National Park Service searches for cause of sinkhole
By Amy Lavalley Post-Tribune correspondent July 15, 2013 12:53PM
Guards head toward the crews working at Mount Baldy in Michigan City, Ind., Friday, July 12, 2013. | Taylor Irby~For Sun-Times Media
Help out
Four of the firefighters involved with Friday’s rescue of Nathan Woessner have worked with the non-profit Unity Foundation of LaPorte County to set up a fund to assist Nathan’s family.
A link to “The Mt. Baldy Miracle Fund” can be found on the foundation’s website, www.uflc.net; donations are tax deductible. Donations also can be mailed to the Unity Fund of LaPorte County, P.O. Box 527, Michigan City, IN 46361.
For more information,
call 879-0327.
call 879-0327.
ARTICLE EXTRAS
Updated: July 15, 2013 10:40PM
MICHIGAN CITY — Mt. Baldy will remain closed indefinitely as officials with the National Park Service work to determine what caused a sinkhole that buried 6-year-old Nathan Woessner of Sterling, Ill., Friday.
A park official said one possibility is that a decomposed tree under the dune left a void in the sand that may have opened up.
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“That was the theory we’re working on now, to see if it caused the accident,” Bruce Rowe, the park’s public information officer, said Monday.
The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore is bringing in staff from the park service’s Geologic Resources Division, as well as other geologists, to investigate the incident, which occurred on the dune’s north side, facing Lake Michigan.
The park also is looking for ground sensing equipment to peer under the surface of the dune, “to see if other dangers could exist,” he said.
In the meantime, the park is putting together a safety protocol for park staff before any further research is done. The area around Mt. Baldy remains cordoned off and anyone breaching the area is subject to law enforcement action.
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The rest of the national lakeshore remains open.
“What we feel is that outside of Mt. Baldy, the rest of the areas of the natural lakeshore are safe,” Rowe said.
Mt. Baldy has been shifting for some time and portions of it have been closed off for the past few years. The south side of the dune, which faces the parking lot, was closed off a few years ago because hikers were speeding sand erosion.
Park officials closed off lower portions of the dune last year for restoration of marram grass, and more of the dune was restricted this year, Rowe said, though the north side had a path for hikers.
As the dune has shifted, it’s covered trees and revealed exposed stumps, lending credence to the theory that a decomposed tree could have caused the sinkhole that consumed Nathan, Rowe said.
Regardless, the incident has everyone at the park puzzled, including Rowe, who’s been at the lakeshore since 1991. “No one here in the park had ever seen or heard of anything like this.”
Officials believe sinkhole deeper than originally thought
Posted: Jul 16, 2013 1:50 AMUpdated: Jul 16, 2013 9:27 AM
(Source: Assumption Parish OEP)BAYOU CORNE, LA (WAFB) -
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Officials report they believe the giant sinkhole is much deeper than originally thought and additional materials have surfaced.
MORE
According to the Assumption Parish Police Jury, John Boudreaux with the Assumption Parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness has tagged the bottom center of the sinkhole, where the raindrop bubbles are occurring.
Authorities said the depth is more than 500 feet, although debris was felt at about 175 to 200 feet, while the weight continued to fall to the 500-foot depth.
Officials added there will be attempts this week to use a longer measuring device to determine the depth of what is suspected to be the "upside down witch's hat."
They reported more debris and hydrocarbon have risen to the top at the site.
Meanwhile, of the 92 homeowners that were offered a settlement for their homes, 59 have come to an agreement with Texas Brine.
July 14, 2013 at 5:58 PM | Page modified July 15, 2013 at 11:02 AM
Space weather could now cause trillions in damage
Today, electric utilities, telecommunications providers and the insurance industry are grappling with a scary possibility: a solar storm that would wreak havoc on power grids, pipelines and satellites.
The Washington Post
BRENDA AHEARN / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
View of the Northern Lights over the Flathead River early June 29, east of Kalispell, Mont. Experts say space-weather impacts on the Earth pose greater threats as dependency on electricity increases.
