENTAL EARTH/SOLAR SYSTEM CHANGES: The Moon Is Being Pushed Away From The Earth Faster Than Ever - Key Is The Massive Accelerated Expansion Of The North Atlantic Ocean?!

June 02, 2013 - SPACE - Earth is pushing the moon away faster now than it has for most of the past 50 million years, mostly a result of tides, a U.S. researcher says.

Matthew Huber of Purdue University says his models of the influence of tides on the moon's orbit help solve a longstanding mystery concerning the moon's age, NewScientists.com reported Wednesday.

The moon's gravity creates a daily cycle of low and high tides that dissipates energy between it and Earth, slowing the planet's spin on its axis and causing the moon's orbit to move farther away by about an inch and a half a year.

If that rate has always been the same, given where the moon's orbit is now the moon should be 1.5 billion years old, Huber said, yet some lunar rocks are 4.5 billion years old.

Huber and his colleagues gathered data on ocean depths and continental contours existing 50 million years ago to create a model of ancient tides. The model suggests the energy dissipation then was only half what it is today, so the moon was pushed away at a slower rate, Huber said.

The key is the North Atlantic Ocean, which is much wider today than it was 50 million years ago -- wide enough for water to slosh across once per 12-hour cycle, creating larger waves and very high tides that result in shoving the moon faster, he said. - Moon Daily.

GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVAL: NASA's GRACE Sees Major Water Losses In The Middle East - Tigris And Euphrates River Basin Has Lost Dead Sea-sized Quantity Of Water, "Among The Largest Freshwater Losses" Ever, Could Alter Earth's Mass In Particular Areas!

March 13, 2013 - MIDDLE EAST - Scientists using the twin gravity-measuring satellites of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) have found that a large portion of the Middle East lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade.

The research team observed the Tigris and Euphrates river basins—including parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran—and found that 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of fresh water was lost from 2003 to 2009. That amount is roughly equivalent to the volume of the Dead Sea. About 60 percent of the loss was attributed to the pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs.

NASA Earth Observatory. Acquired September 7, 2006.

The two natural-color images above were acquired by the Landsat 5 satellite and show the shrinking of the Qadisiyah Reservoir in Iraq between September 7, 2006 and September 15, 2009. The first graph shows the elevation of the water in that reservoir between January 2003 and December 2009. The elevation is a proxy measurement for the total volume of water stored there; labels show the water elevation at the time of the satellite images.

NASA Earth Observatory. Acquired September 15, 2009.

The second graph shows the water storage for the entire study area as measured by GRACE from January 2003 to December 2009. The gray line depicts total water storage in the region—groundwater, surface water bodies, and soil moisture—while the green line depicts changes in surface water. The difference between those two lines reflects the change in water stored in underground aquifers (ground water). The total water storage shows a seasonal fluctuation, but also an overall downward trend, suggesting that groundwater is being pumped and used faster than natural processes can replenish it.

“GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India,” said Jay Famiglietti, principal investigator of the study. “The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws.”

NASA Earth Observatory. Acquired January 1, 2003 - December 31, 2009.

Obtaining ground-based data in Middle East can be difficult, so data from satellites such as GRACE are essential to providing a global picture of water storage trends. Within any given region on Earth, rising or falling water reserves alter the planet’s mass, influencing the gravity field of the area. By periodically measuring gravity in each region, the GRACE satellites tells us how water storage changes over time. (To learn more about GRACE’s ability to study fresh water on Earth, read The Gravity of Water.)

Variations in total water storage from normal, in millimeters, in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, as measured by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, from January 2003 through December 2009. Reds represent drier conditions, while blues represent wetter conditions. The majority of the water lost was due to reductions in groundwater caused by human activities. By periodically measuring gravity regionally, GRACE tells scientists how much water storage changes over time. Image credit: NASA/UC Irvine/NCAR.

The researchers calculated that about one-fifth of the water losses in their Tigris-Euphrates study region came from snowpack shrinking and soil drying up, partly in response to a 2007 drought. Loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs accounted for another fifth of the losses. The majority of the loss—approximately 73 million acre feet (90 cubic kilometers)—was due to reductions in groundwater. “That's enough water to meet the needs of tens of millions to more than a hundred million people in the region each year, depending on regional water-use standards and availability,” Famiglietti said.

