SIO15: Natural Disasters

Earthwatches

December 20, 2010

December 06, 2010

November 22, 2010

November 08, 2010

November 01, 2010

October 25, 2010

October 18, 2010

October 11, 2010

October 04, 2010

September 27, 2010

September 20, 2010

September 13, 2010

September 06, 2010

August 30, 2010

August 16, 2010

August 09, 2010

July 26, 2010

July 19, 2010

July 12, 2010

June 28, 2010

June 21, 2010

June 14, 2010

June 07, 2010

May 31, 2010

May 24, 2010

May 10, 2010

May 03, 2010

April 26, 2010

April 19, 2010

April 05, 2010

February 01, 2010

January 11, 2010

Quest Short Featurettes

February 1, 2010: Biodiversity: The hottest of hot spots

February 1, 2010: Earthshaking news

December 20, 2010 (for week ending Dec 17)

Earthquakes

• [With a 5.1 magnitude,] the strongest of eight earthquakes to strike the heart of the Philippine island of Luzon in a single day knocked out power and caused light damage near the epicenter.
• Earth movements were also felt in Sulawesi Island [magnitude 5.9], the Mexico-California border area [4.9] and central Oklahoma [3.3].




Preserving The Wild

An ambitious international effort has been launched to gather and store the wild plant species from which the world's primary food crops have been bred.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust says the project is designed to safeguard valuable genetic traits, which could come in handy when it becomes necessary to breed yet further varieties able to cope with climate change and new plant diseases. "All our crops were originally developed from wild species that's how farming began," said Cary Fowler, the trust's executive director.
The project will focus on the ancestors of 23 global food crops, including wheat, rice beans, potato, barley lentils and chickpeas. While plant breeders have used many traits from the wild relatives of our crops for thousands of years, native species have never been systematically collected and cataloged.



Flitting to Oblivion

Europe's leading butterfly protection group says that the insects are declining at a steep rate across the continent due to a catastrophic loss of flowering meadows. A new study by Butterfly Conservation Europe reveals the populations of 17 butterfly species have declined by more than 70 percent over the past 20 years.
The study was conducted at 3,000 site in 15 countries. The organization cautions that butterflies are sensitive environmental indicators, and their decline is a warning of underlying problems with the environments.
The grassland habitats of the butterflies have been created by traditional livestock grazing and hay-making over centuries of human occupation since the last ice age. The losses are believed to be due to more intensive growing practices in somme regions, and the loss of flowering crops as farms are abandoned in others.



Glow-in-the-Dark Tours

Ukraine has decided to open the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster to tourists starting next month, nearly 25 years after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion showered a large area with radioactive fallout.
"Tours to Chernobyl are extreme tourism," said Anatoliy Pakhlya, head pf the Ukrainian State Service for Tourism and Resorts. While it is already possible to take unauthorized tours of the Chernobyl plant and surrounding areas, the government says they are illegal and the tourists' safety cannot be guaranteed.
Phyla says that new authorized tours would steer visitors away from high levels of radioactivity, but allow them to visit abandoned communities and the crippled reactor building itself.



Chilean Firestorms

Huge summertime wildfires in Chile have blackened more than 14,000 acres of forest in five regions. The country's second-largest city of Valparaiso was threatened by the blazes, which have been fanned by strong winds and sparked by arsonists in unseasonably hot temperatures.
Dozens of homes have been lost to the fires, which were also raging around the greater Santiago area and the remote southern region of Magallanes. One of the hardest-hit areas is the tourist town of Guanaqueros, where the fires damaged 30 summer homes.



Kissless Christmas?

Mistletoe, a popular Christmas decoration that gives both pagans and Christians an excuse to steal a holiday kiss, may disappear from Britain or become harder to find, according to the country's national Tryst.
The organization warns the decline of traditional apple orchards, where the parasitic plant thrives, threatens the yuletide tradition. It says that in the apple-growing heartland of Somerset, Gloustershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, orchards have declined dramatically over the past 60 years.
Besides bedecking the halls in December, mistletoe also provides an important winter food for birds and supports six insects, including the rare mistletoe marble moth.



No Bugs for Christmas

An ubiquitous bug, whose appearance has meant Christmas is almost here for generations of Australian children, is disappearing around the country's largest city due to urban sprawl, according to a leading entomologist.
Stephen Fellenburg, who runs the website Insektus, says Christmas beetle populations are plummeting in and around Sydney as new construction destroys their breeding grounds.
The insects were once so common around Sydney that some remember tree branches collapsing under their weight. But loss of habitat means today's children may grow up not hearing the sound of the beetles beating against their green door as pre-Christmas warmth sets in at the onset of the southern summer.
Christmas beetles live underground for up to two years as they mature from larva to pupa. Development is paving the ground in metropolitan Sydney.


• Extreme temperatures: -59 deg F Baykit, Siberia; 117 deg F Linguere, Senegal

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December 6, 2010 (for week ending Dec 3)

Earthquakes

• Tall buildings in downtown Tokyo swayed following a 6.9-magnitude quake centered 500 miles south of the Japanese capital, beneath the seabed of the Pacific Ocean.
• Earth movements were also felt in New Zealand's North Island [magnitude 5.4], Indonesia's Papua province [5.5] and Sulawesi island [4.3], southeast Tibet [5.5], east-central Sweden [2.8], metropolitan Los Angeles [3.3] and from Long Island northward into New England [3.9].



Tropical Cyclones

• Tropical Storm Abele coalesced from an area of disturbed weather sinning over the central Indian Ocean. Maximum sustained winds reached only about 45 mph near the storm's center before Abele began to dissipate far from land.



Indonesian Blast

Another one of Indonesia's numerous volcanoes shot ash into the sky during a series of blasts about 60 miles east of Mount Merapi, which itself has produced devastation and triggered mass evacuations on Java in recent weeks.
Mount Bromo's rumblings prompted officials to warn nearby residents to be prepared to leave quickly should the mountain become more dangerous. Bromo typically erupts about once per year, but rarely spies debris and superheated gas far from its crater.
Approximately 60,000 people who have been living in temporary shelter since fleeing Merapi's deadly debris have been offered homes on a less-populated island.



Toxic Dead Sea

Analysis of air samples collected over the Dead Sea reveals high levels of oxidized mercury, far more toxic than mercury's natural form, exist over the storied body of water.
When oxidized, mercury can be widely dispersed, finding its way into lakes and oceans where it poses health risks all the way up the food chain to humans. Such high levels of mercury oxidation were thought to occur only in the bitter chill of the polar regions, and certainly not at the lowest point of the world's land surface, which often reaches 113 degrees Fahrenheit.
Researchers from Nevada's Desert Research Institute and Israel's Hebrew University found that an unusually high level of bromine in the Dead Sea is responsible for the conversion of mercury to its dangerous form.
The Dead Sea was a refuge for the biblical Kind David. King Herod turned it into one of the world's first health resorts and its surrounding salt flats have been a source of minerals for thousands of years. That material is sometimes used to create cosmetics and herbal sachets.



Another Record Year

Climate experts say their initial calculations of this year's global temperature data indicate that 2010 will go in the records book tied with 1998 for the hottest year on record.
Reliable records go back to 1850, and temperatures are now about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than at that time. Data for the year so far show that 2010 is just under 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer that the 1961 - 1990 average.
Even if the closing weeks of this year turn sharply cooler, 2010 is expected to be no lower than the third-warmest on record, behind 1998 and 2005, according to Britain's Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.



'Flying' Snakes

Five related species of Asian tree-dwelling snakes have been found to be able to 'fly' through the air in a talent that has piqued the interest of the U.S. military.
Virginia Tech researchers have documented how the forest fliers are able to fling themselves from tree limbs and conduct a controlled glide nearly 80 feet through the air. "Basically ... they become one long wing." researcher John Socha told reporters. He describes them as having "multiple segments that become multiple wings."
The snakes have been described as biometrical wonders that seem to swim through the air with a great deal of control as to where they land.
The Pentagon is funding the research, but not to breed and enlist the snakes into a terrifying reptilian guerrilla army. It's believed the military interest is strictly in the aerodynamics of the snakes' abilities.



Cherry-red Raiders

An illicit diet of junk food has turned a hive of New York City bees a garish red, exasperating their beekeeper and vexing those who work at a nearby plant that uses Red Dye No. 40 in its products.
Cerise Mayo of Brooklyn was initially stumped when her bees started coming home with an unnatural blush. She became even more puzzled when the foragers began producing scarlet-tinted honey. Then a friend suggested the bees might be skipping the local pollen sources for the more stimulating sweets of a nearby maraschino cherry plant.
An investigation revealed the source of the apian rubescence to be the artificial coloring used at Dell's maraschino Cherries Co in Red Hook. Workers there said the bees had been creating a huge nuisance, but plans were being made to install screens that should keep the sugar raiders out.


• Extreme temperatures: -68 deg F Goryachinsk, Siberia; +109 deg F Koolan Island, Australia

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November 22, 2010 (for week ending Nov 19)

Earthquakes

• Residents of Israel, Lebanon, Syria and the occupied Palestinian territories were jolted awake by a pre-dawn [magnitude 4.0] temblor centered in far southern Lebanon.
• Earth movements were also felt along the Afghan-Pakistan border [magnitude 4.0], New Zealand's Canterbury aftershock zone [4.0], Indonesia's Papua province [5.9], southwest Washington state [4.2], metropolitan Los Angeles [3.2], eastern Nebraska [3.2] and in both Puerto Rico and nearby areas of the Dominican Republic [5.6].



Volcano Evacuees

Thousands of monkeys and other animals have been seen fleeing Indonesia's Mount Merapi volcano since the mountain began erupting last month.
Hundreds of thousands of humans have also evacuated since Merapi began to hurl vast columns of ash into the sky above java and send deadly superheated clouds of debris cascading down its slopes.
Nearby villages told the Antara news agency they fear some of the monkeys were unable to escape the deadly pyroclastic flows, which have also killed about 270 people. Rescue workers say they have also encountered hundreds of dead cattle and other animals in abandoned villages hit by volcanic debris.



Deep Warming

U.S. and British climatologists say they have found that the lowest level of the atmosphere, where the majority of weather occurs, has been warming right along with the land surface in recent decades. The study confirms earlier indications that the troposphere has been responding to global warming at the same time Earth's surface temperatures rose.
NOAA and U.K. Met Office researchers documented the vast warming by reviewing 40 years of observations and scientific papers. Some studies conducted in the 1990s failed to show the troposphere was warming.
This cast doubt on the ability of computer models to predict climate change, while prompting some to wonder if warmer surface observations were reliable. But extensive analysis of data from weather balloons, satellites and surface instruments have revealed a consistency in global warming through the troposphere as greenhouse gas levels rose.



Mutants into the Wild

Genetically modified mosquitoes have been released in the Cayman Islands over the past few months in an effort to fight dengue fever. Researchers from the British-based Oxitec Limited created male mosquitoes that will only mate with females of the target Aedes aegypti species, producing offspring that are unable to develop into biting adults.
It was the first time genetically altered mosquitoes have ever been set loose in the wild. After releasing 3 million mutant males in a 40-acre test plot from May to October, scientists found that mosquito numbers in the region plunged by 80 percent compared to a neighboring area.
such a drop in the mosquito population would likely mean fewer dengue infections, researchers say.



Big Cat Wanderings

tigers that have recently begun roaming around villages in Indonesia's Bengkulu province, on Sumatra, have residents living in constant fear, according to wildlife officials.
Only about 400 Sumatran tigers remain in the wild, and conservationists say that disruptions of the big cat's remaining habitat is probably responsible for them straying into the human population. So far, no humans have been attacked by the wayward felines.



Deaf and Disoriented

U.S. researchers say they have found that some dolphin species stranded near the shore are often deaf. The finding could solve the mystery of why at least some of the thousands of marine mammals wash up on the world's beaches every year.
The University of South Florida marine biologists, writing in the journal Plos One, say they are unsure what causes the hearing loss. But Navy sonar has been found to be associated with some stranding.
Without adequate hearing, dolphins are unable to find food or family members and wind up weak and disoriented, the researchers say. The findings could prove disheartening for marine life rescuers who often help stranded dolphins recuperate before releasing them into the wild. Researcher David Mann said that in many cases, the dolphins are released back into an underwater world in which they still can't hear.



Urban Swarms

Southeast Australia's worst locust infestation in 30 years has produced swarms of the ravenous insects that have reached the streets of Melbourne.
Hot northerly winds blew some swarms into the city's northern neighborhood, but experts said they didn't thing the locusts would do much damage to the urban landscape.
Fiona Clissold, a Sydney University ecologist, suggested Melbourne residents could prepare a tasty treat by throwing the bugs on the "barbie", or by pulling off their wings and frying them. "They taste great,' she told Australia's Channel 9 News. Victoria wheat farmers say the pests are also devouring crops just as the grain has begun to mature and become ready for harvest.


• Extreme temperatures: -61 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +113 deg F Vredendal, South Africa

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November 8, 2010 (for week ending Nov 5)

Earthquakes

• A sharp [magnitude 5.3] quake centered in the heart of Serbia killed two people and injured about 50 others. The shaking wrecked several buildings.
• Earth movements were also felt in northwest Turkey [magnitude 5.3], western Sumatra [5.1], Taiwan [4.4], New Zealand's North Island [4.4], central Chile [4.7] and eastern Tennessee [2.9].



Tropical Cyclones

• At least 12 people were killed on the eastern Caribbean island of Saint Lucia by high winds and torrential rains brought by passing Hurricane Tomas. The storm wiped out the island's banana crop and caused millions of dollars in damage.
  A weakened Tomas was taking aim at Haiti late in the week, where in threatened to unleash deadly flooding in a region still recovering from January's devastating earthquake and a recent cholera outbreak.
• Typhoon Chaba battered some fo Japan's southernmost islands, but was mainly a threat to maritime traffic.
• Tropical Storm Anggrek passed over the Indian Ocean to the south of Sumatra.



Volcanoes

• Indonesia's Mount Merapi produces some of its strongest blasts and lava emissions so far since it roared to life in late October. Officials were forced to extend the danger zone and evacuate hundreds of thousands of people on Java. Blasts from Merapi have killed more than 100 people.
• Mount Anak Krakatau volcano (Child of Krakatoa) showed signs it could erupt at any time west of Java.
• The rapid melting of a glacier atop Iceland's most active volcano means Grímsvötn could be about to erupt, according to scientists.



El Niño - Antarctic Melt

A change in precipitation patterns caused by the El Niño ocean-warming in the tropical Pacific appears to be the driving force behind the disappearance of ice in parts of Antarctica, according to a new study.
Researchers from the German Research Center for Geosciences said satellite observations show that year-by-year changes in the ice mass on the frozen continent correspond to El Niño episodes.
they found that the ice thickness in some glaciers is decreasing rapidly and ice streams are retreating back into the interior.
The findings from the GRACE gravity field satellite mission reveal that the significant changes unfolding in ice covering Antarctica are critical factors in global climate change.
The German scientists also found that La Niña, the opposite ocean-cooling phenomenon from El Niño, favors heavier precipitation and briefly causes an increase in ice thickness.



Rising Tide Wall

The Marshall Islands is asking the U.N. for funds to construct a large wall to hold back rising sea levels that threaten to swamp the Southern Pacific chan of 29 coral atolls and five islands.
Almost all of the territory is less than 3 feet above the high tide mark and most of its 55,000 residents live within 30 feet of the shore.
High tides during 2008 swamped the main Majuro Atoll, causing several million dollars in damage and forcing dozens of islanders from their homes. Similar inundations are predicted during the next two months.
The Marshall Islands government wants to initially build a 3-mile sea wall on the windward coast of Majuro Atoll and the fill in small bays as a buffer against ocean flooding during storms.
The Marshall Islands was a U.S.-administered fruit territory until gaining independence in 1986.



Owl Superstition

The popularity of Harry Potter, and dabbling in the dark arts, are responsible for the demise of wild owls in India, according to the country's environmental minister. "Following Harry Potter, there seems to be a strange fascination event among the urban middle classes for presenting their children with owls." said Jairam Ramesh.
His warnings came as a new report on the illegal trade of the endangered birds was released by Traffic, and organization working to protect them. The report also says that the practice of sacrificing owls and using their body parts in ceremonial rituals on auspicious occasions is also fueling the illicit trade.
Traffic warned of likely owl sacrifices around Diwali, the festival of lights, which started Nov. 5.



Prettier in Pink

The largest species of flamingo has been observed using makeup to enhance its signature pink hue in an effort to breed more successfully and form a monogamous sexual partnership.
Writing in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociology, Spanish researchers say greater flamingos apply reddish-orange pigments, called carotenoids, from glands near the base of their tails to make their pink coloration brighter.
The birds' main pastel tint comes from pigments in the food they eat.
Females apply the makeup more often than males, and those who use it the most breed earlier and more successfully.
The researchers also found that when the birds stop rubbing the carotenoids onto their plumage, the brightness fades quickly as the sun bleaches it out.
The birds were observed applying the most oil during months when they were looking for a mate.


