Ophelia strengthening; Typhoon Nalgae a new threat to the Philippines
Posted by: JeffMasters, 1:51 PM GMT on September 29, 2011
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Tropical Storm Ophelia is strengthening as it pulls away from the Lesser Antilles Islands and heads north-northwest. Recentsatellite loops show that Ophelia has developed a Central Dense Overcast (CDO) of high cirrus clouds over its core, which is characteristic of strengthening tropical storms that are nearing hurricane intensity. Dry air and moderate wind shear of 15 – 20 knots are slowing down Ophelia’s intensification, but by Friday morning, wind shear is expected to fall to 10 – 15 knots, and remain below 15 knots through Sunday morning. This should allow Ophelia to intensify into a hurricane on Friday. Most of the models agree that Ophelia will track far enough to the east of Bermuda that the island should see sustained winds below 45 mph, since it will be on the weak (left) side of the storm. We can’t rule out the possibility that Bermuda will receive hurricane force winds yet, but the odds are low–the 5 am wind probability forecast from NHC gave Bermuda just a 3% chance of receiving hurricane force winds. Ophelia’s closest approach to the island will be late Saturday night and early Sunday morning. Ophelia is likely to bring high winds and heavy rains to Southeast Newfoundland Sunday night, as a weakening tropical storm.
In the middle Atlantic, Tropical Storm Philippe is headed west-northwest, and is not expected to trouble and land areas.Satellite loops show Philippe is a small system with little heavy thunderstorm activity. Wind shear is expected to diminish some today over the storm, which should allow the storm to intensify. However, by Saturday, Philippe will be encountering very high wind shear of 30 – 40 knots associated with the upper-level outflow from Ophelia. This shear will probably be high enough to destroy Philippe by Monday. In the event Philippe does survive the shear, the storm could penetrate far enough west that Bermuda might need to be concerned with it.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic, none of the computer models is calling for a new tropical storm to form in the coming seven days. The large-scale environment over the Atlantic currently favors sinking air, due to the current phase of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). This situation will likely last well into next week, and will discourage formation of new tropical storms. The MJO is a 30-60 day cycle of thunderstorm activity that affects the tropics.
Figure 1. Morning satellite image of Ophelia, showing the large Central Dense Overcast (CDO) that has formed.
Typhoon Nesat battering China Typhoon Nesat hit China’s Hainan Island today as a Category 1 typhoon with 75 mph winds. While Nesat’s winds and storm surge will not cause major damage, it is a very wet storm, capable of dropping up to 8 inches of rain in 24 hours, according to latest satellite rainfall forecasts.Haikou on Hainan Island recorded a wind gust of 78 mph and 3.23″ of rain as the eyewall passed just to the north. Nesat will hit Vietnam near Hanoi as a tropical storm on Saturday.
Nesat roared across Luzon Island in the Philippines Monday as a powerful Category 3 typhoon with 120 mph winds, leaving35 people dead and 45 missing. The Philippines has a new worry today: Typhoon Nalgae has formed 700 miles to the east of Luzon Island, and is expected to follow a course just to the north of Nesat’s. Nalgae is expected to intensify into a major Category 3 typhoon and hit the northern portion of Luzon on Saturday afternoon, local time. With soils on the island already saturated from the heavy rains Nesat brought, the new typhoon promises to bring heavy flooding to Luzon this weekend.
Figure 2. True-color MODIS image of Typhoon Nesat over the South China Sea taken at 1:35 pm local time September 28, 2011. At the time, Nesat was a Category 1 typhoon with 75 mph winds. Image credit: NASA.
Medical schools are starting to train doctors to be less intimidating to patients. And patients are starting to train themselves to be less intimidated by doctors.
We haven’t completely gotten away from the syndrome so perfectly described by Alec Baldwin’s arrogant surgeon in the movie “Malice”: “When someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn’t miscarry or that their daughter doesn’t bleed to death or that their mother doesn’t suffer acute neural trauma from postoperative shock, who do you think they’re praying to? … You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.”
But there have been baby steps away from the Omniscient Doctor. The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has begun a new campaign to encourage patients to ask more pertinent questions and to prod doctors to elicit more relevant answers.
“I used to think, ‘He’s a doctor. Who am I to ask a question?’ ” Bill Lee, a Baltimore man who has suffered 10 heart attacks, says in a video on the agency’s Web site urging people to speak up.
