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Thursday, January 30, 2014

10 fascinating historic maps of the Arctic

Love this resource posted by in Mapping on Thursday, February 21, 2013

Pulled from the CG Compass Blog


The mysteries of the Arctic have captivated explorers and mapmakers for centuries, as Europeans searched for northern sea routes to Asia.

The blending of myth and fact in the maps below represent our evolving understanding of the Arctic.



1. Mercator, 1595
This map, drawn by Flemish cartographer Mercator, was among the first to indicate an all-water route across the top of North America. An enormous magnetic rock encircled by four islands forms the North Pole. At the time, many people believed that the waters between the islands flowed northward into the centre of the Earth.




2. Barentsz, 1599
This 1599 map by Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz shows Spitsbergen — the main island in Norway's Svalbard archipelago — mapped for the first time. Labelled as Het Nieuwe Land, meaning “the new land” in Dutch, the Arctic island had been forgotten since its discovery by the Vikings 400 years prior to Barentsz's arrival. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia was named after the explorer.




3. Pitt, 1680
Published in the English Atlas by Moses Pitt, this North Pole map shows northern Canada in more detail than the first two — but a lot is still missing. Everything west of Baffin's Bay and Hudson's Bay was still unknown to the European explorers. Notice the depictions of Inuit culture and whaling along the top of the map, as well as the inset of Nova Zembla. Explorers took interest in the Russian island while searching for the Northeast Passage.



4. Scherer, 1702
Heinrich Scherer, a Jesuit cartographer from Germany, held on to the hope of a Northwest Passage via Hudson's Bay, though there had not been any major expeditions to the Canadian Arctic since the 1630s to provide more detail. His decorative map included the mythical island, Frisland.




5. de Wit, 1715
Large areas remain blank in this 1715 map by Dutch cartographer Frederick de Wit, which is decorated with scenes from the whaling industry.




6. Vaugondy & Diderot, 1772
The French Robert de Vaugondy family of mapmakers prepared this map of northwestern North America in 1772 as a supplement to Diderot's Encyclopédie. The map depicts a mythical Northwest Passage.




7. Thomson, 1814
Scottish cartographer John Thomson removed the possibility of a Northwest Passage from his 1814 map of the northern hemisphere. The hand-coloured map shows immense political and geographical detail around the hemisphere, with the exception of the Canadian Arctic. Notice how the Thomson has placed emphasis on detail and accuracy rather than the decorative elements of earlier maps.




8. Parry, 1820
Arctic explorer William Parry's 1820 map shows the route his expedition took in the quest to find a Northwest Passage. The expedition reached as far as Melville Island (shown on the left of the map), where the crew was iced in for 10 months. The Parry Channel, a natural waterway through the Canadian Arctic, was named for Parry.



9. Riou, 1866
This 1866 map of northern Canada and Greenland was published by the French author Jules Verne in his novel Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Known as a father of the science fiction genre, Verne is best known for his novels Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.




10. Stanford, 1876

Edward Stanford’s 1876 circumpolar map shows a well-defined Arctic coastline. The English cartographer and businessman coloured known sea ice light blue. He left the unexplored areas white. By 1880, the British government had given up on the hope of using the Northwest Passage as a shipping route and transferred sovereignty of the Arctic islands to Canada.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Vancouver: Nearby Georgia Basin May Amplify Ground Shaking from Next Quake

Original paper:

Sheri Molnar et al. Earthquake Ground Motion and 3D Georgia Basin Amplication in SW British Columbia: Deep Jan de Fuca Plate Scenario EarthquakesBulletin of the Seismological Society of America, January 2014

From: Science Daily


Jan. 20, 2014 — Tall buildings, bridges and other long-period structures in Greater Vancouver may experience greater shaking from large (M 6.8 +) earthquakes than previously thought due to the amplification of surface waves passing through the Georgia basin, according to two studies published by the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA). The basin will have the greatest impact on ground motion passing over it from earthquakes generated south and southwest of Vancouver

"For very stiff soils, current building codes don't include amplification of ground motion," said lead author Sheri Molnar, a researcher at the University of British Columbia. "While the building codes say there should not be any increase or decrease in ground motion, our results show that there could be an average amplification of up to a factor of three or four in Greater Vancouver."

The research provides the first detailed studies of 3D earthquake ground motion for a sedimentary basin in Canada. Since no large crustal earthquakes have occurred in the area since the installation of a local seismic network, these studies offer refined predictions of ground motion from large crustal earthquakes likely to occur.

