This Is What A Volcano Looks Like From Space. [PICTURES]

If you ever wonder what it looks like when a volcano erupts from outer space the pictures are below.

This May 23, 2006, photo released by NASA shows the eruption of Cleveland Volcano, Aleutian Islands, Alaska, as photographed by an Expedition 13 crew member on the International Space Station. The image captures the ash plume of the very short-lived eruption. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center)

In this June 16, 2010 satellite image provided by NASA, Papua New Guinea’s Manam Volcano releases a thin, faint plume, as clouds cluster at the volcano’s summit. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite took this image. The clouds may result from water vapor from the volcano, but may also have formed independent of volcanic activity. The volcanic plume appears as a thin, blue-gray veil extending toward the northwest over the Bismarck Sea. (AP Photo/NASA)Seen here on on June 12, 2009 in the beginning stages of eruption is Sarychev volcano. This was the sixth eruption since 1946, making it one the busiest volcanoes on Russia’s Kuril Islands. (Photo: NASA)

The Real Moby Dick. [Picutres] [VIDEO]

So we finally did it. We found the real Moby Dick. He is an albino humpback whale.

Migaloo, the only documented albino humpback whale in the world, thrilled cruise passengers on Saturday, when he was spotted off Cairns, Australia:

“The famous whale enjoyed clear skies and low winds and dived repeatedly into the blue depths before surfacing every 10 to 15 minutes GBR Helicopter Group director Deborah Ross said the footage taken by cinematographer David Farmer and pilot Chris Rose, of Chris Rose Flying Films, would be given to the BBC, which is producing a documentary on Migaloo. ‘We’ve made it a professional goal to make sure we get Migaloo recorded so we can help protect him because he is so precious,’ she said. ‘This is the first time Migaloo has been filmed anywhere professionally in the world.'”

 

 

Migaloo, which means “white fellow” in one of Australia’s indigenous languages, was first spotted in 1991, when he was believed to be less than 5 years old.

Read more: http://www.towleroad.com/2010/08/worlds-only-documented-albino-humpback-whale-reappears.html#ixzz1YQkh7V4g

 

New Species Of Dolphin Found In Australia. [PICTURES]

(CNN) — Australian researchers have discovered a new species of dolphin living right under their, uh, bottlenoses.
A population of 100 dolphins in Port Phillip Bay and 50 in the Gippsland Lakes on Australia’s southern coast have been proven to be genetically unique from dolphins anywhere else in the world, Monash University doctoral researcher Kate Charlton-Robb said in a university release.

“We’re very pleased to announce that yes it is a new dolphin species, and I have called it Tersiops Australis,” Charlton-Robb said in an interview with Radio Australia.
The new species has been given the common name the Burrunan dolphin, meaning “large sea fish of the porpoise kind” in Aboriginal languages, she said.

The Burrunan dolphins were originally thought to be one of two bottlenose species, but researchers used DNA and skull comparisons to establish they were a new species.
Only three new dolphin species have been recognized since the late 1800s, Charlton-Robb said.
“This animal has been living right under our noses for so many years, and just with combining those two different technologies, with looking at the skull morphology and the DNA, you know there’s still really exciting discoveries to be made,” Charlton-Robb told Radio Australia.
She said the discovery highlights the importance of conservation efforts.

“It would be a shame to discover something and then and lose it. So we really are working hard to try and protect and conserve these animals,” she told Radio Australia.
And if you want to get a look at the new species, head to Port Phillip Bay.
“The animals that you would see out in the bay on a normal occasion would be this new species type,” Charton-Robb told Radio Australia.

This Toad Would Make A Sweet Hippy Pet.

Scientists scouring the mountains of Borneo spotted a species of toads last seen by European explorers in 1924, providing the world with the first photographs of the colorful, spindly legged creature, a researcher said Thursday.

In recent years, the Washington-based Conservation Internationalplaced the Sambas Stream Toad, also known as the Bornean Rainbow Toad, on a list of the world’s “Top 10 Most Wanted LostFrogs” and voiced fears that it might be extinct.

Full article here –> Borneo toad spotted for 1st time in 87 years

Lost City Of Atlantis. [Not So Lost Anymore]

Scientists believe they may have found the lost city of Atlantis 1.2 miles below the arctic sea. 

Geologists have discovered an ancient underwater landscape more than a mile beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean. The 56-million-year-old landscape, which was uncovered by a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, UK, whose findings appear in the July 10 issue ofscientific journal Nature Geoscience, reveals evidence of human inhabitants.

The team, led by Cambridge graduate student Ross Hartley, used images created using an echo-sounding technique that bounces sound waves off the sea floor to develop a map of the landscape. The data was collected by a seismic contracting company that gathers information for oil companies, reports FoxNews.com.

The 3,861 square miles of newly discovered landscape is located just west of the Shetland Islands, which are located in the  between northern Scotland and Norway, at the convergence of theNorwegian Sea and the North Sea.

The research team has so far found a total of eight major rivers in the covered landscape. And rock samples taken from the sea floor show evidence of pollen and coal, which suggests humans once inhabited the land. Harley and his team predict that the sunken land mass once connected Scotland to Norway.

What remains one of the primary mysteries of this discovery is why the landscape, which geologic evidence shows was once above sea level, now resides about 1.2 miles under water.

Their answer so far is that the Icelandic Plume, which carries magma from deep within the Earth’s mantle, emitted a “giant hot ripple” of molten rock, which pushed the lost land up above the water. Eventually, the ripple passed, and the land receded back to its water depths. 

Originally at –> Lost \’Atlantis-like\’ world discovered under North Atlantic Ocean 

Sedimentary basins in the North Atlantic Ocean preserve a record of intermittent uplift during Cenozoic times¹. These variations in elevation are thought to result from temperature changes within the underlying Icelandic mantle plume². When parts of the European continental shelf were episodically lifted above sea level, new landscapes were carved by erosion, but these landscapes then subsided and were buried beneath marine sediments³. Here, we use three-dimensional seismic data to reconstruct one of these ancient landscapes that formed off the northwest coast of Europe during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. We identify a drainage network within the landscape and, by modelling the profiles of individual rivers within this network, we reconstruct the history of surface uplift. We show that the landscape was lifted above sea level in a series of three discrete steps of 200–400 m each. After about 1 million years of subaerial exposure, this landscape was reburied. We use the magnitude and duration of uplift to constrain the temperature and velocity of a mantle-plume anomaly that drove landscape formation. We conclude that pulses of hot, chemically depleted, mantle material spread out radially beneath the lithospheric plate at velocities of ~35 cm yr⁻¹.

Originally Posted At  –> Transient convective uplift of an ancient buried landscape