MADRID (AFP) - A 48 year-old man has been found dead, apparently the first victim of a heat wave in southern Spain, and six people have been hospitalised with heat exhaustion, health authorities said.

The man, said to have been suffering from a chronic ailment, was found at Ciudad Real in the centre of the country. His body had registered a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) at the time of its discovery.

Health Minister Elena Salgado said six people had been hospitalised in Andalusia due to the effects of heat.

Meanwhile electricity consumption in Spain has soared to new summer records due to increased use of air conditioning and refrigerators, the utility operators Red Electrica de Espana (REE), announced.

By Wednesday consumption had reached a peak of 36,800 megawatts, overtaking a Tuesday record of 36,700 megawatts, they said.

A power supply breakdown in Seville Tuesday temporarily deprived tens of thousands of the use of electric fans and air conditioning. [...]

MANILA (Reuters) - The death toll from the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year rose to 23 on Friday, as rescue workers rushed to clear landslides and send food and medicine to isolated areas, disaster officials said.

Thousands of people were displaced by typhoon Mindulle, which packed winds of 118 miles per hour and gusts of up to 140 miles per hour as it swept past the northern region of the main Luzon island.

Crop and infrastructure damage was estimated at $9.8 million, mostly in rice- and corn-growing areas in Cagayan Valley region, the National Disaster Coordinating Council said. [...]

TAIPEI (AFP) - At least two people were killed as Typhoon Mindulle swept through Taiwan, triggering floods and landslides, the national rescue center said.

Two men died after their pickup truck, parked on a path on Mountain Ali in central Taiwan, was smashed by a huge rock when a landslide occurred, the rescue center said Friday.

The victims were identified as Tsai Cheng-lun, 26, and Ho Chang-chin, 61. Tsai's father Tsai Jui-lin, 51, who was out of truck checking the path, survived with minor injuries.

Mindulle, which was downgraded to a tropical storm Thursday, uprooted trees in eastern Taiwan and dumped heavy rains, swelling rivers.

It claimed at least 24 lives and left 19 missing in the Philippines before hitting Taiwan. [...]

DALLAS - Rain swept across northern Texas for a record 18th consecutive day on Wednesday following flooding that chased people out of their homes and a major amusement park.

Up to 7 inches of rain fell in a three-hour period early Wednesday in southern Texas and the San Antonio area, the National Weather Service said. The 18 consecutive days of rain in northern Texas was a record for June. [...]

Extreme drought and wildfire risks across the West are taking the kaboom out of some backyard Fourth of July celebrations, with communities restricting or banning the sale and use of fireworks.

But officials say Independence Day need not be boomless. Instead, they are encouraging people to watch large municipal fireworks displays.

Santa Fe, N.M., banned the use of fireworks and asked stores to voluntarily stop selling them. All complied. The city fireworks show is still scheduled. [...]

Fire risk prompted Albuquerque, N.M., to ban fireworks from wildland areas in the city. Cedar City, Utah, residents are only allowed to ignite fireworks in the parking lots of a park and two high schools.

Meanwhile, the anticipated influx of people into campgrounds and national forests on the holiday weekend is stirring anxiety among land managers.

"We are concerned about the Fourth of July weekend, because of campers and fireworks. We always have a bunch of grassfires and stuff from that," said David Widmark, spokesman for the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center in Portland, Ore.

In Las Vegas, police planned to stop vehicles heading to Mount Charleston this weekend to make sure fireworks aren't brought into the popular recreation area, part of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. [...]

MADRID (AFP) - A 53-year-old woman died of heat exhaustion in southern Spain, becoming the fifth victim of the soaring temperatures that have gripped the country for the past week, health officials said.

The woman died in hospital overnight Thursday in Jerez de la Frontera, in the southern region of Andalucia, where two men, aged 40 and 72, died earlier this week as a result of the heat.

Five deaths have now been blamed on the heatwave in Spain, where exceptionally hot weather killed at least 141 people last year.

Some 15 people remained hospitalized for heat exhaustion across the country.

But the worst appeared to be over on Friday as temperatures started to fall back towards normal seasonal levels, allowing Spanish authorities to lift a nationwide state of alert. [...]

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says a plague of desert locusts could soon hit several north African states.
It says this year's locust swarm looks like being the worst for 15 years.

About $9m has been pledged for assistance, but the FAO says more money and resources are urgently needed.

The FAO says the first swarms of locusts have moved from their spring breeding grounds into Mauritania, Mali and Senegal, with many more to come.

It issued its first warning of a coming locust plague back in February, when unusually high rates of breeding were detected south of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and Algeria.

Darfur danger

Major insecticide spraying programmes were initiated, some funded by western donors, aiming to cut the plague off at source.

Clearly they have not worked. The first swarms have now moved into Mauritania, Senegal and Mali, and the FAO says Niger and Chad will also see swarms in the next few weeks.

Summer rains have started in the area, which means the insects will lay more eggs as they travel.

Swarms could eventually reach the Darfur region of Sudan, where conflict has already created a major humanitarian crisis.

Locusts can eat their own weight in food every day, which means a single swarm can consume as much food as several thousand people.

GUWAHATI (India): At least 20 people were feared drowned overnight and more than 15,000 people uprooted from their homes in flash floods triggered by heavy monsoon rains in Arunachal Pradesh, officials said Tuesday.

A police spokesman said at least 20 labourers were feared drowned when floodwaters trapped them Monday while they were collecting stones from a quarry close to the swollen Pakke river in the western Seppa district, about 430 km from Arunachal Pradesh capital Itanagar.

"There could be many more casualties as reports of people missing or getting drowned in the area have been pouring in thick and fast," a police official in capital Itanagar said by telephone.

"The area is totally cut off and in many places the water level is as high as five metres above normal." [...]

Dawson City — A team of Yukon government employees headed into a fire evacuation zone Monday to warn gold field miners about an encroaching forest fire.

The government declared a state of emergency on the weekend for the gold fields south of this historic Klondike gold rush town. [...]

SAFFORD, Ariz. — Firefighters widened a defensive ring around a mountaintop observatory Monday, trying to hold back two wildfires and protect a powerful telescope under construction.

