Free Republic

Summer of 2009 1) Hurricane Bill 2) big fire on La Palma Island 3) at the same time, same area, Russian subs and surface vessels were operating 4) Wonder of wonders, a Russian cargo ARCTIC SEA ship "disappears" after being fitted at the port of Murmansk.MURMANSK,  in spite of massive multinational hi-tech search and chase operation. 5) eventually the cargo ship is suddenly "found" in the same area off the Cape Verde Islands, where the Russian subs had been operating. 6) same area is home to the Cumbre Vieja Shelf, undersea volcanoes see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja and: http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_grl.pdf and: http://www.maine.gov/doc/nrimc/mgs/explore/hazards/tsunami/jan05.htm It is...

deepest hole ever drilled, the Kola Deep borehole in the Russian Arctic, reaches only 0.2 percent the way to the center...even the best scientific maps didn’t look much better than your middle-school textbook cartoon showing an outer crust, an inner core and a thick layer called the mantle in between But that picture is changing. Researchers... are...seeing is full of complex detail...The mantle appears to be layered like an onion, with major transitions 250 miles and 410 miles down. At the 410-mile level, researchers recently identified a tremendous interior mountain range, with peaks perhaps even taller than Mount Everest. “...

Native Sweden Volume 61 Number 4, July/August 2008 by Zach Zorich Indigenous Saami are rediscovering their long-lost heritage Smithsonian archaeologist Noel Broadbent and Tim Bayliss-Smith of Cambridge University walk past a line of 1,100-year-old hut foundations at Grundskatan. (Zach Zorich) Smithsonian archaeologist Noel Broadbent offers me a handful of blueberries he has picked from the shrubs that hug the forest floor. I pop them into my mouth. The pulp and seeds are sugary, rough, and slick at the same time. In early September the leaves change color and the berries ripen on Sweden's Hornsland peninsula. Broadbent crouches by the trail...

Russia's Sami fight for their lives By Jorn Madslien BBC News, Lovozero, Russia Bored youths kick a football against a grey concrete wall. A husky dog languishes in the quiet street. In this town, where many would struggle to pay for a bus ticket, there are hardly any cars. Most Sami have been forced to quit their nomadic lives "The last villagers came to Lovozero in 1968," says Nina Afanasyeva. "But there were no jobs for them." These days, some make traditional garments and souvenirs for the occasional tourist. And the Tundra reindeer farm cooperative provides some 300 jobs. Yet...

Research now indicates that the enormous tanks holding discarded submarine fuel rods in the Andreeva Bay may explode at any time, creating a nuclear nightmare for Northern Europe. Norway and other Western authorities have argued for years that the stockpile of highly radioactive nuclear waste on the Kola peninsula poses an environmental hazard to the local population and for Norway. New research A new report from Rosatom, the Russian government's highest nuclear authority, shows that there is a grave danger that the stockpile can explode. For Norway the consequences could exceed the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and...