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June 30 (Reuters) – Poet, the largest U.S. ethanol maker, purchased an ethanol plant in Cloverdale, Indiana, that was expected to come on line by April 2011 with a production capacity of 90 million gallons a year, Chief Executive Jeff Broin said on Wednesday in a conference call with media.
The plant is the privately held company’s 27th U.S. ethanol facility and will increase Poet’s annual ethanol production capacity to about 1.7 billion gallons, he said. (Reporting by Karl Plume)
Washington, May 21(ANI): With oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill threatening fragile coastal wetlands, clean-up crews are about to discover whether a combination of old and new clean-up methods will help limit the environmental damage.
According to Chemical and Engineering News (C and EN) Assistant Editor Michael Torrice, scientists and engineers are using three basic tools to try to clean up the spill, in which millions of gallons of oil escaped into the ocean from an oil rig following a pipe rupture.
The tools include mopping-up the oil with absorbent pads called “skimmers”, burning the oil in a controlled fashion, and breaking-up the oil into smaller particles using chemicals called dispersants.
Scientists are also investigating new clean-up methods which includes applying dispersants under water to prevent the oil from rising to the surface and forming emulsions, reddish-brown clumps of an oil and water mixture that are extremely difficult to clean up.
In recent tests of this approach, remotely operated underwater “robots” injected the dispersants directly into the leaking oil plume.
When oil hits the shore, scientists might rely on a more standard method and spray the wetlands with fertilizers that can boost the growth of naturally-occurring, oil-chomping bacteria that are found in the area. Whether or not this multipronged clean-up approach will save the wetlands remains to be seen. (ANI)
Washington, May 21 (ANI): A nanotechnology-based sensor could soon tell whether someone has Type I diabetes – just by analysing their breath.
The sensor, which has been successfully tested by researchers in Switzerland, could also be used by emergency room doctors to determine whether a patient has developed diabetic ketoacidosis, a potentially serious complication that happens when diabetics do not take enough insulin.
Even diabetics could use the technology someday in their own homes, to determine whether they need more insulin.
Professor Sotiris E. Pratsinis and colleagues at ETH Zurich in Switzerland explain that everyone has a little bit of acetone in their breath.
But people with Type I diabetes release unusually high levels of the chemical when they exhale.
If they have diabetic ketoacidosis, a dangerous buildup of acetone in the blood, they exhale even-larger amounts of acetone.
The researchers built an extremely sensitive acetone detector by directly depositing from a flame plume a thin film of semiconducting, mixed ceramic nanoparticles between a set of gold electrodes.
The device acts like an electrical resistor. When it gets hit with a puff of acetone-filled air, its resistance drops, allowing more electricity to pass between the electrodes.
If a diabetic were to breathe on the sensor, its resistance would suddenly drop.
When a healthy person exhales onto the nanoparticles, their resistance will not change very much.
The scientists found this new sensor can detect acetone in extremely moist air, an attribute that is critical for any breath test.
It is sensitive enough to detect acetone at 20 parts per billion, a concentration that is 90 times lower than the level at which it can be found in the breath of diabetic patients.
The study has been published in ACS” Analytical Chemistry, a semi-monthly journal. (ANI)
London, May 4 (ANI): Air travellers could face further problems on Tuesday as experts monitored the return of the volcanic ash cloud over UK airspace
The skies over parts of Scotland were closed as a precaution last night after an increased concentration of volcanic ash was detected in the atmosphere, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said.
The ash is forecast to exceed the safe level agreed by the CAA and airlines in the Outer Hebrides today, The Scotsman reports.
Airspace over the Outer Hebrides was closed to all operations at 6 p.m. following advice from the Met Office.
The closures could see flights to and from the Western Isles cancelled, but the situation will be constantly reviewed. Passengers are advised to check with their airline before travelling, The Scotsman reports.
The move came as flights in and out of Ireland, including Dublin, Cork and Belfast were grounded for six hours from 7 a.m. this morning as a dense plume travels across the island
The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) said the decision to ground aircraft was based on the safety risks to crews and passengers as a result of the drift south of the volcanic ash cloud caused by the north-easterly winds, The Scotsman reports. (ANI)
Washington, April 20(ANI): The area in the atmosphere that pilots prefer to fly in, known as jet stream, is most likely to be impacted by plumes from volcanic ash, according to an expert.