The crews in southeastern Arizona used bulldozers and fire retardant around the Mount Graham International Observatory, which has two operating telescopes and the $120 million soon-to-be-completed Large Binocular Telescope. The ground crews were helped by an air tanker plane dropping retardant.

"The building's not going to burn, but the smoke and heat could do some real damage to the instruments inside," said Pruett Small, a fire official.

Researchers from around the world use the observatory, which is an extension of the University of Arizona. When fully operational in 2005, the Large Binocular Telescope will be the world's most technologically advanced optical telescope. It's expected to yield images nearly 10 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The observatory, consisting of eight buildings, encompasses 8 1/2 acres of pine forest on Mount Graham's 10,470-foot Emerald Peak and is surrounded by a 200-foot-wide clearing. It also has a sprinkler system that officials said would be turned on if flames came within a quarter-mile.

One of the two threatening fires was a lightning-sparked blaze that had grown to more than 6,200 acres by Monday. It was burning less than a mile southeast of the $200 million-plus observatory. [...]

Tiny bubbles of ancient air are locked in the ice Global climate patterns stretching back 740,000 years have been confirmed by a three-kilometre-long ice core drilled from the Antarctic, Nature reports.

Analysis of the ice proves our planet has had eight ice ages during that period, punctuated by rather brief warm spells - one of which we enjoy today. [...]

Initial tests on gas trapped in the ice core show that current carbon dioxide (CO2) levels are higher than they have been in 440,000 years.

Nobody quite knows how this will alter our climate, but researchers hope a detailed picture of past fluctuations will give them a better idea. [...]

Epica is still busy analysing the ice core's atmospheric gases, but preliminary results suggest that present CO2 levels are remarkably high.

"We have never seen greenhouse gases anything like what we have seen today," said Dr Wolff. [...]

Over the last 800,000 years the Earth has, on the whole, been a pretty chilly place. Interglacials - or warm spells - have come every 100,000 years and have generally been short-lived.

Over the last 400,000 years, interglacials have lasted about 10,000 years, with climates similar to this one. Before that they were less warm, but lasted slightly longer.

We have already been in an interglacial for about 10,000 years, so we should - according to the pattern - be heading for an ice age. But we are not.

The Epica team has noticed the interglacial period of 400,000 years ago closely matches our own - because the shape of the Earth's orbit was the same then as it is now.

That warm spell lasted a whopping 28,000 years - so ours probably will, too.

"The next ice age is not imminent," said Dr Wolff, "and greenhouse warming makes it even less likely - despite what The Day After Tomorrow says."

BEIJING - Mudslides and flooding triggered by torrential rains killed at least 28 people in China's south and northwest, newspapers and state television reported Wednesday.

The biggest death toll was in the mountainous southwestern province of Yunnan, where flooding killed at least 13 people on Monday and Tuesday, state television said on its midday national newscast.

In the southern region of Guangxi, flooding killed at least eight people, the China Daily said.

Two members of a road crew were killed in Tibet when mud and rocks swept across their work site, newspapers said.

Other five deaths were reported in the provinces of Guangdong in the south and Shaanxi in the northwest.

Sweden has experienced the coldest start to summer since 1928, with cool temperatures and frequent showers leaving sun worshippers pale and chilled and flocking to travel agents to book holidays in the sun.

The country has experienced no extended warm period yet this year, the Swedish meteorological institute SMHI said on Wednesday.

The highest temperature reported in Sweden so far was 27.4 degrees Celsius (81 degrees Fahrenheit) in the town of Gaevle, north of the capital Stockholm, on June 3.

Not since 1928 has the highest temperature been so low at this point in the summer, SMHI said.

At least 41 people have been killed and more than 150 injured in freak weather-related incidents across China, officials and reports said Wednesday.

Three people were killed and 143 injured when a hurricane lashed eastern China Wednesday, turning a rural community into a blizzard of walnut-sized hailstones and falling tree trunks, officials said.

The gale measuring force 12, the maximum on the Beaufort scale, hit Xiao county in Anhui province early Tuesday with a strength unprecedented in the area's recorded history.

"A total of 18,000 houses were destroyed when the hurricane struck," said Yang Nianwu, an official at the county's bureau of civil affairs.

"They either collapsed under toppled trees or were damaged by the hail," he told AFP by telephone from the ravaged area.

The hurricane came during a week of bad weather across China that has proved unusually lethal.

In southwest Sichuan province, seven people, including two girls aged three and seven, were killed and 10 others injured during a lightning strike Sunday, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The lightning struck as rainstorms and hail pounded 33 towns in the Liangshan prefecture, affecting 38,000 people and 2,990 hectares (7,305 acres) of cropland.

Forty homes were also destroyed in the area, home to the Yi ethnic minority.

In the northwest Xinjiang region two people drowned and six went missing in mountain torrents on Tuesday, while on Monday at least 14 were killed and 22 were missing after a huge mudslide in southwestern Yunnan province.

Yang, the Xiao county official, described a scene of utter destruction left in the wake of the unprecedented hurricane.

"A million trees were uprooted, and our cotton fields were destroyed by the hail," he said. "The infrastructure was also badly damaged. The power supply stopped."

Equally devastating for an area heavily reliant on agriculture, more than 30,000 domestic animals were injured.

As the locals were tending to the injured, six of whom were seriously hurt, life was slowly returning to normal on Wednesday.

"People are either put up in houses that weren't damaged in the storm, or they hurriedly repair houses hit by the hurricane," said Yang.

While Anhui was recovering from the storm, a heat wave in southern Guangdong province's Dongguan city has claimed 15 lives over the past two weeks, according to figures released Wednesday in the Yangcheng Evening Post.

A total of 255 people from the city were taken to hospitals because of heat-related complications.

Temperatures have fallen in recent days as a result of rain and the situation in the city was under control, the report said.

Thousands of households in England were hit by power cuts Wednesday after a severe storm lashed the south and east of the country.

Trees were felled and trains and ferry services to France delayed.

A spokeswoman for EDF Energy, the main electricity supplier to the region, urged members of the public to stay away from collapsed power lines.

