Chesapeake's Big Bang Gets Bigger

Bay crater may extend into Isle of Wight County

The Chesapeake Bay impact crater, an impressive 80-plus miles across, may actually be a little bigger than that.

State and federal scientists following up on a water-well permit have determined that the crater disrupted aquifers and left a rocky debris field at least as far south as Carrollton in Isle of Wight County.

Significantly, at this location, the disrupted rocks and soil are still able to transport water, which is not the case in most of the crater.

The impact crater lies under the Chesapeake Bay and Eastern Shore, as well as parts of Hampton Roads and the peninsulas. It was created some 35 million years ago by a meteor smashing into what was then a shallow sea.

The crater, thought to be at least a mile deep, has been filled in over the centuries and is not visible on the surface.

"The biggest impact crater in the United States, and the sixth- or seventh-largest in the world, and it's right under your house," said hydrologist Randy McFarland of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Cross sectional view of crater

Water - or the lack of it - is the crater's lasting legacy. The blast destroyed aquifers across the region and trapped saltwater, making it difficult or impossible to drill freshwater wells in many locations.

McFarland joined other longtime crater researchers Tuesday at an empty lot in the Ashby subdivision, where 500 feet of core samples revealed that the crater's debris field extends farther southwest than had been mapped before.

The bolide that struck the Atlantic Ocean where the North American coast occurs in our modern era (it hasn't always been in the same place), is generally thought to have created the conditions that formed the Chesapeake Bay. The giant crater, left a deep depression and caused the rivers of the Atlantic Coastal Plain that mostly travel southeast to the ocean, to dump into the giant hole.  The crater now is not visible at the surface, was certainly a traumatic event when it occurred, near the Eocene, Oligocene boundary.  An impact that large like caused a massive extinction event on North America, and likely affected the worlds climate for a long time.

But it's OK, because it made my fishing hole.

In a Parallel Universe, Things Didn't Work Out So Well

Wombat-Socho has his Sunday Rule 5 extravaganza with "Half Your Age", in some cases, one third of mine.

That's Just Mean

I like it...



Are they responsible for heart attacks or soiled garments?

Evolution's Hiccup

Oxygen’s ups and downs in the early atmosphere and ocean

Most researchers imagine the initial oxygenation of the ocean and atmosphere to have been something like a staircase, but with steps only going up. The first step, so the story goes, occurred around 2.4 billion years ago, and this, the so-called Great Oxidation Event, has obvious implications for the origins and evolution of the first forms of eukaryotic life. The second big step in this assumed irreversible rise occurred almost two billion years later, coinciding with the first appearances and earliest diversification of animals.

Now a team led by geochemists at the University of California, Riverside challenges the simple notion of an up-only trend for early oxygen and provides the first compelling direct evidence for a major drop in oxygen after the first rise.

“Our group is among a subset of scientists who imagine that oxygen, once it began to accumulate in the ocean-atmosphere system, may have ultimately risen to very high levels about 2.3-2.2 billion years ago, perhaps even to concentrations close to what we see today,” said Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry and the principal investigator of the project. “But unlike the posited irreversible rise favored by many, our new data point convincingly to an equally impressive, and still not well understood, fall in oxygen about 200 million years later.”

According to Lyons, this drop in oxygen may have ushered in more than a billion years that were marked by a return to low-oxygen concentrations at Earth’s surface, including the likelihood of an oxygen-free deep ocean.

“It is this condition that may have set the environmental stage and ultimately the clock for the advance of eukaryotic organisms and eventually animals,” he said.

From the point of view of the early inhabitants of earth, the first rise of the oxygen atmosphere was more dire than anything global warming climate change has to offer us. Free oxygen is a deadly poison to those organisms that lived in the primordial soup, and the presence of oxygen was like an atmosphere of cyanide to us.  Perhaps the initial rise of oxygen led to a global ecological catastrophe that all but halted the green, photosynthetic revolution until a new community evolved to cope with it.

Or maybe a comet or ice age did it.  Speculation is fun.

Evolution in Action

VIMS says oysters show disease resistance

First, a hint.  If you click on the link above, be prepared to hit the stop button before the page finishes loading and takes you to a page demanding that you sign up.  If you miss it, hit the back button and the stop.

For decades now, Chesapeake Bay oysters have been ravaged by two diseases that nearly wiped them out. Dermo and MSX and the parasites that cause them are still rampant in high-salinity waters of the bay and its tributaries, but research from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) suggests native oysters are developing a resistance to them.