On a cool September night in 1859, campers in Colorado were roused from sleep by a “light so bright that one could easily read common print,” as one newspaper described it. Some of them, confused, got up and began making breakfast.
Farther east, thousands of New Yorkers were rushing onto their roofs and sidewalks to gaze up at the heavens. The sky was glowing, ribboned in yellow, white and crimson.
At the time, it was a dazzling display of nature. Yet if the same thing happened today, it would be an utter catastrophe.
The auroras of 1859, known as the “Carrington Event,” came after the sun unleashed a large coronal mass ejection, a burst of charged plasma aimed directly at the Earth. When the particles hit our magnetosphere, they triggered a fierce geomagnetic storm that lit up the sky and frazzled communication wires around the world. Telegraphs in Philadelphia were spitting out “fantastical and unreadable messages,” one paper reported, with some systems unusable for many hours.
Today, electric utilities, telecommunications providers and the insurance industry are grappling with a scary possibility. A solar storm on the scale of that in 1859 would wreak havoc on power grids, pipelines and satellites. In the worst case, it could leave 20 million to 40 million people in the Northeast without power — possibly for years — as utilities struggled to replace thousands of fried transformers stretching from Washington to Boston. Chaos and riots might ensue.
That’s not a lurid sci-fi fantasy, but rather a sober new assessment by Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance market. The report notes that a smaller solar-induced geomagnetic storm in 1989 left 6 million people in Quebec without power for nine hours.
“We’re much more dependent on electricity now than we were in 1859,” explains Neil Smith, an emerging-risks researcher at Lloyd’s and co-author of the report. “The same event today could have a huge financial impact” — pegged at up to $2.6 trillion for an especially severe storm. (To put that in context, Hurricane Sandy caused about $68 billion in damage.)
The possibility of apocalypse has piqued scientific interest in solar storms in recent years. But researchers are now realizing that space weather can cause all sorts of lesser mischief, such as disorienting GPS satellites or severing contact between polar flights and air-traffic control.
So, in recent years, scores of businesses and government agencies are starting to take space weather more seriously. Electric-grid operators are devising plans to reroute currents through their systems to brace for solar storms. Airlines such as Delta have developed plans to reroute flights in the case of emergency. The U.S. military has begun to realize that space-weather blips can disrupt communication in the heat of battle.
But preparing for disruptions isn’t easy. Just as interest in space weather is surging, the United States is facing the loss of key monitoring satellites in the coming years because budget cuts mean that aging systems aren’t being replaced. And scientists are rushing to plug troubling gaps in their knowledge about these storms.
The problem is far from theoretical. Last month, at a conference on space weather in Silver Spring, Md., Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado announced that the sun had unleashed another large coronal mass ejection in July 2012 that traveled at speeds comparable to the Carrington Event of 1859. It missed the Earth by a week.
“Had that storm occurred a week earlier, it would have been a direct hit,” Baker said. “And we’d probably be having a very different conversation about this today.”
When it comes to space weather, the foremost concern is what a solar-induced geomagnetic storm might do to electric grids around the world.
At certain points in the sun’s cycle, as sunspots appear and flares erupt, the sun will eject part of its outer atmosphere, a cloud of fast-moving charged particles. If one of these coronal mass ejections hits the Earth’s magnetic field in just the right way, it can induce strong ground currents that travel through power lines, oil pipelines and telecom cables.
A truly severe geomagnetic storm could create currents powerful enough to overload electric grids and damage a significant number of high-voltage transformers, which can take a long time to repair or replace. That could leave millions without power for months or years.
“That’s a key vulnerability,” Smith says. “If you had a really big solar event, there just aren’t enough replacement transformers available. It can take up to 12 months to build new ones.”
