Mine Therapy

Historical records indicate an improvement in breathing of miners from Roman and medieval times. In 1843, Dr. Feliks Boczkowski, a Polish physician stationed at a salt mine, noticed that miners there did not suffer from lung diseases. During WWII, Dr. Karl Hermann Spannagel noticed an improvement in his patients after they hid in salt caves to escape heavy bombing. Most recently, in the 1950s it was documented that Polish mine workers rarely suffered from tuberculosis.

Research suggests that salt-permeated air helps dissolve phlegm in the bronchial tubes and kills micro-organisms that cause infections. This greatly helps patients undertaking asthma treatment and so mine therapy is currently being practiced in Slovakia, Poland, and Ukraine.

The photos above (Credit:Kirill Kuletski) shows tunnels, which are 300 meters underground, in the clinic at the Ukranian Solotvyno salt mine. Between three and five thousand people are treated here yearly, and many more have been wait-listed. On average patients spend 24 days at the facility and use a lift to travel down for afternoon or overnight sessions. But salt isn't the only option...

Here we can see four adults enjoying some radon therapy at a mine in Boulder, Montana. The use of radon is also quite an old therapeutic process. In Europe, bathing in hot springs with high radon content goes back over 6000 years. The Japanese have been benefiting from radioactive hot springs for over 800 years in Misasa and Tamagawa. In today's society, more than 75,000 patients looking for a natural arthritis cure pay a visit to radon therapy clinics and underground caverns for radon inhalation and/or bathing. The Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine in Montana offers full therapy for $225, including a 10-day stay at Mine Motel, or just a 60 minute session for $7. They don't discriminate against other species either, according to a testimonial from Irving the Cat, who overcame his thyroid problem after a visit in 2000.

Guatemala Sinkhole

Earlier this week a massive sinkhole opened up in Guatemala, which managed to suck up a three story building during the process. The hole, located in the dense downtown core of Guatemala City, is 30 meters across and 60 meters deep. This is the second major sinkhole in Guatemala to open up in the last three years.

A sinkhole is a naturally occurring cavity in the ground, frequently found in limestone bedrock, which is caused by water erosion as the liquid travels from the surface to the depths beneath. They often vary in size from less than a meter to several hundred meters both in diameter and depth. This hole in particular comes in the wake of Tropical Storm Agatha. The image above was released by the nation's own government to show the tremendous effects of the deadly storm. The video below (RussiaTV) shows footage of the sinkhole as well as some additional images:

Iceland Watches Katla Closely

The world has been severely impacted by the March 2010 eruption of glacial volcano Eyjafjallakokull. Flights coming in and out of Europe were halted for one week due to drifting volcanic ash and dust that made for potentially dangerous flying conditions. Recently most flights have been resumed, but the threat of an eruption still exists, and attention has been diverted to Katla, a neighboring volcano with a repeated history of even more violent eruptions.

Katla peaks at 1512 meters and is located east of the smaller glacier Eyjafjallajokull. It is also partially covered by the Myrdalsjokull glacier with an area of 595 km². The major concern for geophysicists is that the recent eruption will trigger an even more powerful eruption of Katla, which has been the historical trend. Eyjafjallojokull has blown 3 times in the past thousand years, in 920AD, in 1616, and between 1821 and 1823. Each time it set off Katla.

The volcano normally erupts every 40-80 years and its last eruption was in 1918, shown in the photograph above, which was sold at an auction to Bjornsog Toggle. Following the 2010 eruption Icelandic President Olafur Grimsson released a statement "the time for Katla to erupt is coming close... we [Iceland] have prepared... it is high time for European governments and airline authorities all over the world to start planning for the eventual Katla eruption".

Eruptions like this put our small world into perspective. One volcano erupts and it can have an enormous impact on the rest of the world. For example, consider Iceland's worst modern time eruption in 1783 when the Laki volcano blew. The lava shot 1.4 km into the air and more than 120 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide was released into the atmosphere, which would transform the world. The results included Britain's notorious "sand summer", creating havoc with harvests in France, and changing the climate so dramatically that New Jersey recorded its largest snowfall and Egypt experienced one of its most enduring droughts. For now we can only wait and hope for the best...

Searchers Set Record Finding Meteorites

The luminous fireball that lit up Alberta and Saskatchewan's night sky last fall, previously covered on Markit Science (Meteorite Spotted + Found!), has set a Canadian record for the number of meteorites recovered from a single fall. Scientists from University of Calgary have searched for the scattered remnants and have found more than 1000 fragments in fields near Lloydminster on the Alberta-Saskatchewan boundary.

This beat the previous record of 700 pieces set after a meteor hit the ground in central Alberta in 1960. Now that the snow has melted, the search continues, and Alan Hildebrand says they are finding dozens of meteorites a day.

Meteorite Spotted + Found!

The fireball seen in the video above was captured by a peace officer's dashboard cam in Devon, Alberta, providing an excellent account of this event. The meteorite fall occurred on 2008 November 20 at 5:26.42 MST. It was seen by thousands of people across the Canadian prairies, sparking a wide range of reactions from sheer awe to fear and panic.

Thousands of meteorites are expected to have rained down over a 20 square km area, but they were difficult to find in the varied terrain of Buzzard Coulee. After quick examination of the suspected region of impact, the first meteorites were located by Ellen Milley, a PhD candidate at the University of Calgary, in a frozen fish pond near the agricultural community of Lone Rock, Saskatchewan.

The largest meteorite fragment to be recovered in the first days was a 13 kg whopper which creating a form fitting indentation 5-10 cm deep before bouncing out and resting on the frozen ground a few cm away. Take a look at the detailed topographical map to see the exact impact location of the large meteorite.

Oldest Rocks Discovered

Along the Northern Quebec coast of Hudson's Bay, Canadian and U.S. researchers claim to have found the oldest rocks in the world. The rocks are estimated to be 4.28 billion years old, according to a team of researchers from McGill University, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. Jonathan O'Neil, a Ph.D. candidate at McGill's department of Earth and planetary sciences and the lead author of a study to be published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, said the discovery would offer new insight into the early Earth.

"Our discovery not only opens the door to further unlock the secrets of the Earth's beginnings," said O'Neil in a statement. "Geologists now have a new playground to explore how and when life began, what the atmosphere may have looked like, and when the first continent formed."