Marcus I. Bursik, professor of geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, explained the reason behind the problem.
He said: “That”s a problem because modern transcontinental and transoceanic air routes are configured to take advantage of the jet stream”s power, saving both time and fuel.
“The interaction of the jet stream and the plume is likely a factor here. Basically, planes have to fly around the plume or just stop flying, as they have, as the result of this eruption in Iceland.”
Often the plume can be tracked satellites and pilots can steer around the plume.
However, it didn’t work in the current ash cloud cover over Europe, following volcanic eruption in Iceland, since the ash drifted right over Britain.
Bursik has further explained the problems in a 2009 paper called “Volcanic plumes and wind: Jet stream interaction examples and implications for air traffic”.
He said: “In the research we did, we found that the jet stream essentially stops the plume from rising higher into the atmosphere. Because the jet stream causes the density of the plume to drop so fast, the plume”s ability to rise above the jet stream is halted: the jet stream caps the plume at a certain atmospheric level.”
Bursik says that new techniques now in development will be capable of producing better estimates of where and when ash clouds from volcanoes will travel.
He and his colleagues have proposed a project with researchers at the University of Alaska that would improve tracking estimates to find out where volcanic ash clouds are going.
He added: “What we get now is a mean estimate of where ash should be in atmosphere but our proposal is designed to develop both the mean estimate and estimates of error that would be more accurate and useful. It could help develop scenarios that would provide a quantitative probability as to how likely a plane is to fly through the plume, depending on the route.”
The study has been published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research. (ANI)
Qantas estimates flights to Europe and the UK will not be operating again until Sunday as a result of volcanic ash blasting out of an Icelandic glacier.
The volcano under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier is spewing a plume of grey ash up to 10 kilometres high across the Atlantic, closing major airports more than 2,000 kilometres away in the most extensive shutdown of airspace since the September 11 attacks in 2001.
The entire airspace in the UK, Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Sweden is closed and there are partial closures in France and Finland.
Qantas has cancelled today’s flights to London and Frankfurt and over 1,500 travellers are now stranded in Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok airports waiting for a connecting flight.
Airline spokesman David Epstein says passengers trying to get to Europe from Australia should not fly to Asia as all hotels there are booked out.
He says passengers travelling in the next few days should not go to the airport unless the airline has directed them to do so.
“We’d urge you to go to qantas.com,” he said.
“People travelling with us in the next few days, don’t got to the airport until you have confirmed with us.
“It is going to take some time [to] work through the backlog of flights coming in from Europe.”
Qantas passenger and New South Wales Liberal Party Director, Mark Neeham, flew into Singapore early this morning only to be told his flight to the United Kingdom will not be taking off until Saturday night.
But Mr Neeham says he is grateful he has been put up in a hotel and does not have to wait at the airport.
“Just as you came off the aircraft what greeted you was the hordes of people wandering around, people laying against the walls, laying against seats, every bit of floor space available somebody was sitting on it or asleep on it so it was not a pleasant place to be,” he said.
Rhianne Hole was due to leave Melbourne Airport to visit family in Wales.
She says she is annoyed the airline told her to reschedule the flights herself.
“Not happy at all, the fact that we have to call the reservation line and do it ourselves like they should… if they’re sending us home they should be rebooking the flights for us,” she said.
Mr Epstein says Qantas is at the mercy of the volcano and then the British authorities.
He says Qantas has provided the passengers stranded in Asia with meal vouchers and accommodation.
“We are working through the situation with them. Whether they want to remain in situ in Asia … or whether they want to return home,” he said.
But he says accommodation in Asia is already under pressure as the number of stranded tourists increases.
Mr Epstein says Qantas has experience operating around volcanic activities and he says there will be no flights until officials say there is no threat to safety.
“Qantas does have some experience in dealing with volcanic activities. Our meteorological people pay a lot attention to volcanic activity,” he said.
Volcanic ash contains tiny particles of glass and pulverised rock, which can melt in plane engines, causing a loss of power.
The flight safety officer for the British Airline Pilots’ Association, Dave Reynolds, says the problem with the ash is not confined to it getting into engines.
“Also as significantly, the ash can get inside the aircraft’s instrument systems and under conditions where the pilots are using their instruments to fly the aircraft, they’ll find themselves in the very dangerous situation of not being able to have reliable instruments,” he said.