"We have extra staff working to deal with these faults, but are still being affected by the ongoing weather conditions," the spokeswoman said.

"We are aware that a number of overhead power lines have been brought down and would urge people to stay away from these as some may still be live," she said.

Up to 106,000 homes, mostly in the worst hit southern and eastern parts of the country, were hit by blackouts through the day Wednesday.

High winds forced the P and O cross-channel ferry company to cancel its services between Portsmouth and Cherbourg and Portsmouth and Caen, while Dover-Calais sailings were subject to delay.

[...] Southern England has been bracing itself for unusually and unseasonably bad weather, the result of low pressure and high winds, for Wednesday night and Thursday.

Deep in the Antarctic interior, buried under thousands of meters [more than two miles] of ice, lies Lake Vostok, the world's largest subglacial lake. Scientists believe that the waters of Lake Vostok have not been disturbed for hundreds of thousands of years, and there are tantalizing clues that microbes may exist there that have been isolated for at least as long.

Now, the most comprehensive measurements of the lake--roughly the size of Lake Ontario in North America--indicate that it is divided into two distinct basins that may have different water chemistry and other characteristics.

The findings have important implications for the diversity of any microbial life in Lake Vostok and for how scientists should study the lake's various ecosystems, if an international scientific consensus is ever reached to explore the lake.

Lake Vostok is thought to be a very good terrestrial analogue to the conditions on Europa, a moon of Jupiter thought to hold a large liquid ocean far under its frozen surface. If microbial life can exist in Vostok, scientists have argued, then it also might thrive on Europa.

Vancouver — British Columbia's lucrative, lush, coastal forests are being threatened by drought and fire-prone conditions not seen in more than 400 years, a forest scientist warns.Reese Halter, founder of Global Forest Science, said yesterday that the province's normally moist coastal forests are perilously dry. [...]

"The last time we saw this was in the 1580s," Mr. Halter said in basing his conclusion on tree-ring analysis and current climate trends.

"We are looking at a 400-year bonfire, and by that I mean massive, catastrophic stand-replacing fires... eight times larger than they had in the B.C. Interior last year.

"We don't have them yet, but conditions are becoming more and more alarming," Mr. Halter said in an interview from the organization's office in Banff, Alta.

Already, he noted, there have been numerous fires in B.C.'s coastal forests.

"These are in a rain forest that is usually wet. But the wet coastal forest is starting to experience a prolonged drying-out. The stars are lining up. . . . It could be cataclysmic."

Mr. Halter, an award-winning conservation biologist, pointed out that more than two million acres of forest are ablaze in Yukon and Alaska.
"Those forests should not be burning. They are a harbinger of the critical times ahead." [...]

Record-breaking blasts from unseasonable solar storms seen in late 2003 are just now reaching the edge of the Solar System, scientists reported on Thursday.

More than a dozen coronal mass ejections - eruptions of super-heated gas triggered by tangled magnetic fields on the Sun's surface - shot from the star over a period of 20 days last October and November.

In the events, which pointed in different directions because of the Sun's rotation, radiation and high-speed particles surged ahead of gas from the blasts themselves. On 28 and 29 October, that gas reached Earth in record time - about 20 hours, sweeping past the planet at five million miles per hour.

"If you look at the overall speed of the events - the sheer momentum of it - it's the biggest event we've measured in space," University of Michigan astronomer Thomas Zurbuchen told reporters at a NASA teleconference.

An unprecedented number of spacecraft tracked the blasts as they sped outward from the Sun, producing a trove of data that may help scientists predict the effects of future space storms.

The blasts produced auroras as far south as Florida in the US, shut down power in a city in Sweden, and forced astronauts aboard the International Space Station to duck into a relatively well shielded service module.

Martian impact

A few hours after reaching Earth, the blasts hit Mars, which has no global magnetic field to shield it from solar storms. The events disabled a radiation-monitoring instrument on the orbiting spacecraft Mars Odyssey. And computer simulations suggest they also blew off part of the planet's upper atmosphere, an effect that may have helped erode the planet's surface water over 3.5 billion years.

"We know there used to be a lot more water than there is right now. Where did it go?" Zurbuchen said. "One of the key ideas people are talking about is the connection to these space storms."

The Ulysses spacecraft near Jupiter and the Cassini spacecraft near Saturn both detected radio waves when the blasts slammed into the planets' magnetic fields.

In April, the blasts - slowed to 1.5 million miles per hour - even caught up with the Voyager 2 probe, which has travelled about 7 billion miles from the Sun since its launch in 1977. And preliminary data suggest they may have reached the Voyager 1 spacecraft, nearly 9 billion miles from the Sun this Tuesday, eight months after erupting from the star.

At those distances, the Sun's magnetic influence begins to wane as solar wind particles come into contact with particles from interstellar space. The blasts are expected to temporarily expand - by 400 million miles - the boundary of this heliosphere, which they will probably reach by early 2005.

[...] The "Halloween" solar storms in October-November 2003 launched billions of tons of electrified gas (plasma) that blasted by Earth within a day and past Mars hours later.

[...] The Halloween storms were the most powerful ever measured. The storms broke all-time records for X-ray intensity and for speed and temperature of the solar wind observed near Earth. About a third of the total particle radiation emitted by the Sun in the last decade in the deadly 30-50 MeV energy range came from these storms, even though the solar activity cycle was well past its maximum.

[...] The shocks created by the storms in the inner solar system not only accelerated electrons and protons to high energy, they also trapped the particles in the inner heliosphere. This resulted in elevated radiation levels everywhere between Venus and Mars that decayed only gradually over a period of weeks. This kind of event will have significant implications for radiation protection requirements for explorers who venture outside of the Earth's protective magnetosphere (magnetic field).

EDMONTON - The cleanup continued Friday in Grande Prairie, Alta., after a suspected tornado rocked cars and tore off buildings' doors, windows and roof shingles.

The storm, which rolled through the city's downtown at about 3:30 p.m. local time on Thursday, also knocked over a power line, started at least one small fire at a hotel and toppled a big Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket from its pole in front of the fast-food restaurant.

Nobody was injured in the city of 40,000 people northwest of Edmonton, officials said.

