Earthweek: a diary of the planet
Poseidon waves
The huge ocean swells that can form on an otherwise calm sea are now a little less frequent in our changing climate, but those that do form are getting taller. Researchers at Britain’s National Oceanography Center made the discovery by looking at data from eastern Pacific buoys between 1994 and 2016. They also found there are more rogue waves in winter, which are “more rogue.” Defined as waves that are at least twice as high as the background ocean, rogue waves are a growing threat to global shipping as they increase in height by about 1 percent each year. It appears the waves are getting taller, in part because oceanic winds are increasing.
Earthquakes
At least two people were killed on the Indonesian island of Lombok by a landslide triggered by a magnitude 5.5 quake. Earth movements were also felt in Taiwan, western Pakistan, western Turkey, southwestern Greece and central Oklahoma.
Hydrogen power
Stanford scientists have proved they can use solar power to convert salt water taken from San Francisco Bay to create hydrogen gas. On a larger scale, the process could achieve a truly pollutionfree and carbon-neutral energy source to power cars and other devices. Current methods of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen require the use of expensive purified water, which doesn’t corrode the electrodes that produce the splitting as does seawater at high voltages. The researchers found that by using electrodes rich in negatively charged layers of nickel-iron hydroxide and nickel sulfide over a nickel foam core, the corrosion is significantly reduced.
Tiny voyager
The epic migration of a tiny bird was tracked as it traveled 12,400 miles back and forth between Alaska and the Amazon. Scientists at Canada’s University of Guelph say the 0.4-ounce blackpoll warbler is one of the fastest-declining songbirds in North America. The record-holding bird was observed taking 18 days to fly from Nome, Alaska, to the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas, where it rested and fattened up for almost a month. The bird then endured a nonstop 2½-day flight across the open water of the Atlantic toward its wintering grounds in South America. Wayward gorillas
Australian scientists believe they know why the endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park are leaving the reserve to raid nearby eucalyptus plantations, causing conflict with the human population. It had been thought that the gorillas made the regular forays into the nearby farms only because the plants there were richer in protein and more digestible than what is available in the park. But researchers at the University of Western Australia found that the eucalyptus bark is rich in salt, which the gorillas crave and will go out of their way to get.
Billion-volt storm
The most powerful thunderstorm on record, with an electric potential of 1.3 billion volts, has been measured by scientists from Japan and India. They made the novel discovery by using a muon telescope in southern India to estimate the intensity of the record storm by measuring the flow of the high-energy muon particles it blocked. Muons are subatomic particles that rain down after being created when cosmic rays collide with Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Tropical cyclones
Cyclone Idai killed hundreds of people as it inundated parts of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. U.N. officials predict it may have inflicted the worst weather-related disaster on record anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Category-3 Cyclone Trevor knocked out power and closed ports on far northern Australia’s Cape York Peninsula. Cyclone Veronica was predicted to strike northwestern Australia.
©2019 Earth Environment Service