• Extreme temperatures: -75 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +107 deg F Khartoum, Sudan

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November 01, 2010 (for week ending Oct 29)

Earthquakes

• More than 343 people were killed on the remote Mentawai Islands off Sumatra while hundreds of others were left missing in the wake of a 10-foot tsunami triggered by a powerful [magnitude 7.7] undersea temblor. Many more were missing and feared to have been washed out to sea when the tsunami struck.
• A moderate [magnitude 4.7] quake in central China's Henan province leveled 24 homes and injured 12 middle school students, according to state media. Several other homes sustained cracks due to the shaking.
• Earth movements were also felt in Indonesia's Sulawesi Island (5.8). new Zealand's Canterbury aftershock zone (4.8), the Australian outback (4.4), central Iran (4.2) and northwestern Wyoming (4.6).



Tropical Cyclones

• Category-4 Cyclone Giri roared ashore along Myanmar's remote northwestern coast, killing at least 27 people and damaging thousands of buildings, according to state television. Maximum winds reached 110 mph as the storm approached the Bay of Bengal coast near the town of Kyaukpyu.
• Hurricane Otto passed harmlessly over the open waters of the Atlantic.
• A much-weakened Typhoon Megi drenched China's southeastern coast with up do 13 in of rainfall after killing dozens of people in Taiwan and the northern Philippines.
• Hurricane Richard drenched Belize and neighboring Mexico.



Deadly Eruption

A trio of eruptions of Indonesia's Mount Merapi volcano killed at least 34 people and caused thousands to flee the volcano's clouds of superheated debris and ash.
Nearby residents on Java had been warned for days that the mountain was building toward a violent eruption. But nearly 15,000 refused to leave their homes.
Local TV showed footage of burned houses and ash-covered bodies being placed in body bags. Most of the fatalities occurred when pyroclastic flows of superheated debris cascaded down Merapi's slopes only eight minutes after the initial eruption.
A 2006 eruption of the 9737-foot mountain killed only two people. Merapi is one of Indonesia's most active and dangerous volcanoes. It has produced more lava flows than perhaps any other volcano in the world.



Spring Twister

A rare Argentina tornado left six people dead and at least 110 others injured in the northern town of Pozo del Tigre. The twister hit Formosa province during the afternoon of Oct. 21, near the Argentine border with Paraguay. Officials say that the homes of 873 families were either severely damaged or destroyed by the twister.



Record Amazon drought

Dozens of communities on a major Amazon tributary have become cut off from the outside world due to a protracted drought that has brought their waterway to the lowest level since Brazilian authorities began keeping records more than a century ago.
Houseboats along the Rio Negro now rest on dry riverbeds, and the riverbank has collapsed in some areas. Authorities have begun to cut a new road through the thick vegetation to reconnect the community of Iranduba with the state capital of Manaus, 15 mi away.
Runoff from recent rains far upstream in the Amazon rain forest is likely to take weeks to begin raising the lower reaches of the Rio Negro.



Coral death

Vast areas of coral reef across the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian region have died due to excessive heat this year, in what researchers fear could be the world's worst coral losses on record.
"So far around 80% of Acropora colonies and 50% of colonies from other species have died since the outbreak began in May this year," said Australian coral expert Andrew Baird.
The losses stretch from around the Seychelles off Africa to the waters around Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia. Baird and others fear the losses could spread southward to the Great Barrier Reef as summer warmth arrives after the New Year.
Coral losses are expected to cause hardship for fishermen who rely on the rich biodiversity the reefs bring when healthy. Of particular concern are the coral deaths off the northwestern tip of Sumatra, which have been most pronounced.



Tail-walking

Dolphins off southern Australia appear to be learning to "walk" on the surface of the water with their tails, and seem to be doing it just for fun.
Researcher Mike Bossley of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) says he first observed two adult female dolphins demonstrating the spectacular tail-walking on Adelaide's Port River.
One of the dolphins is said to have learned the trick while briefly held at a marine park. It later taught the other female the trick after being released back into the wild.
The tail-walking behavior is now being picked up by the wider dolphin community, according to WDCS. "As far as we are aware, tail-walking has no practical function and is performed just for fun, akin to human dancing or gymnastics," Bossley said.


• Extreme temperatures: -90 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +111 deg F Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

October 25, 2010 (for week ending Oct 22)

Earthquakes

• New Zealand's quake-damaged city of Christchurch was jolted by a powerful [magnitude-5.0] aftershock that cut power and phone service while also creating additional light damage. It was the most violent shaking the Canterbury region has experienced since a 7.1-magnitude quake on Sept. 4 damaged about 50,000 homes and left 1200 of them so wrecked that they will need to be rebuilt.
• Earth movements were also felt in Taiwan (4.0), central Chile (5.8) and northwestern Mexico (5.8).



Super typhoon

• Category-5 Typhoon Megi slammed into the coast of the northern Philippines, killing at least 23 people as it wrecked thousands of homes and destroyed large tracts of rice and other crops.
  The worst storm to hit the region in nearly 20 years created waves "as high as houses" and produced wind gusts of more than 160 mph as it roared ashore in northern Luzon's key agricultural province of Isabela.



Eruption of Fire

A burst of flammable gas from a mud volcano in northwestern Colombia destroyed a small area of nearby crops and killed a few farm animals while sending nearby residents rushing for safety. Several people sustained minor injuries near the town of Arboletes during the brief panic, according to a local clinic.
A fiery blast four years ago prompted officials to move 14 nearby homes to a safer distance from the natural geologic feature. Officials credit that move with the lack of any fatalities from the latest explosive venting. An eruption three years ago spewed only mud.



Disease Victory

For only the second time in history, humans are poised to have eradicated a viral disease from the planet, and for the first time eliminate an animal disease. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says that rinderpest, an illness that has devastated animal herds for millennia, will be declared eradicated by the middle of next year.
The announcement will be made after final reports confirming the annihilation of the disease are received from a small number of countries belonging to the World Organization for Animal Health.
Rinderpest means "cattle plague" in German. It doesn't directly affect humans, but has caused outbreaks of famine after killing livestock herds. It was last reported in Kenya during 2001. It is believed to have originated in Asia, then was carried elsewhere by prehistoric cattle traders. The only other disease ever to have been wiped out around the world is smallpox. The world was declared free of that scourge in 1980.



A Century of Drought

A second report in as many weeks points to a much drier planet emerging as a result of climate change. Researchers from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research conclude that the warming global climate will likely create unprecedented dry conditions across much of the globe over at least the next 30 years.
Lead scientist Aigou Dai says that analysis of 22 climate models and a comprehensive drought index indicates dryness is likely to increase substantially across most of the Western Hemisphere, as well as large parts of Eurasia, Africa and Australia.
The concurrent increase in wetness over the northern, sparsely populated high latitudes won't compensate for the increasing aridity elsewhere, the report cautions.



Hottest ever

The first nine months of 2010 have tied with the same period in 1998 for the warmest combined land and ocean surface temperature on record, according to the latest tabulation by the U.S. National Climate Data Center. The center also says the average temperature of the world's land surface was the second-warmest on record, behind 2007.
Researchers say the average total global temperature for the first nine months of this year was 1.17°F above the normal for records going back 131 years.
On Sept. 27, Los Angeles set a maximum temperature record when the downtown thermometer reached 113°F. In regional contrast, Australia recently had its coolest maximum temperatures since 1984.



Marauding Monkeys

Dozens of monkeys went berserk on an Indonesian plantation, injuring one man as they made off with crops and chicken eggs.
The Antara news agency reports a rubber tapper had to receive 60 stitches to an arm injured after about 10 of the monkeys set upon him. A total of 40 to 60 unspecified wild monkeys were involved in the attack, which occurred about 100 mi west of Singapore, in the village of Teluk Mesjid, located in Sumatra's Siak River basin.
The rubber tapper, Juju, told the agency that this is not the first time monkeys have raided the village or injured its residents. Deforestation and loss of habitat have increasingly caused conflict between human residents and wildlife on Sumatra. Many parts of the island are once again blanketed in a thick pall of smoke from seasonal agricultural burning.


• Extreme temperatures: -86 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +113 deg F Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

October 18, 2010 (for week ending Oct 15)

Earthquakes

• The second-strongest earthquake on record to ever hit Oklahoma [magnitude 5.1] broke windows and sent residents around Norman and Oklahoma City fleeing buildings. Shaking was felt northward into Kansas and as far south as Dallas and Fort Worth.
• The Two weeks of unrelenting tremors have wrecked may buildings in a western India village (4.0), where residents now live outdoors in fear of further shaking. Seismologists have not said why the scores of tremors have rocked Gujarat's Jalandhar village.
• Earth movements were also felt in New Zealand's Christchurch aftershock zone (5.0), northern Taiwan (5.2), Fiji (4.2), eastern Bulgaria (4.4), Costa Rica (5.8) and northern Arkansas (4.0).



Tropical Cyclones

• Category-2 Hurricane Paula formed off the coast of Honduras then drenched parts of the Yucatan Peninsula before spreading heavy rain and high winds over western Cuba.
• Hurricane Otto passed harmlessly over the open waters of the Atlantic.
• Typhoon Megi was taking aim on the northern Philippines.



A Drier World

Earth's water cycle may have reached its limit due to climate change, with large swaths of the planet apparently drying up over the past decade.
Climate scientists have long predicted that the amount of moisture evaporating off land and released by plants would increase as Earth's overall climate warms. This "evapotranspiration" did indeed rise until 1998, but then the overall trend reversed.
Writing in the journal Nature, researchers from Europe and the U.S. say that large parts of Australia, Africa and South America have since dried up. While the cause for the sudden drying is not entirely understood, its consequences could be severe. The subsequent loss of plants would allow more CO₂ to build in the atmosphere. And the loss of natural cooling produced by evaporation could cause more heating of the land in a "feedback loop" that could intensify global warming, the researchers caution.



A Cove Reprieve

The Japanese village made famous for its dolphin slaughter in the award-winning film "The Cove" has for the first time spared the lives of some of the youngest marine mammals recently caught, according to the conservation group Sea Shepherd.
The group says international pressure may have prompted the change in practice. Activists staged protests at Japanese embassies around the world on Oct. 14 to express outrage over the continuing mass slaughter that is conducted by Taiji villagers each year between September and March.
Sea Shepherd said that is also appears the hunters hadn't killed any distinctive bottlenose dolphins, the same species as "Flipper" from the 1960s TV show ad that appears in shows at marine parks around the world.



Prairie Home Infestation

Canadian wildlife officials are applying insecticide to the grassland homes of prairie dogs to help boost their population by preventing an outbreak of a deadly disease carried by insects.
Researchers say the population of the burrowing rodents is 50 percent to 70 percent lower than normal in Saskatchewan's Grasslands National Park, possibly due to drought and predators. But they fear that the sylvatic plague that often infects and kills the animals may also be to blame.
Humans seldom contract this particular form of plague. Parks Canada says that any widespread plague outbreak could cause a further decline in the black-tailed prairie dog population, and the insecticide should help kill fleas that spread the illness.



Dengue Alert

Dengue fever is spreading across Asia at an alarming rate, with the World Health Organization(WHO) warning that cases in India are at a 20-year high.
WHO says that dengue is the most rapidly spreading mosquito-borne viral disease in the world, infecting between 50 million and 100 million people annually. Efforts to genetically modify the Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, which carry the virus, are currently under way in an effort to breed a dengue-free population.



Long-haul leviathan

A humpback whale has broken the world record for travel by any mammal other than man as it swam more than 6,000 miles across two oceans.
The female was first observed and photographed among a group of whales off southern Brazil in August 1999. Just over two years later, her distinctive markings led her to be identified off the coast of Madagascar.
Humpbacks normally migrate between two general areas to breed and feed. There are no known migration routes between the eastern coast of South America and the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar. Writing in the Royal Society's Biology Letters, marine researcher Peter Stevick says that is probably wasn't love that motivated the wayward leviathan." It may be that this is an extreme example of exploration." He said. "Or it could be that the animal got very lost."


• Extreme temperatures: -96 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +112 deg F Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

October 11, 2010 (for week ending Oct 8)

Earthquakes:

• A 5.1-magnitude offshore temblor jolted eastern Cuba, including the U.S. military base and detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Items on shelves were shaken, but there were no reports of damage or injuries.
• Earth movements were also felt in the southern Philippines (5.3), New Zealand's Canterbury aftershock zone (5.2), western Japan (5.0), Okinawa (6.3), northwestern Turkey (4.4), northwestern California (4.4) and eastern Virginia (3.0).



Colombian rumbling

Colombia's Nevado del Ruiz volcano appears to be awakening from 25 years of slumber.
It killed 25,000 people during a violent 1985 eruption about 80 mi west of Bogota. Geologists say the mountain has produced about 2000 tremors since Sept. 30, most related to the movement of magma. Nearby residents report the smell of sulfur in the air and a plume of steam rising above the crater.



Self-awareness

Humans have somewhat arrogantly maintained that they are the only creature to be self-aware, making themselves, well, human. But recent studies have demonstrated that dolphins, some other species of primates and elephants can recognize and react to their own reflections.
While asserting that creatures are self-aware solely based on such reactions is controversial, some test results are startling. Bottlenose dolphins have been found to spend more time swimming and looking at themselves in front of large reflective surfaces after large black markings have been applied to their sides.
Macaques fitted with skullcap-mounted implants on their heads and placed in front of mirrors soon come to realize they are looking at themselves and not other monkeys. They have been observed maneuvering both the mirror and their posture to view and groom the area around the implant. Placed in front of larger mirrors, the monkeys began performing gymnastic feats to view their reflections and to see otherwise inaccessible parts of their bodies. This behavior stopped when the mirror was covered up.



Kiwi Menace

A pair of stray dogs is threatening hundreds of endangered brown kiwis in far northern New Zealand. The canines were spotted roaming around the Whangarei Sanctuary, north of Auckland, which has New Zealand's largest concentration of kiwis for its size.
The country's kiwi population has been ravaged by invasive species, such as dogs and cats, which were introduced over the past two centuries by European settlers. "It only takes one dog to wipe out large numbers of birds," said Department of Conservation spokeswoman Clea Gardiner.



Sea Census

A 10-year census of marine life has uncovered thousands of new species and illustrated how interconnected the ocean environment is. The unprecedented study by more than 2700 census scientists has revealed a watery world full of abundance, with creatures ranging in size from microbes to whales living from the icy poles to the equator.
Some of the more startling creatures discovered include a hairy-clawed "yeti crab," luminous fish that live so deep that sunlight never penetrates and a shrimp that was thought to have become extinct in Jurassic times.
The Census of Marine Life will provide a benchmark from which future changes in ocean life can be measured, according to those who helped coordinate the effort.



Toxic Disaster

A massive spill of toxic sludge from a Hungarian storage pond threatened to pollute one of Europe's main waterways, endangering drinking water supplies in five countries downstream.
A wave of toxic red sludge from an alumina plant in Ajka swept through local villages, killing four people and sending many more to hospitals with chemical burns. Emergency crews poured 1000 tons of plaster into the polluted flow in a frantic effort to solidify it and prevent the material from reaching and contaminating the Danube, Europe's second-longest river.
Hungary's environment secretary, Zoltan Illes, told the BBC that topsoil will eventually have to be removed throughout the contaminated area. The cleanup could cost tens of millions of dollars and take well over a year.



Different Whale Rescue

With parallels to the epic novel "Moby Dick," three Australian fishermen had to be rescued off the country's west coast after their boat sank due to a collision with what they believe was a whale.
Wearing life vests, a father, son and a friend were forced to abandon their 46-foot wooden boat after striking something "solid" in rough seas off Exmouth. A nearby oil rig crew responded to their mayday call and plucked them to safety about four hours later by following an emergency beacon.
"Being such an isolated part of the world and to come out of it unscathed and without any injuries, they are extremely, extremely lucky," said Exmouth police sergeant Michael Weir.


• Extreme temperatures: -87 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +114 deg F Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

October 4, 2010 (for week ending Oct 1)

Earthquakes

• One person was killed and three others were injured by a strong quake in southwest Iran's Fars province. Some older buildings collapsed during the 6.1 magnitude shaking.
• Earth movements were also felt in Japan's Honshu Island [magnitude 5.8], northern New Zealand [5.3], Indonesia's Papua province [7.2], interior Alaska [5.4], central Nebraska [3.0] and parts of New England [3.1].



Tropical cyclones

• Tropical Storm Matthew roared ashore along the Nicaragua-Honduras border, then drenched parts of Mexico that were still reeling from Hurricane Karl's deluge. The combined rainfall is being blamed for a massive landslide in Mexico's Chiapas state that buried hundreds of homes.
• Tropical Storm Nicole killed nine in Jamaica before drenching Cuba, the Bahamas and Florida. Hurricane Lisa formed briefly in the Atlantic.



Bolivian Conflagration

Bolivia's worst drought in 30 years has sparked nearly 50,000 wildfires over the past few months, creating health problems and even disrupting air traffic.
"The drought has kindled these massive, widespread blazes and estimates tell us they will continue until December." Bolivian Forest and Lands Authority President Cliver Rocha told state media.
President Evo Morales and several government officials have said that some of the fires were intentionally ignited, but blames climate change for the conditions that allowed them to spread to such a great extent.
Neighboring Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina also have experienced drought-enhanced wildfires over the past few months, which have generated a huge pall of smoke over a broad swath of South America.



