In all of these posts I figured I’d better post about the BP oil disaster in the Gulf. It’s nothing any of us want to hear, especially if it’s the continuing news that they still haven’t fixed it.

According to BP, their latest containment dome effort has successfully siphoned 250,000 gallons of oil to the surface, but it’s only a third of the 798,000 gallons spilling daily. Hence the successfully.

According to BP’s senior VP Boy Fryar, “that operation has gone extremely well.” Well? Well? They finally managed to place the cap so I suppose that went well (after how many tries?), but considering how much oil is continuing to spill into the ocean, I doubt the word is well.

BP says that when the pressure inside the cap lessens, valves on the cap can be closed, allowing the apparatus to siphon up to 630,000 gallons to the surface a day. That’s a good number, but still not enough to divert all the oil.

Around the internet, there’s no shortage of places to find information on what’s happening in the Gulf (or opinions on how BP’s attempting to handle it) but here are a few particular powerful items that are making the rounds:

• Oilaholic is a new aggregator for all-things-oil-disaster, packing a live UStream, Flickr photos, and Twitter updates on one page.

• Boston.com’s Big Picture blog delivered some of the most powerful imagery of the saga yet with “Caught in the oil,” a disturbing collection of photographs showing oil-covered wildlife.

• And Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, posted a disheartening item on his blog entitled “Closing the Hole in the Gulf: A Petroleum Engineer Responds.” Take Reich’s anonymous source with a grain of salt, but it makes BP look even worse than they already do.

So what’d we learn? A guess at how much oil is spilling into the ocean. That this is having a huge impact (and I’m guessing a much bigger one than we’re expecting right now.)

To get an idea of how big the spill is, check out this site that allows you to place it over any location. Goodbye Northern Utah. Goodbye Bay Area. Wowzers.

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The first headline I read was something about a hole to the center of the Earth. Then I looked at the photos and thought they had to have been photoshopped. Turns out, they’re definitely not.

This sinkhole happened over the weekend in a street intersection of Ciudad de Guatemala. And it seems like you can really see to the center of the Earth…

It really is quite bizarre — a hole 100s of feet deep just suddenly appearing. So what is it? What causes it?

Sinkholes are natural depressions in the Earth caused by water removing soil. It usually happens when the ground is formed by limestone, carbonate rock, salt beds or any other rock that is easily eroded by water streams. Sometimes the process can be slow, but sometimes the land just cracks open without notice. In this case, it happened suddenly, swallowing an entire house. Tropical storm Agatha is to blame as it caused massive underground water torrents.

Sinkholes’ size ranges from low terrain depressions to hundreds of feet. I think last I read they were estimating this sinkhole to be almost 200 feet deep! Luckily there haven’t been any deaths or injuries reported, and the sinkhole’s only victim is a clothing factory.

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With the massive 8.8 earthquake that shook Chile this last weekend and caused tsunami warnings aplenty, it’s no surprise that the effects it has had on the country and the people with the destruction it caused are some of the most reported stories for this week all over the world. What did take me by surprise that I learned today is that one of the effects actually has an impact on every single person on Earth:

Bwah?!

Not only did the earthquake shape the day and the days that followed for Chileans, but it shaped about all of the days for all the rest of measured time. Whoa.

It was so big (the seventh strongest in recorded history) that it has caused the Earth to spin faster and days to be shorter. The earthquake caused one tectonic plate to be shoved beneath another, closer to the Earth’s center, and that in turn increased the planet’s rotational speed by 1.26 milliseconds. The computer model used to determine the effects of the earthquake also found that it should have moved Earth’s figure axis by about 3 inches. (The Earth’s figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis. It is the axis around which the Earth’s mass is balanced and is offset from the Earth’s north-south axis by about 33 feet.)

According to Dr. Richard Gross, who studies the Earth’s rotation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California,

But apparently, changes in the Earth’s rotation speed isn’t uncommon in smaller doses — it speeds up or slows down usually due to oceans or wind. One Earth day is about 24 hours long. Over the course of a year, the length of a day normally changes gradually by one millisecond. It increases in the winter, when the Earth rotates more slowly, and decreases in the summer.

For an earthquake to cause a change, it has to be big, deep and in the middle latitudes. That said, strong earthquakes have altered Earth’s days and its axis in the past. In 2004 there was a 9.1 Sumatran earthquake should have shortened Earth’s days by 6.8 microseconds and shifted its axis by about 2.76 inches.

So although the Chile earthquake was much smaller than the Sumatran one, its effects on the Earth are larger because of its location. Its epicenter was located in the Earth’s mid-latitudes rather than near the equator. The fault responsible for the 2010 Chile quake also slices through Earth at a steeper angle than the Sumatran quake’s fault according to NASA scientists.

Of course these findings are based on early data available on the Chile earthquake. As more information about its characteristics are revealed, the prediction of its effects will likely change. But still, who knew such things were possible.

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