Asteroid (441987) 2010 NY65 passes the Earth.

Asteroid (441987) 2010 NY65 passed by the Earth at a distance of 4 118 000 km (10.7 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 2.75% of the average distance between the Earth and the Sun), at about 10.30 am GMT on Friday 24 June 2016. There was no danger of the asteroid hitting us, though had it done so it would have presented a considerable threat. (441987) 2010 NY65 has an estimated equivalent diameter of 94-300 m (i.e. a spherical body with the same mass would be 94-300 m in diameter), and an towards the upper end of this range would pass through the atmosphere and directly impact the ground with a force of about 1110 megatons (about 65 300 times the explosive energy of the Hiroshima bomb), causing devastation over a wide area and creating a crater about 4.6 km across, and resulting in global climatic problems that could last for decades or even centuries.

The calculated orbit of (441987) 2010 NY65. JPL Small Body Database.

(441987) 2010 NY65 was discovered on 14 July 2010 by the NEOWISE system on the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite. The designation 2010 NY65 implies that it was the 1649th asteroid (asteroid Y65) discovered in the first half of July 2010 (period 2010 N), while the designation 441987 implies that it was 441 987th asteroid ever discovered (asteroids are not given this longer designation immediately to avoid naming double or false sightings).

(441987) 2010 NY65  has a 365 day orbital period, with an elliptical orbit tilted at an angle of 11.6° to the plain of the Solar System which takes in to 0.63 AU from the Sun (63% of the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun and inside the orbit of the planet Venus) and out to 1.38 AU (38% further away from the Sun than the Earth). This means that close encounters between the asteroid and Earth are fairly common, with the last thought to have happened in June 2015 and the next predicted in June 2017. (441987) 2010 NY65  also has frequent close encounters with the planet Venus, with the last thought to have occurred in June 1999 and the next predicted for May 2022. Although it does cross the Earth's orbit and is briefly further from the Sun on each cycle, (441987) 2010 NY65 spends most of its time closer to the Sun than we are, and is therefore classified as an Aten Group Asteroid. As an asteroid possibly larger than 150 m in diameter that occasionally comes within 0.05 AU of the Earth, (441987) 2010 NY65 is also classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid. 

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Asteroid 2016 MA passes the Earth.      Asteroid 2016 MA passed by the Earth at a distance of 999 900 km (2.60 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.66% of the average distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly before 4.35 am GMT on Sunday 19 June 2016...

Asteroid 2004 KH17 passes the Earth.   Asteroid 2004 KH17 passed by the Earth at a distance of 16 990 000 km (30.2 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 11.4% of the average distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly before 0.20 am GMT on Thursday 2 June...

Fireball over Arizona.                                  The American Meteor Society has received reports of a bright fireball meteor being seen over much of the southwest United States at about 4.00 am local time on Thursday 2 June 2016 (about 11.00 am GMT). The fireball was seen across Arizona, Utah, New...

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Wahlisaurus massarae: A new species of Ichthyosaur from the Early Jurassic of Nottinghamshire, England.

England is noted for having produced a large range of Early Jurassic Ichthyosaur specimens, though the majority of these have come from the Jurassic Coast area of Dorset, with specimend also described from Somerset, Leicestershire and Warwickshire. A number of specimens are also known from the Early Jurassic of Nottinghamshire, though to date these have been the subject of little organized study.

In a paper published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology on 13 June 2016, Dean Lomax of the School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at The University of Manchester describes a new species of Ichthyosaur from the Early Jurassic Scunthorpe Mudstone Formation of the Normanton Hills, near Normanton on Soar in the district of Rushcliffe, Nottinghamshire.

The species is described from a single specimen, obtained from the collection of Percy Faulks by the Leicester Arts and Museums Service. The specimen has been prepared mechanically and by acid disolution some time between 1952 and 1981, and is currently in several pieces, with the majority on three large blocks. It is named Wahlisaurus massarae, in honour of William Wahl and Judy Massare for their contributions to the study of Mesozoic Marine Reptiles.

