A powerful 8.8 magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale has struck south-central Chile. The quake, the third strongest in the past 100 years, was centered in the VIII Administrative District of Chile also known as the Bío-Bío near the city of Concepción, Chile’s second largest city with just under 900,000 inhabitants. The quake struck at approximately 3:30 AM local time when most residents were sleeping and was felt as far north as Santiago and as far east as Mendoza, Argentina. 

The quake, which was centered 22 miles deep in the Earth, set off a tsunami with warnings spanning the Pacific including ones for Hawaii and southern California. Tsunami warnings are in effect for 53 countries across the Pacific Basin. Waves hit the Juan Fernández Islands (the setting for Robinson Crusoe) wiping out half of the small town. The coastal areas of Easter Island were evacuated as a precaution. A tsunami wave travels at about 600 miles per hour, about as fast as a jet, and it can be expected to cross the Pacific and hit Japan 21 hours after the quake hit.

The loss of life so far stands at 147 but is expected to rise as Chileans awake to the devastation and sift through the rubble. This was a deep quake though it was 101.8 times more powerful than the 7.0 quake that struck Port-au-Prince back on January 12, 2010. However, the Haiti quake was shallower and Haiti’s infrastructure wasn’t built to withstand quakes. Chile has much more experience with earthquakes and much more stringent building codes. Nonetheless, the damage to infrastructure especially in Concepción seems vast. The city was founded in 1550 and one can expected buildings from the colonial era to have suffered immensely.

The Bío-Bío is one of the world’s richest fisheries. That small region accounts for some 5 percent of world seafood production. The region is a major producer of sea bass, farmed salmon (Chile’s second largest export), mackerel, hake, sardines and anchovies. The Bío-Bío is also, not surprisingly, a major shipbuilding center. The area is also a major forestry products producer and a tourist gateway to the lake district in Patagonia. The region is named after the Bío-Bío river, one of the most rugged rivers in the world and a major whitewater rafting destination. Finally, the region is a major hydroelectric power producer.

The quake comes at an odd time for Chile as the country is in the midst of a Presidential transition and a change of power from one party to another. Sebastián Piñera, the first right of center candidate to be elected President in Chile since 1958 and the first conservative since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, is to assume the oath of office on March 11th. Outgoing President Michelle Bachelet has declared a “state of catastrophe.”

Chile’s Seismic History

The magnitude-8.8 earthquake that struck off the coast of Chile early Saturday morning occurred along the same fault responsible for the biggest quake ever measured, a 1960 tremor that killed thousands in Chile and hundreds more across the Pacific.

Both earthquakes took place along a fault line where the Nazca tectonic plate, the section of the earth’s crust that lies under much of the Eastern Pacific Ocean south of the Equator, is sliding beneath another section, the South American plate. The two are converging at a rate of about three and a half inches per year.

Earthquake experts said the strains built up by that movement, plus the stresses added along the fault line by the 1960 quake and smaller ones in the intervening years, led to the rupture on Saturday along what is estimated to be about 400 miles of the fault. The quake generated a tsunami, with wave heights of about 5 feet recorded along the Chilean coast and larger waves forecast for Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific.

The quake was centered about 140 miles north of the center of the 1960 earthquake, which ruptured more than 650 miles of the fault and was measured at magnitude 9.5. The fault is a thrust fault, in which most of the ground motion during a quake is vertical.

Experts said the earthquake appeared to have no connection to a magnitude 6.9 quake that struck off the southern coast of Japan on Saturday. The Chilean event also had no connection to the magnitude-7.0 quake that occurred in Haiti on Jan. 12.

That quake, which is believed to have killed more than 200,000 people, occurred along a strike-slip fault, in which most of the ground motion is lateral.

Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo., said the quake on Saturday generated about 500 times more energy than the Haitian quake, which was measured at magnitude-7.0. “But even though this quake is larger, it’s probably not going to wreak the devastation that the Haitian quake did,” at least on land, Caruso said.

For one thing, he noted, the quality of building construction is better in Chile than in Haiti. And the fact that the quake occurred offshore should also help limit the destruction. In Haiti, the rupture occurred only a few miles from the capital, Port-au-Prince. The rupture on Saturday was centered about 200 miles southwest of the Chilean capital, Santiago, and 60 miles from the nearest town, Chillan.

