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It’s actually nesting season for the sea turtles in Bangladesh and India, but this year the beaches where these animals generally lay their eggs are empty.

According to conservation workers, nearly around a thousand dead turtles were washed ashore along the coasts of both India and Bangladesh in the last few weeks.

Around 200 dead reptiles have appeared in the last week alone along a single stretch of beach, in the Bangladeshi tourist town of Cox’s Bazar. According to a team of scientists who visited the beach, these mysterious mass deaths have been caused due to fishing nets.

The sea turtles that are swarming towards the shore to lay their eggs to nest are getting caught in badly laid nets and dying. The local fishers disagree with this and claim that they very rarely catch sea turtles, and even if they do, they quickly return the animal back to the water alive.

Many hundreds of miles away in eastern India as well conservationists say that they too are finding similar evidence that nets are to blamed for their death.

An ancient “supervolcano” is present in what is now being called “Washington State” it gave out steam and billowed ash in enormous amounts. The blow-up happened in two major bursts that occurred around 3.7 million years ago in the northern Cascade Range, causing the flow of  hot gas that belched out around 33 cubic miles of ash.

This according to the researchers at Western Washington University is not the first and the last eruption to occur there. The blasts that occurred could have killed all the life that existed several miles further. It might have also collected large amounts of ash around the down hill area.

When this volcano occurred, the crack widened, and made the ground on one side drop like a trap door swinging down. This section of earth fell more than 3,000 feet (1,000 meters).The second eruption occurred around a hundred thousand years later, when the upper end of the trap door dropped, forming a rectangular crater measuring 5 miles by 2.5 miles.

The two eruptions described involved a total of around 30 cubic miles magma “in a period of just a day or two.Ever since, the site has been silent, as volcanic activity has shifted 15 miles (25 kilometers) southwest, to the present location of 10,778-foot (3,285-meter) Mount Baker, near the city of Bellingham.

No one can predict about Mount Baker, or another peak in the Cascades, they might someday produce a huge eruption.

The pre-Aztec city of El Tajin, which is located on Mexico’s Gulf coast, is famous for its temple pyramids and the intricately carved relics. Acidic air pollutants that are being pumped out by oil-drilling platforms and power stations along the coast are slowly ruining these carvings, according to Humberto Bravo, an air pollution specialist.

“The deterioration is alarming … and could cause irreparable damage to monuments that are an important part of our cultural heritage,” said Bravo of the University of Mexico’s Center for Atmospheric Sciences.

El Tajin was built in what is now considered the state of Veracruz by the Totonac, a civilization that reached the peak in early 9th to the early 13th century A.D. Major of El Tajin city name refers to the names for the Totonac god of thunder that still remains unexcavated. The most famous building prevalent in the site is an elaborate niche-studded pyramid.

This center also has many temple pyramids, palaces and courts for playing a ritual Mesoamerican ball game that is sometimes compared to basketball. Now the carvings depicting the game are eroding at an alarming rate, according to Bravo.

Bravo and his colleagues spent many years to increase the effects of polluted air and acid rain on El Tajin’s soft limestone buildings. They found that the erosion may have been caused due to contaminants like chlorine, sulfates and nitrates in the air from power stations and oil refineries.

They also claim that the erosion is caused due to acid rain because of the sulfuric acid and nitric acid that reacts with the calcium carbonate to form gypsum that just flakes off. Acid rain is caused when the pollutants in the air mix with water droplets in a cloud. The pollution is then carried down to earth along with the rain.

“The Vera Cruz region has some of the highest acid levels in the air in Mexico,” Bravo said.

Common Problem

Other scholars expressed similar alarm at the detrimental effects of pollution on El Tajin.

“The art of El Tajin is crucial to our understanding of the ancient history of the Gulf coast,” said John Machado, a pre-Columbian art historian at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California.

“It gives evidence of a powerful and complex civilization that had broad interaction with Mesoamerican cultures in both central Mexico and Maya-controlled regions but still cultivated its own unique Veracruz style and iconography.”

“The loss of these images would be devastating to the cultural heritage of the area,” said Machado, who has done extensive research at El Tajin. But the problem of pollution affects archaeological sites throughout Mexico.

The sources of degradation vary, said Maria Lourdes Gallardo, chief conservator at the main Aztec temple, Templo Mayor, in Mexico City. “The pollutants … in the archaeological zone of Templo Mayor … range from the smog to water filtrations underground,” Gallardo said.

“We found that there had been a significant change in the rate of pollutants derived from sulfur, which had reduced to a great extent, compared to an increase in the quantity of chloride and heavy metal pollutants.”

The site has Olmec-style bas-relief carvings that can be dated back to 700 B.C. in granodiorite, a rock that is harder than limestone.

Gas drilling on the Indonesian island of Java has triggered what can be called a “mud volcano” that had killed around 13 people and has made four square miles (ten square kilometers) of countryside uninhabitable for years.

According to a recent report released, a team of British researchers says that the deadly upwelling began when an exploratory gas burst out through a rock of 9,300 feet (2,800 meters) below the ground, letting hot, high-pressure water to escape.

