SERNAGEOMIN raised the alert level of the volcano to orange yesterday after an increase in seismic activity. A pulse of volcanic tremor was detected that could indicate magma moving into the volcano’s plumbing system. On the surface, no unusual activity has been seen at the volcano so far, except that an increase in SO2 emissions (approx 2,300 tons / day) was measured. This supports the idea that magma has risen under the edifice. Whether this activity is followed by new eruptive activity remains to be seen. In most cases, intrusions of magma under volcanoes do never reach the surface, i.e. produce eruptions. ONEMI (Civil Defense) published a bulletin stating that civil alert remains at yellow for the highest risk areas, in particular the most proximal areas around the volcano itself, but also include the city of Alto BiobÃo located 40 km west of the volcano, because it is at the mouth of a valley that drains Copahue on the north side and therefore, a potential pathway for mud flows that could occur during an eruption.
The volcano continues to show signs of unrest. A swarm of volcanic-tectonic earthquakes occurred the day before yesterday. SERNAGEOMIN keeps the alert level of the volcano at Yellow. [more]
The argument, put forward by a team from Oxford and Sheffield Universities in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, begins with temperature. Warmer climates mean more vigorous tree growth and more leaf litter, and more organic content in the soil. So the tree’s roots grow more vigorously, said Dr. Christopher Doughty of Oxford and colleagues.
They get into the bedrock, and break up the rock into its constituent minerals. Once that happens, the rock starts to weather, combining with carbon dioxide. This weathering draws carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and in the process cools the planet down a little. So mountain ecosystems—mountain forests are usually wet and on conspicuous layers of rock—are in effect part of the global thermostat, preventing catastrophic overheating.
The tree is more than just a sink for carbon, it is an agency for chemical weathering that removes carbon from the air and locks it up in carbonate rock.
That mountain weathering and forest growth are part of the climate system has never been in much doubt: the questions have always been about how big a forest’s role might be, and how to calculate its contribution.
Keeping climate stable
U.S. scientists recently studied the rainy slopes of New Zealand’s Southern Alps to begin to put a value on mountain ecosystem processes. Dr. Doughty and his colleagues measured tree roots at varying altitudes in the tropical rain forests of Peru, from the Amazon lowlands to 3,000 meters of altitude in the higher Andes.
They measured the growth to 30 cm below the surface every three months and did so for a period of years. They recorded the thickness of the soil’s organic layer, and they matched their observations with local temperatures, and began to calculate the rate at which tree roots might turn Andean granite into soil.
Then they scaled up the process, and extended it through long periods of time. Their conclusion: that forests served to moderate temperatures in a much hotter world 65 million years ago.
Finally, a Billboard That Creates Drinkable Water Out of Thin Air
I’ve never cared much for billboards. Not in the city, not out of the city — not anywhere, really. It’s like the saying in that old Five Man Electrical Band song. So when the creative director of an ad agency in Peru sent me a picture of what he claimed was the first billboard that produces potable water from air, my initial reaction was: gotta be a hoax, or at best, a gimmick.
Except it’s neither: The billboard pictured here is real, it’s located in Lima, Peru, and it produces around 100 liters of water a day (about 26 gallons) from nothing more than humidity, a basic filtration system and a little gravitational ingenuity.
Let’s talk about Lima for a moment, the largest city in Peru and the fifth largest in all of the Americas, with some 7.6 million people (closer to 9 million when you factor in the surrounding metro area). Because it sits along the southern Pacific Ocean, the humidity in the city averages 83% (it’s actually closer to 100% in the mornings). But Lima is also part of what’s called a coastal desert: It lies at the northern edge of the Atacama, the driest desert in the world, meaning the city sees perhaps half an inch of precipitation annually (Lima is the second largest desert city in the world after Cairo). Lima thus depends on drainage from the Andes as well as runoff from glacier melt — both sources on the decline because of climate change.
Enter the University of Engineering and Technology of Peru (UTEC), which was looking for something splashy to kick off its application period for 2013 enrollment. It turned to ad agency Mayo DraftFCB, which struck on the idea of a billboard that would convert Lima’s H2O-saturated air into potable water. And then they actually built one.
