By Kevin M. Folta, Professor and Chair, Horticultural Sciences Department, Graduate Program in Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Florida. Plants make proteins based on whatever genetic material you give them. Carl Davies, CSIRO, CC BY I was cutting my grass when the battery in my iPod died. Instead of enjoying the distraction of music,…
Photos and video obtained by MSNBC on Sunday showed that Hurricane Irma had pulled a large portion of the water out of Tampa Bay.
"Here's the water, it has gone," NBC editor Cal Perry told MSNBC host Brian Williams. "The water in Tampa Bay is receding into the background."
"You could live there all your life and not see this sight," Williams said. "And not see what's beneath the water you walk by every day."
"This is literally the storm blowing the water out to sea," Perry explained.
"The water simply disappeared," Williams noted later in the broadcast.
Update: The City of Tampa is advising residents that it is dangerous to walk in the bay even though the water has temporarily receded.
Watch the video below.
The biggest threat to human life during a hurricane is often the storm surge, which occurs when sea level rises dramatically during a storm, sending a wall of water gushing over land.
Forecasters warn that the storm surge from Hurricane Irma could reach 15 feet (4.5 meters) along parts of the Florida coast in the coming hours.
Here are some facts about storm surge and what makes it so dangerous.
- How does it start? -
Storm surge does not come from rainfall or flooding, but occurs when powerful winds from a hurricane push ocean water higher than usual over the shore.
Storm surge is an "abnormal rise of water generated by a storm, over and above the predicted astronomical tides," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
- Why is it so deadly? -
Storm surge begins before the hurricane makes landfall, making it harder for people to evacuate in time.
Most of the 1,800 deaths from Hurricane Katrina, which struck Louisiana in 2005, are attributed to storm surge, NOAA said.
Storm surge can extend for dozens of miles inland, filling buildings with water quickly, making roads impassable and causing people to drown in their cars or homes.
Also, the accumulated weight of water -- some 1,700 pounds per cubic yard -- can demolish any structure not specifically designed to withstand such force.
- Factors that shape surge -
Storm surge is shaped by a number of different factors, including storm intensity, forward speed, the size of a storm and the angle of approach to the coast.
The underlying features of the land at the coast, including bays and estuaries, are also at play.
"A shallow slope will potentially produce a greater storm surge than a steep shelf," said NOAA.
The Louisiana coastline has a wide and shallow continental shelf, which can produce a 20-foot storm surge in a Category 4 hurricane.
Miami Beach, on the other hand, has a steep dropoff to its continental shelf, which could limit the storm surge to about eight or nine feet under a Category 4 hurricane.
Even as Irma takes aim at Florida's west coast, both coasts of the peninsula can expect storm surge.
On the west coast, storm surge could reach as far as seven miles (11 kilometers) inland, meteorologists say.
- Unknowns -
Rising seas and warming oceans due to climate change are also expected to amplify the effects of storm surge in the coming decades.
Numerous studies have predicted that storm surges will become more frequent and deadly as the planet warms.
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Hurricane Irma will pose the toughest test yet for U.S. nuclear power plants since reactors strengthened their defenses against natural disasters following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan in 2011.
Irma was on course to hit South Florida early on Sunday as a Category 4 storm, packing winds of up to 145 miles (233 kilometers) per hour and bringing a storm surge of as much as 12 feet to a state that is home to four coastal nuclear reactors.
The National Hurricane Center's forecast track shows Irma making landfall on the southwest side of the Florida Peninsula, west of the two nuclear reactors at the Turkey Point plant.
The operator, Florida Power & Light (FPL), has said it will shut Turkey Point well before hurricane-strength winds reach the plant. The reactors are about 30 miles (42 kilometers) south of Miami.
FPL said it will also shut the other nuclear plant in Florida at St Lucie, which also has two reactors on a barrier island on the state's east coast, about 120 miles (193 km) north of Miami.
"We will shut the reactors down 24 hours before Category 1 force winds are forecast to hit," FPL Chief Executive Eric Silagy told a news conference.
FPL said both Turkey Point and St Lucie were designed to withstand storms stronger than any ever recorded in the region and both plants are elevated 20 feet (6 meters) above sea level to protect against flooding and extreme storm surges.
But South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard said he was concerned about the potential for floods to damage power generators at Turkey Point, which in turn might threaten the ability of the plant to keep spent nuclear fuel rods cool. At Fukushima in Japan, an earthquake and tsunami disrupted power supplies and caused the fuel in some units to meltdown.
"The whole site is pretty well able to handle dangerous wind, the real problem from my perspective is water," Stoddard said. He said he was more worried about the nuclear waste than the reactors.
"The real question is can they keep the spent fuel cool."
Peter Robbins, an FPL spokesman, said “Mayor Stoddard is wrong. Turkey Point is safe and is ready for Hurricane Irma.”
U.S. nuclear operators have taken steps to improve preparations for disasters since Fukushima. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) required plants to install portable pumps and generators to keep water moving over fuel rods and the spent fuel pool even if offsite power supply was lost.
Nuclear plants also hired more staff and stored equipment needed to deal with reactor problems.
"Things are better today than in March 2011. Time will tell whether better proves good enough," said Dave Lochbaum, director of a watchdog group, the nuclear safety project, at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The NRC said it was posting more inspectors at the two Florida plants and was considering sending more inspectors to plants in Georgia and South Carolina should the storm head that way.
The NRC said the plants should not be compromised by Irma's storm surge.
"The storm surge forecasts that we have seen so far do not challenge the sites' designs," said NRC spokesman Scott Burnell.
