Fast food ice dirtier than toilet water, study finds
June 5, 2013 | RTAmerica
A new study by UK's The Daily Mail found that ice from McDonald's,
Starbucks, Burger King and KFC, to name a few, contains more bacteria
than toilet water...[...]
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
The REAL Reason Housing Prices Have Skyrocketed
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| © unknown |
June 5, 2013 | Washington's Blog
How Another Housing Bubble Was Blown … And Why
Preface: In Part 1, we showed that mortgage applications are down, and it is really institutional investors driving the housing boom. Part 2 explains why.
Housing prices have boomed because:
(1) Lenders are artificially keeping vacant houses off of the marketArtificially Suppressed Housing Inventory
and
(2) The Obama administration has thrown all sorts of artificial incentives at institutional investors to pump up prices
Naked Capitalism reported last August:
Two trends are apparent. One is that banks are delaying foreclosures, or not foreclosing at all despite long-term delinquencies. The other is that private equity firms – flush with cash thanks to Tim Geithner’s religious devotion to trickle-down economics and the resulting cascade of corporate welfare – have been bidding up and holding foreclosed houses off the market. These two factors have artificially limited supply and, combined with cheap mortgages rates, driven up prices. While we can debate whether these strategies represent the best public policy, these policies are obviously not long-term sustainable.Indeed – in the real world - 12.6 million houses are vacant … 1.5 million more home than are underwater. In other words, without artificial scarcity created by banks, there would be more available houses than there are underwater homeowners having problems paying their mortgage. There would – in a word – be a glut.
***
Lenders argue the drop in foreclosures is caused by delays in the court system. However, Judge Jennifer D. Bailey, lead foreclosure judge in Miami-Dade County – epicenter of the foreclosure crisis – solidly rebuts that argument. “Here in Miami-Dade County’s Eleventh Circuit, there has been no delay in foreclosure case hearings for nearly two years,” Judge Bailey said in an Aug. 19, 2012 interview with the Miami Herald. “If you want to see a judge to hear your trial or summary judgment, you get a prompt court date.” This coincides with my own observations in foreclosure court, where judges rail at bank lawyers for repeatedly delaying their cases, even when borrowers are in no way contesting their foreclosures.
Holding back inventory means that the houses that are put on offer sell faster and at higher prices. That creates an incentive to delay foreclosures or not foreclose at all even when a home is delinquent.
Government Is Secretly Helping Financial Companies to Snap Up Housing
There are realistic ways to help the economy. For example:
- Force the big banks to write down bad debt
Stocks, for example, are largely being driven by insiders and government policy.
Indeed, we’ve pointed out for years that all of the Obama administration’s “homeowner relief” programs are really just back-door bailouts to the big financial companies … and are not even intended to help homeowners.
Mike Whitney explained last September:
Private Equity firms are piling in to the housing market to take advantage of bargain basement prices on distressed inventory. The Obama administration is stealthily selling homes to big investors who are required to sign non-disclosure agreements to ensure that the public remains in the dark as to the magnitude of the giveaway. Aside from the steep discounts on the homes themselves, the government is also providing “synthetic financing to reduce the up-front capital required if they agree to form a joint venture with Fannie Mae and share proceeds from the rental or sale of properties.” (Businessweek)
In other words, US-taxpayers are providing extravagant financing for deep-pocket speculators who want to reduce their risk while maximizing their profits via additional leverage. The plan resembles Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s Public-Private Partnership Investment Program …. Speculators are getting lavish incentives (gov financing, low rates, and severe discounts) in secret deals to buy distressed inventory which should be available to the public at market prices. If that’s not a ripoff, then what is?
***
Obama’s preferred customers are getting discounts of up-to 60 percent of the home’s peak value and generous gov-backed financing to boot!
***
As the article above indicates, there’s no shortage of delinquent homes that will eventually be foreclosed. That means the process is being dragged out so the banks don’t have to fess-up to the losses on their fetid pile of nonperforming loans Here’s a little more background from an article in Businessweek:
“About 6 million U.S. borrowers will lose their homes in the next five years because of inability to pay their mortgages, creating demand for as many as 4 million new rental households, according to Scott Simon, head of mortgage bonds at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California….If “6 million homeowners” will lose their homes in the next five years, then why are clownshoes media dupes touting a “bottom” in prices and a “market rebound”?
