February 2010

Earthquake in Chile

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Early this morning, a massive earthquake of 8.8 magnitude struck central Chile, causing buildings to collapsed, and setting off a  tsunami warning. The quake hit about 100km (60 miles) from Concepcion,  Chile's second-largest city, with a population of more than 200,000 people. The President of Chile, Michele Bachelet, declared a "'state of catastrophe." The quake in Chile was 1,000 times more powerful than the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that caused widespread damage in Haiti on Jan 12, killing at least 230,000. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world/americas/28chile.html).

Slowmo Lightening Devil's Tower, Wyoming

Tom Warner is an atmospheric sciences Ph.D. student at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. His research area is lightening and associated

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phenomena, and he has created a method for recording lightening. He uses a high-speed video camera that can record up to 54,000 fps. in a continous recording that goes to a looping memory buffer (when the buffer fills, it starts overwriting). When Warner sees lightening, he triggers the camera at the end of the flash, which causes the camera to save to real memory the preceding 2.5 seconds of video. That video is then transferred to Warner's computer for later analysis.

This video shows lightening striking near Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. You can read more here