The fissures began appearing years ago. But in recent months, seismic activity has accelerated in northeastern Africa as the continent breaks apart in slow motion. Researchers say that lava in the region is consistent with magma normally seen on the sea floor -- and that water will ultimately cover the desert.
Cynthia Ebinger, a geologist from the University of Rochester in New York, could hardly believe what the caller from the deserts of Ethiopia was saying. It was an employee at a mineralogy company -- and he reported that the famous Erta Ale volcano in northeastern Ethiopia was erupting. Ebinger, who has studied the volcano for years, was taken aback. The volcano's crater had always been filled with a bubbling soup of silver-black lava, but it had been decades since its last eruption. The call came last November. And Ebinger immediately flew to Ethiopia with some fellow researchers. "The volcano was bubbling over; flaming-red lava was shooting up into the sky," Ebinger told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The earth is in upheaval in northeastern Africa, and the region is changing quickly. The desert floor is quaking and splitting open, volcanoes are boiling over, and seawaters are encroaching upon the land. Africa, researchers are certain, is splitting apart at a rate rarely seen in geology.
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Rare earth elements are driving a revolution in low-carbon technology Baotou was of little interest to the outside world for millennia. When one of the first visitors reached its walls in 1925, it was described as "a little husk of a town in a great hollow shell of mud ramparts". Some 84 years later, this once barren outpost of Inner Mongolia has been transformed into the powerhouse of China's dominance of the market in some of the globe's most sought-after minerals. The Baotou Rare Earth Research Institute is home to some 400 scientists whose work has put China at the pinnacle of research into a group of 17 metals which sound as if they were dreamt up as poisons for superheroes – yttrium, promethium, europium – but whose unique properties make them indispensable to technologies worth trillions of pounds. The development of Baotou into the global capital of rare earths, which occupy their own obscure corner of the periodic table, is due to two things: its proximity to the Baiyunebo mine, a vast open pit that is the world's largest rare earth mine, and Beijing's deliberate policy of at least two decades to turn this "Mother Lode" into a stepping stone towards status as an economic superpower. Delta IV Heavy launch. TV image from United Launch Alliance The United States launched a classified spy satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this afternoon -- and for a top-secret launch, the government was actually pretty open about it. The satellite -- publicly designated NROL-49 -- was mounted atop a rocket 230 feet tall, known as a Delta IV Heavy. It is currently the tallest rocket in America's fleet of launchers, and when it leaves a launch pad, generating two million pounds of thrust, it is hard to miss. It was the largest rocket ever launched from the West Coast. The Saturn V moon rockets and the space shuttles were built to generate more thrust, but they only launched from Florida. "Launches like this have been seen all up and down the coast, as far as Los Angeles," said Mike Rein, a spokesman for the United Launch Alliance, which ran the launch for the National Reconnaissance Office. "And, of course, it leaves a vapor trail too." Vandenberg is about 150 miles northwest of the Los Angeles basin. Officers at the base closed nearby roads and a park, did tests to make sure the vibrations from the launch would not break windows, and announced the planned launch time well in advance so that people would not think they were caught in an earthquake. What was the rocket carrying? The launch team would not say, beyond a coy phrase on the ULA website that "this launch supplies the military's national defense mission." A leading business forum discussing global competitiveness will in its annual conference host a panel discussing UFOs and extraterrestrial life. The Global Competitiveness Forum is hosted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and discusses business trends and insights essential for future business investment and competitiveness. The panel is titled: “Contact: Learning from Outer Space”, and features famed astrophysicist Dr Michio Kaku and a leading Islamic scholar, together with prominent UFO experts Stanton Friedman and Nick Pope. The Global Competitiveness Forum is poised to introduce, perhaps for the first time, many world business leaders to key issues concerning UFOs and extraterrestrial life, and how these impact on economic competitiveness. The Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF) is hosted by the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority and will be hosted in the capital Riyadh from January 22-25, 2011. The GCF website says: "The Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF), the only event of its kind, is an annual meeting of global business leaders, international political leaders, and selected intellectuals and journalists brought together to create a dialogue with respect to the positive impact organizational and national competitiveness can have on local, regional and global economic and social development. It was founded in 2006 by the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA), and is held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia under the patronage of HM King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques." NASA has revealed a sneak peek at how we may be travelling in the year 2025.
Last year, the US space agency awarded contracts to three teams - Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing - to study advanced concept designs for aircraft of the future. Their brief was a difficult one: to create aircraft that delivered less noise, cleaner exhaust and lower fuel consumption than today's planes, while still being able to achieve speeds up to 85 per cent of the speed of sound; cover a range of approximately 11,000 kilometres; and carry between 50,000 and 100,000 pounds (22,600 and 43,200 kilograms) of payload, either passengers or cargo. "Each aircraft has to be able to do all of those things at the same time, which requires a complex dance of tradeoffs between all of the new advanced technologies that will be on these vehicles," NASA said on its website. |
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