The water along with it carried mud to the surface, where it spread to a region of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) in diameter in eight months since the eruption began. The mud volcano is similar to a gusher or blowout, which occurs in oil drilling when oil or gas squirt to the surface, according to the team.

Eventhough the eruption isn’t as violent as a typical volcano, around dozen people died in this event. The volcano also known as Lusi, will leave more than 11,000 people permanently displaced.

Human Reasons

Mud volcanoes are caused when pressures deep in the Earth cause the mud to squirt to the surface.

According to Richard Davies, lead author of the study:

“It’s simply an eruption of mud and liquids,” added Davies, who directs the Center for Research into Earth Energy Systems at Durham University. “There are probably a couple of thousand on planet Earth.”

Typically, the eruptions are caused by tectonic forces or by the compaction of sediments at the deltas of large rivers, such as the Mississippi. “They’re very common features,” Davies said.

But even though an earthquake had occurred in the Java region only two days prior to the eruption, the delayed mud release confirms a human cause.

Danger Continues

Another unusual feature of the Indonesian eruption is that it is a very thin, liquid mud, according to another researcher, Richard Swarbrick of Geopressure Technology Ltd. It is unfortunate that it is thin mud because this could flow for long distances, increasing the devastation and destruction.

Another concern is that the mud is getting eroded from deep underground, causing a cavern. This means that the land around the volcano might collapse to form a crater, Swarbrick said.

The duration of the volcano’s activity is of concern. Usually, mud volcanoes erupt quickly, and then become a slow ooze intermingled with the occasional major upwelling. But in Java the flow rate appears to have doubled since the eruption began, Swarbrick said.

At its center, the pancake-like deposit is already about 33 feet (10 meters) thick, Durham University’s Davies added. “It’s carried on for a long time at a high rate, which suggests it’s not going to stop tomorrow,” he said.

A major part of southeast Louisiana is slowing moving into the Gulf of Mexico, according to a recent report from the American Geophysical Union. Researchers have for decades known that the southern part of the state is sinking. according to recent findings, there is a large egg-shape area around 250 miles (400 kilometers) long and 180 miles (290 kilometers) wide which is slowly moving into the Gulf.

“This whole section is moving south-southeast and pulling apart from the rest of the country up in the Lake Pontchartrain region,” said lead study author Roy Dokka, executive director of the Center for Geoinformatics at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

According to a Report in the December 2006 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters this region is moving at a speed that is equal to that of a glacier, around a few millimeters in a year. Timothy Dixon, a study co-author and professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, says there is no need for panic.

“If it continues to move in the same speed as it is moving now, then it could take thousands of years for this process to have serious affects. During that tiem new orleans could have a very high risk of flooding.

Bedrock

many parts of Southern Louisiana that sit on the Mississippi River Delta have been built over many thousands of years with sediments from the river. Unlike the solid bedrock in other parts of the country, this part of the state is situated on an unstable land.

Eventhough the movement of south Louisiana is a slow and natural process, but the movement of the land has increased due to human activities like the building of levees and exploring for oil.

Quakes and Floods

Large earthquakes have been occurring around the south of New Orleans over the past 20 or 30 years that are likely to be tied to the region’s sliding movement.

According to Dokka, there is a slight potential for a seriously damaging earthquake, but nothing that could cause south Louisiana to suddenly break away from the rest of the state.
What’s more, study co-author Dixon added, the region that is sliding sits over a layer of salt that may prevent earthquake-type stresses from building up enough to trigger a large quake.

The researchers say that flooding could be Louisiana’s main concern and that the state can only be saved by protect itself by monitoring coastal subsidence through a global positioning system network that is already being used. When monitored properly, levees can be raised and flood protection can be changed as the land sinks and moves.

“What’s important,” Dokka said, “is that we’ve been able to recognize one of the important processes that makes south Louisiana vulnerable.”

According to a recent study by by Christian D. Klose of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, the most damaging earthquake in Australia’s history was caused by humans. The magnitude-5.6 quake that struck Newcastle, in New South Wales, on December 28, 1989, killed 13 people, injured 160, and caused 3.5 billion U.S. dollars worth of damage.
According to researchers that quake was caused by the changes in the earth caused by 200 years of underground coal mining. This intensity of the quake wasn’t enormous, but considering that Australia isn’t actually a seismically active place, it came as a surprise.
Over Burdening the Earth

The extraction of many millions of tons of coal from the area caused stress underground and triggered the Newcastle quake.
There has also been a significant amount of water being extracted along with the coal and this water is pumped out to avoid the flooding of these mines. For every ton of coal that is extracted around 4.3 times more water is extracted.

Quakes Caused by Humans

Coal mining is not the only reason why the earthquaakes are triggered. They are also caused by the construction of reservoirs and the production of oil and natural gas as well. Three of the largest human-caused earthquakes of all time were a trio that occurred in Uzbekistan’s Gazli natural gas field between 1976 and 1984

Each of the three had a magnitude greater than 6.8, and the largest had a magnitude of 7.3. Human-triggered earthquakes are very dangerous, especially in places that are not prone to earth quakes. this is because people in such areas are not prepared for the worst.