Patients have more options, a flood of Internet information and a bombardment of drug ads listing side effects — and that can be terrifying. It adds to the general anxiety level that health insurance costs are rising sharply and that President Obama’s health care law seems headed toward the Supreme Court.
The “experts” are always issuing guidelines, which are soon contradicted by another set of “experts.” It happened with the recommended age for regular mammograms, and it’s happening with guidelines on hormone replacement for postmenopausal women.
First, estrogen was going to be the fountain of youth. Then hormone replacement therapy was going to spell doom, causing heart disease, stroke and breast cancer. And now, as The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, “some experts are reaching a more nuanced view of the risks and benefits and concluding that hormone therapy may still be a good option for healthy women in their 50s, depending on their symptoms, family history and worst fears.”
Each patient, a Michigan gynecologist told The Journal, is like a Rubik’s Cube, and must get an individual solution.
That is also the message of a new book, “Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You,” by Jerome Groopman, an oncologist, and his wife, Pamela Hartzband, an endocrinologist, both members of the Harvard faculty and staff physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Few people have done as much to demystify medicine as Dr. Groopman, who has written four other books and lots of New Yorker essays aiming to help doctors understand that patients are often neglected allies with good intuition, and to help patients get confidence and control by understanding how doctors think.
Like a Middle East peace broker, he aims to lower the stress level and bring together two sides who perpetually misunderstand each other.
With his white beard, 6-foot-5 stature and friendly manner, the Queens native certainly looks trustworthy. Stephen Colbert once accused Groopman of “trying to look like God.”
And I can say from personal experience — since I’ve known him, he’s provided guidance that helped save the lives of three members of my family — that he is a fierce, sensitive and generous patient advocate. (And an aficionado of Irish literature.)
Dr. Hartzband and Dr. Groopman warn against excessive reliance on overreaching so-called experts and nebulous metrics and statistics.
“The answer often lies not with the experts but within you,” they write, adding that the Albert Einstein line is apt: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
The authors stress that “the best” and “informed” can be subjective terms, and that your prognosis can often look very different if you “flip the frame” of reference.
They try to decode the Orwellian language that prevents physicians and patients from cooperating, and show how doctors can project their own preferences on patients.
They interview patients who are Doubters and Minimalists, who may agree with Voltaire’s view that “the art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.” And they interview Believers and Maximalists, who go for radical treatments too quickly. They confess that they have a mixed marriage: Dr. Hartzband tends to be a Doubter (her mom’s mantra was “Doctors don’t know everything”) while Dr. Groopman tends to be a Believer (a status that got shaken when he jumped into a spinal fusion operation that had “disastrous consequences.”)
“The unsettling reality,” they write, “is that much of medicine still exists in a gray zone, where there is no black or white answer about when to treat or how to treat.”
But they are both optimists who warn against the “focusing illusion” — focusing on what will be lost after a colostomy, mastectomy, prostate surgery or other major procedures.
“The focusing illusion,” they write, “neglects our extraordinary capacity to adapt, to enjoy life with less than ‘perfect’ health.”
Their complaints range from corruption to lack of affordable housing and joblessness, common grievances the world over. But from South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.
They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box.
“Our parents are grateful because they’re voting,” said Marta Solanas, 27, referring to older Spaniards’ decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. “We’re the first generation to say that voting is worthless.”
Economics have been one driving force, with growingincome inequality, high unemployment and recession-driven cuts in social spending breeding widespread malaise. Alienation runs especially deep in Europe, with boycotts and strikes that, in London and Athens, erupted into violence.
But even in India and Israel, where growth remains robust, protesters say they so distrust their country’s political class and its pandering to established interest groups that they feel only an assault on the system itself can bring about real change.
Young Israeli organizers repeatedly turned out gigantic crowds insisting that their political leaders, regardless of party, had been so thoroughly captured by security concerns, ultra-Orthodox groups and other special interests that they could no longer respond to the country’s middle class.
In the world’s largest democracy, Anna Hazare, an activist, starved himself publicly for 12 days until the Indian Parliament capitulated to some of his central demands on a proposed anticorruption measure to hold public officials accountable. “We elect the people’s representatives so they can solve our problems,” said Sarita Singh, 25, among the thousands who gathered each day at Ramlila Maidan, where monsoon rains turned the grounds to mud but protesters waved Indian flags and sang patriotic songs.
