Free Republic

Skywatchers will have many opportunities in 2016 to see just how small we are in the universe. Four days into the new year, hundreds of meteors will dance across the night skies.... Come September, an outer ring of the sun's annular eclipse will be visible across Africa. In between, there will be spectacular shooting stars, super moons, and lunar eclipses to take in. ... From about Jan. 20 to Feb. 20, all five planets that are visible to the naked eye — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — will occupy the morning sky. This hasn't happened since 2005, according...

(Phys.org)—When a huge meteor collided with Earth about 2.5 million years ago in the southern Pacific Ocean it not only likely generated a massive tsunami but also may have plunged the world into the Ice Ages, a new study suggests. A team of Australian researchers says that because the Eltanin meteor – which was up to two kilometres across - crashed into deep water, most scientists have not adequately considered either its potential for immediate catastrophic impacts on coastlines around the Pacific rim or its capacity to destabilise the entire planet's climate system. "This is the only known deep-ocean impact...

A new record has been set for the deepest fish ever seen in the world, at an incredible depth of 26,722 feet (8,145 metres). The snailfish was found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, and breaks the previous record by almost 1,640 feet (500 metres). The finding was part of an international expedition that also found many other new species at the extreme depths.

Things are heating up on planet Earth. Average global temperatures shattered records this June ... for the second month in a row, according to a new report from the National Climactic Data Center. The NCDC, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, analyzed data from 2,000 weather stations scattered across the globe measuring both ocean and land temperatures and found that global average temperatures surpassed the previous record by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit. That makes June 2014 the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880. If this trend continues, 2014 could top 2010 as the warmest year recorded.

Jay T. Cullen, Associate Professor of marine chemistry at the University of Victoria, Daily Kos diary, Jan. 4, 2014: [...] Fukushima derived Cs has reached the west coast as of June 2013 by ocean transport but [the] concentrations of Cs continue to be well below levels thought to pose environmental or public health threats. There have been a number of popular press articles that [...] report the timing of the arrival of the radionuclides but offer no perspective on the actual levels and the associated risk to residents of the west coast (e.g. link). [...] About 93% of radioactivity in...

The World is at a critical crossroads. The Fukushima disaster in Japan has brought to the forefront the dangers of Worldwide nuclear radiation. The crisis in Japan has been described as “a nuclear war without a war”. In the words of renowned novelist Haruki Murakami: “This time no one dropped a bomb on us … We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives.” Nuclear radiation –which threatens life on planet earth– is not front page news in comparison to the most insignificant issues...

We've extensively documented that radioactivity from Fukushima is spreading to North America. More than a year ago, 15 out of 15 bluefin tuna tested in California waters were contaminated with radioactive cesium from Fukushima. Bluefin tuna are a wide-ranging fish, which can swim back and forth between Japan and North America in a year:

Nicaragua has awarded a Chinese company a 100-year concession to build an alternative to the Panama Canal, in a step that looks set to have profound geopolitical ramifications. The president of the country's national assembly, Rene Nuñez, announced the $40bn (£26bn) project, which will reinforce Beijing's growing influence on global trade and weaken US dominance over the key shipping route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The name of the company and other details have yet to be released, but the opposition congressman Luis Callejas said the government planned to grant a 100-year lease to the Chinese operator. The national...

Scientists say a fault-line running across Alaska could cause tsunamis of the same magnitude as the Japanese disaster of March last year. Attention has turned to the Alaskan-Aleutian subduction zone, a region where one of the earth's tectonic plate, carrying the Pacific Ocean, drops beneath the North American plate. A particular section of the fault near the Semidi Islands has not ruptured since at least 1788, and measurements on this area - which lies four to five kilometres under water - reveal the pressure is accumulating rapidly. If the Pacific Ocean plate slips, as happened in the geographically-similar Tohoku subduction...

President Barack Obama said during the visit of Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping in February that “we welcome China’s peaceful rise [and] we believe that a strong and prosperous China is one that can help bring stability and prosperity to the region and the world.” Few presidents have made statements so stunningly disingenuous as this. For as he was speaking, Obama was presiding over a shift in military doctrine whose central tenet is that China is, and will be, the main military threat to the United States for at least the next generation. Weeks earlier, in November 2011, the Pentagon...

Call it China’s ‘Christmas surprise.’ In a series of grainy photos given a pass by government Internet censors starting December 25, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force unveiled the country’s first stealth fighter prototype, the Chengdu J-20. For alarmists, the Pacific balance of power seemed to shift in an instant. Armed with hundreds of fast, elusive J-20s in coming years, the PLAAF could dominate the South China Sea, reaffirming China’s rise as a global power and elbowing aside less audacious, tech-savvy rivals. ‘(The) Asia-Pacific’s political landscape will be changed as China’s military capability can win over countries in this region,’...

