Sun hurls strong geomagnetic storm toward Earth

WASHINGTON: The strongest geomagnetic storm in more than six years was forecast to hit Earth’s magnetic field on Tuesday, and it could affect airline routes, power grids and satellites, the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center said.

A coronal mass ejection – a big chunk of the Sun’s atmosphere – was hurled toward Earth on Sunday, driving energized solar particles at about 5 million miles an hour (2,000 km per second), about five times faster than solar particles normally travel, the center’s Terry Onsager said.

“When it hits us, it’s like a big battering ram that pushes into Earth’s magnetic field,” Onsager said from Boulder, Colorado. “That energy causes Earth’s magnetic field to fluctuate.”

This energy can interfere with high frequency radio communications used by airlines to navigate close to the North Pole in flights between North America, Europe and Asia, so some routes may need to be shifted, Onsager said.

It could also affect power grids and satellite operations, the center said in a statement. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station may be advised to shield themselves in specific parts of the spacecraft to avoid a heightened dose of solar radiation, Onsager said.

The space weather center said the geomagnetic storm’s intensity would probably be moderate or strong, levels two and three on a five-level scale, five being the most extreme. AGENCIES

Up to 100 hurt in Iran earthquake: reports

TEHRAN: A 5.5-magnitude earthquake struck the area of the city of Neyshabour in northeast Iran on Thursday, injuring at least 100 people and damaging several houses, state media reported.

The jolt hit at 1235 GMT, the reports said.

“In the quake, 100 people were injured. Eighty-three were treated as out patients and the rest have been admitted to hospital. We have no reports of any deaths,” Khorasan Razavi provincial crisis management director Hojat Ali Shayanfar was quoted as saying.

Local media said around a dozen aftershocks were felt, breaking windows in some houses and causing cracks in walls terrifying some residents.

Neyshabour, a city of nearly half a million, is around 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Iran’s holy city of Mashhad, where reports said the tremor was also felt.

Iran sits astride several major fault lines in the Earth’s crust and is prone to frequent earthquakes, many of which have been devastating.

The deadliest in recent times was a 6.3-magnitude quake which struck the southern city of Bam in December 2003, killing 31,000 people — about a quarter of the population — and destroying the city’s ancient mud-built citadel. AGENCIES

Israel on high alert as Palestinians petition UN

JERUSALEM: Some 22,000 Israeli police and border police were on high alert across the country on Friday, poised to respond to any unrest resulting from a Palestinian bid to seek UN membership in New York.

“We have deployed 22,000 police and border police officers who will be on duty until at least Saturday night in order to maintain order across the country,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP.

The forces were deployed along the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, in annexed east Jerusalem, and around Arab Israeli towns, he said.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas will present a formal request for UN membership for a Palestine state later on Friday in a move which has sparked anger in Israel and opposition from Washington which has vowed to block the move at the UN Security Council.

Israel’s defence establishment has been preparing for months for the eventuality of rioting and mass unrest should the membership bid be scuttled, with the army, police and emergency services all on high alert on Friday.

In Jerusalem, police barred entry to the city’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound to men under 50 and anyone not holding a blue east Jerusalem ID card.

The army also boosted numbers in the West Bank, deploying an extra 1,500 reservists across the territory, media reports said. A military spokesman on Thursday said troops would show “restraint” in dealing with any disturbances, “using riot dispersal means” in accordance with the level of unrest.

Earlier this week, tens of thousands of Palestinians rallied across the West Bank in a massive show of support for the UN campaign, but there was little sign of any unrest and only isolated incidents of stone throwing.

More gatherings are planned for Friday evening when Palestinians are expected to turn out en masse to watch Abbas’s speech to the UN General Assembly on large screens in towns and cities across the West Bank.

Palestinian officials have repeatedly pledged that the marches and demonstrations will be peaceful and stay within Palestinian-controlled areas. AGENCIES

US faces de-industrialization, joblessness

A serious warning that all is not well has come in the form of Friday s historic downgrade of its “AAA” credit rating by Standard & Poor, which was followed Monday by plunging global stock prices.

