The Ayles Ice Shelf, roughly 41 square miles in area, was one of six major ice shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic.

Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor.

"It is consistent with climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906.

"We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."

Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated.

Weir notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.

Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as data from seismic monitors, Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.

"What surprised us was how quickly it happened," Copland said. "It's pretty alarming. Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly, but the big surprise is that for one they are going, but secondly that when they do go, they just go suddenly, it's all at once, in a span of an hour."

Adobe PDF Dec-Feb
Within days, the floating ice shelf had drifted a few miles offshore. It traveled west for 31 miles until it finally froze into the sea ice in the early winter.

The Canadian ice shelves are packed with ancient ice that dates back over 3000 years. They float on the sea but are connected to land.

Derek Mueller, a polar researcher with Vincent's team, said the ice shelves get weaker and weaker as the temperature rises. He visited Ellesmere's Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in 2002 and noticed it had cracked in half.

"We're losing our ice shelves and this a feature of the landscape that is in danger of disappearing altogether from Canada," Mueller said. "In the global perspective Antarctica has many ice shelves bigger than this one, but then there is the idea that these are indicators of climate change."

The spring thaw may bring another concern as the warming temperatures could release the ice shelf from its Arctic grip. Prevailing winds could then send the ice island southwards, deep into the Beaufort Sea.

"Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes," Weir said. "There's significant oil and gas development in this region as well, so we'll have to keep monitoring its location over the next few years."


© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

During an El Nino pattern the Tasman Sea, between Australia and New Zealand, cools so easterly winds carry less moisture than normal, meaning lower rainfall across Australia's East coast, the area worst hit by the current "Big Dry".

Signs of a reprieve included changing sub-surface temperatures in the Pacific, and trade winds strengthening to near-normal values over the past month, the Bureau of Meteorology said.

In addition, the Southern Oscillation Index, which is markedly negative during an El Nino pattern, had moved back towards postive territory, it said.

Poor rainfall has drastically reduced Australia's agricultural output, and left dams in many of the nation's cities dangerously depleted.

"Now whether or not it's a big enough break to recharge those very empty water storages, that remains to be seen," Coughlan said.

He said it would probably take until March for a definitive picture to emerge, and cautioned that after the last El Nino ended in 2003, rainfall was still lower than normal.

The new data backs up a similar prediction made in recent weeks by commercial meteorological prediction service Weatherzone, which foresaw an end to the El Nino-driven drought.

Weatherzone's Matt Pearce said the El Nino effect -- which resulted in the third-lowest rainfall on record nationwide for the August to November period -- had its greatest influence on Australia's weather during spring, with a decreasing impact in summer.

"Therefore, we expect rainfall to gradually return to more normal levels over the next few months."

Even so, temperatures would likely remain well above average across most of Australia through summer and into early autumn, Pearce said.

He said El Nino conditions had also been the major factor behind the bushfires that ravaged at least 850,000 hectares (2.13 million acres) across Australia before cooler Chistmas weather granted exhausted firefighters relief.

Human civilization has never experienced such a catastrophic eruption, which could blanket the state of Texas with soot two feet deep, for about 74,000 years. That's when Mount Toba in Indonesia blew its top making history as the largest eruption in the last 2 million years.

Even still, with the potential to devastate Earth, colossal-size eruptions are front and center for researchers who want to find ways of predicting the when, where and how big of such blasts.

Making magma

Beneath the ground, a large enough store of magma must build up to fuel the eruptions.

"It's all got to be underneath the ground in one place so that when you tap that magma chamber it all comes out at once or at least in a relatively short period of time, days to weeks," said Jake Lowenstern, U.S. Geologic Survey's chief scientist of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

Glazner suggested that if more magma gets pumped up from below a volcano than exits at the surface, a super eruption could result. One way to change this balance is to turn up the heat, which can occur, he said, during inter-glacial periods when precipitation decreases.

"If you have a system where you're pumping heat in at the bottom and you're cooling if off the top, at the same time you never make a big magma body," Glazner told LiveScience. When conditions dry out the cooling effect of water gets turned off. Without cooling, super-size magma chambers can build and ultimately fuel an eruption.