Southwestern British Columbia is situated above the seismically active Cascadia subduction zone. A complex tectonic region, earthquakes occur in three zones: the thrust fault interface between the Juan de Fuca plate, which is sliding beneath the North America plate; within the over-riding North America plate; and within the subducting Juan de Fuca plate.

Molnar and her colleagues investigate the effect the three dimensional (3D) deep basin beneath Greater Vancouver has on the earthquake-generated waves that pass through it. The Georgia basin is one in a series of basins spanning form California to southern Alaska along the Pacific margin of the North America and is relatively wide and shallow. The basin is filled with sedimentary layers of silts, sands and glacial deposits.

While previous research suggested how approximately 100 meters of material near the surface would affect ground shaking, no studies had looked at the effect of the 3D basin structure on long period seismic waves.

To fill in that gap in knowledge, Molnar and colleagues performed numerical modeling of wave propagation, using various scenarios for both shallow quakes (5 km in depth) within the North America plate and deep quakes (40 -- 55 km in depth) within the Juan de Fuca subducting plate, the latter being the most common type of earthquake. The authors did not focus on earthquakes generated by a megathrust rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone, a scenario studied previously by co-author Kim Olsen of San Diego State University.

For these two studies, the authors modeled 10 scenario earthquakes for the subducting plate and 8 shallow crustal earthquakes within the North America plate, assuming rupture sites based on known seismicity. The computational analyses suggest the basin distorts the seismic radiation pattern -- how the energy moves through the basin -- and produces a larger area of higher ground motions. Steep basin edges excite the seismic waves, amplifying the ground motion.

The largest surface waves generated across Greater Vancouver are associated with earthquakes located approximately 80 km or more, south-southwest of the city, suggest the authors.

"The results were an eye opener," said Molnar. "Because of the 3D basin structure, there's greater hazard since it will amplify ground shaking. Now we have a grasp of how much the basin increases ground shaking for the most likely future large earthquakes."

In Greater Vancouver, there are more than 700 12-story and taller commercial and residential buildings, and large structures -- high-rise buildings, bridges and pipelines -- that are more affected by long period seismic waves, or long wavelength shaking. "That's where these results have impact," said Molnar.

















Sunday, January 19, 2014

Climate change’s new menace: mountain tsunamis

Toronto Star Sunday January 19, 2014


Last summer more than 6,000 died after glacial melt cascaded through valleys in northern India. Scientists expect such disasters to become more common.

Climate change’s new menace: mountain tsunamis
/ The ASSOCIATED PRESS
Climate change is partly to blame for the rains last June that heavily damaged the pilgramage town of Kedarnath and its majestic eight-century temple dedicated to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.

UTTARAKHAND, INDIA—The raging torrent hit in the morning, as Gopal Singh Bhist and his son, a cook and the leader of a pony train, prepared for work.

In minutes, the Mandakini river had breached its banks, sending a crushing hammer of water, ice and rock through the Himalayan villages in this north Indian state of Uttarakhand.

“There was no meaning in it. It didn’t give anyone a chance to survive,” said Bhist, a gaunt, weather-beaten man with a piercing stare. “Instantly, the water turned everything upside down.”


Bhist and his son were in Rambada, eight kilometres downstream from the Hindu pilgrimage town of Kedarnath. Each day during summer, an estimated 5,000 people trek through the valley to the bustling mountain outpost to visit the majestic eighth-century temple dedicated to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.

For the cooks, dishwashers, porters and other men who made their livelihood from the pilgrimage, a typical morning was suddenly transformed into a life or death struggle. The young and strong scrambled up the mountain. Older men, like Bhist, sought whatever cover they could find.

“I found a tree and threw my arms around it. I thought, ‘If the tree is washed away I will go along with it.’ I hung on alone,” Bhist said.

His son ran off with the younger men.

Soon, unknown thousands were swept away or buried under swirling sand.

The rain beat down as Bhist clung to the tree. A sudden hailstorm pelted him with ice, and then the rain beat down again, adding to the surging current surrounding his refuge.

Finally, in mid-afternoon, the weather cleared. Slowly, a tiny group of survivors gathered, and waited.
The pilgrimage route, and the entire town of Rambada, had washed away. There was no way up and no way down. It was as if the world they had known all their lives had been erased.

