The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) today released new video of a fluid simulation scenario showing oil from the BP disaster moving into the Atlantic Ocean as early as 80 days after it was spilled, or sometime in July.

While the dye model simulation doesn’t capture the dynamics of crude oil interacting with the ocean, and it depends upon the very likely possibility that the oil will continue to gush out of the ruined well, it does illustrate how quickly fluids entrained in the Gulf Loop Current can end up carried by the Gulf Stream around Florida and up the Eastern Seaboard.

But before you give up your summer beach rental out at the Vineyard, there are some limits to the fidelity of their simulation:

The dye tracer used in the model has no actual physical resemblance to true oil. Unlike oil, the dye has the same density as the surrounding water, does not coagulate or form slicks, and is not subject to chemical breakdown by bacteria or other forces.

Peacock and her colleagues stress that the simulations are not a forecast because it is impossible to accurately predict the precise location of the oil weeks or months from now. Instead, the simulations provide an envelope of possible scenarios for the oil dispersal. The timing and course of the oil slick will be affected by regional weather conditions and the ever-changing state of the Gulf’s Loop Current—neither of which can be predicted more than a few days in advance. The dilution of the oil relative to the source will also be impacted by details such as bacterial degradation, which are not included in the simulations.

It is possible that the oil may dilute or degrade long before it gets to the Atlantic, but the simulation does present the sobering possibility that BP’s oil may end up coming home this fall, albeit not in the belly of a tanker.

BP is providing this live video from one of the ROVs assisting in the “top kill” procedure:

It is my understanding that the brown fluid is drilling mud venting from the damaged riser pipe. The mud is being injected downstream into the blowout preventer, and the hope is that while much of it is leaking from the riser, the majority of the pressure is downward into the well.

Update (05/27/10 9:02am): Tentative reports suggest the top kill effort was successful in stopping the flow. If this is confirmed, the next step would be cement the wellhead.

According to a email sent by the Alex Zwissler, Executive Director/CEO of the Chabot Space & Science Center to members of the Mount Diablo Astronomical Society, a proposed City of Oakland FY 2010-11 budget will include drastic cuts in the City’s contribution to the Chabot. In the proposed budget document, the budget cuts, designed to eliminate a $32M shortfall would include the elimination or significant reduction of yearly contributions to a number of social and cultural programs along with the Chabot, programs like the Oakland Zoo, the Symphony in the Schools program, and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center.

In the case of the Chabot, the proposed budget will zero out the City’s contribution of nearly $500,000:

On Tuesday, February 16th, a Special Concurrent Meeting of the
Oakland Redevelopment Agency/City Council will take place to
recommend measures to balance the city of Oakland 2009-2010 budget and to recommend cuts for the 2010-2011 fiscal year that will be considered by the Council in the spring.

The proposal from the Office of the City Administrator for the 2010–2011 budget recommends eliminating 100% of the current funding for Chabot Space & Science Center. This proposal will decrease our allocation in 2009-2010 of $480,000 to a 2010-2011 allocation of $0.

The elimination of the City of Oakland contribution, a $300,000 subsidy and an additional $180,000 grant, looks to be a massive cutback, but would not cause the shutdown of the museum, which sees 150,000 visitors annually. According to a strategic plan document available at the Chabot website, the loss would represent about 5% of the Chabot’s total yearly revenue of $9.9M and a little over 7% of the $6.6M in grants received annually. However, since most non-profits operate will little budgetary maneuvering room, a cut of even 5% could force reductions in programs, staff, and even hours of operation.

We appreciate the difficult choices the city currently faces, and
over the last couple of years we have withstood these increasing
city funding cuts by making our own significant cuts to our staff
and programs, while working diligently to increase our other sources of funding – not an easy task in these challenging economic times.

We are fully prepared to share the burden…however, we must be able to maintain our services to the community and to the 50,000+ students we serve each year. Chabot is partially owned and administered by the City under a Joint Powers Agency Agreement, so Completely eliminating Chabot from the city budget is untenable.

