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The Philippines may miss a direct hit from Typhoon Songda, but it will bring major wind and rain damage. Susan Powell looks at the likely course of the storm.

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Ash track hard to predict

The Icelandic ash plume affecting UK airspace on Tuesday has moved eastwards over the North Sea towards the European continent. But as Susan Powell explains, the risk of further disruption remains.

The 20 climate change activists convicted of breaking into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station are to appeal on the grounds of alleged suppressed evidence from police infiltrator Mark Kennedy. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Twenty environmental activists who were convicted of conspiring to shut down one of the UK's biggest power stations are to launch an appeal after allegations that police suppressed potentially crucial evidence from an undercover officer.

The 20 were found guilty of plotting to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station following a three-week criminal trial and police operation costing £700,000.

But their convictions were thrown into doubt after revelations that they had been infiltrated by Mark Kennedy, a police spy who was alleged to have played a central role in the organising the plot.

This led to Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, to ask senior barrister Claire Montgomery to conduct an independent review into the safety of the convictions. The review's conclusion prompted Starmer to telephone the activists' barrister offering to provide assistance in overturning the convictions.

Today the 20 appellants formally submitted their application for permission to the court of appeal.

In a joint statement they said: "Our case continues to demonstrate the state's consistency in putting the interests of unlimited growth and unfettered capitalism before the rights and needs of people and planet. Our story began with the largest pre-emptive arrest of activists the UK has ever seen back in April 2009, and has since seen a random selection of us dragged through costly legal processes. The resulting consequence was 20 of us being convicted and sentenced for a crime we did not commit."

The statement added: "The launch of this appeal is just one small step in the fight back against the systemically political nature of policing. We stand in solidarity with all those who face repression for daring to take political action."

Mike Schwarz, the group's lawyer said: "We shall follow the DPP's response to the appeal with interest. We take the view that it is now incumbent on the crown - having assiduously and in such underhand and unaccountable ways gained so much personal information about the protest movement - to make amends. The crown should account fully and publicly to the court of appeal."

Revelations about Kennedy in the Guardian earlier this year have led to four inquiries amid admissions from police chiefs and ministers that the infiltration of protest groups has gone "badly wrong".

In one inquiry, the Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating the allegation that the police deliberately withheld evidence from court.

Kennedy says he secretly taped protesters as they discussed plans to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire in April 2009. The protesters want copies of these tapes and other reports of Kennedy's operations to help their appeal, a move the CPS would now find hard to resist.

The protesters say Kennedy's evidence would have bolstered their defence in front of the jury. They had admitted the break-in plot, but insisted they were acting to prevent the greater crimes of death and serious injury caused by climate change.

Prosecutors told the court that the protesters conspired to break into the power station as a stunt to attract publicity for their campaign against climate change.

The sun's rays provide both light and heat to Earth, and regions that receive greater exposure warm to a greater extent. This is particularly true of the tropics, which experience less seasonal variation in incident sunlight. Moisture-laden tropical air warms, becomes less dense, and rises. But as air reaches the upper levels of the atmosphere, it cools. Water molecules condense to form clouds and eventually fall as rain. Warm air rising from Earth's surface pushes the air mass away from the equator, and releases its moisture as precipitation as it travels pole-ward (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation

Areas in the tropics receive greater incident sunlight throughout the year, which causes water to evaporate. The moisture-laden air travels away from the equator, losing precipitation as it goes.

© 2011 Nature Education All rights reserved.

If the Earth did not spin on its axis, this cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation would move water and air along a north-south axis from the equator to the poles. This, however, does not happen. Earth's spin creates three belts of circulation (Figure 2). Air circulates from the tropics to regions approximately 30° north and south latitude, where the air masses sink. This belt of air circulation is referred to as a Hadley cell, after George Hadley, who first described it (Holton 2004). Two additional belts of circulating air exist in the temperate latitudes (between 30° and 60° latitude) and near the poles (between 60° and 90° latitude).

Figure 2: Hadley cells and prevailing winds

Solar warming of the tropics drives atmospheric circulation in three cells. Rotation of the Earth generates Coriolis forces that create the easterly trade winds below 30° latitude and polar easterlies above 60° latitude. Coriolis forces create prevailing westerlies in the mid-latitudes.