For four long days, Bhist and the rest of the older men huddled amid the ruins of Rambada, surviving on crackers and bags of bread dropped by an air force helicopter. The weather was too rough to land. Fearing the river was contaminated, they shared four bottles of water scavenged from a local shop, rationing their sips to make it last. Finally, the air force was able to evacuate them.

There was no sign of the young men who had scrambled for higher ground. Neither Bhist’s son nor any of the others ever came back.

“I waited four days hoping they would come back, but the people who went up the hill did not return,” Bhist said.

The mid-June 2013 deluge affected tens of thousands of people, washed away hundreds of villages, and killed at least 6,000 people. It stranded around 70,000 religious pilgrims in the mountains for weeks, as the Indian army and air force worked day and night to evacuate them. The official tally continued to fluctuate months after the disaster as more bodies were recovered.

Across rugged Himalayan valleys, hundreds of bridges were destroyed. Landslides covered thousands of kilometres of road. Houses, schools and hotels toppled into the torrent. Bustling markets were swept downstream.

The epicentre of the disaster was Kedarnath, near where Bhist lost his son. There, it levelled everything but the Shiva temple.

The immediate cause: the bursting of a natural dam holding back a glacial lake that ultimately triggered the “Himalayan tsunami.”

But the root cause was climate change, according to experts.

As the weeks passed, scientists concluded that something more complex had occurred than the simple bursting of a glacial dam.

The devastation was unleashed by a perfect storm consisting of heavy rain; warmer, looser snowpack; and most insidiously by a climate-induced glacial instability that, in future years, threatens to wreak havoc across the region.

Underlying all of these is a factor beyond India’s control: the changing pattern of the monsoon.

Lifelong residents say they have never seen a torrential downpour like the one that struck this past June. But the timing was as important as the volume of the rains. Since local scientists became aware of the issue of climate change, they’ve observed that the snow has been coming later and the rains earlier every year. At the same time, the sudden cloudbursts that most often cause flash flooding have become more frequent.

In 2013, the snowmelt runoff was at its peak when the monsoon arrived — letting loose the deadly cloudburst over Kedarnath.

“Earlier there was (such a) cloudburst (every) five, six, eight years. Now you see one every second year,” said Anil Joshi, who heads the Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization.
This year, unseasonal rains lashed Uttarakhand and parts of neighbouring Himachal Pradesh for three straight days.

“Continuous and heavy” rainfall occurred on June 15 and June 16, said Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology glaciologist D.P. Dobhal. “If you see the measurement of all the previous years it was 200-300 times more than normal.”

But as global warming progresses, local scientists warn that such extreme climatic events will grow increasingly common.

The shifting climate also has an adverse impact on the snow pack.

Warmer temperatures mean that snowfall that once began in October now arrives in January. That leaves too little time for it to harden into more heat-resistant ice. So when summer returns, the volume of meltwater is much larger.

Combined with the snowmelt, the June downpour caused flooding in countless sites along the six tributaries of the mighty Ganges that originate here.

Ironically, with more water now cascading through Himalayan valleys, climatologists fear the heavily populated downstream regions of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India will soon suffer from water shortages as the glacial ice becomes depleted.

Aside from the stronger rains and the later snowfall, melting glaciers are literally transforming the Himalayan landscape at an unprecedented rate.

An hour or two before the flash flood forced Bhist and the other labourers to scramble for safety, scientific observers at Chorabari Lake, about 2.5 kilometres upstream from Kedarnath, heard a loud bang, according to Dobhal. It had already been raining for days, and millions of litres of water had accumulated in the lake.

Now, Dobhal speculates the bang may have been the noise of an avalanche or landslide that knocked loose the natural dam of ice and rock holding back the lake — draining it in minutes and sending the full force of the waters down onto the town below.

It won’t be the last such disaster, experts fear.

Across the region, rising temperatures are fast creating thousands of such lakes. And the growing volume of meltwater is dangerously increasing the risk of sudden glacial lake outburst floods, according to the Kathmandu-based International Center for Integrated Mountain Development.

“When you talk about glacial lakes, in Nepal alone there are more than 1,400 lakes. And if you talk about the whole Himalayan Range . . . there are about 20,000 glacial lakes,” says Pradeep Mool, who monitors the risk of glacial lake outbursts for the mountain development centre.

More than 200 of these lakes have been classified as potentially dangerous.