In some respects, the Chilean quake is similar to the Indonesian earthquake of Dec. 26, 2004. That quake, which also occurred along a thrust fault, generated a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

When they occur underwater, thrust-fault earthquakes are far more likely to create tsunamis than tremors on strike-slip faults, said David Schwartz, an earthquake geologist with the geological survey in Menlo Park, Calif. “When they slip, the fault that causes the earthquake breaks the surface, and pushes the water up,” he said. “It pushes an awful lot of water. And that water has to go somewhere.”

That is what occurred in 1960. A tsunami generated by that quake devastated Hilo, Hawaii, with waves as high as 35 feet, killing 61 people. The tsunami reached as far as Japan, reaching northern parts of the main island, Honshu, about a day after the quake and killing 185 people and destroying more than 1,600 homes.

The New York Times has a full account as does The Independent. The UK Guardian has some great coverage of the tsunami impact.

If you understand Spanish, you can watch Chilean television at TV de Chile on Ustream.

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Sixty years have passed since the former Soviet Union detonated its first experimental nuclear bomb in eastern Kazakhstan.

Al Jazeera’s Robin Forestier Walker visits the highly contaminated test site, Polygon, and the surrounding area where effects of the experiments can still be seen.

Cancer rates in the area are 1.5 times higher than in the rest of the country, and the region has high levels of early mortality from a range of common diseases.

Doctors say more research is urgently needed to understand how the 40 years of nuclear tests could harm the children of tomorrow.

The report features an interview with Rebecca Johnson, the director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, who has conducted research in Kazakhstan’s Semei region.

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The world’s oceans this summer are hotter than they have ever been and it could feed hurricanes and harm coral reefs, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). More from the Associated Press:

July was the hottest the world’s oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping.

The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the branch of the U.S. government that keeps world weather records. That was 1.1 degree higher than the 20th century average, and beat the previous high set in 1998 by a couple hundredths of a degree. The coolest recorded ocean temperature was 59.3 degrees in December 1909.

Meteorologists said there’s a combination of forces at work this year: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made global warming, and a dash of random weather variations. The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen.

The Gulf of Mexico, where warm water fuels hurricanes, has temperatures dancing around 90. Most of the water in the Northern Hemisphere has been considerably warmer than normal. The Mediterranean is about three degrees warmer than normal. Higher temperatures rule in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

The heat is most noticeable near the Arctic, where water temperatures are as much as 10 degrees above average. The tongues of warm water could help melt sea ice from below and even cause thawing of ice sheets on Greenland, said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado.

Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land.

“This warm water we’re seeing doesn’t just disappear next year; it’ll be around for a long time,” said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. It takes five times more energy to warm water than land.

The warmer water “affects weather on the land,” Weaver said. “This is another yet really important indicator of the change that’s occurring.”

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Recently Professor Lawrence Lessig of the Stanford Law School has switched gears from his fight for copyright reform to a fight for campaign finance reform. At his talk at this summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival, Professor Lessig talks about Forbin Problems in a talk entitled Will Technology Change Our Lives?

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Africans are more genetically diverse than the inhabitants of the rest of the world combined, according to a study published in the journal Science Express.

Michael Novacek, the provost of science at the Museum of Natural History, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the implications of the study, how it was conducted and Africa’s importance to genetic research.

Researchers from three continents studied 121 African populations, African American populations from Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and North Carolina, and 60 non-African populations for patterns of variation at 1327 DNA markers from the nuclear genome.

They traced the genetic structure of Africans to 14 ancestral population clusters that correlated with modern ethnicity and shared culture or language.

They also determined that the ancestral origin of humans some 200,000 years ago was probably located in southern Africa, near the South Africa-Namibian border. From there, ancient populations migrated toward the northeast, exiting the continent from a point near the middle of the Red Sea.

Analysis showed the four populations of African Americans studied originated predominantly (71 percent) from Niger-Kordofanian language groups in western Africa. But, they say, the continental ancestors of African Americans were themselves genetically mixed with diverse groups from that region.

“Most African Americans are likely to have mixed ancestry from different regions of western Africa,” the report says. That “will make tracing ancestry of African Americans to specific ethnic groups in Africa challenging, unless considerably more markers are used.”

The research team demonstrated African and African-American populations show the highest levels of genetic diversity of any group, while some African populations contain genetic structures not found anywhere else in the world.

