At present, fragment B is glowing like a 9th magnitude star, making it an easy target for backyard telescopes and CCD cameras. Fragment G also has split. Fresh ice exposed by the disruption is vaporizing, causing this fragment also to brighten nearly fifteen-fold since April 2, reaching a brightness of magnitude 12.

Amateur astronomers with backyard telescopes and CCD cameras can monitor the ongoing disintegration. Spaceweather.com is providing sky maps, images and more information on its Web site.

"The most likely scenario is that this is an aftershock of earlier seismic activity," institute seismologist Alexandros Andreou told AFP, adding that there were no immediate reports of damage.

There has been a string of moderately strong quakes in the same undersea area since April 10, measuring between 5.4 and 5.9 on the Richter scale.

Tremors last week caused cracks to appear in buildings on the popular holiday island and led the authorities to temporarily close local schools as a safety measure.

They also dislodged earth around the island capital's Venetian fortress, threatening part of its wall with imminent collapse, according to the culture ministry.

At the local archaeological museum, an ancient statue fell and broke its base, the ministry added.

Greece is more affected by seismic activity than any other European country and bears the brunt of half of all earthquakes on the continent.

The Ionian Sea is one of the most earthquake-prone areas in the country.

"We all agree it would be worthwhile to have from a loss of life standpoint. You certainly can't stop it from happening," said Tom Bleier, president of QuakeFinder, which is developing technology that could one day predict quakes hours or even days in advance. "This is a tough nut to crack. It's taking a lot of time, and everybody is trying to report what they (observe) to see if there is a trend here."

Quake prediction will be one of the topics this week at a seismology conference in San Francisco that coincides with the 100th anniversary of the massive San Francisco quake that took place on April 18, 1906.

Earthquakes tend to occur in regular cycles, and seismologists can somewhat accurately predict the probability of earthquakes along a given fault over an extended period of time. There is a 60 to 70 percent chance of a major quake hitting California's Bay Area within the next 30 years, for example.

Predicting that the giant rumbler might hit next Monday, however, has proved elusive. One area of research that appears promising comes in examining the behavior of rocks immediately before a quake.

After a major quake in the greater San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, scientists at Stanford University, looking retroactively at data from a magnetometer, noted that two weeks before the quake, electromagnetic readings for an area near one of the faults active in the quake jumped significantly. Three hours before the quake, the readings from an electromagnetic field rose to 60 times the normal level. Magnetic readings further stayed elevated weeks after the quake as the ground subsided.

Friedemann Freund, a researcher who works with NASA and the SETI Institute, has conducted experiments on rocks under stress. When subject to pressure, normally inert rocks produce positive charges, Freund found. The positive charges, which increase as pressure does, in turn generate an electric field, which generates a magnetic field.

"A rock, when you squeeze it, becomes a battery," he said.

Freund's research was conducted in a lab, but when extrapolated to large areas, the changes could account for the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field in the region around a fault, under the right conditions.

Earthquakes occur when two tectonic plates hit head on or slide against each other. The changes in the electromagnetic field could be generated when the rocks bordering the two plates begin to grind against each other.

Searching for clues

The positive charges emitted by the pressured rock could also explain other so-called earthquake precursors. When the earth becomes positively charged, the positively charged particles of the ionosphere, a layer of the atmosphere that sits about 90 kilometers (56 miles) above the earth's surface, will get pushed away and get replaced by negatively charged particles.

The sudden rush of negatively charged electrons in that portion of the ionosphere in turn should interfere with radio waves and reception. Radio interference, in fact, occurred in the days before the huge 1960 Chilean earthquake and the Good Friday earthquake in Alaska in 1964.

Rock stress may additionally explain surges of infrared energy, which manifests itself as luminescence, observed before some quakes. Eerie lights in the sky were seen before the earthquake swarm in Japan between 1965 and 1967, which could have been a manifestation of a burst of energy caused by an earthquake. Scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center have recorded data showing infrared blooms approximately 50 to 100 kilometers across occurring a few days before a quake. In experiments conducted by Freund, the positive charges generated by rock under pressure can convert to infrared energy.

"Lab experiments show two things. One, there is a current generated when you start to crack a rock before it crumbles and, two, there is infrared energy that comes out of the rock when the charged particles drop their energy," Bleier said. "The question now is, does the same happen when you are 15 kilometers underground? Do they generate big currents? Do they generate infrared blooms? What we've got to do is get more data from large earthquakes."

Strange animal behavior, conceivably, might be the reactions to these environmental changes, Freund and others have speculated.