Today, the tourists and pilgrims have been evacuated from Uttarakhand. But government officials and aid workers are still coping with the tragedy’s impact.

With the destruction of the roads and bridges connecting many villages to larger towns and cities, tens of thousands of people are now forced to hike for basic supplies such as rice and flour. Moreover, their renewed isolation threatens to erase the economic gains that come from access to markets and labour centres.

“We have villages that got totally destroyed,” said Aditi Kaur, 43, who heads the non-profit Mountain Children’s Foundation. “The river has just become so wide now, (and) the flow was so swift, that there is no rubble left to see.”

“The fields just disappeared into the river so the food-grain you are growing for the next year is not going to be there. The disaster that has happened today is also affecting tomorrow and a year from now.”

Worse still, in some of these villages, all of the men worked in Kedarnath during the pilgrimage season, so there are countless families whose fathers, husbands and brothers have all been lost.

Because few village women have ever left their fields and livestock for paid jobs — though all of them work from sunrise to sunset — a loss of husband and father means the loss of the family’s sole breadwinner.
That was the scene that confronted Bhist when, five days after he’d clung to a tree to save his life, he hiked four hours to his home village of Chandrapuri.

Some 64 of his downhill neighbours’ houses had been washed away, along with fields and crops. Half of the village was now a floodplain of grey sand.

There is now nobody but 64-year-old Bhist left to support the son’s wife and two small children — a 6-year-old girl and 4-year-old boy.

His religious faith, too, has been shattered.

“Where is God? We used to go there to pay our respects to God, to touch his feet and daily bow our heads before him. God could have saved us somehow or the other. He could have taken me and saved my son.”

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Review: A History of the World in Twelve Maps

 Jonathan Crowe

If somebody who was vaguely interested in maps wanted a book to get them started, I think I might point them toward A History of the World in Twelve Maps, written by Renaissance Studies professor Jerry Brotton. This book first appeared in September 2012 in Great Britain, where it’s now out in paperback. The U.S. edition came out last month in hardcover.


It’s a history of cartography that takes a rather unique approach: instead of providing a straight narrative history, Brotton focuses on twelve maps (or, more precisely, mapmaking endeavours), ranging from Ptolemy’s Geography to Google Earth. But Brotton does a lot more than talk about just twelve maps. Familiar maps like the Waldseemüller map and even the Peters projection share the spotlight with maps that are perhaps less well-known: the maps of al-Idrisi and Diogo Ribeiro, the Kangnido map, the geopolitical maps of Halford Mackinder. Brotton didn’t choose these maps for their intrisic qualities, but for their historical siginificance: for example, both the Hereford Mappa Mundi and Mercator’s world map reflect the religious imperatives of their times; Blaue’s Atlas Maior is placed in the context of a fiercely competitive 17th-century Dutch mapmaking industry; Cassini map of France demonstrates the shift to institutional mapping and modern surveying methods.

It’s accessible and engaging, but fiercely erudite. To a certain extent the maps themselves are sidelined by Brotton’s examination of their makers and their historical context, but that context is precisely the sort of thing I’m interested in. If nothing else, that context demonstrates that none of these maps were isolated productions: the products of trade, exploration, diplomacy and religious tradition. Not to know that is not to understand the maps.

Because this book is not lost in its own arcana despite being a serious and scholarly work, I suspect that it might well serve as a university-level introduction to the history of cartography. I’m quite impressed with A History of the World in Twelve Maps: I’ve been mucking about with maps for more than a decade, and this book still showed me that I had significant gaps in my understanding. I wish that this book existed a decade ago.

A History of the World in Twelve Maps
by Jerry Brotton
Viking (U.S.), November 2013 | Allen Lane (U.K.), September 2012
Buy at Amazon (Kindle, U.K.) | publisher’s page (U.K.) | Goodreads | LibraryThing

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Breaking up is hard to do - especially if you are a country.


A great article by Amanda Briney from About.com

What is Balkanization?

The Breaking Up of Countries is Not an Easy Process

Balkanization is a term used to describe the division or fragmentation of a state or region into smaller, often ethnically similar places. The term can also refer to the disintegration or break-up of other things such as companies, Internet websites or even neighborhoods. For the purposes of this article and from a geographic perspective, balkanization will describe the fragmentation of states and/or regions.

In some areas that have experienced balkanization the term describes the collapse of multiethnic states into places that are now ethnically similar dictatorships and have undergone many serious political and social issues such as ethnic cleansing and civil war. As a result, balkanization, especially with regard to states and regions, is typically not a positive term as there is often much political, social and cultural strife that takes place when balkanization occurs.