Single-family rentals are priced to deliver unlevered total returns in the range of 7.5 percent to 8 percent, or about 0.5 percentage point to 1 percentage point higher than institutional-quality apartments, according to a June 8 report by Ray Huang, senior associate at Green Street Advisors in Newport Beach, California. (“Colony Said to Win Foreclosed Homes Sold by Fannie Mae”, Businessweek)[Link.]
It’s all hype. And look at how calculatingly fiendish Obama’s foreclosure-to-rental program really is. The big boys have figured out the nearest penny how much they can make by throwing people out of their homes. (7.5 percent to 8 percent) Talk about heartless. And, of course, this whole process is being orchestrated by President Fairydust and his Wall Street Pranksters to keep prices artificially high and preserve the illusion that the banks are solvent.And if that isn’t hard-hitting enough for you, Jim Quinn writes:
It’s infuriating!
The contrived elevation of home sales and home prices has been engineered by the very same culprits who crashed our financial system in the first place. This has been planned, coordinated and implemented by a conspiracy of the ruling oligarchy – the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, U.S. Treasury, NAR, and the corporate media conglomerates. Ben’s job was to screw senior citizens and drive interest rates low enough that everyone in the country could refinance, attract investors & flippers into the market, and propel home prices higher. Wall Street has been the linchpin to the whole sordid plan. They were tasked with drastically limiting the foreclosure pipeline, therefore creating a fake shortage of inventory. Next, JP Morgan, Blackrock, Citi, Bank of America, and dozens of other private equity firms have partnered with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, using free money provided by Ben Bernanke, to create investment funds to buy up millions of distressed properties and convert them into rental properties, further reducing the inventory of homes for sale and driving prices higher. Only the connected crony capitalists on Wall Street are getting a piece of this action. The Wall Street big hanging d[!@#*] have screwed the American middle class coming and going. The NAR and media are tasked with what they do best – spew propaganda, misinform, lie, cheerlead and attempt to create a buying frenzy among the willfully ignorant masses. The chart below reveals the truth about the strong sustainable housing recovery. It doesn’t exist. Mortgage applications by real people who want to live in a home are no higher than they were in 2010 when home sales were 33% lower than today. Mortgage applications are lower than they were in 1997 when 4 million existing homes were sold versus the 5 million pace today. The housing recovery is just another Wall Street scam designed to bilk the American middle class of what remains of their net worth.Of course, economist Michael Hudson would put it a little differently: banks are trying to roll back all modern laws and make us all into serfs.
In other words, the giant financial service companies are attempting to privatize public resources, socialize losses, scam people out of their homes and other private property … and then rent back to us what we used to own for a hefty price.
Do you understand the game now?
Fish farming killing off native species; boycott farmed salmon before it's too late
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June 5, 2013 | Natural News | Ethan A. Huff
(NaturalNews) Equally as menacing as the potential release of genetically-modified (GM) salmon into the wild, factory fish farms are a modern scourge responsible for killing off droves of native fish species all around the world. And unless immediate action is taken to address this problem - you can help by boycotting all farmed fish when you shop or dine out - wild salmon, an important "keystone" species that sustains entire ecosystems, could become extinct in the not-too-distant future.
While it is true that the general concept of fish farming has been around for centuries, modern day fish farms are exceptionally invasive and damaging, not only to the environment but also to wild fish species. As explained in the new documentary film Salmon Confidential, fish farms are spreading viruses and other diseases to wild fish species, which has led to major declines in wild fish populations. And in the case of wild fish populations near British Columbia, Canada, government corruption is largely to blame for these die-offs.
"When biologist Alexandra Morton discovers BC's wild salmon are testing positive for dangerous European salmon viruses associated with salmon farming worldwide, a chain of events is set off by government to suppress the findings," explains a synopsis of the film. "The film documents Morton's journey as she attempts to overcome government and industry roadblocks thrown in her path and works to bring critical information to the public in time to save BC's wild salmon."
You can view Salmon Confidential in its entirety on Vimeo:
http://salmonconfidential.ca/
Why keystone species are necessary to sustain life
It would be one thing for wild salmon to merely go extinct in isolation - as devastating as this would be, at least we would have all the other fish and sea life, right? Wrong. Because it is a keystone species, wild salmon are absolutely necessary for the proper function and sustenance of the entire ecosystem. Without wild salmon, in other words, many fish species would die, as would native human populations that rely on wild salmon for food.
