PETERMANN GLACIER, WE BARELY KNEW YOU !
Satellite images of the Petermann Glacier in Greenland before and after breaking off
Monday, August 9, 2010 – 20:39
On the 5th of August we reported that a massive chunk of the Petermann Glacier broke off in Greenland, this was the biggest chunk of ice to break from the Petermann Glacier in a long time. Nasa recorded satellite images of the ice after and before it broke off so we can easily compare the two and see just how big this chunk of ice was.
According to NASA:
On August 5, 2010, an enormous chunk of ice, roughly 97 square miles (251 square kilometers) in size, broke off the Petermann Glacier, along the northwestern coast of Greenland. The Canadian Ice Service detected the remote event within hours in near real-time data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. The Peterman Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70-kilometer (40-mile) long floating ice shelf, said researchers who analyzed the satellite data at the University of Delaware.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured these natural-color images of Petermann Glacier 18:05 UTC on August 5, 2010 (top), and 17:15 UTC on July 28, 2010 (bottom). The Terra image of the Petermann Glacier on August 5 was acquired almost 10 hours after the Aqua observation that first recorded the event. By the time Terra took this image, skies were less cloudy than they had been earlier in the day, and the oblong iceberg had broken free of the glacier and moved a short distance down the fjord.
Icebergs calving off the Petermann Glacier are not unusual. Petermann Glacier’s floating ice tongue is the Northern Hemisphere’s largest, and it has occasionally calved large icebergs. The recently calved iceberg is the largest to form in the Arctic since 1962, said the University of Delaware.
UPDATE: STOCKHOLM — An island of ice more than four times the size of Manhattan is drifting across the Arctic Ocean after breaking off from a glacier in Greenland. Potentially in the path of this unstoppable giant are oil platforms and shipping lanes – and any collision could do untold damage. In a worst case scenario, large chunks could reach the heavily trafficked waters where another Greenland iceberg sank the Titanic in 1912. It’s been a summer of near biblical climatic havoc across the planet, with wildfires, heat and smog in Russia and killer floods in Asia. But the moment the Petermann glacier cracked last week – creating the biggest Arctic ice island in half a century – may symbolize a warming world like no other.
“It’s so big that you can’t prevent it from drifting. You can’t stop it,” said Jon-Ove Methlie Hagen, a glaciologist at the University of Oslo.Few images can capture the world’s climate fears like a 100-square- mile (260-sqare-kilometer) chunk of ice breaking off Greenland’s vast ice sheet, a reservoir of freshwater that if it collapsed would raise global sea levels by a devastating 20 feet (6 meters).
The world’s newest ice island already is being used as a powerful emblem in the global warming debate, with U.S. Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts suggesting it could serve as a home for climate change skeptics.Researchers are in a scramble to plot the trajectory of the floating ice shelf, which is moving toward the Nares Strait separating Greenland’s northwestern coast and Canada’s Ellsemere Island. If it makes it into the strait before the winter freeze – due to start next month – it would likely be carried south by ocean currents, hugging Canada’s east coast until it enters waters busy with oil activities and shipping off Newfoundland.”That’s where it starts to become dangerous,” said Mark Drinkwater, of the European Space Agency.
Update by Karl Ritter/AP
DRAMA IS NEVER FAR AWAY !
Many of us believe our lives will be just one quiet moment to the next. Some call it boredom, others realize if you step in the middle of i-10 life gets different real fast, because of that, many of us have decided not to become Indy Car drivers or Border Patrol, instead there are leagues of insurance agents, salespersons and education positions usually come with a roof and four walls. What if you were sitting at home, enjoying Oprah, eating bom-boms and instantly the roof disappears and then all four walls…….
A tornado was caught on camera destroying a farmhouse this Video shot by a storm chaser shows the tornado touching down near the house in Wilkin County, Minnesota, and debris flying into the air as the funnel tears into the building. As the tornado moves away, the home appears shredded, with part of its roof missing. Tornados were reported on Saturday evening near Tyler, North Dakota, Tenney, Minnesota, and Fergus Falls, Minnesota. 8/8/2010
Imagine you are running down field on a soccer play one moment, and the next, you are running for your life.
HISPANICS RISE UP OVER SB10-70
Maybe three hundred protesters closed Tucson Streets Thursday to show their displeasure in the new law many believe will cut severely into their civil rights particularly in Arizona. Hispanics fear walking out the front door and being deported to Mexico, insponse Hispanic have risen up all over the United Sates. Cities and States all across the United States have taken sides on the controversial law, many feel it is needed because of the lack of enforcement by the Feds, many residents fear they will no longer be free of the stigma of being a Hispanic.