Development of the Term Balkanization 

Balkanization originally referred to Europe’s Balkan Peninsula and its historic break-up after control by the Ottoman Empire. The term balkanization itself was coined at the end of World War I following this break-up as well as that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire.

Since the early 1900s Europe as well as other places around the world have seen both successful and unsuccessful attempts at balkanization and there are still some efforts and discussions of balkanization in some countries today.

Attempts at Balkanization

In the 1950s and 1960s balkanization began occurring outside of the Balkans and Europe when several British and French colonial empires began fragmenting and breaking up in Africa. Balkanization was at its height in the early 1990s however when the Soviet Union collapsed and the former Yugoslavia disintegrated.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the countries of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were created. In the creation of some of these countries, there was often extreme violence and hostility. For example, Armenia and Azerbaijan experience periodic war over their borders and ethnic enclaves. In addition to violence in some, all of these newly created countries have experienced difficult periods of transition in their governments, economies and societies.

Yugoslavia was created out of a combination of over 20 different ethnic groups at the end of World War I. As a result of differences between these groups, there was friction and violence in the country. Following World War II, Yugoslavia began to gain more stability but by 1980 the different factions within the country began fighting for more independence. In the early 1990s, Yugoslavia finally disintegrated after around 250,000 people were killed by war. The countries eventually created out of the former Yugoslavia were Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Kosovo did not declare its independence until 2008 and it is still not recognized as fully independent by the entire world.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia are some of the most successful but also the most violent attempts at balkanization that have taken place. There have also been attempts to balkanize in Kashmir, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Kurdistan and Iraq. In each of these areas there are cultural and/or ethnic differences that have caused different factions to want to break away from the main country.

In Kashmir, Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir are trying to break away from India, while in Sri Lanka the Tamil Tigers (a separatist organization for the Tamil people) want to break away from that country. People in the southeastern part of Nigeria declared themselves to be the state of Biafra and in Iraq, Sunni and Shiite Muslims fight to break away from Iraq. In addition, Kurdish people in Turkey, Iraq and Iran have fought to create the State of Kurdistan. Kurdistan is currently not an independent state but it is rather a region with a mostly Kurdish population.

Balkanization of America and Europe

In recent years there has been talk of the "balkanized states of America" and of balkanization in Europe. In these cases, the term is not used to describe the violent fragmentation that occurred in places like the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. In these instances it describes potential divisions based political, economic and social differences. Some political commentators in the United States for example claim that balkanized or fragmented because it is special interests with elections in specific areas than with governing the entire country (West, 2012). Because of these differences there have also been some discussions and separatist movements at the national and local levels.

In Europe there are very large countries with different ideals and opinions and as a result, it has faced balkanization. For example there have been separatist movements on the Iberian Peninsula and in Spain, particularly in the Basque and Catalan regions (McLean, 2005).

Whether in the Balkans or in other parts of the world, violent or not violent, it is clear that balkanization is an important concept that has and will continue to shape the geography of the world.

Monday, January 13, 2014

Five environmental issues to watch in 2014

I found this article. originally published in the Toronto Star, to be quite interesting.

By:  Environment, Published on Fri Jan 03 2014

Here is a look at five environmental issues that will make headlines in 2014.

Five environmental issues to watch in 2014

Sue Ogrocki / AP file photo
Sections of pipe ready to become part of the Keystone Pipeline are stacked in a field near Ripley, Okla.
As he laid out big plans to combat climate change, he said the decision on whether to approve the last crucial leg of the Alberta-Texas Keystone XL pipeline was still in the hands of the U.S. State Department, but it would move forward only if it “doesn’t significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”

The climate factor, said Obama, cannot be ignored.

Activists believed he had indicated where the decision was headed; oil corporations said no, not at all.
We still don’t know how that will go but the Keystone XL decision will definitely be one of the big environment stories in 2014.

But it won’t be the only one.

The Keystone decision

Some time this year, the U.S. State Department will likely take a decision on Keystone XL, Canada’s most ambitious export project.

It has been under review for over six years. It has divided Americans, it has become the battle of a lifetime for some activists.

The pipeline proposed by TransCanada that will allow crude oil extracted from Alberta oilsands to be refined on the Gulf of Mexico coast. It will cut through at least six U.S. states and facilitate the extraction and release of 240 billion tonnes of carbon. Climate scientists argue this carbon must stay in the ground.

Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaign co-ordinator with Greenpeace, says Keystone will continue to be a major issue in 2014, too.

“It crystallizes what are usually fairly abstract issues into a clear decision between a clean or dirty energy future,” says Stewart.

Whichever way the decision goes — he would like it to be turned down — the important thing, he says, is that what was supposedly a “done deal or no-brainer decision in favour of the oil industry turned into a real fight.”

The CO2 conundrum

On May 10 2013, readings at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii showed that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — the key driver of recent climate change — had passed 400 parts per million.

CO2 concentrations have not been this high in millions of years and the rate of increase has been particularly high in the past five decades.

Pieter Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Hawaii, told the Star that it’s not clear what level of CO2 is sustainable.

“I don’t know what the tipping point is,” he said. “But it’s important to start reducing emissions now.”
Tackling CO2 and other greenhouse gases will be a big issue in 2014, says John Smol, a researcher on environmental change at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. “We need to dramatically change how we do things — we can’t keep treating the airways as an open public sewer and not expect consequences.”

The insurance files

The economic cost of extreme weather events has multiplied many times over in the past few years.
For instance, last year’s flooding in southern Alberta has been labelled the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history — up to $6 billion, by some estimates. Flooding in Toronto, after a torrential July downpour, also caused havoc.

Ultimately, the insured loss is borne by the premiums that policy holders pay and, in case of higher losses than premium income, by the insurance companies’ investors.

The more money that is used to pay insurance claims after an extreme event, the less can be used to increase the wealth of a society, says Peter Höppe, head of Geo Risks Research at Munich Re., a reinsurance company in Munich, Germany.

On the future, Höppe says that while there has been a long-term increase in the cost of weather-related disasters in North America because of increasingly severe weather and increased property values “but this does not mean that every year will show an increase.”

The Algae blooms

Swathes of blue-green algae in Lake Erie made big news in 2013.

Algae blooms have caused beaches to close, making a dent into the tourism industry. Its density has also slowed down boats.

Will the blooms be back in 2014?

The weather plays a critical role in algae bloom formation, says Raj Bejankiwar, lead scientist of the International Joint Commission’s Lake Erie Ecosystem Priority (LEEP).

If it is a wet, stormy spring, then yes.

Algae blooms are caused largely by phosphorus runoffs. Phosphorus is used as fertilizer, it’s also in manure and other waste products from agri-business operations such as pig farms and greenhouses.

When it rains a lot, there are more phosphorus runoffs.

Bejankiwar says the International Joint Commission is working on a report that will have recommendations for U.S. and Canada to mitigate the blooms.

Among other things, governments are being asked to ban application of fertilizers in winter. “When snow melts, phosphorus is washed away. It is of no use.”

The litigation question

Greenpeace’s Keith Stewart believes this could be the year of court battles, especially with regard to Alberta’s oilsands.

Among others, First Nations communities in British Columbia are set to fight over the giant Northern Gateway pipeline, which was recently given the go-ahead by the National Energy Board, a federally convened review panel.

“All litigation, all the time, is what I see on the horizon,” Larry Innes, lawyer for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, told The Canadian Press earlier this week.

In the past year or so, Ottawa and Edmonton have rewritten the book on resource development. Everything, from how First Nations communities will be consulted to land use planning to oilsands monitoring, has been changed.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

It's So Cold In Canada The Ground Has Literally Been Cracking Open


Christina Sterbenz Business Insider
Jan. 5, 2014, 4:22 PM


A few nights ago, residents across Canada took to Twitter, announcing the loud noises they heard during the night, CBC News Toronto reported.

Although many called police stations, they didn't hear gunshots or sonic booms. Instead "frost quakes," also known as cryoeisems, caused the hullabaloo.

These occur when temperatures drop so drastically and quickly, ground water (like accumulated rain or even wetness in the soil) immediately freezes and causes the earth to crack open.

When water freezes, it expands. Sometimes the ground, especially rigid surfaces like the pavement pictured below, just can't take the pressure.




Screenshot via CTV News

Here, pavement froze so quickly, it cracked open, known as a "frost quake."

Two years ago in 2011, confused Indiana and Ohio residents reported the same phenomenon.

Temperatures reached about -4 degrees Fahrenheit in Toronto on the night of January 3, CBC reported.

