Valleys May Funnel Tornado Winds

Fans of the TV series "Storm Chasers" may be disappointed — not all tornado scientists race after dangerous weather. Some are more like crime scene investigators, only showing up after the damage has been done.

Such forensic experts can learn a lot from studying the aftermath of a fierce tornado, said Christopher Karstens, a meteorologist at Iowa State University in Ames.

Karstens recently traveled to Alabama to survey the toll of a particularly deadly storm, gaining valuable insights into how cyclones behave when they're forced to churn through mountainous territory.

Tornado trail

In April 2011, hundreds of tornadoes ripped through the Southeast U.S., killing more than 300 people. One particularly savage twister, which at one point swelled to about 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) wide, careened tore its way 60 miles (97 kilometers) from Tuscaloosa, Ala.60 miles (97 km) northwest to Birmingham, leaving a trail of rubble in its wake. Karstens rushed to the scene not long after. [5 Deadliest Tornado Years in U.S. History]

Like an expert tracker, the young meteorologist followed the footprints of the tornado as it wound through the thick forests near Tuscaloosa. It was tough going. This stretch of Alabama — which sits at the southern edge of the Appalachian Mountains — is marked by steep ridges that rise close to 490 feet (150 meters) high, then plummet into narrow valleys.

But Karstens didn't mind the trek. In fact, he was interested in how tornadoes themselves are able to cross such terrain. Most tornado research, he explained, is done where it's flat — think the plains of Oklahoma or Kansas — but tornadoes don't just touch down on even ground.

"If you talk to people in Alabama, they'll probably tell you that they have tornadoes as frequently as people in Oklahoma," Karstens told OurAmazingPlanet. So far, however, it hasn't been clear how such rugged terrain can affect tornado winds.

Valley vortex

Lucky for Karstens, his cyclone left behind telling clues — namely, snapped twigs and broken branches. The trick was to observe the wreckage, then "try to understand the winds that produced that damage," he said. Karstens discovered during his first visit and several to follow, for instance, that trees lying in low valleys took a much more severe beating than those resting at the tops of ridges. Trees right in the path of the severe winds even had their bark completely stripped off.

Karstens suspects, but can't yet prove, that as a twister drops into a narrow valley, the winds escaping from its vortex may become trapped by the ridges to either side. Then, similar to gusts in a wind tunnel, these rushes of air surge away from the tornado and down the valley — and quickly. That could make such channels a very dangerous place to be during a storm. It's an interesting observation for twister buffs, but it may also help to keep people safe, said Partha Sarkar, a structural engineer at Iowa State and one of Karstens' colleagues. For instance, once scientists know how tornadoes behave in hilly territory, they may be able to warn people living in particularly wind-prone locales, say at the bottoms of valleys.

This story was provided by OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to LiveScience.

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8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World

Over the last 100 years, global temperatures have warmed by about 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit (0.74 degrees Celsius) on average. The change may seem minor, but it's happening very quickly — more than half of it since 1979, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Though it can still be difficult to tease out how much climate change plays in any given weather event, changes are occurring.

In the spirit of Earth day, here's a look at our marvelous blue marble and the ways people and other living things are responding to global warming. [50 Amazing Facts About Earth]

1. Moving the military northward

As the Arctic ice opens up, the world turns its attention to the resources below. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 30 percent of the world's undiscovered natural gas and 13 percent of its undiscovered oil are under this region. As a result, military action in the Arctic is heating up, with the United States, Russia, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Canada holding talks about regional security and border issues. Several nations, including the U.S., are also drilling troops in the far north, preparing for increased border patrol and disaster response efforts in a busier Arctic.

2. Altering breeding seasons

As temperatures shift, penguins are shifting their breeding seasons, too. A March 2012 study found that gentoo penguins are adapting more quickly to warmer weather, because they aren't as dependent on sea ice for breeding as other species.

It's not just penguins that seem to be responding to climate change. Animal shelters in the U.S. have reported increasing numbers of stray cats and kittens attributed to a longer breeding season for the felines.

3. High-country changes

Decreased winter snowfall on mountaintops is allowing elk in northern Arizona to forage at higher elevations all winter, contributing to a decline in seasonal plants. Elk have ravaged trees such as maples and aspens, which in turn has led to a decline in songbirds that rely on these trees for habitat.

4. Altered Thoreau's stomping grounds

The writer Henry David Thoreau once lovingly documented nature in and around Concord, Mass. Reading those diaries today has shown researchers just how much spring has changed in the last century or so.