MOUNT LEMMON SKY CENTER COOL ESCAPE
Summer’s in Tucson are suffered by those without the funds to spend those months at the beach in California. That said, after three hot months, folks in Tucson tend to get a wee bit crazed and that’s when they have to get out…but where to go, its hot, too hot to even leave the house. So when the Mount Lemmon Sky Center offered an evening of looking at the stars through a world class telescope, it seemed almost too good to be true. Many of the astronomical photographs being produced today are taken by Adam Block at UA’s Mount Lemmon Sky Center using a 24-inch RC Optical Instruments telescope, the same scope visitors get to use. From that 24 inch scope Astrophotographer Adam Block captured this image with the telescope at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter showing two galaxies on a collision path, earlier he had captured the huge appetite of a black hole 50 million light years away.
[ Our guide to the heavens Mike Terenzoni lectured and guided us to a 9100 foot view of the sunset. Later, dinner was served–as was some liquid nitrogen dished up to demonstrate the adverse temps in outer space. A great opportunity is coming up with the August 11 | Perseid Meteor Shower which should be perfectly viewed from Tucson on Mt. Lemmon The University of Arizona’s SkyCenter is sold out for this annual event but for other evenings it costs, $70 adults, $35 youth (under 18), reservations required 4:45 pm, 520-626-8122 or http://skycenter.arizona.edu
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- Mike Terenzoni show folks around the viewing area
LINK to HUBBLE’S Ultra Deep Field Photo encompasses 800 exposures totaling ONE MILLION SECONDS..said to look back past the BIG BANG
DIA de MUERTOS Mexicans celebrate DEATH
Contrasts Tucson’s Day of the Dead celebration and procession (see video) with the age old Mexican practice seen on both sides of the border to visit the graves of their loved ones on All Souls and All Saints Day. This visit took place in Nogales Sonora in Northern Mexico only a hour drive south of Tucson. Mexicans turn out in large numbers to clean, repaint and repair the graves for another year. Lots of folks turn out to help, the painters and yard workers, plus pizza salesmen and musicians.
Newspapers flying off to Dodo Island …
I became a newspaperman in the “Golden Age of Newspapers” we chased ambulances and everything else. One night as a news photographer I sat at the Blue Note’s bar sipping beer and waiting for the police to break-in and raid the place. The Note was a “dance place” and my favorite of the evening (I remember it still) was a pretty young lady with two six-guns and a boa. The huge snake’s tail was everywhere. No police raids and I had to go back to work empty handed because nothing had happened. In those days you didn’t have a story until something happened, today–newspapers advance stories, talk to all the people who are going, get their take on things and move on to another front page advance. Got to the point we never went to the event itself. That’s why I got into newspapering–covering the event, going to see what happened or who said what. One thing for sure, you could never make it up better than what actually happened, the facts, were always better.My hometown, Moberly, Missouri once had three newspapers, the Moberly Monitor, the Moberly Index and the Moberly Evening Democrat and so when they folded into one press the newspaper became the Moberly Monitor-Index and Evening Democrat. Newspapers brought political and community voice to issues and often championed one side or the other. In Tucson the Citizen was the conservative voice and the Arizona Daily Star the more liberal view. For years the letter’s to the editor reflected the frustrations of both sides and then in the Bush Years, the rancor was dialed up and politics boiled over and community newspapers starting putting the news of the day on page three and some “advance” on page one. Telling folks how to become a part of the community, instead of telling them what they missed, is how we spun the news we were pushing. Then we decided we needed to court the new generation because they were our future, so we decided not to cover the older generation who read us religiously and concentrate on tomorrow instead of yesterday. Then TNI circulation decided it was too expensive to drive the Citizen to Sierra Vista, AZ (even though we had 2500 readers there) so we walked away from 10 per cent of our reader base and the Star never picked up those readers. We did this again and again, and each time, we would concentrate on a smaller area of coverage…at one time…we decided we would just cover the University of Arizona and tell the news of Tucson through the eyes of their students and teachers. We quit covering Picture Rocks, Saddlebrook, Oro Valley, Marana, Green Valley and started to concern ourselves with the area surrounding the newspaper building at 4850 South Park Ave, less mileage expense and besides who wants to buy and advertise in a newspaper nobody needs or reads. In the 1970’s we covered Arizona from the Utah border to New Mexico border to California border into Mexico.
It wasn’t long after that Tucson Newspapers Inc decided the Citizen was too expensive to produce any longer and folded the newspaper after 138 years of covering Southern Arizona.