Both Florida reactors have previously weathered major storms. Turkey Point took a hit from Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm, in 1992. Andrew damaged a smokestack at the plant. Repairs cost about $90 million.
St Lucie withstood the back-to-back impact of Hurricanes Frances (Category 2) and Jeanne (Category 3) in 2004.
FPL shut St Lucie last October as Hurricane Matthew skirted the Florida coast.
Lochbaum said the NRC and the industry could do more to reduce vulnerability to flooding.
In January 2014, about 50,000 gallons of rainwater leaked into the St Lucie plant after a heavy downpour. An NRC study blamed degraded and missing flood seals that were not discovered during checks after Fukushima.
There is also spent nuclear fuel at the site of a third power plant in Florida which stopped operating in 2009. That is the Crystal River plant, owned by Duke Energy Corp.
Duke is in the process of transferring used fuel from the spent fuel pool at the plant to dry cask storage as part of work to decommission the plant. Once in storage, the fuel no longer needs cooling.
The NRC's Burnell said Duke has suspended work to transfer the rods ahead of Irma. He said the fuel was safe and the plant also has backup power, even though it has been shut for years.
Irma is expected to disrupt much of Florida's power supply. FPL, the state's largest electric company, has warned Irma could cut service to about 4.1 million of its nearly 5 million customers. FPL is one of four large publicly traded utilities in Florida.
Other natural disasters since Fukushima have shut some plants. An earthquake in Virginia in 2011 shut Dominion Energy Inc's North Anna plant for about 2-1/2 months, the time it took to complete a full damage inspection. That plant sustained no major damage.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused three reactors in the U.S. Northeast to shut but inflicted no serious damage.
(Editing by Simon Webb and David Gregorio)
Scientists from Sweden's Uppsala University have produced DNA evidence that women Viking warriors fought alongside their male counterparts in the Swedish Viking Age.
"The study was conducted on one of the most well-known graves from the Viking Age, a mid-10th century grave in Swedish Viking town Birka," said an Uppsala press release. "The burial was excavated in the 1880s, revealing remains of a warrior surrounded by weapons, including a sword, armour-piercing arrows, and two horses. There was also a full set of gaming pieces and a gaming board."
The morphology of the skeleton suggested to scientists that the buried warrior may have been female, but long-held beliefs about the period said that all Viking warriors were men. However, a team of archaeologists, geneticists and archaeogeneticists announced this week that genetic material they tested from the ancient skeleton had two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome, meaning that the skeleton belonged to a woman.
“This is the first formal and genetic confirmation of a female Viking warrior,” said Professor Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala’s Department of Organismal Biology.
Isotope tests showed that the woman soldier lived a transient life, in keeping with the military culture of the era.
“The gaming set indicates that she was an officer, someone who worked with tactics and strategy and could lead troops in battle. What we have studied was not a Valkyrie from the sagas but a real life military leader, that happens to have been a woman,” said study leader Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson of Stockholm University.
Uppsala University archaeology and ancient history professor Neil Price said, “Written sources mention female warriors occasionally, but this is the first time that we’ve really found convincing archaeological evidence for their existence.”
The project is part of an ongoing venture between Uppsala University and Stockholm University called ATLAS that is tasked with exploring Scandinavian history.
By Brett Carter, Senior Research Fellow, RMIT University, Alexa Halford, Researcher in Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College, and Julie Currie, Research Officer, RMIT University. A huge solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun on Sept. 6, 2017. A separate image of the Earth provides scale. NASA/GSFC/SDO, CC BY If you still have your solar…
A secret world of animals and plants -- including unknown species -- may live in warm caves under Antarctica's glaciers, scientists said Friday.
The caves, hollowed out by steam from active volcanoes, are light and could reach temperatures of 25 degrees Celsius (77 Fahrenheit), researchers said, raising the possibility of a whole ecosystem of flora and fauna deep beneath the frozen surface.
A study led by the Australian National University around Mount Erebus, an active volcano on Ross Island in Antarctica, showed extensive cave systems.
Lead researcher Ceridwen Fraser said forensic analyses of soil samples from the caves had revealed intriguing traces of DNA from algae, mosses and small animals.
While most of the DNA was similar to mosses, algae and invertebrates found elsewhere in Antarctica, not all sequences could be fully identified.
"The results from this study give us a tantalising glimpse of what might live beneath the ice in Antarctica -– there might even be new species of animals and plants," she said.
"The next step is to go and have a really good look and see if we can find communities living beneath the ice in Antarctica."
Despite the continent's freezing temperatures, Fraser said heat emanating from the volcanoes could make the caves quite hospitable, warm enough "to wear a t-shirt and be comfortable", with light filtering deep down where the overlying ice was thin.
Co-researcher Charles Lee, from the University of Waikato in New Zealand, said there were many other volcanoes in Antarctica, so subglacial cave systems could be common.
"We don't yet know just how many cave systems exist around Antarctica's volcanoes, or how interconnected these subglacial environments might be," he said.
"They're really difficult to identify, get to and explore."
The research, published in international journal Polar Biology, said there were more than 15 volcanoes in Antarctica that were either known to be currently active or show evidence of recent activity, with new ones continuing to be found.
But despite recent advances in understanding Antarctic biodiversity, scientists still know "little about life in the continent's subglacial cave systems, which may harbour diverse and complex communities".
"Our results highlight the importance of investigating these cave systems in greater detail -- despite the field challenges associated with such an endeavour - to confirm the presence of living macrobiota," it said.
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