In order to make up for the reduced number of posts during the last month, here are some bonus videos for this weekend. The vidoes are so amazing that I couldn’t wait for the next weekend to post them. The first video is an amazing time-lapse video of the full moon (supermoon event), beautifully shot by Frédéric Lagléra in Tignes France. Great work Fredric and thanks for submitting the video to “science is beautiful” vimeo blog. Second video was shot by Norwegian photographer Terje Sorgjerd. He shot about 22,000 mesmerizing pictures of Aurora Borealis event (Northern Lights) and put together the pictures to create a breathtaking time-lapse video for us to enjoy and cherish. You can read my earlier posts (here and here) to understand the science behind the origin of green and violet colors as seen in Aurora Borealis. As the Sun is now entering into a more active phase after a period of lull, more such beautiful events will occur owing to strong solar storms.
This weekend’s video edition showcases two very beautiful videos showing nature in action. The first one is a beautifully shot 8-min short film “Winter in Hell” giving us a glimpse of stunning and jaw-dropping visuals of Icelandic landscape. As the film progresses, the frozen landscape gets transformed when Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupts spewing out hot molten lava. Enrique Pechico shot this video in about an year and spent another eight months to process it and the outcome is just superb.
The second video by Mark Rigler captures another spectacular natural phenomenon–starling roosting. More than 100,000 starlings fly over the skies of Sterte in UK and as they fly and turn and wheel and swoop they make spectacular patterns in the sky– call it avian sculpture in the sky or you can call it murmuration. Starlings are very social birds and these huge flocks provide them socializing opportunity and allows them to keep warm in the night. Large numbers of birds in the flock also provides them safety from their predators. Enjoy these videos and have a great SuperBowl Weekend. Go Packers, Go Steelers!!
It’s snow-day in Cincinnati today. Schools were closed and my office was also closed early during the day so that people could avoid slippery road conditions and reach home safely. During the evening, I decided to step out to have some coffee and click some pictures. I was not the only one out in the snow as there were bunch of people including kids playing slip-n-slide on the snow.
Mt Merapi in Indonesia continues to spew lava, ashes and gases disrupting lives of hundreds and thousands of people. Here are few breathtaking pictures of the volcano.
In one of my previous post, I mentioned about twin disasters of earthquake/Tsunami and volcanic eruption which Indonesia has been facing. Mt Merapi first erupted recently on Oct 26th killing about 44 people. Since then the volcano has been active on and off. On Nov3rd, it erupted again but this time it was 5 times stronger than Oct 26th eruption killing more people and spewing out gases and ashes farther than expected. Till now total number of reported deaths have been 144 and about 160,000 people have been evacuated. Indonesian govt has declared the event as a national emergency and danger zone has been extended to 12 miles from the location of the volcano.In the image above you can see thermal images from NASA’s Terra satellite taken on Oct 30. The thermal data has been then overlaid on the map of the mountain to give an idea of extent of the flow of material from the eruption.
While Mt Merapi has been an active volcano, but this hasn’t deterred people from living on its slopes and fothills. On various occasions volcano activity has disrupted the lives of the villagers. Some might ask why the villagers go and live on the slopes of killer mountain. Well, volcanic activity results in making the surrounding lands very fertile which is good for cultivation and helps in supporting a large population. Indonesia is a very densely populated country and land availability is scarce. So I guess villagers chose to live in the shadow of this killer volcano knowing the fact that it might erupt anytime, but atleast till that time, they will be able to grow food and feed their family and survive and hope that in future if it erupts, they might be lucky enough to survive and continue with their lives.It’s a very very tough choice they have to make.
Migration of animals is such an interesting phenomenon where animals and birds and insects, big and small all over the earth move around in huge numbers to optimize their chances of survival. If you are interested in this topic you might want to catch up with a new series on National Geographic titled ” Great Migrations“. First episode of seven part series airs on Nov 7th, 8 PM. The series is aptly subtitled as “Move as Millions. Survive as One” and you can preview first 15 minutes of the show here:
Coming back to above picture, you can see zebras amidst wildebeest herd and this is quite a common sighting in East African jungles where both the species migrate together and benefit from each others company. If you ask, what are the benefits they get from each other, I will try to enlist some of them which I gathered from the net.
Wildebeest and zebras can migrate in harmony as they both prefer different parts of the grass when grazing and so there is no conflict of interest in terms of food. Wildebeests are short grass grazers while zebras have long front teeth which facilitates them in feeding upon longer grass. So when the herd enters a new area, zebras basically mow the whole area which helps wildebeest to feed upon soft parts of the grass, and then zebras feed upon the leftover parts. So the feeding pattern works out for both of them.
Zebras have good memories and the are good travelers as they can remember the directions and they watch carefully when and where to cross places before jumping in. Wildebeest on the other hand move in herd without much thought which many of the times lead to their peril as well. So being with zebras gives wildebeest better navigating capabilities.
Wildebeests are good in sensing water and this feature is very helpful to both the species when they are migrating in dry lands of Eastern African jungles.
Zebras have better hearing and seeing capabilities which helps them in sensing danger better.
There is also a hypothesis that lions prefer eating wildebeest meat, or maybe they are easy to hunt, so being with a weak prey such as a wildebeest is a good thing for zebra, quite clever. [Source: goafrica.about.com]
In the picture below, you can see a young zebra following it’s mother while migrating. Baby zebra stays with it’s mother and recognizes her by voice, smell and stripe patterns. It’s interesting to note that no two zebras look exactly the same and baby zebras can figure out that pretty easily.
Picture credit: Boston.com/National Geographic/Marc Moritsch/Mitsuaki Iwago/ Minden Pictures
Indonesia was struck by two natural disasters during last week resulting in loss of more than 400 lives and large-scale displacement of people. On 25th October, a 7.7 scale earthquake triggered Tsunami in western parts of the country which resulted in loss of about 393 lives. Barely a day after, Mt Merapi, located in central Java, erupted multiple times and covered many neighboring villages in ashes. As of now about 33 people have been reported dead due to these eruptions. Many of the affected villages are in very remote areas and occurrence of these two events in quick succession has complicated the relief efforts. Tsunami warning system was put in place but it’s not clear why it couldn’t respond to the earthquake.
Officials say a multimillion-dollar tsunami warning system that uses buoys to detect sudden changes in water levels broke down a month ago because it was not being properly maintained. The system was installed after a monster 2004 quake and tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries. A German official at the project disputed there was a breakdown, saying Monday’s 7.7-magnitude quake’s epicenter was too close to the Mentawai islands for residents to get the warning before the killer wave hit. “The early warning system worked very well — it can be verified,” said Joern Lauterjung, head of the German-Indonesia Tsunami Early Warning Project for the Potsdam-based GeoForschungs Zentrum. He added that only one sensor of 300 had not been working and said that had no effect on the system’s operation. [AP]
Image credit: 1) Mt Merapi on Aug 8,2010 | Flickr user Bernard Tey| Used under creative commons license
May 20, 2012 1799 Honore De Balzac 1851 Emile Berliner 1908 James Stewart 1920 Betty Driver 1942 Lynn Davies 1944 Joe Cocker 1946 Cher 1961 Nick Heyward