Migratory Mismatch

European researchers say that climate change is happening so quickly that migratory birds are not keeping up with the earlier arrival of spring. They warn that a resulting "ecological mismatch" could be the main reason the birds' populations are declining.
Long-distance migratory species are the most impacted, according to Nicola Saino of the University of Milan. His study of the spring arrival of 117 species over the past 50 years indicates that the birds are now missing the best period in which to breed.
Spring is arriving an average of 11 days earlier than it did 30 years ago across much of Europe." Peaks in food abundance, such as insects, are very narrow in northern latitudes; so if you arrive too late and miss the peak, then you miss the best opportunity to raise your offspring." Saino writes.



Fatal Blizzards

Brutal late-winter snowstorms across southern New Zealand have killed more than half of all the new lambs born this season. Federated Farmers President Don Nicolson told Newstalk ZB radio at least 500,000 lambs have perished.
Many adult sheep have also succumbed to the blizzards, and dairy farmers say their milk production has plummeted as well. The most recent blizzard came at the height of lambing season.
Farmers said there was little they could do to save their flocks since moving sheep when they're lambing brings the danger of smothering and other conditions that could prove fatal. They say they're hoping for a rapid snowmelt.



Monkey vs. Monkey

Indian authorities have deployed a contingent of 30 langurs, a large breed of monkey, to help police protect spectators and contestants at the Commonwealth Games from more troublesome monkey.
"People who are coming from outside the country should not face any problems because of the monkeys. These langurs have been deployed for their safety so that the Games go on unhindered." Langur trainer Pramod Kumar told NDTV.
Wild monkeys freely roam the streets of India, sometimes attacking humans and raiding public building. In 2007, the deputy mayor of New Delhi died after he fell from his balcony during an attack by wild monkeys. About 25 other people were injured when a monkey went on a rampage in the capital.
Langurs are common across South Asia. They are often used to keep other simians in check in public places because of their larger size and dominant nature.



Irrigation Improvidence

A new study shows that the use of groundwater around the world has more than doubled in recent decades, threatening famine and chaos once it eventually becomes depleted.
Marc Bierkens of the Netherlands' Utrecht University say groundwater depletion rates are highest in northwest India, northeastern China, northeast Pakistan, California's Central Valley and the American Midwest.


• Extreme temperatures: -98 deg F South Pole, Antarctica; +117 deg F Mecca, Saudi Arabia
top

September 27, 2010 (for week ending Sep 24)

Earthquakes

• Anchorage and other parts of south-central Alaska were jolted by a 4.9-magnitude quake that knocked items off shelves and shifted furniture.
• Earth movements were also felt in central Oklahoma (4.0), the desert resorts of Southern California (3.4), Peru's central coast (5.9), eastern Afghanistan and neighboring parts of India, Pakistan and Tajikistan (6.2), and in the Christchurch, New Zealand, aftershock zone (3.4).



Tropical cyclones

• Category-3 Typhoon Fanapi lashed Taiwan for nearly a day, killing two people and dumping more than 50 inches of rainfall in some area. The storm then hit East China, where at least 54 people were killed in floods and landslides.
• Typhoon Malakas passed east of Japan.
• Hurricane Karl left 12 people dead along Mexico's Gulf Coast. Tropical storm Georgette drenched northwest Mexico while Lisa churned the Atlantic.
• Former Category-4 Hurricane Igor caused surprisingly little damage to Bermuda as it passed just to the west of the British Atlantic territory. The storm later caused flooding in Newfoundland.



Volcano Borehole - Campi Flegrei drilling

Italian scientists are making plans to drill deep into an active volcano near Naples in a move some local residents fear could actually lead to an eruption. The 13,000-foot borehole into the Campi Flegrei volcanic formation is designed to gauge just how active it is.
The complex of 24 volcanic fissures and craters last erupted in 1538, and recent seismic activity indicates it could be ready to blow again. Much of Campi Flegrei lies beneath the Bay of Naples, and was believed by ancient Romans to be the home of Vulcan, the god of fire. It exhibited periods of unrest between 1969 and 1972, as well as between 1982 and 1984.
Italy's National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology will use sensors to measure seismic activity and temperature at various depths to determine stability.



Ozone healing

The global agreement to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting compounds appears to have finally stopped additional damage to Earth's protective layer of stratospheric ozone.
Scientists say the ozone layer is no longer depleting and should regain its density by about 2048. The first report in four years by the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and the Montreal Protocol says the ozone hole is recovering more quickly than expected. The ozone provides a filter against harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun, which can cause cataracts and skin cancer.



Amazon drought

A parching drought in northern Brazil this year has caused the Amazon River to dwindle to its lowest level since 1963. Seven remote towns that rely on the waterway as their link to the outside world have been cut off as their tributaries all but dried up.
Meteorologists say lack of rainfall, which is typical for this time of year, should continue for a few more weeks until the start of the rainy season. They say that the unusually active Atlantic hurricane season has tapped moisture that would have otherwise provide rainfall for the Amazon region.



Arctic melt

The greatest extent of Arctic ice melt of the year occurred on or about Sept. 10, and preliminary estimates are that it was the third-greatest melt on record. Scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado said polar ice coverage was a little more than in 2008 and during the record low of 2007.
Most researchers believe the disappearing Arctic sea ice during summer is tied to warming temperatures caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases being spewed into the atmosphere, "We are still looking at summers with an ice-free Arctic Ocean in perhaps 20 to 30 years," said Mark Serreze, who is director of the center and a University of Colorado at Boulder profess.



Horror fly returns

A mythical fly that was once thought to be the first such insect to be driven to extinction by humans has risen from the dead after apparently dying off 160 years ago. Thyreophora cynophila belongs to the gruesome bone-skipper family of flies. It feeds and lays eggs exclusively on the carcasses of large animals in an advanced state of decomposition with bones broken open. More common flies prefer less-rotten flesh.


• Extreme temperatures: -102 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +116 deg F Illizi, Algeria.

September 20, 2010 (for week ending Sep 17)

Earthquakes:

• Residents of south-central Java were shaken soundly by a 5.0-magnitude quake. There were no reports of damage or injuries.
• A man was thrown from his horse in northwest Wyoming when one in a string of minor, magnitude 3.6 quakes in the area spooked the animal.
• Earth movements were also felt in Indian-controlled parts of Kashmir [magnitude 4.8], Bangladesh [4.8], northern Japan [5.8], far southern Philippines [5.2], the California-Mexico border area [5.0] and in the Christchurch, New Zealand, aftershock zone [5.0].



Tropical Cyclones

• High winds from Typhoon Meranti killed three people in China's Fujian province as the Category 1 storm wrecked their coastal homes.
• Typhoon Fanapi gained strength and took aim on Taiwan's east coast.
• Hurricane Igor strengthened to Category 4 force as it roared across the North Atlantic toward Bermuda.
• Much weaker Hurricane Julia Steered a more northerly course, while Tropical Storm Karl Drenched the Yucatan Peninsula.



Aleutian Plume

Alaska's Mount Cleveland spewed a plume of ash and steam over the central Aleutian Islands. Satellite infrared observations detected an increase in heat within the 5.676-foot mountain, but the Alaska Volcano Observatory said that didn't necessarily mean a larger eruption is imminent.
Volcanologists there have put the mountain on yellow alert, but say the lack of seismic equipment on Mount Cleveland makes it difficult to monitor its activity. They cautioned trans-Pacific aviation interests that it could take hours for new ash clouds to show up on satellite images.



Kiwi Quake Survivor

The egg of critically endangered subspecies of kiwi that survived the devastating Sept.4 Christchurch earthquake unbroken has hatched. Only about 300 rowi are believed to still be alive after the iconic New Zealand birds were ravaged by non-native predators such as cats, dogs, ferrets and opossums over the past two centuries.
Department of Conservation spokesman Rory Newsam says the newborn chick is called "Richter" after one of the pioneers of seismology for whom a scale of intensity was named. Richter's egg rolled round in its incubator during this month's 7.1-magnitude quake, but rubber matting prevented any damage, according to Newsam. The chick will be taken to a small island sanctuary free of predators once it's about a year old.



Heat Exodus

Sea temperatures around Japan during August reached the warmest levels ever recorded since reliable measurements began 25 years ago. Fish are believed to have fled the heat.
The average sea-surface temperature of 77 degrees Fahrenheit followed the hottest summer since 1898 across the country. Thousands of people have been taken to hospitals suffering from heatstroke and other heat-related ailments. Japanese fishermen say they have been hard-pressed to find their usual catches of Pacific sauries, which have dropped 80 percent in numbers since last summer.
Pacific saury, known as sanma in Japan, usually swim about 3 feet below the surface, according to Akihiko Yatsu, a senior researcher at the National Research Institute of Fisheries Science. He told the Yomiuri Shimbun that unlike other fish, sanma cannot dive to reach cooler water, so they must swim elsewhere.



Bat Disease Hope

New treatments are being proposed to help combat a fatal bat disease that has decimated the flying mammals' population in several parts of the eastern United States. The so-called white-nose syndrome is a fungal infection that emerged in 2006.
Scientists don't know exactly how it has wiped out 97 percent of the bat population in some areas, but researchers think they can fight it. Addressing a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, Jeremy Coleman, head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's response to the problem, says that the use of antifungal drugs might be successful in treating infected bats, and antiseptics could be used to de-contaminate bat caves. But Coleman warns that further study is necessary to make sure the treatments don't harm other wildlife or cause their own set of problems.



Polar Ice Refugees

Walruses have joined polar bears and other creatures that are acutely affected by the record decline of Arctic sea ice in recent years. Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey found that for the third time in four years, unprecedented numbers of the marine mammals are congregating onshore in northwest Alaska due to the lack of an ice pack.
Large numbers of walrus calves have been found swimming in the Arctic alone, presumably abandoned by their mothers while they were making an arduous ice-free journey to shore. The bulky animals normally float on ice over the summer, occasionally diving to the sea floor to forage for food. But again this year, tens of thousands have been forced to swim to land and crowd together in Alaska and Siberia due to ice-free conditions.


• Extreme temperatures: -107 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 116 deg F Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

September 13, 2010 (for week ending Sep 10)

Earthquakes

• New Zealand's second-largest city was under a state of emergency after a 7.1-magnitude quake wrecked hundreds of buildings, cracked roads and ripped a new 11-foot-wide fault across Christchurch. There were no reports of fatalities due to the overnight temblor, which struck the South Island early on Sept.4.
• Earth movements were also felt in northern New Zealand (5.2), Fiji (6.3), Indonesia's Sumatra (5.6) and Sulawesi (4.7) islands and northern Japan's Hokkaido Island (5.0).



Tropical cyclones

• Tropical Storm Hermine produced torrential rainfall and scattered tornadoes as it made landfall in far northern Mexico, then cut a path northward through Texas.
• South Korea and Japan were drenched by Tropical Storm Malou. Some Japanese communities received nearly 20 inches of rainfall, the highest amount ever for a single storm.
• Igor formed near the Cape Verde Islands and was expected to become at least a Category 2 hurricane.



Sumatran blasts

Indonesia's Mount Sinabung continued to erupt for a second week, producing its most violent activity since it roared back to life after remaining dormant for 400 years. More than 30,000 people living along the volcano's fertile slopes have been evacuated to refugee camps, mosques and churches in nearby village.
Volcanologists fear that a much more destructive explosion could occur in the coming weeks or months. But they also say it's possible Sinabung will go back to sleep after letting of stem.
Torrential rains accompanying the eruption have washed large quantities of ash and mud down the volcano's slopes, inundating abandoned homes. Sinabung's awakening caught scientists off guard. Local volcanologists failed to notice signs of rising magma, slight uplifts in land and minor volcanic tremors.



Eaten into oblivion

Some of humankind's closest relatives are literally being eaten to extinction, according to wildlife experts. A new study of human settlements in the most remote parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo shows that chimpanzees have become the victims of a "wave of killing" by bush-meat hunter.
Meat from the primates is sold openly in the markets of Kisangani and smaller towns, where officials are failing to enforce the ban on killing chimps. "I was actually astonished to see the sheer quantities of bush meat being taken out of the forest," researcher Cleve Hicks of the University of Amsterdam told the U.K.'s The Guardian newspaper. Hicks says that the killing of adult chimps has left a large number of young orphans, many of which are captured and kept as pets.



Guatemalan tragedy

A week of torrential rainfall in western Guatemala unleashed tons of mud and rock that killed 45 people when they were buried alive in scores of separate slides. The country's president, Alvaro Colom, described the disaster as a "national tragedy."
Accompanying floods washed away sections of the Inter-American Highway, burying a bus and knocking several other vehicles off the road. There were numerous reports of survivors across the country managing to dig themselves out after being buried by a landslide.
The wettest weather in 60 years has taken the lives of about 225 people so far this year in various weather-related disasters. Tropical Storm Agatha alone killed 165 Guatemalans in May. A U.N. report published last year on the effects of climate change listed Guatemala as among the 10 countries in the world at greatest risk from resulting disasters.



Bug Brain Antibiotics

Brain tissues and the nervous systems of insects may provide the next line of antibiotic defense against emerging superbugs that have become resistant to drugs.
Researchers from the U.K.'s Nottingham University discovered that molecules found in cockroaches and locusts are toxic to MRSA and E. coli bacteria, without harming human cells. The scientists say they're currently identifying the exact chemical ingredients that can kill bacteria and other pathogens.
Speaking at a meeting of the Society for General Microbiology, researcher Simon Lee said: "We're a long way from these being active drugs."



Air mail hazard

Canada Post was forced to suspend mail delivery to about 150 homes after a family of hawks began dive-bombing a Calgary neighborhood's letter carrier.
Spokeswoman Teresa Williams told the Calgary Herald that the carrier started wearing a helmet when the Bayview area's birds of prey began to repeatedly swoop down. But then, one "attacked with such force, it broke her bicycle helmet," Williams said.
Local residents initially welcomed the birds when they set up a nest last summer. But the hawks' instinct to protect their young has now made them an airborne Hazard. Canada Post says the mail will resume once the birds leave on their winter migration southward to Argentina, which wet weather has delayed.


• Extreme temperatures: -108 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 119 deg F Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

September 06, 2010 (for week ending Sep 03)

Earthquakes

• Three people were killed when a 5.9-magnitude temblor rocked the northern Iranian city of Damghan. State media reports that 40 others were injured during the shaking.
• China's quake-prone Sichuan province was jolted by a 5.0-magnitude quake that left 14 people injured and hundreds of homes damages.
• Earth movements were also felt in Taiwan (5.2), northern Japan (5.2), Croatia (3.3), around the Greek capital of Athens (4.2) and in central Oklahoma (3.6).



Tropical Cyclones

• Northern parts of the Windward Islands and Puerto Rico were buffeted and drenched by passing Hurricane Earl. The storm went on to lash parts of the U.S. eastern seaboard. Tropical Storm Fiona took a more easterly path in Earl's wake.
• Tropical storms Namtheun and Lionrock brought rain to Taiwan and parts of coastal China.
• Typhoon Kompasu killed three in Seoul as the strongest such storm there in 15 years.



Sumatran Eruption

An Indonesian volcano that had been dormant for four centuries roared back to life in northern Sumatra, forcing about 30,000 people to flee their homes. Mount Sinabung produced strong eruption for two consecutive days, with plumes of ash and steam soaring a mile and a half into the sky.
Sinabung last erupted in 1600, leaving today's scientists with little or no historical information to determine its eruptive pattern and help predict what it might do.
People began to evacuate almost two days before the country's National Disaster Management Agency advised them to do so. When the mountain did explode in the middle of the night, no one was injured as hot volcanic debris blanketed areas up to 20 miles away. Lava flowed for a short distance down Sinabung's slopes. Residents in the region were forced to wear face masks and cloths over their nose and mouth as ash fell for the following three days.



Modified Mosquitoes

Malaysia's plans to release genetically modified mosquitoes to combat dengue fever are drawing criticism from environmental organizations. Some fear the move could fail to prevent the spread of the disease, and possibly have unintended consequences.
Between 2,000 and 3,000 modified male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are slated to be released in two Malaysian states during October. Their offspring die quickly, hopefully curbing the growth of the mosquito population.
It's hoped a massive release could entirely eradicate the dengue mosquito if the test project works. Females of the species are responsible for spreading dengue, which has killed 100 people in Malaysia so far this year.



Migration Warning

Wildlife groups are asking the Tanzanian government to reconsider building a highway through the country's Serengeti National Park, the world's best known wildlife sanctuary. The Zoological Society of London and the Wildlife Conservation Society warn that the road would disrupt the migration of 2 million wildebeest and zebras.
Tanzania's government says the road is necessary to connect the country's west with commercial centers on the eastern coast. Critics say a new highway could just as easily be built through the southern parts of the park without disruption the migration route.



