Barrel sponge

Giant barrel sponge
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Giant barrel sponge
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Porifera
Class: Demospongiae
Order: Haplosclerida
Family: Petrosiidae
Genus: Xestospongia
Species: X. muta
Binomial name
Xestospongia muta


Xestospongia muta, commonly known as the giant barrel sponge, is one of the largest species of sponge found in the Caribbean. It grows at depths of 10 metres (33 ft) or more and it grows between 60 cm and 1.8 m. It is brown-grey to reddish in color, with a hard or stony texture. There is little scientific information about the species, although it has been monitored since 1997.

X. muta has been called the "redwood of the reef" due to its up to 2000 year lifespan as well as its size and color.

Beautiful Geodes

Diamonds

Diamonds are geologists' discoveries; society must know Geology if they love their diamonds, gold,platinum & building materials; life with this awareness makes you a CITIZEN SCIENTIST

Carvings

Carvings are best done by weathering

Volcanic landscapes-Yellowstone Park

Yellowstone is renowned for its volcanic landscapes, which bubble, pop, steam, and burst. In fact, the park contains the highest concentration of geothermal features in the world. It is also home to a sublime wilderness of evergreen forests, deep canyons, and broad valleys where robust herds of American bison, elk, deer, and pronghorn antelope roam.

Huge rock block is left high & hanging

 An ice pedestal is seen at basecamp on Mount Everest.

Ice melts & drifts away

Date: 16-Apr-12
Country: RUSSIA

Birds sit on melting ice as it floats on the river Neva past a reflection of the Peter and Pavel Fortress in St. Petersburg April 13, 2012.

Tornado

A tornado makes its way through farmlands near Rush Center, Kansas, on April 14, 2012. Over 100 tornadoes ripped through several Plains states in just 24 hours that weekend
Gene Blevins / Reuters


It could have been so much worse. Over 100 tornadoes ripped through several Plains states in just 24 hours over the weekend. Cars were tossed through the air and houses were pulverized. Hail the size of baseballs fell from the sky, crushing anything left in the open. More than what is ordinarily a month's worth of cyclones struck in a single day, yet miraculously, only one, in the Oklahoma town of Westwood, proved fatal, killing six victims who lived in and around a mobile-trailer park. "God was merciful," Kansas Governor Sam Brownback told CNN on Sunday.

But it wasn't just God or chance. The low death toll was also due to a faster and more insistent warning system by weather forecasters, who put the word out early and often and over many platforms that the past weekend could be a dangerous one for the Midwest, thanks to an unusually strong storm system. The National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center took the unusual step of alerting people in the region more than a day before what was termed a possible "high-end, life-threatening event." Warnings went out over radios, smart phones and TVs, urging people to stay underground or in a tornado shelter for the duration of the storm. And with memories of the more than 500 people who died in cyclones last year still fresh, residents in the affected areas paid attention and stayed out of harm's way.

(PHOTOS: Tornado Alley: On the Ground With a Storm Chaser)

In the age of climate change, a lot of science and press coverage have been given over to determining whether warming really does make extreme events like heat waves, floods, storms or tornadoes more frequent or more powerful. That's understandable: gradual warming over years or decades doesn't get a lot of attention, but a megastorm like Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or the bursts of killer tornadoes last spring certainly do. It's not just a matter of focusing public attention, however; extreme-weather events kill tens of thousands of people every year, and take a sizable chunk out of the global economy — not something anyone's likely to fail to notice. Last year the U.S. experienced a dozen natural disasters that caused a billion or more dollars in damages, ranging from Hurricane Irene in September to the lingering drought in Texas and the Southwest. If climate change is really supercharging extreme weather — causing death and mayhem — that's one more reason to get a grip on carbon emissions fast.

As it happens, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published an assessment on the science of extreme weather and global warming just last month — but the answers are cloudy. The panel found that it was likely that man-made carbon emissions are leading to extreme heat, something that should resonate on an April day that was so unseasonably hot that runners were warned away from the Boston Marathon. There was also medium confidence that carbon emissions and other anthropogenic factors are leading to more extreme rainfall — like the Pakistan floods of 2010 — and more intense droughts, like the one much of the U.S. is suffering through right now.