Past blasts

Looking over the history of giant eruptions, Glazner did find that many occurred during inter-glacial periods and in areas with dry climates. He hopes to complete a detailed analysis of the geologic record of eruptions to bolster this theory.

Lowenstern said that Glazner's idea is interesting, but it shouldn't be used to look at any individual volcano.

"So when I look at what Allen was talking about you're really looking at the effect of one particular factor out of many and how it may be important in the overall behavior of global volcanic systems," Lowenstern said.

Time scales

The trouble with studying super-size eruptions is they don't happen often. "We've been studying for 30 or 40 years something that is active on hundreds of thousands of years of time scale," Lowenstern said.

"It's kind of like if you were trying to take somebody's pulse and you only left the stethoscope on for a tenth of a second. You might not even get one heartbeat," he added.

Still researchers are monitoring active and inactive volcanoes to answer their questions. For instance, they would like to know the size of the underground magma chamber, but imaging techniques are still to crude to show such detail.

"We want to understand what causes those kinds of eruptions, how to recognize when one is coming. And I'm just interested in this idea that the atmosphere and the climate can affect what happens with the style of eruptions," Glazner said.

"Of all the creatures on the Earth, snakes are perhaps the most sensitive to earthquakes," Jiang Weisong, director of the earthquake bureau in Nanning, in southern Guangxi province, told The China Daily. Serpents can sense a coming earthquake from 120km (75 miles) away, up to five days before it happens. They respond by behaving extremely erratically. "When an earthquake is about to occur, snakes will move out of their nests, even in the cold of winter. If the earthquake is a big one, the snakes will even smash into walls while trying to escape," he said.

The earthquake bureau in Nanning, a city particularly prone to earthquakes, has developed a system that monitors snakes' natural behaviour using hi-tech equipment. Experts at the bureau observe snakes at local snake farms using video cameras linked to a broadband internet connection running 24 hours per day.

China is frequently struck by earthquakes, with most hitting remote rural areas, but big cities have also been hit. In 1976, the city of Tangshan was devastated by an earthquake and some 250,000 people died.

Nanning is one of 12 Chinese cities monitored by hi-tech equipment. It also has 143 animal monitoring units. "By installing cameras over the snake nests, we have improved our ability to forecast earthquakes. The system could be extended to other parts of the country to make our earthquake forecasts more precise," said Mr Jiang.

It's not just snakes - dogs and chickens also behave abnormally when an earthquake is about to happen.

Two people were killed and 42 injured on Tuesday when three buildings collapsed in earthquakes that shook southern Taiwan. Even if the hypersensitive animals had caught the earthquakes in time, there was little they could do about the damage done to miles of fibre-optic cable laid in areas of seismic activity around the region. Most internet access in China was still down following the quakes - indeed, this report from Beijing is being written from a handheld computer. The tremors exposed the frailties of the whole system of cables laid deep under water in Asia, which has formed the lifeblood for the region's economic boom.

Mr Jiang has written a letter to the central government seeking funds to build more snake-monitoring stations. "Local farmers have welcomed the cameras and broadband," said Mr Jiang. "They can access information on the internet, such as techniques for raising snakes and demand for snakes in the market."

As well as their ability to predict earthquakes, snakes are also valued in China for their uses in traditional medicine. They are also popular in soup.

China and Korea were heavily affected, with most of their connectivity to the rest of the world cut off. Not surprisingly, this meant that the rest of the world got a lot less spam, too. Neither country is the haven for overt spammers that it used to be, but both have large broadband networks with vast numbers of virus controlled zombie computers. One large network in North America saw their mail from Korea drop by 90% and from China by 99%. Since the mail sent from those countries to the US is typically 99% spam and 1% legitimate mail, the earthquake's effect on e-mail was, to a first approximation, to get rid of a lot of spam. Brett Glass, a journalist who runs a small rural ISP in Wyoming, noted that if the affected countries dealt more effectively with their spam, they might not well have needed all of the capacity they'd lost.

