Tag Archives: compressed

We Compressed 1,000 Years of Storms into Four Years in Just One Week

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The flooding began in Texas before rains hit North Carolina, New Mexico, and Illinois.

In just one week, at least four events classified as 1,000-year rainfalls occurred across the United States, a phenomenon expected to take place only about 0.1% of the time each year.

“It’s rare for these intense rainfall events to occur in any given year,” stated Kristina Dahl, vice president of science at Climate Central.

Some experts noted that this is a significant statistical observation, likely linked to climate change, and may become more frequent.

Last week, heavy rains led to catastrophic flash floods in central Texas, claiming at least 120 lives across six counties. The Guadalupe River near Carville rose over 20 feet within just 90 minutes, causing widespread destruction.

Days later, Tropical Storm Chantal brought heavy rain to North Carolina, with reports of severe flooding in the central region, where some locations received nearly 12 inches of rain within a mere 24 hours. Local officials are still assessing the death toll from the Thursday floods amidst ongoing monitoring.

In New Mexico, three individuals lost their lives on Tuesday due to a devastating flash flood that swept through a remote village in Ruidoso, situated approximately 180 miles south of Albuquerque.

On the same day in Chicago, 5 inches of rain fell in merely 90 minutes around Garfield Park, necessitating multiple rescue operations in the west side of the city.

While experts acknowledge that 1,000-year floods are statistically rare, they also highlight that significant rain events happen every year in the U.S.

“The probability for any specific location is only 0.1% annually, meaning it’s highly unlikely to experience such an event in your area, yet they do occur somewhere in the country each year,” explained Rus Schumacher, director of the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University.

He emphasized that climate change is likely to increase the frequency of these extreme flood incidents.

While pinpointing the exact impact of climate change on specific weather events can be challenging, scientists concur that a warmer atmosphere leads to more intense rainfall and severe storms.

“This area demonstrates a strong correlation because the underlying physics is relatively straightforward,” Schumacher noted.

A warmer environment can retain more water, leading to storms that can unleash vast amounts of rain. Research suggests that for every degree Fahrenheit that the planet warms, the atmosphere can hold about 3% to 4% more moisture.

“It’s mathematically certain that as the atmosphere retains more water, it can release more during storms,” stated Dave Gouchs, a hydrologist who directs forecast services for a company based in Mammoth Lake, California, focusing on snow and water resource measurements.

However, terrain also plays a critical role during heavy rainfall events, Gouchs added.

In Texas, the hills and canyons are particularly prone to flash flooding, as the thin soil above the bedrock limits water absorption, according to Gouchs.

In New Mexico, the village of Ruidoso was severely affected by last year’s wildfires, leaving burn scars that exacerbate runoff and heighten the risk of flash floods.

The recent events highlight the devastating consequences of climate change on extreme weather, as well as the urgent need for community protection measures both before and after such incidents, remarked Dahl from Climate Central.

She emphasized that recovery efforts could take years, with ongoing public health implications that may last even longer.

“These events come and go in the news cycle. We move on to the next story before fully grasping the impact,” Dahl pointed out. “For those affected, it’s easy to forget that healing from such events is a prolonged process.”

Source: www.nbcnews.com

Starfish possess only a substantial, compressed head and lack a body.

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A juvenile Patilia miniata starfish with fluorescent staining highlighting the skeleton, muscles, and nervous system.

Laurent Formery

Scientists trying to figure out where the starfish’s head is located have come to the surprising conclusion that the starfish is practically the entire body of the animal. The discovery not only solves this long-standing mystery, but also helps us understand how evolution created the dramatic diversity of animal forms on Earth.

Starfish, also known as sea stars, belong to a group of animals called echinoderms, which includes sea urchins and sea cucumbers. Their strange body design has long puzzled biologists. Most animals, including humans, have distinct cranial and caudal ends, and a line of symmetry runs down the middle of the body, dividing it into two halves of its mirror image. Animals with this bilateral symmetry are called bilateral animals.

Echinoderms, on the other hand, have five lines of symmetry radiating from a central point and no physically obvious heads or tails. However, they are closely related to animals like us, having evolved from bilaterally symmetrical ancestors. Even larvae are bilaterally symmetrical and then radically reorganize their bodies as they metamorphose into adults.

These large differences make it difficult for scientists to find and compare equivalent body parts in bilateral animals to understand how echinoderms evolved. “Morphology tells us very little,” he says. Laurent Formery at Stanford University in California. “That’s too strange.”

Formalie and his colleagues decided to examine a set of genes known to direct head-to-tail control. All bilateralist organizations. In these animals, these genes are turned on and expressed in stripes in the outer layers of the developing embryo. The genes expressed in each stripe define which point it is on the cranio-caudal axis.

The aim was to see if gene expression patterns could reveal the hidden “molecular anatomy” of echinoderms. “This particular gene suite is ideal for investigating the diversity of the most extreme forms of animals,” says the team leader. chris lowe, also at Stanford University. “I think echinoderms are a very extreme experiment in how to use that bidirectional network to produce very, very different body plans.”

To the team’s surprise, the gene that determines the head edge of bilateral animals was expressed in a line running down the center of each star star’s lower arm. The next leading gene is expressed on both sides of this line, and so on.

Even more bizarrely, genes normally expressed in the trunk of bilateral animals were missing from the animals’ outer layers. This suggests that the starfish abandoned its trunk region and released its outer layer to evolve in a new direction, Formery said.

The findings show that “the bodies of echinoderms, at least with respect to their external surfaces, are essentially lip-walking heads.” Thurston Lacari from the University of Victoria, Canada, was not involved in the study. Animals like us may have swam away to escape predation. “Echinoderms didn’t need trunks because they were hunched over and armored,” Lacari says.

The idea that echinoderms are “head-like” animals is “interesting and powerful,” he says. Andreas Heyland at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. This raises some very important and fundamental questions about how ecological factors shape the evolution of anatomy, he says. “Finding the underlying conserved patterns provides important insights into how development evolves.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com