Salmon Bonanza

Western Canada's sockeye salmon, which mysteriously vanished from the Fraser River last year, have returned in numbers not seen since 1913. The species had become so depleted in the British Columbia river last summer that the federal government launched an inquiry into the disappearance.
The sockeye that have returned this summer were born in 2006, and left the river for the open Pacific in 2008. The Pacific Salmon Commission estimates that slightly over 25 million fish have returned to spawn.
A record number of salmon smolts were born in the Fraser during 2005, and experts were baffled as to why they didn't return during the summer of 2009. Some speculated that they were eaten by predators or affected by warmer ocean temperatures and scarce food. Whatever the reason for last year's disappearance, British Columbia fishermen are now preparing for what may prove to be an epic fishing season thanks to this summer's river bonanza.



African swarms

Crop-devouring locusts have swarmed across more than 40 villages in eastern parts of the West Africa nation of Guinea-Bissau. Officials say that the insects appear to be heading northward toward neighboring Senegal.
Guinea-Bissau regional representative Queba Balde told AFP that as many as 125 to 150 locusts were found per square yard in some areas. The plant protection service in the city of Bafata told the agency it has been unable to contain the infestation with its limited resource. Massive locust swarms in 2004 caused a food crisis in Mali, Senegal and Mauritania.


• Extreme temperatures: -104 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 118 deg F Death Valley, California.

August 30, 2010 (for week ending Au g06)

Earthquakes

• Four moderate [magnitude 5.4] quakes jolted Taiwan within a single day, but none was strong enough to cause damage or injuries.
• Earth movements were also felt along the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border (5.2), in northern New Zealand (5.0), western Greece (5.6), California's desert resort of Palm Springs (3.6) and the Southern California coastal strip near Malibu (4.0).



Tropical Cyclones

• < a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Pacific_typhoon_season#Tropical_Storm_Mindulle" target="new2">Tropical Storm Mindulle killed at least 10 people in central and northern Vietnam as is blew roofs off homes and uprooted trees while moving ashore form the South China Sea.
• Hurricane Danielle posed no threat to land areas after it formed over the open waters of the eastern Atlantic.
• Hurricane Frank passed well of Mexico's Pacific coast.



Volcanic Alert

Columbia's Galeras volcano erupted with plumes of gas and ash that soared high above the sky near the border with Ecuador.
The country's Institute of Geology and Mining had warned the nearly 8,000 nearby residents that the mountain was about to erupt. But many refused to leave and hunkered down in their homes, according to officials.
Galeras has produced similar activity in recent years, and those living near it say they now mainly ignore the regular warnings of an impending eruption. The volcano last erupted in January, triggering forest fires on its slopes.



Gulf Oil Eaters

Scientists say a newly discovered species of carbon-eating microbe found in the Gulf of Mexico could be responsible for the BP oil spill dissipating far more quickly than expected.
A study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found high concentrations of the bacteria in the deep plume of oil near the well during May and June. Writing in the journal Science, lead author Terry Hazen says 100 times fewer bacteria were present outside the spill zone. Now that most of the spill appears to be gone, the prodigious oil eaters have resorted to feeding on their dead "brethren," which expired after consuming the oil, Hazen says.
Some scientists question the bacteria'a role in the oil disappearance, Richard Camilli of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution says it's possible the oil has moved or become so diluted that is can't be detected.



Toad Airlift

A precious cargo of 100 tiny, wild toads was airlifted from the Bronx and Toledo zoos to Tanzania in an attempt to reintroduce the species to where it has become extinct in the wild.
The Kihansi spray toad's habitat was destroyed when a hydroelectric dam was built in 2000, eliminating nearly all the waterfall mist that the amphibians need for survival. The toads soon began to dry out and fall ill. But scientists managed to collect a colony of almost 500 and shipped them to a handful of zoos entrusted with preserving the species.
The toads haven't been seen in the wild since 2004, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. The organization is in charge of reintroducing them to their original home, which encompasses only 2 hectares in the Kihansi Gorge. Artificial sprinklers are now being installed in the gorge to simulate the spray toads' original living environment, allowing them to soon return home after a 10-year absence.



Radioactive Swine

Radioactive fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is contaminating southern Germany's wild boars due to a combination of climate change and settling of the radiation into the soil. A warming climate is providing ideal breeding conditions for the swine as higher temperatures cause oak and beech trees to overproduce seed and farmers to grow more crops the boars like.
And the resulting population boom of the wild game is also feeding more and more on mushrooms and truffles that tend to store radioactivity the most. Nearly a quarter of a decade after the nuclear plant explosion, the cesium-137 contamination has now seeped into the soil to the exact level where the most truffles grow.
The radioactivity doesn't appear to be harming the boars, but German hunters in Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg must have their kills checked for radioactivity before it can be consumed or sold. Game deemed unsafe is purchased by the government and burned. Cesium-137 has a half-life of about 30 years. Officials point out that Cs has ceased to be a problem on crops across the region.



Deadly Chill

Many parts of South America remain in a bitter Antarctic chill that has caused misery and even death in the normally temperate region. Temperatures in the Peruvian capital of Lima have recently been the coldest in 40 years, due in part to cooler-than-normal coastal waters linked to the returning La Niña ocean phenomenon.
Health experts say the chill is responsible for the deaths of more than 250 young children across Peru, who suffered from cold-related respiratory disasters like pneumonia. Unusually cold weather has reached as far north as the Amazon rain forest.


• Extreme temperatures: -79 deg C Vostok, Antarctica; 48 deg C Port Sudan, Sudan.

August 23, 2010 (for week ending Aug 20)

Earthquakes

• A moderate [magnitude 4.5] earthquake centered just off the northern coast of Sicily sent several people to a hospital suffering from panic attacks and minor injuries.
• Earth movements were also felt in Costa Rica [magnitude 4.6], western India [5.4], northwestern Wyoming [4.3] and west-central Utah [3.8]



Waning Eruption

The eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano is slowly fading, but officials warn that dangers from it are not yet entirely gone.
Billowing ash clouds from the volcano in late spring disrupted air transporting across the Atlantic and parts of Europe, and caused local flooding around the glacier covering it. The movement of magma beneath that part of Iceland appears to have almost halted.



Mega Disaster

The unprecedented flooding submerging almost a thirds of Pakistan has become one of the worst natural disasters of our time.
The U.N. estimates that as many as 20 million people have lost their homes due to the inundation. A large number of those victims still have not received any relief assistance from their government or international aid agencies. The U.N. warns that the Pakistan floods have affected far more people than the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and this year's devastating quake in Haiti.
Emerging waterborne disease across the flood zone could result in more fatalities than from all those other disasters combined. "I just don't think the world has realized the magnitude of this now, because ... it doesn't have the drama of an earthquake that impacts a huge number of people all at once." said USAID's regional adviser for South Asia Bill Berger.



Vampire Bat Attacks

Rabid vampire bats have bitten more than 500 people in the Peruvian Amazon, where health workers rushed to provide vaccinations to those attacked. Health ministry spokesman Jose Bustamante says four children who were bitten have died from the horrific effects of rabies infection, which is almost always fatal once symptoms develop.
Its incubation period can last several months. Vampire bats usually get their blood meals from animals, but they can sometimes attack sleeping humans when unusually hungry or rabid.
This is especially a problem in areas where their rain forest habitat has bee destroyed. Replacing the cleared forest with cattle has provided a rich new living food source for the bats, which increased their population near humans.



Australian Swarms

The worst locust swarms in nearly 30 years are expected to ravage crops across parts of Australia in the coming months. Unusually wet weather earlier this year allowed hundreds of millions of spur-throated locusts to breed, especially in western Queensland.
Officials have launched an intense spraying assault on existing swarms before they get a chance to reach prime agricultural areas. "The (southern) winter months are the ideal time for spraying, as locusts band together in swarms and present a good target," Primary Industries Minister Tim Mulherin told the Australian Associated Press. Recent warm weather may mean the insects could been moving earlier than expected.



Truly Clever Birds

New Zealand's mischievous and cunning kea parrots have been found the be able to plan their moves ahead of time, especially when it comes to acquiring food.
A researcher at Japan's Kyoto University presented some of the birds with boxes of food secured with up to three bolts. The birds managed to handily unlock all of them. To complicate the task, Hiromitsu Miyata arranged the locks so one needed to be opened before the second would released. Miyata found that the birds could solve this challenge faster if they could see and study the arrangement before being allowed to tackle it.
He says this suggests they are able to plan their moves, rather than grappling with problems in a haphazard fashion as earlier believed. Miyata's study is published in the journal Animal Cognition.



Superbug Alert

A dangerous new enzyme that can allow any bacteria to become a superbug, resistant to all known antibiotics, is causing alarm among health experts worldwide. Known as NDM-1, the enzyme appears to have emerged in South Asia last year and has since been spread back to the home countries of patients who visited Pakistan and India for discounted medical procedures like cosmetic surgery.
So far, the number of people identified as carrying the enzyme is small, including 37 in the U.K. and there from Australia. Cases in Canada and the U.S. have also been reported.
The death of a Belgian man linked to the superbug is believed to be the first fatality from it in the world. Earlier this month, a chemical compound called GSK 299423 was found effective against antibiotic resistant bacteria. Some believe this could become a treatment for the new NDM-1 strain.


• Extreme temperatures: -105 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +121 deg F Death Valley, California

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August 16, 2010 (for week ending Aug 13)

Earthquakes:

• Thousands of residents of coastal Chile fled to higher ground in fear of a tsunami following a sharp [magnitude 5.7] quake that knocked out power.
• A 7.3-magnitude quakes centered huts off Vanuatu's capital of Port Vila caused minor damage and created some of the worst shaking residents had ever experienced.
• Earth movements were also felt in New Zealand's North Island (4.3), Pakistan's Punjab region (3.8), Ecuador (6.9), south-central Alaska (4.1), southern Quebec (3.2) and near California's Silicon Valley (3.9).



Tropical Cyclones

• Tropical Storm Dianmu left five people dead after brushing the southern coast of South Korea. Dianmu had earlier drenched coastal parts of China's Shandong province with downpours that forced the evacuation of 158,000 residents, according to China's Ministry of Civil Affairs. The storm later brought heavy rains to parts of northern Japan.
• Tropical Storm Estelle formed briefly off Mexico's Pacific coast.



Eruption Deaths

An eruptions of Indonesia's Mount Karangetang volcano left five people injured as it damaged 10 homes and two bridges nearby, according to officials. The victims died as the volcano sent lava and a searing cloud of superheated gas cascading down its slopes.
Volcanologists said Karangetang spewed in the middle of the night after heavy rain caused its hot lava dome to split. Ash and lava then poured down the mountain's western slope, according to the National Disaster Management Agency. About 65 people were evacuated from threatened villages near the volcano's flanks following the initial phase of the eruption.



Pandemic's End

While sporadic outbreaks of the H1N1 swine flu have recently emerged in India and a handful of other locations, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) says the virus has run its course and the pandemic is over.
In June 2009, the WHO declared that a new flu virus was causing the first pandemic in more that 40 years. It first emerged in Mexico and the United States. Based on recent reports from the Southern Hemisphere, where it is winter, the WHO says H1N1 is now behaving more like a seasonal flu.
The latest update from the U.N. health body said: "Globally, pandemic influenza transmission remains most active in parts of South Asia and in limited areas of tropical South and Central America. In the temperate zone of the Southern Hemisphere, overall seasonal and pandemic influenza activity remains low, except in South Africa."



Wildfire Radiation

The massive firestorms that have raged across western Russia have burned some of the vegetation that has stored radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. While officials say there have been no reports of increased levels of radioactivity, nuclear contaminants have been transported by billowing colds of smoke.
"There is no reason for panic," forest agency head Alexei Bobrinsky told SFP. The deputy head of the firefighting effort says that the bulk of the radioactive debris has seeped into the lower levels of soil during the past 20 years. Greenpeace in Russia also says the danger from radiation is insignificant. But authorities have cordoned off the contaminated forests. Strong winds finally cleared the smoke from Moscow, but blistering heat remained. Fatalities in the Russian capital had doubled due to the air pollution.



Heat Wave Invasion

The recent hot weather baking many parts of the eastern and central United States appears to be driving snakes into the cool oases of North Carolina homes. Critter Control owner Bob Jankowski told The Dispatch of Lexington that the reptiles don't like the hot weather any more than we do and are just trying to regulate their body temperature.
He says he has a no-kill policy and releases most of the copperhead snakes he extracts from buildings back into the wild. "When treated properly, they're not dangerous," Jankowski told the paper. "You just don't want the step on them." Copperheads have a venom that is not especially toxic. While their bites are very painful, they are seldom fatal. North Carolina leads the nation in the number of bites from copperheads, which live from northern Mexico to southern New England.



Ocean Sound Pollution

Man-made noises polluting the world's oceans could be leading fish away from healthy habitats and to their deaths, according to a study at the Great Barrier Reef.
Steve Simpson of the University of Bristol's School for Biological Sciences says that baby tropical fish rely on natural sounds from fish, shrimps and sea urchins to find the coral reefs where they can thrive. But he says that exposure to artificial noise makes the ifs become attracted to "inappropriate sounds" that lead them away from the reefs.
Simpson writes that man-made noise "has increased dramatically in recent years, with small boats, shipping, drilling, pile driving and seismic testing now sometimes drowning out the natural sounds of fish and snapping shrimps."


• Extreme temperatures: -110 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +122 deg F Mecca, Saudi Arabia

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August 9, 2010 (for week ending Aug 6)

Earthquakes

• Iran was rocked by two strong quakes within a 24-hour period, striking the northeast and southern parts of the country. The first quake registered a magnitude of 5.6 and injured more than 200 people about 75 miles south of Iran's second-largest city of Mashhad. It was followed by a 5.3-magnitude quake that caused extensive damage in the Negar region.
• Earth movements were also felt in western Nicaragua [magnitude 5.0], eastern Papua New Guinea [7.0], southern Tajikistan [5.4], islands around Indonesia's Molucca Sea [6.3] and western Wyoming [4.8].



Tropical Cyclones

• Tropical Storm Colin formed briefly to the east of the Windward Islands. It weakened to a tropical depression, which was expected to keep a safe distance from land.



Russian Conflagrations

The hottest July temperatures in western Russia since record-keeping began during the time of the czars set the stage for disastrous firestorms across the region. The conflagrations have become the worst in living memory.
Many were sparked by discarded cigarettes, campfires and barbecues. Dozens of people have perished in the blazes, which covered 440,000 acres and have also forced about 100,000 people from their homes.
Blazes reached the gates of Russia's closed city of Sarov, where the country's nuclear bombs are developed. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered soldiers to dig trenches and fell trees to create fire breaks around military installations and nuclear power plants.
The 50 peat bog fires that have ringed Moscow for weeks have created a choking pall of smoke that threatens public health in the capital. The blocking weather pattern responsible for the heat and fires is not expected to shift until late August.



Fox Army vs Rats

Authorities in China's westernmost Xinjiang province have enlisted an army of silver foxes to battle a plague of rats that has damaged vast expanses of grassland. The official Xinhua news agency reports that the Xinjiang government has released nearly 300 foxes into the wild that were purchased from the fur industry.
"Foxes are excellent natural predators of the rodent. One fox can catch about 20 rats per day," project deputy head Ni Yifei told Xinhua He says silver foxes were chosen because of their ability to run, hunt and live under the harsh conditions on the Xinjiang prairie.
Rat numbers are said to have dropped by 70 percent in one area where the foxes were released. China has tried various "natural" methods to cope with its perennial rat problems. It has used hand-to-hand combat by farmers, released owls and provided nests and perches for eagles in efforts to eradicate the pests. Hunan province even constructed a "great wall" 25 miles long in 2007 to stop a rat plague from spreading.



Solar Tsunami

Nearly the entire Earth-facing side of the sun became involved in a complex and violent string of events on Aug 1, sending bursts of charged particles rushing toward Earth. The surprising upheaval shook the sun's atmosphere as a huge solar flare accompanied by other dramatic events.
Scientists say they are puzzled by why so many things happened in different areas of the sun almost at once, especially considering how unusually quiet Earth's star has been for more than two years.
Two bursts of plasma sent out by the upheaval caused displays of the aurora borealis and aurora australis when they reached Earth's magnetic field.



Chilean Chill

People living in Chile's capital of Santiago suffered the coldest July since 1908, according to the University of Chile's Department of Geophysics. The Santiago Times reports one in three capital residents have reported respiratory illness during the past few weeks due to the chill, which was accompanied by a record amount of frost at the depth of the southern winter. Frost damage to avocados, oranges and lemons could reach as much as 40 percent, according to the English-language daily.
In neighboring Bolivia, the coldest conditions in have a century killed approximately 6 million fish in rivers of the country's subtropical region. Fresh drinking water is being provided to those living along the rivers now polluted with rotting fish.



Pakistan Flood Crisis

A monsoon season unlike any other in living memory has inundated vast stretches of northwestern and central Pakistan, triggering a massive humanitarian crisis. More than 1,500 people have been killed in the disaster over the past three weeks.
The United States, the U.N. and international relief agencies are scrambling to provide food and relief supplies to the affected areas. But their efforts are being hampered by washed-out bridges and roads, as well as downed communications lines.
The floods have event washed away supplies at the U.N.'s UNICEF warehouse. Waterborne illness is expected to spread quickly since many wells have become contaminated and dead animals are decomposing in the floodwaters.