President Barack Obama said he heard the warning. “Our problems are imminently solvable. And we know what we have to do to solve them,” he said Monday, referring to the need to rein in massive US budget deficits.

He stressed his confidence in the US economy: “We continue to have the best universities, some of the most productive workers, the most innovative companies, the most adventurous entrepreneurs on Earth,” he said.
This patriotic statement, however, obscures some less pleasant details.

If, as Obama believes, investors around the globe still give the United States a “AAA” rating, the country must first retain its uncontested currency supremacy.
Supported by a domestic financial sector and the confidence of foreign central banks, the status of the dollar is virtually intact.

“The US economy has its own problems, that we highlighted with the downgrade,” said John Chambers, S&P s managing director and head of its sovereign ratings committee.

But he added that “the dollar will remain the key international reserve currency under any plausible scenario.”
Judging by its value, though, the dollar may be losing its luster. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in its annual report on the US economy in July that the dollar is now at its lowest level in decades against the currencies of major trading partners.

One problem the United States faces is a loss of competitiveness, something Americans encounter every day as the vast majority of the products they consume bear the words, “Made in China.”
“They re really starting to worry that America has lost its competitive edge. Jobs are going overseas,” said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

According to the World Trade Organization, the US share of world exports for goods fell by 12.1 percent in 2000 to 8.4 percent in 2010. More than 10,000 factories have closed in the United States since 2003, the trade publication “Plant Closing News” reports.

The loss of manufacturing jobs, in turn, has helped open growing income gaps between college graduates and unskilled workers, between regions and between ethnic groups.

To be sure, the US economy is still the queen of the service sector, and of finance in particular.
In an interview with The New Republic in February, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he had no enthusiasm for

“trying to shrink the relative importance of the financial system in our economy as a test of reform, because we have to think about the fact that we operate in the broader world.”

IMF chief economist Simon Johnson called this a fundamental error. “It is a deeply disturbing vision, one that amounts to a huge, uninformed gamble with the future of the American economy,” he said, recalling the trials of Iceland and Ireland in their financial globalization.

Increasing the finance sector s influence is a way to mask an economy of debt, a main product of banks, say certain economists. And the financial crisis showed that credit can be harmful.

In the United States “you have a big private debt overhang, in this case households,” said economist Carmen Reinhart Saturday on the Bloomberg TV channel.

Asked what that means for the future, she said “stubborn unemployment issues” and “growth that is not on par with other recoveries.”

NASA finds new evidence of liquid water on Mars

LOS ANGELES: NASA scientists have discovered new evidence that briny water flows on Mars during its warmest months, raising chances that life could exist on the Red Planet, the space agency said on Thursday.

NASA first found signs of water on Mars more than a decade ago, but earlier indications were that any existing water would be frozen and concentrated at the poles.

Recently analyzed images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite show dark, finger-like features that extend down some slopes and crater walls on the planet during its late spring through summer, fading in the Martian winter.

“This is the best evidence we have to date of a liquid water occurring today on Mars,” said Philip Christensen, a geophysicist at Arizona State University, Tempe, in a NASA panel announcing the findings in Washington.

NASA scientists believe that if there is liquid water on Mars, it would be highly salty and lie beneath the surface. That would explain why it would not freeze in the planet’s frigid surface temperatures, which can fall to around 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 128 degrees Celsius), or evaporate in its low air pressure.

“It is more like a syrup, maybe, in how it flows,” said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator in charge of a special camera on the Mars orbiter called a High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment.

He also is the lead author of a report on evidence of water flows published on Thursday in the journal Science.

BETTER THAN ICE

The scientists on NASA’s panel stressed that liquid water is more likely to sustain life than ice, underscoring the importance of the latest discovery.