"They're organisms living sort of in an evolutionary space, and they had to develop some resistance or disappear," said Ryan Carnegie, research associate professor at VIMS in Gloucester Point. "We still see some disease, and they still die. But it's just not as bad in the wild oysters that have been exposed as it used to be."

This is pretty rapid for evolution to be at work, but there is tremendous selective pressure, and lots of scope for selection to operate. Disease runs through the oyster populations like a plague, often killing the majority of them, leaving the disease survivors (some of them resistant) to breed.  Oysters have short generations times.  They start to breed in their first year (mostly as males), and rarely live longer than a few years before watermen, disease or predators take them.  Thus, there are frequent extreme selection events. 

However, not all are convinced that natural oysters are evolving disease resistance on their own:

Oyster expert Jim Wesson with the Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC), calls it a "double-edged sword" that oysters grow best in saltier waters that likewise have the highest disease mortality. Wesson is not persuaded by Carnegie's conclusions.

"I'm not totally convinced that there's any significant resistance," Wesson said. "I think we're managing around it better."
...Wesson is in the midst of VMRC's annual fall oyster survey and said he's finding it hard to find big, healthy oysters in the high-salinity, high-disease areas he's targeting.

"It's not black and white, what's going on," Wesson said. "If resistance was really out there, we ought to be seeing a lot of 4- and 5-year-old oysters."

I'll reiterate my plan for oyster restoration.  Ignore them for five years.  No fishing, no planting.  If they're not making a comeback, they won't, at least under the current state of the bay.

Chesapeake Bay: There's an App for It

Looking for the perfect place in the Chesapeake Bay watershed to stroll a scenic trail or catch a waterfall? To hike, bike or kayak?

Now there’s an app for that.

The National Park Service just released the “Chesapeake Explorer” mobile application to offer info on national parks, state parks, Chesapeake Bay Gateways and Watertrails Network sites, among others.

You can get location, hours, activities and fees, and sort through locations according to your particular interest. It can suggest thematic tours or customize them for you.

The app is free, available here for iPhones. The NPS says it’ll be available soon for Androids.

I don't think I need it; I know where I want to go and what I want to do on the Bay, but it might be for someone out there.

CBF Unhappy with City, County Suits on 'Bay Diet'

Alan Girard: Beware pollution report out of Baltimore

County and municipal governments on the Eastern Shore should scrutinize carefully a pitch by a Baltimore-based law firm which is trying to convince them pollution from the Susquehanna River will erase any local pollution reduction efforts.

The firm’s presentation is rife with misinformation.

We are confident if localities inspect the idea closely, they will see it for what it is: a flawed solution. Better to stay the course with strategies that are working.The firm, Funk & Bolton, said it will offer its services for $30,000 per county to help them potentially challenge state sewage treatment standards and other environmental efforts, according to newspaper stories.

Working?  It's just barely begun, and we don't expect to see significant improvement in the Bay for several years!  The terms of the law don't call for all the restrictions to be imposed on the cities, counties, farmers, builders, and industries of the Bay until 2025.  In fact, most of the important part of the diet, the model, is still under attack, and should be, getting it right is critical, and proving a model is right is a very difficult proposition.

"Stay the Course" is usually the campaign slogan of someone who has no results to show.

Still More Butterflies!

A quiet day at home today, a Drs. appointment and shopping trip in the morning, and lazing around this afternoon, nursing my cold.  At some point this afternoon, I took the camera out to the garden, and found some butterflies hanging around the Mexican Sage.

Click on the pics to see larger views.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure they are Cloudless Sulphurs, one I caught on digits before, but not this well.  It's still had to do get shot of the top of the wings; I have yet to see one sit with its wings spread.

However, I did catch this one in flight in a not too awfully blurry shot.  Note the dark wings and scalloped edges.





At one point, the three individuals present took off in an aerial dog fight.  God only knows what they think they're doing; I can't imagine them inflicting any damage on each other.  Well, maybe it's foreplay...

A little later, I found this dark skipper.  I don't even pretend to try to identify skippers; there's just too many of them, and the differences are pretty subtle.

This naked Katydid wandered by during the photo shoot.

As did this little something.It might be an Eastern Tailed Blue, but it's awfully indistinct. It does look like the remains of one of the tails on the rear wing.

The Death Stare

Seemingly trying to avoid looking like the clown Joe Biden had appeared to be in his debate with Paul Ryan, last night, President Obama adopted a much more serious, disapproving demeanor, that Twitchy has dubbed the "Death Stare":

I saw a timber rattlesnake give a rat it intended to eat that stare just before it bit.