REUTERS – The eruption under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland that has thrown up a six-km (3.7-mile) high plume of ash and disrupted air traffic across northern Europe shows no signs of abating after 40 hours of activity.
Located under Iceland’s fifth largest glacier, the volcano has erupted five times since the area was settled in the 9th century.
Eyjafjallajokull has a 2.5 km-wide volcanic crater, covered in ice. Fissure-fed lava flows occur on its eastern and western flanks of the so-called stratovolcano, which is built up from
alternating layers of ash, lava and rocks ejected by earlier eruptions.
When the volcano began erupting in late March it opened a 500-m fissure producing lava fountains along the vent.
The ash cloud has been formed through a process called fragmentation which occurs in several stages. First, magma travelling under pressure through underground conduits is broken up into pieces by expanding gases.
As pressure decreases closer to the surface, the magma turns into fine volcanic ash which breaks into even smaller particles when it makes contact with glacial ice on the surface of the crater. The fine dust melds with steam rising from the crater to to form a dark, billowing plume.
“It’s like a soda bottle when you take the top off,” said Icelandic vulcanologist Armann Hoskuldsson, describing what happens to magma as it travels to the surface.
“At the same time there is little wind in Europe to disperse the plume,” said Freystein Sigmundsson, a researcher at the Institue of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik.
(Writing by London Editorial Reference Unit; Editing by Michael Roddy)
REYKJAVIK, April 14 (Reuters) – A volcanic eruption in southern Iceland spewed black smoke and white steam into the air on Wednesday and partially melted a glacier, forcing hundreds to evacuate from the thinly populated area.
The plume was seen rising from a crater under about 200 metres (656 ft) of ice at the Eyjafjallajokull glacier, close to the site of another eruption which started last month and only died down on Monday, Icelandic state radio reported.
The Icelandic Civil Defence Authority ordered 700 people to evacuate their homes and warned that melting ice could set off floods at a nearby river, which had already risen by 84 centimetres (33 inches), the radio said.
A coast guard plane flying overhead was able to spot an opening in the glacier, but no lava or fire was immediately visible due to low clouds, the report said.
Icelandic scientists had measured increased seismic activity near the glacier about two hours before the volcano started to erupt in the early morning on Wednesday, it added.
In March, another volcano erupted near the Eyjafjallajokull glacier and caused no casualties.
The volcano, situated beneath Iceland’s fifth largest glacier, has erupted five times since Iceland was settled in the ninth century.
Iceland sits on a volcanic hotspot in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and has relatively frequent eruptions, although most occur in sparsely populated areas and pose little danger to people or property. Before March, the last eruption took place in 2004.
Commercial fishers on Western Australia’s south coast have expressed concerns about the adequacy of measures designed to prevent elevated mercury levels after dredging in Albany’s King George Sound.
Mercury levels above the guidelines for ecosystem health have been found in a layer of sediment in the sound.
Albany purse seine fisherman Peter Westerberg says he is worried mercury will build-up in the food chain and affect sardine stocks.
Mr Westerberg says he is not sure he trusts assurances that contaminants will not spread.
“It’s a bit of the unknown, you see what’s happening in Fremantle. They keep telling you there’s a little plume, but all of a sudden the plume’s far bigger than anticipated, so if the dredging goes ahead and takes up most of King George Sound, well there goes sardine fishing for seven, eight, nine, 10 months,” he said.
The oil and gas producer Santos says it still does not know the source of an oil leak found two years ago in the groundwater beneath its Port Bonython plant near Whyalla.
The Greens say industry sources have told them the oil has reached Spencer Gulf, but Santos has denied the claims, saying it built a trench to stop the spread.
The Port Bonython plant manager, Warren Kruger, says the company has mapped the extent of the leak with an extensive network of groundwater wells.
“It’s been contained within the confines of the plant and the size of the plume is not growing,” he said.
In January, Santos reported it had found the potential source of the leak – three holes at the bottom of a large crude oil tank.
Now it says further investigations have indicated that is not the source and research is continuing.
London, September 19 (ANI): Two separate lunar missions have found evidence which indicates that the polar regions of the moon are chock full of water-altered minerals.
According to a report in Nature News, early results from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched on June 18, are offering a wide array of watery signals.
The Moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places: not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth.
“We are on the verge of a renaissance in our thinking about the poles of the Moon, including how water ice gets there,” said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which on October 9, will slam into a polar crater with the intention of ploughing up a plume of water ice for many telescopic eyes to see.
