Northwest passage starting to open *already*
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Triple the previous record anomaly for the first half of the season
CT area fell by 145k yesterday, which meant that the fall over the preceding week was 1.25M, one of the biggest weekly falls of all time.
Not as much as today. After a fall of 206k, the weekly decline is 1.3M.
The negative anomaly of 1.811M is the largest ever during the vernal half of the solar year.
The earliest that I can find a negative anomaly so large is on day .6000 – which is sometime about July 25.
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/06/asi-2012-update-5-when-graphs-agree.html#comments
Bad/good news from the Arctic
Recent meltdown of Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice
The above graph snipped from Cryosphere Today shows how much more sea ice has melted this year than the old average, before the melt started in earnest in the past decade or so. The reason it’s happening so drastically right now according to recent posts at Nevin’s sea ice blog is a combination of the ice volume and thickness having already been severely reduced, and a big high with lots of sun over the “wafer thin” only-one-year-old ice. Although patterns are supposed to shift this week, they expect another big high around the solstice, when the sun will be up 24/7 for a couple of weeks. We’re already in record anomaly territory, and this could be the year when the meltdown in 2007 is finally exceeded.
The reason I say this is in a way good news is if disaster has to strike, perhaps it is better it come before the full oil crunch comes, because at least for now we have the resources to come up with big solutions, whereas in a few years we might be much reduced in such capacities, and then be unable to stop it. So it’s not just morbid fascination that drives us progressives to watch for signs of climate collapse, its also because we’re desperate for an adequate response that is as of yet not forthcoming from the serious folk who control the world.
3D Earthquakes under Katla Volcano in Iceland
Was toying with the semi-free Graph app for Mac after a hurried search for a free way to portray lat/long/depth from data I pulled off the Iceland Met site and it works great for that. One can even rotate the graph with the mouse. Here are some screenshots for earthquakes going back to March.
There’s a lot of hype about Katla, after its smaller sister Eyjafjallajokull caused such disruption a couple of years ago, because historically Katla always erupts soon after Eyjafjallajokull. It’s looking like that will happen again, although who knows how severely or how soon.
The swarmsara applet
Here’s a screenshot of the applet you can run and play with from
http://personalpages.tds.net/~alturner/java/
It’s been a long time since I wrote this but I’m still proud! The world’s first computer simulation of the Buddhist theory of the life process.
Welcome to Swarmsara
This blog is going to be about a lot of things, from recent developments in science, to progressive politics, to Buddhism, to my photography and writings. In other words, a pretty typical blog, but with, perhaps, a unique flavor conferred by the long process of individuation to which we humans are subjected if we’ve held ourselves to the fire of experience long enough, which for good or ill, I have.
It will also be a proving ground for various experiments in theming and plugin combinations, and will have links to various other projects. For instance, while setting it up I was surprised to find my old ISP website is still available online, including my masters thesis of the same name as this blog. Reading it you will learn more about my eccentric imagination than you ever wished to know.
And OMG google made a BOOK out of my thesis!!??? With 0 reviews. I trust my so far non-existent readers here will change all that.
–Alex