However, the snake was out of venom, and the rat proceeded to chew up the snake.

Ever Feel Like This?

I have, at least without the outfits...



Some of the music lyrics are a little NSFW.

Wombat-Socho has his Sunday Rule 5 extravaganza with "Half Your Age", in some cases, one third of mine. Also linked at the Classical Liberal "Rule 5 Bad Reputation", with Joan Jett and the Foo Fighters.

Seven Hours

The embassy in Benghazi was attacked for 7 hours while a drone flew overhead, sending back video.

On September 11, at about 10 p.m. Libyan time (4 p.m. in Washington), Ambassador Chris Stevens and a small staff were inside our consulate in Benghazi when terrorists attacked. The consulate staff immediately contacted Washington and our embassy in Tripoli. The White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and numerous military headquarters monitored the entire battle in real time via the phone calls from Benghazi and video from a drone overhead.

Our diplomats fought for seven hours without any aid from outside the country. Four Americans died while the Obama national-security team and our military passively watched and listened. The administration is being criticized for ignoring security needs before the attack and for falsely attributing the assault to a mob. But the most severe failure has gone unnoticed: namely, a failure to aid the living...

Fighter jets could have been at Benghazi in an hour; the commandos inside three hours. If the attackers were a mob, as intelligence reported, then an F18 in afterburner, roaring like a lion, would unnerve them. This procedure was applied often in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Conversely, if the attackers were terrorists, then the U.S. commandos would eliminate them. But no forces were dispatched from Sigonella.

Somebody owes the family of Ambassador Stevens and the other casualties an explanation.

A New Butterfly?

Found this little one (compare to the grass blades) flitting around the hillside near the harbor, and I got lucky when it set down for a moment and spread its wings within range of my zoom. Unfortunately, I didn't get a shot of the underside of the wings, which might be more distinctive. Identification of small blue butterflies is chancy, but Summer (or Spring) Azure (Celastrina neglecta, C. ladon), look like a decent bets...

A Pre-debate Primer - Monitoring the Moderators: Bob Schieffer's Previous Biases

Excerpted heavily from Michelle Malkins well annotated post here:

1. Schieffer penned a book in 1989 titled “The Acting President: Ronald Reagan and the Supporting Players Who Helped Him Create the Illusion That Held America Spellbound.”

2. In June, Schieffer hosted RNC chair Reince Preibus on his “Face the Nation” program, and lambasted Republicans for focusing on “silly and petty” things — like the $500 million Solyndra bankruptcy.

3. Schieffer condemned Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer for defending herself against thin-skinned Obama’s tarmac hissy fit over her book. Remember: It was Obama who stalked off rudely after whining about her book (which he hadn’t read), not Brewer. In Schieffer’s reality bubble, Brewer was the “vulgar” aggressor — and he used the incident to complain inexplicably about “social media.” Via MRC:

4. Listen to this testy exchange between conservative talk show host Steve Malzberg and Schieffer, in which Schieffer complains again about the “Internet” for spreading false rumors (pssst…it was the “Internet” that exposed the monumental CBS Rathergate scandal) and stubbornly defends double standards in coverage of Sarah Palin versus Joe Biden.

5. Schieffer moaned in February that it was the GOP that was obsessed with birth control, criticized the party for being “too far to the right,” and falsely stated that Obama had “backed away” from his religious liberty-crushing Obamacare abortion mandate.

6. Schieffer gushes about Obama during the inaugural celebration, compares him to Lincoln.

7. Schieffer’s fair and balanced assessment of Bill Clinton’s DNC speech on September 5:  “Just an amazing speech.”

 But I'm sure he'll be perfectly fair...

Time to Get Out of the Business

Italian court convicts 7 scientists for no quake warning

L'AQUILA, Italy - An Italian court convicted seven scientists and experts of manslaughter on Monday for failing to adequately warn citizens before an earthquake struck central Italy in 2009, killing more than 300 people. The court in L'Aquila also sentenced the defendants to six years in prison. Each one is a member of the national Great Risks Commission. In Italy, convictions aren't definitive until after at least one level of appeals, so it is unlikely any of the defendants would face jail immediately.

Scientists worldwide had decried the trial as ridiculous, contending that science has no reliable way of predicting earthquakes.

The timing of earthquakes perhaps one of the least predicitable things in nature, except for maybe the exact time of an individual radioactive decay.  One can predict them well enough on a statistical basis over a long enough time period but the occurrence of an individual event is very difficult.  Scientists have been trying to predict earthquakes maybe as long a astrologers have, and made very little more progress.  There are a few things that may precede a shock, but in many cases, they also occur in the absence of a shock.

