Global Hoax

Radar helps locate meteorite in Kansas

By ROXANA HEGEMAN, Associated Press WriterTue Oct 17, 7:56 PM ET

Scientists were excited when they pulled a 154-pound meteorite from deep below a Kansas wheat field, but what got them most electrified was the way they unearthed it.

The team Monday uncovered the find 4 feet under a meteorite-strewn field using new ground-penetrating radar technology that someday might be used on Mars.

It was that technology which pinpointed the site and proved for the first time that it could be used to find objects buried deep in the ground and to make an accurate three-dimensional image of them.

"It validates the technique so we can use something similar to that instrument when we go to Mars," said Patricia Reiff, director of the Rice Space Institute.

Such GPR systems had been used in the past to locate smaller meteorites through the ice in Antarctica. But until the Kansas dig, the technology had not been successfully used for ground detection in heavy soils — like on Mars — to find meteorites or water there.

The dig was likely the most documented excavation yet of a meteorite find, with researchers painstakingly using brushes and hand tools to preserve evidence of the impact trail and to date the event of the meteorite strike. Soil samples also were bagged and tagged and organic material preserved for dating purposes.

"When we find a piece of meteorite, each one is a new sentence we add to the book to understand the evolution of the solar system," Essam Heggy, planetary scientist at the Johnson Space Center's Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

Even before they had the pallasite meteorite out of the ground, the scientific experts at the site were able to debunk prevailing wisdom that the spectacular Brenham meteorite fall occurred 20,000 years ago. Its location in the Pleistocene epoch soil layer puts that date closer to 10,000 years ago.

"We know it is recent," said Carolyn Sumners, director of Astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, as she surveyed progress on the dig. "Native Americans could have seen it."

The expedition was put together by the Houston Museum of Natural Science and led by meteorite hunters Steve Arnold and Philip Mani. Johnson Space Center's Lunar and Planetary Institute, the Rice Space Institute at Rice University and George Observatory in Houston also sent researchers.

Fewer than 1 percent of the meteorites discovered on earth are pallasite meteorites, known for their crystals embedded in iron, Mani said.

Sophisticated metal detectors at the site initially detected what had been thought to be the largest pallasite meteorite ever discovered. But ground-penetrating radar showed that the object was only a steel cable.

The Brenham field was discovered in 1882. Scientists have since traced pieces of the shower as far away as Indian mounds in Ohio, indicating the meteorites were traded as pieces of jewelry and ceremonial artifacts.

The site was largely forgotten in recent decades until Arnold and Mani leased eight square miles of it and began looking deep below the surface. More than 15,000 pounds of meteorites have been recovered from the area.

This week's find will end up as part of a new exhibit on comets, meteors and asteroids at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The museum will pay about $50,000 for it, Sumners said. It is valued at more than $100,000, she said.

Landowner Alan Binford watched with interest as the scientists freed the meteorite, bagging clumps of his rich Kansas farmland around it.

"I didn't figure there would be that much scientific value," he said. "I never thought about them going to this extent. It is interesting history."

GLOBAL SEPTEMBER TEMPERATURE FOURTH WARMEST ON RECORD

NOAA image of January-September 2006 statewide temperature rankings.Oct. 16, 2006 — September 2006 was cooler than average for the continental U.S., providing relief from the second-warmest summer on record, according to scientists at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. September was the first cooler-than-average month for the continental U.S. since May 2005. Drought conditions also improved in some areas of the nation, with nationally averaged precipitation above average during September. The global temperature remained well above average. (Click NOAA image for larger view of January-September 2006 statewide temperature rankings. Please credit “NOAA.”)

U.S. Temperature Highlights

The September 2006 temperature for the contiguous United States (based on preliminary data) was 0.7 degrees F (0.4 degrees C) below the 20th century average of 65.4 degrees F (18.6 degrees C). This was the first cooler-than-average month since May 2005, based on the century-scale average. The rarity of below-average national temperatures is reflective of the overall long-term warming trend for the nation.

The January-September 2006 combined temperature is warmest on record. The previous record warm January-September happened in 2000.

The September temperature was below average in 25 states of the continental U.S., while above-average temperatures occurred in only five (Vermont, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon).