Compared to the late 1800s, the first flowering dates for 43 of the most common plant species in the area have moved forward an average of 10 days. Other plants have simply disappeared, including 15 species of orchids.

5. Changed "high season" at national parks

When's the busiest time to see the Grand Canyon? The answer has changed over the decades as spring has started earlier. Peak national park attendance has shifted forward more than four days, on average, since 1979. Today, the highest number of visitors now swarm the Grand Canyon on June 24, compared with July 4 in 1979.

6. Genetic changes

Even fruit flies are feeling the heat. According to a 2006 study, fruit fly genetic patterns normally seen at hot latitudes are showing up more frequently at higher latitudes. According to the research, the gene patterns of Drosophila subobscura, a common fruit fly, are changing so that populations look about one degree closer in latitude to the equator than they actually are. In other words, genotypes are shifting so that a fly in the Northern Hemisphere has a genome that looks more like a fly 75 to 100 miles (120 to 161 kilometers) south.

7. Hurting polar bears

Polar bear cubs are struggling to swim increasingly long distances in search of stable sea ice, according to a 2011 study. The rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic is forcing bears to sometimes swim up to more than 12 days at a time, the research found. Cubs of adult bears that had to swim more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) had a 45 percent mortality rate, compared with 18 percent for cubs that had to swim shorter distances.

8. More mobile animals

Species are straying from their native habitats at an unprecedented rate: 11 miles (17.6 km) toward the poles per decade. Areas where temperature is increasing the most show the most straying by native organisms. The Cetti's warbler, for example, has moved north over the last two decades by more than 90 miles (150 km).

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

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NASA Launches Earth Day Video Contest

This Earth Day, NASA is launching a competition for anyone who's ever wanted to send the planet a love letter.

The U.S. space agency announced this week that beginning this Earth Day (April 22), it will start taking submissions for its second annual Earth Day video contest. Planetary science buffs-turned-shutterbugs, or vice versa, will get the chance to produce and edit short videos showing off their creative perspectives on our home planet — all to win a uniquely NASA prize.

In a press release, NASA said that its science "has changed how we think about exploring the Earth or even how we see the Earth."

To celebrate the Blue Marble, the agency is asking video producers to shed a little light on just how that science may have influenced their own views. That might mean viewing the Earth with a little humility, such as regarding it as a pinpoint of light as seen billions of miles away by the Voyager probes. Or maybe with a sense of the planet's constant change, such as appreciating the churning winds of an El Niño event.

Last year's winning video, for instance, meditated on Earth's seemingly unique ability, at least as far as this solar system is concerned, to host life.

NASA directs participants to keep their entire video short, no more than two minutes long. They also ask that those that enter draw from its wide catalog of visualization tools, which include videos shot from the International Space Station in orbit around the Earth and computer simulations of weather events.

The winner of the contest, who will be announced after the competition's close on May 31, will have the chance to watch NASA science unfold firsthand during the launch of a new rocket in January 2013, part of the agency's Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM). Think of it as a gala Hollywood event just for space nerds.

This story was provided by OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to SPACE.com.

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Fishermen blast premier dive sites off Indonesia

KOMODO ISLAND, Indonesia (AP) — Coral gardens that were among Asia's most spectacular, teeming with colorful sea life just a few months ago, have been transformed into desolate gray moonscapes by illegal fishermen who use explosives or cyanide to kill or stun their prey.

The site is among several to have been hit inside Komodo National Park, a 500,000-acre reserve in eastern Indonesia that spans several dusty, tan-colored volcanic islands. The area is most famous for its Komodo dragons — the world's largest lizards — and its remote and hard-to-reach waters also burst with staggering levels of diversity, from corals in fluorescent reds and yellows to octopuses with lime-green banded eyes to black-and-blue sea snakes.

Dive operators and conservationists say Indonesia's government is not doing enough to keep illegal fishermen out of the boundaries of the national park, a U.N. World Heritage site. They say enforcement declined greatly following the exit two years ago of a U.S.-based environmental group that helped fight destructive fishing practices.

Local officials disagree, pointing to dozens of arrests and several deadly gunbattles with suspects.

Michael Ishak, a scuba instructor and professional underwater photographer who has made hundreds of trips to the area, said he's seen more illegal fishermen than ever this year.

The pictures, he said, speak for themselves.