The initial LRO results confirm what was long suspected as a way for ice to stay trapped on the Moon for billions of years.
A thermal mapping instrument showed that permanently shadowed regions within deep polar craters are as cold as 35o Kelvin (-238o Celsius).
Project scientist Richard Vondrak said that they are the coldest spots in the Solar System – even colder than the surface of Pluto.
Variations in the flux of neutrons suggests variability in water content among craters.
But, the surprise comes from a different instrument on LRO, which counts slow-moving neutrons as a way of measuring hydrogen abundance in the top metre or so of the surface.
This hydrogen is often interpreted as a proxy for water ice, although it could also be molecular hydrogen or hydrogen trapped in other molecules.
The LRO instrument has already found a significant excess of hydrogen at the poles.
But, with added resolution, it is seeing surprising variability within the polar regions. Some of the craters appear enriched in hydrogen. Others are not.
Stranger still, some areas outside the crater walls, which were thought to get too hot for water to linger, show an excess of hydrogen.
Vondrak said this shows that the water could have arrived more recently, or that it can persist if buried as impacts till the lunar soil.
If the LCROSS impact spews up ice, it will eliminate the last vestiges of doubt about water on the Moon.
It could also start a new hunt: to find a record of impact events, such as water-rich comet strikes, that put the ice there in the first place. (ANI)
London, September 19 (ANI): Two separate lunar missions have found evidence which indicates that the polar regions of the moon are chock full of water-altered minerals.
According to a report in Nature News, early results from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched on June 18, are offering a wide array of watery signals.
The Moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places: not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth.
“We are on the verge of a renaissance in our thinking about the poles of the Moon, including how water ice gets there,” said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which on October 9, will slam into a polar crater with the intention of ploughing up a plume of water ice for many telescopic eyes to see.
The initial LRO results confirm what was long suspected as a way for ice to stay trapped on the Moon for billions of years.
A thermal mapping instrument showed that permanently shadowed regions within deep polar craters are as cold as 35o Kelvin (-238o Celsius).
Project scientist Richard Vondrak said that they are the coldest spots in the Solar System – even colder than the surface of Pluto.
Variations in the flux of neutrons suggests variability in water content among craters.
But, the surprise comes from a different instrument on LRO, which counts slow-moving neutrons as a way of measuring hydrogen abundance in the top metre or so of the surface.
This hydrogen is often interpreted as a proxy for water ice, although it could also be molecular hydrogen or hydrogen trapped in other molecules.
The LRO instrument has already found a significant excess of hydrogen at the poles.
But, with added resolution, it is seeing surprising variability within the polar regions. Some of the craters appear enriched in hydrogen. Others are not.
Stranger still, some areas outside the crater walls, which were thought to get too hot for water to linger, show an excess of hydrogen.
Vondrak said this shows that the water could have arrived more recently, or that it can persist if buried as impacts till the lunar soil.
If the LCROSS impact spews up ice, it will eliminate the last vestiges of doubt about water on the Moon.
It could also start a new hunt: to find a record of impact events, such as water-rich comet strikes, that put the ice there in the first place. (ANI)
London, June 25 (ANI): A new research by European scientists has provided evidence that an enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus is fed by a salty ocean, a discovery that may have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.
The Cassini spacecraft made a surprising discovery about Saturn’s sixth largest moon, Enceladus, on its exploration of the giant ringed planet in 2005.
Enceladus ejects water vapor, gas and tiny grains of ice into space hundreds of kilometers above the moon’s surface.
Enceladus orbits in Saturn’s outermost “E” ring. It is one of only three outer solar system bodies that produce active eruptions of dust and vapor.
Moreover, aside from the Earth, Mars, and Jupiter’s moon Europa, it is one of the only places in the solar system for which astronomers have direct evidence of the presence of water.
New understanding of how this plume is produced was revealed in 2008 by Juergen Schmidt of the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Nikolai Brilliantov of the University of Leicester, and colleagues.
They explained how the water vapor jets are blasted out much faster than the dust particles. To work their theory required that Enceladus has an ocean of liquid water below its surface.
The same team, working with Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, in Heidelberg, has now found the direct experimental evidence for the presence of this ocean, which was previously lacking.
Current theories of satellite formation suggest that should a moon have a deep liquid ocean in contact with the body’s rocky core, for many millions of years, then it should be a salty ocean.