We need your help in sending a message to city officials that this elimination of any funding to Chabot will result in the Center
having to cut services and programs we consider to be critical in
achieving our mission to the community.

The email includes a call to action to contact the following city officials.

City Administrator Dan Lindheim: dlindheim@oaklandnet.com

Mayor of Oakland Ron Dellums: rdellums@oaklandnet.com

Oakland City Council

• Jane Brunner (President): jbrunner@oaklandnet.com
• Jean Quan (chair, finance committee): jquan@oaklandnet.com
• Desley Brooks: dbrooks@oaklandnet.com
• Ignacio De La Fuente: idelafuente@oaklandnet.com
• Rebecca Kaplan: rkaplan@oaklnadnet.com
• Pat Kernigan: pkernighan@oaklandnet.com
• Nancy Nadel: nnadel@oaklandnet.com
• Larry Reid: lreid@oaklandnet.com

If you want to contact the City on behalf of the Chabot, Zwissler requests you cc: him at:

Alex Zwissler, (Chabot CEO): c/o jgordon@chabotspace.org

An emergency City Council meeting to adopt an amended budget for FY2009-10 is scheduled for February 16th, at 5pm. The agenda for the meeting is posted online, and includes Open Forum time for making public comment. A formal proposal of the FY2010-11 budget is set for later in May.

There is no question the Chabot Space & Science Center provides a significant resource to this community. Its telescopes are open to the public many nights of the year, and its educational programs reach 50,000 Bay Area children each year. Over 2,000 K-12 teachers receive science training annually, and over 150,000 yearly visitors, many of them adults, experience the wonders of space through their exhibitions, special programs, lectures, and classes.

I would encourage you to consider becoming a member of the Chabot Space & Science Center, and to make a donation.

I’m sure that the email from the Chabot was not to create a competion among various City-funded agencies for these scarce resources, but I do want to include a list of additional cultural programs that are on the list of proposed reductions:

• Vietnamese Senior Services %100 reduction
• Cypress-Mandela Training Center %100 reduction
• Hacienda Peralta %100 reduction
• Oakland Asian Cultural Center %100 reduction
• School of the Arts %100 reduction
• Symphony in the Schools Program %100 reduction
• Women’s Business Initiative %100 reduction
• Day Laborer Program %100 reduction
• Art Grants %50 reduction
• Zoo Subsidy %25 reduction
• Jack London Square Aquatic Center Project %100 reduction
• Human Services – Academies Program %100 reduction
  

I’m sure these are all worthy programs, and the loss of any of them would be to the detriment of a city that needs to protect and nurture the cultural health of its adults and children, especially when times are tough.

At 4.27pm PST, a little piece of the Gorda plate some 30 miles west of Ferndale, CA decided to move to the north a little ahead of the rest of its plate.

According to the Eureka Times-Standard, the resulting 30-second earthquake has knocked out power in Eureka and Ferndale, and while the damage is widespread it also appears to be relatively minor. There is no count of injuries or fatalities.

As is typical of a moderate earthquake, the USGS is forecasting a 78% chance of a comparable aftershock. Humboldt County, a part of California better known for making an industry out of helping folks get mellow, is going to be a bit jittery for the next week or so.

In case you’re wondering, the Gorda Plate is actually not a Taco Bell item, but is the southern portion of the Juan de Fuca Plate, vestigial remnants of the long-vanished Farallon Plate.

The Juan de Fuca and Gorda Plates are following the Farallon in a suicide plunge under the North American Plate. The act of one plate diving under another is known as subduction, and this particular area is known to geologists and West Coast disaster planners as the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

Before the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Indonesia, the Cascadia Subduction Zone was well understood as the fire underneath such famous volcanic landmarks as Mount Lassen, Mt. St. Helens, and Mount Rainier. Since 2004 however, the idea of a massive tsunami generated by a similar subduction earthquake off the West Coast has a lot of folks worried. An earthquake only a few miles offshore could produce a devastating tsunami that would reach landfall in minutes, leaving little time for an evacuation. This what is known in the business as a “bad day.”