Basioccipital, rostrum and dentition of Wahlisaurus massarae. (A) Basioccipital in posterior view; note the extensive extracondylar area, fragment of the left stapes and portion of basisphenoid. (B) Ventral view of mandible and snout with anterior portion of dentary rotated (in dorsal view) and positioned adjacent (dashed line indicates point of fit); note the slenderness of the rostrum and the presence of an overbite. (C) Close-up of the large, long and robust teeth and some of the needle-like teeth positioned under the maxilla. (D) Close-up of three dentary teeth; note the ‘waisted’ morphology, recurved crown and infolded root. Abbreviations: bas, basisphenoid; den, dentary; mx, maxilla (right maxilla); pmx, premaxilla; sta, stapes. Scale bars: (A) 5 cm; (B) 10 cm; (C) 3 cm. Lomax (2016).

The specimen has variable preservation, with some portions articulated and well preserved, and others completely disarticulated and worn The skull is partially crushed with some portions missing completely. It is thought to be a sub-adult, with only partial fusion of the skull and patches of roughness on the articulating surfaces of the humerus, which would be expected to be smooth in a fully mature specimen.

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Sclerocormus parviceps: A new species of Ichthyosaur from the Early Triassic of Anhui Province, China.                                 Ichthyosaurs were Marine Reptiles known from the Triassic to the Cretaceous. They were fully-aquatic with a Dolphin-like form, and known to have given birth to live young, rather than emerging from the water to lay eggs, as is the case in Turtles and Crocodiles...

A new species of Hupehsuchian from the Early Triassic of Hubei Province, China.      The Hupehsuchians are a group of Marine Reptiles known only from the Early Triassic of Hubei Province, China. Their origins and relationships are obscure, though it has been suggested that they might be...

A fresh look at the Albian Ichthyosaur Platypterygius hercynicus.                           The Ichthyosaurs were a group of marine tetrapods that resembled dolphins. They appear in the fossil record in the mid-Triassic about 245 million years ago, and survive till the mid-Cretaceous, about 90 million years ago. During the Jurassic they appear to have been the top marine predators, but in the Cretaceous they were...

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Flooding kills 26 in West Virginia.

Twenty six people have been confirmed dead in West Virginia after the state suffered its worst flooding in a century this week. 250 mm or rain was recored in parts of West Virginia on Thursday 23 June 2016, roughly a quater of the expected annual rainfall for the state, and leading to flash floods that swept away many houses and other buildings. The worst hit areas are reported to be in the southeast of the state, notably Greenbrier County, where sixteen people are reported to have died and Kanahwa County, where another six fatalities occured.

Floodwaters near White Sulphur Springs in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, on 24 June 2016. AP.

At least a hundred homes are thought to have been destroyed, while across the state about  32 000 homes and businesses are thought to be without electricity. A State of Emergency has been declared by President Barack Obama following a request from State Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, meaning that residents of the worst affected areas will be able to apply for federal aid to help them rebuild.

Flooding in Richwood in Nicholas County, West Virginia, on 23 June 2016. Jeremy Rose/Charleston Gazette-Mail.

Richwood

Richwood

West Virginia has a warm subtropical climate with rainfall largely driven by evaporation in the North Pacific rather than the (nearer) Atlantic, with prevailing winds predominantly carrying moist air from the West that is pushed upwards by the Appalachian Mountains, causing it to cool and lose its capacity to cary as much water, resulting in rainfall. However Atlantic storms can reverse this process, bringing warm moist air from the Atlantic, which also tends to deposit its water content on encountering the Appalachians.

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Magnitude 3.5 Earthquake in Ballard County, Kentucky.                                                      The United States Geological Survey recorded a Magnitude 3.5 Earthquake at a depth of 16 km...

Elderly woman dies after falling into sinkhole in Louisville, Kentucky.                                    An elderly woman has died after falling into a sinkhole in the Pleasure Ridge Park district of Louisville, Kentucky at about 7.30 pm local time on Tuesday...

One dead and two injured following roof collapse at West Virginia mine.                   One worker has died and another two have been injured following a collapse at the Marshall County Mine in Cameron, West Virginia, which occurred at about 10.00 pm local time on Sunday 8 March 2015. Earlier reports suggested that more miners...

