Earth ChangesS


Snowflake

Blizzard blasts North Dakota with up to 19 inches of snow closing down most roads

 An exhausted man takes a break from the task of attempting to shovel his vehicle out of deep snow at a northwest Minot intersection Tuesday morning
© Kim Fundingsland/MDN An exhausted man takes a break from the task of attempting to shovel his vehicle out of deep snow at a northwest Minot intersection Tuesday morning
Eastern North Dakota's first snowstorm of the season dumped more than a foot of snow on Monday night and Tuesday in many areas, but it was the howling winds up to 30 mph to 50 mph that caused blizzard conditions across the region.

Wind driven snow depth
© Lauren Ashley Otradovec, Glenburn, NDLauren Ashley Otradovec who lives in Glenburn, ND, found this massive pile of wind driven snow when she opened her door. There is about a foot of snow on the ground after a new storm dumped a few inches but the big issue is the wind.
The highest snowfall was thought to be in Kensel where 19 inches fell through Tuesday night. The small town is about 30 miles north of Jamestown.

Grand Forks was also close to having the biggest snowfall at 13 inches by 6 p.m., said National Weather Service meteorologist Amanda Lee.

She said another inch or two could fall late Tuesday into early Wednesday.

Other high snowfall total were 12.5 inches in Hatton about 40 miles southeast of Grand Forks and 14 inches in Harvey and McHenry south and west of Devils Lake.


Sun

Video footage captures triple sun dogs over St. Petersburg, Russia

Triple sun dog in St. Petersburg
Incredible footage and images show three suns appearing in the sky over Russia.

People in the country's second city of St Petersburg were left stunned by the unusual sight.

The triple sun scene was the result of a rare natural phenomenon.

Maria Borukha, head of popular science at the Petersburg Planetarium and a current PhD student in celestial mechanics at St Petersburg State University, said the false suns were known as 'sun dogs'.

She explained that they were an atmospheric phenomenon consisting of a pair of bright spots appearing on either side of the Sun.


Blue Planet

Earth's days getting longer, slower, without notice

Earth
© NASA/AFP
Earth's days are getting longer, according to a study
Earth's days are getting longer but you're not likely to notice any time soon -- it would take about 3.3 million years to gain just one minute, according to a study published on Wednesday.

Over the past 27 centuries, the average day has lengthened at a rate of about +1.8 milliseconds (ms) per century, a British research team concluded in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

This was "significantly less", they said, than the rate of 2.3 ms per century previously estimated -- requiring a mere 2.6 million years to add one minute.

"It's a very slow process," study lead co-author Leslie Morrison, a retired astronomer with Royal Greenwich Observatory, told AFP.

Comment: Here is an interesting article on how the Inuits in the Arctic regions of Canada, the United States and Greenland have noticed Earth changes" "Earth has shifted"-Inuit elders issue warning to NASA and the world (Video)
[snippet]
A new warning has come to NASA from the Inuits. They are warning that the change in climate is not due to global warming but rather, because of the Earth shifting a bit.

The Inuits are local people that live in the Arctic regions of Canada, the United States and Greenland. They are excellent weather forecasters and so were their ancestors. Presently they are warning NASA that the cause of change in weather, earthquakes etc, are not due to global warming as the world thinks. They also report that

They state that the earth has shifted or "wobbled". "Their sky has changed!"

The elders declare that the sun rises at a different position now, not where it used to previously. They also have longer daylight to hunt now, the sun is much higher than earlier, and it gets warmer much quickly. Other elders across the north also confirmed the same thing about the sky changing when interviewed.

They also alleged that the position of sun, moon and stars have all changed causing changes in the temperature. This has also affected the wind and it is very difficult to predict the weather now and according to them predicting weather is necessary on Arctic.

All the elders confirmed that the Earth has shifted, wobbled or tilted toward the North. This information provided by the Inuit Elders has caused a great concern in the NASA scientists.


Wolf

Stray dogs kill 4 children within a week in 2 Uttar Pradesh villages, India

Stray dogs
Representative image
Villagers in Kundarki sub-division of Moradabad have taken to the streets in protest after two more children, six-year-old Abdul Samad and 10-year-old Rehnuma, were mauled to death by strays. Two days ago, two kids were killed by dogs in another village. In all, eight children have fallen to dog attacks in the area this year. Officials are unable to understand how the number of canines has gone up again when 160 dogs were caught in the area and released into the wild just last month.

The situation has become so grim that the administration now wants trained shooters and tranquiliser guns to deal with the menace. The district magistrate has ordered a probe into the growing number of dog attacks.

Abdul Basit, sub-divisional magistrate, said, "The alarming frequency of dog attacks indicates that the canines here may have developed the habit of eating human flesh and find easy prey in children. On occasions, we have placed pieces of animal meat in jungles in our bid to lure them into traps, but they didn't eat it." The administration has also blamed forest officials for not providing assistance in catching dogs. "The forest department says the problem is out of their purview as jungle dogs are not categorised as vermin," Basit added.

Six-year-old Abdul Samad was attacked by a pack of over a dozen dogs in Bhishmpur village of Kundarki on Tuesday when he was playing near a field along with four other children. "My son resisted the dogs and fought them for 10 minutes before he fell down. By the time other children informed others and he was rescued, it was too late," said his father Ibne Hasan. Ten-year-old Rehnuma was killed by dogs in Chitupur village on Monday.