“But that is not actually happening. Corruption is ruling our country.”
Increasingly, citizens of all ages, but particularly the young, are rejecting conventional structures like parties and trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.
In that sense, the protest movements in democracies are not altogether unlike those that have rocked authoritarian governments this year, toppling longtime leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Protesters have created their own political space online that is chilly, sometimes openly hostile, toward traditional institutions of the elite.
The critical mass of wiki and mapping tools, video and social networking sites, the communal news wire of Twitter and the ease of donations afforded by sites like PayPal makes coalitions of like-minded individuals instantly viable.
“You’re looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing,” said Yochai Benkler, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren’t anymore.”
Yonatan Levi, 26, called the tent cities that sprang up in Israel “a beautiful anarchy.” There were leaderless discussion circles like Internet chat rooms, governed, he said, by “emoticon” hand gestures like crossed forearms to signal disagreement with the latest speaker, hands held up and wiggling in the air for agreement — the same hand signs used in public assemblies in Spain. There were free lessons and food, based on the Internet conviction that everything should be available without charge.
Someone had to step in, Mr. Levi said, because “the political system has abandoned its citizens.”
The rising disillusionment comes 20 years after what was celebrated as democratic capitalism’s final victory over communism and dictatorship.
In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, a consensus emerged that liberal economics combined with democratic institutions represented the only path forward. That consensus, championed by scholars like Francis Fukuyama in his book “The End of History and the Last Man,” has been shaken if not broken by a seemingly endless succession of crises — the Asian financial collapse of 1997, the Internet bubble that burst in 2000, the subprime crisis of 2007-8 and the continuing European and American debt crisis — and the seeming inability of policy makers to deal with them or cushion their people from the shocks.
Frustrated voters are not agitating for a dictator to take over. But they say they do not know where to turn at a time when political choices of the cold war era seem hollow. “Even when capitalism fell into its worst crisis since the 1920s there was no viable alternative vision,” said the British left-wing author Owen Jones.
It took 33,000 years, but one Russian dog is finally having its day.
The fossilized remains of a canine found in the 1970s in southern Siberia’s Altay Mountains (see map) is the earliest well-preserved pet dog, new research shows.
Dogs—the oldest domesticated animals—are common in the fossil record up to 14,000 years ago. But specimens from before about 26,500 years ago are very rare. This is likely due to the onset of the last glacial maximum, when the ice sheets are at their farthest extent during an ice age.
With such a sparse historical record, scientists have been mostly in the dark as to how and when wolves evolved into dogs, a process that could have happened in about 50 to a hundred years.
“That’s why our find is very important—we have a very lucky case,” said study co-author Yaroslav Kuzmin, a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.
In the case of the Russian specimen, the animal was just on the cusp of becoming a fully domesticated dog when its breed died out.
Kuzmin and colleagues recently used radiocarbon dating to examine the skull and jaw of the Russian dog in three independent laboratories. Each lab confirmed the fossil’s age at around 33,000 years old.
Burnt twigs also found at the site, known as Razboinichya Cave, suggest that hunter-gatherers used the space for something, and it’s likely the dog was their pet before its death from unknown causes, Kuzmin said.
Cold temperatures and nonacidic soil in the cave likely kept the dog’s remains from completely decaying, he added.
The team compared the Russian dog fossils with the bones of wild wolves, modern wolves, domesticated dogs, and early doglike canids that lived before 26,500 years ago.
The results showed that the dog—which probably looked like a modern-daySamoyed—most closely resembled fully domesticated dogs from Greenland in size and shape. That’s not to say the two dog types are related, though, since the new study didn’t run DNA analysis.
Because it wasn’t fully domesticated, the Russian dog retained some traits from its ancestors—namely wolf-like teeth. But the animal bore no other resemblance to ancient or modern wolves or to dog breeds from elsewhere in Russia, Kuzmin and colleagues found.
The discovery suggests that this dog began its association with humans independently from other breeds, which would mean that dog domestication didn’t have a single place of origin—contrary to some DNA evidence, the study said.
Curious Wolves Went to the Dogs
In general, dogs likely became domesticated when curious wolves began to hang around Stone Age people, who left butchered food remnants littering their camps, according to study co-author Susan Crockford, an anthropologist and zooarchaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada.
This phenomenon occurred in Europe, the Middle East, and China, according to the study, published July 28 in the journal PLoS ONE.