September temperatures for Alaska averaged at 48.6 degrees F and were warmer than average, 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C) above the 1971-2000 mean (45.9 degrees), the 11th warmest September since statewide records began in 1918.

NOAA image of January-September 2006 statewide precipitation rankings.U.S. Precipitation Highlights

Wetter-than-average conditions in September occurred from the northern High Plains to the Southwest and from New York to the mid-Mississippi Valley. Overall, precipitation was above average for the nation. (Click NOAA image for larger view of January-September 2006 statewide precipitation rankings. Please credit “NOAA.”)

Kentucky tied its September precipitation record with 8.02 inches of rain.

A wetter-than-average summer monsoon season for much of the Southwest ended in September. Precipitation during the past few months ended drought in New Mexico and helped reduce drought severity in other parts of the region. However, below-average reservoirs and other longer term hydrological effects remained widespread.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 33 percent of the continental U.S. was in moderate to exceptional drought at the end of September, a decrease of 11 percent since the end of August.

Severe-to-exceptional drought remained across large parts of Arizona, southern Oklahoma to south Texas, areas of the northern high Plains, the northern Rockies and northern Minnesota.

Drier-than-average conditions across the Far West contributed to the continuation of a very active wildfire season for the nation. By early October, more than 9 million acres, mostly in the continental U.S., had burned since the beginning of the year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. This exceeded the previous record for an entire year, set in 2005 when 8.7 million acres burned, much of it in Alaska.

Global Highlights
It was the fourth warmest September and fifth warmest year-to-date period since records began in 1880 for global land- and ocean-surface temperatures (1.01 degrees F/0.56 degrees C, 092 degrees F/0.51 degrees C above the 20th century mean). September land surface temperatures were second warmest, while ocean surface temperatures were third warmest in the 127-year record. An El Niño episode began in September as ocean temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific continued a recent warming trend.

In 2007 NOAA, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department, celebrates 200 years of science and service to the nation. Starting with the establishment of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1807 by Thomas Jefferson much of America's scientific heritage is rooted in NOAA. The agency is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and information service delivery for transportation, and by providing environmental stewardship of the nation's coastal and marine resources. Through the emerging Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), NOAA is working with its federal partners, more than 60 countries and the European Commission to develop a global monitoring network that is as integrated as the planet it observes, predicts and protects.

By LAUREN DAKE, Associated Press WriterMon Oct 9, 11:35 PM ET

A colorful new bird has been discovered in a previously unexplored Andean cloud forest, spurring efforts to protect the area, conservation groups said Monday.

The bright yellow and red-crowned Yariguies brush-finch was named for the indigenous tribe that once inhabited the mountainous area where it was discovered.

For conservationists the discovery of the species came at a crucial time — the government has decided to set aside 500 acres of the pristine cloud forest where the bird lives to create a national park.

"The bird was discovered in what is the last remnants of cloud forest in that region," Camila Gomez, of the Colombia conservation group ProAves, said on Monday. "There are still lots of undiscovered flora and fauna species that live in the area."

The small bird can be distinguished from its closest relative — the yellow-breasted brush finch — by its solid black back and the lack of white marks on its wings.

"There are about two to three new birds found in the world every year," Thomas Donegan, the British half of an Anglo-Colombian research duo who discovered the bird in January 2004, told The Associated Press on Monday. "It's a very rare event."

To access the bird's isolated habitat, Donegan and partner Blanca Huertas regularly hiked 12 hours into the nearly impenetrable jungle, depending on helicopters to drop off supplies at mountain peaks 10,000 feet above sea level.

"We first went to Yariguies about three years ago," Donegan said. "It's a huge patch of isolated forest that no one knew about, not even in Colombia."

The new finch, the size of a fist, is native to Colombia's eastern Andean range and considered by its discoverers to be near threatened and in need of close monitoring to prevent it from becoming endangered.

One of the two birds caught by the team was released unharmed after they took pictures and DNA samples, while the other died in captivity.

Donegan said this was one of the first time researchers were able to confirm a new bird without having to kill it.

The last new bird discovery in Colombia was a Tapaculos species found in the south last year.