It’s not entirely self-sufficient, requiring electricity (it’s not clear how much) to power the five devices that comprise the billboard’s inverse osmosis filtration system, each device responsible for generating up to 20 liters. The water is then transported through small ducts to a central holding tank at the billboard’s base, where you’ll find — what else? — a water faucet. According to Mayo DraftFCB, the billboard has already produced 9,450 liters of water (about 2,500 gallons) in just three months, which it says equals the water consumption of “hundreds of families per month.” Just imagine what dozens, hundreds or even thousands of these things, strategically placed in the city itself or outlying villages, might do. And imagine what you could accomplish in any number of troubled spots around the world that need potable water with a solution like this.
MAYO DRAFTFCB / UTEC
Mayo DraftFCB says it dropped the billboard along the Pan-American Highway at kilometer marker 89.5 when summer started (in December, mind you — Lima’s south of the equator) and that it’s designed to inspire young Peruvians to study engineering at UTEC while simultaneously illustrating how advertising can be more than just an eyesore. (Done and done, I’d say.)
“We wanted future students to see how engineers can also solve social needs in daily basis kinds of situations,” said Alejandro Aponte, creative director at Mayo DraftFCB.
The city’s residents could certainly use the help. According to a 2011 The Independent piece ominously titled “The desert city in serious danger of running dry,” about 1.2 million residents of Lima lack running water entirely, depending on unregulated private-company water trucks to deliver the goods — companies that charge up to 30 soles (US $10) per cubic meter of H2O, or as The Independent notes, 20 times what more well-off residents pay for their tapwater.
The 2,965m (nearly 10,000ft) volcano – which sits in the Andes cordillera – has so far only spewed gas, but thousands of minor earth tremors have been registered in the area. Chilean Interior and Security Minister Andres Chadwick said the increased activity could lead to an eruption and officials would evacuate 2,240 people, or 460 families, within a 25-kilometre radius. “This evacuation is obligatory; it’s not voluntary,” Chadwick told reporters. Stoll not everybody is willing to leave. “No. I do not want to leave because we have chickens and it isn’t easy to leave them and go to a shelter,” resident Florinda Lipiman told the news agency Reuters. In neighbouring Argentina the authorities had first declared a “yellow alert” but later revised it to the highest level. They have now ordered the evacuation of at least 600 people from the town of Caviahue to the neighbouring city of Loncopue where the crisis committee said than an eruption “can take place at any moment now” Fears run deep as Copahue’s new eruptive cycle began in July 1992 when the crater lake explosions ejected rock fragments, white dust, large amounts of green and yellow liquid sulphur. In July 2000 Copahue registered its largest eruption in 100 years. Eruption of lapilli, ash, and bombs occurred at the volcano. Bombs up to 13 cm in diameter were ejected more than 8 km from the summit, and ash fell 100 km away.
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Chile, Argentina Order Evacuation Around Stirring Volcano
A plume of ash and smoke rise from the Copahue volcano, as seen from Caviahue, in the Argentine province of Neuquen on May 24.
Tuesday, 28 May 2013 03:47 AM
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SANTIAGO/BUENOS AIRES — Chilean and Argentine authorities on Monday declared a red alert and ordered the mandatory evacuation of a 25-kilometer (15.5-mile) radius around the active Copahue volcano, which straddles the border between the two Andean nations.The volcano — located some 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of capital Santiago, between Chile’s Bio Bio region and Argentina’s Neuquen province — has seen increasing seismic activity in recent weeks but has not erupted, Chilean authorities said.
“This doesn’t necessarily mean the volcano will start erupting. But according to the Sernageomin (National Geological and Mining Service), the volcano is now in a process that could culminate in an eruption, for that reason we’ve issued a red alert and the evacuation,” Chilean Interior Minister Andres Chadwick told a nationally televised news conference.
Authorities estimated that some 2,240 people will be evacuated in Chile.
disclaimer: image is for illustration purposes only
Researchers at Ohio State University who retrieved the cores from a Peruvian ice cap in 2003 are calling them “Rosetta Stone” samples with which to compare other climate histories from Earth’s tropical and subtropical regions over the last two millennia.
The scientists said they noticed startling similarities to other ice cores retrieved from Tibet and the Himalaya, with patterns in the chemical composition of certain layers matching up, even though the cores were taken from opposite sides of the planet.
“These ice cores provide the longest and highest-resolution tropical ice core record to date,” earth sciences Professor Lonnie Thompson said.