© Shutterstock/Sadik Gulec.

The team was led by Famiglietti and Kate Voss of the University of California–Irvine (UCI) and Georgetown University, and included other researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. - Earth Observatory.

GLOBAL VOLCANISM: New Study Reveals That Gravity Deforms And Sags Volcanoes, Influencing Eruptions?!

February 20, 2013 - VOLCANOES - The way gravity deforms volcanoes could help explain mysterious features seen in volcanoes on Mars, Earth and elsewhere, as well as potentially revealing risks that volcanoes pose to neighboring communities on Earth, a group of researchers says. Gravity can make large volcanoes warp under their own weight in two ways: they can either spread outward on top of their "basement" of underlying rock or sag downward into that basement.

The way volcanoes deform strongly influences the stability of their structures, and when and how they erupt. To learn more about how gravity can change the shape of volcanoes, researchers built models simulating a range of deformation styles, from pure spreading to pure sagging.

Messy modeling
The scientists developed models consisting of large containers in which the researchers placed silicone putty mimicking the pliable part of the Earth's uppermost layers. On top of that, the scientists placed sand and gypsum to reflect the more brittle layers of a volcano's basement.

Experimental results -- photos from above. Left: Sagging volcano. Middle: Hybrid sagging-spreading volcano.
C: Spreading volcano. CREDIT: P.K. Byrne et al., Geology.

Finally, researchers poured more sand and gypsum on top to build cones representing volcanoes and waited about 10 to 60 minutes to let the cones deform their basements. For some models, the team added a thin silicone layer just below the cone's base, imitating certain weak basement materials, such as waterlogged rocks.

"I can certainly say it was good fun, if messy," said researcher Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "The gypsum powder we used to increase sand cohesion had a tendency to settle on everything in the lab, and the silicone gel was impossible to control once it was out of a container.

I wrote off more than a few pairs of pants, shoes and lab coats during the experiments I conducted." The researchers took digital photos as the models developed and used special software to measure, with exceptional detail, how the structures' surfaces deformed over time.

"Our experimental method is sufficiently straightforward that these experiments can be carried out in high school labs, which could encourage the next generation of earth and planetary scientists," Byrne told OurAmazingPlanet.

Spreading and sagging
The researchers saw that a range of volcano spreading and sagging evolved, depending on the rigidity and strength of a volcano's basement compared to the size of the volcano it supported. Spreading occurred when the basement was rigid, as appears to be the case with the volcanic island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean, while sagging happened when a volcano and its basement deformed together, as is the case with

Elysium Mons on Mars.
Sagging and spreading can also happen at the same time, when a volcano and its basement deform separately. These interactions may explain features seen at Olympus Mons on Mars and with volcanoes on Hawaii, the largest volcanoes on Mars and Earth, respectively. Such activity may explain puzzling terraces seen jutting a bit like steps out fromthese structures' mid-to-upper flanks.

"Our models can reproduce, and so help explain, the range of structural complexity seen on volcanoes across the solar system," Byrne said. "In particular, we are able to tie the various enigmatic structural features on the largest known volcano, Olympus Mons on Mars, into a single model, which is rewarding as I've been studying this volcano since 2005."

Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system, about 370 miles (600 km) in diameter, wide enough to cover the entire state of New Mexico, and 13.6 miles (22 km) high, nearly three times taller than Mount Everest.

Volcano hazards
Such research could help assess the hazards that different volcanoes pose. For instance, "a volcano that's more likely to spread than sag is at greater risk of suffering landslides or a full-blown flank collapse, and vice versa for a sagging volcano," Byrne said. These studies could also reveal likely sagging- or spreading-influenced sites of eruptions.

Byrne added that his team could start to think "about other, smaller volcanoes on Earth and Mars, and not just some of the very largest, like [those in] Hawaii or the enormous Olympus Mons. Moreover, we can look to apply these results to yet other extraterrestrial volcanoes, such as the shield volcanoes on Venus, structures named for their resemblance to a warrior's shield laid on the ground.