As it turns out, most utilities don’t keep lots of spares around. The largest transformers, which convert the electricity in high-voltage lines to lower voltages, are custom-built, can cost millions of dollars and weigh up to 400 tons. Procuring a new one is a complex process that involves lining up the necessary copper and steel supplies, working with a long chain of manufacturers and arranging specialized transport. So, the Lloyd’s report notes, if even 20 transformers in the Northeast were knocked out, the logistical challenges would be “extremely concerning.”
Smith notes that the Northeast, with its aging power grid and peculiar geologic features, is especially at risk. Suffice it to say, it’s not fun to think about what would happen to the region if 40 million people had to go without power indefinitely.
Take Pittsburgh: One 2004 assessment from Carnegie Mellon University found that a large number of the city’s services were simply unprepared for an extended blackout. Half the city would lose water after three days if the city’s electrical pumps couldn’t be revived. Grocery stores, gas stations and cellphone networks would be knocked out. Police stations would go dark. Traffic lights would blink out. Most hospitals have backup systems in place, but emergency rooms would be strained if, say, the air conditioning went out during a hot summer.
“The absence of such fundamental services could lead to major and widespread social unrest, riots and theft,” the Lloyd’s report warns.
In theory, power utilities could try to take precautions if they had advance notice of a major solar storm headed our way. Using existing satellites, the National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., can detect an incoming event that’s about 30 minutes away.
There are technologies that could harden the grid, such as capacitors that can help block the flow of ground currents induced by a geomagnetic event. In Quebec, the Canadian government has spent about $1.2 billion on these technologies since the 1989 blackout.
Last fall, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order that will eventually require grid operators to prepare both operational and technological responses to a space weather event.
Setting aside apocalyptic blackouts, solar storms and space weather can create all sorts of hiccups in the global economy that scientists are only just beginning to understand.
Case in point: During the Battle of Takur Ghar in Afghanistan in 2002, a U.S. helicopter team was sent in to pick up a team of Navy SEALs. The SEALs sent a message to the helicopter warning the team not to land, but for some reason, it was never received. The helicopter landed under intense fire and four Americans were killed — an event dramatized in Sean Naylor’s best-selling account of Operation Anaconda, “Not a Good Day to Die.”
Some scientists now suspect that space weather could have been to blame for the incident.
At the space-weather conference in June, Michael Kelly of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory presented early evidence that a form of space weather known as “scintillation” can cause disturbances in the ionosphere and disrupt local radio communications. Researchers are working to model this phenomenon more accurately.
Airlines, too, have to take outbursts from the sun into account. Delta runs a number of commercial flights over the poles, such as routes between Detroit and Beijing and between Atlanta and Tokyo. But if they get a last-minute warning from the Space Weather Prediction Center of a geomagnetic storm, the planes often have to divert their routes away from the poles or risk losing radio contact with the ground. These diversions can cost thousands of dollars, Delta officials noted, so better predictions would help a great deal.
Joseph Kunches, a scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center, says we’re still learning about activities that could be disrupted by solar weather. Satellite communications can go astray. Pipelines can corrode from ground currents. Even human space travel faces a threat.
Kunches and other experts pointed to the potential impact of solar eruptions on GPS technology. Certain storms could degrade the signal as it makes its way from the satellite to the ground. GPS is built into so much of the modern economy — from navigation to geophysical exploration by oil and gas companies — that any interference with GPS signals could be quite costly.
“I call it the cyber-electric cocoon we’ve built around the Earth,” says Baker, who heads the Space Physics Research Laboratory at the University of Colorado. “There are all these relationships that most people don’t even have a clue are there, and we’re still trying to understand everything that’s at risk.”
It’s difficult to predict whether a solar outburst will actually create a storm when it hits Earth. A great deal depends on how a coronal mass ejection interacts with other solar winds as it moves toward us. Kunches likens it to knowing that a hurricane is coming, but not being able to measure its barometric pressure.
It would also be helpful to have more spacecraft studying the sun and giving us advance warning of storms. But, if anything, the Earth’s alert systems are about to get worse, not better.