Animals that were more comfortable around humans underwent changes in their growth rates—probably regulated by hormones—that eventually changed their reproductive patterns, sizes, and shapes, turning them into dogs, Crockford said by email.
For example, dogs became smaller, developed wider skulls, and gave birth to bigger litters than wolves, she said.
“The somewhat curious and less fearful ‘first founders’ became even more so as they interbred amongst themselves,” Crockford said.
NIGHT TO REMEMBER: A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetic field around noon Universal Time on Sept. 26th. The impact set the stage for a night to remember. As soon as darkness fell over Scandinavia, auroras filled the sky with such intensity that they were visible through rain clouds. Fredrik Broms photographed the scene from Kvaløya, Norway:
“These were some of the most amazing auroras I have ever seen,” says Broms, a longtime observer of the Arctic lights. “The colours were absolutely stunning with purple and deep blood-red in addition to the green. It was a night I will never forget!
Sky watchers at the highest latitudes should remain alert for auroras as Earth’s magnetic field continues to reverberate from the CME impact.
Weather Forecast: Powerful “Superstorm” to slam the Pacific Northwest
Published on September 28, 2011 2:30 am PT
– By TWS Meteorologist
(TheWeatherSpace.com) – A strong surface low will develop in the Pacific Ocean, aided by a powerful upper level jet that will bring gusty winds, severe thunderstorms, and even a tornado chance to the Pacific Northwest later this weekend into next week.
It is the season for ‘bomb’ type systems. ‘Bombs’ is a weather term for rapidly deepening low pressure at the surface and this is what is scheduled for Sunday or Monday across the Pacific Northwest
As of right now the probability of damaging winds for inland areas would depend on the low’s track, but to be conservative I will keep the damaging winds along the coast, where less friction resides. Anyone living on the coast of Washington and Oregon will need to keep tuned to further updates here at TWS and on the Pacific Northwest Facebook Page below.
Because of the deeper moisture available, colder mid-level temperatures, excellent upper level jet dynamics. and winds backing in the lower levels, have decided to put the mention in here of the chance of severe thunderstorms, including isolated tornadoes with this system.
Locations are not certain with the small-scale features but this system will closely be monitored here at TheWeatherSpace.com.
The storm moves northeast into Canada from there and another frontal zone quickly moves hit next week.
This “bomb” is the signal to ‘spin’ the atmosphere into the new season.
.from: As of right now the probability of damaging winds for inland areas would depend on the low’s track, but to be conservative I will keep the damaging winds along the coast, where less friction resides. Anyone living on the coast of Washington and Oregon will need to keep tuned to further updates here at TWS and on the Pacific Northwest Facebook Page below.
Because of the deeper moisture available, colder mid-level temperatures, excellent upper level jet dynamics. and winds backing in the lower levels, have decided to put the mention in here of the chance of severe thunderstorms, including isolated tornadoes with this system.
Locations are not certain with the small-scale features but this system will closely be monitored here at TheWeatherSpace.com.
The storm moves northeast into Canada from there and another frontal zone quickly moves hit next week.
This “bomb” is the signal to ‘spin’ the atmosphere into the new season.
Rising Volcanic Activity Prompts Evacuations On El Hierro, The Canary Islands
By MARK DUNPHY – Wed Sep 28, 4:45 pm
MODIS satellite image of The Canary Islands on Tuesday 27 September 2011
Fears are growing that the El Hierro volcano in The Canary Islands could soon erupt after seismic activity beneath the island increased dramatically during Tuesday and Wednesday.
Over 150 earthquakes were recorded on the smallest of the Canary Islands during Tuesday prompting officials to evacuate some local residents, shut El Hierro’s main tunnel, and close local schools.
At least 20 earthquakes, exceeding magnitude 3.0 on the Richter Scale, have been felt by local residents during the last 24 hours. The most recent earthquake, which measured 3.4 magnitude, was recorded just off the southern tip of the island at 07:04 am Wednesday.
The rise in seismic activity last night prompted the Spanish Civil Guard (Guardia Civil) to advise almost 50 residents of the municipality of La Frontera to leave their homes because of landslide fears.
Plans are also underway to evacuate more of the island’s 10,000 residents, according to Canarias7.es. The newspaper reported that two units of the Spanish military’s emergency intervention unit (EMU) will depart nearby island Tenerife this afternoon to assist in the possible evacuation of hundreds of El Hierro residents.