• Extreme temperatures: -115 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +118 deg F Death Valley, California

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August 2, 2010 (for week ending Jul 30)

Earthquakes

• An extremely powerful [magnitude 7.6] temblor capable of inflicting great damage, but centered far below the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, was barely felt at the surface.
• Residents in northern Sumatra rushed out of high-rise buildings and apartment complexes as a 5.4 magnitude quake rocked the region.
• Earth movements were also felt in Taiwan [magnitude 5.6], northeastern India[4.1], Canada's Bay of Fundy [3.2] and along the California-Mexico border [4.0].



Tropical Cyclones

• Tropical Storm Bonnie brought gales and locally heavy rain as it passed over the Bahamas and the southern tip of Florida on July 23. Fears that Bonnie would reach hurricane force while approaching the coastal waters of Louisiana prompted the temporary evacuation of vessels and personnel working to contain and clean up the BP Gulf spill.



Marine Food Threat

The foundation of the entire marine food chain is being profoundly shaken by climate change, which could impact nearly all sea creatures as well as the humans who eat many of them.
Researchers from Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University write in the journal Nature that the number of phytoplankton has plummeted globally over the last century as the climate has warmed. They say the rate of loss has increased in recent years.
The microscopic plants are not only key to the oceanic food chain, but they are also responsible for producing half of Earth's atmospheric oxygen. The Dalhousie team says it believes there has been an approximate 40 percent decline in phytoplankton numbers since 1950, which can be linked to rising sea surface temperatures and changing oceanographic conditions.



Great Lakes Warming

The North American Great Lakes are as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above normal this summer, approaching record warmth in some areas due to a shortened winter season with scarce ice, followed by a hot spring.
"They're already at what we would have expected to be their peak temperatures for the summer ,and we have several more weeks of warming to go," University of Minnesota physics professor Jay Austin told The Detroit News.
Lake Superior commercial fisherman Ralph Wilcox told the paper that whitefish have become much harder to catch since they fled the warmth near shore for cooler, deeper waters.
This summer's warmth also appears responsible for the unusually thick blooms of algae that have slimed some parts of the Great Lakes. But the balmy waters have delighted many vacationers who can now swim much longer in the usually bracing surf.



Deforestation Slows

New technology that quickly detects large-scale illicit deforestation in Brazil's Amazon region has resulted in a dramatic drop in the practice over the past year, according to the country's environment agency.
IBAMA says satellite images reveal that only 580 square miles were lost to the most aggressive forms of illegal land-clearing between August 2009 and May 2010. That compares to 1,160 square miles over there same period a year earlier. The agency says that the use of radar sensors allows it to detect illegal logging and land-clearing even when skies are cloudy, or at night.



Cricket Meteorite

A British cricket match was disrupted by a suspected meteorite that crashed in front of two of the spectators, one of whom was struck by a fragment. Jan Marszel and Richard Haynes of the Sussex County Cricket Club said they saw a small dark object hurtling toward them "out of a blue sky." Marszel was hit in the chest by part of the 5-inch rock that bounced up after splitting on impact.
"We were quietly supping our pints, both looked up at the same time and saw a black object coming towards us. We didn't know what it was," said Haynes. He said that had it come from the other direction, they might have suspected that it had been thrown by someone. But both say it came from a great distance nearly parallel to the ground.
If confirmed, it would be the first known meteor impact in the U.K. since 1992.



Apt Apes

Tourists visiting the South African coast near Cape Town are being warned of a troop of baboons that can tell if visitors have left their vehicles unlocked or not. The South African Press Association reports that troublesome primates have learned to listen for the telltale "tweet tweet" triggered when the doors are locked by remote control. They immediately target those left unlocked once the owners are out of sight.
Among the items reported to have been plundered by the simian snatchers are cameras, food and other valuables. Baboons have become more of a problem to humans as their habitat has been invaded by development around the Cape Peninsula. In early July, a 14-year-old baboon named William by local residents was euthanized by lethal injection after he was caught repeatedly breaking into homes and terrorizing eople.


• Extreme temperatures: -109 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; +125 deg F Death Valley, California

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July 26, 2010 (for week ending Jul 23)

Earthquakes

• One person was killed in southern Iran by a 5.8 magnitude quake that damaged homes in four villages along the southern Persian Gulf.
• Earth movements were also felt in Papua New Guinea's New Britain Island (6.9), Taiwan (5.4), the Aleutian Islands (6.7), along the California-Mexico border (3.8), near Reno (4.2, and in the metropolitan Washington-Baltimore area (3.6).



Typhoon Season

• The death toll from Typhoon Conson's rampage across the Philippines during the previous week rose to 76 as more bodies were plucked from the sea. Two other fatalities were reported on China's Hainan Island before Conson wrecked homes and boats in Vietnam.
• Typhoon Chanthu formed in Conson's wake over the northern Philippines, then drenched parts of south China that were already experiencing severe flooding.

Hawaiian lava evacuation

A fresh surge of lava from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano forced a couple and their dogs to evacuate as their home was being surrounded by the molten rock.
The lava came to within about 300 feet of the residence, also sparking several small fires and crossing an access road. Volcanologists and civil defense officials say they hope the lava will stop moving parallel to the coast and begin flowing directly to the ocean, away from, any more structures. Lava flows in 1987 buried much of the Royal Gardens subdivision.



Disappearing Africa

Decades of animal monitoring in Africa reveal that the populations of large animals in the continent's wildlife sanctuaries have plummeted over a 35-year period. The greatest decline was found in West Africa, where an 85% loss was measured between 1970 and 2005 by researchers from the Zoological Society of London and Cambridge University.
The number of animals such as lions, elephants, buffalo, leopards and rhinos has dropped 50 to 60% in East Africa's national parks, including the famed Serengeti and Masai Mara. The rate of decline has slowed over time, however, said researcher Ian Craigie. But the populations of some wild animals in southern Africa are actually growing, due to better management and greater financial resources to protect wildlife.



Meteor[ite] 'attack'

A Bosnian man says that the six times his home has been struck by meteor[ite]s since November 2007 could not have possibly occurred naturally. The chances of that happening to one home within such a short period of time are literally astronomical, says Radivoje Lajic.
"I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don't know what I have done to annoy them, but there is no other explanation that makes sense," Lajic told local press at his home in the village of Gornji Lajici.
He says he sold one of the stones from space to a Dutch university to help pay for reinforcing his roof with steel. Experts confirmed that all of the rocks he has shown them are meteorites. Lajic says all of the meteor[ite] impacts have been during heavy rainstorms, so he now huddles in fear every time it begins to rain. He says so many people have visited to see the remaining meteorite collection that he plans to put a small museum in his garden.



Lifelong flu vaccine

Australian researchers say they have uncovered a key to how the flu virus mutates, which could lead to a new range of drugs to combat influenza, or even a lifelong vaccine.
Marco Casarotto of the Australian National University says the discovery is important because there is evidence suggesting that the currently available arsenal of vaccines could become ineffective within five years.
Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Casarotto and Matthew Rosenberg said they found how older flu drugs interacted with a protein found in the influenza virus, which mutated and rendered the treatment useless. They say they believe it will soon be possible to make drugs that can overcome these mutations.



Penguin deaths

Approximately 500 dead penguins and several other marine creatures have washed up on the beaches of southern Brazil, where experts are trying to determine what caused so many to die.
Most were Magellan penguins, which migrate northward at this time of year in search of food in warmer waters. Autopsies of the penguins revealed that their stomachs were entirely empty, indicating they probably starved to death, according to Thiago do Nascimento, a biologist at Brazil's Peruibe Aquarium.
He and others say that stronger currents or cooler-than-normal waters may have caused the penguins' food sources to dwindle. Or overfishing could have made the fish and squid more scarce, Nascimento said. Penguins often get lost, and a handful of them die of starvation each year as they end up along the Brazilian coastline, far from their normal habitats.


• Extreme temperatures: -100 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 123 deg F Al Qaysumah, Saudi Arabia

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July 19, 2010 (for week ending Jul 16)

Earthquakes:

• A 4.6 magnitude quake in Tibet caused some buildings to crack in Ngamring County but resulted in no injuries, according to the official Chinese Xinhua News Agency.
• Chile's Antofagasta region was jolted by a 6.5-magnitude quake that sent residents rushing outside. No damage was reported.
• Earth movements were also felt in northern New Zealand (5.3), islands around Indonesia's Molucca Sea (5.4), Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands (5.5), and in central parts of Chile (5.2).

Typhoon Season:

The Philippines' first typhoon of the rainy season killed at least 37 people as it brought flooding to six provinces, mainly near Manila. Typhoon Conson also disrupted air and ferry transport before weakening and later drenching parts of South China.

Hot Times Are Coming:

The sweltering heat waves that have baked several parts of the Northern Hemisphere over the past two weeks will become commonplace within the lifetimes of most of the world's current inhabitants, according to a new report. Researchers from Stanford University confirm earlier studies that point to the average temperature reaching 2 degrees Celsius higher within 30 years than it was in the mid-1800s. Noah Diffenbaugh says he and his team also found that the longest heat waves on record that occurred between 1951 and 1999 will likely become five times as frequent between 2020 and 2029. Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers caution that the 2030s are likely to be even hotter. "By the decade of the 2030s, we see persistent, drier conditions over most of the U.S.," writes Diffenbaugh. "Not only will the atmosphere heat up from more greenhouse gases, but we also expect changes in the precipitation and soil moisture that are very similar to what we see in hot, dry periods historically."

Disappearing Tigers:

A meeting convened in Bali to help save the world's tigers was told that the wild population of the big cats has now fallen to as low as 3,200, down from an estimated 100,000 in 1900. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warns that the tigers could become extinct across their southern and eastern Asia ranges unless urgent action is taken to prevent hunting and loss of habitat. WWF called on countries where the tigers still survive to fulfill their earlier commitments to double tiger numbers by 2022. The felines' most pressing threats are from conflicts between tigers and the people living near their habitats, damage to those habitats, hunting and illegal trading, according to WWF.


• Magnetic Vision:
  German researchers say they have discovered that some birds actually use their eyes to "see" Earth's magnetic field as they migrate. Writing in the journal Current Biology, lead author Katrin Stapput of Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt says robins have unique molecules in the retinas of their right eyes that become active when struck by blue light. The presence of magnetic fields affects how the molecules behave after exposure to the blue light, causing shading in the bird's field of vision that can be used to determine which direction to fly. "Both the visual and magnetic images involve variations in light and shade, but visual images tend to have sharp lines and edges, while the magnetic images have more gradual changes from light to dark," the article says. This shading is superimposed over the robin's normal vision, but only in the right eye. Stapput says that if the brid's right eye is covered, it loses the ability to see the magnetic field, but not if vision in the left eye is blocked.


• Mouse Plague:
  Australian farmers that have battled a huge locust infestation for the past few months are now forced to cope with a plague of mice that threatens to devour almost everything in its path. The problem is especially acute along the western coast of South Australia. "They destroy things, they chew everything, they chew wirings in your vehicles," farmer Bill Oats told Adelaide Now. Some farmers say the plague has become so bad that they are choosing to not grow grain. The only positive aspect of the rodent infestation is that the mice are eating about 10 percent to 20 percent of the region's locust eggs before they hatch.

Greenland Breakup:

A massive chunk of Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier broke off into the sea earlier this month, startling scientists who detected the event within hours thanks to satellite images. The breakup of nearly 7 square kilometers of ice caused the glacier to retreat inland nearly 1.6 kilometers between July 6 and 7, to a point farther from the sea than ever before observed. Jakobsavn Isbrae is responsible for as much as 10 percent of all ice lost from Greenland and is believed to be the single largest contributor to sea level rise in the Northern Hemisphere, according to NASA.


• Extreme temperatures: -74 deg C Vostok, Antarctica; 50 deg C Al Ahsa, Saudi Arabia.

July 12, 2010 (for week ending Jul 9)

Earthquakes:

• A 5.4 magnitude jolt centered near Palm Springs sent people scrambling beneath desks as items toppled off shelves across a wide area of Southern California.
• Earth movements were also felt in south-central Alaska (5.0), northeastern Japan (6.4) and south-central coastal Chile (5.0).


• Recycled Islands:
  A Dutch architecture company says it plans to construct a massive island in the Pacific made from the vast collection of plastic that has collected in the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" between Hawaii and San Francisco. WHIM's Ramon Knoester says the construction of "Recycled Island" will clean out the majority of the Pacific's plastic pollution and create new habitable land as many of the world's coastlines are lost to rising sea levels. A large portion of the new island is being set aside fro agriculture so inhabitants can be self-sufficient in food production, Knoester says. Prototypes of the plastic blocks to be used in the island buildings are said to be under development. If completed, the island would float in a circle around the North Pacific Gyre, remaining in the same general area of mild and relatively storm-free weather.


• Dolphin 'Superpod':
  A group of tourists on a whale-watching expedition off the western coast of Scotland was treated to the sight of about 1,000 dolphins swimming around them in a "superpod." Operator Nick Davies of Hebridean Whale Cruises said he'd seen such a sight only once before during the past 15 years of cruising off the isle of Skye, and it was in the same general area. "They were everywhere you looked for as far as you could see," Davies told reporters. "There was five square miles where they just filled the sea." It's believed that the gathering of short-beaked common dolphins occurred as smaller pods came together to chase a huge shoal of fish.


• Fish Talk:
  A New Zealand marine researcher says he has found that some fish can talk to each other with noises that include chirps, pops and grunts. Shahriman Ghazali, of the University of Auckland, says he believes that audible messages are used to attract mates, scare predators or even orient themselves. "All fish can hear, but not all can make sound-pops and other sounds made by vibrating their swim bladder, a muscle they can contract," Ghazali told the New Zealand Herald. He says cod are mostly silent, but become very vocal while spawning. The gurnard was found to have a wide vocal repertoire and to chat almost constantly. But Ghazali says the gilled gabbers might have to fall silent at times to keep from giving away their locations to passing predators.


• Call of the Wild:
  Zoo staff in New York say they have found a way to coax a critically endangered bird to breed by playing back the recorded sounds of others in the species that were preening and nest building. Only about 400 Waldrapp ibises are believed to still be left in the wild. One semi-wild flock in Austria provided the recorded love sounds that have inspired several of the winged couples in the Bronx Zoo to produce eggs. The birds don't often reproduce in captivity. After plugging the recorded ibis love calls stored on an iPod into speakers around the birds' enclosure, the ibises began to build nests, preen and neck. Eventually, six chicks hatched in May and have since grown to about adult size, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, which owns and operates the zoo.

Glacial Disappearance:

The leader of a new scientific expedition to eastern Indonesia's equatorial glaciers in the mountains of Papua province says he has found they yare melting at an alarming rate. "These glaciers are dying," said Ohio State University glaciologist Lonnie Thompson. "Before I was thinking they had a few decades, but now I'd say we're looking at years." He said that his expedition was pounded with rain every day, something he has never before encountered during three decades of drilling ice cores. Thompson told reporters he is fortunate to have collected climate details stored in the ice before it disappears forever.

Solar Harmonies:

The huge magnetic loops that create solar flares and prominences erupting from the surface of the sun are also creating cosmic melodies that scientists say can help them better understand how Earth's nearest star works. Astronomers at Britain's University of Sheffield said they uncovered the eerie musical harmonies produced by the magnetic field in the sun's outer atmosphere by using a complicated computer model to interpret new high resolution satellite observations. "It is providing us with a new way of learning about the sun and giving us a new insight into the physics that goes on in the sun's outer layers, where temperatures reach millions of degrees," solar physicist Robertus von Fay-Siebenburgen told the UK's Daily Telegraph. He says studying the "music of the sun" could provide the ability to predict solar flares before they happen. Charged particles sent into space by such eruptions can knock out satellites, electronics and power grids if they are powerful enough when reaching Earth.


• Extreme temperatures: -112 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 120 deg F Al Ahsa, Saudi Arabia.

June 28, 2010 (for week ending Jun 25)

Earthquakes:

• A broad swath of eastern Canada and the northeastern United States was rocked by a 5.0 magnitude quake. The shaking caused thousands of people across a wide region to rush outdoors as the ground shook for about 30 seconds.
• The second strong temblor (5.9) to rock India's remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands within a week damaged buildings and roadways in the Andaman portion of the archipelago.
• Earth movements were also felt in northern New Zealand (4.0) and south-central Alaska (4.5).

Tropical Cyclones:

The season's second, third and fourth named storms of the eastern Pacific hurricane season formed in rapid succession off Mexico. Tropical Storm Blas never attained significant strength, while Hurricane Celia quickly intensified to Category 2 force far from land. Tropical Storm Darby later formed from an area of distributed weather off the coast of Guatemala.

