I am starting to sound like a stuck record. The news of the world contains only natural disaster reports, but we’ll start in South Africa, which has declared a national disaster after floods and storms caused widespread damage in the country, allowing the government to free up funds for relief and reconstruction.
Disruptive rains, floods, strong winds and hail from October 22 to 29 affected the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Free State, Limpopo, North-West, Gauteng and Mpumalanga provinces, Elias Sithole, head of the National Disaster Management Centre, said in an official notice on Wednesday. That caused damage to property, infrastructure and the environment, and disrupted the provision of basic services, he said.
The floods left at least 10 people dead and hundreds more displaced in the Eastern Cape alone, Johannesburg-based broadcaster eNCA reported.
The declaration of a national disaster assigns primary responsibility for the coordination and management of the clean-up to the national government, Sithole said.
The announcement comes almost a year after South Africa proclaimed a climate-related national disaster following floods and storms in three coastal provinces in September and October 2023.
In addition to last month’s storms, the country had unseasonal snow in September that closed a major highway for two days, and a major snowfall in November for the first time in 85 years.
Poor old Cuba has been struck again, this time by an earthquake, of magnitude 6.8, just off the South coast at a depth of 14km. No tsunami was generated, but 51000 people were exposed to severe shaking.
And hot on the earthquake’s heels, comes a warning for Tropical Storm SARA, which is threatening Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Mexico. Cuba has only just said goodbye to RAFAEL, with maximum measured wind speeds of 194km/h.
Carlos CO2JC, he of IARU Region 2, said on Thursday that “During the early hours of today, the low pressure area in the central Caribbean Sea became a tropical depression and later Tropical Storm SARA. At 18:00 UTC its centre was located NE of Cabo Gracias a Dios, on the border between Nicaragua and Honduras and 330 km ESE of Guanaja Island, Republic of Honduras. SARA is moving west at a rate of 19 km/h. Since this (Thursday) morning, it has been raining in towns in eastern Honduras, especially in the regions of Gracias a Dios and Colon.
“In the next 24 to 48 hours, Tropical Storm SARA is expected to move along a similar track, slowing down its speed, very close to the coast of Honduras. During its movement over the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea it may gain a little more in organization and intensity.
“For this reason we have received a request from the emergency coordinators of Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua to protect the following emergency frequencies:
“40m band: 7080 kHz, 7143 kHz, 7198 kHz
“2m band: 146.520 MHz, 147.300 MHz (+600KHz offset)
“Earlier today we learned through Juan de la Cruz Rodriguez Perez (YN1J), that they are listening on Echolink “CONFERENCE ZONE YN“, linked to the Node YN1J-L and remain alert for any help that can be provided.”
Thank you to Greg G0DUB for passing on those frequencies to avoid.
Not to be outdone, Philippines has 4 orange or red alerts for Tropical Cyclones bearing down on it. Cyclone YINXING is threatening Philippines with 231km/h winds, Cyclone USAGI has maximum wind speeds of 185km/h, Cyclone TORAJI has positively boring wind speeds of 148km/h, and MANYI, still a way off, has wind speeds of 231km/h. So far this hurricane season, Philippines has been struck by eleven tropical storms, and is, for the third year running, the most disaster-prone country in the world. The resilience of the Filipino people must be extraordinary, as they have hardly picked up the pieces from last week’s cyclone, or several from last year’s season, before being struck by the next one. Just how many times can one rebuild one’s house?
In 2018, on August 12th to be precise, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, designed to fly towards the sun, using Venus gravity assist flyby’s to adjust its trajectory into a final orbital configuration, which will bring the spacecraft closer to the sun than any human made object has ever been.
After its November the 6th flyby, Parker will be on course to swoop within 6 million kilometres of the solar surface, the final objective of the historic mission first conceived over 65 years ago. No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker’s data will be charting as-yet uncharted territory. In this hyper-close route, Parker will cut through plumes of plasma still connected to the Sun. It is close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave.
“This is a major engineering accomplishment,” said Adam Szabo, mission scientist for Parker Solar Probe at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The closest approach to the Sun, or perihelion, will occur on Dec. 24, 2024, during which mission control will be out of contact with the spacecraft. Parker will send a beacon tone on Dec. 27, 2024, to confirm its success and the spacecraft’s health. Parker will remain in this orbit for the remainder of its mission, completing two more perihelia at the same distance.
Personally, I’m a bit concerned that the solar probe will be cooked to a cinder in the sun’s corona, without being able to send back any useful science, but this doesn’t seem to be bothering the mission scientists, and I guess they have done their sums. Anyway, it is the 27th December we must wait for, to get that beacon tone to signal its health.
Thanks to science.nasa.gov for extracts from their report.
In a good example of lateral thinking, scientists decided to ask Gophers (or burrowing rodents) to rescue the ecology of a volcanic eruption. This started with the eruption of Mount St. Helens in May of 1980, which caused staggering ecological damage. Faced with a devastation that would take the local environment a substantial amount of time to recover from, scientists were open to unorthodox ideas that might speed the process along.
Specifically, as laid out in the University of California’s report, the thinking was “by digging up beneficial bacteria and fungi, gophers might be able to help regenerate lost plant and animal life on the mountain.” So, just two years after the devastating eruption, that’s exactly what scientists did. They gathered up some gophers, brought them to the eruption site, and let them do their gopher thing.
And, six years after the gophers were placed on two specific plots of pumice for a single day, there were 40,000 plants thriving. Nearby areas, that didn’t get the gophers, took much longer to recover. 40 years later, the microbial community fostered within those plots, specifically mycorrhizal fungi, are still allowing plant life to thrive in the area.
So, the interaction between burrowing animals, turnover of the soil, and the interactions between Mycorrhizal fungi and soil bacteria, should never be underestimated.
Perhaps the habitual digging by my Jack Russell should not be condemned after all.
This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.