The team now reports the detection of sodium salts among the dust ejected in the Enceladus plume.
Postberg and colleagues have studied data from the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) onboard the Cassini spacecraft and have combined this data with laboratory experiments.
They have shown that the icy grains in the Enceladus plume contain substantial quantities of sodium salts, hinting at the salty ocean deep below.
The theory, proposed by Brilliantov and Schmidt, has allowed the team to relate the detected salt in the CDA with the likely concentration in the water vapor above the ocean, which proves the consistency of the experimental data.
The results of the study imply that the concentration of sodium chloride in the ocean can be as high as that of Earth’s oceans and is about 0.1-0.3 moles of salt per kilogram of water. (ANI)
Washington, June 24 (ANI): NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, successfully completed its most significant early mission milestone on June 23 with a lunar swingby and calibration of its science instruments.
The satellite will search for water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole.
With the assist of the moon’s gravity, LCROSS and its attached Centaur booster rocket successfully entered into polar Earth orbit at 6:20 a.m. PDT on June 23.
The maneuver puts the spacecraft and Centaur on course for a pair of impacts near the moon’s south pole on October 9.
“The successful completion of the LCROSS swingby proves the science instruments are functioning as expected. It is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the entire team,” said Dan Andrews, LCROSS project manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.
“We are elated at the results from the maneuver and eagerly anticipate the impacts in early October,” he added.
During its swing by the moon, the spacecraft’s instruments were turned on and calibrated by scanning three sites on the lunar surface.
These sites were the craters Mendeleev, Goddard C and Giordano Bruno. They were selected because they offer a variety of terrain types, compositions and illumination conditions.
The spacecraft also scanned the lunar horizon to confirm its instruments are aligned in preparation for observing the Centaur’s debris plume.
“Each instrument returned good data that the science team will spend the next few weeks analyzing,” said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist at Ames.
“These data will ensure we are as prepared as possible for monitoring and interpreting data we receive during impact,” he added.
LCROSS and its attached Centaur upper stage rocket are now in a long, looping polar orbit around Earth and the moon.
Each orbit will be roughly perpendicular to the moon’s orbit around Earth and take about 37 days to complete.
Before impact, the spacecraft and Centaur will make approximately three orbits.
LCROSS and the Centaur separately will collide with the moon at approximately 7:30 a.m. EDT on October 9, creating a pair of debris plumes that will be analyzed for the presence of water ice or water vapor, hydrocarbons and hydrated materials.
The spacecraft and Centaur are targeted to impact the moon’s south pole near the Cabeus region.
The exact target crater will be identified 30 days before impact, after considering information collected by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and observatories on Earth. (ANI)
Sydney, May 21 (ANI): The devastating February bushfires that killed 173 people across Australia generated enough energy to fuel 1,500 atomic bombs, the bushfires royal commission has been told.
The Sydney Morning Herald quoted bushfire behaviour analyst Dr Kevin Tolhurst told the commission the fires were like “1500 atomic bombs the size of Hiroshima”.
“It’s an enormous amount of energy,” he said. r Tolhurst estimated the fire moved at a speed of about 120km/h, which was about the same speed estimated on Ash Wednesday.
In some areas, the blaze spotted 35km ahead of the main fire.
Dr Tolhurst said it was important to evaluate a fire on a three dimensional level, taking into account not just surface winds but upper winds created by the plume of smoke above a fire.
He showed the commission photos of trees that had been snapped off about three to four metres above ground level in the February 7 Black Saturday bushfires by these types of winds.
The hearing continues. (ANI)
London, May 21 (ANI): Evidence from Hawaii and Iceland has indicated that the Earth may literally have a heartbeat, in the sense that the planet’s core may be dispatching simultaneous plumes of magma towards the surface every 15 million years or so.
According to a report in New Scientist, if the hypothesis is true, it would revolutionize our ideas of what’s happening far below our feet.
Rolf Mjelde of the University of Bergen and Jan Inge Faleide of the University of Oslo, both in Norway, used seismological data to measure the thickness of Earth’s crust between Iceland and Greenland.
Iceland is on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where magma wells up to form fresh crust.
The measurements allowed Mjelde and Faleide to infer the past flow of magma in the plume generally thought to rise beneath Iceland.
When this plume is strong, it thickens the crust that it forms at the surface.
