Category: Environment

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Environmental Updates and Calf Fetus Shocks Los Brazos, New Mexico

Update Note: More information about fetus eye examination will be added to this report on or about November 13, 1999. Also, please see web site listing below.

November 7, 1999 Environmental Updates -

Primitive Fish A Half A Billion Years Ago

One of the challenges of science is to figure out the beginning of things, from the dawn of the cosmos to how long ago vertebrate animals with bones first appeared on earth. In this past week's journal Nature, two Chinese teams reported the discovery of fish-like fossils with primitive backbones that are about 530 million years old. That puts them in the middle of the Cambrian epoch when all kinds of animal life proliferated on this planet. For Cambridge, England scientist, Simon Morris, the fact there were primitive fish nearly half a billion years ago means that "the so-called Cambrian explosion was more abrupt and dramatic than we thought."

 

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A U. S. Army Infantryman’s Abduction

October 24, 1999  Findlay, Ohio ­ This week, I interviewed a man who fought in Vietnam from 1966 to 1967 and then came back to California to finish his service, as he said, "in the Combat Developments Experimental Command at Hunter Liggett Military Reservation eighty miles from Fort Ord in the middle of the Mojave Desert."

Editor's Clarification since radio broadcast and posting of this report:

Hunter Liggett Military Reservation is located between Monterey and Paso Robles, California, not in or near the Mojave Desert. This fact was brought to my attention by several earthfiles.com visitors. I confirmed the location now called Fort Hunter Liggett on a map and called George Ritter.

He said, "I came out of Vietnam and went straight to Fort Ord on the ocean. But for the assignment with that Experimental Command, we were bussed for two hours into a desert that I was told was the Mohave Desert. Coming from Findlay, Ohio, I didn't know anything about California and have always assumed that was the desert we were in. I know we passed Soledad prison and Lockwood on our way to where we had guard duty."

 

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Short Updates About Environmental Problems

October 24, 1999 ­

Insecticides and Rat Poisons Hurting Children and Other Life

On Friday, October 22nd, milk contaminated with insecticide killed at least 28 children ages 5 to 15 and sickened 20 others in a Peruvian village. Powdered milk received at their school was prepared in a pot used earlier to mix insecticide.

­ In Apopka, Florida near Orlando, hordes of mice turned up for reasons unknown and residents laid out poisons and traps. Now eagles and hawks and other birds of prey are turning up sick from eating the mice.

 

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Bird Deaths In Mascoutah, Illinois and Erie, Pennsylvania

October 21, 1999 ­ 

1) Mascoutah, Illinois Red-winged Blackbird Deaths

Last weekend on October 16-17th, a large flock of birds migrating south through the mid-West landed in two fields near Mascoutah, Illinois. That's a small farm community about 30 miles southeast of St. Louis, Missouri. Residents noticed the birds were not moving and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources was notified. Their agents got into the fields to collect birds for analyses. Agents reported that all the birds - mostly male red-winged blackbirds, some grackles and other blackbirds - had their wings outstretched, laying tilted to one side with their beaks sticking straight down into the soil.

Male Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoenicus © 1993 Kirtley Perkins.
Male Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoenicus © 1993 Kirtley Perkins.

As of October 21, 1999 the official count was 27,000 birds dead over twenty acres and the cause was declared deliberate poisoning of seed grain with the insecticide, Furadan. A reporter and photographer from the Belleville Illinois News Democrat got to the fields before all the birds had been picked up. I talked with Tim Vizer who is the newspaper's Chief Photographer about his assignment to Mascoutah.

 

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Last 1999 Crop Formation in Wiltshire, England

October 14, 1999 Avebury, Wiltshire, England ­

Aerial photograph © 1999 by Ulrich Cox and Peter Sorensen, September 1, 1999, Avebury, Wiltshire, England.
Aerial photograph © 1999 by Ulrich Cox and Peter Sorensen, September 1, 1999, Avebury, Wiltshire, England.