With as many as 1,865 different species, Colombia has long been considered a bird watchers' paradise, albeit a risky one because of the country's four-decade-old civil war.

In 1998, rebels kidnapped four American bird watchers who were later found unharmed.

Mass Venezuela opposition rally
By Greg Morsbach
BBC News, Caracas

Tens of thousands of people have marched through the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, in support of the main opposition candidate, Manuel Rosales.

Mr Rosales will face President Hugo Chavez in December's presidential poll.

The march, which filled the main avenues of the city centre, was the biggest opposition rally Venezuela has seen since early 2004.

Then, protesters made an unsuccessful bid to oust Mr Chavez from power in a recall referendum.

Chance to unite

Young and old took to the streets to throw their weight behind the campaign of Mr Rosales, a middle-class Social Democrat who governs the state of Zulia, on the Colombian border.

Many claimed that they were seeking liberty and democracy and that made Mr Rosales their only option:

"The problem of the opposition is that before we had a lot of candidates and people couldn't make up their minds whom to support," one woman said.

"Right now we have just one candidate and I believe that we have a better shot if we have just one candidate against Chavez."

For some it was simply a day out to enjoy the sunshine, but for most it was a chance to listen to a speech by Mr Rosales, who declared that Venezuela was "at a crossroads".

Mr Rosales condemned what he called the cheque book diplomacy of Mr Chavez, accusing him of giving away Venezuela's oil wealth to foreign powers.

If Mr Rosales can keep up this kind of pressure against his rival, the election results may not necessarily be a foregone conclusion.

But for now, Mr Chavez still enjoys a clear lead in opinion polls because of a sense of loyalty that poor and working-class voters feel towards him.

By CHRIS CAROLA, Associated Press WriterSun Oct 8, 2:23 AM ET

This history-rich Hudson River community has yielded a museum's worth of 18th-century military artifacts over the decades, from musket balls to human skeletons. But a colonial soldier's daily lot wasn't all fighting and bloodshed. They had their share of down time, and that's where the sutler came in, offering for sale two of the few diversions from frontier duty: alcohol and tobacco.

A five-year-long archaeological project has unearthed the 250-year-old site of a merchant's establishment that sold wine, rum, tobacco and other goods to the thousands of soldiers who passed through this region during the French and Indian War, when Fort Edward was the largest British military post in North America.

Sutler, derived from the Dutch word for someone who performs dirty work, was the name given to the merchants who arrived on the heels of the British army and sold what the redcoats wouldn't — or couldn't — provide at a frontier outpost. With the permission of military officials, sutlers set up shop near a fort's gates, taking advantage of the isolated location to do a brisk trade with off-duty soldiers and officers.

With Albany located some 40 miles down river, the sutlers doing business here served as a precursor to today's convenience stores, said archaeologist David Starbuck.

"For your merchants of the day, this is your big captive audience," he said recently while giving a tour of the site. "Booze and tobacco were the big things. I guess things don't change with the years."

Starbuck said "huge numbers" of artifacts have been found at the sutler site, located in a wooded area on private property on the Hudson's east bank, just south of where the fort stood.

"It's definitely the richest one we've ever found in Fort Edward," said Starbuck, a New Hampshire college professor who has led a series of summertime excavations here and elsewhere in the region since the early 1990s.

High school history teacher Matt Rozell, a veteran of many of Starbuck's digs, found the sutler site in the 1990s after hearing stories of treasure hunters sneaking onto the property to loot artifacts. But the illegal digging only scratched the surface. The real treasures, Rozell said, were buried a foot or more below ground.

After receiving permission from the property owners to excavate the site, Starbuck's team of students, volunteers and professional archaeologists began digging in 2001. Over the next five summers, they uncovered remnants of a least one sutler's store, including fireplace bricks and a charred staircase and beams in what was the dirt-floor basement of the structure. Scattered about the site were various coins, thousands of broken and intact clay pipes and glass fragments from wine and rum bottles, evidence that the store doubled as a tavern.

Among the biggest finds: a 19-inch British bayonet in nearly pristine condition and an intact bottle.

"You don't find too many of them like that," said Rozell as he gently held a squat, dark-green bottle inside the work room at the Rogers Island Visitors Center, where the artifacts have been catalogued and stored.

