Miami - Just when the Atlantic hurricane season was supposed to end, Tropical Storm Epsilon formed in the central Atlantic on Tuesday but posed no immediate threat to land, US weather forecasters said.
Epsilon, named after the fifth letter in the Greek alphabet, was the 26th named storm of a record-breaking season and was around 845 miles (1,360 km) east of Bermuda by 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT), the US National Hurricane Center said.
Rockfall at Mount St. Helens kicked up a dust plume Tuesday that rose above the rim of the volcano's crater, drawing attention in the region.
"It's a nice sunny day and we're having the first couple of rockfalls that we've had in a while that are putting little dust plumes over the crater rim," said U.S. Geological Survey geologist Seth Moran at the agency's Cascade Volcano Observatory here, about 50 miles south of the mountain that erupted to deadly effect in May 1980.
In the eastern province of Jiangxi, an earthquake yesterday killed 14 people and injured nearly 400.
The quake, which measured 5.7 on the Richter scale, struck at 8.49am and was followed by two aftershocks, damaged 130,000 homes and forced the evacuation of 420,000 people, according to initial reports.
Alireza Ronaghi
ReutersMon, 28 Nov 2005 12:00 UTC
Ten people were killed and about 50 injured when an earthquake razed mud-brick villages on the Gulf island of Qeshm off Iran's south coast yesterday, officials and state media said.
Denver - Blizzard conditions wreaked havoc from Colorado to the Midwest, and tornadoes ripped through Arkansas and Kansas as a burst of treacherous weather damaged homes, turned roads into ice rinks and sent cars spinning off highways.
A Rise in Deadly Storms Since '95 Has Researchers Worried About the Future.
A pair of scientific papers published this year detected an unexpected spike in storm intensity over the past several decades, suggesting that global warming might already be having an effect.
CNNFri, 25 Nov 2005 12:00 UTC
Bogota, Colombia -- A volcano erupted Thursday in southwestern Colombia, spewing smoke and ash, and raising fears for the safety of nearby villagers, officials said.
Police and emergency officials were on high alert after the 14,110-foot Galeras volcano became active at dawn and dumped heaps of ash on the city of Pasto, 12 miles away.
"It was a brief eruption of ash for 30 minutes that was not preceded by a temblor inside the volcano," said Marta Lucia Calvache of Colombia's Volcanology Institute. "But there is still a thin plume of ash leaving the crater, and we can't rule out the possibility of further eruptions."
The government this month ordered the preventive evacuation of thousands of people living in the shadow of the volcano amid signs of an imminent eruption. But many farmers are believed to have defied the order and stayed behind, fearful of losing their livelihoods by leaving crops unattended.
Paris - Levels of carbon dioxide, the principal gas that drives global warming, are now 27 percent higher than at any point in the last 650,000 years, according to research into Antarctic ice cores.
The study, adding powerfully to evidence of human interference in the climate system, appears in the runup to a key conference on global warming which opens in Montreal next Monday.
The evidence comes from the world's deepest ice core, drilled at a site called Dome Concordia (Dome C) in East Antarctica by European scientists who battled blizzards and an average year-round temperature of minus 54 Celsius (minus 65 Fahrenheit) and made a thousand-kilometer (650-mile) trek to bring up supplies.
Scientists monitoring earth movements in Antarctica believe they have found a singing iceberg.
Sound waves from the iceberg had a frequency of around 0.5 hertz, too low to be heard by humans, but by playing them at higher speed the iceberg sounded like a swarm of bees or an orchestra warming up, the scientists said.
For more than 30 years the 980 people living on the six minute horseshoe-shaped Carteret atolls have battled the Pacific to stop salt water destroying their coconut palms and waves crashing over their houses. They failed.
Yesterday a decision was made that will make their group of low-lying islands literally go down in history. In the week before 150 countries meet in Montreal to discuss how to combat global warming and rising sea levels, the Carterets' people became the first to be officially evacuated because of climate change.
