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[ New Beginnings Birth of An Island - Tongan Archipelago ]

THIS WEEK ON SCIENCE FRIDAY...
16 July 1999:
Searching the Web/Satellites and Disease If it seems like you get page after page of useless results when you search for specific items on the web, you're probably right. A study published last week in the journal Nature reveals that the major search engines are failing to index much of the information available on the web, while the size of the web continues to grow. The search engine that covered the largest portion of the web was Northern Light, but even that service was only able to find about 16 percent of the web's estimated information content. And new information can take up to six months to appear in major search engines.
The researchers estimate that there are 2.8 million web servers in operation, containing over 800 million pages - containing, in total, over six terabytes of text data. Much of that data was commercial in nature - and, despite what you may have heard about the web, the researches estimate that only 1.5 percent of the web is devoted to porn. But how can researchers on the web hope to track down what they're looking for among the piles of chaff? We'll search for an answer on this hour of Science Friday.
We'll also talk about an innovative way to keep a high-flying eye on potential disease outbreaks -- satellites. By tracking rainfall, vegetation patterns, and other climate signs using satellite data, researchers have been able to keep tabs on areas of the globe that may be ripe for disease. In this week's issue of the journal Science, researchers report that they have used satellite data to successfully predict outbreaks of Rift Valley fever, a mosquito-borne disease. Other scientists have been using satellites to monitor potential hotspots of diseases such as hantavirus and Lyme disease. And it's not just weather-related data that gets eyed from above - some researchers are even using satellites to locate piles of junk tires, a notorious breeding place for potentially disease-carrying mosquitoes. We'll talk about the possibilities of using remote sensing to help predict diseases, and whether or not information from space can be used in time to allow public health workers to squelch potential epidemics before they start.

Scientists can monitor phytoplankton
in the Indian Ocean - and use that to help
predict cholera. (NASA image)

Guests:
Steve Lawrence
Research Scientist
NEC Research Institute
Princeton, New Jersey

Compton J. Tucker
Earth Sciences Directorate
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland

Dr. Jonathan Patz, M.D.
Director Program on Health Effects of Global Environmental Change
Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health
Baltimore, Maryland

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Great Lakes levels dip to 32-year low

ROCHESTER, N.Y. - Last year, spring torrents pushed Lake Ontario above flood levels and storm waves turned a few shoreline homes near Rochester into small islands.
This year, the situation is the opposite: The beaches of Lake Ontario and the other Great Lakes are lengthening, and the numbers show the grim state of water levels in the five lakes, which have ebbed to their lowest since 1967.
Lake Ontario recently stood at 7 inches below average. Seven inches may not seem like much water, but that's on a lake that is roughly 200 miles long and 50 miles across.
Lake Erie was down 3 inches, Superior was 6 inches off and Michigan and Huron came up 8 inches short.
The lakes will probably recede an additional 1 1/2 feet through November before inching back up again, experts said. Little rain and snow during the past year are blamed.

From January 1998 through this spring, the Army Corps of Engineers estimates that precipitation was 20 percent below normal in the Great Lakes Basin. Dozens of small boats have run aground on the lakes. Many more have gouged hulls or damaged propellers after hitting obstacles that previously were too deep to worry about. Freighters and other large ships don't go near the shallow water where sandbars are appearing.
Even a pleasure trip can be ruined. After a brisk voyage along Lake Ontario's southern shore, Dave Walsh steered his 28-foot sailboat toward home, carefully hugging the west-shore pier as he entered Irondequoit Bay.
Thirty yards off the pier, the sailboat ran gently aground on a sandbar, stranding Walsh and his sons, Russell, 15, and Jeffrey, 14. It was a first for Walsh in 30 years of sailing on Lake Ontario.

"The last 30 years, with the lake levels significantly above average, there was a greater cushion; people weren't that close to that bottom," said Roger Gauthier, a hydrologist with the Corps of Engineers in Detroit.
Lake Ontario has one advantage over the other lakes: a plug of sorts. A dam sits on the 40-year-old St. Lawrence Seaway leading down to the Atlantic Ocean, and the flow through its gates has been reduced slightly.
"We're just hoping for the best," said Tony Eberhardt, chief of the Lower Great Lakes Water Control Center. Business is leaking away from small marinas unable to rent out their shallow dock spaces. All 18 slips at Long Pond Marina in Greece, a Rochester suburb, lie empty, and owner Mark Sheffield reckons he'll lose $10,000 in fees.
He's staying afloat with the increased demand for boat repairs.
The sandbar that left Walsh and his sons high and dry was 4 feet below the surface, but his sailboat - "Blown Away" - has a draft of 5 feet. Nothing they tried would get the boat off the sand, not even firing up the engine. But then a fellow cruised by on a jet ski. He dismounted and waded across the sandbar to tie a line to their boat. "Blown Away" was towed off the sand without damage, but Walsh knows he'll have to be more careful on a planned trip to Thousand Islands, a St. Lawrence Seaway resort region. "When you hit the bottom there, you're mostly hitting granite," he said.

GEOLOGY
[ Gold under the waves
Giant nugget may be world's richest trove ] A crater in an undersea volcano near Japan may be the biggest pot of precious metals ever found, holding gold and silver each worth around $2 billion. Its treasure is a 30-acre lump of minerals, as broad as the Pentagon building and 100 feet high, that is still growing as mineral-rich, scalding-hot water spews from a profusion of chimneylike vents.
Finding the monster nugget "is the most exciting thing I've ever been associated with," says volcanologist Richard Fiske of the Smithsonian Institution, who worked with the Japanese-led research team that announced the find in last week's Science. They spotted it through the portholes of a three-person research submarine, the Shinkai 2000, in water 4,000 feet deep in an active volcanic region about 250 miles south of Tokyo. It comes as interest is heating up in deep-sea mining worldwide.

[ Deep-sea discovery
But did any of the wine survive? ] Around the time that Homer composed his epic of a hapless sailor named Odysseus, some mariners from the land of Phoenicia lost their own battle with the sea. Having set out from the shores of Lebanon with a cargo of wine probably bound for Egypt, they encountered a storm that sank their vessels more than a quarter of a mile beneath the waves.