When Ishak returned last month to one of his favorite spots, Tatawa Besar, known for its colorful clouds of damselfish, basslets and hawksbill sea turtles, he found that a 500-square-meter (600-square-yard) section of the reef had been obliterated.

Many smaller patches were destroyed elsewhere at the site.

"At first I thought, 'This can't be right. I must have jumped in the wrong place,'" he said, adding he swam back and forth to make sure he hadn't made a mistake. "But it was true. All the hard coral had just been blasted, ripped off, turned upside down. Some of it was still alive. I've never seen anything like it."

The national park's corals are supposed to be protected, but fishermen are drawn there by locally popular fish like fusiliers and high-value export species like groupers and snappers.

Fishermen can be seen in small wooden boats, some using traditional nets or lines. Others are blasting sites with "bombs" — fertilizer and kerosene mixed in beer bottles. Breathing through tubes connected to air compressors at the surface, young men plunge to the bottom and use squeeze bottles to squirt cyanide into the coral to stun and capture fish.

Dive operators are increasingly seeing dead fish on the sea floor or floating on the surface.

"The biggest problem is that fishermen seem to be free to come into Komodo, completely ignoring the zoning and resource use regulations," said Jos Pet, a fisheries scientist who has worked with numerous marine conservation groups in the area in recent years.

He said they are "quite simply fishing empty this World Heritage Site."

Sustyo Iriyono, the head of the park, said problems are being exaggerated and denied claims of lax enforcement.

He said rangers have arrested more than 60 fishermen over the past two years, including a group of young men captured last month after they were seen bombing fish in waters in the western part of the park.

One of the suspects was shot and killed after the fishermen tried to escape by throwing fish bombs at the rangers, Iriyono said. Three others, including a 13-year-old, were slightly injured.

"You see?" said Iriyono. "No one can say I'm not acting firmly against those who are destroying the dive spots!"

He added that the park is one of the few places where fish bombing is monitored with any regularity in Indonesia, a Southeast Asian nation of more than 17,000 islands.

Divers, however, say enforcement has dropped dramatically since 2010, when the government reclaimed sole control of operations.

For two decades before that, The Nature Conservancy, a U.S.-based nonprofit, had helped the government confront destructive fishing practices there. "No-take zones" were created, protecting spawning areas, and coastal areas also were put off limits.

Patrols using park rangers, navy personnel and local police were key to enforcement.

In 2005, the government gave a 30-year permit to Putri Naga Komodo, a nonprofit joint venture company partially funded by The Nature Conservancy and the World Bank to operate tourist facilities in hopes of eventually making the park financially self-sustaining.

Entrance and conservation fees — just a few dollars at the time — went up several tenfold for foreign tourists. With around 30,000 local and international visitors annually at the time, that would have given the park a budget of well over $1 million, but outraged government officials demanded that the funds go directly into the state budget. The deal collapsed in 2010, when Putri Naga Komodo's permit was yanked.

"They had no right to directly collect the entrance fees from the tourists," said Novianto Bambang, a Forestry Ministry official.

Dive operators and underwater photographers have asked The Nature Conservancy and similar organizations like WWF Indonesia, to return to Komodo and help with conservation efforts there.

Nature Conservancy representative Arwandridja Rukma did not address that possibility, saying even though it was heartwarming to see so much concern about this "national treasure," it only takes part in projects at the invitation of the government.

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Better Earthquake Warnings Within Reach, Scientists Say

SAN DIEGO — More accurate early warnings for dangerous tsunamis and powerful earthquakes could be within reach for the millions of people who live in vulnerable areas of the western United States, said scientists gathered here this week for the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America.

In fact, researchers said, the instruments needed to produce better quake warnings are already in place; improving warnings simply requires adding information from GPS monitors to information delivered by vast networks of seismometers that dot the western United States, which are currently the sole provider of the data used to alert people in the moments before powerful shaking strikes.

"We depend on seismic networks for early warning, but they have limitations, especially for large earthquakes," said Yehuda Bock, a research geodesist and senior lecturer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.  Bock pointed to Japan's devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the deadly tsunami that followed as an example of the value of improved early warnings.

Although the Japanese have incredibly advanced earthquake and tsunami warning systems, they don't include GPS data in the mix — and GPS data can provide key information about the true magnitude of the most massive earthquakes.

Marrying the data

Seismometers close to an earthquake can pick up on the energy it released and transmit that information in real time to faraway places, providing warning before the ground shaking jolts a population center. However, seismometers aren't so good at accurately assessing magnitudes larger than 7. That's where GPS comes in. Though it takes a tiny bit longer to arrive at its first measurement, GPS is very good at assessing magnitude, because it literally measures how much the ground is moving.