Among those convicted were some of Italy's most prominent and internationally respected seismologists and geological experts, including Enzo Boschi, former head of the national Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology. `'I am dejected, desperate," Boschi said after the verdict. `'I thought I would have been acquitted. I still don't understand what I was convicted of."

I know one way to predict every earthquake; get up every morning and predict one.  If it doesn't happen, go to bed happy, and get up the next morning, and repeat.  You'll never fail to predict the earthquake, but since people will have stopped paying any attention years ago, it won't help.

The trial began in September 2011 in this Apennine town, whose devastated historic center is still largely a ghost town.

The defendants were accused in the indictment of giving `'inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" about whether small tremors felt by L'Aquila residents in the weeks and months before the April 6, 2009, quake should have constituted grounds for a quake warning.

Yes, small earthquakes can precede big earthquakes. Or they can precede years of nothing.

Before you reject this as merely an Italian fluke (they are an excitable bunch), remember that most stupidities from Europe end up being imported into the US, and if you don't think Gloria Allred and her ilk in the US wouldn't be happy to sue on behalf of the victims of a US earthquake, you are kidding yourself.

Of course, they'd probably have better success against scientists from a private university such as Stanford or Harvard than against scientists employed by the US government.

Washington State Candidate Revealed as Former Playgirl

A conservative blogger in revealed that Amy (Jugs) Biviano, a candidate for the Washington State Legislature, posed for Playboy magazine in 1995, in one of their famous (or perhaps infamous) college features, "Women of the IVY League" (NSFW link):

The dictionary definition of hypocritical is the “pretense of having virtues, beliefs, principles, etc.” Many politicians are well described by this adjective; but in 2012, none deserves it more than Amy Biviano.

Biviano has worked hard to transform her image from a Yale educated anthropologist and self-avowed feminist into a suburban mom with an adoring husband.

This is how she describes herself on her own website:

“I am a long-time Spokane Valley resident, a mother, and small business owner… I grew up in a small, close-knit town in Oklahoma, the daughter of a farmer and a public school teacher. I met my husband Andrew in 1993, on our first day of freshman year at Yale University, and we married two months after graduation. We moved to Andrew’s hometown of Spokane Valley in 2001, deciding that it is the ideal place to raise our family. We have now been married almost 15 years and have two incredible sons: Alex, age 13, and Aidan, age 11…I am an active member of Bethany Presbyterian Church, where I teach Sunday school and serve on the finance committee.”

What she doesn’t share in her bio is her work as a model for Playboy. She appeared in the October 1995 issue of the Men’s soft porno magazine as part of a special spread on “The Women of the Ivy League.”

Her opponent, of whom she has demanded the release of personal information, including his divorce:

Ironically, a central theme of her campaign has been repeated demands that Representative Shea tell all about his past. She is referring to Shea’s divorce from first wife Lisa. This is well-trod turf with Democrats and the local liberal media bringing up his divorce in every one of his earlier campaigns. They claim that the breakdown of his first marriage is fair game because Representative Shea is the Legislature’s biggest opponent of gay marriage.

has disavowed any role in the release, and expressed his sympathy for Jugs:

I am saddened by the release by a national media outlet of my opponent’s involvement in pornography. I strongly condemn the release of this information. Our campaign was aware of this information several months ago, and made a very determined decision to not use or disperse this information in any way, shape, or form. I specifically instructed the few members of my campaign team who knew of this situation to not disseminate this information, engage in negative, personal attack campaigning, even though my opponent had already done so. This type of negative campaigning is exactly what is wrong with politics today. While these revelations are indeed alarming, my heart goes out to Amy and her family. My wife Viktoriya and I will continue to pray for her.

I don't necessarily find someone who posed in Payboy Playboy magazine in 1995 hypocritical for trying to live by "family values" in 2012. In fact; I would not have an issue if she had posed in Women of Summer, 2012.  However, given the nature of the world, you have to expect such facts about your past to come out when you run for office in 2012.  We know the democrats would never pass up a Republican's apparent "hypocrisy" on such an issue regardless of how many years had intervened.

Wombat-Socho has his Sunday Rule 5 extravaganza with "Half Your Age", in some cases, one third of mine. Also linked at the Classical Liberal "Rule 5 Bad Reputation", with Joan Jett and the Foo Fighters.

So How Does Panda Taste?

No, Don't Eat Me!

Apparently, those who know, aren't telling...

