Space

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β€˜Wobble’ in moon to cause severe flooding in US coastal cities in 2030s – syracuse.com

β€˜Wobble’ in moon to cause severe flooding in US coastal cities in 2030s – syracuse.com

The moon is currently in the β€œtide-amplifying part of its cycle,” according to NASA, but by mid-2030, when this intensified series returns, people living in coastal cities may be dealing with severe floods β€œevery day or two.” Why? This natural yet amplified lunar cycle will be coupled with higher sea levels caused by global warming, triggering a decade of dramatic surges in the number of days with high-tide flooding on nearly all mainland coastlines in the U.S., Hawaii and Guam. High-tide flooding, also known as β€œnuisance” or β€œsunny day” floods, is projected to exceed thresholds across the nation more often and occur in clusters that last a month or longer, the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team of the University of Hawaii said. Their study was published last month in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Solar weather and fire risk

I wonder how successful fire departments would be at putting out fires during severe solar weather. While it’s safe to say severe solar weather would require shutting down the power grid and would take offline most cellphone service and even radio communications, it’s not clear if it would it be strong enough nterfere with diesel engines or the largely gravity fed water systems.

It really depends on how strong the EMF is from the solar weather, how successful power companies are at grounding out power lines and even how dry the grass is under the certain to be arcing power lines. Peppers aren’t wrong to be very concerned with severe solar weather. It really would be very devastating in modern society.

NPR

New Effort To Clean Up Space Junk Reaches Orbit : NPR

A demonstration mission to test an idea to clean up space debris launched Monday morning local time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Known as ELSA-d, the mission will exhibit technology that could help capture space junk, the millions of pieces of orbital debris that float above Earth.

The more than 8,000 metric tons of debris threaten the loss of services we rely on for Earth-bound life, including weather forecasting, telecommunications and GPS systems.

Landstat 1 and CORONA Satellite

Been digging through some of that Landstat 1 satellite photos from the early 1970s and also some of the declassified CORONA satellite images from the early 1960s on Earth Explorer.

While the images are pretty low resolution – they’re satellite from 50 years ago – they’re still fascinating to get a glimpse of the earth from outer space a half century ago. I want to download more the next time I’m at the library, maybe tomorrow.