"We're talking about real-time accuracy within centimeters," said Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory.

When Japan's March 2011 earthquake struck offshore along a subduction zone — a type of fault where the ocean floor is grinding beneath another tectonic plate in a slow-motion dive — authorities estimated it was a magnitude 8 earthquake within about 120 seconds, said Walter Szeliga, a geodesist and research professor at Central Washington University. [7 Craziest Ways Japan's Earthquake Affected Earth]

"A magnitude 8 is a very large earthquake, but it's not expected to produce nearly as large a tsunami as you did have," Szeliga told OurAmazingPlanet. Combined seismic and GPS data would have revealed far more quickly that the quake was in fact a magnitude 9 — a quake about 30 times more powerful than a magnitude 8, he said.

"So an early warning is, in part, for shaking, but it's really useful for rapid tsunami alerts," Szeliga said.

The shadow of the March 2011 Tohoku disaster loomed large in discussions of how to improve warnings for the United States, which, like Japan, has the dubious distinction of sitting right next door to a fault — the Cascadia subduction zone — which is capable of producing the most powerful kinds of earthquakes on the planet.

Twofold threats

However, the seismological situation for the United States is a bit more complicated than it is for Japan, Allen told OurAmazingPlanet.

"They are mostly concerned about offshore earthquakes," Allen said. The United States faces threats not only from offshore earthquakes along the Cascadia fault, but also from those that hit on land — so-called strike-slip quakes, the sort produced by the San Andreas fault.

"That's why we're a little behind them," Allen said. "We need faster methodology because our cities are right on top of the faults."

He said an early warning system using both GPS and seismic data is operational right now, and about 50 scientists and a few public and private entities have access to the warnings. The system would require more instruments if it were to be made public — a goal that Allen envisions reaching by 2015 if funding comes through. Current estimates put the price tag at about $150 million.

The system could alert people from a few seconds to tens of seconds to up to a minute before an earthquake hits, using real-time information streamed from instruments close to the spot where the sudden movement along a fault first began.

"When people experience an earthquake, they just experience the strong shaking at their location," Allen said. "But the earthquake probably started seconds or minutes earlier at some distant location; you use the instruments close to the epicenter to constrain its size, so people get a warning before they feel the shaking."

This story was provided by OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to LiveScience.

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DARPA releases cause of hypersonic glider anomaly

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An unmanned hypersonic glider likely aborted its 13,000 mph flight over the Pacific Ocean last summer because unexpectedly large sections of its skin peeled off, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said Friday.

The Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., atop a rocket and released on Aug. 11, 2011, was part of research aimed at developing super-fast global strike capability for the Department of Defense.

The vehicle demonstrated stable aerodynamically controlled flight at speeds up to 20 times the speed of sound, or Mach 20, for three minutes before a series of upsets caused its autonomous flight safety system to bring it down in the ocean, DARPA said in a statement.

A gradual wearing away of the vehicle's skin was expected because of extremely high temperatures, but an independent engineering review board concluded that the most probable cause was "unexpected aeroshell degradation, creating multiple upsets of increasing severity that ultimately activated the Flight Safety System," the statement said.

Initial shockwaves created by the gaps in the skin were more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand, but it was still able to recover and return to controlled flight, said Kaigham J. Gabriel, DARPA's acting director.

Eventually the upsets grew beyond its ability to recover.

The 2011 flight was the second time an HTV-2 was launched. The first flight, in April 2010, also ended prematurely.

Data from that flight was used to correct aerodynamic design models for the second test, resulting in controlled flight, and now data from the latest flight will be used to adjust assumptions about thermal modeling, Air Force Maj. Chris Schulz, the DARPA program manager, said in the statement.

"The result of these findings is a profound advancement in understanding the areas we need to focus on to advance aerothermal structures for future hypersonic vehicles. Only actual flight data could have revealed this to us," he said.

Most specific details of the program are secret. DARPA has released artist renderings showing a craft that looks something like the tip of a spear. After the 2011 flight the agency released handheld video, taken aboard a monitoring ship, that showed a dot streaking across the sky.

The HTV-2 would have splashed down in the ocean regardless of the anomaly. The vehicles are intended to be used once and are not recovered.