Past NASA discoveries revealed evidence of ancient shorelines and riverbanks on Mars. And analysis of gullies on the Red Planet five years ago turned up fresh mineral deposits that suggested recent water flows, but provided no categorical proof of that, scientists said.

The latest discovery is more difficult to explain away as evidence of anything but contemporary water flows, said Michael Meyer, Mars exploration program lead scientist at NASA.

Another possibility to account for the periodic darkening in the areas under examination is dust moving along the surface of the planet, McEwen said. But dust avalanches would occur at more random intervals, rather than on a seasonal basis, he said.

Scientists on the panel said the latest imaging evidence of flowing water also suggests the existence of liquid water closer to the planet’s equator than previously found.

Any liquid water would likely lie beneath the surface because the atmosphere on Mars is so thin that liquid water above ground would quickly evaporate, scientists said.

Some organisms on Earth thrive underground with little access to sunlight, and the same thing could be occurring on Mars, said Lisa Pratt, biogeochemist at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a participant on the NASA panel discussing the results on Thursday.

Pratt said further research is needed at the seven sites where recurring evidence of flowing water was found.

“It is our first chance to see an environment on Mars that might allow for the expression of an active biological process, if there is present-day life on Mars,” she said. AGENCIES

Lights off as ”Earth Hour” circles the globe

PARIS: Hundreds of landmark buildings and millions of ordinary homes were switching off their lights Saturday as the annual “Earth Hour” moved around the globe in what was dubbed the world”s largest voluntary action for the environment.

Australia”s Opera House was the first of many global landmarks to go dark as the event got under way, as hundreds of millions of people prepared to follow suit to enhance awareness of energy use and climate change.

Others in their turn included Beijing”s “Bird”s Nest” stadium that hosted the 2008 Olympics, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the London Eye Ferris wheel, Times Square in New York and Brazil”s Christ the Redeemer statue.

Most were switching off their floodlighting, advertising signs and other illuminations for an hour from 8:30 pm local time.

“The amount of power that”s saved during that time is not really what it”s about,” Earth Hour co-founder and executive director Andy Ridley told in Sydney, where the movement began in 2007. “What it is meant to be about is showing what can happen when people come together.”

Ridley said a record 134 countries or territories were on board for this year”s event, which organisers have dubbed the world”s largest voluntary action for the environment.

Organisers this year also asked people to commit to an action, large or small, that they will carry through the year to help the planet. For example, Dalian city in northeastern China will spend 1.5 billion dollars planting 340 million trees and Chengdu city in the southwest will make up to 60,000 bicycles available for public rental.

The event kicked off in the Pacific, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia, rolling into Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas as it followed the descending sun.

Ridley said Earth Hour, organised by global environment group the WWF, this year would also focus on connecting people online so they could inspire each other to make commitments to help protect the environment.

In Australia, organisers said an estimated 10 million people, nearly half the population, took part, with Sydney Harbour Bridge another of the landmarks to go dark.

Hong Kong”s neon waterfront dimmed, while in Singapore all decorative lights were switched off and non-critical operational lights lowered at Changi Airport for an hour. The airport said the effort would result in energy savings equivalent to the total amount of electricity consumed by a four-room apartment over three months.

In Japan, which is reeling from a huge earthquake and tsunami that struck this month, several thousand people and a hotel-turned-evacuation centre in the northeast marked Earth Day.

In Paris a minute”s silence was to be observed for Japan as the city of light went dark, with illuminations switched off at the cathedral of Notre Dame, City Hall, the two opera houses and many bridges, fountains and public places.

Another 129 French towns and cities were also taking part in Earth Hour.

In Russia some 30 cities were joining in, from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the most easterly city on the Kamchatka peninsula, through Moscow to Murmansk in the far north. Moscow was to turn off floodlighting on more than 70 buildings and bridges, including the 540-metre (1,780-foot) television tower and the 32-storey Moscow State University building.

In Athens monuments being darkened included the Acropolis, the parliament building, the presidential palace and at the temple of Poseidon near the city.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon backed Earth Hour, urging people to celebrate the shared quest to “protect the planet and ensure human well-being”. “Let us use 60 minutes of darkness to help the world see the light,” he said.