China and Korea are not alone in sending 99% spam; I see many countries in Europe, South America, and elsewhere in Asia that are just as bad. It would be nice if this were a wakeup call to networks to deal with parasitic usage, but I'm not holding my breath.

Luke Copland, an assistant professor at the school's department of geography, said scientists are surprised at the speed of the collapse of the Ayles ice shelf, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole. It took less than an hour.

He said the new island formed by the 66-square-kilometre fragment, which could be up to 4,500 years old, could present a serious risk to oil platforms in its drift path in the spring.

At the longest and widest spans, the remains of the Ayles shelf are about 15 kilometres long and five kilometres wide. The fragment is between 30 and 40 metres thick.

Copland learned of the break after an official with the federal government's Canadian Ice Service noticed the change on satellite images and passed it on to him to determine what happened, according to a report by CanWest News Service.

In June, Copland received nearly $206,000 in grant funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to create the Laboratory for Cryospheric Research, which will monitor the state of glaciers, climate change and study ice in all of its forms.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University in Quebec City, who travelled to the new segment, said in 10 years of working in the Arctic, he had never seen such a dramatic collapse.

"It's like a cruise missile has come down and hit the ice shelf," he told CanWest News Service. Vincent is a professor at the university's biology department, where he does ecological research.

The collapse of the Ayles shelf - one of six that still existed in Canada - occurred 16 months ago, on Aug. 13, 2005, but because it is so remote, no one saw it.

Scientists have been combining seismic and satellite data to determine what happened and are now releasing details of the collapse.

The researchers suspect climate change may have played a role in the collapse but said they cannot definitively say it is a result of global warming.

"Our system is gradually recovering," leading Japanese provider NTT Communications said, explaining that it had re-routed much of its data transmission away from the troubled Taiwan route.

"However, for certain customers it will take a longer time for full restoration, as it may require a complete reinstallation of cables."

The 7.1-magnitude earthquake that hit late Tuesday sparked widespread communications disruption Wednesday in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and elsewhere. Knock-on problems occurred as far away as Australia.

Millions of people dependent on the Internet for news, stock prices and e-mail were reminded of life before the World Wide Web.

Telecommunications operators in Taiwan and Hong Kong warned that completely solving the problem could take three weeks.

Taiwan's largest phone company, Chunghwa Telecom, has contracted three boats from Britain, Japan and Singapore to take workers to the zone early next week, said deputy general manager Lin Jen-hon.

Lin said seven or eight troublespots needed attention, adding that efforts would be made to divert Internet links with the support of foreign service providers until the ruptured cables could be repaired.

Chunghwa put losses since Tuesday's quake, which killed two people on the island, at 150 million Taiwan dollars (4.6 million US).

Hong Kong's telecommunications authority said five maintenance ships had been sent out to repair the cables, which handle about 90 percent of capacity in the area.

International landline calling and roaming mobile services in the southern Chinese territory were returning to normal Thursday, but the authority said full repairs could take up to a week.

China Telecom, the country's largest fixed-line carrier, said six undersea cables were cut off 15 kilometers from the south of Taiwan, causing severe Internet congestion on the mainland.

China's Ministry of Information Industry, its Internet regulator, and major telecom operators have started emergency action to overcome the difficulties, Xinhua news agency said.

Global banking giant HSBC said Thursday its internet service had been affected and it was working to restore service to customers via alternative connections.

Indonesia called on people to limit their Internet use to give priority to aid workers after floods killed more than 100 and forced 400,000 to flee their homes.

"There are many NGOs in disaster areas such as in Aceh who are depending so much on the Internet for their communications. They are the ones feeling the most impact," telecommunications director general Gatot Dewobroto said.

In Vietnam, operators urged Internet users to ease congestion by refraining from downloading music or large data files from local websites unaffected by the quake-related damage.

In Thailand, Jirachai Srichon, from CAT Telecom, Thailand's communications authority, said 50 percent of Internet connections in the kingdom had been recovered.

"Connection, however, has remained slow, especially when traffic is huge," the senior executive vice president told reporters.