Still, the data is far from conclusive, said Greg Beroza, a professor of geophysics at Stanford. After examining the magnetic readings from the San Francisco Bay Area 1989 quake, the same researchers examined magnetic field readings after a 1999 quake in Southern California. The readings didn't spike. Beroza further added that the pressures that Freund applied to rocks in the lab seem to exceed the pressures exerted in real earthquakes.

"I'm kind of skeptical," he said.

The river also flooded the small port of Bechet, while soldiers and civil defense workers scrambled to reinforce dykes and build sandbag barriers on both sides of the river.

Romania's government started controlled flooding to divert water, flowing near a record 15,800 cubic meters per second, away from low-lying villages and was helped by the collapse of a dam in southwestern Romania which flooded farmland.

"The water flow has fallen by 200 cubic meters per second. This is a success," Beatrice Popescu, of the Environment Ministry, told Reuters.

In all, Romania plans to submerge about 90,000 hectares of fertile soil on a 400-km (250 mile) stretch on the Danube's northern bank, a major area for wheat and maize farming.

RELIEF, FRUSTRATION

The Balkans are still recovering from devastating floods last summer, which killed scores of people and caused hundreds of millions of euros in damage to farmland and infrastructure.

This time, floods have submerged hundreds of houses, leaving thousands homeless and leaving tens of thousands more at risk.

Officials said the Danube's level should remain high until Wednesday and Thursday, but the controlled flooding in Romania appeared to keep its level steady in many places, giving a reprieve to some towns that had been partially submerged.

In the Bulgarian port city of Lom, 120 soldiers came to reinforce civil defense workers, but water levels were unchanged at a record 9.45 meters (29 feet).

"There is no reason to panic," Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev told reporters. "We are ready to evacuate people if there's a need, but I hope it will not happen."

In Serbia, the floods killed their first victim in the village of Stari Kostolac on Friday where water reached the roofs of 200 houses. The Danube's level dropped in the city of Novi Sad, but authorities braced downstream in Belgrade for a eastern-moving floodwave, which originated in central Europe.

At the village of Mosorin on the Tisa river, 250 people worked to shore up dykes at critical spots. Agriculture Minister Ivana Dulic Markovic said the berms could fail and told officials to prepare for evacuation, Beta news agency reported.

"We are all mobilized and what is left now is for us to trust in God that all will end well," she was quoted as saying.

Hundreds of citizens and soldiers also worked overnight to build an embankment in the eastern town of Smederevo after water inundated its ancient fortress, port and train station.

The Agriculture Ministry said 223,000 hectares of farmland were under water but could not estimate damages until later.

Back in Romania's western county of Timis, the country's worst hit region in last year's floods, some who were displaced last year were again visited by disaster.

"If the government expected floods again this year, why did they move us here?" Ioan Subulescu, whose new house has been partially flooded, told the Evenimentul Zilei paper.

Accompanied only by his personal physician, Michael MacNamara, British mountaineer Annabelle Bond, Russian explorer Matvei Shparo and four other people, the prince, 48, covered the distance from a Russian weather station with the aid of six husky-drawn sleds.

"When you see these landscapes, these landscapes of the sea of ice, it is astonishing to see how diverse our planet is," he told AFP by phone an hour and a half after reaching the top of the world, where at this time of the year the sun never sets.

Albert, the first head of state in office to reach the pole, undertook the trip to draw attention to global warming "accentuated by the impact of all human activity on nature."

He was also paying tribute to his great grandfather, Prince Albert I, one of the pioneers of modern oceanography, who made four trips to Spitzbergen in Norway between 1898 and 1907.

"I think everyone by their behaviour can make their small contribution to a global and extraordinary effort."

Albert II consulted the notes taken by his ancestor, who never reached the pole but explored the Arctic during the summer months.

"He used to say that he had come across ice very, very far south. The ice began much earlier, at the 81st or 82nd parallel.

"Now you see it at the 86th, I think. The cracking of the ice and the break up begin fairly early. For some years it has been noticed that spring arrives earlier and earlier," he told AFP.

The temperature never fell below minus 20 degrees Celsius (four degrees Fahrenheit).

From a wildlife point of view the trip was not especially rewarding. Albert spotted two birds and another member of the team saw a seal. But no polar bear was in sight.

Albert took notes and kept a diary but has not decided what to with them. The team left the Russian weather station at Barneo on Thursday with sleds each drawn by six dogs for the 91-kilometre (56-mile) journey across the ice.

In fact the distance covered was nearer 150 kilometres, he said, given the need to skirt outcrops of ice.