Ridley said he never expected the Earth Hour movement to become so large. “We didn”t imagine right at the beginning… it would be on the scale that it is now. And the fact that it is so cross cultural, beyond borders and race and religion,” he said. (AFP)

What is a tsunami?

TOKYO: A once-exotic word that has now entered the everyday lexicon, a tsunami refers to a shock of water that spreads through the sea, usually after a sub-sea floor quake.

A section of seabed is thrust up or driven down by violent movement of the Earth”s crust.

The rift displaces vast quantities of water that move as waves, able to cover enormous distances over open water, sometimes at the speed of a jet plane.

An 8.9-magnitude quake off Japan”s northern coast on Friday generated a 10-metre (33 feet) tsunami that picked up ships and dashed them into coastal towns.

Buildings and vehicles were carried away as the huge wall of water swept inland.

The word “tsunami” comes from the Japanese words for “harbour” and “wave”.

At their point of generation, tsunamis have a relatively small wave height, with peaks far apart.

As the waves approach the shore they are compressed by the shelving of the sea floor, reducing the distance between the peaks and vastly increasing the height.

To those on the shore, the first sign of something amiss can be the retreat of the sea, which is followed by the arrival of large waves.

“The sea was driven back, and its waters flowed away to such an extent that the deep seabed was laid bare and many kinds of sea creatures could be seen,” wrote Roman historian Ammianus Marcellus, awed at a tsunami that struck the then-thriving port of Alexandria in 365 AD.

“Huge masses of water flowed back when least expected, and now overwhelmed and killed many thousands of people… Some great ships were hurled by the fury of the waves onto the rooftops, and others were thrown up to two miles (three kilometres) from the shore.”

Several factors determine the height and destructiveness of a tsunami.

They include the size of the quake, the volume of displaced water, the topography of the sea floor as the waves race to the coast and whether there are natural obstacles that dampen the shock.

Destruction of protective mangroves and coral reefs and the building of homes or hotels on exposed beaches are fingered as leading causes of high death tolls from tsunamis.

Large quakes are the main drivers of tsunamis, but the phenomenon can also be sparked by other cataclysmic events, such as volcanic eruptions and even landslides.

In 1883, a volcano shattered the Pacific island of Krakatoa, causing a blast so loud that it could be heard 4,500 kilometres away, followed by a tsunami that killed some 30,000 people.

The tsunami of December 2004 in the Indian Ocean was caused by a monstrous 9.1-magnitude earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

It released energy equivalent to 23,000 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, according to the US trendpk.comlogical Survey (USGS). Some 220,000 people in 11 nations were killed, many of them thousands of kilometres from the epicentre.

The Pacific Ocean is particularly prone to earthquakes and therefore to tsunamis.

But research has found that, over the millennia, tsunamis have occurred in many parts of the world, including the Atlantic and Mediterranean. A global monitoring network, overseen by the UN, has been set in place to alert areas at risk.

Massive quake unleashes tsunami on Japan

TOKYO: One of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded hit Japan Friday, unleashing a 10-metre high tsunami that tossed ships inland and sparked fears that destructive waves could hit across the Pacific Ocean.

The devastating 8.9-magnitude quake left many people injured in coastal areas of the main Honshu island and Tokyo, police said, while TV footage showed widespread flooding in the area. 26 people were reported dead.

A monster 10-metre (33 feet) wall of water was reported in Sendai city in northeastern Miyagi prefecture, media said after a four-metre wave hit the coast earlier. The government said the quake had caused “tremendous damage”.

Helicopter footage showed massive inundation in northern coastal towns, where floods of black water sent shipping containers, cars and debris crashing through streets. An oil refinery was ablaze near Tokyo.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre issued a widespread warning for territories as far away as South America, New Zealand and Hawaii, where evacuations were ordered.

