The authorities have already evacuated everyone living within an eight-kilometer radius, as small earthquakes, glowing lava at the peak, and falling ash created fears that the volcano was going to erupt once again. According to NASA:

On the evening of December 14, the local volcano observatory raised the alert level to Level 3, which means "magma is close to the crater and hazardous explosive eruption is imminent."

This natural-color image of Mayon was captured on December 15, 2009, by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. A small plume of ash and/or steam is blowing west from the summit. Dark-colored lava or debris flows from previous eruptions streak the flanks of the mountain. A ravine on the southeast slope is occupied by a particularly prominent lava or debris flow.

According to local news reports from December 16, fragments of lava were continuously detaching from the lava filing the crater and cascading down slope up to 3 kilometers. Lava flows reached several hundred meters from the summit, but they were still confined to ravines.

[NASA Earth Observatory]

According to NASA, whose researchers first wrote about this lingering smog bank on Oct. 30:

A temperature inversion may be responsible for the build up of pollution over eastern China. Normally, air cools with altitude, but occasionally, a layer of cool air will be trapped beneath a layer of warm air. Since the cool air is more dense than the air above it, the two layers don't mix and pollutants build up in the cool air near Earth's surface.

Temperature inversions develop most often during the winter, when long, cool nights chill the ground. The cold land cools the air nearest the ground, leaving the air at higher altitudes warmer. The two layers of air do not easily mix, and the temperature inversion can last for days if winds are calm.

So far it has lasted for more than a week. Is this the future of weather?

via NASA

According to New Scientist:

The magma inside the volcano did not reach the surface and erupt as a fountain of lava – instead, it was diverted into the continental rift underground. The magma cooled into a wedge-shaped "dike" that was then uplifted, rupturing the surface and creating a 500-metre-long, 60-metre-deep crack . . . Eventually it could reach the east coast of Ethiopia and fill up with seawater. "At some point, if that spreading and rifting continues, then that area will be flooded," says Ken Macdonald, a marine geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study.

Ebinger says this won't happen any time soon – it would take around 4 million years for the crack to reach the size of the Red Sea.

[via New Scientist]

By the time Jimina hit Mexico, it was no longer technically a hurricane, though it still did huge amounts of damage. Image 1 shows Jimena at full category 4 hurricane strength in late August, and the other two satellite photos show the diminished tropical storm as it lashed out at Mexico in early September. The picture of the storm on the ground is in Baja California.

Hurricane Jimena News at Huffington Post

Satellite photos by NOAA/Getty Images. Photo of the storm in Baja California by Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images.

According to a release from Nature Geoscience, where the study was published yesterday:

Itsushi Uno and colleagues used satellite and model data to show that a storm in China's Taklimakan Desert in May 2007 generated dust clouds that were lifted 8-10 km above the Earth's surface, and transported more than one full circle around the Earth. When the dust reached the north-western Pacific Ocean for a second time, the subsidence of a high-pressure system caused the dust-laden clouds to descend into the lower atmosphere and some of the dust was then deposited in the ocean.

The analysis also suggests that the dust particles may have triggered ice formation in the high-altitude clouds.

The researchers suggest that this ice could have affected temperature as well.

Coupled with the amazing infographic, above, this news makes it clear that particles in the atmosphere affect the entire Earth - not just the regions where they formed. This obviously tells us something about how pollution could affect regions far removed from it. But more generally, it gives scientists more information about the formation of weather patterns.

via Nature Geoscience

National Geographic explains:

Yellowstone is a volcano, and not just any volcano. The oldest, most famous national park in the United States sits squarely atop one of the biggest volcanoes on Earth . . . The last three super-eruptions have been in Yellowstone itself. The most recent, 640,000 years ago, was a thousand times the size of the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980, which killed 57 people in Washington. But numbers do not capture the full scope of the mayhem. Scientists calculate that the pillar of ash from the Yellowstone explosion rose some 100,000 feet, leaving a layer of debris across the West all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Pyroclastic flows-dense, lethal fogs of ash, rocks, and gas, superheated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit-rolled across the landscape in towering gray clouds. The clouds filled entire valleys with hundreds of feet of material so hot and heavy that it welded itself like asphalt across the once verdant landscape. And this wasn't even Yellowstone's most violent moment. An eruption 2.1 million years ago was more than twice as strong, leaving a hole in the ground the size of Rhode Island.

It's worth reading the rest of this article - it beautifully captures the pyrotechnic scientific mystery that is Yellowstone Park. Photographer Mark Thiessen captured the blowholes where Yellowstone lets off scalding, mineral-rich water.

via National Geographic (Thanks Marilyn Terrell!)

Created by civil engineering professors Ross Boulanger of UC Davis and James Michael Duncan of University of Maryland, the Geo Photo Album is full of mega-disasters coupled with precise explanations of why buildings have topped or dams have burst. Essentially, you can read the album as a compendium of engineering disasters.

But it is also a compendium of engineering fixes - at least half the site is devoted to images of properly-conceived dams, gas storage tanks, and foundations, that are likely to remain standing in the event of disaster. Check out a few of the images here, along with Boulanger and Duncan's engineering insights. If you need more (and of course you will), you can go to the Geo Photo Album.