Right now, the United States has four space satellites situated between the Earth and the sun, which can provide roughly 30 minutes’ warning of a major solar eruption. But these satellites are all reaching the end of their planned lives (and fuel tanks), and there’s only one replacement satellite scheduled to launch in 2014.
At the space conference in June, various speakers discussed ways to improve our ability to watch the sun. One engineer described fantastical plans for a satellite with a 100-square-meter “sail” that would use be steered and pushed by the sun’s photons in order to get closer and closer to the star without getting sucked in by gravity. A solar-sail satellite could, in theory, give us twice as much warning to prepare for a space storm.
But so far, these plans are all theoretical. “There’s a real need for a truly operational, 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week space-weather observatory,” Baker says. “But right now, we don’t see that coming from policymakers or the agencies that would have to step up.”
That means we may have to hope for a bit of luck in the years ahead. Solar activity tends to follow an 11-year cycle, with the most intense events often occurring near the peaks of the solar maximum — which, NASA says, could well arrive in late 2013, although it’s difficult to predict for sure.
That doesn’t mean the big one will hit then (for one thing, sunspot activity has been rather muted of late). But it does lend some urgency to the problem.
“We’re really on an unknown timeline here,” Beck says. “One of these could happen at any time.”
Space invasion: Solar storms pose critical threat to US infrastructure
By Joel Hruska on July 15, 2013 at 11:34 am
On September 1, 1859, the most powerful geomagnetic storm of modern times hit the Earth. Aurorae, normally visible only at high latitudes, reached the Caribbean. The glow over the Rocky Mountains was so bright, gold miners reportedly exited their tents and began preparing breakfast. Telegraphs failed across the world — though in some areas, they continued to send and receive messages, even after being disconnected from their electrical supplies.
The event became known as the Carrington Event, after British astronomer Richard Carrington — but what caused small problems and unusual events in the 1800s would be absolutely devastating today. The handful of moderate geomagnetic storms in the last 40 years have caused significant damage to the grid; a full hammerblow would destroy the US electrical grid for several years. The economic impact of a similar disaster today is estimated at $2.6 trillion.
Often, when online publications write disaster-themed science stories, there are a number of comforting facts buried below the lede to take the edge off. Sure, a dinosaur-level extinction event [1] could make for a really rocky millennium or two on Earth, but the chances of a rock that big hitting the planet are minuscule. Reading up on the potential impact [2] [PDF] a coronal mass ejection (CME) could have on Earth [3] offers no such comfort. (Read: Tesla turns in his grave: Is it finally time to switch from AC to DC? [4])
The truth is, solar flares as large as the one that caused the 1859 Carrington Event happen fairly regularly. Since we started monitoring the Sun’s solar cycle, we’ve gotten lucky on a number of occasions — CMEs that would have hit us even harder than 1859 have merely glanced us due to a non-ideal trajectory. Meanwhile, the United States’ grid is more vulnerable to such events than ever before — our transformer grid is, on average, nearly 40 years old, high-voltage power lines are carrying far more energy than they used to on a day-to-day basis, and there’s virtually no way to quickly repair the damage such a storm would cause.
Cloudy with a chance of civilization-crippling electromagnetic forces
Just how much of a threat is this? We consulted the Department of Energy’s own research to get a better idea. According to that report, transformers are custom-designed, highly intricate, take up to two years to manufacture, cost between $5-7 million apiece, and weigh between 100 and 400 tons. Ordinary transformers are far too bulky and heavy to ship by road, and must be moved around the country in specially-designed railcars. Smaller models are available, but are typically more expensive.
[5]The United States power grid is utterly incapable of weathering a devastating geomagnetic storm. In worst-case scenarios, the sheer amount of energy flowing down the high-voltage wire would blow transformers in quick succession. The automatic load balancing and considerable safety margins that are built into plants are designed to deal with terrestrial disasters, not space invasions. Offline power capacity normally used for supplementing baseline power during peak hours might survive, but these plants are not staffed or fueled for long duration. Up to 92% of the Northeast’s power generation capability could be taken offline for periods of several years.