"Salmon runs function as enormous pumps that push vast amounts of marine nutrients upstream to the headwaters of otherwise low productivity rivers," explains the Wild Salmon Center about the importance of wild salmon. "Salmon carcasses are the primary food for aquatic invertebrates and fish, as well as terrestrial fauna ranging from marine mammals to birds - eagles, ducks and songbirds - to terrestrial mammals, especially bears and humans."
Wild salmon, in other words, are a delivery system for nutrients that sustains both freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems all across the planet. Over 40 species of birds and mammals just in southeast Alaska rely on salmon for food - just imagine how many species worldwide rely on salmon for survival? The threat to their preponderance as a species is great, and factory fish farms are the leading cause of this threat.
To make matters worse, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning to approve the first genetically-engineered (GE) salmon for commercial sale, which recent studies have shown will contaminate native species. So not only will wild salmon have to deal with diseases like infectious salmon anemia virus (ISA) and salmon alphaviruses from farmed fish, but they will also face genetic contamination from GE "Frankensalmon."
Be sure to check out the film Salmon Confidential to learn more:
http://www.wildsalmoncenter.org/about/whySalmon.php
You can also tell your local grocers, restaurants, and other food suppliers that you will no longer purchase any farmed fish, and urge them to stock only wild varieties harvested sustainably.
Sources for this article include:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/bytes/ob376.html
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_27358.cfm
http://www.wildsalmoncenter.org/about/whySalmon.php
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Black hole cores may not be infinitely dense but portals to elsewhere
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| © NASA | JPL-Caltech Artist's concept of a supermassive black hole. |
June 4, 2013 | Charles Q. Choi | ISNS
The cores of black holes may not hold points of infinite density as currently thought, but portals to elsewhere in the universe, theoretical physicists say.
A black hole possesses a gravitational field so powerful that not even light can escape. A black hole generally forms after a star dies in a titanic explosion known as a supernova, which crushes the remaining core into dense lumps.
A maddening enigma called a singularity -- a region of infinite density -- lies at the heart of each black hole, according to general relativity, the modern theory of gravity. The infinite nature of singularities means that space and time as we know them cease to exist there.
Scientists have long sought ways to avoid the complete breakdown of all the known laws of physics brought on by singularities. Now researchers suggest the centers of black holes may not hold singularities after all.
These new findings are based on loop quantum gravity, one of the leading theories seeking to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity into a single theory that can explain all the forces of the universe. In loop quantum gravity, the four dimensions of spacetime are composed of networks of intersecting loops - ripples of the gravitational field.
The researchers applied loop quantum gravity theory to the simplest model of black hole - a spherical, uncharged, non-rotating body known as a Schwarzschild black hole.
"We have been looking at various aspects of spherical models for several years," said researcher Jorge Pullin, a theoretical physicist at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. "We like them because they are at the frontier of what is possible in loop quantum gravity today - a bit more complicated than the cosmologies that have been studied over the last decade, but not so complicated as to become intractable. An 'aha' moment was when we realized we can carry out an important simplification of the equations of the model."
Instead of a singularity, they found the center of this black hole only held a region of highly curved spacetime.
"This is a clean treatment of what happens inside a black hole, using a quantum theory of gravity," said theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli at Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France, who did not take part in this study. "It has long been expected that the singularities in the centers of black holes are cured by quantum gravity, and this is the conclusion that this work supports."
Theoretical physicists had previously shown that with loop quantum gravity, they could eliminate the singularity that past research suggested existed at the Big Bang. Instead of emerging from a point of infinite density, their work proposed the cosmos was born from a "Big Bounce," expanding outward after a prior universe collapsed.
"Perhaps in the future it can be shown that all singularities are removed by the theory," Pullin said.
Just as loop quantum gravity replaced the singularity at the Big Bang with a bridge to another universe, these new findings replace each singularity in black holes with "a bridge to another region in the future of our universe," Pullin said. Although prior studies also suggested black holes harbored such bridges, researchers had believed the singularities in black holes prevented any way of crossing those bridges.
"I think that this shows that loop quantum gravity is very vital and bubbling, and continues to produce exciting new results and new ideas," Rovelli said.
Pullin emphasized that they used a very simple model in this study, consisting of only highly curved spacetime without representing the actual matter found inside real black holes. The models for the study were also exactly spherically symmetrical, unlike many black holes, which spin and thus differ across their surfaces. Finally, in their model the black hole was there forever and will be there forever - in reality, black holes generally form after the collapse of stars and should one day evaporate away if they no longer have matter or energy to devour.