© 2011 Nature Education All rights reserved.

The sinking air mass at 30˚ latitude drives two phenomena: It contributes to the formation of arid climates and drives circulation of air north and south of the tropics. Dry, even desert-like conditions often occur at 30˚ north and south latitude because the descending dry air draws moisture from the soil (Figure 3). As warm air rises in the tropics, cool air is drawn from surrounding areas to fill the void. This creates the trade winds that blow in subtropical regions. But some of the air that descends from the Hadley cell is drawn away from the equator toward the poles. This air mass creates winds that characterize weather patterns in the temperate zones.

Figure 3: Distribution of arid land

Dry air descends at 30° latitude, drawing moisture from the soil and contributing to the creation of arid climates.

© 2011 Nature Education All rights reserved.

Under the influence of Earth's rotation, air returning to Earth's surface is deflected by the Coriolis force, which shifts the flow of air to the right of its initial trajectory in the northern hemisphere and to the left of its trajectory in the southern hemisphere. Winds blowing toward the equator are deflected to the west, creating the easterly trade winds (easterly winds blow from east to west). In the temperate zones, where the winds blow toward the poles, the Coriolis force deflects them toward the east, with prevailing westerlies (blowing from west to east) transporting most weather patterns in these temperate climes (Figure 2).

Despite the massive release of seismic stress two months ago, another large earthquake could strike the region.

Sid Perkins

The huge earthquake on 11 March did not release all of the seismic pressure built up along the fault near Japan.Photoshot

The tsunami-spawning, magnitude-9 earthquake that hit Japan on 11 March was the largest tremor to strike the region in hundreds of years, but immense amounts of seismic stress remain stored in the area's tectonic interfaces — and the next large quake could occur much closer to Tokyo, a troubling analysis suggests.

The 'Tohoku-Oki' earthquake in March occurred beneath the ocean east of Honshu, Japan's main island, where the Pacific tectonic plate subducts beneath, or slides under, Japan. Although magnitude-7 or larger quakes strike the same segment of the subduction zone every 30–40 years, the only previous event that might be comparable to that 10 weeks ago happened in July 869 AD, says Mark Simons, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

In the first of three studies published online today in Science, Simons and his colleagues used global positioning system (GPS) data recorded at more than 1,200 sites in Japan to reconstruct how the Tohoku-Oki quake unfolded¹.

During the earthquake the northern half of Honshu shifted eastwards, with some onshore sites nearest to the epicentre moving horizontally more than 4.3 metres and dropping about 66 centimetres. These movements resulted from slippage and deformation of the tectonic plates, which prior to the quake had been flexed and loaded with unreleased stress.

The team's models suggest that the sea floor about 50 kilometres offshore dropped by about 2 metres, and about 100 kilometres offshore, near the epicentre of the quake, it rose by about 9 metres.

In the second study², Mariko Sato, a geodesist with the Japan Coast Guard in Tokyo, and her colleagues tracked the long-term movements of transmitters installed on the sea floor in the region in 2000–04. Their results confirm the motions deduced by Simons. Measurements taken in the weeks following the quake indicate that one sea-floor site had moved about 24 metres to the east–southeast and risen about 3 metres since the previous measurement in February. Most of these motions were presumed to have occurred during the quake.

The tectonic plates slipped, on average, about 20 metres during the quake, but in some spots deep within Earth's crust they scraped more than 50 metres past each other, Simons and his colleagues calculate.

Deep vibrations

In the third study³, Satoshi Ide, a seismologist at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues analysed seismic waves spreading from the quake. They suggest that for the first 40 seconds, rupture of the tectonic interface occurred deep beneath the sea floor. Only later did slippage migrate to shallower portions of the subduction zone. The largest amounts of slippage occurred at shallow depths, but most of the energy released in high-frequency vibrations — the type that are most easily felt and do the most damage — apparently radiated from deeper portions of the rupture.