Question

Texas residents report loud boom, house shaking - cause unknown

Lake Jackson water tower
© lakejackson-tx.gov
People living in and around Lake Jackson took to social media to report hearing a loud boom around 2 p.m. Tuesday.


Lake Jackson police posted on Facebook that they got calls on the boom and reached out to the industrial plants and were trying to find the source, but hadn't been able to.


Plants in the area also report having no problems.

Police are still working to figure out what caused the issue, but no damage or injuries have been reported.

Attention

Safari leader killed by elephant in Malawi

A safari leader has died after his vehicle was flipped over by an elephant
A safari leader has died after his vehicle was flipped over by an elephant
A safari leader has died after his vehicle was flipped over by an elephant which then attacked him when he got out and took a photograph.

Norwegian Sigurd Halvorsen was taking a group of four tourists and two other guides around the Majete Game Reserve in Malawi when the enraged animal rammed into them.

The elephant battered the car against a tree and turned it over before the terrified passengers managed to escape unhurt.

Halvorsen, from Haugesund in Norway, started taking pictures when he believed he was at a safe distance - only for the huge animal to launch an attack.


His family insist that he was not using a flash despite claims in Malawi media, according to Norwegian website Haugesund Avis.

Seismograph

Precursor to eruption? Dozens of earthquakes rattle a Chilean volcano, alert status raised

Cerro Hudson eruption in Chile
© John Warburton-Lee/Getty ImagesDead trees in the River Ibanez valley killed by ash from the Cerro Hudson eruption in 2011.
Last night, the ONEMI (Oficina Nacional de Emergencias) and SERNGEOMIN (Chilean Geological Survey) in Chile raised the alert status for the area around Cerro Hudson in the southern Andes.

Normally, raising the alert status like this is due to an acute change, when the behavior of the volcano shifts suddenly. However, this time, the elevation to Yellow alert status at Cerro Hudson is due to accumulated events over the past month.

Dozens of small earthquakes have occurred since the start of November, none stronger than M3.2. But their location (in geographic space and depth) are similar to those before the last eruption of Hudson in 2011. The number of earthquakes hasn't increased much above the baseline activity at an active volcano like Hudson, but energy released by the largest earthquakes has been increasing over the past few months.

Combine that with the fact that the earthquakes have the character of those associated with magma movement, and the SERNAGEOMIN and ONEMI decided to treat Hudson with an abundance of caution, setting up a 3.5 kilometer exclusion zone around the volcano.

Attention

70-Mile-Long Crack Opens Up in Antarctica

Antarctic ice crack
© NASA/John SonntagA huge crack can be seen in the Antarctic Peninsula's Larsen C ice shelf in this aerial image snapped on Nov. 10, 2016, as part of NASA's IceBridge mission.
An ominous crack in an Antarctic ice shelf as wide as a football field is long takes on an otherworldly beauty in a new aerial image.

Snapped by scientists on NASA's IceBridge mission, the shot shows a rift in Larsen C, an ice shelf that is floating off the Antarctic Peninsula. When the crack eventually spreads across the entire ice shelf, it will create an iceberg the size of the state of Delaware, according to IceBridge. That's around 2,491 square miles (6,451 square kilometers).

As of Nov. 10, when the IceBridge scientists observed this crack, it was 70 miles (112 km) long and more than 300 feet (91 meters) wide. The dark depths of the crack plunge down about a third of a mile (0.5 km), all the way through the ice to the ocean below.

Comment: See also:


Wolf

Pit bull terrier seriously injures four-year-old boy in Pocatello, Idaho

Dog attack
A four-year-old boy is recovering Monday night after he was attacked by a pit bull Sunday afternoon.

The boy is currently in his mother's custody and was living with her. The pit bull was owned by the mother's boyfriend.

The attack happened just off Highway 30 in a camper home next to the Idaho Salvage Pool. Greg Hamann, the boy's father, said his son went into the kitchen to talk to his mom. That's when the pit bull attacked. Hamann said they don't know why the dog would have attacked.

Now his son has a lot of healing to do. The attack damaged two of the boy's facial nerves, which control movements, like smiling. Other wounds damaged the spit glands, the upper lip and below one eye.

dog  attack
It took surgeons six and a half hours of surgery to repair the damage. Hamann said there were so many stitches no one could even get an exact count, but he said there's more than 1,000. He said his son will not only have a long to recovery physically, but emotionally.

"He's going to have to do a lot of counseling because he's going to be terrified," Hamann said. "A poor four-year-old don't know what's going on when something like that happens. So it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of counseling, a lot of love."


Seismograph

Magnitude 6.2 earthquake rocks Trinidad and Tobago

6.2 magnitude earthquake rocks Trinidad and Tobago.
© UWI Seismic/ Image from social media6.2 magnitude earthquake rocks Trinidad and Tobago.
An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 rocked Trinidad and Tobago on Tuesday evening sending people into the streets and throwing items of the shelves of some stores and supermarkets.

The Seismic Research Centre (SRC) at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) said that the quake, which occurred at 5:42 pm (local time), was located at a depth of 29 kilometres.

It said the 6.2 magnitude quake was felt in many parts of the country including Scarborough in Tobago.

The location was Latitude: 11.04N, Longitude: 60.70W.

Many people in the west of the capital scampered out into the streets as the buildings shook, throwing many items to the ground.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damages.