"Adding matter and having a black hole that evolves is what we are aiming for next," Pullin said.
Pullin and his colleague Rodolfo Gambini detailed their findings online May 23 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Monday, June 3, 2013
2.2 Million cubic meters raw sewage from Israeli settlements poses environmental threat
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| Raw sewage from the Elqana settlement is leaked directly into Al-Yarkoun, the biggest water reservoir in the West Bank |
June 3, 2013 | Occupied Palestine
A report by Israel’s Ministry for Environmental Protection has revealed that 2.2 million cubic metres of raw sewage flows annually from the country’s illegal settlements in the West Bank directly into waterways or cesspits without passing through any treatment facility. According to Haaretz newspaper, the report has been passed to Israel’s Civil Administration for the occupied Palestinian territory.The Ministry’s report points out that almost one-third of sewage treatment facilities in the West Bank settlements are either not up to date or not in operation. Most facilities were designed to deal with 28 per cent of the amount of sewage now produced. There is a real threat of pollution in water resources and the environment generally across the West Bank as a direct result of untreated sewage coming from the settlements.
Haaretz said that the report covers more than 150 settlement compounds which are home to around 350,000 Israeli settlers. The overwhelming majority of the sewage is domestic, not industrial. For example, around 1,000 Jewish settlers live in Yitzhar settlement on Palestinian land in Nablus. Their sewage does not pass through any treatment process before being leaked through five places into the Palestinian city, which has a sewage treatment plant.
The most dangerous concern, says the report, is Elqana settlement, home to 4,000 settlers. Raw sewage is leaked directly into the biggest water reservoir in the West Bank at Al-Yarkoun.
Most Israelis, alleges Haaretz, ignore these facts and always blame the Palestinians for endangering the environment and water resources.
George Carlin Talks About "Stuff"
George Carlin Talks About "Stuff"
May 1, 2007 | CappyNJ
George Carlin's classic standup routine about the importance of 'Stuff' in our lives. This was from his appearance at Comic Relief in 1986.
May 1, 2007 | CappyNJ
George Carlin's classic standup routine about the importance of 'Stuff' in our lives. This was from his appearance at Comic Relief in 1986.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
EFF Launches Full-Court Press To Bust Podcasting Patent
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| image |
May 30, 2013 | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Campaign Will Use Crowd-Power and New Law to Invalidate Patent Trolls’ Claim
San Francisco - The patent trolls have gone far enough: Starting today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is mounting a new, focused campaign to bust the dangerous patent that a Texas company has been using to shakedown podcasters. EFF intends to challenge the original grant of that patent before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by proving that the company, Personal Audio, did not really invent anything new.
Claiming it owns the patent that broadly covers podcasting technology, Personal Audio is the classic example of a patent troll that neither makes nor sells anything, but uses its patent as a weapon to threaten lawsuits and extort settlement fees. This particular troll has bullied prominent podcasts and podcasters, including How Stuff Works and Adam Carolla, in addition to smaller podcasters working out of their own homes.
"Patent trolls have been wreaking havoc on innovative companies for some time now," said EFF Staff Attorney Julie Samuels, who also holds the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents. "But this particular breed of troll—targeting end users, small businesses, startups, and even individuals like podcasters for simply using everyday products—is a disturbing new threat."
EFF is partnering with the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to use a new legal tool against this patent called the "inter partes review," which was introduced by the America Invents Act. The first step is to identify "prior art," or published examples of similar or identical ideas, that existed before October 2, 1996. EFF is putting out a call today to the podcasting community to spread the word and help us collect the prior art we need to fight this dangerous patent. EFF is also looking for financial support to take on this challenge, which—even with pro bono help—will likely cost nearly $30,000.
"A podcaster working out of a garage is unlikely to have the financial resources to fight a lawsuit," said EFF Staff Attorney Daniel Nazer. "Patent trolls like Personal Audio know this and use the threat of ruinous litigation costs as a weapon. Defeating this patent at the PTO would put an end to Personal Audio's campaign."
Because of the deep and systemic problems in the American patent system, EFF is spearheading the Defend Innovation project to advocate for reform. EFF is asking the public to sign on to our petition at defendinnovation.org and to comment on seven recommended proposals we think would make the broken system work better for software. In the meantime, EFF is doing its best to rid the world of one more bad patent in the hands of a patent troll and help out podcasters who find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun.
