Earthquake in a Woodland

The earthquake damage near Sendai.    Photo by Jo Yong-Hak/Reuters.

  This morning I started my day by scanning through the 100 photographs of the destruction caused by the earthquake in Japan. I'm not a television watcher nor much of a newspaper reader these days, but I do check into the The New York Times online for "big" events such as the recent earthquake--now rated at 9.0.
   Most photographs depicted vast areas of debris--shattered homes, overturned cars, flipped planes, listing shipping tankers--and victims in line for water and supplies or sifting through the rubble of their homes and villages for someone or something. Viewing the images without the voices of the suffering residents or the news reporters necessarily inadequate commentary--provided the end-of-the-world soundtrack: silence.
   Even after 100 photographs, it is difficult to comprehend a tragedy of this scale and magnitude. The human brain seems incapable of grasping at the breadth and depth of this horror and how the years and decades ahead will unfold.
     Only one photograph in the hundred showed the impact of the quake in nature (posted above). There in a young woodland, amid the bare-branched trees and snow-covered earth is a dark and meandering crack. It follows the "natural" lines of creek, a river and its tributaries, a tree with branches, a bolt of lightning, leaf veins, human arteries or veins. It is a beautiful, peaceful photograph. The woodland looks unscathed, untouched. The word "damage" doesn't seem to apply. In a few months, the trees will bud, leaf-out, and resume life as if nothing ever happened. If it were only so everywhere else.

Click here to view the New York Times photographs.

Only You Can Help Prevent Oil Spills

This is a Washington-State funded tug stationed year-round at Neah Bay to assist with disabled oil tankers. It may be all that comes between you and a disastrous spill. Read this blog and help keep our waters safe.

  This month marks that 22^nd anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill of 11 million gallons of oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska. I still refuse to patronize Exxon/Mobil gas stations, even though I realize this is The One Spill that comes to mind when we think of catastrophic spill in U.S. waters.
  For those who live in Washington State, who remembers the 2003 Chevron Texaco spill? The 1999 New Carissa spill? How about the 1991 Tenyo Maru? Or the 1988 Nestucca spill? Each of these spills put hundreds of thousands of gallons of  oil (crude, fuel, diesel, etc) into Washington waters. A 2007 report on oil spills in Washington State published by the Department of Ecology lists dozens more spills as well as pipe-line and oil-processing facility spills. There are also dozens of listed "near misses" that occurred when tankers were grounded, lost power, or suffered accidents that could have had disastrous effects on Puget Sound and the Straits of Juan de Fuca.

Here is what the BP Gulf oil spill slick would look like if the BP well had been located in Seattle. Blogger Brian Jackson posted this on the Environmental Defense Fund website, www.edf.org. Naturally, the shape of a Puget Sound spill would be different (and on on the water/coastline) but this gives you an idea of the extent of such a disaster.

   In the wake of these disasters, the state has passed important legislation to help decrease the number of spills and increase funding for clean-ups following a spill. Yet, we are still at great risk as oil tankers ply our local waters. Some 15 billion gallons of oil is transported through the Northwest Straits and Puget Sound every year. And though we have bike lanes, sidewalks, and public busses where I live, I usually grab the car keys before planning out a better way. I am working on, but old habits die hard, especially when it's pouring rain and I'm running late.
  If you live in Washington State and you've saved just 5 minutes today by opting for the car, why not use that extra time to contact your local legislators to ask them to pass House Bill 1186 and Senate Bill 5439? These bills improve funding for the oil spill program, augment spill-response equipment, as well as provide training commercial fishermen to aid in oil-spill responses. Public hearings are scheduled this week so it's important to contact your representative now.
   These bills will help protect wildlife--everything from our iconic orca whales to our overlooked planktonic friends and my favorite endangered seabird, the marbled murrelet. This small seabird spends 90% of its life in on our outer coast, in the Straits of Juan de Fuca and in Puget Sound. Because of their size, these birds are quickly covered by oil and quickly drown..
    For information on the bill and the issues it addresses, go to Puget Sound Partnership.
    If you would like to feel personally responsible for saving an orca or a marbled murrlet or diatom, please contact your representatives.
    If you're scratching your head, follow this link to find out who are your legislators.

