NASA Dramatic Photographs Shows How Our Planet Earth is Changing Over the Time

The below incredible NASA images showing incredible changes have been observed over 100 years or so. If you compare the images, you will know the difference clearly. These pictures are can found on NASA website. The human activities are changing the entire world into cemented skyscrapers and destroying natural resources. The ever changing technologies are playing a big part in increasing human greediness to control natural resources to make a big money. This is incredible stuff and everyone would feel sadness of losing planet earth. No one sure, where would we stand after 100 years? Can our generation see any kind of natural resources or not?  Source: Charismatic Planet

The world's hottest day EVER is recorded in Kuwait as temperature soars to 54C

Temperatures in Kuwait reached 54C this week, making Thursday the hottest day EVER recorded. The blistering temperature was recorded in Mitribah, Kuwait, on Thursday. And yesterday, Iraq was nearly as hot, as the mercury soared to 53.9C (129.0 degrees Fahrenheit). Weather forecaster Nagham Mohammed expected temperatures Saturday to hover around 49 degrees Celsius (120.2 Fahrenheit) in Basra and to decline in the coming days. Mohammed added that temperatures in Baghdad are expected to reach 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit). And weather historian, Christopher C. Burt said the temperatures made them the hottest "ever reliably measured on Earth". On Wednesday, temperatures soared up to 51C (123.8 Fahrenheit) in Baghdad and as much as 53C (127.4 Fahrenheit) in Basra.

 

What You Need to Know About the World's Water Wars

Underground water is being pumped so aggressively around the globe that land is sinking, civil wars are being waged, and agriculture is being transformed. In some neighborhoods, the ground is giving way at a rate of four inches a year as water in the giant aquifer below it is pumped.

The groundwater has been so depleted that China’s capital city, home to more than 20 million people, could face serious disruptions in its rail system, roadways, and building foundations, an international team of scientists concluded earlier this year. Beijing, despite tapping into the gigantic North China Plain aquifer, is the world’s fifth most water-stressed city and its water problems are likely to get even worse.

Beijing isn’t the only place experiencing subsidence, or sinking, as soil collapses into space created as groundwater is depleted. Parts of Shanghai, Mexico City, and other cities are sinking, too. Sections of California’s Central Valley have dropped by a foot, and in some localized areas, by as much as 28 feet.

Around the world, alarms are being sounded about the depletion of underground water supplies. The United Nations predicts a global shortfall in water by 2030. About 30 percent of the planet’s available freshwater is in the aquifers that underlie every continent.

More than two-thirds of the groundwater consumed around the world irrigates agriculture, while the rest supplies drinking water to cities. These aquifers long have served as a backup to carry regions and countries through droughts and warm winters lacking enough snowmelt to replenish rivers and streams. Now, the world’s largest underground water reserves in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas are under stress. Many of them are being drawn down at unsustainable rates. Nearly two billion people rely on groundwater that is considered under threat.

Richard Damania, a lead economist at the World Bank, predicts that without adequate water supplies, economic growth in the most stressed parts of the world could decline by six percent of GDP. His findings conclude that the most severe impacts of climate change will deplete water supplies.

“If you are in a dry area, you are going to get a lot less rainfall. Run-off is declining,” he says. “People are turning to groundwater in a very, very big way.”

But few things are more difficult to control than groundwater pumping, Damania says. In the United States, farmers are withdrawing water at unsustainable rates from the High Plains, or Ogallala Aquifer, even though they have been aware of the threat for six decades.

“What you have in developing countries is a large number of small farmers pumping. Given that these guys are earning so little, there is very little you can do to control it,” Damania says. “And you are, literally, in a race to the bottom.”Over the past three decades, Saudi Arabia has been drilling for a resource more precious than oil. Engineers and farmers have tapped hidden reserves of water to grow grains, fruits, and vegetables in the one of the driest places in the world. They are tapping into the aquifer at unsustainable rates. On these NASA satellite images of the Wadi As-Sirhan Basin, green indicates crops, contrasting with the pink and yellow of dry, barren land.

As regions and nations run short of water, Damania says, economic growth will decline and food prices will spike, raising the risk of violent conflict and waves of large migrations. Unrest in Yemen, which heavily taps into groundwater and which experienced water riots in 2009, is rooted in a water crisis. Experts say water scarcity also helped destabilize Syria and launch its civil war. Jordan, which relies on aquifers as its only source of water, is even more water-stressed now that more than a half-million Syrian refugees arrived.

Jay Famiglietti, lead scientist on a 2015 study using NASA satellites to record changes in the world’s 37 largest aquifers, says that the ones under the greatest threat are in the most heavily populated areas.