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Didymodon novae-zelandiae: A new species of Moss from Manukau Harbour, New Zealand.

Mosses are among the simplest and most ancient groups of plants. They lack flowers, seeds and roots, and only have very simple vascular systems. Despite this primitive nature they are still some of the most abundant plants today, due to their ability to colonise short-lived environments and live upon other plants.

In a paper published in the journal Phytotaxa on 3 May 2016, Jessica Beever of Landcare Research and Allan Fife of the Allan Herbarium describe a new species of Moss from the northern shore of the Manukau Harbour on the Auckland Isthmus of North Island, New Zealand.

The new species is placed in the genus Didymodon and given the specific name novae-zelandiae, in reference to the country where it was discovered. The Moss was found growing at a single site on a vertical sea-cliff made up of volcanic tuff (rock formed from ash) shaded by a canopy of Pōhutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa) trees. The plants brownish in colour and were small even for a Moss, with stems reaching 1-2 mm in length.

Didymodon novae-zelandiae habit with capsules. Beever & Fife (2016).

Areas of the cliff colonised by Didymodon novae-zelandiae were apparently more easily colonised by a larger Moss, Bryum clavatum, which was able to settle in such patches then competitively exclude the smaller Didymodon novae-zelandiae. This process, called succession by ecologists, is common in plat communities, where one plant modifies an environment in a way that makes it suitable for a second plant to take over and exclude the original coloniser. However the tuffa cliffs where the Mosses were found were extremely soft and poorly consolidated, with areas of the cliff surface regularly falling away and revealing fresh surface, suitable for colonisation by Didymodon novae-zelandiae but not Bryum clavatum. A more serious threat to the whole ecosystem appeared to come from invasive Kikuyu Grass (Cenchrus clandestinus) which was begging to settle soft unstable sediments at the base of the cliff.

 Type locality of Didymodon novae-zelandiae on Manukau Harbour foreshore. Didymodon novae-zelandiae (position arrowed) on the cliff face, below a denser band of vegetation (mainly Bryum clavatum), some 1.5 m above high tide mark. The remains of trunks of trees buried by eruption of nearby Mount Maungataketake can be seen in the cliff base both to the right and left of the standing figure. The large Pōhutukawa tree (Metrosideros excelsa) to the right, above, has now fallen from the cliff. Jessica Beever in Beever & Fife (2016).

Didymodon novae-zelandiae was found growing only at a single site, on a poorly consolidated volcanic cliff. Such habitats are not common, even in volcanic New Zealand, however the small size of the Moss does leave the possibility that it is present in other environments and has been overlooked. For this reason Beever and Fife suggest that it be classified as an Data Deficient Endemic Plant for conservation purposes.

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Mosses from Late Eocene Rovno Amber. Mosses are thought to be among the most ancient of plant groups, and still make up a significant proportion of all plant communities. They are an ancient group, considerably predating vascular plants such as...

Two new species of Moss from the Permian of Brazil.                                                  Mosses (Bryophytes) are simple plants which lack vascular systems to pump water and nutrients from a root system, instead relying on what they can absorb through their leaves, and generally only reaching a few cm in height. This means that they are at their... 

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Ninety-eight confirmed deaths as storms batter Jiangsu Province, China.

Ninety-eight people have been confirmed dead and around 800 injured following a series of storms that battered coastal areas of Jiangsu Province, China, on Friday 24 June 2016. Windspeeds of 125 kilometers per hour were recored in Funing County, and witnesses reported seeing a tornado near the city of Yancheng. A factory belonging to GCL System Integration Technology Co Ltd has also been partially destroyed, including a store for hazardous chemicals, leading to concerns that water supplies could be contaminated.

Storm damage in Funing County following the storms that battered Jiangsu Province on 24 June 2016. AP.

Ocean storms form due to heating of air over the sea in tropical zones. As the air is heated the the air pressure drops and the air rises, causing new air to rush in from outside the forming storm zone. If this zone is sufficiently large, then it will be influenced by the Coriolis Effect, which loosely speaking means the winds closer to the equator will be faster than those further away, causing the storm to rotate, clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere.

