Rock and Roll..

Earthquake Record Shakes Up Pacific Northwest Predictions

The study delves into the past of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a tectonic boundary that stretches more than 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) from Northern California to Vancouver Island. The exhaustive, 170-page report from a team at Oregon State University (OSU) offers ample evidence that 19 or 20 magnitude-9.0 earthquakes have ripped along the fault over the last 10,000 years. 

"That is a remarkable record that goes back a long time," said geophysicist Craig Weaver, the Pacific Northwest coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey's Earthquake Hazards Program, who was not associated with the research.  

Weaver said that it's been known since the late 1980s that the Cascadia Subduction Zone can rupture its entire length all at once, producing magnitude-9.0 quakes — the same magnitude as Japan's devastating March 2011 earthquake — along a fault that is even closer to shore. Yet the new report shows it has done so repeatedly, about every 500 years. 

The last magnitude-9.0 earthquake hit in January 1700, and sent a deadly tsunami across the Pacific Ocean to Japan. That event has been well-documented both historically and geologically.

California: once the bread basket of the world

Now a basket case.

The Los Angeles Times:

If San Joaquin Valley farmers such as Locke are fearful, so are the agricultural scientists who support California's $10-billion annual fruit and nut crop, the largest in the nation. A new study from UC Davis, to be published today, found that the number of winter chilling hours, essential to the flowering of orchards, has declined as much as 30% since 1950 in large swaths of the Central Valley, where most of the tree crops are grown.

Only 4% of the Central Valley is now suitable for apples, cherries and pears, all high-chill fruits that could once be grown in half the valley, according to the study. By the end of the century, it says, "areas where safe winter chill exists for growing walnuts, pistachios, peaches, apricots, plums and cherries are likely to almost completely disappear."

And:

Along California's central and northern coasts, salmon season has been closed for the second straight year because, in large part, water conditions have become so mucked up in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta that baby fish can't survive before heading to sea.

Commercial fishermen and their crews can't work. Recreational anglers can't fish, hurting charter boat owners.

"The delta is a black hole" for salmon, legislators were told by Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Assns.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin river system -- encompassing California's Central Valley -- historically has been the second-largest salmon producer on the West Coast, second only to the Columbia River. And Columbia salmon tend to migrate north to British Columbia and Alaska. Salmon that make it through the delta and out the Golden Gate have supplied 90% of the catch off California, and 50% off Oregon.

The delta also is the largest estuary on the West Coast of America, north and south, Grader said in an interview.

"Estuaries are places where salmon gain strength before going to sea," he continued. "We've been seeing salmon actually losing weight in the delta. They become weakened, get lost because of [reverse river] flows, become entrained in pumps or wind up in forebays where they're easy prey to predator fish."

What Grader describes is pretty much the fault of water management in the delta during the past half-century -- something all sides currently are trying to fix.

And here's this nice graphic that shows how the Central Valley will dry up.

Add in the economic collapse and budget disaster and California will be good and truly Californicated.

Just a word of advice...

Don't buy a house near the beach. Buy the one on the hill, it will be beachfront property in a few years...

California's interagency Climate Action Team on Wednesday issued the first of 40 reports on impacts and adaptation, outlining what the state's residents must do to deal with the floods, erosion and other effects expected from rising sea levels.

Hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars of Golden State infrastructure and property would be at risk if ocean levels rose 55 inches by the end of the century, as computer models suggest, according to the report.

The group floated several radical proposals: limit coastal development in areas at risk from sea rise; consider phased abandonment of certain areas; halt federally subsidized insurance for property likely to be inundated; and require coastal structures to be built to adapt to climate change.

"Immediate action is needed," said Linda Adams, secretary for environmental protection. "It will cost significantly less to combat climate change than it will to maintain a business-as-usual approach."

From the same article, maps showing what will go underwater...

Because the Arctic ice cap is melting:

(CNN) -- It could be the ultimate test of human endurance: Three British explorers are risking their lives in subzero temperatures to measure the melting Arctic ice cap.

The team is on a three-month, 621-mile (1,000-kilometer) hike to their final destination at the North Pole. Along the way, taking precise measurements to determine exactly how fast the ice cap is disappearing.

[snip]

The unique expedition was prompted by this chilling prospect: The Arctic ice cap is melting at an unprecedented rate, which may lead to a dramatic shift in average global temperatures.