"Without sustainable groundwater reserves, global security is at far greater risk,” he says. “As the dry parts are getting drier, we will rely on groundwater even more heavily. The implications are just staggering and really need to be discussed at the international level.”

Below are answers to your key questions.

Where is groundwater the most threatened?

The most over-stressed is the Arabian Aquifer System, which supplies water to 60 million people in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The Indus Basin aquifer in northwest India and Pakistan is the second-most threatened, and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in northern Africa the third.

How did these giant basins become so depleted?

Drought, bad management of pumping, leaky pipes in big-city municipal water systems, aging infrastructure, inadequate technology, population growth, and the demand for more food production all put increasing demand on pumping more groundwater. Flood irrigation, which is inefficient, remains the dominant irrigation method worldwide. In India, the world’s largest consumer of groundwater, the government subsidizes electricity – an incentive to farmers to keep pumping.

How has irrigation changed farming?

Irrigation has enabled water-intensive crops to be grown in dry places, which in turn created local economies that are now difficult to undo. These include sugar cane and rice in India, winter wheat in China, and corn in the southern High Plains of North America. Aquaculture has boomed in the land-locked Ararat Basin, which lies along the border between Armenia and Turkey. Groundwater is cold enough to raise cold-water fish, such as trout and sturgeon. In less than two decades, the aquifer there has been drawn down so severely for fish ponds that municipal water supplies in more than two dozen communities are now threatened.

How much water remains?

More is known about oil reserves than water. Calculating what remains in aquifers is extraordinarily difficult. In 2015, scientists at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada concluded that less than six percent of groundwater above one-and-a-half miles (two kilometers) in the Earth’s landmass is renewable within a human lifetime. But other hydrologists caution that measurements of stores can mislead. More important is how the water is distributed throughout the aquifer. When water levels drop below to 50 feet or less, it is often not economically practical to pump water to the surface, and much of that water is brackish or contains so many minerals that it is unusable.

Is there any good news?

Depleted groundwater is a slow-speed crisis, scientists say, so there's time to develop new technologies and water efficiencies. In Western Australia, desalinated water has been injected to recharge the large aquifer that Perth, Australia's driest city, taps for drinking water. China is working to regulate pumping. In west Texas, the city of Abernathy is drilling into a deeper aquifer that lies beneath the High Plains aquifer and mixing the two to supplement the municipal water supply. Source: National Geographic

Scientists uncover evidence of prehistoric 'megatsunami

Scientists have found evidence of an unprecedented “megatsunami” off the Cape Verde Islands that occurred some 70,000 years ago. Caused by sudden volcanic collapse, the 800-foot wave would have engulfed what is now Santiago Island, some thirty miles away. That estimate, which was published today in Science Advances, could prompt scientific community to re-evaluate the threat of catastrophic collapses near coastal communities. When volcanoes collapse, the resulting landslides can cause tsunamis of varying severity. Previous research proposed a gradual model for volcanic breakdown, which would result in multiple smaller waves. But a series of van-sized boulders, found nearly 2,000 feet inland, suggest otherwise. Lead author Ricardo Ramalho noted that the boulders were composed of marine rock, while the surrounding terrain was made of young volcanic rock. These shoreline boulders were most likely deposited by a massive wave, Dr. Ramalho and colleagues argue. They calculated the height of the wave based on the weight of the rocks, many of which weigh several hundred tons.  “We were all very surprised by the findings,” Ramalho says, “especially because we found them by chance. When we realized the potential implications of these findings, we were naturally excited (academically speaking). But also respectful of what this represents in terms of hazard.”

Ramalho stresses that, while megatsunamis are devastating, they are also incredibly rare.“These are what we scientists call ‘very low frequency, very high impact events,’” Ramalho says. “Due to their very low frequency, we estimate that the probability for them to happen again is very small. But they may and will happen nevertheless, at some point in time. And since their impact can be absolutely devastating, we need to be vigilant and improve our society’s resilience to their possible occurrence.”

Like most natural disasters, tsunamis cannot be prevented by technology. But there are ways to improve our resilience to them, Ramalho says. Further research, particularly on what triggers flank collapse, could help society to better understand the hazards associated with these events.Meanwhile, improved monitoring networks could provide additional warning time before a collapse. While some of these networks are able to detect volcanic unrest, many aren’t designed to pick up on the ground deformation that occurs prior to flank collapse.But perhaps most importantly, a thorough response plan is essential to minimizing damage in the wake of natural disaster.“We need to start thinking, coolly and rationally, what can be done in terms of disaster risk reduction,” Ramalho says. “How may we respond to such a crisis, and what measures can be taken at short, medium, and long term to increase our society’s resilience to their threat? For example, better territorial and urban planning help in mitigating the effects of natural catastrophes in general, and this would not be an exception – and that can be implemented at any time.