For more on the Save Podcasting campaign:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/help-save-podcasting
For technical details of the search for prior art:
http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/3884/call-for-prior-art-system-for-disseminating-media-content-representing-episodes
Donate to fund this campaign:
https://supporters.eff.org/donate/save-podcasting
Julie Samuels
Staff Attorney and The Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents
Electronic Frontier Foundation
julie@eff.org
Daniel Nazer
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
daniel@eff.org
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Supernova "Too Bright" For Standard Theory
Supernova "Too Bright" For Standard Theory
June 1, 2013 | ThunderboltsProject
Astronomers using the Pan-STARRS1 telescope recently observed a supernova that they say is "way too bright" for conventional theory to explain.
June 1, 2013 | ThunderboltsProject
Astronomers using the Pan-STARRS1 telescope recently observed a supernova that they say is "way too bright" for conventional theory to explain.
A Blast of a Find: 12 New Alaskan Volcanoes
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| One of the newest volcanic vents discovered in Southeast Alaska is an underwater volcanic cone in Behm Canal near New Eddystone rock. CREDIT: James Baichtal, U.S. Forest Service |
May 31, 2013 | Our Amazing Planet | Becky Oskin
In Alaska, scores of volcanoes and strange lava flows have escaped scrutiny for decades, shrouded by lush forests and hidden under bobbing coastlines.
In the past three years, 12 new volcanoes have been discovered in Southeast Alaska, and 25 known volcanic vents and lava flows re-evaluated, thanks to dogged work by geologists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Forest Service. Sprinkled across hundreds of islands and fjords, most of the volcanic piles are tiny cones compared to the super-duper stratovolcanoes that parade off to the west, in the Aleutian Range.
But the Southeast's volcanoes are in a class by themselves, the researchers found. A chemical signature in the lava flows links them to a massive volcanic field in Canada. Unusual patterns in the lava also point to eruptions under, over and alongside glaciers, which could help scientists pinpoint the size of Alaska's mountain glaciers during past climate swings.
"It's giving us this serendipitous window on the history of climate in Southeast Alaska for the last 1 million years," said Susan Karl, a research geologist with the USGS in Anchorage and the project's leader. [Image Gallery: Alaska's New Volcanoes]
Volcano forensics
The project kicked off in 2009 as part of an interdisciplinary effort to better understand volcanism in Southeast Alaska, Karl said.
The team's first result, from a volcanic pile about 40 miles (70 kilometers) south of Mount Edgecumbe, was an intriguing match in time to the panhandle's biggest volcano. The team planned to test if the two were related, sort of a geologic genetic test. But even though the two volcanoes had erupted at about the same time in the past, their chemistry was wildly different. It was like one volcano was a freshwater fish and the other came from the salty ocean. And what really captured the geologist's attention were signs that the little volcano squeezed out lava that oozed next to glaciers.
"That's when we realized we had a whole new kind of volcano separate from Mount Edgecumbe," Karl told OurAmazingPlanet.
Lava chemistry holds forensic clues that reveal what was happening in Earth's crust and mantle when the magma formed. The unusual chemistry sent Karl and her collaborators hunting for more rocks to test. This meant days-long backpacking trips into remote wilderness or submersible dives to underwater volcanoes.
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| Underwater volcanoes and cinder cones pockmark Behm Canal. CREDIT: James Baichtal, U.S. Forest Service |
"We're convinced now there's probably a whole bunch of green knobs out there covered with timber that may be vents that may have never been mapped," said James Baichtal, a geologist with the U.S. Forest Service based in Thorne Bay, Alaska, and a project leader.
Connection to Canada
Now comes the CSI twist. All of these newly tested lavas in Alaska are kissing cousins to volcanoes in Canada, such as Mount Edziza, which last erupted about 10,000 years ago.
The connection makes perfect sense, Karl said. "I'm actually surprised no one has hypothesized it before," she said. "It made total sense that this volcanic province would extend across Southeast Alaska, and now I have the data to show that's the case."
Little known outside of Canada, Mount Edziza is part of the Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province, a broad swath of volcanoes and hot springs some 1,250 miles (2,000 km) long and about 375 miles (600 km) wide.
Karl's big picture meets approval with scientists studying Canada's volcanoes.
"I knew there were volcanics to the west in Alaska, but I didn't know they were nearly [this] extensive," said Ben Edwards, a volcanologist at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, who is not involved in the project but has visited the new volcanoes with Karl and Baichtal. "They have really found a lot more places than we realized, but there's certainly no reason for them not to be there. It makes a lot of sense."