Thunderstorms have pummeled Central Florida almost daily in the past two weeks, leaving in their wake damaged homes and businesses, downed trees, power outages, several injuries and at least one death.

No county has escaped the tens of thousands of lightning strikes.
Two workers at a Pierson convenience store were injured Wednesday when lightning hit their building.

A Sanford family was burned out of its home Tuesday by a lightning strike.

Three fans at the Pepsi 400 were hurt Saturday in an electrical storm.
A firefighter was injured by crashing debris when three homes near Oviedo were set ablaze by lightning July 1.

The same day, lightning killed a plumber working on a home in Kissimmee.

And a severe storm June 25 uprooted 100-year-old trees and left thousands without power in the Conway and Belle Isle areas of Orange County.

If it seems as if the weather gods are angry with Central Florida, weather experts insist there is nothing that sets this year apart from others.

Welcome to summertime in the Sunshine State.

The season's weather patterns are consistent, said John Pendergrast, a National Weather Service meteorologist. The clash of hot, sticky air inland with cool air rushing in from the coast is the perfect recipe to cook up violent storms. [...]

The collision of the sea breezes doesn't always create severe weather. Other factors, such as drier air or cooler daytime temperatures, can lessen the severity of storms. But recently, all the ingredients have been present to create some doozies.

"It's not uncommon to see several days of severe storms," Pendergrast said.

'Everybody runs for cover'

But the potential of severe weather lingering this long is beginning to unnerve some people.

At the first clap of thunder, "everybody runs for cover," said David Watson, owner of the Shipwreck Cafe, a downtown Sanford restaurant that offers outdoor seating. "Nobody wants to sit around."

"It hits close," Watson said. "It's not off in the distance."

Wednesday's worst storms exploded from Daytona Beach to Melbourne as the severe weather shifted east for the second consecutive day, though Osceola County also got slammed.

The thunderstorm pattern has moved because of a high-pressure ridge parked in South Florida, Pendergrast said. That ridge creates a western breeze early in the day that often is enough to nudge storms east later in the day, he said.

"The sea breezes develop along the east coast and don't move much," he said. "The western breeze pins the east coast breeze to the coast."

But the storms Tuesday and Wednesday produced an extraordinary number of lightning strikes -- 16,000 each day -- high even for an area considered the lightning capital of the United States.

On Wednesday, one of at least two storms moved into east Volusia County about 4 p.m. A lightning strike at a Pierson gas station traveled into the building and struck a cook and another person inside, according to emergency workers.

By 4:30 p.m., firefighters were responding to several reported lightning strikes throughout the county.

"This storm has been particularly violent -- a lot of lightning strikes," said Walter Nettles, a Volusia County Fire Department spokesman. "I've got six lines going."

Lake County firefighters say lightning may have caused a blaze that badly damaged a two-story home south of Clermont. Nobody was home during the fire, which was still being investigated early Wednesday evening, officials said.

Osceola County's Fire Department responded to reports of hail about 3 p.m. in Poinciana. Also, a tree hit a house in the Poinciana development about 3:45 p.m., said Twis Lizasuain, Osceola County spokeswoman. [...]

Heavy storms overnight flooded homes and caused rail and road chaos in parts of northern and eastern Germany, while power supplies were cut by lightning strikes, police said Friday.

In the eastern city of Chemnitz, car drivers were forced to climb onto their vehicles as water levels rose cutting off several roads in the area.

At Frankfurt-an-der-Oder on the Polish border, high winds blew down trees and the overhead lines for the town's tram system. Lightning caused numerous power blackouts.

Flying debris and downed power cables caused delays on the Berlin to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder railway line, police said.

Emergency workers in the northern port city of Hamburg spent several hours pumping out flooded basements and underpasses overnight.

TOKYO, July 9 (Xinhuanet) -- Oppressive heat continued to cover the Japanese archipelago Friday as the mercury shot up to over 35 degrees Centigrade in some parts of the country during what is normally the height of the rainy season.

According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, temperatures hit 37.5 C in Kumagaya, Tokyo's neighboring Saitama Prefecture, 37.1 Cin the city of Gifu in central Japan, and over 36 C in Kyoto and many other cities across the country.

The heat wave has hit most parts of Japan in July, prompting many people to wonder whether this year's rainy season is already over and to call the agency to check.

PASADENA, Calif., July 9 (UPI) -- All systems were go Friday for the weekend launch of a Delta II rocket set to carry into a new satellite into orbit that scientists expect will provide a wealth of new information on the increasingly controversial subject of global warming.

The Aura satellite is scheduled to blast off during the wee hours of Sunday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It is equipped with cutting-edge scanning instruments that will monitor the various layers of the atmosphere and how they interact with pollutants that include the greenhouse gases that may or may not be causing Earth's climate to heat up.

Climate scientists can always use new and improved data, but the Aura mission's greatest value may be in the political arena where policy makers remain in the middle of a battle between environmentalists who insist global warming is a genuine threat and skeptics led by some in the business community who dismiss the entire concept as junk science."

"Nothing really is in the works that addresses global air quality," Project Scientist Phil DeCola told reporters from Vandenberg in a televised news conference Friday. "One can imagine the value of this information in developing future policies."

Described as being about the size of a small school bus, Aura holds four different types of scanning instruments that will take in-depth measurements of the atmosphere, in particular the ozone layer in the upper stratosphere that protects humans from the sun's harmful radiation. [...]

As soon as data from Aura begins streaming back to Earth, in about 90 days, it should help present a truer picture of the globe's air quality and set the stage for meaningful regulation that is more tightly focused on the scope and source of the problem. [...]

A third of male fish in British rivers are in the process of changing sex due to pollution in human sewage, research by the Environment Agency suggests.

A survey of 1,500 fish at 50 river sites found more than a third of males displayed female characteristics.

Hormones in the sewage, including those produced by the female contraceptive pill, are thought to be the main cause.

The agency says the problem could damage fish populations by reducing their ability to reproduce.

The death toll from floods submerging eastern India reached 78 as army helicopters averted tragedy by airlifting children from their marooned school.

Five more people died in the northeastern state of Assam when two boats carrying families capsized in the region's central Kamrup district Friday, a police spokesman said.