"In 2007, sea ice loss was the worst in recorded history," said oceanographer Kate Moran, professor of oceanography and ocean engineering at the University of Rhode Island.

The last time that scientists can say confidently that the Arctic was free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, according to the Web site of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

All that could vanish within our lifetime, warn climate scientists, who predict that the Arctic sea ice in the summer season could be gone between 2013 and 2040.

Include Greenland and the Antarctic in that:

Scientists will warn this week that rising sea levels, triggered by global warming, pose a far greater danger to the planet than previously estimated. There is now a major risk that many coastal areas around the world will be inundated by the end of the century because Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting faster than previously estimated.

Low-lying areas including Bangladesh, Florida, the Maldives and the Netherlands face catastrophic flooding, while in the UK, the Thames estuary is likely to disappear by 2100. Cities like London will need new flood defenses.

“It is now clear that there are going to be massive flooding disasters around the globe,” said David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. “Populations are shifting to the coast, which means that more and more people are going to be threatened by sea-level rises.”

And um... bulges of water roaring about the globe?

Scientists say the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would have such profound effects it would shift the planet's rotation, sending a bulge of water into the Northern Hemisphere.

The enormous ice sheet, which many experts believe could collapse as the climate warms, is so heavy that as it melts it "will actually cause the Earth's rotation axis to shift rather dramatically," reports a team led by geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica, at the University of Toronto. The scientists say the North and South poles would move about half a kilometre if the entire ice sheet collapses and shifts more water north.

Coastal regions from Washington to Vancouver could expect sea levels to rise at least six metres, Mitrovica and his colleagues report Friday in the journal Science. Much of Florida would be drowned as would low-lying areas in Maritime Canada, the Arctic and along the Pacific coast.

There is nowhere on the coast of Canada or the U.S. that the sea level won't rise to at least six metres, Mitrovica said in an interview.

He and his colleagues stress that the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, while a big concern, is not imminent and may not occur for centuries. "But these findings do suggest that if you are planning for sea level rise, you had better plan a little higher," says co-author Peter Clark at Oregon State University.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that a collapse of the ice sheet would raise global sea levels by about five metres - a figure that has led to the "simplistic" idea that water will rise evenly around the planet, says Mitrovica.

Learning how to swim and tread water might be helpful, but the best is to have an inflatable boat in your hall closet...

crossposted at American Street

And so the fun begins

Birds not migrating:

But in a sign of the blurring of the seasons brought on by climate change, one of the birds has this year shunned migration to Africa and instead spent all winter in Britain.

In what experts say is the first documented evidence of the species "overwintering" here, a solitary swallow has been monitored from November to the end of February in a village near Truro, Cornwall.

Paul Stancliffe, a spokesman for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), called the discovery "incredible".

[snip]

In the BTO programme, a single wheatear was found to have overwintered in Burniston, near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, instead of in west Africa. Some 5,000 chiffchaffs, which normally migrate there or to Spain or Morocco, spent the winter in Britain. Mr Stancliffe said: "These are birds that would ordinarily migrate south of the Sahara. We believe it is because our winters are getting milder and birds are actually able to survive here through the winter."

The bird atlas programme will run until 2011, with 50,000 volunteers reporting sightings. The last time the exercise was carried out, in the 1980s, fewer than 1,000 chiffchaffs were found to be overwintering in Britain.

As further evidence of climate change, volunteers have also recorded "early returns" by many migrants this year, as well as unseasonably early nesting by birds that ordinarily remain here.

Salmon are dying via Kirk Murphy at Firedoglake:

The largest salmon run in the largest estuary on this hemisphere's Pacific Coast has collapsed. Why care about a bunch of fish and a big marsh? Well, healthy salmon runs require healthy water: fresh and salt. Crashing salmon runs tell us something in the water(s) has gone terrribly wrong. SF Bay fresh water is sucked up to supply central California crops and communities and Southern California taps. With over 17 million people in the LA area alone, and with California producing over half the nation's fruit, vegetables, and nuts, SF Bay water affects the price of your greens - and the health of your family, wherever they live. And the salmon tell us the Bay is very sick.

Polar ice is melting faster than expected (via Sorghum Crow):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The thickest, oldest and toughest sea ice around the North Pole is melting, a bad sign for the future of the Arctic ice cap, NASA satellite data showed on Tuesday.

But wait! We're saved! They've invented this:



Oddly it reminds me of the Mechanical Hound in Fahrenheit 451 .... which is why I want to beat it to death immediately.