“An earthquake of this size has the potential to generate a destructive tsunami that can strike coastlines near the epicentre within minutes and more
distant coastlines within hours,” the centre said in a statement.

Swells of up to one metre were reported hitting Russia”s far east, with bigger waves expected later.

Television footage showed a wide, muddy stream moving rapidly across a residential area near the Natori River in Sendai, levelling all in its path.

The tsunami also reached Sendai airport, submerging the runway while a process known as liquefaction, caused by the intense shaking of the tremor, turned parts of the ground to liquid.

Public broadcaster NHK said several dozen houses had been washed away in Miyagi Prefecture.

In the capital, where millions evacuated strongly swaying buildings, multiple injuries were reported when the roof of a hall collapsed during a graduation ceremony, police said.

Plumes of smoke rose from at least 10 locations in the city, where four million homes suffered power outages.

The first quake struck just under 400 kilometres (250 miles) northeast of Tokyo, the US trendpk.comlogical Survey said. It was followed by more than a dozen aftershocks, one as strong as 7.1.

The quake was the largest ever in Japan, the fifth strongest tremor worldwide since 1900 and the seventh strongest in history, according to the US trendpk.comlogical Survey and Japanese seismologists.

“We were shaken so strongly for a while that we needed to hold on to something in order not to fall,” said an official at the local government of the hardest-hit city of Kurihara in Miyagi prefecture.

“We couldn”t escape the building immediately because the tremors continued… City officials are now outside, collecting information on damage,” she said by telephone.

A major blackout occurred across a wide area of northeastern Japan.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan quickly assembled his cabinet after the quake hit, and the government dispatched naval vessels from near Tokyo to Miyagi.

The quake affected the nation’s key transportation systems, including Narita airport, which shut its runways for safety checks.

The quake, which hit at 14:46 pm (0546 GMT) and lasted about two minutes, rattled buildings in greater Tokyo, the world”s largest urban area and home to some 30 million people.

In Tokyo, where the subway system stopped, sirens wailed and people streamed out of buildings. The government moved to reassure people that there had been no radiation leak from the country”s network of nuclear power plants.

Japan sits on the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, which is dotted with volcanoes, and Tokyo is situated in one of its most dangerous areas.

The quake sent the Nikkei share index plunging at the close while the yen fell sharply against the US dollar before recovering.

The mega-city of Tokyo sits on the intersection of three continental plates — the Eurasian, Pacific and Philippine Sea plates — which are slowly grinding against each other, building up enormous seismic pressure.

The government’s Earthquake Research Committee has warned of a 70 percent chance that a great, magnitude-eight quake will strike within the next 30 years in the Kanto plains, home to Tokyo”s vast urban sprawl.

The last time a “Big One” hit Tokyo was in 1923, when the Great Kanto Earthquake claimed more than 140,000 lives, many of them in fires. In 1855, the Ansei Edo quake also devastated the city.

In 1995 Kobe earthquake killed more than 6,400 people.

More than 220,000 people were killed when a 9.1-magnitude quake hit off Indonesia in 2004, unleashing a massive tsunami that devastated coastlines in countries around the Indian Ocean as far away as Africa.

Small quakes are felt every day somewhere in Japan and people take part in regular drills at schools and workplaces to prepare for a calamity.

Nuclear power plants and bullet trains are designed to automatically shut down when the earth rumbles and many buildings have been quake-proofed with steel and ferro-concrete at great cost in recent decades.

Discovery shuttle poised for historic final launch

CAPE CANAVERAL: Discovery, NASA’s oldest and most journeyed space shuttle, is poised to launch Thursday on its final mission, wrapping up a near three-decade legacy of orbital travel.

When the storied spacecraft lifts off at 2150 GMT, it will mark the beginning of the end of the US space shuttle program, with Discovery the first of the remaining three shuttles headed for retirement this year.

The closure of the US shuttle program will leave a gaping hole in the American space mission, and leaves astronauts to rely on the Russian Soyuz space capsule for transport to the orbiting International Space Station.