Considering temperatures across the U.S. will match and even beat Canada early this week, residents might hear some cracks in the night, as well.

Although frost quakes don't share their causes with earth quakes, a seismograph — an instrument that monitors movement of the earth — can pick up the events, if the ground cracks close enough to the device.

People experiencing frost quakes also often mistake them for earthquakes, perhaps the origin of the name.

Check out this reading from National Resources Canada:





National Resources Canada

Recorded on the vertical component of the seismic station in Sadowa, Ontario, near Georgian Bay (SADO), on January 18, 2000.

A frost quake isn't an ice quake — another non-tectonic seismic event caused by glacial movements. Ice quakes occur when water pools underneath a glacier and acts as a lubricant, allowing it to move.

According to this news video from Peterborough, Ontario, the loud cracking woke, and even scared, an adorable elderly woman. Others in the area reported similar reactions.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-a-frost-quake-2014-1#ixzz2poyAgGYz

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Mine Landslide Triggered Earthquakes: Record-Breaking Slide Would Bury Central Park 66 Feet Deep

  1. Kristine L. Pankow, Jeffrey R. Moore, J. Mark Hale, Keith D. Koper, Tex Kubacki, Katherine M. Whidden, Michael K. McCarter. Massive landslide at Utah copper mine generates wealth of geophysical data. GSA Today, 2014; : 4 DOI: 10.1130/GSATG191A.1


Jan. 6, 2014 — Last year's gigantic landslide at a Utah copper mine probably was the biggest nonvolcanic slide in North America's modern history, and included two rock avalanches that happened 90 minutes apart and surprisingly triggered 16 small earthquakes, University of Utah scientists discovered.
The landslide -- which moved at an average of almost 70 mph and reached estimated speeds of at least 100 mph -- left a deposit so large it "would cover New York's Central Park with about 20 meters (66 feet) of debris," the researchers report in the January 2014 cover study in the Geological Society of America magazine GSA Today.

While earthquakes regularly trigger landslides, the gigantic landslide the night of April 10, 2013, is the first known to have triggered quakes. The slide occurred in the form of two huge rock avalanches at 9:30 p.m. and 11:05 p.m. MDT at Rio Tinto-Kennecott Utah Copper's open-pit Bingham Canyon Mine, 20 miles southwest of downtown Salt Lake City. Each rock avalanche lasted about 90 seconds.

While the slides were not quakes, they were measured by seismic scales as having magnitudes up to 5.1 and 4.9, respectively. The subsequent real quakes were smaller.

Kennecott officials closely monitor movements in the 107-year-old mine -- which produces 25 percent of the copper used in the United States -- and they recognized signs of increasing instability in the months before the slide, closing and removing a visitor center on the south edge of the 2.8-mile-wide, 3,182-foot-deep open pit, which the company claims is the world's largest humanmade excavation.

Landslides -- including those at open-pit mines but excluding quake-triggered slides -- killed more than 32,000 people during 2004-2011, the researchers say. But no one was hurt or died in the Bingham Canyon slide. The slide damaged or destroyed 14 haul trucks and three shovels and closed the mine's main access ramp until November.

"This is really a geotechnical monitoring success story," says the new study's first author, Kris Pankow, associate director of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations and a research associate professor of geology and geophysics. "No one was killed, and yet now we have this rich dataset to learn more about landslides."

There have been much bigger human-caused landslides on other continents, and much bigger prehistoric slides in North America, including one about five times larger than Bingham Canyon some 8,000 years ago at the mouth of Utah's Zion Canyon.

But the Bingham Canyon Mine slide "is probably the largest nonvolcanic landslide in modern North American history," said study co-author Jeff Moore, an assistant professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah.

There have been numerous larger, mostly prehistoric slides -- some hundreds of times larger. Even the landslide portion of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption was 57 times larger than the Bingham Canyon slide.
News reports initially put the landslide cost at close to $1 billion, but that may end up lower because Kennecott has gotten the mine back in operation faster than expected.

Until now, the most expensive U.S. landslide was the 1983 Thistle slide in Utah, which cost an estimated $460 million to $940 million because the town of Thistle was abandoned, train tracks and highways were relocated and a drainage tunnel built.

Pankow and Moore conducted the study with several colleagues from the university's College of Mines and Earth Sciences: J. Mark Hale, an information specialist at the Seismograph Stations; Keith Koper, director of the Seismograph Stations; Tex Kubacki, a graduate student in mining engineering; Katherine Whidden, a research seismologist; and Michael K. McCarter, professor of mining engineering.