They found that the crust has thickened roughly every 15 million years, suggesting the plume pulses at around that frequency.
Regular pulsing of plumes is not a new idea, but when the pair compared their results with similar pulsing in Hawaii, which also sits on a plume, they found a surprising correlation.
Data collected by Emily Van Ark and Jian Lin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts, suggests that Hawaii’s plume pulses have coincided with Iceland’s.
“These two are on very different parts of the Earth, so I don’t think the synchrony could be related to something in the mantle,” said Mjelde. “It must relate to the core somehow. I can’t see any other possibility,” he added.
This would mean that the Earth’s core periodically heats up the overlying mantle, generating synchronized plumes that rise to the surface at widely separated spots.
“If correct, it would be a significant alteration from our current thoughts,” said Rhodri Davies of Imperial College London.
Most geologists who believe that mantle plumes exist think that pulsing can be explained by processes in the mantle alone, such as magma build-up in regions of different viscosity.
“A new way of thinking would be needed,” said Mjelde. (ANI)
London, April 30 (ANI): Scientists, studying measurements made by Cassini spacecraft, have found salt in the ice plumes that bloom above Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which suggest the presence of a liquid ocean on the satellite.
The Cassini spacecraft flew through a plume on October 9, 2008, and measured the molecular weight of chemicals in the ice.
According to a report in New Scientist, Frank Postberg of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, and colleagues, found traces of sodium in the form of salt and sodium bicarbonate.
The chemicals would have originated in the rocky core of Enceladus, so to reach a plume they must have leached from the core via liquid water.
Observations from Earth in 2007 spotted no sign of sodium, casting doubt on such a subsurface sea.
Although the salt could have been leached out by an ancient ocean which since froze solid, that freezing process would concentrate most of the salt very far from the surface of the moon’s ice, according to Julie Castillo of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“It is easier to imagine that the salts are present in a liquid ocean below the surface,” she said. “That’s why this detection, if confirmed, is very important,” she added. (ANI)
Washington, March 26 (ANI): In a new research, scientists have determined that studying tornado-like rotation in volcanoes can help them to better predict the effects of volcanic eruptions.
The research is based on a 200-year-old report by a sea captain and photographs of the 2008 eruption of Mount Chaiten.
Scientists involved in the research have shown that the spontaneous formation of a “volcanic mesocyclone” – a rotating, column-shaped vortex – causes the volcanic plume to rotate on its axis.
The rotation, in turn, triggers a sheath of lightning and creates waterspouts or dust devils. The origins of these volcanic phenomena were previously unexplained.
“These results solve a long-standing mystery about the relationship between volcanic plumes and associated tornadoes, waterspouts and lightning, showing for the first time that rotation of a volcanic plume may be the primary cause of these effects,” said Sonia Esperanca, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) geosciences directorate.
“Rotation is an essential element of a strong volcanic plume,” said Pinaki Chakraborty, a computational scientist and engineer at the University of Illinois and the research paper’s lead author. “By taking into account the rotation, we can better predict the effects of volcanic eruptions,” he added.
In 2008, a photograph of the Mount Chaiten eruption in southern Chile showed what appeared to be a volcanic plume wrapped in a sheath of lightning.
A search for references to other occurrences of lightning sheaths led Chakraborty, mechanical engineer Gustavo Gioia and geologist Susan Kieffer to an obscure paper by a sea captain, published in 1811.
In that paper, the sea captain reported his observations of a volcanic vent that emerged from the sea in the Azores archipelago and formed a large volcanic plume.
According to the captain, the plume rotated on the water “like an (sic) horizontal wheel” and was accompanied by continuous “flashes of lightning” and a “quantity of waterspouts.”
This conjunction of rotation, lightning and waterspouts is characteristic of a familiar meteorological phenomenon seemingly unrelated to volcanic plumes: a tornadic thunderstorm.
The same process that creates a mesocyclone in a tornadic thunderstorm also creates a volcanic mesocyclone in a strong volcanic plume, according to Chakraborty.
“What happens in tornadic thunderstorms is analogous to what happens in strong volcanic plumes,” he said.
A strong volcanic plume consists of a vertical column of hot gases and dust topped with a horizontal “umbrella.” A volcanic mesocyclone sets the entire plume rotating on its axis.