But concerns for the future were brushed aside as excitement mounted at Kennedy Space Center for Discovery”s mission, with technical checks moving along smoothly and no hint of the fuel tank woes that delayed the launch in November.

“Everything is on track and going beautifully with the countdown,” said mission management team director Mike Moses. “We’re really looking forward to a very action-packed, successful mission.”

Cracks on Discovery”s external fuel tank emerged just before launch more than three months ago, causing engineers to puzzle for many weeks over the cause and how to fix it.

In January, engineers agreed that installing small metal strips, called radius blocks, on the 6.7 meter- (22-foot-) long U-shaped aluminum brackets, called stringers, would reinforce their strength.

Shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach said the teams preparing Discovery this time had found “no problems at all” as they count down toward lift-off.

“We’re not tracking any issues and it looks like Discovery will fly this time,” said Leinbach.

The rotating service structure around Discovery was rolled away on Wednesday evening, revealing the shuttle on the launch-pad for the first time.

The six-member crew of astronauts headed to bed at 0400 GMT and were to awaken at 1200 GMT for the launch Thursday, NASA said.

The loading of the external fuel tank was to begin at 1225 GMT. The astronauts were expected to board the shuttle at around 1835 GMT.

The mission will be led by commander Steven Lindsey, pilot Eric Boe and astronauts Alvin Drew, Michael Barratt, Steve Bowen and Nicole Stott.

Astronaut Tim Kopra was scratched from the crew list after a bicycle accident in January. He was replaced by Bowen.

The crew plans to deliver the Permanent Multipurpose Module, with extra storage space and an area for experiments, as well as some spare parts and the Express Logistic Carrier, an external platform for large equipment.

The shuttle is also to bring the first humanoid robot to the ISS. The Robonaut 2, or R2, is a joint project of General Motors and NASA and will stay behind when Discovery leaves as a permanent resident of the ISS.

The weather forecast – clear skies, sunshine and a mild breeze – was considered exceptionally good with only a 20-percent chance of conditions that could delay the launch, NASA weather officer Kathy Winters said.

Discovery first flew in 1984. Final flights for the other two remaining in the fleet, Atlantis and Endeavour, are scheduled for later this year.

Endeavour is set for its final takeoff on April 19 and a last mission for Atlantis is scheduled for June 28, though funding for Atlantis remains in question.

There were initially five space shuttles in the fleet — Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986 and Columbia disintegrated on its way back to Earth in 2003.

The sixth shuttle, Enterprise, did test flights in the atmosphere but was never flown into space. It is already on display at a museum outside Washington.

Partial solar eclipse on Jan 4

KARACHI: A partial solar eclipse will occur on January 4.

This was announced by an official of the Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) here on Friday.

The eclipse will visible in Pakistan with a 13 percent obscuration of the solar disk.

The experts have warned not to look at the sun without wearing proper eye shielding as a solar filter.

The partial eclipse is the first of four solar events in a year that is unusual for having no total solar eclipses and for turning on four of the partial kind. The last time four partial eclipses occurred in the same year was 2000, and eight of the last 11 years had none. The years 2007 and 2004 had two each. In January, Europe, Africa and Asia will be treated to the phenomenon, which gives the Sun a crescent shape.

There are only two partial solar eclipses between 2011 and 2018, which turns on three.

The second partial solar eclipse of 2011 occurs on Jun 1, and will be visible in East Asia, North America and Iceland. The third, visible to southern Indian Ocean countries, occurs exactly one month later. The last of the four falls on Nov 25, and it will be visible in South Africa, Antarctica, the state of Tasmania in Australia and in New Zealand.

A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon blocks all or part of the Sun”s light from reaching the Earth”s surface because it passes directly between the Earth and the Sun. Total solar eclipses turn day into night for several minutes. With a partial solar eclipse, there is very little diminution of sunlight.

The eclipse would start at 11:40am, maximum at 13:51pm and end at 16:01pm.

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