Planet Earth
Melted Remains of Hiroshima Litter Japans Beaches
If you take a close look at the beaches of Motoujina Peninsula in Japan, you’ll find the sand is littered with tiny glass beads strangely shaped like teardrops as if they’ve been blasted down from the skies.
It might come as no surprise that these unusual objects are the relics of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in the dying days of World War Two. As reported in the journal Anthropocene, these pieces of debris – dubbed “Hiroshimaites” – are essentially the remains of the city that were blasted into the skies, cooked in an atomic cloud, and later rained down.
While sifting through the sands of Hiroshima Bay and Miyajima Island, geologist Mario Wannier started to notice these glassy flecks and set out on a journey to discover how exactly they were created. In the samples of sand he and his team collected, they found the spheroids and other unusual particles accounted for up to 2.5 percent of all of the grains.
This assortment of glassy particles was discovered in beach sands near Hiroshima. (c) Anthropocene, Volume 25, March 2019
Although most unusual, the teeny structures did remind Wannier of other sediment samples he had analyzed that date to the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, better known as that time an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million ago. Whatever forged the structures, it must have been an unbelievably epic amount of energy – and since they were found just miles outside the epicenter of nuclear explosions that occurred just 74 years ago, the source of that energy was obvious.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the US dropped “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima, marking just the second ever detonation of an A-bomb and the first nuclear weapon ever used in warfare. Over 70 percent of the city was destroyed in the blink of an eye, along with at least 70,000 people who died instantly. An estimated 200,000+ more died in the following years due to injuries and radiation.
“This was the worst manmade event ever, by far,” Wannier said in a statement. “In the surprise of finding these particles, the big question for me was: You have a city, and a minute later you have no city. There was the question of: ‘Where is the city – where is the material?’ It is a trove to have discovered these particles. It is an incredible story.”
The wrecked framework of the Museum of Science and Industry in Hiroshima, Japan. Everett Historical/Shutterstock
A deeper analysis of the Hiroshimaites showed a wide variety in the chemical composition, including concentrations of aluminum, silicon, and calcium. However, some were composed purely of just iron and steel, or even concrete, marble, stainless steel, and rubber.
“Some of these look similar to what we have from meteorite impacts, but the composition is quite different,” explained co-author Rudy Wenk, a professor of mineralogy at UC Berkeley. “There were quite unusual shapes. There was some pure iron and steel. Some of these had the composition of building materials.”
Understandably, the research team concluded that only an atomic explosion could have kicked up such a strange composition.
Next, the team hopes their research will encourage further tests on the samples to see if any samples carry radioactive elements. They’d also like to travel to Nagasaki, the Japanese city hit by the US’s Fat Man atomic bomb three days later, to see if similar structures can be found.
Tom Hale
IFLScience
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Planet Earth
Scientists – It is much colder today than in the last 8,000 years
Undisputed temperature reconstructions from around the world show that for much of the Holocene (last 10,000 years), the planet was much warmer than it is today.
Kenneth recently wrote how many new studies of glacier and sea ice sizes show that Iceland is 2-4 ° C colder today than it has been in the past 8,000 years. Only the late 19th century was a little colder.
This post was posted on WUWT and the author provided additional graphics there from other parts of the world showing that the early Holocene was warmer around the world.
First, South America, which shows 100 years ago that it was much warmer from the 1930s to the 1950s than it is today:
Next, we have a 7000-year reconstruction of the Canadian Arctic temperature:
Note that, as many of us already know, the Arctic was much warmer in the early Holocene than it is today.
Finally, let’s take a look at the Swiss Alps, which are 9,000 years old:
Here we see that today it is very cold in the Alps compared to the early Holocene. Old tree trunks found under the glaciers confirm this.
A WUWT reader added that he has “a lot more of this type of graphs, which show very clearly that the whole wolrld has been much warmer for much of the last 10,000 years than it is now.”
And there are really a lot of them!
Medieval warm period, confirmed by hundreds of works
Sebastian Lüning’s remarkable and outstanding Medieval Warm Period reference map, shows hundreds of climatic reconstructions from this period. There we find a lot of research that shows that there is nothing unusual about today’s climate compared to what it was 1000 years ago.