But there's much less certainty on whether carbon emissions are supercharging hurricanes, tropical cyclones or tornadoes. That's due in part to limitations in past data. Today, every tropical depression gets named and tracked, so there's no chance that a hurricane could somehow form without being noticed. And both professional and amateur storm trackers keep a close eye on tornadoes, so even in a cyclone that touches down for a few moments goes into the record books. But in the past, hurricanes were often just sketchily documented and only the strongest tornadoes — or the ones that actually caused damage — likely would have been recorded. The occurrence of strong and violent tornadoes may well have remained relatively stable over the long term; the fact that we're seeing more tornadoes overall now might simply mean that we're noticing storms we might have missed 30 or 40 years ago.

(VIDEO: Climate Central: Tornado-Chasing Scientists)

There's no doubt that the actual cost of extreme weather is on the rise, with U.S. insured losses from weather disaster soaring from $3 billion a year in the 1980s to about $20 billion a year in the past decade, adjusted for inflation. But it doesn't automatically follow that those higher costs are due to climate-change-powered superstorms. The U.S. and the world at large are both richer and more populated than they were 30 years ago, and much of that wealth is now concentrated along highly vulnerable areas like coastlines. When a hurricane like Irene rakes the East Coast as it did last summer, it can affect far more people and valuable property than it would in the past. That translates to greater potential losses.

The fact that it's impossible to draw a straight line between climate change and the seemingly more turbulent weather doesn't mean we should act as if the two aren't linked. There's no doubt that warming raises at least the risk of extreme-weather events, something we're thinking about more in the early part of what is shaping up to be a brutally hot year in the U.S. But the fastest way to reduce the death and damage from extreme weather is through adaptation, whether that takes the form of better tornado warnings or micro-insurance policies that allows subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to bounce back from drought.

There's a reason that 95% of the deaths from natural disasters occur in the developing world; poverty leaves populations unprepared for extreme weather. That's true even within rich nations; it wasn't a coincidence that the handful of deaths caused by tornadoes in the Midwest occurred in a trailer park. But even poor countries or regions can learn to protect themselves. In 1970 a Category-3 cyclone killed an astounding 300,000 people in Bangladesh, yet an even stronger storm struck the country in 2007 and claimed only 4,200 lives — still a heartbreaking loss, but a far smaller one. Climate change and poverty can make extreme weather worse, but it doesn't have to claim lives.

Read more:http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2112188,00.html#ixzz1sIzMMxN2

Faulting

Conjugate normal faults, Black Mountains frontal fault zone, Death Valley,California.

Handling stress can make you shine like a Diamond

'Look deep into nature;~ and then you will understand everything better'.

CHEVRON FOLDS

Chevron folds with flat-lying axial planes, Millook Haven, North Cornwall, UK

COLUMNS

This photograph of lava-formed columns surrounding Svartifoss ("The Black Fall") in Iceland's Skaftafell National Park was taken by Giacomo Ciangottini. It was submitted as an entry in the 2012 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest.

LANDSCAPES

Strange Landscapes
Andres Arce—Reuters
March 4, 2012. The Perito Moreno glacier is seen after the rupture of a massive ice wall near the city of El Calafate in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, Argentina.

Himalayan Glaciers...

I do not know of any scientific study that supports a complete vanishing of glaciers in the Himalayas within this century
Michael Zemp
World Glacier Monitoring Service

Dinosaur eggs

Dinosaur Eggs Found In Russia's Chechnya

A man looks at what is believed to be fossilised dinosaur eggs at a site in Russia's volatile Chechnya region April 14, 2012.

Geologists in Russia's volatile Chechnya region have discovered what they believe to be fossilized dinosaur eggs laid by one of the huge extinct reptiles that roamed the Earth more than 60 million years ago.

"We've found about 40 eggs so far, the exact number has not been established," said Said-Emin Dzhabrailov, a geologist at the Chechen State University.

"There could be many more laying under the ground."

The find was uncovered when a construction crew was blasting through a hillside to build a road near the region's border with former Soviet Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains.

A team of geologists stumbled across the smooth, oval rock-like forms, which range from 25 cm to one meter coincidentally on a recent trip to the area, said Dzhabrailov.

He said paleontologists were needed to determine which species of dinosaur had laid them.

Dzhabrailov said that the regional Chechen government, which is eager to shed the region's reputation for violence, is considering turning the area into a nature preserve and seeking to attract tourists.