Luckily, this particular earthquake was generated in a vertical fault on the plate itself. Why is that lucky?

As the Gorda plate subducts below the the North American Plate to the east, its rocks bend and stretch, fracturing them into vertical faults in much the same way a brick would if you tried to bend it. Now the Pacific Plate is moving steadily to the northwest and mashing on the plate, so those fractured rocks tend to want to slide to the north and ease that pressure, and so you get earthquakes.

But since the predominant motion in strike-slip earthquakes is horizontal, there isn’t a lot of the vertical thrusting that you need to cause a big tsunami. A look at a seismograph trace recorded here shows that indeed the highest amplitudes are in the N-S (top) and E-W (middle) direction.

Folks are going to be pretty edgy, P.G. & E. will getting the lights back on, and grocery store owners will be picking up a lot of cans, but this was not the Big One. For now, the folks at the Pacific Tsunami Center are breathing a sigh of relief.

From spaceweather.com comes word of what may go down in history as the weirdest atmospheric phenomenon in history. Sometime in the early morning in the skies over Norway, some unknown something left something, something in a beautiful and wholly artificial spiral pattern.

The best theory I’ve heard is that a missile launch, possibly Russian in origin, malfunctioned and the booster ejected the material as it tumbled.

This doesn’t appear to be fake as there are other sure other, poorer quality images at spaceweather.com.

After 2 days of fearing the worst was imminent, the situation on Mt. Wilson has brightened considerably according to MWI director Hal McAlister:

Monday, 1 Sep 09, 5:26[sic] pm PDT – The Battalion fire chief on Mount Wilson has just called both Larry and Dave to ask how to turn off the fire alarm up there! His name is Cam Todd and he’s a Cal Fire chief with crews from Calaveras County. These are the same fire crews who did such a fantastic job prepping the place over the weekend before they were withdrawn yesterday morning. Chief Todd confirmed that these are indeed backfires and he said his guys are doing a heck of a job and their efforts are going just great!

The power is out at the observatory, so he has moved his updates to the CHARA site at Georgia State University. CHARA stands for Center for High Angular Astronomy, and their telescope is among the many at the threatened by fire at summit atop Mt. Wilson.

Also, if you want to check out UCLA’s Towercam overlooking the communication array, home to many of the TV and radio antennas that serve Los Angeles, it is now available at a mirror site to ease the load on the main server.

Finally, if you wish to watch the progress of the firefighting efforts, local TV KTLA and CBS (via Wildfire Today) have live feeds.

We wish the MWO and firefighters luck in their endeavors, and sympathy to those displaced from their homes or who have lost loved ones.

Update 09.01.09 9:45 PM: At 7:21, Hal McAlister received a full briefing from LA County Deputy Fire Chief Jim Powers, and things look very good:

Chief Powers expressed his absolute confidence that they will save the Observatory. He said that while it may have appeared over the last day or so that the Observatory was being neglected, that they never lost sight of the importance of Mount Wilson’s preservation and it is now their highest priority. He flew up to the mountain yesterday, was delighted with what he found and knew they could achieve success here.

Observatory weather: Smokey. Observatory operations shut down due to nearby fires.

That is the ominous status of the Mount Wilson Observatory, located high atop southern California’s Mt. Wilson, where smoke from the nearby Station fire has shut down operations and may even threaten the observatory itself.

According to CAL FIRE, the Station fire has burned over 35,000 acres and with 1,800 firefighters on scene, only 5% of the fire has been contained. As a result, Governor Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency for LA County.

The UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy has a live webcam located on the summit of Mt. Wilson. The 2-minute updates produce very large, scary 1280×960 images.

