Latest news with #Bohon
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists gobsmacked by never-seen footage of earth rupturing during Myanmar quake
When you watch the video below, don't get distracted by the cracking concrete or the metal gate rocking back and forth. Keep your eyes focused on the right side of the screen, where you will see an astonishing sight — one that earthquake scientists say has never been caught on camera before. The video was captured by a surveillance camera on March 28, when a violent earthquake struck the southeast Asian country of Myanmar — causing widespread damage as far away as Bangkok in neighbouring Thailand, and killing some 3,700 people, according to Myanmar's ruling military junta. The footage shows the moment the 7.7 magnitude quake caused the land on one side to thrust forward with a powerful jolt, as a rupture ripped opened the earth for 460 kilometres along the Sagaing Fault. "My jaw hit the floor," said Wendy Bohon, an earthquake geologist and science communication specialist in Sacramento, Calif., when she saw it. WATCH | Video captures land mass shifts, earth ruptures during Myanmar quake: Satellite imagery and other data had already helped scientists determine the extent of the rupture and approximately how much the earth moved. But seeing such a dramatic shift of the landscape in action is a first for scientists like Bohon, and may prove to be an invaluable tool in understanding the type of earthquake that ravaged Myanmar. "We have computer models of it. We have laboratory models of it. But all of those are far less complex than the actual natural system. So to see it actually happening was mind-blowing," she told CBC News. Why the earth shifted so powerfully "I keep going back and watching it," said geologist Judith Hubbard, an assistant professor at Cornell University's department of Earth and atmospheric sciences. "It's really kind of staggering to see a fault slide in real time, especially for someone like me, who has spent years studying these things, but always from more remote kinds of data, like offsets after the fact or data recorded by sensors," she said in an email interview. The Sagaing Fault runs some 1,400 kilometres, between the Indian and Eurasian plates, right through Myanmar and into the Andaman Sea. It's a strike-slip fault, meaning that when an earthquake happens, the land mass on one side of the fault slides past the other. Researchers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab used satellite and radar data to determine that the earthquake caused a horizontal displacement up to six metres in some locations along the fault. The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan made similar observations. Scientists like Hubbard say there is "compelling evidence" it was a supershear earthquake. That's when the speed of the rupture, which is generally slower-moving, travels faster than seismic waves that the earthquake produces, which can travel up to six kilometres per second. The video appeared May 11 on a YouTube channel called 2025 Sagaing Earthquake Archive, which has been curating social media videos and security camera footage since the quake struck. According to a Facebook post linked in the caption, the video was from a camera at a power facility in Tha Phay Wa. That's in the township of Thazi, some 110 kilometres south of the city of Mandalay, and close to the epicentre of the quake and its 6.7 magnitude aftershock. A Google Maps satellite view of the area shows a power facility located in this area and close to the Saigang Fault. Hubbard said that watching the video, it doesn't look like the quake was supershear at this location, because you see the seismic waves hit and the terrain shaking before the rupture occurs. But it's possible it was happening at supershear speed elsewhere along the fault. She said this video offers her and other earthquake scientists "a really striking observation." "We don't tend to have instruments right along the fault. They are often disrupted by shaking," she said. This happened right there in front of their eyes, on video, which means they don't only have to rely on analyzing and interpreting complicated recordings and data to determine what happened on the ground. WATCH | Myanmar earthquake rescue, relief efforts hindered by lack of supplies, civil war: How to tell what we're seeing is real Bohon said there's little doubt the video is real and she doesn't believe it's been altered or fabricated in any way. She said there are finer details in the background that you would have to pay close attention to, or that AI tools wouldn't know to generate — such as a bird flying away as the shaking begins about 12 seconds into the video, and power lines straining and eventually causing a transmission tower to buckle a few seconds later. "There's also another kind of more subtle thing," Bohon said. "It's called the geomorphology, the shape of the surface of the earth." Earthquakes, she explained, change the landscape and move hills and rivers. She pointed to the small hill in the background of the CCTV footage, situated along the fault, that thrusts forward. "That hill in the background, that you see move towards the camera," she said. "If you look at it, it's kind of long and linear, and then it just cuts off right about where the fault is." She said that if you can view the location using satellite imagery, you could look to see where the other half of that hill is in relation to the portion that moved forward in the quake. The observations Bohon made to verify what she was seeing in the video also told her a lot about the earthquake itself and that this kind of footage has "tremendous scientific value." She said that despite the violent shaking and and shifting of the earth, it was interesting to see that small structures were relatively unscathed considering the force of the quake. "Watching the destruction in the nearground and watching it in the background, and then even further away, was a really interesting look into how earthquakes impact things right next to the fault and at varying degrees away from the fault itself," she said. As "devastating and horrific" as earthquakes like the one in Myanmar can be, Bohon said they always present a learning opportunity that can hopefully be used to improve safety and protect lives. While this footage is a first, Bohon expects there will be more to come because of the prevalence of CCTV and other types of cameras that are capturing video around the clock and from multiple angles. WATCH | Rescue crews in Myanmar, Thailand work tirelessly to find quake survivors in rubble:
