faulker015

Yesterday, following two earthquakes (the second a magnitude 7.5 quake) and a series of aftershocks off the west coast of Sulawesi Island, a tsunami struck Palu, at the end of a long, narrow bay.  Both the Island and the adjacent Makasser Strait lie squarely on a southern extension of the Eurasian Plate, which encompasses all of Indonesia. Destructive tsunami's are generally triggered by Subduction Earthquakes , where one tectonic plate dips beneath another; such a subduction zone stretches along the outer border of Indonesia, where the Australian and Philippine Plates are subducting beneath the Eurasian Plate.  Yesterday's series of quakes and aftershocks are thought to have developed along a transverse fault, where two microplates (of the Eurasian Plate) are scraping past one another; such faults do not generally produce vertical lift of the overlying sea, the tectonic process that usually generates tsunamis. Geologists suspect that some vertical movement of one of the micr...

Wanting to get closer to the red tide destruction, my wife and I visited Whitney Beach this morning.  Stretching along the northwest edge of Longboat Key, it is both the most scenic stretch of sand and (in my opinion) the best birding location on this barrier island.  As expected, the beach was littered with dead fish, eels, rays and horseshoe crabs and the variety of birds was far below normal. Wandering among the dead, we endured the nauseating stench of rotting sea life.  While a couple of yellow-crowned night herons and a dozen shorebirds (black-bellied plovers and ruddy turnstones) scoured the beach, they stayed clear of the victims; brown pelicans and large flocks of laughing gulls passed overhead or lounged far offshore.  Except for a lone hunter with his metal detector, we were the only humans on that popular beach. Though the algal counts have waxed and waned along Florida's Southwest Coast, the red tide is expected to persist until a tropical storm or cool ...

On our flight back from Geneva, Switzerland, yesterday, the route took us over the southern tip of Greenland, the largest island on our planet.  It was our first encounter with that land of ice, rock and scenic fjords and, for twenty minutes or so, we were mesmerized by the spectacle, 34,000 feet below. Sparsely populated by humans, this Arctic nation is an independent territory of Denmark.  Mountain ranges run along its east and west coasts while a massive ice sheet covers 80% of the island's surface.  Icebergs speckled the fjords as we passed over Greenland and the majesty of its landscape was truly inspiring. Of course, one cannot mention Greenland without invoking the fact that its Arctic ecosystem is threatened by global warming.  The rate of melting has sharply increased and the total loss of Greenland's ice sheet would raise sea levels by 24 feet, a disaster for island and coastal communities and ecosystems across the planet. See also:  Greenland and Ice...