South Korea's information and communications ministry said 98 exclusive business lines -- 80 run by Korean Telecom and 18 by LG Dacom -- remained out of action Thursday, but other Internet and telephone services were normal.

"Just the services have got back to normal. The cables still remain damaged," Hong Seong-Yong, a ministry official handling the problem, told AFP.

Service across most of Australia had been restored on Thursday.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, host of the conference, said that desertification "affects a third of the surface of our planet, more than the surface of China, Canada and Brazil combined," and is a threat to world peace.

Bouteflika called in a speech opening the event for a concerted, global effort, saying it was "more urgent that ever" to put into practice measures agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to tackle desertification and preserve non-renewable resources.

Around 2 billion people live in areas threatened by desertification.

The implications for human migration are huge, with estimates today showing that migrants uprooted primarily by environmental factors now exceed the number of political refugees, according to a UNU statement.

Desertification has been on the world agenda for 50 years but efforts to arrest the problem have been chronically under-funded, and the situation is getting demonstrably worse every year, the organization said. It is still not known precisely how fast the process is unfolding, much less how best to address it.

One of those in attendance was Professor Rattan Lal of Ohio State University, who said poor developing-country households must switch to clean cooking fuels instead of burning crop residue and animal dung.

This will stop the loss of valuable sources of nutrients needed to forestall desertification and world hunger, Lal said.

By modestly improving soil quality in developing countries, an extra 20 to 30 million tonnes of food per year could be produced -- enough to feed the number of people being added to their populations annually -- at a cost of less than two billion dollars (1.5 billion euros) per year.

Karl Harmsen, director of UNU's Ghana-based Institute for Natural Resources in Africa, noted estimates that Africa may be able to feed just 25 percent of its population by 2025 if the decline in soil conditions continues on the continent.

Source: Agence France-Presse

"I saw an owl when I was 10," said Tom Young, 38, who grew up in Essex and coordinates the Newburyport portion of the annual Christmas Bird Count, which concludes Sunday. Like many others birders, he said, he can recall the "crystallizing moment" that drew him to a lifelong hobby.

This year, local birders have seen a new trend in the data that has led to some unsettling conclusions. It is a common discussion in birding circles about the correlation between a changing bird population in Massachusetts and the disturbing ecological trend known as global warming.

As the earth has warmed over the past few decades, according to most climatologists, birders are finding fewer migratory species from the northernmost regions, and more and more species of birds that -- 30 years ago -- would never venture this far north in December.

"Global warming is one of these things that, in many minds, is still somewhat controversial," said Wayne Petersen, co-author of "Birds of Massachusetts" and director of the Massachusetts Important Bird Areas program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. He's also the longtime regional editor for the Christmas Bird Count in New England, compiling the figures sent in from local counts.

"Having said that, and the fact that it increasingly seems there is overwhelming evidence to suggest it's real, the Christmas Bird Count is one way to get a hint of that."

The best example, he said, is the trend of more and more species of birds -- many of which are highly migratory -- showing up on the Christmas bird count.

"The implication is that they're staying later, or not migrating as early in the fall, or wintering farther north then they ever did," said Petersen, who offered as an example the sighting of three hummingbirds recorded in the first few days of the count this year.

"That's unprecedented," he said.

Warblers are another species being seen in greater numbers. That's a species that frequently winters in the tropics, but is showing up on the Christmas Bird Count.

"There have been a variety of other species of this sort, that if you go over the last five or 10 years or so there's an increasing trend of a lot of these species appearing in December that were never here before" at that time of year, Petersen said. "They're usually gone by October or November at the latest."

In 2002, Ivan Valiela, a professor at the Boston University Marine Program in Woods Hole, coauthored (with student Jennifer Bowen ) an academic paper that tracked the trends from Christmas bird counts and matched them with recorded temperatures.

"What has been happening in the last few decades is that there's a higher and higher proportion of species that, in previous decades, used to be fairly south in the winter and now manage to survive -- do well, even -- in our winters, at this latitude," he said.

In constructing the study, Valiela and Bowen reviewed Christmas bird counts in Massachusetts, which run back to the early 1930s.

