Japan: Interactive photos, maps, video, graphics

Before-and-after interactive photos:

ABC.net: Japan Earthquake: before and after

Aerial photos taken over Japan have revealed the scale of devastation across dozens of suburbs and tens of thousands of homes and businesses: Hover over each satellite photo to view the devastation

CBC News: Japan earthquake: interactive photos

Satellite images before and after: Select a location using the tabs, then use the slider to compare before-and-after images of selected regions

VIDEO: Watching it come toward you

Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish: If you haven't seen this video of the tsunami approaching from the street level, you haven't quite yet absorbed the terrifying power of this death machine. When the buildings start moving off their foundations and sail through the city streets, it is hard not to gasp. I wish I could be more eloquent, but sometimes words fail.

Interactive map:

The Guardian: Japan earthquake -- the worst-affected areas and the nuclear risk

Graphics:

National Post: Disaster in Japan -- The Aftermath

National Post: Meltdown Fears

CBC Alert! Radioactive fallout on the way to BC

VIDEO: CBC ALERT! Japanese Nuclear Jetstream Fallout Map for Canada, BC

Quake moved Japan coast 2.4 metres, shifted Earth's axis 10 centimetres

CNN: The quake was 'hundreds of times larger' than the 2010 quake that ravaged Haiti. AFP: USGS seismologist Paul Earle: 'We've had aftershocks (in Japan) larger than the Haiti earthquake.'

Image source here.

Ice melting faster, sea levels higher than projected

Pace of polar ice melt 'accelerating rapidly'

Agence France-Press: The pace at which the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting is 'accelerating rapidly' and raising the global sea level, according to findings of a study financed by NASA... The findings suggest that the ice sheets -- more so than ice loss from Earth's mountain glaciers and ice caps -- have become 'the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.'

This study, the longest to date examining changes to polar ice sheet mass, combined two decades of monthly satellite measurements with regional atmospheric climate model data to study changes in mass.

'That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising'... said lead author Eric Rignot, jointly of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine. 'What is surprising is this increased contribution by the ice sheets is already happening.' Under the current trends, he said, sea level is likely to be 'significantly higher' than levels projected by the United Nations climate change panel in 2007.... The findings were published in the March edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

Image source here.

Japan quake centres, tsunami travel times

Sources for images: The Toronto Star and NOAA.

Cartoon for the day

(Brian Gable/The Globe and Mail)

BSE: Agribusiness disaster a boon for birds

European mad cow outbreak fuelled surge in Canadian birds through 'butterfly effect'

Postmedia News: In a study described as a 'striking illustration' of the long-distance links between a global trade disruption and impacts in the natural world, two Canadian scientists have connected the dots between the emergence of mad cow disease in Europe in the mid-1980s and a subsequent series of population spikes among grassland birds in southern Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario.

The rare example of successfully tracking a 'butterfly effect' linkage between seeming disparate phenomena, carried out by researchers from Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., showed how 18 of 20 bird species in North America appeared to benefit from the 1985 outbreak of BSE -- bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- after it destroyed cattle herds in Britain. [The study is published in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences.]...

First, the scientists describe how the appearance of the bovine brain-wasting disease prompted cattle culls and beef export bans across Europe. This, in turn, led to increased beef exports from Canada and the U.S., thus shrinking herd sizes in North America and reducing the need for hay to feed cows. Reduced hay harvesting, then, meant a greater availability of grassland habitat for such birds as the sage wren, grasshopper sparrow and Eastern meadowlark, each of which thrived form greater nesting opportunities in fields that were uncharacteristically left uncut.

The researchers determined that the time lag between the closing of European beef exports and the population explosions among grassland bird species was about three years.

Image source here.

International Women's Day: 100 Years

Image source here.

Sudden chill of seas killed 75% of marine species

Quebec island a window on Earth's second-largest extinction

Postmedia News: Canada's historic Anticosti Island has produced the first clear evidence that the planet's second-largest mass extinction -- the sudden disappearance of 75% of all marine species on Earth about 450 million years ago -- was caused by a rapid, five-degree plunge in ocean temperatures. The discovery on the large Quebec island was reported just days after another team of scientists pointed to ash deposits on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic as proof that the planet's biggest extinction event -- when 95% of all life died out 250 million years ago -- was linked to volcano-fed coal fires in ancient Siberia.

Anticosti Island, located in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and first described by French explorer Jacques Cartier during his 1534 voyage of discovery to inland Canada, is widely viewed as a geological treasure. The steep cliffs along the island's shores preserve a fossil-rich record of Earth history from a time when present-day North America was situated around the equator...

Using the alignment of telltale molecules in the animals' preserved shells as a 'paleo-thermometer,' the scientists discovered that a spike in extinctions during the Ordovician era coincided exactly with the sudden cooling of the seas. 'Our study strengthens the case for a direct link between climate change and extinction,' California Institute of Technology researcher Seth Finnegan said in the study overview. Study co-author Woodward Fischer, also a Caltech researcher, noted that 'our observations imply a climate system distinct from anything we know about over the last 100 million years.'