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Scientists: Fish are sick where BP's oil spill hit

BARATARIA BAY, La. (AP) — Two years after the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, scientists say they're finding trouble with sick fish that dwell along offshore reefs and in the deep waters — especially in places where the oil spill hit the hardest.

The scientists are unsure what's causing a small percentage of the fish they're catching to have large open sores and strange black streaks. The biggest question is whether contaminants from the BP spill are causing the problems. For now scientists can't say for sure if the spill is the cause or if it's normal to find this number of sick fish.

The fish illnesses don't pose an increased health threat to humans, scientists say, but they could be devastating to prized species and the people who make their living catching them.

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US scientists head to Mount Everest for research

KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) — A team of American scientists and researchers flew to the Mount Everest region on Friday to set up a laboratory at the base of the world's highest mountain to study the effects of high altitude on humans.

The team from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota says it plans to monitor nine climbers attempting to scale Everest to learn more about the physiology of humans at high altitudes in order to help patients with heart conditions and other ailments.

"We are interested in some of the parallels between high altitude physiology and heart failure physiology," Dr. Bruce Johnson, who is heading the team, told The Associated Press before leaving Nepal's capital, Katmandu, for the mountain. "What we are doing here will help us with our work that we have been doing in the (Mayo Clinic) laboratory."

Johnson and the eight other team members flew to the airstrip at Lukla, near Everest, on Friday.

It will take them about a week to trek to the Everest base camp, with several porters and yaks helping to carry their 680 kilograms (1,500 pounds) of medical equipment. They will set up their lab at the base camp, which is located at 5,300 meters (17,380 feet), and expect to be at the camp until at least mid-May.

The team says Everest's extreme altitude puts climbers under the same conditions experienced by patients suffering from heart disease.

The team members plan to study the effects of high altitude on the heart, the lungs, muscle loss and sleep during their stay at Everest, which peaks at 8,850 meters (29,035 feet).

Johnson said that the team's laboratory at the Mayo Clinic focuses on lung congestion during heart failure and that lung congestion often kills mountain climbers.

Hundreds of climbers and their guides attempt to climb Everest every year, while thousands more trek up to the base camp. Several of them suffer from high altitude sickness and other complications because of the low level of oxygen.

An experienced Sherpa guide who had scaled Everest at least 10 times died of high altitude sickness Wednesday at the mountain's base camp, becoming the first fatality in this year's spring climbing season.

Hundreds of climbers and their guides are currently camped at the base camp preparing to scale Everest. Climbers generally try to scale the mountain in May, when weather conditions usually improve just enough to enable them to attempt to reach the peak.

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Science lacking on whether death penalty deters murder

Scientific research to date provides no useful conclusion on whether the death penalty reduces or boosts the murder rate, said a report by the US National Academy of Sciences on Wednesday.

A committee of scientists reviewed research done over the past 35 years and found it was "not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates," said the report.

"Consequently, claims that research demonstrates that capital punishment decreases or increases the homicide rate by a specified amount or has no effect on the homicide rate should not influence policy judgments."

The report was issued by the NAS's National Research Council, which convened a Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty to look at available evidence on how the death penalty may affect murder rates.

A previous report by the NRC in 1978 found that "available studies provide no useful evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment."

In the decades since that report, "a considerable number" of studies have attempted to judge how well it works, or does not, and have reached "widely varying conclusions," the latest report said.

"Fundamental flaws in the research we reviewed make it of no use in answering the question of whether the death penalty affects homicide rates," said Daniel Nagin, professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University and chair of the committee that wrote the report.

"We recognize that this conclusion may be controversial to some, but no one is well-served by unsupportable claims about the effect of the death penalty, regardless of whether the claim is that the death penalty deters homicides, has no effect on homicide rates or actually increases homicides."

Until now, a key flaw in the research has been the failure to account for how punishments such as life in prison without the possibility of parole may affect homicide rates.

Also, a number of assumptions have hobbled previous studies, particularly by assuming that potential murderers actually consider the risk of execution and respond accordingly.

Instead, researchers going forward must perform more rigorous studies that assess how potential criminals view the death penalty and its likely effect on their actions, the report said.

Better methods for future research include collecting data that consider both capital and non-capital punishments for murder and doing studies on how potential murderers perceive a range of punishments in homicide cases, it said.

Just 15 percent of people who have received the death sentence since 1976 have been executed, "and a large fraction of death sentences are reversed," added the report.

The members did not examine the moral arguments for or against capital punishment, or the costs involved.

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