Scientist Expects, Antarctica May Have Hit Highest Temperature on Record

Experts have measured what is expected the highest temperature ever on Antarctica: 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit (17.5 Celsius). They have made measurements at Argentina's Esperanza Base, on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, according to the meteorological website Weather Underground. The preceding hottest recognized temperature on the Antarctica was 62.8°F (17.1°C), recorded at Esperanza Base on April 24, 1961. The Weather Underground called last week's temperatures a remarkable heat wave, though they happened during the end of the austral summer, when Antarctic temperatures are naturally highest. The temperature has yet to be certified as an official record for the continent by the WMO (World Meteorological Organization). Therefore it is hard to draw much conclusion from a single temperature record, cautions Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. Last year Antarctica also logged a record cold temperature.

What are more imperative are the long-term trends, says Schmidt. And when it comes to Antarctica, he points out, the past few years "have actually been quite complex. The world's ocean has been warming rapidly, absorbing much of the planet's excess heat. The large glaciers around Antarctica that come in contact with the warming water have been melting rapidly. But some other glaciers farther inland on the continent are actually growing. That has not been reasonably explained. The science is mostly intricate because the ozone hole continues to affect the region's climate in ways that aren't well understood. The global circulation of winds and currents remains a test for researchers to grasp. One record warm temperature doesn't cut through all that intricacy. When it comes to the entire planet, the Earth remains on track to warm by an average of at least two degrees C (3.6 degrees F) by the end of the century, experts report, though exactly how much is expected to depend on countries' abilities to lessen emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Source: National Geographic  

Breathtaking! Watch Fiery Lava Spill into Ocean

Lava overtopped a seaside cliff in Hawaii sending up stunning steam plumes caught on film and in pictures by a camera crew aboard a helicopter. The sluggish stream of molten rock, a sticky form of lava called "pahoehoe," crested the edge around. Paradise Helicopters in Hawaii flew videographers Ann and Mick Kalber over the foaming ocean, capturing the formation of the world's most modern land. The thick lava drops downward, it tears and plops onto cooled rocks below, building 6 meter towers that look like stalagmites. It was truly beautiful at night, you could see them glowing because they were topped with hot lava. It made these very neat-looking towers.

The lava oozes from rift vents on the eastern flank of Hawaii's Kilauea volcano, fed by its Pu'u O'o crater. The molten stream is about 4 to 5 feet wide and travels gradually, advancing only about 1,600 feet in two weeks. The lively lava flows are within the Kahauale'a Natural Area Reserve, which is closed to access and can be viewed only from the air or from Hawaii National Park's Kalapana viewing area. The slow Lava has repeatedly streamed into the ocean from Kilauea's east rift zone since the volcano started erupting Jan. 3, 1983. The last time molten rock from Kilauea met the ocean was in December 2011.

Chasing down the world’s vanishing glaciers

The melting glacial ice in places similar to the Alps, Greenland and the Himalayas is a spectacular visual document of how our planet's climate is fast changing. The United States based environmental photographer James Balog, it is a vision he has spent over 6 years trying hard to record and preserve. I was really shocked by the changes taking place and sought to find a way to capture what was going on, in the Arctic and glaciers elsewhere around the world. The effect has been a new documentary film, "Chasing Ice," based on 36 time-lapse cameras looking at 16 different glaciers in locations in Alaska, Canada, France, Greenland, Bolivia, Iceland, Nepal, the Rocky Mountains and Switzerland. Each camera has been taking a snap every half-an-hour during daylight, developing almost one million pictures in total. What we have seen has been an absolute shock. I never really projected to see this magnitude of change. Every time we open the backs of these cameras it's like 'wow, is that what's just happened.

He says at one point in the film, he has just removed memory card from camera and saying: "This is a memory of a landscape. A landscape that is now gone and will never be seen again in the history of civilization. It is the Arctic that has attracted most attention in recent years. In September 2012, the ice cap fell to its lowest point on record. Surprising it grows each winter but is retreating further and further every summer, and the summer ice extent has decreased by 13% each decade since the ice was first monitored in 1979. Climate researchers have previously forecasted the Arctic could lose almost all of its ice cover in the summer months by 2100. Though, the current accelerated ice losses have led some to believe that date could come much sooner.

What we are observing is a much more accelerated rate of change, particularly in the last 40 years or so and that has clearly been traced by researchers to the impact of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions into the atmosphere. In the last 100 years, the atmosphere has accumulated 40 percent more carbon dioxide in it than had been seen in the peak over the past one million years. He believes the economic and technological solutions to mitigate the effect of climate change already exist. What we require is a better political and public understanding of the immediacy and reality of these changes. I think that this film can help shift public perceptions by telling people a story that is true and happening now.