Storm damaged buildings in Yangcheng following the storms that battered Jiangsu Province on 24 June 2016. AP.

Tropical storms are common in South China, but Jiangsu Provinc is in the northeast of the country and does not usually suffer such storms. Meteorologists in China have suggested the storms may be conneted to last year's El Niño conditions, which has brought unusual weather conditions around the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Movements of air masses and changes in precipitation in an El Niño weather system. Fiona Martin/NOAA.

The El Niño is the warm phase of a long-term climatic oscillation affecting the southern Pacific, which can influence the climate around the world. The onset of El Niño conditions is marked by a sharp rise in temperature and pressure over the southern Indian Ocean, which then moves eastward over the southern Pacific. This pulls rainfall with it, leading to higher rainfall over the Pacific and lower rainfall over South Asia. This reduced rainfall during the already hot and dry summer leads to soaring temperatures in southern Asia, followed by a rise in rainfall that often causes flooding in the Americas and sometimes Africa. Worryingly climatic predictions for the next century suggest that global warming could lead to more frequent and severe El Niño conditions, extreme weather conditions a common occurrence.

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Landslide kills six in Zhejiang Province, China.                                                           Six people have been confirmed dead following a landslide in the city of Jiande in Zhejiang...

Multiple deaths following landslide in Zhejiang Province, China.                        Eleven people have been confirmed dead and another 26 are still missing following a landslide that buried about 27 houses in the village of Lidong in the Llandu District of Zhejiang Province at about 10.50 pm local time on Friday 13 November 2015. The...

Earthquake in Anhui Province, China, kills at least two.                                                 Two people are known to have died and at least twelve more have been injured following an Earthquake close to the city of Fuyang in Anhui Province slightly before 2.15 pm local time (slightly before 6.15 am GMT) on Saturday 14 March 2015, which was recorded by the...

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Asteroid 2016 MA passes the Earth.

Asteroid 2016 MA passed by the Earth at a distance of 999 900 km (2.60 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.66% of the average distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly before 4.35 am GMT on Sunday 19 June 2016. There was no danger of the asteroid hitting us, though had it done so it would have presented no threat. 2016 MA has an estimated equivalent diameter of 5-19 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object with the same volume would be 5-19 m in diameter), and an object of this size would be expected to explode in an airburst (an explosion caused by superheating from friction with the Earth's atmosphere, which is greater than that caused by simply falling, due to the orbital momentum of the asteroid) in the atmosphere between 40 and 25 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's surface.

 

 The calculated orbit of 2016 MA. JPL Small Body Database.

 

2016 MA was discovered on 16 June 2016 (three days before its closest approach to the Earth) by the University of Arizona's Mt. Lemmon Survey at the Steward Observatory on Mount Lemmon in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. The designation 2016 MA implies that the asteroid was the first object (object A) discovered in the second half of June 2016 (period 2016 M).

 

2016 MA has a 658 day orbital period and an eccentric orbit that takes it from 0.92 AU from the Sun (i.e. 92% of the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 2.03 AU from the Sun (i.e. 203% of the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, considerably outside orbit of the planet Mars). It is therefore classed as an Apollo Group Asteroid (an asteroid that is on average further from the Sun than the Earth, but which does get closer). This means that close encounters between the asteroid and Earth are fairly common, with the last thought to have happened in May 2007 and the next predicted in October this year.

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Asteroid 2004 KH17 passes the Earth.   Asteroid 2004 KH17 passed by the Earth at a distance of 16 990 000 km (30.2 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 11.4% of the average distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly before 0.20 am GMT on Thursday 2 June...

Fireball over Arizona.                                  The American Meteor Society has received reports of a bright fireball meteor being seen over much of the southwest United States at about 4.00 am local time on Thursday 2 June 2016 (about 11.00 am GMT). The fireball was seen across Arizona, Utah, New...

Asteroid 2016 JD18 passes the Earth.    Asteroid 2016 JD18 passed by the Earth at a distance of 625 300 km (1.63 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.42% of the average distance between the Earth and the Sun), at about 11.25 pm on Monday 16 May 2016. There...

 

 

 

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