Say Boulanger and Duncan about this 1999 earthquake damage in Turkey:

The mat foundation for this building was exposed when it overturned. This building has a relatively large height-to-width ratio, making it more susceptible to overturning failure.

Here's another shot of the 1999 Turkey quake damage. Boulanger writes:

While these buildings are now partly submerged, the collapse of the one building and the near collapse of the other building are illustrative of structural performance throughout Golcuk, and are mainly attributed to the effects of shaking.

The researchers write:

This building hangs over the head scarp of a landslide in decomposed bedrock that was triggered by the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Several homes were buried and over 30 people killed by the landslide.

Here is a picture of a port damaged by the same Kobe earthquake. Says Boulanger:

This car ramp at a ferry terminal collapsed when the fill materials liquefied and the quay wall displaced outwards. The graben behind the quay walls is filled with water.

This is a massive sinkhole that was created when a gypsum stack collapsed in Florida. Gypsum stacks are byproducts of phosphate mining processes. Say the researchers:

This massive sinkhole formed on top of a gypsum stack in Florida, and contributed to contamination of the aquifer below. Grouting work by Hayward Baker to seal the aquifer from the gypsum stack was recognized with a national award.

And here's one possible solution to bad engineering. Here you can see a picture from a project to make the Port of Oakland less likely to fall apart in an earthquake. Boulanger explains:

The grid of soil-cement columns is exposed at this location. The piles within the grid will support a wharf that is being constructed. The grid of soil-cement walls extends down through soft soils into harder, competent soils, and acts to increase the stability of the channel slope.

In this image, you can see the volcanic plume extending into the sky. But you can also see the atmospheric shock wave from the eruption, which pushed the clouds back into a ring in the sky. Also visible is a smooth, fluffy white cloud on top of the rapidly rising ash column. This is likely a result of rapidly rising water vapor condensing on top of the plume.

A detail of the image also reveals what is known as the pyroclastic flow. This is a mixture of super hot gas and ash that can travel at up to 130 miles per hour. It's similar to the kind of rapidly moving pyroclastic surge that supposedly wiped out Pompeii so quickly, killing everyone in its path. It's a beautiful image, dense with interesting quirks that demonstrate just how powerful, dangerous and complex volcanoes are.

via NASA Earth Observatory

According to Gregory Ryskin of Northwestern University, Earth's magnetic field lines are being dragged by ocean currents, and changing due to the oceans' own magnetic fields, which are generated by electricity flowing through the seawater. According to other scientists, however, not so much:

Despite the supporting evidence, the hypothesis has been met with strong objections from mainstream geophysicists. "Physicists should know better," said one when contacted by New Scientist.

Not everyone is entirely dismissing the idea out of hand, however; Imperial College London geophysicist Raymond Hide says that his water theory holds water, and suggests that geophycisists should be thanking Ryskin for his research. We're just wondering why the poles are moving if it's not because of the oceans...

Earth's poles may be tugged around by oceans [New Scientist]

The image above was snapped by GeoEye-1, a commercial satellite. Located about 100 miles southwest of the city of Anchorage, the over 10-thousand-foot-tall Mt. Redoubt has been spewing steam and ash high into the atmosphere, but now NASA reports that its emissions are closer to Earth. This plume is extremely dark, which suggests the mountain is mostly erupting with ash instead of steam this week. And that's not very good news. According to NASA:

Volcanic ash consists of tiny shards of rocks and volcanic glass. Extremely abrasive and mildly corrosive, this kind of ash can even conduct electricity when wet, sometimes leading to electrical outages. Winds can easily carry volcanic ash hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from the eruption site.

So the ash we're seeing here is potentially quite dangerous. Below is another satellite image of the Redoubt eruption, taken last week.

via NASA Earth Observatory

I also appreciate the way the newscaster clarifies that the "leap second is like a leap year - only shorter." Seconds are shorter than days! Good to know.

I feel sorry for the poor guy from NIST who was brought in as an expert and obviously quoted way out of context in this segment. He's explaining something a lot more complicated than "weather makes the Earth slow down." But good old ABC made it sound as if he really thought the only reason we need a leap second is that we had a lot of snowmelt.

Good to know that as we charge into the year 2009, science coverage is getting even better at the major networks. Probably for the best that CNN fired Miles O'Brien along with its whole Earth and space reporting team - as this ABC segment makes clear, any old person can understand teh sience. We all know that seconds are shorter than days!

This week in San Francisco, researchers at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union presented a case for Titan's cryovolcanism, which is today's awesome term of art from the world of geophysics. According to Yahoo News:

Scientists believe methane gas breaks up in the atmosphere and forms clouds that rain methane.

The source of methane remains a mystery. Scientists favoring the volcanic theory say methane eruptions from Titan's interior could explain the moon's smoggy atmosphere.

Data from the spectrometer instrument on Cassini found bright spots on two regions on Titan. In one of the regions, scientists found evidence of ammonia frost that they interpreted as coming from the interior.

You can see one of those dark spots in the image from Titan above.