Updates on the fire are available at InciWeb. The Mount Wilson Institute has also been posting regular updates on the situation at the observatory.

Update Sunday, 30 Aug 09, 8:07 pm PDT
According to Hal McAlister, Director of the Mount Wilson Institute, the fire department has decided to keep firefighters in place overnight in order to protect the Observatory and the Communications Facility (several Southland radio and TV towers are located at the at the summit adjacent to the Observatory). “That’s very good news,” he writes.

Update 5:13pm 07/20/09: JPL observations confirm Jupiter impact:

Following up on a tip by an amateur astronomer that a new dark “scar” had suddenly appeared on Jupiter, this morning between 3 and 9 a.m. PDT (6 a.m. and noon EDT) scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, gathered evidence indicating an impact.

New infrared images show the likely impact point was near the south polar region, with a visibly dark “scar” and bright upwelling particles in the upper atmosphere detected in near-infrared wavelengths, and a warming of the upper troposphere with possible extra emission from ammonia gas detected at mid-infrared wavelengths.

Images depicting a mysterious dark spot on Jupiter are starting to come in from amateur astronomers around the world. According to Anthony Wesley, the Australian astronomer who first reported the find on Sunday, July 19, 2009, the dark blot in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere is an impact mark.
Yes, you read that right, initial reports are beginning to confirm the very real possibility that earth-based telescopes have once again imaged the remnants of either an asteroid or cometary impact with Jupiter. According to Wesley:

Glenn Orton from JPL has imaged this site using the NASA Infrared Telescope on Hawaii and confirms that it is an impact site and not a localised weather event.

You may recall the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts as the last time the world witnessed an impact on the solar system’s largest planet. It looks like it has happened again, albeit with a smaller object, and with no prior warning.
Professional astronomers are currently working to point their telescopes at Jupiter in the coming days in a continuing effort to confirm that the dark spot is an actual impact site and not some kind of weather phenomenon.

Impact site visible as dark spot at top

Wesley has set up a mirror site with additional images.

Infrared image: NASA/JPL/Infrared Telescope Facility
Color image: Anthony Wesley

To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing (and score more potential mail addresses), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) is offering free access to the January 30, 1970 issue of Science magazine.

However, registration with the AAAS is required in order to get access to PDF versions of articles published in the issue.

According to the AAAS, the 335 page issue was “one of the largest issues ever published by Science.” It includes some of the first lunar science results published after astronauts returned samples from the moon:

Also included in the special issue were a summary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Science Conference, measurements of the age of the Moon, findings of rare Earth elements in the lunar samples of soils and rocks, research on the composition of sun and solar wind processes, general mineralogy from the Sea of Tranquility, insights into important rock-forming processes, and assessment of organic compounds in lunar materials.

If you don’t mind getting a little spam from the AAAS, check it out!

A few weeks ago, we reported on how ISS astronauts serendipitously photographed the eruption of Sarychev Peak as it was occurring, capturing pyroclastic flows as they sped down the mountain’s slopes.

This week, NASA’s Earth Observatory released images taken by the ASTER satellite showing in graphic detail the resulting devastation of over half of the Ostrov Matua.

First, let’s have a look at this peaceful, unsuspecting island back in 2007:

Click for larger image

Now, let’s have a look post-eruption. I’ve outlined in yellow the original coastline:

Click for larger image

As released by Earth Observatory, red colors represent the remaining vegetation. Pretty clearly, pyroclastic flows have not only wiped out most of the vegetation, but have also altered the coastline in fairly substantial ways. Here’s an ISS photo, reoriented to roughly the same angle to give you an idea of what the island looked like during the eruption:

Click for larger image

Any part of the island you can still see in this photo is pretty much the red untouched region in the satellite image.

Ostrov Matua satellite photos: Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

Eruption photo: ISS020-E-9044, NASA Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center.