"And we can apply the insights gained from our laboratory models to numerical models, and so begin to get a more detailed understanding of how gravity-driven volcano deformation works mechanically." Byrne and his colleagues detailed their findings online Jan. 17 in the journal Geology. - Live Science.

GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVAL: NASA's GRACE Sees Major Water Losses In The Middle East - Tigris And Euphrates River Basin Has Lost Dead Sea-sized Quantity Of Water, "Among The Largest Freshwater Losses" Ever, Could Alter Earth's Mass In Particular Areas!

February 13, 2013 - MIDDLE EAST - Already strained by water scarcity and political tensions, the arid Middle East along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is losing critical water reserves at a rapid pace, from Turkey upstream to Syria, Iran and Iraq below.

Unable to conduct measurements on the ground in the politically unstable region, UC Irvine scientists and colleagues used data from space to uncover the extent of the problem. They took measurements from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, and found that between 2003 and 2010, the four nations lost 144 cubic kilometers (117 million acre feet) of water - nearly equivalent to all the water in the Dead Sea. The depletion was especially striking after a drought struck the area in 2007. Researchers attribute the bulk of it - about 60 percent - to pumping of water from underground reservoirs.

© Shutterstock/Sadik Gulec.

They concluded that the Tigris-Euphrates watershed is drying up at a pace second only to that in India. "This rate is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents," the scientists report in a paper to be published online Feb. 15 in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Water management is a complex issue in the Middle East, "a region that is dealing with limited water resources and competing stakeholders," said Katalyn Voss, lead author and a water policy fellow with the University of California's Center for Hydrologic Modeling in Irvine.

Turkey has jurisdiction over the Tigris and Euphrates headwaters, as well as the reservoirs and infrastructure of its Southeastern Anatolia Project, which dictates how much water flows downstream into Syria, Iran and Iraq. And due to varied interpretations of international laws, the basin does not have coordinated water management. Turkey's control of water distribution to adjacent countries has caused tension, such as during the 2007 drought, when it continued to divert water to irrigate its own agricultural land.

"That decline in stream flow put a lot of pressure on downstream neighbors," Voss said. "Both the United Nations and anecdotal reports from area residents note that once stream flow declined, the northern part of Iraq had to switch to groundwater. In a fragile social, economic and political environment, this did not help."

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, which NASA launched in 2002 to measure the Earth's local gravitation pull from space, is providing a vital picture of global trends in water storage, said hydrologist Jay Famiglietti, the study's principal investigator and a UC Irvine professor of Earth system science.

GRACE is "like having a giant scale in the sky," he said. "Whenever you do international work, it's exceedingly difficult to obtain data from different countries. For political, economic or security reasons, neighbors don't want each other to know how much water they're using. In regions like the Middle East, where data are relatively inaccessible, satellite observations are among the few options."

Rising or falling water reserves alter the Earth's mass in particular areas, influencing the strength of the local gravitational attraction. By periodically quantifying that gravity, the satellites provide information about how much each region's water storage changes over time.

The 754,000-square-kilometer (291,000-square-mile) Tigris-Euphrates River Basin jumped out as a hot spot when researchers from UC Irvine, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the National Center for Atmospheric Research looked at global water trends. Over the seven-year period, they calculated that available water there shrank by an average of 20 cubic kilometers (16 million acre feet) annually.

Meanwhile, the area's demand for freshwater is rising at the worst possible time. "They just do not have that much water to begin with, and they're in a part of the world that will be experiencing less rainfall with climate change. Those dry areas are getting drier," Famiglietti said. "Everyone in the world's arid regions needs to manage their available water resources as best they can."

Other authors are MinHui Lo of National Taiwan University, Caroline de Linage of the University of California's Center for Hydrologic Modeling, Matthew Rodell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and Sean Swenson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. - Earth Sky.

