week #12: a bad week for S. America & Europe

(since last week encompassed Thanksgiving, I made the news journals extra credit, so there was no blog entry for week #11.)

What my students found in their search through the news:

• the random award is a tie between: a study of a Tennessee coal ash spill that occurred two years ago and that Saturn’s moon Rhea has an atmosphere
• flooding in the Balkans & extreme cold across northern Europe was reported this past week (wind is blowing north to south instead of its normal west to east)
• New York may be the first state to ban fracking if Gov Paterson signs the legislation
• EQs: 6.7 magnitude near Papua New Guinea on Thursday, 2. December; a 6.9 in Japan on Monday, 29. November, that resulted in the “Disaster Proof: Japan Endures 6.9 Quake” headline in Time that at least one person commented on via Twitter this week (which I can’t find now…); a sequence of smaller earthquakes near Reno, Nevada at the end of November caught the eye of one student; the 3.9 magnitude EQ off of NY on Monday, 30. November also caught Brian’s (@clasticdetritus) eye as to its placement on the continental shelf; a 6.1 event off the coast of Fiji on Wednesday, 1. December
• volcanoes: Tungurahua stepped up its activity on Saturday, 4. December, and a number of locals have been evacuated from the area, though I really doubt that there is still a glacier on the volcano as CNN reported (more coverage of the Ecuadorian volcano can be found from Erik at the Eruptions blog); Mt. Merapi refuses to leave the news as reports of lahars flowing down the sides of the volcano causing even more evacuations (Erik also has coverage of this Indonesian volcano)
• landslides: Venezuela has suffered from severe rain leading to mudslides & the death of at least 21 (this is relatively “minor” in comparison to the neighboring landslide issues in Columbia, which Dave at the Landslide Blog addressed last week); also in the mass movement category, avalanches have been reported in Scotland (also covered by Dave)
• planetary science: the question has been raised whether Tharsis Rise (on Mars), which includes Olympus Mons, should be the largest volcano in the galaxy
• in case you were living under a rock (or a pile of papers to be graded), NASA made a huge fuss last week that led to the announcement of a Science (which is behind a paywall) paper concerning bacteria that like to eat arsenic–cool, but did not live up to the hype (yes, there was tweeting about this… too much, in fact, to narrow down a few to quote)
• topics that relate to last week’s lectures (glaciers, relative dating of rocks): a coroner in New Zealand calls to close access to local glaciers due to two deaths that occurred 2009; the exceptional preservation of soft parts of a 440 Ma Eurypterid due to glacial silt in South Africa (both glacial & relative time!); a discussion about whether global warming or Indian troop activity on the ice is causing melting of the Siachen Glacier on the India / Pakistan border was found by one student

Just as a heads up, this is the 2nd to last week of this assignment.   Next semester, I have mineralogy & structure, so my class-related blog posts will have a different focus.

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