[6]A cascade failure that took out such a huge swath of our power generation would have untold downstream effects as people lost the ability to contact emergency services, lost water pressure in areas that rely on electrical pumps, and were forced to rely on limited generator power. The damage estimates aren’t just theoretical — we know the electrical grid is sensitive to such geomagnetic storms after a surge in 1989 caused a major failure of a hydroelectric generator in Quebec. In the wake of that event, some of the US-based power companies instituted safeguards, but they’re woefully lacking compared to what could hit us.
Infrastructure protection
Even moderate geomagnetic storms cause significant damage or accelerate failures in equipment. Two years after the 1989 storm, 12 mid-sized transformers had failed — all of them significantly earlier than had otherwise been expected. During solar storms on April 3-5 1994, major transformers failed in Illinois at the Zion Nuclear plant as well as facilities in Braidwood and at the Powerton coal plant.
[7]The windings in this transformer were oil-cooled and rated for 3000 amps.
The good news is, there are ways to protect the grid and mitigate the damage that another Carrington event would cause. The bad news is, we’re mostly not doing them, despite the catastrophic damage such an event will cause. The Washington DC/New York City corridor is considered to be most at-risk, with 20-40 million people in danger. While it would cost several billion dollars to protect existing lines, the impact of a severe storm currently sits at an estimated $2.6 trillion.
Unlike dinosaur-level extinction events, geomagnetic storms that cause enormous disruptions in the Earth’s magnetic field are a regular phenomenon and were reported widely in historical journals and writings, stretching back to the dawn of human history. Storms with the power of the 1859 CME hit, on average, every 154 years.
Now read: Nuclear power is our only hope, or, the greatest environmentalist hypocrisy of all time [8]
Jul 15, 2013 02:28 PM EDT
Weakest Solar Maximum of the Last 100 Years? One Scientist Offers Different Explanation
By Tamarra Kemsley
X-class Solar Flare
This year marks the peak of the Sun's 11-year solar weather cycle, and the star appears to be asleep on the job: what usually marks a period of violent outbursts is turning out to be a season so quiet that some are calling it the weakest solar maximum of the last 100 years.
Key to increased solar activity are sunspots, which are believed to be the result of interplay between the Sun's plasma and its magnetic field. These darker, cooler areas on the star's surface are the source of massive surges of charged particles often sent hurtling toward the Earth's surface, damaging satellites and causing radio blackouts.
Solar maxima result when, about every 11 years, the Sun goes through a cycle of first increasing and then decreasing number of sunspots; however, this year, the number of sunspots has left astronomers wanting.
"It's the smallest maximum we've seen in the Space Age," David Hathaway of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., told reporters in a teleconference, according to Space.com.
In fact, 2013 has been so quiet that some scientists began to wonder as early as March if perhaps forecasters had missed the mark. However, solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center believes the answer lies elsewhere.
"This is solar maximum," he said in a NASA press release. "But it looks different from what we expected because it is double peaked."
By "double peaked" Pesnell means the Sun is engaging in a mini-cycle that lasts about two years in which solar activity goes up, dips and then resumes, as was the case for the solar maxima of 1989 and 2001.
As evidence, he points to the fact that sunspot counts jumped in 2011 and then dipped in 2012. Should everything go according to plan, Pesnell expects them to rebound again in 2013.
"I am comfortable in saying that another peak will happen in 2013 and possibly last into 2014," he said.
Jul 15, 2013 10:10 AM EDT
Sun's 2013 Solar Activity Peak is Weak and Disappointing
By Catherine Griffin
Sun
Our Sun is reaching the peak of its 11-year solar cycle, a time when it should be hurling out more solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Yet it seems as if our closest star is coming up a little short. Researchers have begun to discuss exactly why the sun has showed a disappointing lack of solar activity this year.