Radiation Mystery:

South Korean scientists say they detected abnormally high radiation levels near the border with North Korea two days after the neighboring Communist nation asserted it had created nuclear fusion. Pyongyang announced on May 12 that it had mastered the ability to generate limitless amounts of energy with the new technology. Three days later, atmospheric xenon, an inert gas associated with nuclear explosions or leakage from nuclear power plants, was found in levels eight times higher than normal by South Korean monitors. Such levels are said not to be dangerous. Scientists have discounted the possibility North Korea actually achieved nuclear fusion. Australian nuclear physicist David Hinde says the xenon most likely came from some type of fission reaction. North Korea is believed to have enough weapons-grade plutonium for at least a half-dozen nuclear weapons. It conducted two underground tests in 2006 and 2009.

Human Extinction:

Two eminent scientists say the human race is likely to become extinct at its own hand within the next 100 years as it exhausts resources through a population explosion and unbridled consumption. "It's an irreversible situation. I think it's too late," said 95-year-old Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner, who helped eradicate smallpox from the planet. Britain's astronomer-royal and president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, questions whether humans are smart enough to use what they have learned to save themselves. He warns that the promise of extended life spans through medicine, and prosperity through economic growth, could easily lead to oblivion by using up Earth's resources and changing the planet's climate.

Mass Poisoning:

Tens of millions of Bangladeshis are being poisoned by arsenic through drinking from contaminated wells dug since the 1970s. Many of the millions of tube wells, dug over the past few decades in an effort tot alleviate the country's chronic freshwater shortage, reached layers that are heavily laced with naturally occurring arsenic. A new study published in the journal Lancet documents that more than 20 percent of the deaths in the country's capital of Dhaka can directly attributed to drinking arsenic-tainted well water. Bandladesh's health minister says he questions the findings. The United Nations World Health Organization calls Bangladesh's arsenic crisis "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history."


• Looming Famine:
  International aid agencies have launched an urgent appeal to donors for help feeding starving people in parts of drought-striken north-central Africa. The relief agency Oxfam warns that 10 million people face starvation due to a failed harvest in Niger and Chad. "People are eating wild fruit and leaves, and building ant hills just to capture the tiny amount of grain that the ants collect inside," said Oxfam officer Charles Bambara.

Solar Harmonies:

The huge magnetic loops that create solar flares and prominences erupting from the surface of the sun are also creating cosmic melodies that scientists say can help them better understand how Earth's nearest star works. Astronomers at Britain's University of Sheffield said they uncovered the eerie musical harmonies produced by the magnetic field in the sun's outer atmosphere by using a complicated computer model to interpret new high resolution satellite observations. "It is providing us with a new way of learning about the sun and giving us a new insight into the physics that goes on in the sun's outer layers, where temperatures reach millions of degrees," solar physicist Robertus von Fay-Siebenburgen told the UK's Daily Telegraph. He says studying the "music of the sun" could provide the ability to predict solar flares before they happen. Charged particles sent into space by such eruptions can knock out satellites, electronics and power grids if they are powerful enough when reaching Earth.


• Extreme temperatures: -107 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 126 deg F Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

June 21, 2010 (for week ending Jun 18)

Earthquake:

• Far eastern Indonesia's Papua province was jolted by two powerful [magnitude 7.0 and 6.1] earthquakes that killed two people and wrecked dozens of homes.
• A 7.5 magnitude undersea earthquake near India's Nicobar and Andaman Islands snapped power lines and tossed people from their sleep.
• Earth movements were also felt in metropolitan Tokyo (6.1), near the South African city of Johannesburg (5.0), northern Sweden (3.6), south-central Alaska (4.3), and Southern California (5.7).

Gulf Spill Huddle:

Scientists studying the behavior of marine life along he oil-polluted Gulf of Mexico say the BP spill disaster appears to be causing sea creatures to crowd into shallow waters near shore. The troubling phenomenon among dolphins, sharks, crabs and small fish could mean the animals' normal habitats offshore have become so badly polluted that they were forced to flee. "Their ability to avoid it may be limited in the long term, especially if ... oil continues to come in," Duke University marine biologist Larry Crowder told the AP. "At some point they'll get trapped." Another threat is that they can be easily eaten by predators, Crowder warned. Researchers say they believe large schools of fish swimming unusually near shore are there because the water is cleaner and more abundant in oxygen.

Warmest May:

The trend of exceptionally warm temperatures worldwide that has prevailed since 1985 continued during May, with U.S. experts saying the month was the hottest May on record. It also marked the 303rd consecutive month that a month was warmer than its 20th-century average, according to Deke Arndt of the U.S. National Climatic Data Center.

A Desert Bounty:

Parts of Australia's desert outback are in bloom thanks to a second year of heavy rainfall that also promises to fill Lake Eyre to its highest level since 1974. The abundance of water flowing across hundreds of miles and through dozens of streams has turned the rugged region into a spectacular explosion of life. And much of that water is reaching Lake Eyre, normally a glistening salt flat on the edge of the Simpson Desert. This has prompted thousands of birds to fly long journeys to breed in an Eden-like environment that can remain parched and barren for years at a time.


• New Whale Products:
  Companies in the three nations that still hunt whales despite a 1982 global moratorium on the practice are developing new whale-based products as the International Whaling Commission (IWC) prepares to discuss a limited resumption of whaling. The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) says it has found thousands of approved patents that list whale oil and other parts of the marine mammals for use in goods such as golf balls, hair color, detergent, candy, biodiesel and health drinks. "It is clear that whalers are planning to use whale oil and other whale derivatives to restore their hunts to long-term profitability," said WDCS whale campaigner Sue Fisher. She says that Iceland, Japan and Norway are betting heavily that the commercial whaling moratorium will be lifted at the gathering of the IWC in Morocco during late June.

More Cold Winters:

Those who suffered through an unusually brutal winter in parts of North America, eastern Asia and Europe can expect a lot more of the same in future years, according to a leading climate scientist. "Cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception," said James Overland of the U.S. agency NOAA. His prediction, made in Oslo at a gathering of International Polar Year researchers, seems to defy conventional wisdom that a warming Arctic should mean milder winters to the south. The polar regions are crucial drivers of Earth's weather and climate. Overland says the rapid loss of long-term ice in recent years has disrupted "the memory and stability of Arctic climate system."



World Cup Victims:

Superstitious beliefs in South Africa about the ability of vultures to impart clairvoyant abilities to humans has created an even greater threat to the endangered birds during the country's hosting of the World Cup. The Cape Argus reports that according to tradition, eating the brains of a vulture or wearing a freshly decapitated vulture head can give a person the ability to see into the future and thus predict the results of soccer matches. The vulture population across the country has plummeted in recent years and conservationists say lotto players and gamblers are responsible. "It's highly likely there will be an increase in poaching surrounding the World Cup," said Andre Botha of the South African Endangered Wildlife Trust. He says he fears the birds will become extinct if measures aren't taken to ban the killings and to educate the public about the scavenger bird's crucial role in nature.


• Extreme temperatures: -73 deg C Vostok, Antarctica; 51 deg C Kuwait City, Kuwait.

June 14, 2010 (for week ending Jun 11)

Earthquake:

• A late-night [magnitude-3.7] tremor rattled thousands of people out of bed along the coastal strip of metropolitan Los Angeles, but there were no reports of damage or injuries. A swarm of other minor tremors [with a magnitude 3.2 being the largest] jolted Big Bear Lake, about 140 km to the east.
• Earth movements were also felt in southern Scotland (2.3), northern Algeria (4.0), eastern Afghanistan (5.1), and neighboring parts of Pakistan, Vanuatu (6.0), and South Australia (5.0).

Tropical Cyclones:

The death toll from rare and powerful Cyclone Phet reached 21 in Oman and at least 12 in Pakistan. The storm formed over the Arabian Sea, then triggered disastrous flooding and wind damage in Oman, where damage estimates reached near $1 billion.

Rising Above the Tide:

Pacific coral atolls, once feared to be disappearing due to rising sea levels, are about the same size or actually larger than they were 60 years ago, according to a new study. The findings by Paul Kench at Auckland University and ARthur Webb at the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji seem to contradict earlier predictions that swelling seas influenced by global warming would inundate low-lying islands. The researchers used archival aerial photos and satellite images to plot changes in the land surfaces of 27 islands. Writing in the journal Global and Planetary Change, they said they found that only four of the islands have shrunk since the 1950s, while 43 percent of them remained stable and another 43 percent grew in size. The atolls appear to be holding their own despite higher seas due to coral debris, land reclamation and sediment, the researchers say. Other scientist warn that sea level rises will accelerate greatly over the coming decades, eventually overwhelming low-lying islands.

Ebola Cure:

An experimental treatment that could one day save humans from ravages of Ebola has been proved to be 100 percent effective in curing monkeys of the disease. The U.S.-based National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories says the new treatment uses RNA, a type of genetic material similar to DNA, which prevents the Ebola virus from reproducing by targeting three viral proteins. The Boston University laboratory says more research is needed to determine if the treatment is needed to determine if the treatment is safe for humans. Ebola kills about 90 percent of people who become infected. It causes fever, diarrhea, vomiting and sometimes hemorrhaging from bodily orifices.


• Summer Companions:
  Analysis of whale behavior going back 30 years reveals that humpback whales form lasting bonds, reuniting each summer to feed and swim together. Researchers from Canada's Mingan Island Cetacean Study say their findings could mean that commercial whaling may have broken apart long-established social groups among the marine mammals. Humpback females spend most of the year on their own, bonding only briefly with males to breed. But each summer females in the study group reunited and paired up with the same females in the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The researchers say that based on their observations from 1997 to 2005, the females appear to reunite for the summer with others of the same age. It's unclear how they find each other after their long seasonal migrations.
  • In the Pacific, Japan's whaling institute dispatched three harpoon ships to kill 260 whales over the summer months. The fleet sailed despite legal action by Australia in the International Court of Justice to stop Japan's killing of whales in the name of science.

Andean Eruption:

Equador's Tungurahua volcano produced a series of explosive eruptions for a second consecutive week. The country's geophysics institute said between three and five explosions per hour were sending ash and lava spewing from the mountain, located about 90 miles south of the capital of Quito. Tungurahua began its current eruptive phase in 1999.

Snakes Disappearing:

Snake populations have plummeted on three continents over the past 15 years, causing concerns that loss of the reptiles could allow rodents to thrive, as well as other ecological disruptions. A study published in the British Royal Society journal Biology Letters says 11 of 17 snake populations in France, Britain, Italy, Nigeria and Australia dropped off sharply during a four-year period, starting in the late 1990s. England's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology says the reason for the decline is unclear, but the potential consequences could spell trouble for agriculture. "I don't think people realize how important snakes are," said lead scientist Chris Reading. He warns that they are the top predator in many ecosystems, and their absence would allow an explosion of pests such as rats that feed on rice and wheat. Readings says climate change, loss of habitat and pollution may be behind the sharp snake decline.


• Extreme temperatures: -79 deg C Vostok, Antarctica; Al Ahsa, Saudi Arabia; 48 deg C.

June 07, 2010 (for week ending Jun 4)

Earthquakes:

• A 6.2 magnitude offshore temblor shook much of Costa Rica from an epicenter beneath the Pacific, about 45 miles southwest of San Jose. No damage was reported.
• Earth movements were also felt in southern Philippines (6.0) New Zealand's Bay of Plenty (4.1), India's Andaman Islands (6.4), the San Francisco Bay Area (3.0), southeast Missouri (3.1), and along the California-Mexico border (3.8).

Tropical Cyclone:

• Around 180 people perished in floods and mudslides triggered by the seasons first tropical storm to strike the Americas. most of the fatalities from Tropical Storm Agatha occurred in Guatemala, which reported 152 deaths. The other victims died in Honduras and El Salvador.
• Cateogry 5 Cyclone Phet roared ashore from the Arabian Sea onto the coast of the Sultanate of Oman late in the week. Phet affected maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of all the world's seaborne oil supply passes.

Eruptions:

• Debris spewing from Guatemala's Pacaya volcano killed three people, injured 59 others and destroyed about 100 homes. Officials say rocks strewed by the eruption killed the victims.
• Ecuador's Tungurahua volcano spewed ash that forced airports to close and seven villages to evacuate. No fatalities were reported.
• International air traffic was warned to avoid ash soaring high from Vanuatu's Mount Yasur volcano. Disaster officials in the South Pacific island nation said the ash and lava from the volatile mountain was contaminating local water supplies.

Airborne Contamination:

Canadian researchers say they have found that birds feeding on marine life contaminated with toxic metals such as mercury and lead are depositing the poisons in their waste when they migrate to formerly pristine lakes in the Arctic. A team lead by Queen's University biologists compared sediment around where Arctic terns and ducks known as elders nest. Analysis found higher concentrations of mercury and cadmium near the tern habitats as compared withe elevated levels of lead, manganese and aluminum around where elders nest. That matches the contamination found in each of the bird species' primary food sources, the researchers say.


• A Biting Summer:
  Mosquito-control experts across North America are warning residents to prepare for one of the worst mosquito seasons in memory, following a damp spring and subsequent warm spells. "The whole mosquito cycle has been pushed ahead ... and they're actively biting people because we've had so many warm nights," David Henley, superintendent of Massachusetts East Middlesex Mosquito Control Project, told The Boston Globe. Fears of infection from such mosquito borne diseases as West Nile and dengue are prompting officials to warn residents to take measures to keep from being bitten. Henley says the amount of future sunlight, along with temperature and rainfall, will determine how bad the mosquitoes will be. Health officials in interior parts of Los Angeles Basin report the season's first West Nile-infected mosquitoes were found a full 10 weeks earlier than last year.

Hopping Prophets?:

A plague of frogs and fears of a possible seismic disaster have been added to the economic and political anxieties Greek residents have endured in recent weeks. Millions of the amphibians have hopped across the the Egnatia highway in the north of the country, forcing its closure after three cars skidded while trying to dodge he green invaders. Biologist say the frogs could have migrated en masse from a nearby lake in search of food. But some believe the frog movement could portend a powerful earthquake. British scientist released a report in April that documented such mass frog migrations before the April 2009 Italian quake that killed more than 300 people. Millions of frogs began relocating in central China during 2008, just seven days before a powerful quake killed 12,000.


• Potted Parrots:
  Animal shelters in Australia's Northern Territory are being overwhelmed with parrots that have become so "drunk" on a mysterious food source that they have fallen from the sky. The red collar lorikeets eat an unknown food, lose coordination and pass out, according to Lis Hansen, a founding member of the Ark Animal Hospital near Darwin. "Every day, people hand in more birds that have been found stumbling around on the side of the road, eyes gunky and half-closed, unable to fly," Paws animal shelter manager Tess Cooper told the Northern Territory News. Cooper says almost 40 of the lorikeets have been brought in with the same symptoms. The hung-over birds are fed a diet of fruit and nectar for a few weeks so they can sober up and recover enough to be released.



• Extreme temperatures: -104 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 120 deg F Jacobabad, Pakistan

May 31, 2010 (for week ending May 28)

Earthquakes

• A relatively mild [magnitude 3.4] earthquake just to the north of Seattle prompted Washington state highway crews to inspect five bridges. No damage was reported to the structure, or anywhere else in the area.
• Earth movements were also felt in Japan's Ryukyu Islands [magnitude 6.4], south-central Peru [6.1] far western Brazil's Amazon region [6.5] and the southern Arizona-New Mexico border [3.5].



Tropical Cyclones

• Cyclone Laila's passage up the coast of eastern India killed at least 23 people.
  Severe flooding in Andhra Pradesh state was made worse by the nearly 12 inches of rainfall the region received from monsoon storms just before Laila's landfall.
• Tropical-storm-force Cyclone Bandu brought beneficial rainfall to northeastern Somalia.



Shrinking Bluefins

Japanese researchers warn the the number of large, breeding-age Pacific bluefin tuna is shrinking at an alarming rate, similar to what happened to the Atlantic population of the endangered species.
Toshio Katsukawa and colleagues at Mie University said the source of the decline is the overfishing of large-size fish, which leads to excessive catches of bluefins too young to reproduce.
"Its is imperative to suspend the catch during egg production periods and reduce the capture of juvenile fish," Katsukawa told the Kyodo news service.
Japan also has come under mounting pressure for its excessive fishing of Atlantic bluefins, which is threatening the survival of the species. Now Katsukawa says the increased use of encircling nets has brought the average weight of each bluefin caught in the Pacific down to about 110 pounds compared with the 1980s average of 220 to 350 pounds.



Climate to Sneeze at

Suffering from allergies and asthma is likely to become more frequent due to the increased level of carbon dioxide (CO₂) predicted over the coming decades if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed, researchers warn.
Earlier studies revealed that increased CO₂) leads to more eye-watering and sneeze-causing pollen. But writing in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, lead author Julie Wolf of the University of Maryland said that elevated CO₂ concentrations also cause increased production of fungal spores, to which many people are acutely sensitive. The report says that spore production in some areas could increase threefold if the projected level of CO₂ for the year 2040 is actually reached.