Peter Sorensen, Videographer, writes in an e-mail: "This eight-armed formation that appeared with the mathematical symbol for Pi next to it at Avebury, Wiltshire was discovered on September 1, 1999 ­ the latest date so far on record for an English crop formation to appear."

 

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Hurricane Floyd Runoff Suffocating North Carolina Estuary

October 10, 1999  New Bern, North Carolina ­ On Friday, October 8th, the non-profit North Carolina Coastal Foundation met in Raleigh to discuss how effective coastal management has been. The impact of Hurricane Floyd dominated the discussion. Dr. Hans Paerl, a marine scientist at the University of North Carolina said, "What we're seeing is an ecological event on the catastrophic scale."

Hurricane Floyd dumped twenty inches of rain on eastern North Carolina on September 16th. The water killed about fifty people as it filled the river basins to overflowing. The flood waters tore through houses, hog lagoons and sewer plants that had been constructed along the Neuse and Tar Rivers. Everything was dumped into Albemarle-Pamlico Sounds, the second largest estuary in the United States.

 

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Oddball Quasar and Salt Water Inside Meteorite

© 1999 by Linda Moulton Howe

August 29, 1999 ­

Oddball Quasar

Cambridge, England ­ Last week Cambridge scientists said they were puzzled by mysterious, dark bands in the sky just before and after the August 11th eclipse. But Dan Green, Director of Harvard's Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, told me that the horizontal bands have been seen before in other total solar eclipses and are thought to be atmospheric distortions.

This week I also talked with Astronomer George Djorgovski (jor-GOV-ski) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, about a mysterious star his team photographed during their Large Digital Sky Survey. The astronomers noticed an oddly colored star in the constellation Serpens, the Snake.

Photograph by Astronomer S. George Djorgovski © 1999, California Institute of Technology, Carina Software and Large Digital Sky Survey.
Photograph by Astronomer S. George Djorgovski © 1999, California Institute of Technology, Carina Software and Large Digital Sky Survey.

 

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Integrated Circuits the Size of Molecules

© 1999 by Linda Moulton Howe

"In ten years potentially, we will have entire computers not just in your wrist watch, but woven into our clothing. Or a slurry of computers painted on your wall." 

Phil Kueckes, Computer Architect,
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, California, July 1999

August 18, 1999  Palo Alto, California ­ In mid-July 1999, Hewlett-Packard Labs and the University of California at Los Angeles made headlines with a breakthrough that seems like science fiction ­ making integrated circuits for computers no bigger than molecules. Currently, the on-off switches for computing are made by etching pathways with beams of light on silicon wafer chips. But light has a wavelength and cannot make anything smaller than that wavelength.

 

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More Mid-August 1999 Crop Formations in Wiltshire, England

© 1999 by Linda Moulton Howe

August 15, 1999 Stanton St. Bernard, Wiltshire County, England ­ Today I joined photographer Peter Sorensen at new formations in wheat that were discovered August 14th. These can be seen clearly only from the air. On the ground or from the car on the road, the large spiral and Celtic knot with side "signature" are barely visible.

Spiral discovered in Stanton St. Bernard, Wiltshire, wheat near Celtic Knot on August 14, 1999, in same field as the earlier June 23 pictogram. Aerial Photograph © 1999 by Peter Sorensen.
Spiral discovered in Stanton St. Bernard, Wiltshire, wheat near Celtic Knot on August 14, 1999, in same field as the earlier June 23 pictogram. Aerial Photograph © 1999 by Peter Sorensen.

 

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Maryland Fish Kills; Global Warming; and Warm Oceans and Disease

© 1999 by Linda Moulton Howe

July 25, 1999 ­

Chesapeake Bay, Maryland Fish Kills

Maryland fish kills have happened twice this month in the Pocomoke River and Bullbegger Creek which feed into Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. The first die off was 200,000 menhaden and other freshwater fish. Then this past week, another half million were found floating belly up and piled along the creek banks. This brings the total for July in just those two tributaries to over 700,000 dead fish ­ the Chesapeake's worst fish kill in a decade.

 

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