As in Canada's volcanic province, Southeast Alaska's volcanoes and hot springs line up as amazingly linear features. Here's why: The tortured history of this corner of North America, a legacy of collision between the North America and Pacific tectonic plates, created a meshwork of leaky faults and fractures. Magma escapes from Earth's mantle through this patchwork when forces pull on the crust, opening space. The matching chemistry also hints that magma in both regions comes from a similar mantle source.
"It's always fun to discover a new vent; it's fun to find a fossil, and then to be able to understand why it's there is always very satisfying," Karl said. "That's what makes scientists tick."
Strange new finds
Some of the unusual finds Karl and Baichtal have uncovered include a maar lying 295 feet (90 meters) underwater near Cape Addington, about 40 miles (65 km) west of Craig, Alaska. Maars are bomblike craters blasted out when magma rising underground hits groundwater and explodes. The maar is about 13,800 years old, Baichtal said. Sea level was 394 feet (120 m) lower when the maar formed.
The latest find is an underwater volcano in Behm Canal, where hundreds of thousands of tourists on cruise ships have sailed by New Eddystone Rock, an eroded volcano. Behm Canal is dotted with cinder cones, both onshore and below the water.
East of Ketchikan, a basalt flow lapped onto a 42,000-year-old beach, preserving shells, pinecones, pine needles and pollen. Barnacle plates sitting on top of the lava are about 13,000 years old, Baichtal said. The whole package now sits about 260 feet (80 meters) above sea level, hinting at how much Earth's crust has bobbed up since the last ice age.
"It gave us how much isostatic rebound there is today. That's one of those really great days in geology. You couldn't have written a better script, and there's a lot of those kind of things coming out of there," Baichtal said.
Volcanoes and climate change
While the volcanoes in Canada and Alaska have erupted for more than 10 million years, emerging data suggests that the last 3 million years of glaciers growing and retreating in Alaska and British Columbia also prompted many small volcanoes to erupt, because the changing ice mass flexed the Earth. This activated the fractures and made room for more magma to rise.
In Tolay Regional Park, north of Mount Edziza, Edwards is assembling evidence of periodic eruption pulses in the last 2.5 million years.
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| This spectacular columnar joint pattern in lava exposed in Alaska's Suemez Island formed when the lava flowed next to a glacier about 700,000 years ago. CREDIT: Susan Karl, U.S. Geological Survey |
The molten rock also has preserved impressions of bygone glaciers. Many of the lava flows touched ice, leaving a distinctive cooling pattern in the chilled rock. By dating the glacially cooled lava flows, researchers such as Karl, Baichtal and Edwards hope to better understand how much land mountain glaciers covered during past glaciations. About one-third of global sea level rise could come from melting mountain glaciers, but estimating their past size is difficult because growing glaciers plow through evidence of their predecessors.
Risk of eruptions
Despite its great size, the overall risk from eruptions in the Alaska portion of the volcanic province is low, Karl said.
In Canada, the volume of erupted lava is less than 240 cubic miles (100 cubic km) every million years in the last 2 million years. By comparison, Hawaii's Kilauea volcano spewed 4,650 cubic miles (19,400 cubic km) in the past 300,000 to 600,000 years. [Big Blasts: History's 10 Most Destructive Volcanoes]
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| The Blue River lava flow, about 120 years old, is the youngest lava flow in Southeast Alaska and British Columbia, Canada. CREDIT: Susan Karl, U.S. Geological Survey |
"Even though, theoretically, a volcano that erupted 120 years ago is an active volcano, but because it's so remote there isn't any real concern about it," Karl said.
However, an eruption in 1775 killed a village of First Nations people in Canada, though scientists aren't sure why. Lava didn't reach the town, and some researchers suspect gas from the volcano may have suffocated residents.
Karl notes that an earthquake on the Fairweather Fault, a major offshore strike-slip fault, presents a greater risk than a volcanic eruption. "If something is rumbling and bubbling we have so much more technology to become aware of it before it's a hazard, We can't predict exactly when the Fairweather Fault is going to go, and that's a much larger hazard," she said.
With 15,000 miles of shoreline and hundreds and hundreds of islands to explore, Karl and Baichtal think there are more volcanoes to discover in Southeast Alaska.
"It's a tough place to get around, but Sue and I just laugh at it. We will never finish," Baichtal said.
Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @OAPlanet, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.
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