My Blue Room

Imagine peacefully sailing in the ocean when suddenly a 40-ton, 30-foot-long whale flips into the air and crashes onto your boat! That’s exactly what happened to Paloma Werner and Ralph Mothes in the waters off Cape Town, South Africa, this past week.

This amazing photo was taken by a tourist seconds before the whale landed on the boat, thrashing about and damaging its steel mast and cabin. The huge mammal then returned to the ocean. The sailors weren’t hurt, but it was still a frightening surprise.

“It really was quite incredible but very scary,” said Werner. “We thought the whale was going to go under the boat and come up on the other side. We thought it would see us. But instead it sprang out of the sea.”

The whale left blubber and skin on the boat. According to a marine scientist, the whale was probably badly bruised but did not seriously injure itself.

Why exactly do whales breach, or flip themselves, out of the water? Scientists have differing theories. They think whales might do this simply for fun, or it could have a purpose, such as cleaning barnacles and other sea debris from the skin. No matter what the reason, whales rarely land on boats when they breach, which is a good thing for sailors and these extraordinary sea creatures.

reposted from www.scholastic.com. Click the picture to view the original post.

Avatar’s story is being played out in real life.

Reposted from “For the Next 7 Generations” blog…originally posted at Survival.org “The Movement for Tribal Peoples” 25 January 2010

Following the film ‘Avatar’’s win at the Golden Globes, tribal people have claimed that the film tells the real story of their lives today.

A Penan man from Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of Borneo, told Survival, ‘The Penan people cannot live without the rainforest. The forest looks after us, and we look after it. We understand the plants and the animals because we have lived here for many, many years, since the time of our ancestors.

‘The Na’vi people in ‘Avatar’ cry because their forest is destroyed. It’s the same with the Penan. Logging companies are chopping down our big trees and polluting our rivers, and the animals we hunt are dying.’

Kalahari Bushman Jumanda Gakelebone said, ‘We the Bushmen are the first inhabitants in southern Africa. We are being denied rights to our land and appeal to the world to help us. ‘Avatar’ makes me happy as it shows the world about what it is to be a Bushman, and what our land is to us. Land and Bushmen are the same.’

Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, known as the Dalai Lama of the Rainforest, said, ‘My Yanomami people have always lived in peace with the forest. Our ancestors taught us to understand our land and animals. We have used this knowledge carefully, for our existence depends on it. My Yanomami land was invaded by miners. A fifth of our people died from diseases we had never known.’

Director James Cameron received his Golden Globes awards for ‘Avatar’ last week, and revealed one of the central ideas of the film.

‘Avatar asks us to see that everything is connected,’ he said in his acceptance speech, ‘All human beings to each other, and us to the earth.

Cameron was inspired by the Maori language of New Zealand when devising the language spoken by the Na’vi.

Survival’s director Stephen Corry says, ‘Just as the Na’vi describe the forest of Pandora as ‘their everything’, for most tribal peoples, life and land have always been deeply connected.

‘The fundamental story of Avatar – if you take away the multi-coloured lemurs, the long-trunked horses and warring androids – is being played out time and time again, on our planet.

‘Like the Na’vi of ‘Avatar’, the world’s last-remaining tribal peoples – from the Amazon to Siberia – are also at risk of extinction, as their lands are appropriated by powerful forces for profit-making reasons such as colonization, logging and mining.’

‘One of the best ways of protecting the our world’s natural heritage is surprisingly simple; it is to secure the land rights of tribal peoples.’

About a week ago and again Nov. 6 there were asteroids that came really close to Earth. One, ~10 meters wide, exploded over Indonesia on 10/8/09. Here’s more from spaceweather.com:

INDONESIAN ASTEROID: Picture this: A 10-meter wide asteroid hits Earth and explodes in the atmosphere with the energy of a small atomic bomb. Frightened by thunderous sounds and shaking walls, people rush out of their homes, thinking that an earthquake is in progress. All they see is a twisting trail of debris in the mid-day sky:

Click to view an Indonesian news report

This really happened on Oct. 8th around 11 am local time in the coastal town of Bone, Indonesia. The Earth-shaking blast received remarkably little coverage in Western press, but meteor scientists have given it their full attention. “The explosion triggered infrasound sensors of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) more than 10,000 km away,” report researchers Elizabeth Silber and Peter Brown of the Univ. of Western Ontario in an Oct. 19th press release. Their analysis of the infrasound data revealed an explosion at coordinates 4.5S, 120E (close to Bone) with a yield of about 50 kton of TNT. That’s two to three times more powerful than World War II-era atomic bombs.

The asteroid that caused the blast was not known before it hit and took astronomers completely by surprise. According to statistical studies of the near-Earth asteroid population, such objects are expected to collide with Earth on average every 2 to 12 years.

Then another newly discovered asteroid, ~7 meters wide, made the closest pass (about 8700 miles from Earth’s surface) of any but two others, becoming the third closest asteroid on record.
ASTEROID NEAR MISS: On Nov. 6th at 2132 UT, asteroid 2009 VA barely missed Earth when it flew just 14,000 km above the planet’s surface. That’s well inside the “Clarke Belt” of geosynchronous satellites. If it had hit, the ~6-meter wide space rock would have disintegrated in the atmosphere as a spectacular fireball, causing no significant damage to the ground. 2009 VA was discovered just 15 hours before closest approach by astronomers working at the Catalina Sky Survey.

Keep your eyes on the skies! It’s very active right now, and these beauties were previously unknown. Technorati Tags: space, near, Earth, asteroid, miss