Every 11 years, the sun undergoes a solar maximum. This peak is characterized by an unusual number of sunspots that mar the sun's surface. Cool areas caused by intense magnetic activity, sunspots are regions that produce both solar flares and CMEs which can send billions of particles hurtling into space.
Although this peak was scheduled to occur in 2013, the lead up to it has shown a distinct lack of solar activity. That said, there have been a few solar flares and CMEs. For example, in May there were four X-class solar flares produced in quick succession. Yet the overall activity has remained largely low.
It shouldn't be all that surprising, though. In 2009, researchers at NASA predicted that the solar cycle this year would be relatively mild. In fact, they believed that the number of sunspots would be the lowest since 1928. Yet in order to examine the phenomenon a bit further, the Royal Astronomical Society asked solar scientists to give them an update on the state of the sun, according to the LA Times.
It's very possible that this year's weak solar maximum could be part of a 100-year solar cycle. Graphs going back to the 1700s reveal that there were fewer sunspots during solar maximums in the early part of the last three centuries. The latter half of the three centuries, in contrast, showed a much higher level of sunspots. What causes this potential 100-year cycle, though, is unknown.
That's not to say that this solar peak can't cause some major space weather. While categorized as weak, it's still very possible that the sun will still sling some solar flares and CMEs that could impact Earth.
"Even a below-average cycle is capable of producing severe space weather," said Doubt Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, in a news release.
In 1859, a similarly weak solar cycle peak occurred. Yet it created a massive geomagnetic storm named the "Carrington Event" that produced Northern Lights that were so bright that people could read newspapers by their glow. A phenomenon like this could potentially devastate modern high-tech infrastructure, such as satellite and communications.
Currently, though, it seems like the sun is holding off on the solar flares. Whether we'll see any type of increase as the star reaches its solar maximum, is something that remains to be seen.
Magnetic reconnection is responsible for all explosions on the sun and occurs during solar flares and coronal mass ejections. During a recent solar flare, spacecraft were able to capture this process in action and could help scientists understand space weather.
Magnetic reconnection occurs when magnetic fields join and then rearrange, according to NASA. The magnetic fields swap places, and a burst of magnetic energy is released. While magnetic fields are invisible, plasma travels along these lines, allowing scientists to follow the particles and map out the looping magnetic fields. On Aug. 11, 2012 NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, or Rhessi, witnessed a solar flare, and the spacecraft were able to capture magnetic reconnection in action.
Yang Su, from the University of Graz in Austria, said the latest data is just the latest part of an incomplete puzzle that explains how magnetic reconnection causes solar flares. “We have so many pieces of evidence, but the picture is not yet complete,” Su said in the NASA release. Su was responsible for discovering the spacecraft-captured magnetic reconnection in action, and the research was published in the journal Nature Physics.
Magnetic reconnection has been captured in images prior to Su’s research, but the images collected by SDO and Rhessi are the most complete evidence to date. In the video created by NASA, two magnetic fields can be seen joining briefly to form an “X” shape and then separating, one line of plasma particles being propelled into the space and the other line of plasma particles crashing to the sun’s surface, NASA reports. Sometimes, the line of plasma that gets ejected into space escapes the sun’s atmosphere and becomes a coronal mass ejection.
Su observed the process in SDO’s data, and the discovery was confirmed using Rhessi. The spacecraft can measure electromagnetic radiation and create images based on that data. The Rhessi data revealed two extremely hot points above and below the reconnection point of the two magnetic fields, a known sign of magnetic reconnection, NASA reports.
“This is the first time we’ve seen the entire, detailed structure of this process, because of the high-quality data from SDO,” Su said. The new evidence will lead to a better model of magnetic reconnection, how fast the process happens and the energy involved in the process, NASA notes. The newer models will help scientists observe other stars, as magnetic reconnection occurs in stars throughout the universe, and can help create better advanced warning systems for space weather. Coronal mass ejections and solar flares can send particles and radiation toward Earth. While the radiation cannot get through the Earth’s atmosphere, space weather can affect satellites and radio communication.
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