But in the same area, army helicopters swooped down Friday to rescue some 350 children trapped when their school was hit by a flash flood, Kamrup district's chief administrator Samir Sinha said.

"The children were forced to take shelter on the rooftop before two MI-17 helicopters airlifted them to safety," Sinha told AFP by telephone.

Fifty-five deaths have been reported in northeastern India since annual monsoons began last month, while 23 people have died in the eastern states of Bihar and West Bengal.

In Bihar, state Chief Secretary K.A.H. Subramanian said two air force helicopters were arriving Saturday to assist in relief as floods had snapped communication with areas bordering Nepal.

India last year recorded more than 1,000 deaths from floods, which are triggered annually by monsoon rains and melting snows from the Himalayas.

Unseasonal summer cold brought 10 centimeters (four inches) of snow overnight to the Germany's highest mountain, the Zugspitze in southern Bavaria, meteorologists said Sunday.

The mercury dipped to minus six degrees Celsius (21 Fahrenheit), the lowest July temperature recorded in the region in the past decade.

Researchers from Cardiff University have sailed into Cardiff Bay, returning from a major research expedition to to unravel the complex history of ice-ocean and climate change over the past 50,000 years. The collaborative Sequencing Ocean-Ice Interaction Project (Sequoia) to the North East Atlantic has collected deep ocean sediment cores which will allow scientists to investigate the role of ocean circulation in past abrupt climate changes.

[...] Dr. Ian Hall said: "The Sequoia project aims to develop our understanding of the cause and the sequences of change involved in the many sudden and erratic swings in the climate that punctuated the coldness of the last Ice Age."

"Understanding the circulation of the global ocean is of major importance in our ability to predict and identify any human-induced global change and their consequences for our climate."

Using data gathered over the past 19 years, Dartmouth Flood Observatory (DFO) experts know that most flooding worldwide happens in July and August, and they can point out where and when floods are likely to occur.

"We expect summer floods in what we call monsoonal Asia, which includes most of China, Vietnam, Thailand and parts of India," says G. Robert Brakenridge, a fluvial geomorphologist who is also the founder and director of the DFO.

"There will also probably be flooding in sub-Saharan Africa, around the Gulf of Mexico, in the islands of the Caribbean and in Central America."

Floods occur every year, and according to the DFO, these events are increasing in frequency and intensity. In 2003, there were nearly 300 flood events, and the trend over the past three years forecasts a busy 2004.

Large areas of Bangladesh were under water Sunday as driving monsoon rains caused rivers to burst their banks, leaving at least eight people dead and some 800,000 stranded, officials said.

Some 13 districts in the northwestern Rajshahi division of Bangladesh were worst hit, the official news agency BSS said quoting local officials.

Flights were canceled and houses collapsed after the Chinese capital Beijing experienced a rainstorm of unusual severity, state media reported Sunday.

In the course of just a few hours late Saturday, 73 millimeters (three inches) of rain hit downtown, forcing traffic to grind to a halt and causing severe congestion in key parts of the city, the Xinhua news agency reported.

As of 9:30 pm (1330 GMT), more than 200 flights scheduled for take-off from Beijing International Airport had been delayed, according to reports.

Six houses collapsed, and two people were injured when the freak weather caused an electricity pole to topple, Xinhua said.

Putting a positive spin on the near-chaotic scenes throughout the city, meteorologists said the heavy rainfall was "somewhat good" since Beijing had experienced below-average precipitation in the preceding days.

Thunderbolts have killed 22 people and injured 56 so far this year in the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou alone, state media reported Sunday.

In the most recent incident, two people were killed and two injured in the village of Ganhe when lightning struck their home, the Xinhua news agency said.

A farmer working in the fields in Pingtang county was also killed in a sudden thunderstorm, as shocked witnesses described how the lightning tore his clothes to rags, according to the agency.

Guizhou has more than the average share of thunderbolt deaths, because people in the area are too poor to install lightning conductors, Xinhua said.

BUCHAREST (AFP) - At least 18 people have died in the last three days in Romania and another 15 during the past week in Macedonia as a heatwave brought blistering temperatures to the Balkans.

Hospital officials said most of the casualties in Romania had died from heart attacks in the street or while working in the fields as temperatures reached 38 degrees Celsius (100 Fahrenheit).

In the Romanian capital Bucharest the number of calls to emergency services rose sharply and at least 50 cases of people fainting from the heat in the streets were recorded.

The health ministry issued repeated warnings to people to drink plenty of fluids and avoid excessive exposure to the sun.

At least 15 people died in Macedonia in the heatwave, doctors said.

"At least five people die every day as a result of the heat," Ljupco Pajkovski, a doctor in Skopje's emergency centre, told reporters.

"People mostly died of heart attacks, brain seizures or heat stroke," he added.

Since Monday average temperatures in Macedonia have been about 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), while in Skopje and southern parts of the country temperatures have reached 43 degrees (109 Fahrenheit).

Forecasters do not expect lower temperatures before the end of the weekend.

Extreme temperatures, which have killed at least 22 people in Romania in the space of a week, continued to plague Europe on Sunday, with Greece sweltering in a heatwave and an open-air performance of Verdi's "Traviata" canceled in Italy.

Four people, two of them teenage shepherds, were struck by lightning in Romania at the weekend, when a heatwave that had killed at least 18 people during the week gave way to hailstorms and gale-force winds, the interior ministry said on Sunday.

Fierce winds damaged 400 houses, mainly in the north, ripped up trees and cut power supplies to 300 areas, while hailstorms destroyed 4,600 hectares (11,360 acres) of crops, a ministry official said.

Storms that had provoked floods and power cuts in Britain and Germany during the week turned to snow in the Bavarian mountains on Sunday.

Germany's highest mountain, the Zugspitze, was covered in two meters (six feet seven inches) of snow after 10 centimeters fell since Saturday and the mercury dipped to an unseasonally cold minus six degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit), meteorologists said.

In Italy, the opening night of a new production of Verdi's "Traviata" at Verona's Roman amphitheatre was interrupted after seven minutes because of stormy weather, leaving 12,000 people fuming with anger.