The Tucson Daily Citizen had covered the Shoot Out at the OK Corral, Arizona Statehood, Geronimo’s Capture and now wrote it’s own obituary, taking with it a news team the likes of, Tucson, will never see again. The Citizen’s legacy, are the newsmen and women left in its wake, a generation of reporters and communicators who had their shot and took it…
The Citizen’s website survives it’s printed version (for now) preserving a second voice for the Tucson area, it’s staffed by volunteers, and yes folks, ” PLEASE pay no attention to the big man behind the curtain”, thunders the WIZARD of OZ.
The Dodo Bird was a wingless bird living on a single island and having never seen man had no fear of him. It was with great ease the clubing and elimination of the entire species.
ORO VALLEY : Land Stewards or Land Sharks ?
For more than 35 years I have lived on the West side of the Catalina Mountain Range so admittedly I love it as much as I do the air I breathe. Too often in those years I felt the land being developed there was treated secondary to the construction and the natural beauty that brought you, me and the developers was being lost. All that having been said, “beauty is all in the eye of the beholder”, would be the political stalemate we see in all such cases.
So when I complain I can’t see the Mountains, from what is arguably the best vantage afforded anyone driving north on Oracle, because someone built a wall. That seems like a obvious complaint and such a outrageous affront it amazes me no one has blown it up or knocked it down or asked that it be moved. I did my own informal survey and my banker said she was usually so busy driving, she hadn’t noticed the wall that outrages me every time I drive by. My eye doctor had heard lots of complaints and some of them thought it was an affront, many others, thought it, silly.
You wouldn’t find it silly, if you paid big money for a lot and a new home and went out on the patio to enjoy your exclusive view and couldn’t hear the birds singing because of road noise made worse by the echo of the CDO wash. You might not also see the silliness of bulldozers carving out those expensive home plots tearing up the beauty that GOD himself carved and nestled on our west slope. So the wall keeps you from seeing stuff you might not like seeing and therefore heads off complaints and bitching because out of sight–out of mind.
Catalina State Park was born by a land swap that made Sun City Rancho Vistoso possible and gave Oro Valley, the chance to become the next Scottsdale, rather than the tennis court it was for two decades. In those days Big Horn Sheep lived on Pusch Ridge and watched us carefully as our noise and light pollution grew and the growth pushed out. The sheep gave up grazing on the golf course behind the Sheraton and have now gone all together. The only rams to be found there today are the Oro Valley mascots with which they have decorated their environs so they might revel in the days when these wild animals once walked this land. I heard two women talking at a Oro Valley event, one women from Saddlebrook was going on and on about the wildlife that her community enjoys and the Oro Valley women said how she so wished she lived where she could enjoy the desert….
DOGMAN or Don’t Box Me In….?
When wildlife happens it can be arresting and breath-taking as well a time when a little common sense mixes well with a dash of horse sense. No one expects Bighorn Sheep to present themselves for photos to tourists strolling the South Rim of the Grand Canyon so they should be excused if they fail to act responsibly but forethought and constructive comment opens the door to learn. So listen Up, dumb shit! You never box in a wild animal no matter how tame it appears, pushing the limits endanger the animal and yourself–think about the cause and response of your actions. Second lesson was personal since I had Chester, faithful sheltie in tow, the sheep took immediate dislike to Chester’s approach (quiet and unthreatning, just wasn’t welcome) so I tied him off below and still as I approached they stared at me and me alone because smell told them I was half sheltie and half desert rat. So your smell is to be considered when hunting or photographing wildlife, no aftershave, deoderant, perfume or irish spring soap, it will all turn a head or two.
A Study in Order …
When you drive by the Holy Family Church at University and Main your eye is drawn to it because of its simplicity, order and manicured grounds, everything in its place. Even in the absence of people you can see the love–the care someone or many–have showered this chapel. The details are surprising, quite–idealic, in fact ! So I stopped for a half hour walked the grounds, saw the charm, went home and looked it up on the internet. From that you get a picture of choir meetings, late night spanish only mass, weekly evening gatherings, needed volunteers for feeding the homeless, a chance to put faces to the folks whose charm and good will shines from the neighborhood chapel.
LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF FROG MOUNTAIN !
view from the original Rancho Vistoso Ranch, this view is now from a Walmart Parking Lot
Everyone takes their inspiration from the things that surround them or the things that swell up inside of them. I have lived in the shadow of Pusch Ridge for more than thirty years. My morning walks have a bless thirty minute hiatus from the morning sun because the shadow of that tip of the ridge holds back the heat until 6am… In all that time I have depended on the evenings alone with the mountain to be a quiet time to gather strength and to think through what happened today and what will happen tomorrow. In all my years of travel, I have driven through some amazing country, but nothing rivals Tucson surrounded or cradled by the Santa Catalina Range and when I roll in alongside those mountains I finally know I am home.
SOUTHWEST PHOTO JOURNAL 