Variations in total water storage from normal, in millimeters, in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, as measured by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, from January 2003 through December 2009. Reds represent drier conditions, while blues represent wetter conditions. The majority of the water lost was due to reductions in groundwater caused by human activities. By periodically measuring gravity regionally, GRACE tells scientists how much water storage changes over time. Image credit: NASA/UC Irvine/NCAR.

A new study using data from a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade. Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., found during a seven-year period beginning in 2003 that parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of total stored freshwater. That is almost the amount of water in the Dead Sea. The researchers attribute about 60 percent of the loss to pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs.

The findings, to be published Friday, Feb. 15, in the journal Water Resources Research, are the result of one of the first comprehensive hydrological assessments of the entire Tigris-Euphrates-Western Iran region. Because obtaining ground-based data in the area is difficult, satellite data, such as those from NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, are essential. GRACE is providing a global picture of water storage trends and is invaluable when hydrologic observations are not routinely collected or shared beyond political boundaries.

"GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India," said Jay Famiglietti, principal investigator of the study and a hydrologist and professor at UC Irvine. "The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws."
Famiglietti said GRACE is like having a giant scale in the sky. Within a given region, rising or falling water reserves alter Earth's mass, influencing how strong the local gravitational attraction is. By periodically measuring gravity regionally, GRACE tells us how much each region's water storage changes over time.
"GRACE really is the only way we can estimate groundwater storage changes from space right now," Famiglietti said.

The team calculated about one-fifth of the observed water losses resulted from soil drying up and snowpack shrinking, partly in response to the 2007 drought. Loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs accounted for about another fifth of the losses. The majority of the water lost -- approximately 73 million acre feet (90 cubic kilometers) -- was due to reductions in groundwater. "That's enough water to meet the needs of tens of millions to more than a hundred million people in the region each year, depending on regional water use standards and availability," said Famiglietti. Famiglietti said when a drought reduces an available surface water supply, irrigators and other water users turn to groundwater supplies. For example, the Iraqi government drilled about 1,000 wells in response to the 2007 drought, a number that does not include the numerous private wells landowners also very likely drilled.

"Water management is a complex issue in the Middle East -- an area that already is dealing with limited water resources and competing stakeholders," said Kate Voss, lead author of the study and a water policy fellow with the University of California's Center for Hydrological Modeling in Irvine, which Famiglietti directs.
"The Middle East just does not have that much water to begin with, and it's a part of the world that will be experiencing less rainfall with climate change," said Famiglietti. "Those dry areas are getting dryer. The Middle East and the world's other arid regions need to manage available water resources as best they can."
Study co-author Matt Rodell of Goddard added it is important to remember groundwater is being extracted unsustainably in parts of the United States, as well.

"Groundwater is like your savings account," Rodell said. "It's okay to draw it down when you need it, but if it's not replenished, eventually it will be gone." GRACE is a joint mission with the German Aerospace Center and the German Research Center for Geosciences, in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin. For more about GRACE, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/grace and http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace . The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA. - NASA.

COSMIC MELANIN: The Waters Of NU - Galactic Pile-Up May Point To Mysterious Dark Force In The Universe!

January 11, 2013 - SPACE - By closely mapping the mass of an enormous galactic collision, astronomers may have uncovered a type of force that only affects dark matter.  The results come from observations of the Musket Ball Cluster, a vast celestial object located about 5.23 billion light-years away in the constellation Cancer. Galaxies are usually gravitationally bound to other galaxies, creating massive galactic clusters. The Musket Ball Cluster is an example of what happens when two such galactic clusters – each composed of hundreds of individual galaxies – crash into one another. Scientists know the visible stars in these galaxies make up only about 2 percent of the total mass in the cluster. About 12 percent of the mass is found in hot gas, which shines in X-ray wavelengths, while the remaining roughly 86 percent is made of invisible dark matter. Because the galaxies make up so little of the mass of the system and the spaces between them are so large, they don’t really do much of the crashing. Odds are that they will simply sail by one another as the clusters merge. It’s mostly the gas that collides, causing it to slow down and fall behind the galaxies.

The Musket Ball Cluster, two colliding galaxy clusters, which may reveal the interactions of dark matter and point to a new fundamental ”dark force.” The blue and pink colors denote the presence of large masses and hot gases, respectively. X-ray: NASA/CXC/UCDavis/W.Dawson et al; Optical: NASA/STScI/UCDavis/W.Dawson et al.