Meanwhile, the island’s main tunnel (Tunel del Golfo), which links Frontera to Valverde, has been shut forcing motorists to travel across the 280-sq-km island via a mountain road. The Cabildo de El Hierro also has ordered the closure of schools on Wednesday.
Hierro, a shield volcano, has had a single historic eruption from the Volcan de Lomo Negro vent in 1793. The eruption lasted approximately one month and produced lava flows.
The Canary Islands Government commenced an in-depth geological survey of El Hierro earlier this month in an effort to determine the source of an earthquake swarm. The Government raised the volcanic risk level to ‘Yellow’ on Sunday, the highest alert status since an unprecedented earthquake swarm commenced in mid-July.
The unprecedented seismic activity commenced on 19 July (the activity was first reported by iWeather Online on 26 July). In excess of 8,200 earthquakes have been recorded up to Wednesday, 28 September 2011.
Up to last weekend, the majority of earth tremors ranged between 1 and 3 magnitude. However, the majority of quakes are now registering between 2 and 4 magnitude and are occuring at depth of 14-17 kilometres, according to the National Geographic Institute (IGN).
Speaking to the El Pais newspaper, volcanologist Juan Carlos Carracedo suggested that an eruption on El Hierro would “not be a major surprise”. He explained: “It is the youngest of the Canary Islands. There is a ball of magma which is rising to the surface and it is stationed at the limit of the earth’s crust. At the moment we do not know if that ball of magna will break the crust and cause an eruption.”
IGN Director, María José Blanco said that any eruption on El Hierro would most likely have a “low explosion value”. He added that an imminent eruption is unlikely.
In the meantime, the frequent and increasingly intense earthquakes being felt throughout El Hierro are unlikely to appease the residents of and visitors to the tiny island.
For the past three years, a highly encrypted computer worm called Conficker has been spreading rapidly around the world. As many as 12 million computers have been infected with the self-updating worm, a type of malware that can get inside computers and operate without their permission.
“What Conficker does is penetrate the core of the [operating system] of the computer and essentially turn over control of your computer to a remote controller,” writer Mark Bowden tellsFresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “[That person] could then utilize all of these computers, including yours, that are connected. … And you have effectively the largest, most powerful computer in the world.”
The gigantic networked system created by the Conficker worm is what’s known as a “botnet.” The Conficker botnet is powerful enough to take over computer networks that control banking, telephones, security systems, air traffic control and even the Internet itself, says Bowden. His new book, Worm: The First Digital World War, details how Conficker was discovered, how it works, and the ongoing programming battle to bring down the Conficker worm, which he says could have widespread consequences if used nefariously.
“If you were to launch with a botnet that has 10 million computers in it — launch a denial of service attack — you could launch a large enough attack that it would not just overwhelm the target of the attack, but the root servers of the Internet itself, and could crash the entire Internet,” he says. “What frightens security folks, and increasingly government and Pentagon officials, is that a botnet of that size could also be used as a weapon.”
When Russia launched its attack on Georgia in 2008, Russian officials also took down communication lines and the Internet within Georgia. Egypt also took down its own country’s Internet service during the uprisings last spring.
“It’s the equivalent of shutting down the train system during the Civil War, where the Union troops and the Confederate troops used trains to shuttle arms and ammunition and supplies all over their area of control,” says Bowden. “And if you could shut their trains down, you cripple their ability to function. Similarly, you could do that today by taking down the Internet.”
The Conficker worm can also be used to steal things like your passwords and codes for any accounts you use online. Officials in Ukraine recently arrested a group of people who were leasing a portion of the Conficker worm’s computers to drain millions of dollars from bank accounts in the United States.
“It raises the question of whether creating or maintaining a botnet is a criminal activity, because if I break into a safe at the bank using a Black & Decker drill, is Black & Decker culpable for the way I use the tool?” he says. “That’s one of the tools you could use the botnet for. With a botnet of 25,000 computers, you could break the security codes for Amazon.com, you could raid people’s accounts, you could get Social Security numbers and data — there’s almost no commercial security system in place that couldn’t be breached by a supercomputer of tens of thousands.”
After Conficker was discovered in 2008 at Stanford, it prompted computer security experts from around the world to get together to try to stop the bot. The volunteer group of experts, which called itself the Conficker Working Group, also tried to get the government involved with their efforts. But they soon discovered that the government didn’t have a very good understanding of what the worm could do.
