Record rainfall closes Australia's Uluru national park

A record amount of rainfall in Australia has closed its famous national park at Uluru in what meteorologists described as a "twice a century" weather event.

Waterfalls have formed all over the park's huge sandstone landmark, which is also known as Ayers Rock and is among Australia's top tourist attractions in the Northern Territory.

"There's a lot of water coming off the rock and what that does is just channels across the ring road around Uluru," said park ranger Mike Misso.

"Some of those roads there were flooded by about 300-400mm of rain. Quite spectacular but very hazardous road conditions."

Rangers were forced to close the park at 9am on Boxing Day due to flooded roads and a risk of car accidents.

The heavy rain also led to flash flooding in the nearby town of Kintore, which saw 25 houses flooded and forced dozens to evacuate the area.

"There's a significant number of houses that have been affected by flooding in some capacity," Acting Superintendent Pauline Vicary told ABC News.

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World first solar panel roadway opens in French town

It may be situated in a small French village that doesn't see that much sun, but the Normandy town of Tourouvre has opened the world's first solar roadway, bringing the hugely popular idea into reality.

The notion of paving roadways with solar panels to meet our energy needs is very appealing, but for the longest time it has remained largely a theoretical one.
 
The newly launched French roadway is just one kilometre long but that works out to be 2800 square metres of photovoltaic cells - enough, theoretically, to power the village's street lights.

The resin-coated solar panels were hooked up to the local power grid just in time for Christmas as France's Environment Minister Segolene Royal looked on last week.

"This new use of solar energy takes advantage of large swathes of road infrastructure already in use ... to produce electricity without taking up new real estate," she said in a statement.

The one kilometre road is set to pave the way for to construction of much bigger solar highways in the future.

The minister announced a four-year "plan for the national deployment of solar highways" with initial projects in western Brittany and southern Marseille.

The idea, which is also under exploration in Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, is that roadways are occupied by cars only around 20 per cent of the time, providing vast expanses of surface to soak up the sun's rays.

The simple idea bestowes and secondary - and equally important - purpose for roads by allowing them to double as an energy source.

 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=11773475

Killer whale found dead off Canada part of endangered population

 

Killer whale found dead off Canada part of endangered population

Scientists say an orca found dead off the coast of British Columbia belongs to the endangered population of killer whales that spend time in Washington state waters.

Center for Whale Research scientist Ken Balcomb said yesterday that he and others have confirmed the whale was an 18-year-old male called J-34. They based the identification on photographs and its unique markings.

The orca was seen floating near the shore Tuesday near Sechelt, about 40 miles northwest of Vancouver.

The whale was towed to a beach, and Canadian officials performed a necropsy on Wednesday. The centre is awaiting those results for a cause of death.

Balcomb said in a statement that at least four members of the J pod, one of three families of southern resident killer whales, have died this year. The pod now stands at 25 members. K pod has 19 members and L pod has 35.

He said the killer whales have not been getting enough salmon - their chief food source - for years. He said policymakers should be considering stricter salmon catch limits and strategic dam removals to improve wild salmon populations.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11772299

Merry Christmas!!!

Huge hole in the ocean floor near Australia could cause catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis A tear in the sea floor 7km deep just north of Australia could cause disastrous earthquakes and tsunamis.

A tear in the sea floor 7km deep just north of Australia could cause disastrous earthquakes and tsunamis.

The tear in the Earth's crust is in the Banda Sea, near Indonesia, and measures about 60,000sq km - roughly the size of Tasmania.

Geologists have now discovered the tear is one of the biggest faults on the planet and is running through the Ring of Fire, an area in the Pacific Ocean where a huge number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur.

According to the United States Geological Survey, 90 per cent of the world's earthquakes and 81 per cent of the world's worst earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.

The ring extends from New Zealand, around the top of Australia and past Indonesia. It curls around Japan and down the West Coast of the United States before ending at the bottom of South America.

Just last month it became even more evident how dangerous the Ring of Fire could be.

On November 14 Kaikoura was struck by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake that casued widespread damage and killed two people.

On November 22, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.9 shook the Japanese coast of Fukushima prefecture and tsunami waves followed not long after.

This month, 84,000 people were left homeless after an 6.5 magnitude earthquake struck western Indonesia. The earthquake killed more than 100 people.

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Humans have now sliced up the Earth's wilderness into 600,000 little pieces

Scientists yesterday provided a global quantification of one of the most pervasive, but least recognised, ways that humans are marring the coherence of the natural world - by building endless numbers of roads.

Roads fragment natural habitats, and the more of them there are, the smaller and more compromised those habitats become. At the same time, roads give humans access to remote, once pristine regions, where they can begin logging, mining, accidentally (or intentionally) starting fires and much else.

In the Amazon rain forest, for instance, the fragmentation of the landscape that occurs because of deforestation - to which roads also contribute - upends the entire nature of the ecosystem. Once sunlight can penetrate into the rain forest from a cleared area to its side, rather than being mostly blocked out by the lush canopy from above, the forest floor dries out, the forest itself heats up, trees collapse more easily, there isn't enough range for many key species, and on and on.

The new study, published in the journal Science by a team of 10 conservation scientists at institutions in Germany, Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom, Brazil and the United States, used an open-source, citizen science database of global roads. The researchers then combined this with an assessment from the research literature of the size of areas alongside roads that are compromised ecologically by them. This allowed them to count up the world's remaining truly untrammeled areas and assess their number and size.

They defined these areas as starting 1 kilometre away from any road. "There are some effects that go far beyond 1km actually. It's a gradient of course, of impacts fading out, but the majority of problems is occurring in this belt or buffer of 1 kilometre," said Pierre Ibisch, the study's first author and a researcher at the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development in Germany.

Using this metric, the study found that the Earth's land areas (excluding Antarctica and Greenland) were 80 percent roadless, which may sound like a good thing - but peering in closer, the researchers found that roads had divided that land area into some 600,000 pieces. More than half of these were less than a square kilometre in area.

Only 7 per cent of the fragments were very large - more than 100 square kilometres in area. Some of the largest untrammeled areas were in the Amazon rain forest, northern or boreal forests, and in Africa.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11768201

Warming at the top of the world has gone into overdrive

Warming at the top of the world is happening twice as fast as the rest of the globe, and extending unnatural heating into the northern autumn and winter, according to a new US federal report.

In its annual Arctic Report Card , the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration today tallied record after record of high temperatures, low sea ice, shrinking ice sheets and glaciers.

Study lead author Jeremy Mathis, NOAA's Arctic research chief, said it shows long-term Arctic warming trends deepening and becoming more obvious, with a disturbing creep into seasons beyond summer, when the Arctic usually rebuilds snow and ice.

Scientists have long said man-made climate change would hit the Arctic fastest.
Mathis and others said the data is showing that is what's now happening.

"Personally, I would have to say that this last year has been the most extreme year for the Arctic that I have ever seen," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado, who wasn't part of the 106-page report. "It's crazy."

NOAA's peer-reviewed report said air temperatures over the Arctic from October 2015 to September 2016 were "by far the highest in the observational record beginning in 1900." The average Arctic air temperature at that time was 2C warmer than the 1981-2010 average.

It's 3.5C warmer than 1900.

 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11766547