Monarch Recovery

The low numbers and distribution of monarch butterflies returning to the United States from their winter home in Mexico is causing concern for butterfly experts. A brutally damp and icy February in the forests of Michoacan state is believed to have killed more than half of the wintering monarch population.
The insects have since faced a milder and wetter climate than normal as they winged northward across Texas. Chip Taylor, director of Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas, says observers report the monarchs have been confined mainly to Texas this spring, more so than during any other in the past 10 years.
But he says conditions are favorable for the number of monarchs to quickly bounce back. Taylor believes the recovery will be determined by the number of first-generation monarchs that come north out of Texas over the next few weeks, and by weather conditions throughout the northern breeding range over the remainder of the summer.



Melting Africa

An equatorial glacier on Uganda's Mount Stanley has split due to excessive melting caused by climate change, authorities say. Hikers attempting to reach the summit of the mountain's Margherita Peak had to turn back after discovering they could no longer use the melted 20-foot section of the glacier as a bridge.
The director of Uganda's National Environment Management Authority told the Daily Monitor that the entire glacier on Africa's third-highest mountain is melting so rapidly that it will disappear entirely within 40 years.
Researchers say the ice cap has shrunk in size from about 2.3 square miles in the 1950s to its current coverage of less than one-half of a square mile. The mountain is located on the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has a height of 16,763 feet.



Serial Killer

Forest wardens in India's Kerala state are tracking down a bull elephant that is suspected of killing 12 female pachyderms that have spurned his sexual advances since January 2009. Kerala's Chief Wildlife Warden, K.K. Srivstava, told the BBC that one of the bull's tusks is damaged and has become very sharp, easily piercing the females' bodies.
He says a surge of testosterone has led to the unusual and extreme aggression of the tusker, which has been named Alpha.
Wildlife officials say they would like to tranquilize Alpha and trim the tusk so he can no longer kill so easily. but Srivastava says that since Alpha has killed only two females so far this year, perhaps "he is getting better."


• Extreme temperatures: -93 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 127 deg F Sibi, Pakistan

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May 24, 2010 (for week ending May 21th)

Earthquakes:

• Two people were killed and 43 others injured when a 5.1 magnitude quake wrecked buildings in parts of northern Algeria.
• A moderate earthquake (5.8) jolted awake residents of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands , causing structural damage to buildings and landslides in some areas.
• Earth movements were also felt in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty (3.5), Java (5.4), Hawaii's Big Island (3.5), northern Peru (6.0), the California-Mexico border region (5.1) and the San Francisco Bay Area (3.3).

Tropical Cyclone:

• Cyclone Laila drenched India's eastern coast and brought winds of up to 80 mph when it roared ashore over the Krishna River delta in eastern Andhra Pradesh state.
• Cyclone Two menaced maritime traffic in the Gulf of Oman.
• Unabated Warming:
  This year is unfolding as the hottest ever with both the April and the entire January-April periods ranking the warmest on record. Analysis by the U.S. agency NOAA confirms earlier predictions that the year could turn out to be the warmest since reliable instrumental temperatures records began in the late 1800s. The combined global land and ocean surface temperature average for April was 58.1 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.35 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average. The same coverage from January through April was 1.24 degrees gave the average of the past century. The previous record warmest year was 1998, and early indications are that 2010 will be warmer still. Despite a bitterly cold and snowy December and early January in the eastern U.S. and Canada, satellite analysis reveals that the extent of snow cover in North America was the smallest for any April since satellite records began in 1967.
• African Lake Warming:
  The steady warming of southern Africa's Lake Tanganyika over the past century threatens marine life and the millions of people in the region that depend upon the body of water for protein. Researchers from the University of Arizona and Brown University wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience that the lake is now at its warmest in 1,500 years, based on evidence from cores drilled into the sediment at the lake bottom. Lead author Jessica Tierney says the most dramatic warming has occurred over the past 90 years. The paper suggests that recent rises in temperature may be killing fish and other life in the lake. Stratified thermal layers are preventing rich nutrients at the bottom from rising to near the top, where algae can make use of them and become food for larger creatures.
• Australian Swarms:
  An Australian agricultural association warns that an emerging locust plague could ravage such large swathes of crops that food prices will be forced to rise. The New South Wales Farmers Association predicts that the growing swarms could wreak even more costly damage than the recent drought. Extensive rainfall over the Outback during the southern summer provided ideal conditions for locusts to lay billions of eggs. The locusts are becoming so numerous that they have the potential to wipe out wheat, barely and vegetables, and also ravage pastures. Beyond the economic impact on procedure shoppers, such devastation could also leave sheep and cattle with nothing to eat.
• Opium Losses:
  Afghan farmers who have watched their illicit opium poppy crop become damaged this spring tell the BBC's Pashto service they are convinced U.S. secret agents have sprayed their fields with a fungus that attacks the plants. Officials estimate that strains of fusarium oxysporum and pleospora papveracae could cut this year's opium yield by up to 70 percent in some areas. Afghanistan's Taliban insurgency is largely funded by the drug trade, estimated to be worth $2.8 billion. In 2000, the international nongovernmental organization Sunshine Project published reports of "dangerous U.S. fungus experiments" aimed at targeting drug-producing regions. The Guardian (UK) reports The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Kabul says it is unable to confirm the identity or source of the current poppy disease.
• Chill Out For Longevity:
  A new study on the temperament of dogs and how it affects their well-being could have a message fro humans wanting to live a long and healthful life span. A team led by Vincent Careau of Quebec's University of Sherbrooke studied how personality, size, appetite and other characteristics bred into various dog breeds affected the animals' longevity. He and colleagues found that obedient breeds, such as German shepherds, poodles and bichon frises, tend to live longer on average than disobedient breeds, such as high-energy dogs like beagles and Pomeranians. Aggressive dogs also tended to have shorter lives than more mellow breeds. The researchers used data from previous studies and even included data from a Swedish pet insurance company in evaluating canine longevity. The findings will be published in the journal The American Naturalist.
• Extreme temperatures: -95 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 120 deg F Mecca, Saudi Arabia

May 10, 2010 (for week ending May 7th)
• Earthquakes:
  
  • A sharp quake (6.2) centered near the Peru-Chile border toppled power poles in the Peruvian city of Tacna. While there were no immediate reports of injuries or fatalities, residents across the region fled outdoors during the strong shaking.
  • Earth movements were also felt in central Chile (5.9), Haiti (4.4), the Northern Mariana Islands (5.4), Taiwan (4.6), western Japan (4.9), western Sumatra (6.5) and southern Utah (3.6).
• Bee Fatalities Mount:
  The recent trend of bees dying in great numbers over the winter continued this season with nearly 34 percent of managed American honey bee colonies dying off from October to April. Beekeepers said the deaths were mainly due to bad weather, starvation and because some bees were already weak before winter set in. Some apiaries said a portion of the deaths were due to the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which has devastated hives across the United States and Canada over the past few years. The cause of CCD is still unknown. The latest fatalities compare to a 29 percent loss during the previous winter and a nearly 36 percent loss during the winter of 2007-2008, the Apiary Inspectors of America and the Agricultural Research Service say, Researchers warn such losses are not economically sustainable for beekeepers.
• Dwindling Shrine:
  Large stretches of the famed Jordan River, in which Jesus is said to have been baptized, may have no water left for pilgrims to immerse in by next year, according to a report by Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian scientists. Water diversion far upstream over the past five decades has reduced the once roaring waterway to a mere trickle in some places. What was once the narrowest stretch of the river has now become its widest. Despite efforts by Jordan and Israel to curb the flow of pollution into the biblical river, raw sewage and chemicals from agricultural runoff are now about the only thing flowing into it. The report says that if no wastewater were to enter the lower Jordan River, it would entirely dry up. Visiting Christians are discouraged from re-enacting or conducting baptisms there because of the current level of contamination.
• Ugandan Monkey Cull:
  The plan to kill monkeys on a group of islands in the Ugandan portion of Lake Victoria has brought outrage from conservation and environmental groups. The Ssese Islands are a popular tourist attraction because there are more monkeys there than humans. But farmers say their traditional methods of scaring off the primates no longer work. Local official David Balironda told Agence France-Presse that there is a bounty of one dollar for each tail of a dead monkey brought in. Local member of parliament Ruth Nvumetta told the agency that the monkeys have become more troublesome because their forest habitats have been cut down to expand lucrative palm plantations.
• Latin Rumblings:
  Guatemalan officials restricted air traffic over the country because of ash clouds that suddenly began to spew from two separate volcanoes. An eruption of Santiaguito produced a column of volcanic debris that soared more than 27,000 feet into the Central American skies. Disaster officials said falling ash damaged local crops but caused no human injuries. The eruption was followed by renewed activity within Fuego volcano, located near Guatemala's colonial capital of Antigua. A third active volcano, Pacaya, was releasing gas.
• Light Pollution:
  A group formed to preserve the character of England's countryside is working to limit the expansion of what it calls unnecessary light sources that pollute the night sky. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) says its survey of 1,745 people conducted with the British astronomical Association shows that 50 percent of the respondents say their sleep has been disrupted by nighttime light sources. The group wants stricter controls over street lighting as well as the use of neon and other signage. CPRE campaigner Emma Marrington told the BBC: "The costs of not acting are clear: unnecessarily high energy bills ... more carbon emissions, disrupted sleeping patterns for people, disturbance to wildlife, and a night sky bereft of the majesty of the Milky Way."
• Ash Refugee:
  Scottish bird-watchers have been treated to a visit from an imposing bird of prey that is believed to have been driven from its usual habitat by the massive ash clouds spewed by Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano. The gyrfalcon spotted on the Isle of Lewis since late April has a wingspan of more than 6 feet. "Usually, they hang around in the Arctic Circle and move south a little in winter, but very rarely get to the U.K.," said Royal Society for the Protection of Birds conservation officer Martin Scott. He said the ash also appears to have kept a larger number of geese in the Outer Herbrides from being able to migrate to the Arctic.
• Extreme temperatures: -94 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 118 deg F Jacobabad, Pakistan

May 03, 2010 (for week ending Apr. 30th)
• Earthquakes:
  
  • Buildings in Taipei swayed as a long stretch of Taiwan was jolted by a powerful quake centered well off the southern tip of the island. No damage was reported.
  • Earth movements were also felt in Indonesia's North Maluku Province (6.1), southeast Texas (4.0), northeast Ohio (2.7) and along the California-Mexico border (4.8).
• Tropical Cyclone:
  An area of disturbed weather between Australia's northwest coast and the Indonesian island of Java intensified into a Cyclone Sean on April 23. It soon reached its maximum intensity, generating sustained winds of just over 50 mph as it churned the open waters of the far eastern Indian Ocean. Sean eventually dissipated far from any land areas, a threat only to shipping lanes during its brief life span.
• Ungirded Magma:
  British and Icelandic geophysicists have warned that ice-covered volcanoes could erupt more frequently as global warming melts the glaciers currently bottling up the magma below. Caroline Pagli of the University of Leeds wrote a 2008 paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that says climate change may trigger more volcanic eruptions as the resulting glacial melt removes enormous weight from the surface, freeing up magma from the deep. She and volcanologist Freysteinn Sigmundsson from the University of Iceland documneted how the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago coincided with a tenfold increase in eruptions on the island. They believe it occurred because the land rose as the ice melted away. Iceland's icecaps have been melting without much interruption since 1890, which the researchers believe could mean the island is in for another period of soaring volcanic activity.
• Hottest March Ever:
  A detailed analysis of the world's land and ocean surface temperatures has revealed that March 2010 was the warmest March on record, the U.S. agency NOAA reports. The National Climatic Data Center says it determined that the combined average land and ocean surface temperatures for the month was 56.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 1.4 degrees above the 20th century average. Considering just the land areas, the temperature was 2.45 degrees above the 20th century average, making it the fourth-warmest on record. A big contributor to the warmth was the weakening El Nino in the tropical Pacific. The first quarter of this year across the planet's land and ocean surface has stacked up to be the fourth-warmest January-March period on record.
• Gulf Spill Disaster:
  Crews worked round-the-clock to contain a leak from a deepwater oil rig that was spewing about 42,000 gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico each day. An expanding oil slick about 40 miles south of Louisiana threatened to pollute coastal waters rich in shrimp, fish and other marine life. The spill began after a rig exploded and eventually sank in waters about 5,000 feet deep. Submarines were attempting to cap the wellhead on the bed of the Gulf, but officials warned that the spill had the potential to become worse than the 1989 Exxon Valdez environmental disaster. BP said a kink in the pipe was preventing oil from spewing even more heavily. A flotilla of oil-skimming vessels was dispatched to recover as much of the spill as possible.
• Violent Sandstorm:
  A record 16-hour sandstorm collapsed buildings and sparked fires across far western China's Xinjian region, leaving three people dead and one missing. The official Chinese Xinhua news agency reports the violent winds were the strongest ever recorded in Turpan city and the counties of Shanshan and Toksun in central Xinjian. In the neighboring Gansu province, weather officials said black clouds of san dropped visibilities to between zero and two yards. Sandstorms occur each spring across arid parts of northern and western China, often blowing thousands of miles eastward into South Korea, Japan and even the Pacific coasts of Canada and United States.
• Rabbits Besiege Island:
  A rabbit population explosion has been occurring on one of Scotland's Inner Herbrides islands since a rat infestation was eradicated four years ago to protect Canada's seabird population. But the island's 19 human residents say that rabbits now have few natural predators, allowing them to devour crops and undermine historic structures unchecked. Canna's only restaurant now serves rabbit dishes at every meal. But getting fresh vegetables to accompany the entrees is a challenge because the hordes of rabbits that still hop around outside eat them as soon as crops pop out of the ground, residents say. "The only things that are happy are the sea eagles. They have been having a real feast (on the rabbits)," resident Winnie Mackinnon told The Times of London. The National Trust of Scotland, which owns the island, says there is no proven link between the rat eradication and the swelling rabbit population.
• Extreme temperatures: -101 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 116 deg F Nawabshah, Pakistan

April 26, 2010 (for week ending Apr. 23th)
• Earthquakes:
  
  • At least 11 people were killed in northern Afghanistan by a 5.4 magnitude temblor that also wrecked more than 200 homes.
  • The strongest quake ever to rock Western Australia's Goldfields caused some damage but only two injuries.
  • Earth movements were also felt in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty (4.1), South Australia (3.8), Tonga-Samona (5.9), eastern Tennessee (3.3) and in the eastern Dominican Republic (5.4) and nearby Puerto Rico (5.1).
• Volcanic Climate:
  The eruption of Iceland's Eyjafljallajokull isn't likely to have any significant effect on the climate, but the global grounding of aircraft due to the European no-fly zones has resulted in a small decrease in greenhouse gas emission. Volcanologists say that the towering columns of ash from the volcano have contained only small amounts of sulfur, which has cooled the climate in other eruptions by reflecting sunlight. Also, the ash hasn't reached very high in the atmosphere, where its climatic influence would be greatest. Grounded aircraft worldwide had not emitted the more than 3 million tons of carbon dioxide as of Tuesday that they would have if the flight ban had not be imposed, according to the Environmental Transport Association. It's estimated that Eyjafjallajokull spewed about 15,000 tons of CO2 each day during the most powerful phase of its eruption.
• Exxon Valdez Legacy:
  Residual oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill is still being consumed by Alaskan wildlife more than 20 years later, according to a new Canadian study. Researchers from Simon Fraser University say they used biomarkers to measure exposure to oil in harlequin ducks. Writing in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, lead researcher Daniel Esler said that "unequivocally higher" levels were found in birds feeding in areas oiled by the spill than elsewhere. Esler says the findings show that the consequences of oil spills are measured in decades rather than years. A spokesman for ExxonMobil Corp. told reporter in 2006 that more than 350 studies done by independent researchers had failed to find any significant, lingering impact on wildlife as a result of the spill.
• Early Birds:
  Brid watchers across Canada are being treated to sightings of migratory birds returning weeks earlier than usual due to mild spring weather. "One morning, there were virtually no song sparrows countryside was crawling with them everywhere, singing and hopping around," New Brunswick naturalist Jim Wilson told the CBC. On Canada's West Coast, Hammond's flywcatchers arrived on Vancouver Island about two weeks earlier than expected during early April, according to Ann Nightingale, president of the Rocky Point Bird Observatory in Victoria. The winged travelers appear to be responding to a mild winter and early spring, rather than climate change, bird experts say.
• South Seas Rumblings:
  The Pacific island nation of Vanuatu is preparing to evacuate almost 3,000 villagers if a volcano that has been rumbling for months become violent. There have been at least 13 eruptions at Mount Garat since 1963, with the mountain spewing ash hand sulfur on crops across the island of Gaua as recently as last October. Seismologists say recent activity has been significantly more powerful and unstable.
• Outback Swarms:
  Weeks of wet weather that brought rare lush vegetation to Australia's normally arid interior has proved irresistible to swarms of locusts that are now ravaging the Outback. The insects are more than unwelcome to the region's farmers, who have suffered from a decade of drought and now must deal with a locust plague since the rain has returned. The worst swarms in 30 years have already wiped out thousands of acres of crops, as well as ravaging even larger tracts of pasture, according to agriculture officials. Farmers fear that there will be even more losses later this year when new generations of locusts hatch during September and October.
• Pigeon Democracy:
  Pigeons seem to use a flexible system of leadership while choosing what direction to fly, in which every bird in the flock gets a vote, but status determines who are more likely to lead and who are followers. Scientists from Oxford University and Hungary's Eotvos University fitted the birds with tiny GPS backpacks to plot their movements. The team then documented changes in direction and altitude of individual birds in the flock to determine which initiated any given change in direction and which followed. Analysis revealed well-defined hierarchies and ranks of leadership that determine which birds have the most influence. Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers said they found that a bird's position in the flock matched its rank in the hierarchy, with individuals nearer the front more likely to be responsible for choosing which direction to fly.
• Extreme temperatures: -110 deg F Vostok, Antarctica; 121 deg F in Rohri, Pakistan