Here are 80 charts from 58 peer-reviewed articles showing the same.
Planet Earth
Polar vortex: “wild” winter is coming in the US, Northern Europe and East Asia after the 16th of January
In the upper atmosphere above the North Pole, experts saw a rapidly swirling vortex of cold air that could bring severe frosts to the United States, Northern Europe and East Asia. Serious cold snap and snowy weather are expected after January the 16th.
Snowfalls and a cold snap hit South Korea since the start of 2021, hitting historic snow maximums and temperatures. In the country, for the first time since 1964, television and newer communications are sending people cold snap warnings:
winter in South Korea. very cold my friend. enjoy the snow while drinking hot bitter coffee. pic.twitter.com/WcycIEpf2y
— Dhard (@Dhardyant1) January 6, 2021
The situation is similar in Japan, where a new snow storm hit historic highs:
On January 7, the thermometer In Beijing dropped to -20 degrees Celsius, breaking the 1966 record. In other regions of China, the temperature is also not sugar, and you can only move around in special uniforms:
The cold even reached Taiwan, where the temperature in some areas dropped below freezing point, snow poured down and people realized that rice terraces can be used as a ski jump:
Even more snow went to Spain, where on January 6, 2021, a temperature of -34.1 ° C was recorded – the lowest on record. After that, a snow storm hit the country, which has not been seen for 80 years:
The same thing happens in Canada and in the northern states of the United States:
I’m not too sure. But this is the current situation out there. Has not stopped blowing in over 24 hours!! pic.twitter.com/J69zeiHW01
— Amy Montague (@AmyMontague4) January 8, 2021
It seems that after a stratospheric warming, the subpolar vortex began to split:
I wrote in the December 21, 2020 blog our #PolarVortex (PV) model is predicting a major sudden stratospheric warming in early January and then again third week of January. Based on latest model forecasts there really does seem to be two distinct polar warming events in January. pic.twitter.com/vcMCPztoAh
— Judah Cohen (@judah47) January 8, 2021
The vortex itself is a standard phenomenon. However, this time experts were surprised at his movement. It is possible that in the near future it will be divided into two parts.
Scientists associate the strange behavior with the changed climate in the Arctic, which has become warmer. From September to December, the amount of ice cover decreased significantly.
The polar vortex is a low-pressure region located in the stratosphere and filled with cold air. When the jet stream of air that holds the vortex weakens, the low pressure area moves south.
As the ice shrinks, more moisture will move inland. It will turn to snow, so snowfalls are expected. Snow, in turn, reflects heat, leading to a cold snap.
Planet Earth
Hospital in Naples was evacuated after a new, huge sinkhole appeared
Eyewitnesses said they heard a loud crash at dawn when a huge hole in the ground formed outside the Ponticelli Ospedale del Mare hospital in eastern Naples.
Early in the morning of January 8, 2021, a sinkhole occurred in the parking lot of a clinic in Naples. The depth of the formed cavity is about 20 meters, the total area of the hole is about 2,000 square meters.
No casualties were found at the scene; firefighters say the sinkhole “affected an area of about 500 square meters” and engulfed several cars parked near the hospital.
As the press writes and as a little can be seen from the videos, rescuers and firefighters were running around the pit together with the governor of the area. But who should be there in the forefront are Italian geologists, since Naples stands in the very center of the volcanic system known as the Phlegrean Fields.
If the surface collapsed, moreover – the surface reinforced with concrete and reinforced from below with some kind of communications, then we are talking about serious soil deformations caused by the activity of magma.
Italy has been in doubt since the summer of 2020, because swarms were observed there in very atypical places in May, and according to the forecasts of old Italian seismologists, who had witnessed many strong earthquakes, it should have boomed in the August region.
Fortunately, nothing bad happened to Italy and there was no big earthquake. But, since there are swarms, it means that something is being prepared, the magma is gathering strength.
Following this particular sinkhole event – an obvious sign that a major earthquake in Italy is already very close.
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