Differences in behaviour between shallow and deep rupture aren't surprising, because the environmental conditions inside the rocks — including temperature, pressure and water content — vary widely according to depth, says Thorne Lay, a seismologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "But what's controlling that behaviour is what we don't quite know yet," he notes.

On average, the tectonic plates east of Japan move towards each other at a rate of between 8.0 and 8.5 centimetres per year. When plates are locked together, there's no relative movement along the tectonic interface, sometimes for centuries, but when stress builds to unresistable levels the stored energy is released all at once as a quake.

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But even after slippage during the March megaquake has been tallied, approximately 90 metres of convergence since the quake in 869 AD remains unaccounted for. The stress from that amount of slip could have bled off during small quakes or through gradual slippage that didn't generate seismic vibrations, or it may be still stored in the plates, just ready to rip.

Likewise, the section of the subduction zone just south of the Tohoku-Oki rupture may hold large amounts of seismic stress, says Simons. In recorded history, that interface has experienced only one set of quakes larger than magnitude 8 — which means that that region, which lies much closer to Tokyo than the March rupture does, is at risk for its own Tohoku-sized earthquake.

Close monitoring of plate movements in the region should help scientists to determine seismic risk there, Simons and his colleagues suggest. "This area will warrant a lot of attention in the near future," he says. 

The geographic North Pole. Photo: NOAA/PMEL

According to The Copenhagen Post, the government of Denmark has officially stated its intention to claim the North Pole for the Kingdom of Denmark. If they have, that’s because the North Pole doesn’t belong to any nation. Why is that? Can any country lay such a claim?

The North Pole and surrounding waters are international waters that do not belong to any country. Coastal countries have the rights to the marine resources up to 200 nautical miles offshore, according to the 1982 UN Convention of the Law of the Sea – that’s their exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Beyond the EEZs, the sea belongs to no nation. However, the Law of the Sea allows some nations to extend their claims if their continental shelf extends into international waters beyond their EEZ. Under this clause, Russia has claimed the resources on the seabed and the sea around the Lomonosov ridge, an underwater mountain ridge crossing the Arctic (see map).

Out of the blue came Denmark’s news. Its government will likely claim the North Pole as an extension of Greenland, an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark.

The complex national boundaries in the Arctic and the high seas in the "doughnut hole" in between the exclusive economic zones of Arctic nations. Source: University of Durham

 

Why are countries interested in the North Pole and surrounding waters? Simply because the ice is melting and that opens up new business opportunities: oil and gas, minerals, fisheries, and new transportation routes.

The United States cannot make such claims because it has not ratified the Convention of the Law of the Sea. A group of Republican Senators has blocked ratification because they say it’s detrimental to US national interests. Ironically, this leaves the US disadvantaged with respect to the other Arctic nations, which did ratify the Convention.

I believe – as many conservation and scientific organizations believe – that the “doughnut hole” in the middle of the Arctic’s EEZs should be declared a no-take sanctuary. That ecosystem is too fragile and unique, a heritage for all humanity.

 

Pictures: Iceland Volcano Spews Ash, Sparks Lightning

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Iceland Volcano Erupts

Photograph from AFP/Getty Images

A cloud of smoke and ash billows from Iceland's Grímsvötn volcano on Saturday. The country's most active volcano, Grímsvötn sits beneath the Vatnajökull ice cap in the southeastern part of the island. The current eruption is the first for this peak since 2004, according to the New York Times.

In April 2010 another Iceland volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, stirred to life, releasing ash plumes that ultimately grounded a hundred thousand flights. (Related pictures: "Iceland Volcano Spews Giant Ash Clouds [April 2010].")

Grímsvötn's 12-mile-high (19-kilometer-high) ash cloud prompted the country's four international airports to cancel flights on Sunday. Winds are pushing the ash westward toward the United Kingdom, where airline officials are preparing for possible impacts to London's Heathrow Airport by the end of the week, the Guardian newspaper reported. (Read more about why ash is so dangerous to airplanes.)

Even so, Grímsvötn is not expected to hinder air traffic across Europe with the same severity as Eyjafjallajökull's 2010 eruption, the Times reported. For example, the weight of Grímsvötn's ash particles will make them drop to the ground faster, according to the newspaper.