The dark matter is mapped using a quirk in Einstein’s theories of gravity. According to General Relativity, the gravitational fields of massive objects like galaxies bend light. If there is a large galaxy in the way of a distant light source, observers on Earth will see that light distorted, often into a ring-like shape, like the Hubble image at left. By looking at how light from a distant object is bent by the Musket Ball Cluster, scientists can infer where the dark matter is. But when astronomers did this with high precision, they discovered something odd: The dark matter clumps were slowing down relative to the visible galaxies in the cluster. “We see this offset between the dark matter and the galaxies of about 19,000 light-years,” said astronomer William Dawson of the University of California, Davis, who presented his team’s result during a talk Jan. 7 here at the American Astronomical Society 2013 meeting. The reason this is strange is that dark matter is thought to barely interact with itself. The dark matter should just coast through itself and move at the same speed as the hardly interacting galaxies. Instead, it looks like the dark matter is crashing into something — perhaps itself – and slowing down faster than the galaxies are. But this would require the dark matter to be able to interact with itself in a completely new an unexpected way, a “dark force” that affects only dark matter. This would be a new fundamental force of the universe, in addition to the four known forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces. Such a force has been speculated theoretically in previous work and even searched for in small colliders but, if Dawson’s results turn out to be true, this would be the first observational evidence of its existence. Though the dark force is not part of any current model of physics, it could help explain certain behavior seen in dark matter.

In particular it would help solve the core/cusp problem, an outstanding mystery seen in dwarf galaxies and star clusters. If dark matter only feels the force of gravity, it should tend to clump in the center of these objects. But astronomers over and over observe the opposite: The dark matter in dwarf galaxies and star clusters is evenly distributed. If dark matter can interact through some sort of dark force, it can bump into itself and puff out, like a hot gas. The finding could help open up observations of the so-called “dark sector,” a hypothetical set of forces and particles that don’t affect our own ordinary matter. Though dark matter models tend to assume the particles are simple and have no extra forces, there’s no particular reason this should be. Dawson suggested imagining some alien, scientific beings composed entirely of dark matter, who might not even consider that our version of matter has many complex forces and interactions because they can’t detect them. While agreeing that the results are neat and have a potentially huge payoff, astronomer Douglas Finkbeiner of Harvard, who was not involved in the work, isn’t completely convinced by them yet. “It is good to remember that every such hint of exotic dark matter particle properties has always been wrong,” he wrote in an email to Wired. Finkbeiner should know. In 2008, he was part of research team that thought it had glimpsed a signal of a dark force in data from the PAMELA satellite. The results ended up being discounted a few years later. Dawson knows his findings are preliminary, and even he is fairly skeptical of the dark force interpretation. His team can say with roughly 85 percent confidence that what they are observing is due to dark matter interacting with itself. “Those are good odds in Las Vegas, but as scientists we can’t make grand claims with there still being a 15 or 20 percent possibility of this being noise in the measurement,” he said. The bending of light by massive objects is very tricky to observe, and it could turn out there is some problem in the team’s measurements. For now, Dawson is working with his collaborators to analyze data from other massive galaxy cluster collisions and also discover new ones. If they see the same results on these systems, it would bolster the idea of a possible dark force. Otherwise, it will mean that dark matter is fairly simple and scientists need other explanations for the core/cusp problem.
“We need observations to either reign in the theoretical musings or motivate people to think harder about their dark matter models,” said Dawson. - WIRED.

ELECTRIC UNIVERSE: Giant Veil of "Cold Plasma" Discovered High Above Earth - Clouds of Charged Particles Stretch a Quarter the Way to the Moon!

Clouds of "cold plasma" reach from the top of Earth's atmosphere to at least a quarter the distance to the moon, according to new data from a cluster of European satellites.

Earth generates cold plasma—slow-moving charged particles—at the edge of space, where sunlight strips electrons from gas atoms, leaving only their positively charged cores, or nuclei.