British director Graham Vick of the Birmingham Opera Company had promised a revolutionary performance that would innovate without betraying Verdi's popular opera.

Northeast Italy was hit by unseasonally chilly weather over the weekend and snow in the Italian Alps.

In France, where nearly 15,000 people died in an extended heatwave last year, summer 2004 continued to be a rain-drenched washout.

But Greece continued to labour under a heatwave that swept across the Balkans during the week, killing 15 people in neighbouring Macedonia, in addition to the casualties in Romania.

A weekend of torrential rain caused flooding in several regions of southern Sweden, cutting roads and hindering rail traffic, local officials said on Monday.

There were no reports of casualties, and weather forecasters said the rain appeared to have peaked late on Sunday.

Upcoming Olympic Games host Athens saw the mercury soar to up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in some parts of the city over the weekend, prompting warnings to residents with health problems to stay home and forcing firefighters on alert.

Temperatures soared in some western suburbs of the Greek capital, which next month plays host to hundreds of athletes from around the world, meteorologists said.

Similar temperatures, which are not extreme for Greece, were recorded in other regions across the country.

BEIJING (AFP) - Sixty-two tourists have been rescued after they were trapped by mudflows in a remote part of southwest China's Yunnan province near the border with Myanmar.

They were evacuated to safe places and have been provided with food and accommodation, the Xinhua news agency reported Sunday without specifying if the tourists were foreign or Chinese.

Parts of Yunnan province near the well-known tourist spot of Ruili have been hit by mountain torrents, mudflows and landslides following heavy rainfall, according to the agency.

The disaster has affected some 171,600 people, causing serious damage to fields, irrigation systems and homes, Xinhua reported.

About 8,600 hectares (22,000 acres) of farmland were affected and 13,324 houses were damaged, with losses estimated at 437 million yuan (53 million dollars), the agency said.

EDMONTON (CP) - A pounding hailstorm hammered Edmonton today afternoon, turning roads into lakes, flooding homes and damaging parts of Canada's largest mall.

Holes were ripped in the roof over West Edmonton Mall's indoor amusement and ice rink, sending water cascading to the floor.

Police and mall officials ordered the entire 800-store complex evacuated. People leaving on foot reported seeing a "waterfall" flowing from the upper levels.

"We were advised to close all the rides and evacuate Galaxyland and the mall," said a worker at the amusement park who refused to give his name.

Water was ankle-deep on the main floor.

There was a sprawling traffic jam outside the mall as motorists fought through water to get out. [...]

Elsewhere, the deluge swamped major intersections and closed arterial roads, forcing cars into bumper-to-bumper gridlock on side roads.

The fire department called in extra pumping crews.

Intersections were turned into tiny lakes, with water lapping against hubcaps and in some cases reaching car roofs.

Homes were flooded and manhole covers blew as sewer systems failed to keep up with the downpour of icy sleet.

"The hail was about golf-ball sized. There was some that was baseball-sized," said Debbie McIntyre, a cyclist who was caught in the storm.

Mountains of hail lined boulevards, brushed up against fences and turned lawns into dirty snowbanks.

There were no reports of injuries.

The storm forced dozens to wade through knee-deep water for higher ground at Laurier Park south of the city's downtown.

As the water began to rise, the group climbed on top of picnic tables.

"It's like a river coming through the park," said Canadian Press reporter Julia Necheff, speaking on a cellphone from the area.

"Garbage cans are floating away. My bike was swept away in a torrent of water."

Stormy weather also spawned funnel clouds north of the city and a tornado to the east that tore roofs off buildings. There were no reports of injuries.

Heavy rain was forecast to continue through the night.

The collapse of the Earth's magnetic field, which both guards the planet and guides many of its creatures, appears to have started in earnest about 150 years ago. The field's strength has waned 10 to 15 percent, and the deterioration has accelerated of late, increasing debate over whether it portends a reversal of the lines of magnetic force that normally envelop the Earth.

During a reversal, the main field weakens, almost vanishes, then reappears with opposite polarity. Afterward, compass needles that normally point north would point south, and during the thousands of years of transition, much in the heavens and Earth would go askew.

Before the pole reversal

During the field collapse

After the poles have flipped

A reversal could knock out power grids, hurt astronauts and satellites, widen atmospheric ozone holes, send polar auroras flashing to the equator and confuse birds, fish and migratory animals that rely on the steadiness of the magnetic field as a navigation aid. But experts said the repercussions would fall short of catastrophic, despite a few proclamations of doom and sketchy evidence of past links between field reversals and species extinctions.

Although a total flip may be hundreds or thousands of years away, the rapid decline in magnetic strength is already damaging satellites.

Last month, the European Space Agency approved the world's largest effort at tracking the field's shifts. A trio of new satellites, called Swarm, are to monitor the collapsing field with far greater precision than before and help scientists forecast its prospective state.

"We want to get some idea of how this would evolve in the near future, just like people trying to predict the weather," said Dr. Gauthier Hulot, a French geophysicist working on the satellite plan. "I'm personally quite convinced we should be able to work out the first predictions by the end of the mission."

Comment: And just how accurate have the weather predictions been lately around the world?

The discipline is one of a number - like high-energy physics and aspects of space science - where Europeans have recently come from behind to seize the initiative, dismaying some American experts.

No matter what the new findings, the public has no reason to panic, scientists say. Even if a flip is imminent, it might take 2,000 years to mature. The last one took place 780,000 years ago, when Homo erectus was still learning how to make stone tools.

Some experts suggest a reversal is overdue. "The fact that it's dropping so rapidly gives you pause," said Dr. John A. Tarduno, a professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester. "It looks like things we see in computer models of a reversal."

Comment: In other words, it's happening right now. What if it doesn't take 2000 years for the flip to occur? Scientists used to believe that ice ages happened very gradually over long periods of time, yet there is substantial evidence that indicates that ice ages can happen very quickly - even in a few years.

In an interview, Dr. Tarduno put the odds of an impending flip at more likely than not, adding that some of his colleagues were placing informal bets on the possibility but realized they would probably be long gone by the time the picture clarified.