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Fact Check: NASA scrubbed its website to remove mentions of minorities and inclusion
Claim: NASA has removed mentions of women and minorities from its websites. Rating: What's True: The space agency's website had been scrubbed and changed to remove references to inclusion, diversity, gender and minorities, among other terms. It had also been modified to remove Spanish translations "per Fed mandate," according to NASA website change logs on GitHub. Further, a feature about one woman, geologist Wendy Bohon, had been removed from the website two weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump took office. However … What's False: … a page about women at NASA still appeared on the website as of this writing. Two weeks after President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, rumors spread that NASA had scrubbed its website to remove references to women. For example, a Reddit post (archived) that had 41,000 upvotes claimed mentions of "women in leadership" had been taken off the space agenct's website: NASA Ordered to Remove Anything About 'Women in Leadership' From Its Websites: Report by u/dem676 in space The claim also appeared on X. This rumor stemmed from a Feb. 4 report by 404 Media, an investigative news outlet focused on technology and the internet, including privacy issues and cybercrime. Based on an interview with an unidentified NASA employee and a verification of NASA's public GitHub repositories, 404 Media reported that the agency had been told to scrub the site for mentions of "anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.)." 404 Media said it had obtained a Jan. 22, 2025, memo sent to NASA employees that insisted on the urgency of the request (emphasis ours): Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5 pm ET today. This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request. Note that the list below is the list that exists this morning, but it may grow as the day goes on. DEIA Diversity (in context of DEIA) Equity (" ") Inclusion (" ") Accessibility (" ") MSI Minority Serving Institution Indigenous People EEJ EJ Environmental Justice Underrepresented groups/people Anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.) Snopes looked for copies of the memo and contacted NASA asking for one, and we will update this report should we obtain one. The claim spread further when geologist Wendy Bohon shared on LinkedIn (in a now-deleted post) and on Bluesky (archived) that a feature NASA published about her in 2023 had been removed: (Google Search) (Bluesky / Wendy Bohon) In an email exchange, Bohon shared the archived version of the feature. Using the original url, we also landed on a "page not found" error. "I do know that the link was live at 8 p.m. on Saturday and when I checked it again after seeing the article from 404 [Media] on Tuesday, the feature had been removed," Bohon said in an email, referring to Feb. 1 and 4. Bohon also shared a screen capture of the NASA landing page on which the article used to appear, titled "Women at NASA." A search for this specific page revealed it still existed, but it did not refer to the feature on Bohon. 404 Media also identified GitHub repositories belonging to NASA and published screen captures of them. GitHub is an open platform on which software and web developers can store and track their code. They typically save backups of the old code when they make changes so as to identify where things go wrong in case the new code fails. While Snopes had not found the exact change logs of the repositories published by 404 Media, we found others that reflected similar changes in the week of Jan. 20, 2025, the day Trump was inaugurated. NASA GitHub repositories sorted by modification date indicate that many changes on the website occurred that week. For example, the change log for the code of conduct of the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation showed that the developer had removed specific references to "age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation," as well as "diverse, inclusive, and healthy communities." The sections in red show the removed lines, while the green lines show what was added: (GitHub / NASA) A change log for NASA's website on the planet's "vitals" showed similar modifications. Further, a change log for NASA's GeneLab website showed that translation of certain terms to Spanish had been removed during that same week "per Fed mandate": (GitHub / NASA) In its reporting, 404 Media has used GitHub repositories to track changes made to government websites. Jack Izzo contributed reporting. Cole, Samantha. 'Workers at NASA Told to "Drop Everything" to Scrub Mentions of Indigenous People, Women from Its Websites'. 404 Media, 4 Feb. 2025, Koebler, Jason. 'GitHub Is Showing the Trump Administration Scrubbing Government Web Pages in Real Time'. 404 Media, 23 Jan. 2025, 'Modifying Content per Fed Mandate · Nasa/GeneLab-Training@c071692'. GitHub, Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. 'NASA'. GitHub, Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. 'Simplify Code of Conduct · Nasa/EMIT-Data-Resources@5bede8c'. GitHub, Accessed 7 Feb. 2025. 'Simplify Code of Conduct · Nasa/VITALS@bce4604'. GitHub, Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.