“[They] began reaching out to the NSA [National Security Agency] and [the Pentagon] to see if they would be willing to loan their computers [to help them], and what [they] discovered was that no one in the government understood what was happening,” says Bowden. “There was a very low level of cyberintelligence, even at agencies that ought to have been very seriously involved, who were responsible for protecting the country, its electrical grid, its telecommunications. These agencies lacked the sophistication not only to deal with Conficker, but even to understand what Conficker was.”
At some point in early 2009, the Conficker Working Group learned that the Conficker worm could wreak havoc on April 1, 2009 — a date when the computers infected by Conficker would receive instructions from their remote-controlled operator.
Jon Stewart Mocks Indecisive GOP Base: ‘Maybe Your Candidates Aren’t The Problem, Maybe It’s You’ (VIDEO)
The Huffington PostKatla McGlynn First Posted: 9/27/11 09:29 AM ET Updated: 9/27/11 11:04 AM ET
As we grow closer to the one-year mark until the 2012 Presidential election, the crop of Republican candidates is ever expanding with a new frontrunner every month. At first it seemed like Michele Bachmann could be the right person for the job, and then Mitt Romney, but that was before Rick Perry came on the scene. Now even the straight shooter from Texas’ popularity might be fading, thanks to his performance at the last debate.
On Monday night’s “Daily Show,” before his lengthy interview with Congressman Ron Paul, Jon Stewart mocked the muddled GOP field, particularly the prospect of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie now joining the race. Stewart provided an excellent metaphor: that The GOP race is now a season of “American Idol” in reverse, with more and more unqualified people being added every week instead of elimnated (and when he shows a particular Christie clip you’ll see exactly what he means).
Considering that perhaps it’s not the candidates who are the problem, but the GOP base, Stewart’s “Indecision 2012” moniker is more appropriate than ever. Conservatives are typically pro-life, yet they cheered for death during the debate. “They want someone who’ll roll up their sleeves, but not show their arms,” Stewart joked. “You guys need to talk a long, hard look in the mirror and not come away thinking, ‘There’s something wrong with this mirror.”
Tomorrow night the new moon will make a close approach to Earth, giving rise to the second supermoon of the year—but this one will have the power of invisibility.
Because the moon’s orbit is egg shaped, there are times in the roughly monthlong lunar cycle when the moon is at perigee—its closest distance to Earth—or at apogee, its farthest distance from Earth.
“A supermoon occurs when the moon is at perigee and it’s in either a full or new phase,” said Raminder Singh Samra, an astronomer at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, Canada.
A new moon happens when the lunar orb positions itself between Earth and the sun, so that the side of the moon that faces Earth is unlighted.
“The upcoming moon on September 27, 2011, is set to be at perigee and at the new phase,” Samra said, “so we won’t be able to witness the event, as the moon and sun will be in the same region of the sky” and the lunar disk will be entirely dark.
Supermoon to Affect Earth’s Tides?
Because the size of the moon’s orbit also varies slightly, each perigee is not always the same distance from Earth.
When at perigee, the moon is about 18,640 miles (30,000 kilometers) closer to Earth than its average distance of roughly 240,000 miles (385,000 kilometers). When perigee occurs during a full moon, the lunar disk can appear about 14 percent bigger in the sky, Samra said.
Tuesday’s dark supermoon will be just 222,175 miles (357,557 kilometers) away from Earth.
Some people have speculated that this lunar proximity can have unusual gravitational effects on Earth, triggering dramatic events such as earthquakes.
But the truth is that there’s only a very small correlation between full or new moons and seismic stresses, said Jim Todd, planetarium manager at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
“Stronger tidal forces caused by the alignment of the sun and moon may put added stress on tectonic plates,” Todd said.
“However, seismologists have found no evidence connecting lunar perigees to heightened seismic activity. Instead the Earth constantly stores up energy and releases it any time the built-up energy becomes too great.”
Lunar close encounters are well known to cause slightly higher ocean tides, so any localized flooding during a supermoon would be most noticeable around beaches and other low-lying areas.
But linking the supermoon to effects beyond that is far-fetched, the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre’s Samra said.
“While the supermoon is thought to provoke various natural disasters on the Earth,” he said, “such claims are exaggerations, as there is simply no scientific evidence for them.”
