$270 million loan planned
to improve three hospitals


The Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica will provide the funds for a new Puntarenas hospital to replace the Hospital Monseñor Sanabria, that was heavily damaged in the Sept. 5, 2012, earthquake.

President Laura Chinchilla signed documents Tuesday that will advance the loan.

The total is $270 million of which $129.6 million will go to the Puntarenas project.

The new facility in a different location will have 502 beds and extensive supporting departments. The central government said the new facility will be earthquake resistant.

A new tower at Hospital Calderón Guardia in San José will have 239 beds and nearly double the hospital's capacity.

The facility lost a three-story wing July 12, 2005, when a fire determined to have been set swept the surgical recovery area and other locations. There were 19 deaths.

The third project will be at the Hospital La Anexión in Nicoya that also was affected by the 2012 earthquake. A new building with 136 beds will be constructed.

All the hospitals are operated by the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social.

Casa Presidencial said that the new facilities would benefit residents of 30 cantons, about 1.5 million person.

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Scientists have reproduced the conditions inside the magma chamber of a supervolcano to understand what it takes to trigger its explosion. These rare events represent the biggest natural catastrophes on Earth except for the impact of giant meteorites. Using synchrotron X-rays, the scientists established that supervolcano eruptions may occur spontaneously, driven only by magma pressure without the need for an external trigger. The results are published in Nature Geosciences.

A well-known supervolcano eruption occurred 600,000 years ago in Wyoming in the United States, creating a huge crater called a caldera, in the centre of what today is Yellowstone National Park. When the volcano exploded, it ejected more than 1000 cubic kilometers of ash and lava into the atmosphere, 100 times more than Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines did in 1992. Big volcanic eruptions have a major impact on the global climate. The Mount Pinatubo eruption decreased the global temperature by 0.4 degrees C for a few months. The predictions for a supervolcano are a fall in temperatures by 10 degrees C for 10 years.

According to a 2005 report by the Geological Society of London, “Even science fiction cannot produce a credible mechanism for averting a super-eruption. We can, however, work to better understand the mechanisms involved in super-eruptions, with the goal of being able to predict them ahead of time and provide a warning for society. Preparedness is the key to mitigation of the disastrous effects of a super-eruption.”

The mechanisms that trigger supervolcano eruptions have remained elusive to date. The main reason is that the processes inside a supervolcano are different from those in conventional volcanoes like Mount Pinatubo which are better understood. A supervolcano possesses a much larger magma chamber and it is always located in an area where the heat flow from the interior of the Earth to the surface is very high. As a consequence, the magma chamber is very large and hot but also plastic. Its shape changes as a function of the pressure when it gradually fills with hot magma. This plasticity allows the pressure to dissipate more efficiently than in a normal volcano whose magma chamber is more rigid. Supervolcanoes therefore do not erupt very often.

So what changes in the lead up to an eruption? Wim Malfait a researcher with the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich, explains: “The driving force is an additional pressure which is caused by the different densities of solid rock and liquid magma. It is comparable to a football filled with air under water, which is forced upwards by the denser water around it“. Whether  this additional pressure alone could eventually become sufficiently high to crack the Earth's crust, leading to a violent eruption, or whether an external energy source like an earthquake is required has only now been answered.

While it is virtually impossible to drill a hole into the magma chamber of a supervolcano given the depth at which these chambers are buried, one can simulate these extreme conditions in the laboratory.

“The synchrotron X-rays at the ESRF can then be used to probe the state – liquid or solid – and the change in density when magma crystallises into rock” says Mohamed Mezouar, scientist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and member of the team.

Jean-Philippe Perrillat from the Laboratory of Geology of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Université Lyon adds: “Temperatures of up to 1,700 degrees and pressures of up to 36,000 atmospheres can be reached inside the so-called Paris-Edinburgh press, where speck-sized rock samples are placed between the tips of two tungsten carbide anvils and then heated with a resistive furnace. This special set-up was used to accurately determine the density of the liquid magma over a wide range of pressures and temperatures.”

Magma often includes water, which as vapor adds additional pressure. The scientists also determined magma densities as a function of water content.

The results of their measurements showed that the pressure resulting from the differences in density between solid and liquid magma rock is sufficient in itself to crack more than 10 kilometers of Earth's crust above the magma chamber.


Winds expected to taper
as well as the cloud cover


Weather experts are promising a reduction in winds today as well as a reduction in the cloud cover. Winds earlier today reached as high as 51.4 kph (31 mph), according to the automatic station at the University for Peace in Ciudad Colón.

San José winds topped out at 21.2 kph or 13 mph, said the Instituto Meteorológico Nacional. Hacienda Pinilla and Daniel Oduber airport in Liberia both registered winds of 31 to 32 kph or about 20 mph.

Isolated showers are predicted for the Caribbean, the northern zone and in the central and southern Pacific, the forecast said.