Deep inside the Earth, the magnetic field arises as the fluid core oozes with hot currents of molten iron and this mechanical energy gets converted into electromagnetism. It is known as the geodynamo. In a car's generator, the same principle turns mechanical energy into electricity.

No one knows precisely why the field periodically reverses, but scientists say the responsibility probably lies with changes in the turbulent flows of molten iron, which they envision as similar to the churning gases that make up the clouds of Jupiter. [...]

Comment: The scientists actually admit they really do not understand why Earth's magnetic field flips, and yet we are supposed to believe their predictions on when and how such a reversal will occur?

BUENOS AIRES (AFP) - Winter storms have violently struck several South American countries in recent days, leading to eight weather-related deaths in Argentina and Chile, thousands of dead farm animals in Peru and record below freezing temperatures in southern Brazil.

In Argentina, where temperatures reached minus 11 degrees Celsius (12 degrees F) in Tierra del Fuego, in the extreme south, six people died over the weekend.

One construction worker died of hypothermia and an elderly man was found dead in a park. Two couples, in separate incidents, were killed by gas poisoning when they left their stoves on to heat up their homes.

Heavy snow and rain in southern Peru left 53 people homeless and damaged thousands of houses.

Peruvian authorities have dispatched 34 tonnes of shelter material to affected areas and medicine to treat children who live in high altitudes and suffer from pulmonary problems exacerbated by the poor weather. Helicopters have been dropping food and clothing in isolated villages of the Andean nation.

The weather has also killed more than 75,000 farm animals, including cows, sheep and llamas, the Peruvian Agriculture Ministry said.

In Chile, two people died Monday as rain and 70-kilometer (43-mile) an hour winds swept through the southern part of the country. Rescuers were put on alert to assist people who might lost their homes due to the weather.

A 44-year-old man died of hypothermia in the coastal town of Concepcion, where temperatures dropped to near freezing. A second man died electrocuted by street light cables.

Two weeks ago, winter weather claimed four lives in Chile, while floods damaged thousands of homes.

In southern Brazil, where people were still enjoying beach weather a week ago, winter weather slammed the region on Sunday with the coldest temperatures in a decade.

Temperatures reached minus 6.8 degrees Celsius (19.8 degrees F) in the state of Rio Grande do Sul on Sunday, the lowest mark of the year, while the neighboring state of Santa Catarina was hit by the coldest temperature in 10 years, minus seven degrees (19.4 degrees F).

Paraguayan authorities sent children home from school as they brace for freezing temperatures forecast for this week, while in Uruguay shelters for the homeless have been set up.

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. - Wildfires that prompted the evacuation of homes and campgrounds burned unsubdued early Tuesday after scorching 7,000 acres of Southern California brush and forest land.

No homes were destroyed, authorities said. The cause of both fires remained under investigation.

Three firefighters suffered heat exhaustion Monday as they battled a 5,000-acre blaze on the edge of the San Bernardino National forest west of Palm Springs.

Two campgrounds were evacuated as about 1,000 firefighters, backed by helicopters and planes, worked to contain the fire that began Sunday afternoon.

The blaze was 25 percent contained late Monday night. Temperatures in the Riverside County area were expected to top 100 degrees Tuesday.

In northern Los Angeles County, a 2,100-acre fire in the Lake Hughes area of the Angeles National Forest prompted the voluntary evacuation of a dozen homes. The fire was 20 percent contained late Monday night.

The blaze started about 12:30 p.m. Monday and quickly spread in the heavy brush, fanned by winds that gusted around 20 mph, Los Angeles County fire Inspector John Mancha said.

The fire had moved into thick forest that hasn't burned in 75 years, county Fire Department spokesman Mike McCormick said. [...]

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- A wildfire near a village of about 60 residents almost tripled in size today as warm, dry weather gave new life to it and dozens of other fires in Alaska's Interior.

Conditions were drying out, heating up and taking a turn for the worse following several days of rain, officials said.

"The humidity has dropped. The temperature is up, the wind has picked up. Our respite is over," said Gil Knight, of the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center.

The 17,000-acre fire was burning about a mile from the village of Bettles. Fire officials said the blaze was a top priority today -- one of the 71 fires already burning statewide. [...]

Crews also were monitoring wildfires that have burned 338,600 acres north of Fairbanks. Fires have scorched more than 2.3 million acres in Alaska so far. [...]

More than 10 million people across South Asia have been hit by what officials are calling the worst monsoon floods for over a decade.

More than 50 people have died in India in the past few days and millions have left their homes as the annual rains cause chaos.

A third of Bangladesh has been affected, with three million people marooned and several killed.

In Nepal, flash floods have killed at least 50 people in the past week.

Relief efforts

Hundreds of people died last year in South Asia in floods and landslides which are common during the monsoon season.

But officials in India and Bangladesh say that this year's flooding is the worst they have seen in more than a decade.

"This is the worst flooding in recent memory with 22 of the 24 districts in Assam under floodwater," Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi said in the Indian state of Assam.

MEDFORD, N.J. - Residents in the Northeast braced for more heavy rain and flooding after some towns were hit with what meteorologists called once-in-a-lifetime storms.

Severe storms with the potential for more heavy downpours were forecast in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland on Wednesday. Rainfall could reach more than 2 inches per hour, the National Weather Service said.

"That's up to Mother Nature," said Glenn Nickerson, who assisted with flood plan coordination in Burlington County. "All we can do is make sure Emergency Services is prepared."

On Tuesday, Gov. James E. McGreevey called a state of emergency in two counties and lawmakers asked President Bush to declare portions of southern New Jersey a federal disaster area.

No serious injuries were reported, but the rains damaged hundreds of houses, stranded cars, breached small dams and forced untold numbers of road closings.

The storm dumped over 13 inches of rain in a 12-hour period in Burlington County, located in southern New Jersey. It was classified as a 1,000 year storm, the National Weather Service said.

About 100 people who fled the rising waters in New Jersey remained homeless.

"We left with the clothes on our backs," said Sandy Tams, who was taken with her husband and children by boat from their Mount Laurel home after midnight.

Smyrna, Del., received over 11 inches of rain, possibly making it a 500-year storm, the weather service said.