The study was funded by state of Utah support of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations and by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Rockslides Measured up to 5.1 and 4.9 in Magnitude, but Felt Smaller

The University of Utah researchers say the Bingham Canyon slide was among the best-recorded in history, making it a treasure trove of data for studying slides.

Kennecott has estimated the landslide weighed 165 million tons. The new study estimated the slide came from a volume of rock roughly 55 million cubic meters (1.9 billion cubic feet). Rock in a landslide breaks up and expands, so Moore estimated the landslide deposit had a volume of 65 million cubic meters (2.3 billion cubic feet).

Moore calculated that not only would bury Central Park 66 feet deep, but also is equivalent to the amount of material in 21 of Egypt's great pyramids of Giza.

The landslide's two rock avalanches were not earthquakes but, like mine collapses and nuclear explosions, they were recorded on seismographs and had magnitudes that were calculated on three different scales:
  • The first slide at 9:30 p.m. MDT measured 5.1 in surface-wave magnitude, 2.5 in local or Richter magnitude, and 4.2 in duration or "coda" magnitude.
  • The second slide at 11:05 p.m. MDT measured 4.9 in surface-wave magnitude, 2.4 in Richter magnitude and 3.5 in coda magnitude.
Pankow says the larger magnitudes more accurately reflect the energy released by the rock avalanches, but the smaller Richter magnitudes better reflect what people felt -- or didn't feel, since the Seismograph Stations didn't receive any such reports. That's because the larger surface-wave magnitudes record low-frequency energy, while Richter and coda magnitudes are based on high-frequency seismic waves that people usually feel during real quakes.

So in terms of ground movements people might feel, the rock avalanches "felt like 2.5," Pankow says. "If this was a normal tectonic earthquake of magnitude 5, all three magnitude scales would give us similar answers."
The slides were detected throughout the Utah seismic network, including its most distant station some 250 miles south on the Utah-Arizona border, Pankow says.

The Landslide Triggered 16 Tremors

The second rock avalanche was followed immediately by a real earthquake measuring 2.5 in Richter magnitude and 3.0 in coda magnitude, then three smaller quakes -- all less than one-half mile below the bottom of the mine pit.

The Utah researchers sped up recorded seismic data by 30 times to create an audio file in which the second part of the slide is heard as a deep rumbling, followed by sharp gunshot-like bangs from three of the subsequent quakes.

Later analysis revealed another 12 tiny quakes -- measuring from 0.5 to minus 0.8 Richter magnitude. (A minus 1 magnitude has one-tenth the power of a hand grenade.) Six of these tiny tremors occurred between the two parts of the landslide, five happened during the two days after the slide, and one was detected 10 days later, on April 20. No quakes were detected during the 10 days before the double landslide.

"We don't know of any case until now where landslides have been shown to trigger earthquakes," Moore says. "It's quite commonly the reverse."

A Long, Fast Landslide Runout

The landslide, from top to bottom, fell 2,790 vertical feet, but its runout -- the distance the slide traveled -- was almost 10,072 feet, or just less than two miles.

"It was a bedrock landslide that had a characteristically fast and long runout -- much longer than we would see for smaller rockfalls and rockslides," Moore says.

While no one was present to measure the speed, rock avalanches typically move about 70 mph to 110 mph, while the fastest moved a quickly as 220 mph.

So at Bingham Canyon, "we can safely say the material was probably traveling at least 100 mph as it fell down the steepest part of the slope," Moore says.

The researchers don't know why the slide happened as two rock avalanches instead of one, but Moore says, "A huge volume like this can fail in one episode or in 10 episodes over hours."

The Seismograph Stations also recorded infrasound waves from the landslide, which Pankow says are "sound waves traveling through the atmosphere that we don't hear" because their frequencies are so low.
Both seismic and infrasound recordings detected differences between the landslide's two rock avalanches. For example, the first avalanche had stronger peak energy at the end that was lacking in the second slide, Pankow says.

"We'd like to be able to use data like this to understand the physics of these large landslides," Moore says.
The seismic and infrasound recordings suggest the two rock avalanches were similar in volume, but photos indicate the first slide contained more bedrock, while the second slide contained a higher proportion of mined waste rock -- although both avalanches were predominantly bedrock.