"If we don't have replenishing rains that really begin to fill the reservoirs and ... start refilling some of the groundwater tables, then we're going to continue to deplete our water resources and the economic and environmental impacts of that are going to just be devastating."
- Don Wilhite, Director, National Drought Mitigation Center, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, March 29, 2002
Graphic of intensifying drought in the U.S., February 9 - March 15, 2002, courtesy National Drought Mitigation Center, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska.
March 30, 2002 Narrowsburg, New York - Since the dry, warm fall and winter of 2001-2002, rivers on the East Coast of the United States have reached the lowest levels on record. In December, it was so bad in the Cannonsville Reservoir of the Delaware River watershed that its muddy bottom was exposed for the first time since it was built. That reservoir, which helps provide water to Manhattan, had only 3% of its water capacity. In fact, half the drinking water for New York City comes from three reservoirs in the Delaware River watershed and all three right now have less than half their normal water levels.
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"This was the warmest summer (2002) in the Antarctic Peninsula to date. The Antarctic Peninsula has one of the steepest warming trends of anywhere on earth and this event, the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf, was the largest event of its kind in the last 30 years."
- Ted Scambos, Ph.D., Glaciologist,
Univ. of Colorado
The Antarctic South Pole is covered by a continent the size of the United States. The Antarctic ice sheet which is 1.5 miles thick in some places, contains over 90% of the world's fresh water. The Antarctic Peninsula ice sheets that extend into the surrounding seas are melting rapidly, whether from global warming or local climate variations.
March 21, 2002 Boulder, Colorado - Scientists have been warning since 1997 that the Antarctic Peninsula and its Larsen B ice shelf were melting, but no one expected that by March 2002 the Larsen B would have disintegrated to only 40% of the size it was five years ago. But it has and in its collapse, one of the largest floating ice masses of the past thirty years has broken off. Nearly twice the size of Rhode Island covering 2,160 square miles (3,250 square kilometers) and 750 miles thick, iceberg B-22 was photographed on March 11, 2002 by the AVHRR satellite and reported by NOAA, the National Ice Center (NIC) and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center. The ice shelf has existed since the last ice age 12,000 years ago, and yet it disintegrated suddenly over a 35 day period that began the end of January 2002.
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El Nino means "the little boy" or "Christ child" in Spanish. South American fishermen used the name years ago to designate periodic cycles of unusually warm water in the Pacific ocean which appear around Christmas time. El Nino conditions occur once water temperatures have warmed enough (.5 degrees Celsius or more above normal) to alter normal cloudiness and rainfall in the Pacific basin. The cycle is every four or five years and can last up to eighteen months. The last El Nino was 1997-1998.
Pacific Ocean temperatures near the South American coast in February 2002 had warmed 2 degrees Celsius (4 Fahrenheit) indicating that El Nino conditions are developing. Map courtesy National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
March 9, 2002 Washington, D. C. - Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on March 7 that ocean surface temperatures near the South American coast had already warmed 2 degrees Celsius (4 Fahrenheit) by February 2002.
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March 9, 2002 New York City, New York - This week I talked to a scientist who is confident that many dinosaurs had feathers, including the fierce Tyrannosaurus rex "monster" meat-eater, - or at least when it was young. Dr. Mark Norell, Chairman of the Paleontology Division at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, published photographs and information about a new fossil discovery from the Liaoning Province in northeast China in the March 7th journal, Nature.
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An artist's rendering of the Pioneer spacecraft in deep space courtesy NASA.
February 24, 2002 Los Alamos, New Mexico - Thirty years ago on March 2, 1972, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 spacecraft from Cape Kennedy aboard an Atlas Centaur rocket. According to officials, it was the "fastest spacecraft ever to leave Earth." Its mission was to travel through the asteroid belt, be the first manmade machine to pass Jupiter and be the first spacecraft to use planetary gravity to change course and to reach escape velocity from the solar system. Pioneer 10 is powered by electricity derived from the warmth of decaying plutonium 238 and was intended to last only 21 months. Thirty years later, it is still going and sending signals.
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The underwater archaeological site that could be more than 9,000 years old is about 30 miles west of Surat in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay) in northwestern India.
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Cedar Vine Manor, Lebanon, Tennessee
February 16, 2002 Surat, India - A month ago in mid-January, marine scientists in India announced they had sonar images of square and rectangular shapes about 130 feet down off the northwestern coast of India in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay). Not only are their sonar shapes with 90-degree angles, the Indian Minister of Science and Technology ordered that the site be dredged. What was found has surprised archaeologists around the world and was the subject of a private meeting two weeks ago attended by the Indian Minister in charge of investigating the underwater site about thirty miles off the coast from Surat.
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"Government officials said intelligence suggested that al-Qaeda
members had been considering attacking U. S. nuclear power plants
with car or truck bombs, boats or aircraft."
- Seth Borenstein, The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 31, 2002
February 4, 2002 Middletown, Pennsylvania - President George Bush said in his January 29, 2002 State of the Union speech that "diagrams of American nuclear power plants" were found among terrorist manuals and other artifacts left by terrorists in Afghanistan. Earlier on January 16, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had issued an alert that a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant could be imminent.
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Ross Ice Shelf in lower left quadrant of Antarctica map has been the source of Connecticut-sized icebergs dropping into the sea in recent years.
January 30, 2002 Pasadena, California - The huge Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica is bigger than Texas and two-thirds of a mile thick. It has been the source of Rhode Island-sized icebergs in recent years in what was thought to be a continual slow melting in slippery mud at the bottom where the heavy ice layer pushes against the continental land mass. Since the last Ice Age ended ten thousand years ago, icy "rivers" have moved along that mud base and dumped Connecticut-sized icebergs into the sea in recent years.
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