Federal forces fought two separatists wars between 1994-2001 in Chechnya, and an Islamist insurgency persists in the mostly Muslim region and surrounding provinces of Russia's North Caucasus.

However, violence has declined under the strong-arm rule of Ramzan Kadyrov, whose multi-million dollar construction projects are aimed at raising the region's profile and boosting the tourism potential of the troubled area.

Big may not be mighty

Why Huge Dinosaurs Had Such Tiny Babies
In the end, dinosaurs were no match for mammals and the main issue was their egg-laying.

By Jennifer Viegas
Tue Apr 17, 2012 


Larger mammals can have larger babies, but dinosaurs could not due to the physical limitations of laying eggs.
Most dinosaurs were either large or small, but mammals can fill all body size niches in the ecosystem.
When a catastrophic event wiped out larger species 65.5 million years ago, mammals were better able to recover.

dinosaur nest
enlarge

Egg-laying may have helped dinosaurs get big, but it didn't help their survival in the end. Click to enlarge this image.
Julius Csotonyi

A new study may explain many mysteries about dinosaurs, such as why enormous species had such small offspring, why non-flying dinos went extinct, and why today’s birds fly.

The paper, published in the journal Biology Letters, emphasizes how mammals and birds -- but not non-avian dinosaurs -- were able to persist beyond a major extinction 65.5 million years ago. The large body size and egg-laying ways of dinos may have helped to do them in, along with hungry mammals.

"The most successful (dinosaurs) were the very large ones that were able to escape the competition trap and replenish their numbers. After the mass extinction, they again tried to evolve large size, but to escape the competition trap they had to become multi-ton animals," lead author Daryl Codron told Discovery News.

PHOTOS: Oldest Dinosaur Nursery Found

"It seems that with all the mammals that were now in the way, birds simply could not become bigger," added Codron, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zurich’s Clinic for Zoo Animals, Exotic Pets and Wildlife.

Although large flightless birds exist today, such as ostriches and emus, they are a far cry from the gigantic sauropods and other big non-avian dinosaurs.
athletes
WATCH VIDEO: From a tiny, tough guy T. rex to a mummified duck-billed dino, take a look at these stories and more in our dinosaurs playlist.

For the study, Codron and his team simulated both dinosaur and mammal communities comprising species from 27 size categories including the largest and smallest known species of each group. The researchers next used mathematical calculations to simulate what would happen to the adults and offspring of the animals, based on size and resource competition.

While larger mammals can have larger babies, the dinosaurs faced the physical limitations of laying eggs. This meant that even enormous dinosaurs, weighing up to 150 tons, had tiny offspring.

"One cannot have a very large egg with a very thin shell, otherwise it would simply break open," Codron explained. "The shell itself is limited in thickness. It cannot become so thick that gas can no longer diffuse through it, which would deprive the embryo of oxygen. For a very small egg-laying animal this is no problem, but it does mean that very large animals have to produce relatively small eggs."

NEWS: Why Dinosaurs Were So Huge

Since very large adult dinosaurs tended to out-compete medium-sized adults, this and the egg limitations meant that most dino species were either small or large, with a gap in the medium size range, according to the researchers. In contrast, mammals fill all body size ecosystem niches available to them.

Once the catastrophic event 65.5 million years ago wiped out larger dinosaur species, dinos then had less surviving species from which to refill empty spots in the food chain. Mammals diversified and flourished, while non-avian dinosaurs disappeared.

The theory, however, could explain why living dinosaurs -- birds -- survived and evolved flight.

Codron said that "many people assume that dinosaurs were superior competitors, but there is now evidence that mammals were already diverse in those (dino-era) times, albeit small, and mammals may have preyed upon small dinosaur individuals and or eggs."

"Thus, our results might actually provide an explanation for the evolution of flight," he continued. "These small dinosaurs simply had to find a new niche away from mammals because they suffered competition from both each other and from mammals."

Christine Janis, a professor of biology at Brown University, pointed out that a fossil of Repenomamus, the largest mammal known from the Cretaceous period, had a juvenile dinosaur in its stomach.

"Nobody thinks about the fact that all dinosaurs went through small, fairly independent stages where competition with mammals could be an issue, and that this could affect repopulation outcomes following a mass extinction," Janis said.