It looks like this is the week China’s military rapidly advancing military tech keeps getting the limelight . First, we saw pics of the Asian giant’s new stealth fighter. Now, it looks like China is one step closer to fielding ballistic missiles aimed at holding U.S. forces throughout the Pacific at bay. Adm. Robert Willard, the top U.S. officer in the Pacific said this week that China’s new DF-21D anti-ship balistic missiles, with their 900-mile range, have reached an early operational status. Apparently, the missiles, widely fretted over in Washington as one of the most serious threats to the United...

Taiwan's high hopes to get advanced weapons to boost its defense capabilities, the United States remains undecided over whether or not to sell F-16 C/D fighters to Taiwan, Defense Minister Kao Hua-chu said Monday. "The purchase of the high performance jet fighters is a politically sensitive issue due to the U.S.' efforts to maintain a strong presence in the Pacific and to its political difficulties with Beijing, " Kao said when answering questions from Legislator Lin Yu-fang at a legislative hearing. Lin's question came after William A. Stanton, director of the Taipei Office of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT),...

In the last month, three of the four American SSGNs (former ballistic missile subs each now carrying 154 cruise missiles and SEAL commando teams) appeared in the Pacific and Indian oceans (the Philippines, South Korea and Diego Garcia). Some through this was a message for China, but, in fact, the SSGNs go where the potential trouble is. When questioned, U.S. Navy officials responded that, for the first time, all four SSGNs were operating at sea, in locations distant from their bases. Two years ago, the U.S. Navy completed the conversion of the last of four Ohio class ballistic missile submarines...

F/A-18 Hornets started to take off in waves just after 5 p.m. yesterday as more than 100 crew members wearing different colored shirts—including brown for maintenance, yellow for handlers and purple for fuelers—worked the deck of the ship, mostly using hand signals in the noisy and windy environment. Fifty miles south of Oahu, a two-seater Hornet powered up with enough force to cause a vibration in the chest and launched off the deck in less than three seconds at 150 mph. With 4,500 sailors and about 60 aircraft, the aircraft carrier Reagan is the centerpiece of the "Rim of the...

US and Japanese naval forces have successfully completed the Undersea Warfare Exercise (USWEX) in the western Pacific Ocean. The American nuclear-powered super carrier, USS George Washington (CVN 73) participated in the exercise held from June 21 to 25. The exercise was conducted by elements from Commander, Battle Force 7th Fleet (CTF 70), Commander, Patrol & Reconnaissance Force, 7th Fleet (CTF 72), Commander, Submarine Force, 7th Fleet (CTF 74), Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 5, Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 15 and components from the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF). "This year during USWEX we continued to strengthen interoperability between the US Navy and...

Following the longest flight yet by an air-breathing scramjet engine, the X-51A Waverider team is waiting to see whether the largely successful first launch of the hypersonic demonstrator will unlock funding for further development of the ­technology. The X-51A was launched over the Pacific on May 26, achieving scramjet ignition and acceleration, but the engine ran for only 200 sec. rather than the 300 sec. planned, and the vehicle reached around Mach 5 instead of accelerating beyond Mach 6. When it began to slow down and telemetry was lost, the flight was terminated and the vehicle destroyed, says Charles Brink,...

Last month was the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). At the naval parade held to commemorate the event, in front of delegations from 29 countries, PLAN Commander General Wu Shengli declared that Beijing intended to build aircraft carriers, spurring widespread speculation over China’s blue-water ambitions. So what should we make of Beijing’s assertiveness and openness about its carrier plans? My advice: ignore it. Traditional measures of naval power fail to give an accurate picture of China’s maritime ambitions and capabilities. Beijing currently lacks the hardware and skills to keep a carrier at sea,...

The growing capacity of China military force tip the balance in the regional stability of the Asia Pacific area including Taiwan Strait and Southeast Asia, noted Admiral Robert F. Willard, the current Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), while adding that in a broader context, the biggest challenge to US navy in the Pacific Ocean is China, according to Liberty Times report. “In response to China’s immense presence in the Pacific Ocean, the PACOM will step up its efforts to maintain the regional stability,” said Willard at an interview by the Straits Times, a Singaporean news media. China is...

The United States has six naval fleets and eleven aircraft carrier strike groups patrolling the world's oceans and seas. The U.S. Navy is as large as the world's next thirteen biggest navies combined . Washington has as many aircraft carriers as all other nations together. Russia has one; China has none. The U.S. and its NATO allies - Britain (2), Italy (2), France (1) and Spain (1) - account for 17 of 22 in service in the world. Ten of the eleven American carriers are Nimitz class nuclear-powered supercarriers, substantially larger than most all non-U.S. ones. The U.S. Navy has...