Hawaii is in a sticky situation. An estimated 233,000 gallons of thick molasses spilled from a pipeline that was filling a cargo ship. The massive spill has killed just about everything in Honolulu Harbor.
“There’s nothing alive there at all,” diver Roger White said after making a video of dead sea life blanketing the bottom of the harbor. “Everything is dead. They’re all dead and they’re all just lying across the bottom — hundreds and hundreds, thousands.”
“The molasses is not toxic but it’s heavier than water so it’s spreading around on the sea floor, displacing the oxygen-rich water down there, and the fish are suffocating,” said Keith Korsmeyer, a professor of biology at Hawaii Pacific University.
Gary Gill of the state Health Department said, “This is the worst environmental damage to sea life that I have come across, and it’s fair to say this is a biggie, if not the biggest that we’ve had to confront in the state of Hawaii.”
Christchurch EartquakeNASA writes about the religion of earthquakes:
It is a modern human tendency to focus on the number of an earthquake—specifically, the magnitude, or what people used to call the “Richter scale.” But the destruction from a quake usually has more to do with location and timing. Such was the case with the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, on February 22, 2011.
A September 2010 earthquake centered 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Christchurch, in the plains near Darfield, struck at 4:35 a.m., had a magnitude of 7.1, and caused some structural damage and one death (by heart attack). The earthquake in February 2011 occurred at 12:51 p.m. and just 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the center of Christchurch. It had a magnitude of 6.3, though was officially classified—scientifically speaking—as an aftershock of the 2010 quake. At least 166 people died, and the city of Christchurch was devastated structurally and emotionally. Many people are still missing.
The natural-color image above was captured on March 4, 2011, by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. Overlain on the map are seismological measurements of the ground shaking in the Christchurch area on February 22, as noted by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earthquake Hazard Program.
The deeper the red color of the circle, the more intense the “peak ground acceleration,” or shaking of the earth. Note how intensity is highest right around the most densely developed areas of Christchurch. City officials and news accounts also described liquefaction—the softening and loosening of the soil due to shaking and groundwater penetration—that was 300 to 500 percent worse than during the September 2010 earthquake.
There are two forms of energy that cause the shaking in an earthquake. “P” or primary waves provide the initial, often vertical, jolt that lifts people and structures off the ground. “S” or secondary waves lead to horizontal shaking. Most structures collapse during the longer-duration S waves because buildings are not designed to handle this side-to-side motion. In Christchurch, the quake occurred so close by that the lag between P and S waves was a mere second.
References
GeoNet (2011, March 4) Christchurch badly damaged by magnitude 6.3 earthquake. Accessed March 8, 2011.
GNS Science (2011, February 25) February 22nd earthquake in Christchurch. Accessed March 8, 2011.
New Zealand Herald (2011, February ) Christchurch earthquake: Levels of liquefaction 300-500 pc worse. Accessed March 8, 2011.
U.S. Geological Survey (n.d.) Shake Map: South Island of New Zealand. Accessed March 8, 2011.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Robert Simmon, using ALI data from the EO-1 Team and USGS Earthquake Hazard Program. Caption by Mike Carlowicz.