April 19, 2010 (for week ending Apr. 16th)
• Earthquakes:
  
  • More than 600 people died and 9,000 others were injured during a 6.9-magnitude temblor centered in western China's Qinghai Province.
  • A sharp undersea earthquake (5.1) centered just off the Solomon Islands caused damage and injuries in a remote tribal village near the epicenter.
  • Earth movements were also felt in Taiwan (6.8), northern New Zealand (4.3), southern Spain (6.2), south-central Alaska (4.6) and along the Mexico-California border (4.4).
• Eruption Resumes:
  Iceland's Eyjafjallajskull volcano was calming down before a sudden blast of renewed activity sent hundreds of people fleeing. A huge plume of ash blowing southeastward prompted aviation authorities to shut down all air traffic in Scandinavia and Britain, as well as other countries, for the first time in history. The volcanic field initially began spewing fountains of lava above the snow-covered Icelandic landscape on March 20. Heat from the lava of the latest eruption quickly began to trigger snow melt and runoff, posing a threat of local flooding. The eruption has also created an unexpected tourist boom for a country that has suffered from a severely collapsed economy and acutely high unemployment numbers.
• Barrier Reef Scar:
  Australian authorities arrested the crew of a Chinese freighter for gouging a two-mile scar across the Great Barrier Reef after taking an illegal shortcut across the World Heritage Site. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called the grounding of the Shen Neng 1, which also leaked about two tons of fuel oil, an "absolute outrage." In some areas, all marine life has been completely flattened and the structure of the shoal has been pulverized by the weight of the vessel, according to the Great Barrier Reef's chief scientist, David Wachenfeld. It may take decades to recover from the type of paint that scrapped off the Shen Neng 1. The "anti-fouling" chemicals in the paint designed to prevent barnacles and other marine life from building up are now poisoning coral.
• Glacial Tsuanmi:
  A huge chunk of glacial ice crashed into a lake in the Peruvian Andes, generating a 75-foot tsunami that swept into three nearby towns, killing at least one person. The ice block from a glacier on Hualcan glacier was estimated to have been the size of four soccer fields when it hit the lake about 200 miles north of Lima. Peruvian officials point to climate change for the disaster, and for the loss of 22 percent of the country's glaciers over the past 35 years. Peru is home to about 70 percent of Earth's tropical glaciers, which feed hydroelectric plants and provide drinking water.
• Warming Rivers:
  The annual mean temperatures of 20 rivers and streams in the United States have gotten significantly warmer over the past decades, according to a new report. The University of Maryland ecologists and hydrologists who conducted the study say the warming can impact the biodiversity of the waterways. Writing in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the researchers say that the "urban heat island" effect from concrete, asphalt and other materials is responsible for some warming of rivers such as the Colorado, Potomac, Delaware and Hudson. But they say climate change is also a factor. David Secor of the University's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory says Maryland's Patuxent River has warmed by 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1939. "It's both surprising and remarkable that so many diverse river systems in North America behaved in concert with respect to warming," Secor said.
• Apes in Peril:
  The U.N. warns that gorillas could become extinct across much of Africa's Congo River Basin within 10 to 15 years due to illegal logging, mining and demand for meat of the primates. U.N. Environment Program officer Christian Nellemann also points to armed conflict and outbreaks of Ebola as other fatal influences on the ape population. The rain forests of central Africa have long been a refuge for guerillas and other apes. But human intrusion and its resulting environmental degradation are finally reaching primate habitats in what was known by Europeans as deepest and darkest Africa.
• Fatal Flight of Passion:
  The airborne mating frenzy of two Alaskan bald eagles left the pair jammed beak first into two feet of hard snow pack on Easter Sunday after the birds apparently became lost in the passion of the moment. The male eagle was killed on impact near Valdez, but the female survived and was being treated in Anchorage. "They just lose track of what they're doing and don't know how close they are to the ground," said Bob Benda, a bird rescuer and biology professor at Prince William Sound Community College. "It's raging hormones or something." Mating season is in full swing for the majestic birds, who perform an elaborate ritual in which they clasp talons and spiral toward the ground. Most snap out of it before crashing.
• Extreme temperatures: -101 deg F South Pole, Antarctica; 117 deg F in Kiffa, Mauritania

April 05, 2010 (for week ending April 2nd)

Earthquakes:

• A 6.6 magnitude quake centered in India's remote Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal jolted a wide area from Myanmar to the Indian mainland, hundreds of kilometers away. the only injuries caused by the quake occurred when two people jumped from a roof during the shaking.
• A sharp [magnitude-6.2] quake in northern Chile's Atacama region caused landslides and prompted the evacuation of schools and other public buildings.
• Earth movements were also felt in New Mexico (4.3), central Washington (3.8), coastal Maine (3.0) amd southern parts of the San Francisco Bay Area (3.1).

Tropical Cyclone:

• Storm-force Cyclone Paul drenched parts of Australia's Northern Territory with as much as 440 mm of rainfall as it drifted ashore from the gulf of Carpentaria. Resulting floods washed out roads, isolating communities to the southeast of Darwin.

Submerged threat:

A leading Italian volcanologist warned that Europe's largest undersea volcano could crumble at any time, unleashing a tsunami that would engulf southern Italy with little warning. Enzo Boschi told the Corriere della Sera daily that the Marsili volcano has fragile walls that could collapse. "Our latest research shows ... its walls are fragile and the magma chamber is of sizable dimensions," Boschi said. A collapse could result in "a strong tsunami that could strike the coasts of Campania, Calabria and sicily," Boschi told the paper. Marsili rises from the floor of the Tyrrhenian Sea about 150 km southwest of Naples. It has not erupted during recorded history.

Plastic food vortex:

Researchers exploring an area of the mid-Pacific containing vast amounts of plastic pollution say they have discovered that remnants of the plastic could be making it back into the human food supply in the fish that are eating it. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific Trash vortex, contains high concentrations of plastics, chemicals and other debris that have become trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre currents. Scientists from the scripps Institution of Oceanography say they have found pieces of plastic in the guts of fish found in the vortex. University of California, San Diego graduate student Pete Davison, who dissected the fish, told the nonprofit voiceofsandiego.org news site that mostly smaller fish had consumed the tiny plastic particles. But he said those fish are, in turn, eaten by larger, commercially fished species.

Mystery deaths:

Marine mammal experts are scrambling to uncover what has caused a mass death of baby right whales along southern Argentina's Patagonian coast over the past three years. The International Whaling Commission has convened an urgent meeting near where more than 300 dead whales were found. "It has been established that a die-off like this was a completely unknown phenomenon and nothing like it has been seen anywhere else in the world," said Argentine Whale Conservation Institute president Diego Taboada. Most of the fatalities have been among baby southern right whales, which have appeared to be severely malnourished.

Still streaming:

A slowdown of the Gulf Stream and the entire "ocean conveyor belt" circulation has not begun to occur as predicted by some climate models. Scientists from the UK and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory say that while there is considerable variability in the global current system, long-term trends remain neutral. It had been believed that accelerated melting of ice sheets would cause changes in salinity that could disrupt the climate-controlling currents. But despite recent record Arctic melting, there has been no discernible change in the North Atlantic component of the global thermo-haline system, researchers say. The Gulf Stream is key to keeping Western Europe much warmer than its latitude north of the equator would normally allow. The warm current keeps Europe as much as 4 to 6 degrees Celsius warmer than it would otherwise be.


• Social laughter:
  The cackling and giggling sounds for which hyenas are well known have been deciphered by scientists, who say they tell a lot about individual animals of the species. In the open-access journal BMC Ecology, Frederic Theunissen from the University of California Berkeley and colleagues say the giggles' pitch and timbre may help the hyenas establish social pecking orders. The researchers found that the pitch of the giggle reveals a hyena's age, while variations in the frequency of notes contain information about how high it ranks in order of dominance. The study revealed that "whoops," with long intervals between the vocalizations, were found to come from two individuals that have become separated. "Grunts" or "soft growls" are emitted when they come into close contact with each other.


• Extreme temperatures: -87 deg C Vostok, Antarctica; +45 deg C Linguere, Senegal.

February 1, 2010 (for week ending Jan. 29th)
• Earthquakes:
  
  • Aftershocks as powerful as magnitude 5.1 continued to rock the Haitian disaster zone. All of the seismic evens in the ongoing swarm were centered just west of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
  • Earth movements were also felt along the Panama-Costa Rica border (5.7) and in central Peru (5.8).
• Southern Cyclones:
  Cyclone Nisha formed just south of American Samoa and was predicted to move steadily eastward toward the Cook Islands. Samoan Red Cross says heavy rains from Nisha drenched shelters housing those affected by the Sept. 29 quake and tsunami.
• Earth's Mightiest Wind:
  The U.N. World Meteorological Organization says that a new record-high wind gust, not related to a tornado, occurred in northwestern Australia at the height of Cyclone Olivia's fury on April 10, 1996. Review by a panel of experts of weather records and Barrow Island's wind instruments concluded that the record gust of 253 mph surpassed the previous record of 231 mph that occurred atop New Hampshire's Mount Washington on April 12, 1934. "It's obviously a big disappointment. Having the world record for over six decades was such a part of the soul of this organization and for fans of Mount Washington around the country," said Scot Henley, Mount Washington Observatory's executive director. He said that the Australians apparently didn't think the gust was that big of a deal at the time, and the report never made it into the record books.
• Swan Divorce:
  Wildlife experts in southwest England say they are stunned by the apparent "divorce" between a pair of Bewick's swans at a Gloucestershire wild bird sanctuary. The birds normally mate for life, but occasionally bond with another after one of the couple dies. But for only the second time in more than 40 years of observations at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust center at Slimbridge, two previously paired birds have appeared with new partners. "Failure to breed could be a possible reason, as they had been together for a couple of years but had never brought back a cygnet," wildlife officer Julia Newth told the BBC. She said the old pair had not acknowledged each other with any signs of recognition or greeting, even though they are occupying the same part of a small lake. Bewick's swans are the smallest and most rare of the three swans found in Britain.
• Volcanic Gas Hazard:
  Costa Rica's Turrialba volcano vented for a third consecutive week, with fumes of seeping helium, sulfur and carbon dioxide, prompting officials to close two nearby schools. The National Emergency Commission had earlier evacuated seven families because of gas and ash eruptions at Turrialba, placing them in subsidized housing until the mountain's unrest ends. A total of 40 people fled their homes during early January as the volcano displayed its most intense activity in more than 140 years. Volcanologists have assured nearby residents that the mountain does not appear ready to expel lava at this time. The mountain has become increasingly active since it began to awaken in January 2001. Turrialba's acidic gas emissions caused burns to local crops during 2008 and 2009.<\li>
• Deadly Cold:
  A bitter two-week chill blowing across Florida at the beginning of the year killed more than 100 endangered manatees in the state's coastal waters and bays, according to officials. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission told reporters that even more carcasses are still being found. The gentle marine mammals had congregated in canals and around discharge pipes of coastal power plants in an attempt to keep warm. Two manatees rescued near Vero Beach were taken to Sea World in Orlando for treatment, while two others were taken to Miami Seaquarium. Commission officials say the numbers of dead manatees from the cold set a record for any single year. The cold also killed fish and stunned thousands of sea turtles.
• Bee Fatalities Shift:
  A mysterious ailment that has decimated U.S. beehives in recent years appears to be on the decline. A new survey of beekeepers reveals that the number of operations reporting symptoms of colony collapse disorder, or CCD, decreased to 26 percent last winter compared to 38 percent during the previous season. Actual fatalities due to CCD were reported at 36 percent, down from 60 percent three winters ago. The first reports of CCD emerged in 2004, and scientist say they still don't know exactly what has caused it. While deaths from the disorder appear to be declining, beekeepers say fatalities due to severe winter conditions have increased sharply.
• Extreme temperatures: -72 deg F Oimyakon, Siberia; 110 deg F in Oodnadatta, South Australia

January 11, 2010 (for week ending Jan. 8th)
• Earthquakes:
  
  • The strongest in a series of powerful South Pacific earthquakes just off the Soloman Islands (7.2) unleashed a tsunami that struck several coastal villages. Hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed, but there were no fatalities.
  • A powerful nonfatal quake centered along Central Asia's Hindu Kush mountain range (5.3) left about 20,000 people homeless in parts of Tajikistan.
  • Earth movements were also felt in northwest Pakistan (3.2), New Zealand's North Island (4.3), central Peru (5.7), eastern Venezuela (5.4) and along the California-Mexico border (5.8).
• Catastrophic Decline:
  Losses to insurance companies from natural disasters fell by more than half in 2009, according to reinsurer Munich Re AG. In its annual review, the company pointed to an exception in the United States, where climate change contributed to a significant increase in damages and losses from tornadoes, severe storms and flooding.
• Hemispheric Freeze:
  Even with brutal wintry conditions chilling many parts of Asia, Europe and North America, 2009 will rank among the world's 10 warmest years since 1880. That's probably little consolation for people in Britain, northeastern China and the Korean peninsula who have been experiencing the coldest and snowiest conditions in decades. Bitter cold also killed nearly 200 people across the Indian subcontinent during the first week of 2010. America's heartland remained in the grip of a bitter freeze that threatened to destroy citrus and other crops as far south as Florida. It's part of natural variability," said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, "we'll still have record cold temperatures ... just fewer of them."
• Ancient Climate Fatality:
  The famed and timeless quiver trees that grow in South Africa and Namibia have begun dying over the past few years, with officials cautioning that they are the latest victims of climate change. The tree, also known as aloe dichotoma, can live to be more than 300 years old. But large clusters of them have withered and toppled during the past decade, causing alarm among the Bushman and San people who use their branches for bows. "The quiver tree is noted for its drought tolerance and longevity, but it may be operating at the edge of its physiological tolerance," said Wendy Foden in a report by the Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. A 2008 Namibian report said that temperatures have risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century as the country became the driest south of the Sahara.
• Congo Eruption:
  An expansive flow of lava from Nyamulagira volcano has pared humans in far eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but the animal population might not be so fortunate. U.N. peacekeepers have used aircraft to monitor the lava, aiding rangers who help protect endangered apes and chimpanzees. According to Virunga National Park officials, the eruption has been "very destructive" to the chimpanzee range on the volcano's western slope.
• Animal-Human Disease:
  Medical experts warn that dozens of new diseases with origins in the wild have found new homes in human bodies over the past two decades due to climate change, environmental degradation and urbanization of the planet. Writing in the journal Bioscience, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency health scientist Montira Pongsiri and colleagues say that a host of new illnesses that can be passed from animals to humans are waiting around the corner. "We appear to be undergoing a distinct change in global disease ecology," Pongsiri told The Independent "The recent emergence of infectious diseases (such as swine flu and SARS) appears to be driven by globalization and ecological disruption."
• Bunny Fuel:
  Hordes of rabbits are being killed, frozen and converted to biofuel for heating homes in Sweden. The practice has been criticized by Sweden's Society for the Protection of Wild Rabbits, but officials say the fuzzy hoppers are damaging parks, homes and infrastructure each year. "It is in winter they do the most damage. They they eat tree bark, wood, anything. This is when they cause the most costly damage," said Tommy Tuvunger at the Stockholm Traffic Office. Thousands of rabbits have been shot by two people who go out at dawn and use guns with silencers. They are then deep frozen and taken to a Daka Biodiesel plant in Sweden for incineration as fuel.
• Extreme temperatures: -58 deg F Oimyakon, Siberia; 120 deg F in Mardie, W. Australia

Quest Featurettes

February 01, 2010
• Biodiversity: The hottest of hot spots: Scientists have identified one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth: Yasuni National Park in Ecuador. The park, located in the Amazon basin, contains at least 200 mamma species (including 10 primates), 240 amphibian and reptile species, 596 bird species, 1,100 tree species and 100,000 known insect species. Naturally, the region is environmentally threatened, with several oil development projects under consideration.
February 01, 2010
• Earthshaking news: Or maybe not. New studies of the San Andreas Fault on the Carrizo Plain, 100 mi north of Los Angeles, show that the history of temblors along this fault is quirkier than previously believed. The general model presumed large quakes along the south-central portion of the San Andreas happen at roughly regular intervals and tend to be similar in nature and movement. New research suggests more frequent and smaller quakes that don't all behave the same. The significance: Scientists apparently don't understand the San Andreas as well as they thought, and the chances of accurately forecasting future quakes just got more remote.