(Find out how cold plasma might also help explain why Mars is missing its atmosphere.)

Researchers had suspected these hard-to-detect particles might influence incoming space weather, such as this week's solar flare and resulting geomagnetic storm. That's because solar storms barrage Earth with similar but high-speed charged particles. Still, no one could be certain what the effects of cold plasma might be without a handle on its true abundance around our planet. "It's like the weather forecast on TV. It's very complicated to make a reasonable forecast without the basic variables," said space scientist Mats André, of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. "Discovering this cold plasma is like saying, Oh gosh, there are oceans here that affect our weather," he said. (Related: "'Warm Plasma Cloak' Discovered Enveloping Earth.")

The Trick to Finding Cold Plasma.

Researchers already knew that some cold plasma existed in the ionosphere, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth's surface. But few researchers had looked for the clouds between 12,400 and 60,000 miles (20,000 and 100,000 kilometers) high. (Also see "Pictures: Giant Walls of Plasma Seen on Sun.") André and his colleague Chris Cully suspected the plasma could be out there, but they knew the positive charge of spacecraft wasn't helping any search efforts. Similar to the way cold plasma is created, sunlight strips electrons from spacecraft materials, making their hulls positively charged. Like two matching magnetic poles, a spacecraft would simply repulse any cold plasma around it.

To find the stuff, André and Cully instead analyzed anomalies in data from the European Space Agency's Cluster II spacecraft. This group of four satellites swings around Earth in a highly elliptical orbit. At the orbit's peak, the probes reach nearly halfway to the moon. The enormous distance gives researchers a chance to sweep through and monitor Earth's magnetic field and electrical activity, including the influence of "hot" charged particles emitted by the sun. Anomalies in the Cluster II data turned out to be shockwaves from cold plasma particles moving around the satellites.

Cold Plasma a Space Weather "Elephant".

In the end, the pair found that cold plasma makes up between 50 and 70 percent of all charged particles within the farther reaches of Earth's magnetic field. (Related: "Mini Magnetic Shield Found on the Moon.")

André says it's now time to start updating space-weather models to take the extra cold plasma into account—at this point, for instance, nothing is known about how the plasma might affect solar storms. This influence is "not a minor thing in space weather," André said. "It's an elephant in the room." - National Geographic.

MONUMENTAL EARTH CHANGES: A NEW NORMAL - Japan's Massive Mega-Earthquake On March 11, Altered Planet Earth's Gravity Field!

 The devastating earthquake that struck Japan earlier this year was powerful enough to slightly alter the pull of gravity under the affected area, scientists have found.

Anything that has mass has a gravity field that attracts objects toward it. The strength of this field depends on a body's mass. Since the Earth's mass is not spread out evenly, its gravity field is stronger in some places and weaker in others. The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki temblor in March was the most powerful earthquake to hit Japan and the fifth-most powerful quake ever recorded. To see how the temblor might have deformed the Earth there, scientists used the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites to analyze the area's gravity field before and after the quake. The researchers found the Tohoku-Oki quake reduced the gravity field there by an average of two- millionths of a gal by slightly thinning the Earth's crust. In comparison, the strength of the gravitational pull at the Earth's surface is, on average, 980 gals. (The gal, short for Galileo, is a unit of acceleration; one gal is defined as one centimeter per second squared.)

"The most important implication of our findings is that the massive Tohoku-Oki earthquake brings significant changes to not only the ground but also the underground structure of Japan," researcher Koji Matsuo, a geophysicist at Hokkaido University in Japan, told OurAmazingPlanet. The GRACE satellites had previously detected gravity changes caused by the magnitude 9.1 to 9.3 2004 Sumatra-Andaman quake, the third-most powerful earthquake ever recorded, and the magnitude 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile in 2010, the eighth-most powerful on record. These reduced the gravity fields in the areas struck in much the same way as the Tohoku-Oki quake, since they were all similar types of earthquakes. The researchers are now interested in seeing if they can detect post-quake gravity field changes as the crust settles back into place. Matsuo and colleague Kosuke Heki detailed their findings online Sept. 22 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. - MSNBC.