10 | EXPRESS | 08.06.2014 | WEDNESDAY
nation+world WASHINGTONPOST.COM WORLD VIEWS
The scene was too neat. I had just arrived at the shattered remains of a mosque in Gaza City that had been hit by an Israeli airstrike. There was rubble, glass and metal everywhere. But on a patch of ground in front of the structure was a small carpet; on top lay piles of burned, ripped Korans, Islam’s holy book. The symbolism was almost too perfect. It was clear that someone had placed them there to attract sympathy for the Palestinian cause. A TV crew spotted the pile and filmed it. Mission accomplished. In almost every conflict, each side tries to manipulate foreign journalists into covering its grievances, to look at the destruction through its lens. But Israelis and Palestinians take this to a whole new level. The Israelis also are slick. From their media war room, they run one of the most sophisticated operations to sway journalists. During the initial ground incursion, the military was livetweeting propaganda, vowing to crush Hamas, providing quotes for newspapers to publish. In Gaza, it’s a different kind of manipulation, more subtle. Take a recent attack on a neighborhood in Gaza City. Hamas blamed an Israeli strike; Israel said Hamas accidentally fired a mortar into the neighborhood. Children died. In the road was a small pool of blood. I noticed a child’s slipper in the middle. The slipper was intact. There were no bloodstains. And next to the slipper, a black plastic toy gun. Again I noticed a TV cameraman drawn to this powerful image. I moved on. SUDARSAN RAGHAVAN (THE WASHINGTON POST)
Excerpted from washington post.com/blogs/worldviews.
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Caught in the Israel-Gaza propaganda war
Archaeologist Andrei Plekhanov last month surveys the crater discovered in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia.
Don’t blame aliens for Siberian crater Researchers suggest that global warming may be behind the giant mystery SCIENCE Researchers have long contended that the epicenter of global warming is also farthest from the reach of humanity. It’s in the barren landscapes of the frozen North, where red-cheeked children wear fur, the sun barely rises in the winter and temperatures can plunge dozens of degrees below zero. Such a place is the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, translated as “the ends of the Earth,” a desolate spit of land. By now, you’ve heard of the crater on the Yamal Peninsula. It’s the one that suddenly appeared, yawning nearly 200 feet in diameter, and made several rounds in the global viral media machine. The adjectives most
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often used to describe it: giant, mysterious, curious. Scientists were subsequently “baffled.” Locals were “mystified.” There were whispers that aliens were responsible. Nearby residents peddled theories of “bright flashes” and “celestial bodies.” There’s now a substantiated theory about what created the crater. And the news isn’t so good. It may be methane gas, released by the thawing of frozen ground. According to a recent Nature article, “air near the bottom of the crater contained unusually high concentrations of methane” — up to 9.6 percent — in tests conducted at the site July 16, says Andrei Plekhanov, an archaeologist at the Scientific
“Its rims are slowly melting and falling into the crater. You can hear the ground falling, you can hear the water running; it’s rather spooky.” ANDREI PLEKHANOV, an archaeologist at the Scientific Centre of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia, talking about the Siberian crater to the science publication Nature
Centre of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia. Plekhanov, who led an expedition to the crater, says that air normally contains just 0.000179 percent methane. The scientist said the methane release may be related to Yamal’s unusually hot summers in 2012 and 2013, which were warmer by an average of 5 degrees Celsius. “As temperatures rose, the researchers suggest, permafrost thawed and collapsed, releasing methane that had been trapped in the icy ground,” the report stated. Plekhanov told Nature the conclusion is preliminary. He would like to study how much methane is contained in the air trapped inside the crater’s walls. Such a task, however, could be difficult, as the crater’s rims are slowly melting and falling into the crater. Geochemist Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten of Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute said that he’s never seen anything like it. “Gas pressure increased until it was high enough to push away the overlaying layers in a powerful injection, forming the crater,” he said. Some scientists contend the thawing of such terrain, rife with centuries of carbon, would release incredible amounts of methane gas and affect global temperatures. “Pound for pound, the comparative impact of methane gas on climate change is more than 20 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period,” the Environmental Protection Agency said. As the Associated Press put it in 2010, the melting of Siberia’s permafrost is “a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.” As two additional craters have also recently been discovered in Siberia, researchers worry the craters may portend changes to local Siberian life. Two have appeared close to a large gas field. “If [a release] happens at the Bovanenkovskoye gas field … it could lead to an accident, and the same if it happens in a village,” Plekhanov told Nature. TERRENCE McCOY (THE WASHINGTON POST)
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