Chinese scientists have found evidence that prehistoric people ate giant pandas. The Explainer has previously described the flavors of whale, sloth, dinosaur, horse, and even human. How does giant panda meat taste?

Terrible, apparently. In 1983, a Chinese villager named Leng Zhizhong was tried for illegally killing a giant panda. He told the judge that his wife cooked the meat with turnips, but they didn’t enjoy it, so he fed some to his pigs and gave the remainder to his sister. Leng, unfortunately, didn’t explain what made the meat so unpalatable in what appears to be the only written description of panda-eating.

But then, given some of the things that appeal to Chinese (bird nests, jellyfish), I don't always accept the first Chinese opinion that I come by on the edibility of some item.

Rural Chinese people have no tradition of eating the animal, and some ethnic groups may have considered the practice forbidden. When President Theodore Roosevelt’s sons, Kermit and Theodore IV, killed a giant panda in 1928, their local guides refused to join them in eating the meat and called in a priest to purify the hayloft where the beast had been butchered. (The Roosevelt boys left no description of the taste.)

Who'd have thunk that Teddy Roosevelt would name one of his sons after Kermit the Frog?

It’s tempting to assume that giant pandas would taste like other members of the taxonomic family Ursidae, such as black and brown bears, which were a regular part of the frontier diet in 18th-century North America. Bear meat is darker and fattier than beef, although similar in flavor. The problem with the comparison, though, is that an animal’s diet greatly affects the flavor of its own flesh. Bears that dine mainly on salmon, for example, taste worse than those with a more varied diet. Since 99 percent of a giant panda’s diet is bamboo—with the occasional addition of a rodent, bird, or fish that popped out of a stream—it’s very unlikely that its flesh tastes anything like that of other bears.

I don't see how that follows at all;  I would be willing to believe that Pandas taste a lot like other bears that have been eating a mostly vegetarian diet, as they often do.  But there's only one way to find out.

General Tso's Panda anyone?

Don't You Hate it When This Happens?

If you indulge in dangerous hobbies, you should check your equipment to make sure they're adequate to the stresses you put on them.  I guess he's not a viable candidate for the Darwin Awards, since he has already reproduced.

RIP - George McGovern

I think I voted for you way back when, but those memories are getting kind of vague...

A couple excerpts from article on George, first, from AP, as the ultra-liberal,  McGovern an unwavering, often unrequited, liberal

He wasn't good at political gamesmanship. He suffered his worst blunders when he strayed from straight talk in his doomed 1972 presidential campaign. It didn't fit the man and it shook the credibility he treasured.

McGovern was a partisan without the poison that increasingly infected American politics. In his career-long quest for programs to feed the hungry, in the U.S. and worldwide, he worked in partnership with Bob Dole, a former Republican leader of the Senate, where they'd both served.

And a second, from a more libertarian perspective by Nick Gillespie at Reason Magazine, demonstrating how even McGovern altered his ultra-liberal perspectives after they collided with reality in his personal life:

Having sunk most of his savings into the venture, it went belly up, he said, partly because of a bad economy but also due to “federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc.”

Lamenting his lack of business experience while he was a legislator and presidential contender, McGovern concluded that “ ‘one-size-fits-all’ rules for business ignored the reality of the marketplace.”

As he explained, “setting thresholds for regulatory guidelines at artificial levels -- for example, 50 employees or more, $500,000 in sales -- takes no account of other realities, such as profit margins, labor intensive vs. capital intensive businesses, and local market economics.”

Midafternoon Music

Mike Gordon bass player of Phish, and Leo Kottke together in concert. I have an album of this, but there's songs here not on that album

Five Eagle Day at the Beach

Another outstanding morning at the beach.  Just a little cooler and breezier than yesterday, but still bright and sunny.

The only big story was the eagle show.  For the first time I can remember, I saw 5 eagles in the sky over the water simultaneously. I succeeded in getting four of them in a shot at the same time. Four of them were adults, and at least two of them engaged in some dog fighting.  We're speculating that a second adult pair is trying to move into the area, and they're being met with resistance from the current residents.

 At least once, we saw an eagle dive, pick up a fish, and get dive bombed by another adult, and drop the fish.  I think I caught that in the picture above; note the splash under the lowest eagle.

Fall is falling...

Sky and Red are enjoying the cool weather.  The cooler weather has Skye, at least, showing extra pep, despite her failing hind legs.  When it was time to go, she turned around and headed back up the beach for another spin. 

A family looking in the sand for a ring lost the previous night.  Remember, if you're going to take your ring off at the beach, do it before you start drinking...