Because there is no single African population that represents the diversity on the continent, Tishkoff says many ethnically diverse African populations should be included in studies of human genetic variation, disease susceptibility, and drug response.

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I have yet to be convinced of the social utility of Twitter. However today in Chisinau, the capital of the small and highly divided East European nation of Moldova, Twitter ( #pman) played an instrumental role in the protests against the government that ended in an uprising with the Parliament being burned. From the New York Times:

Using social-networking tools like Facebook and Twitter, young people and nongovernmental organizations “started to spread the word around” to gather in the capital’s central square Monday evening, said Mihai Moscovici, a 25-year-old in Chisinau who has become the main person providing updates in English through Twitter. Only a couple of hundred young people attended that first night, he said.

“It was not a call for protest, but to come to the central square with a candle to mourn for our country electing a dictatorial regime,” he said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

They agreed to gather the next morning, and word continued to spread online he said.

“The Twitter community in Moldova is not very big — 100 or 200 people. One of the guys said over Twitter that we need to use a tag so people can find our tweets.” And thus the stream of tweets called #pman was born Tuesday morning, an acronym for the name of the Chisinau central square in Romanian — “Piata Marii Adunari Nationale” — that Twitterers used to organize their reports so that the general public could search for them more easily.

“Then everyone started to use this tag,” Mr. Moscovici said. “We said if you want to be up to date on the protests, follow this tag.” Shortly thereafter Mr. Moscovici, who has a master’s degree in communications from the University of Texas at Arlington, began to write his tweets in English.

“Everyone was tweeting in Romanian,” he said. “Somebody needs to broadcast news in English about what is going on over there.”

Mr. Moscovici, who is paid to blog in English for Propeople, a Danish Web design company, said his Internet service was shut down around 2 in the afternoon on Tuesday, but that he could still use his cellphone to access the Internet and add tweets.

During Tuesday’s protests, “the situation got beyond any expectations” and turned violent, he said, adding that they were never meant to take that turn. “If it would be planned in advance, they would have used Molotov cocktails or other bad stuff,” he said about the protests. “Today they didn’t have any tools to fight back, the stones they got from the ground — from the pavement.”

On Tuesday, he said, he added about 200 new followers on Twitter, most of whom he thought were Moldovan. “I believe they just made an account for themselves for today,” he said. “Because of the Twitter explosion, they started to use Twitter.”

As to why Twitter was effective in organizing a protest, Mr. Moscovici said, “When you follow somebody, you usually know this person, so you trust this person — it is coming from a real person, not an institution.”

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A digital revolution is turning the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia into a nation of Internet innovators. Estonians have put their digital identities onto their national identification cards, and much more.

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Over the weekend, a Canadian research group reported that a cyber spy network had hacked into the computers and, by extension, secret documents of governments and private organizations in 103 countries.

The network, called Ghostnet, is based mainly in China. Among the computers it targeted were those of Tibets spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and Tibet’s government-in-exile in India. Scholars say the operation may have helped identify people in Tibet who talk to exiled Tibetans, putting those in Tibet at risk of reprisals from the Chinese government, which controls Tibet.

The Canadian researchers said the spying activity they found was just the tip of the iceberg. Keith Epstein, an investigative reporter in BusinessWeek’s Washington D.C. bureau who specializes in cyber security, joins Martin Savidge to discuss Chinese cyber spying, what information is at risk and defense systems.

More from the New York Times:

A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

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A funky, psychedelic fish that bounces on the ocean floor like a rubber ball has been classified as a new species. The fish is found off Ambon in the Moluccas.

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How is it that the GOP continues to shoot itself in the foot with its anti-science crusade? Back during the general election, Governor Sarah Palin, in a moment of horrific ignorance, wailed against fruit flies, not realizing the role that the humble fruit fly plays in scientific research. Then there is Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma who believes that global climate change is “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

Now it’s Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s turn to demonstrate a profound ignorance of the country he lives in with yet another flippant anti-science remark. The United States ranks third, behind Indonesia and Japan, in the number of historically active volcanoes. Most of the volcanoes are found in the Aleutian Islands, the Alaska Peninsula, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest. The remainder are widely distributed in the western part of the nation from California to Colorado. The entire Western United States sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire. A part of this ring of fire is the Cascade Volcanic Arc which includes nearly 20 major volcanoes. Seattle and Portland are both firmly at least until the Earth shakes within the Cascade Volcanic Arc.

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