Image source here.

Dinosaur refuge in New Mexico?

Bone discovery suggests dinosaurs survived 700,000 years past meteorite strike

Postmedia News: A fossilized sauropod bone, dated by a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists to 64.8 million years ago, appears likely to force a serious rethinking of the demise of dinosaurs, which were supposed to have been wiped out in a catastrophic meteorite strike no later than 65.5 million years ago -- 700,000 years before the death of the giant, vegetarian beast that left its femur behind in present-day New Mexico.

A study of the bone in the journal Geology, co-authored by University of Alberta paleontologist Larry Heaman and two U.S. colleagues... also represents a landmark achievement in the use of a uranium-lead dating technique -- developed at the University of Alberta -- that allowed the team to pinpoint the age of the bone directly from a fragment of the specimen, not just indirectly from the layer of rock in which it was found.

The bone was unearthed near the New Mexico-Colorado border by U.S. paleontologist James Fassett... In the past, Fassett has controversially proposed that the region may have been a refuge for some dinosaurs that survived the colossal meteorite strike widely believed to have ended the dinosaur age between 65.5 and 66 million years ago. The new findings appear to support Fassett's theory...

'For some time, there's been other evidence that suggests dinosaurs survived,' he said, at least in some small pockets... But it hasn't been 'ironclad evidence,' he noted. 'What was missing was some way to directly date the bone itself. Up to now, it's just never been possible, so this is the first real success.'

Image source here.

Egypt's young activists: 'Like planting a palm tree'

VIDEO: Egypt's Facebook Faceoff

PBS: Back in July 2008, Australian television profiled Egypt's young democracy activists and their savvy use of social media. The film included the April 6 Movement's Ahmed Maher and blogger Wael Abbas, both features in FRONTLINE's Revolution in Cairo. Several activists, who just got out of prison, were reluctant to appear on camera; much of the film, reported by Sophie McNeill, was recorded in secret.

One young activist, Belal Diab, recalls how he heckled Egypt's Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif at a Cairo University event, and made sure his friend used his mobile phone to record and update his protest to YouTube. He had demanded the release of all April 6 Movement detainees. His family told him not to return home that night.

Although Egyptians weren't yet ready to support the young activists back in 2008 because of the regime's brutal crackdown on the April 6 Movement, the young activists never stopped believing that their day would come: 'Our generation believes it is like planting a palm tree,' Diab says about their growing use of online tools. 'We might not eat its dates, but the next generation will.'

Image source here.

Canadian wild salmon at risk from GE fish

Genetically engineered fish could pose threat to wild stocks: DFO scientists

Postmedia News: There's a risk Canadian fish stocks could be harmed if the world's first genetically engineered salmon is approved for commercialization, federal scientists suggest... Experts from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans are concerned about 'limited' and possibly 'constrained' regulatory powers around the approvals for GE fish. The analysis, from senior scientists specializing in biotechnology and aquaculture, comes as a company called AquaBounty Technologies works to bring GE salmon to the dinner plate...

The company cleared an important hurdle in August, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's preliminary analysis concluded that the salmon, engineered in Atlantic Canada to grow twice as fast as normal fish, are safe to eat and not expected to have a significant impact on the environment... The company plans to produce the eggs in Prince Edward Island... where the Massachusetts-based company currently grows sterile female GE salmon for research purposes...

During early consultations a year ago involving... the Department of Fisheries, Environment Canada and Health Canada, fisheries officials voiced concerns... according to the minutes, redacted in many placed and released under access-to-information legislation.

Lucy Sharratt, co-ordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network [said] 'The documents confirm the fish cannot be contained, infertility cannot be 100 per cent achieved, and when fish escape, there's a risk it will come back to affect our fish stocks... Michael Hansen, a scientist at the New York-based Consumers Union, said... 'The assessment that the FDA did was scientifically completely inadequate.'

Image: A transgenic (top) and a non-transgenic salmon at the AquaBounty hatchery in Bay Fortune, PEI. Source here.

Quote for the day

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

The Index of Potential Unrest

To enlarge image, go here and scroll down.

'Can Data Predict Political Revolutions?'

Richard Florida, The Atlantic: With the help of my colleague Charlotta Mellander, we pulled together statistics from 152 nations and sorted them according to eight key variables: human capital levels in combination with percent of the workforce in the creative class, life satisfaction, GDP per capita, perceptions about local labor market conditions, Internet access, freedom, tolerance, and honesty in elections. The data comes from the World Bank, the International Labor Organization, and the Gallup Organization. The map below shows how these nations stack up...

Among the highest scorers are the West Bank/Gaza Strip (.75), Yemen (.75), Egypt (.74), and Iraq (.72)... On the other wise of the ledger, the world's most stable nations are the Netherlands (.25), Norway (.15), Australia (.17), Finland ((.18) and Canada (.19). The United States is in 20th place (.3).

Atwood as goalie: 'You don't deke Margaret'

VIDEO: CBC Celebrity Tip with Margaret Atwood

Watch it here.