[via Yahoo News]

Listen to that sound. I want Meshuggah or Arch Enemy to sample that one and scream over it about industrial death. Over at Discover, io9 pal Michael Reilly describes this second video:

Several kilometers of ice shearing off the Greenland ice sheet is always awesome to behold, and the few thousand folks living down-fjord of Jakobshavn agree; ice-induced tsunamis regularly crash ashore in Ilulissat Harbor, 50 kilometers away from the glacier's edge. A phenomenon they've dubbed 'kaneling.' Rest assured, though, these waves are usually just 1/2 meter high or less when they arrive in the harbor, and they're mostly harmless...mostly. This [video] is a slightly more dangerous version of an ice-tsunami. And yes, that there at the end of the video, that's a couple of guys in a little boat fleeing for their lives.

Awesome Video of Greenland Glacier Disintegrating [via Discover]

According to the Geological Survey of Finland, which created the map out of years of survey research:

This map is the first global compilation of the wealth of magnetic anomaly information derived from more than 50 years of aeromagnetic surveys over land areas, research vessel magnetometer traverses at sea, and observations from earth-orbiting satellites, supplemented by anomaly values derived from oceanic crustal ages. The objective is to provide an interpretive dimension to surface observations of the Earth’s composition and geologic structure. Metamorphism, petrology, and redox state all have important effects on the magnetism of crustal materials.

The magnetic anomalies represented on this map originate primarily in igneous and metamorphic rocks, in the Earth's crust and possibly, uppermost mantle. Magnetic anomalies represent an estimate of the short-wavelenght (< 2600 km) fields associated with these parts of the Earth, after estimates of fields from other sources have been subtracted from the measured field magnitude. In most places the magnetic anomaly field is less than 1 per cent of the total magnetic field.

Magnetic Anomaly Map of the World [via Commission for Geological Maps of the World]

Of course you do. Most of this region of the planet has never before been photographed. The stark shadows you see in the ridges here are caused by the area's proximity to the dividing line between night and day on the planet, which exists in a constant state of boiling heat or freezing cold.

Stunning New Views of Mercury [via Space]

Nobody seems to be asking the most important question: What exactly is the chemical composition of this so-called water? Partly this is because it was only yesterday that scientists got a big enough chunk of the stuff inside Phoenix's ovens, where it can melt the ice and figure out its molecular composition using a mass spectrometer. So we won't know the exact composition of Martian water for a while. But mostly calling the stuff "water ice" vagues out the truth, which is that this ice is only technically water. No creature on Earth could drink it. In fact, as planetary scientist Andrew Knoll said at the AAAS meeting earlier this year, water on Mars is probably so salty and acidic that it would be essentially poison.

So if you are totally freaking out about how all this water on Mars means we can set up colonies there right away, and meet the aliens who live on the stuff in vast underground aquifers, sorry. We're not going to be able to zoom up there and start ice mining to support our colonies. We'll need to pour a lot of resources into de-salinating the stuff, and sucking all the acid out, before it's potable.

One of the interesting side-effects of this water discovery, however, is that it may re-awaken the scientific community's interest in searching for extraterrestrial life. As Eric Sofge argues on Popular Mechanics, Water is usually considered a precursor for living things, and now that we know water exists under the ground on our close planetary neighbor, it's becomes more statistically likely that water could exist elsewhere too. Or that life could exist on Mars.

If you want the full story on Martian water as it's breaking, check out the excellent coverage on Popular Mechanics. But if you want some back story, check out what planetary geologist Bethany Ehlmann had to say on The Scientific Activist about her work on the Martian ice water. Image via NASA.

Reporting for the Anchorage Daily News, Beth Bragg captures the odd excitement of local volcano researchers:

"Things are very hopping," research geophysicist Peter Cervelli of the Alaska Volcano Observatory said Monday afternoon. "We've been ramped up 24/7 for nine days because of Okmok, and to have Cleveland suddenly go off keeps us busy. I'm not sure I'd describe it as fun, but it's certainly exciting."

I love any geophysicist who describes a volcanic eruption as "very hopping." Images via AP.

Dueling Volcanoes [Anchorage Daily News via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]

Above is a picture taken a few days ago of the ash plume. According to PhysOrg:

The ash plume, which is thousands of feet high, indicates an unknown geophysical change deep inside the volcano. Scientists also said small amounts of lava erupted from the crater Monday.

The National Park Service has closed Crater Rim Drive through the south caldera area until further notice, and people with asthma and other breathing problems were told to avoid downwind areas. USGS said the possibility of future small explosions from Halemaumau Crater cannot be ruled out.

Kilauea Spews Ash [PhysOrg]

The photo, taken by Jeff Kerr, was the Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday. It showcases why the shelf cloud is particularly menacing — not only does it presage a storm, but it's attached to another bank of clouds above it. So it's literally a gigantic wall of cloud leading a cold front. (Though it's not the same as a wall cloud, which trails a storm system rather than leading it.)

Also, this image shows off the amazing beauty of the Saskatchewan prairies and reminds me that sometimes Earth is the most alien-looking planet I know.