“In fact, having drilled ice cores throughout the tropics for more than 30 years, we now know that this is the highest-resolution tropical ice core record that is likely to be retrieved.”
PUBLISHED: 11:55 EST, 5 April 2013 | UPDATED: 14:03 EST, 5 April 2013
Glacial ice in the Peruvian Andes that took at least 1,600 years to form has melted in just 25 years, scientists have discovered.
Researchers visiting Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap have released a stunning pair of images to show the dramatic change.
They were also able to obtain ice core samples from the area and track plant life as it moved into previously glacial areas.Two annually dated ice cores drawn from the tropical Peruvian Andes reveal Earth’s tropical climate history in unprecedented detail—year by year, for nearly 1,800 years.
What a difference This 2002 photo of Quelccaya Ice Cap Right) is, taken from the same spot as a previous photo in 1977, and clearly shows the retreat of the ice wall’s vertical margins.
Researchers at The Ohio State University retrieved the cores from a Peruvian ice cap in 2003, and then noticed some startling similarities to other ice cores that they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas.
‘These ice cores provide the longest and highest-resolution tropical ice core record to date,’ said Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and lead author of the study.
‘In fact, having drilled ice cores throughout the tropics for more than 30 years, we now know that this is the highest-resolution tropical ice core record that is likely to be retrieved.’The cores will provide a permanent record for future use by climate scientists, Thompson said.
This is very important, as plants captured by the advancing ice cap 6,000 years ago are now emerging along its retreating margins, which shows that Quelccaya is now smaller than it has been in six thousand years.
‘The frozen history from this tropical ice cap—which is melting away as Earth continues to warm—is archived in freezers at -30ºC so that creative people will have access to it 20 years from now, using instruments and techniques that don’t even exist today,’ he said.
At least seven people were injured and some 20 others went missing in a landslide reoccurred Saturday in southern Colombia, relief agencies said. The incident occurred when a bulldozer was removing earth that blocked a driveway below the Andes Mountains in the aftermath of a previous landslide, and about 20 cars were waiting in a queue to pass at the time, said the Risk Management Department. The injured have all been sent to the University Hospital of Neiva. Due to the unstable terrain, light and weather conditions, rescuers have decided to wait until Sunday to resume the search for the 20 missing persons.
A woman takes a picture with her mobile phone of the Copahue volcano spewing ash on Dec. 22, in Caviahue, Neuquen province, Argentina. Antonio Huglich / AFP – Getty Images
Chile issued a top-level red alert Sunday for its Copahue volcano, in the south on the Andean border with Argentina, as it rumbled to register a greater potential threat.
The National Emergency Office issued a red alert but did not order evacuations as no towns are in the current risk area.
“The intensity of seismic signals suggests the eruption in progress is on the smaller side (but) we are not ruling out the possibility that the activity could turn into a larger-scale eruption,” the Geology and Mining Service said in a statement.
While the 2,965-meter (9,700 foot) volcano straddles the two countries’ border, its crater, where most of the activity was under way, leans toward the Argentine side, experts told AFP.
And population in the area is sparse: about 500 people live in Copahue, a tourist town famous for its spa waters, about 900 in the town of Caviahue and an estimated 800 more in local indigenous Mapuche communities.
The June 2011 eruption of Chile’s Puyehue volcano interfered with air travel in much of the southern cone of South America and as far away as Australia.
A Satellite image taken on 14:00 on 22 November shows a large ash plume drifting 110 KM SE from Copahue volcano. Ash fall has been reported in Loncopue village in Argentina, 50 KM SE of the volcano. The volcano’s last confirmed eruption was in 2000, although one report stated eruptions in 2001 as well. It is apparently still a ‘small’ eruption, but the Alert Level for the volcano has been raised from GREEN to ORANGE.
The authorities in Argentina and Chile have issued an alert over increased activity at the Copahue volcano, which has begun spewing smoke and gas. Many residents have already left the area as a precaution. An orange volcano alert, the second highest, has been issued in both countries. The 3,000m (10,000ft) volcano is in Argentina’s south-western Neuquen province, which borders the Biobio region of Chile. Ash has been raining down on the nearby villages of Copahue, Caviahue and Zapala. Residents who have stayed behind have been told to monitor the situation and be prepared to evacuate. Planes flying over the southern Andes have also been warned. Hundreds of flights were cancelled last year due to the eruption of Puyehue volcano, in Chile.
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