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Massive River Flooding Expected in China's Guangdong, Threatening Millions

FILE PHOTO: Visitors attend the China Import and Export Fair, also known as Canton Fair, in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China April 15, 2024. REUTERS/David Kirton/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Visitors attend the China Import and Export Fair, also known as Canton Fair, in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China April 15, 2024. REUTERS/David Kirton/File Photo
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Massive River Flooding Expected in China's Guangdong, Threatening Millions

FILE PHOTO: Visitors attend the China Import and Export Fair, also known as Canton Fair, in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China April 15, 2024. REUTERS/David Kirton/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Visitors attend the China Import and Export Fair, also known as Canton Fair, in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China April 15, 2024. REUTERS/David Kirton/File Photo

Major rivers, waterways and reservoirs in China's Guangdong province are threatening to unleash dangerous floods, forcing the government on Sunday to enact emergency response plans to protect more than 127 million people, Reuters reported.
Calling the situation "grim", local weather officials said sections of rivers and tributaries at the Xijiang and Beijiang river basins are hitting peak water levels that only happen once in 50 years, according to state broadcaster CCTV news on Sunday.
Massive flooding is expected at the Beijiang basin, CCTV said quoting China's water resource ministry, prompting it to raise an emergency advisory.
Guangdong officials urged departments in all localities and municipalities to begin emergency planning to avert natural disasters and promptly disperse disaster relief funds and materials to ensure affected people have food, clothing, water and a place to live.
The province has seen torrid downpours and strong winds since Saturday evening due to severe convective weather which has affected several parts of China over the past few weeks, Reuters reported.
A 12-hour stretch of heavy rain, starting from 8 p.m. (1200 GMT) Saturday, battered the central and northern parts of the province in Zhaoqing, Shaoguan, Qingyuan and Jiangmen.
Some power facilities in Zhaoqing were damaged, cutting power to some places.
"Please look at Zhaoqing's Huaiji county, which has become a water town. The elderly and children at the countryside don't know what to do with power outages and no signal," said one user on the popular social media site Weibo.
Raging muddy flood waters swept one vehicle down a narrow street in Zhaoqing, showed a video released by Hongxing News.
"It rained like a waterfall for an hour and a half on the highway driving home last night," said another netizen. "I couldn't see the road at all."
Many hydrological stations in the province are exceeding water levels, weather officials warned, and in the provincial capital Guangzhou, a city of 18 million, reservoirs have reached flood limits, city officials announced on Sunday.
Data showed 2,609 hydrological stations with daily rainfall greater than 50 mm (1.97 inches), accounting for about 59% of all observation stations. At 8 a.m. Sunday, 27 hydrological stations in Guangdong were on alert.
Officials have been reducing water levels at the reservoirs through spillways and culvert discharge to ensure downstream flood control.

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Varieties

Alien Planet Lashed by Huge Flares from its 'Angry Beast' Star

File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger
File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger
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Alien Planet Lashed by Huge Flares from its 'Angry Beast' Star

File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger
File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger

Scientists are tracking a large gas planet experiencing quite a quandary as it orbits extremely close to a young star - a predicament never previously observed.

This exoplanet, as planets beyond our solar system are called, orbits its star so tightly that it appears to trigger flares from the stellar surface - larger than any observed from the sun - reaching several million miles (km) into space that over time may strip much of this unlucky world's atmosphere, Reuters reported.

The phenomenon appears to be caused by the planet's interaction with the star's magnetic field, according to the researchers. And this star is a kind known to flare, especially when young.

"A young star of this type is an angry beast, especially if you're sitting as close up as this planet does," said Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy astrophysicist Ekaterina Ilin, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

The star, called HIP 67522, is slightly more massive than the sun and is located about 407 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

This star and planet, as well as a second smaller gas planet also detected in this planetary system, are practically newborns. Whereas the sun and our solar system's planets are roughly 4.5 billion years old, this star is about 17 million years old, with its planets slightly younger.

The planet, named HIP 67522 b, has a diameter almost the size of Jupiter, our solar system's largest planet, but with only 5% of Jupiter's mass. That makes it one of the puffiest exoplanets known, with a consistency reminiscent of cotton candy (candy floss).

It orbits five times closer to its star than our solar system's innermost planet Mercury orbits the sun, needing only seven days to complete an orbit.

A flare is an intense eruption of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the outermost part of a star's atmosphere, called the corona. So how does HIP 67522 b elicit huge flares from the star? As it orbits, it apparently interacts with the star's magnetic field - either through its own magnetic field or perhaps through the presence of conducting material such as iron in the planet's composition.

"We don't know for sure what the mechanism is. We think it is plausible that the planet moves within the star's magnetic field and whips up a wave that travels along magnetic field lines to the star. When the wave reaches the stellar corona, it triggers flares in large magnetic field loops that store energy, which is released by the wave," Ilin said.

"As it moves through the field like a boat on a lake, it creates waves in its wake," Ilin added. "The flares these waves trigger when they crash into the star are a new phenomenon. This is important because it had never been observed before, especially at the intensity detected."

The researchers believe it is a specific type of wave called an Alfvén wave, named for 20th century Swedish physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Hannes Alfvén, that propagates due to the interaction of magnetic fields.

The flares may heat up and inflate the planet's atmosphere, which is dominated by hydrogen and helium. Being lashed by these flares could blast away lighter elements from the atmosphere and reduce the planet's mass over perhaps hundreds of millions of years.

"At that time, it will have lost most if not all the light elements, and become what's called a sub-Neptune - a gas planet smaller than Neptune," Ilin said, referring to the smallest of our solar system's gas planets.

The researchers used observations by two space telescopes: NASA's TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, and the European Space Agency's CHEOPS, short for CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite.

The plight of HIP 67522 b illustrates the many circumstances under which exoplanets exist.

"It is certainly no sheltered youth for this planet. But I am not sad about it. I enjoy diversity in all things nature, and what this planet will eventually become - perhaps a sub-Neptune rich in heavy elements that did not evaporate - is no less fascinating than what we observe today."