A Child's Letter

Miami underwater

imagecredit:postsecret

From

Rising seas could drown historic sites

You can kiss goodbye the things that make South Florida read like an Elmore Leonard novel: the glitz of South Beach, the gator-infested Everglades, and some of the bustling terminals of Miami International Airport.

Many of the beachside places where tourists flock and the rich and famous luxuriate would be under water. Spits of land would be left in fashionable South Beach and celebrity-studded Fisher Island.

While the booming downtown would be mostly spared, inland areas near the airport and out to the low-lying Everglades would be submerged. Miami would resemble a cookie nibbled on from the south and east.

Stephen Sawitz, whose family has run Joe's Stone Crab in Miami Beach for four generations — surviving hurricanes and floods — looks at the maps and sees little hope for his restaurant or his home several decades from now: "I'm going to be thinking about it now for the rest of my life. And the generations after me, I'm going to be telling them about it."

credit: AP and thanks to SOTP

Earthquake in Peru

The Lima newspaper Cronica Viva and other news services reported that 17 people were killed in the southern coastal city of Ica, the site of a popular annual Catholic pilgrimage at the Church of Lúren, which collapsed.

Church of Lúren?

Lake vanishes in Chile

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - A lake in southern Chile has mysteriously disappeared, prompting speculation the ground has simply opened up and swallowed it whole.
The lake was situated in the Magallanes region in Patagonia and was fed by water, mostly from melting glaciers.

Swallowed up by shit

Man, son, neighbor swallowed by cesspool

Associated Press

HUNTINGTON, N.Y. - A 71-year-old man who went outside in the rain to pick up the Sunday newspaper plunged into a cesspool in his front yard, and his son and neighbor were sucked in when they tried to help.

The victims escaped, two with the help of firefighters, covered in raw sewage but not badly hurt.

Andrew Palladino said the soggy ground, soaked by two days of rain, gave way outside his Long Island home: "I walked across the lawn, and all of a sudden I disappeared."

He yelled to his wife for help, and she threw a rope and called their son, Dan, who lives with them. The son said the scene "was like a horror picture."

A neighbor who heard the commotion ran over to help - but the ground gave way again, swallowing him and the son. The neighbor crawled out and passers-by tried to hold onto the others until the Huntington Fire Department arrived.

Firefighters secured the ground, lassoed Palladino and his son and dragged them out.

It's not the first time a cesspool - a pit that collects waste from toilets and sinks - has swallowed someone in Huntington.

In 2001, a man practicing archery in the backyard with his two children died when his cesspool caved in and consumed him. And in 1998, a Huntington Station man was rescued after he fell 65 feet into one.

Swallowed up by the Earth

Sinkhole swallows man in middle of his home

April 24, 2006, 9:37 AM EDT

Associated Press

ALTA, CALIFORNIA -- A large sinkhole opened in the middle of a house, killing a 27-year-old man who plummeted 10 feet and was covered by the rubble, officials said Sunday.

The two-story home, built in the 1980s, might have been sitting atop a decades-old underground mine, authorities said. Recent rains possibly softened the ground under the home, in an isolated area near Lake Alta, northeast of Sacramento.

"It's unbelievable," Placer County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman
Dena Erwin said. "From the front of the house, it's absolutely normal.
Then, in the middle of the house, is this enormous hole."

The victim was on the ground floor about 9:30 p.m. Friday when the
concrete foundation near the kitchen gave way, Erwin said.

The man's wife also was in the house at the time and called 911. She
was uninjured, Erwin said.

Rescuers had trouble reaching him because the ground began to shift,
creating an unsafe situation for work crews.

Authorities declined to release the victim's identity until his body is
recovered.

Copyright (c) 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Scientists Claim to Find Lost Civilization

By RAY HENRY, Associated Press Writer

Scientists have found what they believe are traces of the lost Indonesian civilization of Tambora, which was wiped out in 1815 by the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history.

Mount Tambora's cataclysmic eruption on April 10, 1815, buried the inhabitants of Sumbawa Island under searing ash, gas and rock and is blamed for an estimated 88,000 deaths. The eruption was at least four times more powerful than Mount Krakatoa's in 1883.

Guided by ground-penetrating radar, U.S. and Indonesian researchers recently dug in a gully where locals had found ceramics and bones. They unearthed the remains of a thatch house, pottery, bronze and the carbonized bones of two people, all in a layer of sediment dating to the eruption.

University of Rhode Island volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson, the leader of the expedition, estimated that 10,000 people lived in the town when the volcano erupted in a blast that dwarfed the one that buried the Roman town of Pompeii.

The eruption shot 400 million tons of sulfuric gases into the atmosphere, causing global cooling and creating what historians call "The Year Without a Summer." Farms in Maine suffered crop-killing frosts in June, July and August. In France and Germany, grape and corn crops died, or the harvests were delayed.

The civilization on Sumbawa Island has intrigued researchers ever since Dutch and British explorers visited in the early 1800s and were surprised to hear a language that did not sound like any other spoken in Indonesia, Sigurdsson said. Some scholars believe the language more closely resembled those spoken in Indochina. But not long after Westerners first encountered Tambora, the society was destroyed.

"The explosion wiped out the language. That's how big it was," Sigurdsson said. "But we're trying to get these people to speak again, by digging."

Some of what the researchers found may suggest Tambora's inhabitants came from Indochina or had commercial ties with the region, Sigurdsson said. For example, ceramic pottery uncovered during the dig resembles that common to Vietnam.

John Miksic, an archaeologist at the National University of Singapore, has seen video of the dig and said he believes Sigurdsson's team did find a dwelling destroyed by the eruption.

But he doubts the Tamborans were from Indochina or spoke a language from that area. If Vietnamese-style ceramics reached the island, it was probably through trade with intermediaries, Miksic said.

During the dig, Sigurdsson's team found the charred skeleton of a woman who was most likely in her kitchen. A metal machete and a melted glass bottle lay nearby. The remains of another person were found just outside what was probably the front door.

The team included researchers from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and the Indonesian Directorate of Volcanology.

Storm drops dark brown snow in Colo.

FRISCO, Colo. (AP) — Snow that some residents described as dark as chocolate brown was reported across parts of Colorado Thursday, a result of a wind storm in northern Arizona that kicked up dust that fell with the snow overnight, officials said.
"It's pretty much statewide," said Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. "We've had reports from the San Juans, Winter Park ... all over."

Greene said it's not unusual to see plumes of reddish dust from the desert Southwest drop on the Rocky Mountains in the spring.

(AP via USAToday from Drudge Report )

Mudslide kills more than 1,000

Weather -- or perhaps overpopulation? -- claims a village on a Philippine Island.

Heavy rains -- and a possible quake -- caused a mountain side to disintergrate.

Icecaps Melting

Climate change: On the edge

Greenland ice cap breaking up at twice the rate it was five years ago, says scientist Bush tried to gag

By Jim Hansen

Published: 17 February 2006
A satellite study of the Greenland ice cap shows that it is melting far faster than scientists had feared - twice as much ice is going into the sea as it was five years ago. The implications for rising sea levels - and climate change - could be dramatic.

Yet, a few weeks ago, when I - a Nasa climate scientist - tried to talk to the media about these issues following a lecture I had given calling for prompt reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases, the Nasa public affairs team - staffed by political appointees from the Bush administration - tried to stop me doing so. I was not happy with that, and I ignored the restrictions. The first line of Nasa's mission is to understand and protect the planet.


I think sea-level rise is going to be the big issue soon, more even than warming itself.

click headline link for more