The mesocyclone spawns waterspouts or dust devils, and groups the electric charges in the plume to form a sheath of lightning. (ANI)
Washington, March 25 (ANI): Analysis of deep sea rocks in Australia has suggested that they date back to 3.46 billion years ago, suggesting that not only did the oceans contain abundant oxygen then, but that the atmosphere was as oxygen rich as it is today.
The researchers drilled diagonally into the base of a hill in the Pilbara Craton in northwest Western Australia to obtain samples of jasper or hematite-rich chert that could not have been exposed to the atmosphere or water.
These jaspers could be dated to 3.46 billion years ago.
“Everyone agrees that this jasper is 3.46 billion years old,” said Hiroshi Ohmoto, professor of geochemistry, Penn State. he next step was to determine if the hematite formed near the water’s surface or in the depths.
Iron compounds exposed to ultra violet light can form ferric hydroxide, which can sink to the bottom as tiny particles and then converted to hematite at temperatures of at least 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
“There are a number of cases around the world where hematite is formed in this way,” said Ohmoto. “So, just because there is hematite, there is not necessarily oxygen in the water or the atmosphere,” he added.
The key to determining if ultra violet light or oxygen formed the hematite is the crystalline structure of the hematite itself.
If the precursors of hematite were formed at the surface, the crystalline structure of the rock would have formed from small particles aggregating producing large crystals with lots of empty spaces between.
Using transmission electron microscopy, the researchers did not find that crystalline structure.
“We found that the hematite from this core was made of a single crystal and therefore was not hematite made by ultra violet radiation,” said Ohmoto.
This could only happen if the deep ocean contained oxygen and the iron rich fluids came into contact at high temperatures.
Ohmoto and his team believe that this specific layer of hematite formed when a plume of heated water, like those found today at hydrothermal vents, converted the iron compounds into hematite using oxygen dissolved in the deep ocean water.
“This explains why this hematite is only found in areas with active submarine volcanism,” said Ohmoto. “It also means that there was oxygen in the atmosphere 3.46 billion years ago, because the only mechanism for oxygen to exist in the deep oceans is for there to be oxygen in the atmosphere,” he added.
In fact, the researchers suggest that to have sufficient oxygen at depth, there had to be as much oxygen in the atmosphere 3.46 billion years ago as there is in the present day atmosphere. (ANI)
Washington, March 15 (ANI): A geochemist of Indian origin has determined that an active African volcano possesses the most fluid lava in the world, which points toward its source being a mantle plume that is in complete pristine condition.
The lava composition indicates that a mantle plume-an upwelling of intense heat from near the core of the Earth-may be bubbling to life beneath Nyiragongo, an active African volcano, in the emocratic Republic of the Congo.
“This is the most fluid lava anyone has seen in the world,” said Asish Basu, professor of earth science at the University of Rochester, the geochemist who conducted the research.
“It’s unlike anything coming out of any other volcano. We believe we’re seeing the beginning of a plume that is pushing up the entire area and contributing to volcanism and earthquakes,” he added.
Basu analyzed the lava, which resides in the world’s largest lava lake-more than 600 feet wide inside the summit of Nyiragongo-and found that the isotopic compositions of neodymium and strontium are identical to ancient asteroids.
“This suggests that the lava is coming from a place deep inside the Earth where the source of molten rock is in its pristine condition,” said Basu.
“Because the Earth’s crust is undergoing constant change via tectonic motion, weathering, and resurfacing, its chemical composition has been dramatically altered over its 4-billion-year lifespan, but the Nyiragongo magma source in the deep mantle has not,” he added.
That magma source is thought to retain some of the solar system’s original make-up of elements, and this is what Basu and his colleagues believe they have detected in Nyiragongo’s lava lake.
Scientists believe mantle plumes can last hundreds of millions of years, and that their heat can create phenomena such as Yellowstone National Park or the string of Hawaiian Islands.
According to Basu, Nyiragongo’s frequent eruptions may be the birthing pains of a similar plume and the possible beginning of new large-scale geological formations in the region.
Basu said that other well known features of the region also point toward the idea of a growing plume.
“This is a very troubled region of the world, and we hope to be able to help better understand the conditions under which the people of that area must live,” said Basu.
Nyiragongo last erupted in 2002, sending its super-fluid lava down its slopes at more than 60 miles per hour toward the nearby town of Goma, destroying 4,500 buildings and leaving 120,000 homeless. (ANI)
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