Back at the site, the top half of a broken bottle protruded from the dirt at the edge of the pit, waiting to be excavated, cleaned up and catalogued.

This stretch of the upper Hudson has long been a source of artifacts dating back to the 1700s and earlier. American Indians referred to it as the "Great Carrying Place" because the nearby falls forced travelers to make a 15-mile portage to reach the southern end of Lake George to the north.

The first white settlement here was established in the early 1730s, when John Henry Lydius, a Dutch trader from Albany, opened a trading post. His business thrived until it was destroyed during a French and Indian raid in the 1740s.

In 1755, as the last of the French and Indian wars heated up, the English arrived in force and built Fort Edward. Within a few years, 15,000 British and colonial soldiers were based here, including the famed Rogers' Rangers.

Starbuck said the sutler site probably isn't the original Lydius trading post. It's more likely the sutler's store that appears on maps from the late 1750s, and possibly the same one mentioned in contemporary records as belonging to a "Mr. Best." The building apparently burned down around 1760, after the bulk of the British army had advanced on French-held Canada.

Starbuck has spent most of the past 15 years conducting digs at 18th-century military sites here and in Lake George. Those excavations tended to focus on places made famous by massacres and battles. He concedes that finding the cellar of a merchant's storehouse may not carry the same cachet with history buffs.

But the sutler site does offer a rare glimpse into an important aspect of frontier life in colonial America.

"Sutlers tend to be overlooked but they're a huge part of the (settlement) process," he said. "This is where a community begins. It's like a prelude to the founding of the towns up here."

Starbuck said the Fort Edward sutler site could wind up being second in terms of significance only to Michigan's Fort Michilimackinac, another 18th-century outpost where archaeologists have found hundreds of thousands of artifacts over the past 45 years.

Graduate student Alessandro Cerruti, left, and Professor Paul Kintner work on the antenna on the roof of Phillips Hall. They have found that the kinds of large solar flares expected in five years or so could produce massive outages of all GPS receivers on the day side of the Earth. Robert Barker/Cornell University Photography
A minor solar flare in September 2005 produced a noticeable degradation of all GPS signals on the day side of the Earth. When scaled up to the larger solar flares expected in 2011-12, Cornell researchers expect massive outages of all GPS receivers on the day side of the Earth.

Strong solar flares cause Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers to fail, Cornell researchers have discovered. Because solar flares -- larger-than-normal radiation "burps" by the sun -- are generally unpredictable, such failures could be devastating for "safety-of-life" GPS operations -- such as navigating passenger jets, stabilizing floating oil rigs and locating mobile phone distress calls.

"If you're driving to the beach using your car's navigation system, you'll be OK. If you're on a commercial airplane in zero visibility weather, maybe not," said Paul Kintner Jr., professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell and head of Cornell's GPS Laboratory.

Alessandro Cerruti, a graduate student working for Kintner, accidentally discovered the effect on Sept. 7, 2005, while operating a GPS receiver at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, one of six Cornell Scintillation Monitor (SCINTMON) receivers. Cerruti was investigating irregularities in the plasma of the Earth's ionosphere -- a phenomenon unrelated to solar flares -- when the flare occurred, causing the receiver's signal to drop significantly.

To be sure of the effect, Cerruti obtained data from other receivers operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Brazilian Air Force. He found that all the receivers had suffered exactly the same degradation at the exact time of the flare regardless of the manufacturer. Furthermore, all receivers on the sunlit side of the Earth had been affected.

Cerruti will report on the findings Sept. 28 at the Institute of Navigation Meeting in Fort Worth, Texas, where he will receive the best student paper prize. The full results of the discovery will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Space Weather.

The flare consisted of two events about 40 minutes apart: The first lasted 70 seconds and caused a 40 percent signal drop; the second lasted 15 minutes and caused a 50 percent drop. But this flare was moderate and short-lived; in 2011 and 2012, during the next solar maximum, flares are expected to be 10 times as intense and last much longer, causing signal drops of over 90 percent for several hours.