He arrived at the pole at 5:45 pm local time (1345 GMT) Sunday.

"It is a fantastic impression. It was a physically difficult journey because it isn't a straight line. When you have blocks of ice that crash into each other they make pretty impressive little hills to climb," he said.

Some were 10 metres (33 feet high).

"The team was great and the dogs extraordinary, everything happened in a very good atmosphere," said Albert, before being helicoptered off the ice. Sources in Monaco said he would be in Moscow Tuesday where he would meet President
Vladimir Putin.

The palace in Monaco said Albert's journey had been difficult, covering 20 kilometres (12 miles) on the first day, and the first three days had been especially hard because of cracks and compressions in the ice.

On the second day the team could only cover 17 kilometres because of reduced visibility and ice conditions.

On Saturday the weather improved and the expedition covered more than 35 kilometres. The final 20-kilometre assault on the pole began Sunday at 9:15 am local time (0515 GMT).

Cold, windy weather, a glut of construction sites and poor plant cover around Beijing have also contributed.

So far in 2006, Beijing has notched up days of the worst measure of pollution, more than last year's total and the highest in six years, state media said.

Only 53 "blue sky" days in Beijing had been recorded in 2006 by last Wednesday. The city sets a target of about 230 such clean days a year to help what it says will be a "Green Olympics."

Hospitals have also dealt with a sharp increase in patients with respiratory diseases, and on Monday local newspapers warned residents to wear masks outdoors.

"It took me quite a while to wipe off the sand on my car," said office clerk Chong Zi, who drove to work. "But there's no point in washing it -- who knows when the next storm will hit?"

Firefighters said that on Friday they had distributed food for 10,000 families supplied by the federal government.

Among the dead are a three-year-old boy, a 10-month-old baby and a man, 74.

Thousands of families were taken to shelters set up by the military for persons who had lost their homes.

The army moved troops into several areas likely to be flooded by Amazon tributaries, like the Tapajos, as rain continues to fall.

Residents are using boats for transportation in some areas, and are threatened by cobras and alligators swimming in the waters.

Area businesses have been flooded and milk production has been cut by half.

A trapper recently caught nine along the shores of Lake Washington. Two University of Washington students are studying the rodents to determine where they may show up next.

"It's a pretty ominous picture when you bring nutria into an area where they didn't exist before," said Mike Davison, a wildlife biologist with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. "There is no way of winning on this if nutria establish."

A statewide Invasive Species Council was recently created to track nutria and other invasive plant and animal species, and to find methods for removing them.

The council will include six state agencies and two counties and will work with federal and other government agencies, business, tribal and nonprofit groups. It plans to meet in coming months.

"Having an Invasive Species Council is a big step forward," said Joan Cabreza, invasive species coordinator with the Northwest regional office of the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency.

Washington has lagged behind states like Oregon and Idaho that already have such councils that work to prevent introduction of invasive species. Without such a council, no single agency had the authority to act, Cabreza said.

"If you can get on these things early and get people to understand how important it is, the impact is really small," said Bill Brookreson, deputy director for the state Agriculture Department.

Nationally, nutria are found in at least 15 states, including Louisiana, Texas, the Carolinas, Florida, Maryland and Oregon.

In the 1930s and '40s, they were raised in Washington and elsewhere for their fur. They're vulnerable to cold and flooding, though, and it's believed they died out of the Puget Sound region over the years.

Populations have established in southwest Washington, near Vancouver, where they've turned local dikes to "Swiss cheese," said Davison.

Last summer, more than a dozen were caught in Skagit County in a state-led control effort.

Davison helped in the project in Skagit County, where agricultural and forestry industries and reliance on levies make the area vulnerable to the pests. Traps are still being laid and nutria caught are killed.

Milder weather could have helped the nutria spread into the Puget Sound area, as well as a lack of predators like caiman and alligators in their native environment.

Armed with large packs, camera gear and notebooks, UW students Phu Van and Filip Tkaczyk are documenting where the interlopers are living, how many there are and what they're eating. They're focusing on an area of fields and wetlands north of Husky Stadium.

Along the shoreline, the large rodents have flattened grass and cattails, creating "runways" as they travel from the water to dens to fields where they graze among the Canada geese.

Ed Cunningham, a Highline High School educator who also runs a trapping business, was called this winter by a Lake Washington resident who wanted the rodents removed.

He used bait and wire cages to trap nine of the rodents over a couple of weeks in February and March.

"What we need to do is get some sterile alligators that like cold water," joked Cunningham. "I'm not going to get them all."