Gas Leak
The French energy company Total estimates that its North Sea Elgin field gas well is leaking about 200,000 cubic meters of natural gas per day, enough, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, to supply more than 100 average homes with natural gas for an entire year. Total estimates that it may take six months to stop the leak. The leak, detected March 25th, is at the wellhead platform of Total’s G4 well, located approximately 150 miles east of Aberdeen, Scotland. The gas is mostly methane, which is considered the second largest contributor to human-caused global warming after carbon dioxide. [But its global warming potential is 72 times that of carbon dioxide over 20 years, and 25 times over 100 years]
First sauropod dinosaur
The Aragosaurus was the first sauropod dinosaur described in Spain some 25 years ago in Galve (Teruel), but its age was never clear. The new dating would make it the only dinosaur of the Hauterivian age (between 136 and 130 million years ago) to be found in Spain. Its new age means that Aragosaurus fills in the transitional period between the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, of which there is little record in the world. Aragosaurus would have therefore been a primitive ancestor of the titanosauraus sauropods that would later dominate Europe and Asia during the Late Cretaceous Period. The new finding also reveals that in the Early Cretaceous Period (135 million years ago), what we now know as the European Continent was made up of a series of large islands that could have been, “the point of origin for many vertebrate groups including sauropod dinosaurs like the Basal Titanosauriform.”
Ex-prime minister Murayama expresses regret over supporting nuclear power
Former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama said Sunday it is regrettable that he changed the then Japan Socialist Party’s policy to an acceptance of nuclear power stations while he was in office. “It was imprudent and it was a failure. I want to apologize,” Murayama told an antinuclear meeting in the city of Oita. “I’m filled with a strong feeling that I should not accept nuclear power stations so I can make up for my mistake.” Murayama expressed opposition to the government’s efforts toward resuming idled reactors at the Oi nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture, saying the government has not yet provided a satisfactory explanation to the public regarding why the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant occurred. Murayama of the JSP, now the Social Democratic Party, served as prime minister from June 1994 to January 1996.