"Soon the FAA will require that every plane have a GPS receiver transmitting its position to air traffic controllers on the ground," warned Cerruti. "But suppose one day you are on an aircraft and a solar radio burst occurs. There's an outage, and the GPS receiver cannot produce a location. ... It's a nightmare situation. But now that we know the burst's severity, we might be able to mitigate the problem."

The only solutions, suggested Kintner, are to equip receivers with weak signal-tracking algorithms or to increase the signal power from the satellites. Unfortunately, the former requires additional compromises to receiver design, and the latter requires a new satellite design that neither exists nor is planned.

"I think the best remedy is to be aware of the problem and operate GPS systems with the knowledge that they may fail during a solar flare," Kintner said.

The team was initially confused as to why the flare had caused the signal loss. Then Kintner recalled that solar flares are accompanied by solar radio bursts. Because the bursts occur over the same frequency bands at which GPS satellites transmit, receivers can become confused, leading to a loss of signal.

Had the solar flare occurred at night in Puerto Rico or had Cerruti been operating SCINTMON only at night, he would not have made the discovery.

"We normally do observations only in the tropics and only at night because that's where and when the most intense ionospheric irregularities occur," said Kintner. However, since no one had done it before, Cerruti was looking at "mid-latitudes" (between the tropics and the poles), where weaker irregularities can occur both night and day. As a result, SCINTMON detected the solar flare.

Other authors of the forthcoming paper include D.E. Gary and L.J. Lanzerotti of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, E.R. de Paula of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais and Cornell research associate Hien Vo.

Source: Cornell University

LiveScience Staff

LiveScience.comTue Oct 3, 5:45 PM ET

A minor earthquake that shook parts of Maine at 8:07 p.m. local time Monday caused water to drop 2.5 feet at a U.S. Geological Survey monitoring well.

Nearly 17 hours later, the water level was still dropping, scientists announced today.

Hydrologists call the change in the well “dramatic,” and said well-water users might notice changes in their drinking water.

The preliminary magnitude 3.9 earthquake was the third such event to shake the state in the past few weeks. It was centered about 4 miles south-southeast of Bar Harbor, or 45 miles southeast of Bangor. A magnitude 2.5 earthquake on Sept .28 and a magnitude 3.4 on Sept. 22 were centered in the same location.

“It isn’t unusual for earthquakes to cause minor changes in water levels in wells, but this is the most memorable in Maine in the last decade,” said USGS hydrologist Gregory Stewart. “Users of well water could notice cloudy water and possibly a change in availability of water.”

The 98-foot-deep well is in Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor and is drilled into bedrock. On a normal day the water-level changes 3-4 inches. One other well near the epicenter also showed a drop in water level after the quake.

“Water-level responses can occur over time periods of a few minutes to several months," Stewart said.

Monday’s earthquake was widely felt in coastal and central Maine.

Though major earthquakes are rare in the Northeast, moderate to strong temblors have struck the region in the past.

The largest earthquake centered in Maine was a magnitude 5.1 event on March 21, 1904. It toppled chimneys and was widely felt throughout New England. Historic earthquakes centered outside Maine have been large enough to cause damage in the state.

The largest historic earthquake in the region was a magnitude 7.0 temblor in 1663, centered in Quebec along the St. Lawrence River. It knocked down chimneys in eastern Massachusetts. In 1755, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake brought down chimneys and several brick buildings in eastern Massachusetts.
Video: Earthquake Forecasts Natural Disasters: Top 10 U.S. Threats Satellites Reveal Earthquake Faults Along Eastern U.S. Central US Warned of Larger Earthquakes to Come Ominous Rumbling Under San Andreas Fault Images: Deadly Earthquakes Past and Present Original Story: Maine Quake Causes Dramatic Drop in Well Water Level

Visit LiveScience.com for more daily news, views and scientific inquiry with an original, provocative point of view. LiveScience reports amazing, real world breakthroughs, made simple and stimulating for people on the go. Check out our collection of Science, Animal and Dinosaur Pictures, Science Videos, Hot Topics, Trivia, Top 10s, Voting, Amazing Images, Reader Favorites, and more. Get cool gadgets at the new LiveScience Store, sign up for our free daily email newsletter and check out our RSS feeds today!