"It's really quite a remarkable data set, of places where excellent bird identifiers have had the chance to collect information in the same areas, in basically the same fashion, for decades," he said. "We can also collect data on the temperatures, and what seems to be happening is that as there's this gradual warming, there's also a gradual movement of species northward.

"You can go species by species and see the pattern," Valiela said. "Gradually, these species with southern affinities have been moving northward." And species with northern affinities are moving farther northward.

On Tuesday, approximately 35 volunteers were to fan out in a 15-mile circle, observing birds and gathering data, for the Newburyport bird count. Last week, many of the same volunteers participated in similar counts on Cape Ann and in the Andover-Boxford area.

The participants look forward to their day (or days) taking part in the bird count for a variety of reasons. Some like to go out in teams, Young noted, and most are fueled by the possibility of an unusual find that they can share with appreciative birders at the end of the day.

"It gives you an excuse to be out all day long, and every bird counts because every bird needs to be counted that day," said Jim Berry of Ipswich, 63, who participated in both the Cape Ann and Newburyport counts.

Berry explained that common birds are frequently not given much attention during normal birding.

But because he's collecting comprehensive data, "you have to pay more attention, and need to be more intense," he said.

The Christmas Bird Count, a citizen-scientist project sponsored by the National Audubon Society Inc., dates back 107 years.

© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens again declared a statewide disaster, putting the National Guard on standby as areas west of Denver got 28 inches of snow Thursday and early Friday. In the city, more than a foot of snow had fallen by morning and another foot was expected.

United Airlines and Frontier Airlines, the largest carriers at Denver International Airport, both canceled 322 flights through Friday morning but were hopeful that they could soon get back on schedule.

"Right now, we're planning to operate a full schedule starting at noon," United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said early Friday.

While last week's blizzard dumped nearly 2 feet of snow in about 24 hours, making it impossible for airport and highway plows to keep up, snow from the new storm was expected to stretch over about three days.

The metro area's light rail trains, buses and public transit all planned to run on their regular schedules Friday. Maintenance crews covered Denver streets with deicer, but offices still closed early and residents stocked up on groceries.

Interstate 25, the main north-south highway through the state, was closed about 60 miles north of Denver, and Greyhound canceled all trips out of Denver on Friday and more cancelations could follow.

With memories fresh of the 4,700 stranded holiday travelers and backed up flights around the country last week, New Year's travelers jammed the airport Thursday trying to get out of Colorado while they still could.

Managers at the nation's fifth-busiest airport drew up snowplowing plans, and airlines urged ticket-holders to get early flights or wait until after the storm.

Chris Malmay of San Diego hoped to spend a long holiday with family in Colorado, but because of the first storm, he couldn't reach Denver until Christmas Eve. On Thursday, his flight back to California was canceled because of the second storm.

"It's been crazy," Malmay said as he waited to board a plane Friday. "I'm saying, 'Please let me go back where it's sunny. You won't get snowed in, I promise.'"

The airport and airlines called in extra workers, and security lines moved relatively quickly. But long lines formed at ticket counters as travelers tried to adjust their plans.

The Frontier line snaked across the cavernous terminal, weaving behind the lines of ticket counters on the other side of the building.

Frontier waived its usual change fee to encourage passengers to catch earlier flights. "Let's try and get as many people out ahead of the storm as we can," Frontier spokesman Joe Hodas said.

After running out of bedding for stranded passengers during the first storm, airport managers lined up cots and blankets and urged food vendors to ensure they had plenty of supplies on hand.

In New Mexico, Interstate 40 remained closed Friday morning from Albuquerque to Santa Rosa, with numerous crashes were reported after a storm swept through.

Residents of Cheyenne, Wyo., also braced for another snowstorm. Heavy snow began falling around dusk, and forecasters said up to a foot was expected.

In California, a powerful winter storm left tens of thousands of people without power as winds gusted to near-hurricane force. Forecasters warned of dangerous winds, with gusts over 70 mph, through Friday morning in the valleys and mountain passes.