Cloud of the Week #10: Altocumulus Stratiformis Undulatus

Photo by William Briscoe, www.reflectionsaloft.com. Used by permssion.

  Last week, a good friend and cloudspotter, sent me a link a website called EPOD, which stands (more or less) for Earth Science Picture of the Day--a free service of NASA's Earth Science Division and the EOS Project Science Office (at Goddard Space Flight Center) and the Universities Space Research Association. Now every day, I get a fabulous photograph from somewhere on the planet, contributed by someone on the planet with a camera. Naturally, the cloud photographs inspired me to sign up for my daily EPOD e-mail.
  Because I cannot wait to share this incredible photograph with my readers, I thought I should post it as the cloud of the week. It is a fine and likely rare image of altocumulus stratiformis undulatas. These are mid-level (alto) clumpy (cumulus) clouds. The species is stratiformis (an exetnsive horizontal layer), the variety is undulatus (cloudlets undulate in parallel lines).
  A quick note: There are 14 cloud species, which describe the shape and structure of each type of cloud. There are 9 cloud varieties, which describe either the transparency or arrangement of the cloud elements. There are 10 cloud genera. Don't bother doing the math to calculate all the possible types because a single cloud can express more than one variety (e.g.: altocumulus stratiformis perlucidus undulatus radiatus.)
  So back to the Cloud of the Week. This was posted on EPOD by William Briscoe who kindly gave me permission to post it here. The photo was taken about 8,500 ft somewhere over the southeastern California desert. Shadows from the clouds are projected on the desert sand and look like undulating dunes in the sand. Look again! The undulations are shadows of the clouds given a little extra warping by uneven topography. What's fun about this photograph is that at first glance it seems to be one taken underwater by a scuba diver.  
  Now I am curious to go snorkeling to look for cloud shadows on the floors of silent seas.  

Click here to go to EPOD's website and sign up for your own free daily glimpse of Earth not seen in your local paper.

What We're Not Seeing

  I wonder often how disappointed people were when, in 1783, scientists and inventors collaborated to launch the first hot-air balloons heavenward. What was the reaction on the ground when the manned balloons returned with no news of angels, spirits, or gods dwelling in the glorious clouds? How to report that no, great grandma wasn't up there like we thought? 

  What brings these questions to mind is a marvelous book by Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. One chapter chronicles the fantastical, scientific, and often hilarious aerial experiments designed to get man air-borne in lighter-than-air contraptions. Paris and London were the centers of the experiments--ones involving paper-makers, chemists, doctors, infantry officers, eccentrics, and gondolas full of scientific instruments, champagne, cold chicken, and buxom women in low-cut outfits to swell the already enormous crowds that gathered for the ascension. 

  Holmes stories of the late18th-century and early 19th-century balloon craze are well told and balanced between the mad-cap adventures and real scientific missions sponsored by the French Academie des Sciences and the English Royal Academy. Balloon ascents were consider key to discovering the secret of flight, the nature of the upper atmosphere, and the formation of weather. 

  Holmes writes that ballooning drew attention to the clouds--to their "seasonal varieties and characteristics, and above all perhaps to their astonishing beauty." The Romantic preoccupation with clouds can be followed in the paintings of Turner and Constable and in the poetry of Coleridge and Shelley, Holmes notes. What is fascinating is that, according to Holmes, ballooning produced not a new vision of the heavens as much as it did a new vision of the earth. "The early astronauts suddenly saw the earth as a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature...It was comparable to the first views of the earth from space by the Apollo astronauts in the 1960s, producing a new concept of a 'single blue planet' with its delicate membrane of atmosphere." 

   So, while I am digging for the story of how "the church" responded to these discoveries, I leave you with this, from cartoonist Roz Chast.