In Maryland, flood waters damaged about 80 homes, and road flooding and bridge damage closed major highways and secondary roads, tying up traffic through much of the day. Crews worked to clear more than 100 trees downed in Elk Neck State Park and the nearby state forest.

Tammy Spiese was trying to clear debris on her property near Reading, Pa., when rising water carried her into a drainage pipe. She had to be pulled out by her husband and a police officer.

"I was in the water up to my neck," Spiese said. "It was very powerful and I had to hold onto the rocks above."

NIIGATA — Heavy rain hit Niigata and Fukushima prefectures on Tuesday, leaving three people dead and two others missing, police and local officials said early Wednesday.

About 18,000 households in Niigata and Fukushima were ordered or advised to evacuate, while ground troops were sent in for disaster prevention efforts.

A heavy downpour pounded Moscow on Tuesday morning, and the city deployed rapid-response teams to stem flooding in several districts.

The brunt of the rainfall came between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m, said Alexei Lyakhov, head of the Federal Meteorological Monitoring Service.

Hardest hit was the Timiryazevskaya Akademia district in northern Moscow, which received 45.6 millimeters of rain during the three-hour period, or a little over 40 percent of its July average, he said.

The center also saw a heavy downpour, Lyakhov said, noting that the area around the Baltschug Hotel, just across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, received 45.2 millimeters of rain, also around 40 percent of its July average. [...]

WINNIPEG - An act of God tore the Turtle Mountain Bible Camp apart on Monday, but camp organizers say it was also an act of God that no one was hurt.

The camp was hit by a brutal storm just after 1 a.m. Monday. Strong winds ripped trees out of the ground and even twisted canoes around tree trunks.

More than 100 children and 55 staff members were at the camp, near Boissevain, at the time of the storm. Camp director Kathy Weir is amazed none of the buildings were destroyed.

"It looked like a bomb had just gone off. It was devastating," she says.

"First of all, our first thought was hand of God, was protection, because despite all of the debris and the trees that were down – and there were so many, there was just such a mess – but every cabin was spared. There [were] no buildings destroyed. We have damage to buildings, but everything is operational, we're able to use them all."

Weir says the community came out in droves Monday and all of the debris has been cleaned up.

The storm also hit farms in the area. Scott Day, with Manitoba Agriculture in Boissevain, says the storm dumped up to 15 centimetres of rain in two or three hours, flooding ditches and culverts.

"This has been a crazy year once again, and it is critical because of the staging of the crop," says Day.

"This is the time when the crop becomes susceptible to disease. A lot of wet weather has completely saturated the soil, leads to an increased risk, and hopefully we'll have some clear weather in the next few days."

The extended forecast is calling for hot, dry weather in the next few days. Day says that's exactly what hay crops need to survive. In fact, he says, if it doesn't rain again for the rest of the summer, crops have already received enough moisture to make it though to harvest.

There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than for 55m years, enough to melt all the ice on the planet and submerge cities like London, New York and New Orleans, Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser has warned.

Speaking on his return from Moscow, where he has been acting as the prime minister's "unofficial envoy" to persuade the Russians to ratify the Kyoto protocol to fight climate change, Sir David said the most recent science bore out the worst predictions.

An ice core 3km deep from the Antarctic had a record of the climate for 800,000 years and showed the direct relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and warm and cold periods for the planet.

Critical in climate records is the quantity of ice at the poles and in glaciers. Records show that at the peak of the ice age 12,000 years ago, the sea was 150 metres below where it is now. "You might think it is not wise, since we are currently melting ice so fast, to have built our big cities on the edge of the sea where it is now obvious they cannot remain.

"On current trends, cities like London, New York and New Orleans will be among the first to go.

"Ice melting is a relatively slow process but is speeding up. When the Greenland ice cap goes, the sea level will rise six to seven metres, when Antarctica melts it will be another 110 metres," he said.

Records of the 3km deep Antarctic ice core showed that during ice ages the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 200 parts per million (ppm), and during warm periods reached around 270 ppm, before sinking back down again for another ice age. That pattern had been repeated many times in that period but had now been broken because of the intervention of man.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 360 ppm in the 1990s and now was up to 379 ppm and increasing at the rate of 3 ppm a year - reaching a level not seen for 55m years when there was no ice on the planet because the atmosphere was too warm.

"I am sure that climate change is the biggest problem that civilisation has had to face in 5,000 years," he concluded. [...]

A U.N. official says natural disasters, such as the recent deadly earthquakes in Iran and Algeria, are occuring with greater frequency than in past. The U.N. humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, says natural disasters affect up to 10 times more people per year than war and global conflict.

Mr. Egeland says the world has seen an increasing number of severe natural disasters in recent years. Climate change and population shifts, according to the report, are to blame for the more frequent occurence of natural disasters.

Mr. Egeland says at least two kinds of these disasters, floods and earthquakes, tend to strike fast and can be more deadly than the bloodiest wars. To emphasize his point, Mr. Egeland gave the death tolls for the recent earthquakes in Algeria and the Bam region of Iran.

"The Bam [Iran] earthquake and the Algerian earthquake killed 30,000 people in seconds," said Jan Egeland. "That is more than most wars cost in a decade."

According to Mr. Egeland's research, 700 natural disasters last year killed some 70,000 people. He says the disasters affected 600 million people and cost $65 billion in material damage.

Mr. Egeland says natural disasters have an especially devastating impact on the poorest regions of the world because more low-income people tend to live in disaster-prone areas. Too often, he says, the international community ignores the problem until it is too late.

PETERBOROUGH, ONT. - Heavy rain overnight led to a state of emergency being declared Thursday morning in Peterborough, Ont., and Temiscamingue, Que. People were being advised not to drink the water after the city's Jackson Creek overflowed.

Police said most streets were impassable, with the water almost one-metre deep and lapping at car windows.

"It's insane. We had an officer come in from a place east of here in Havelock, which is about a 20-minute drive from here, and it was bone dry until he reached the outskirts of the city," said Sgt. John Lyons of the Peterborough Lakefield Police Services. "He said it hit him just like a tidal wave."

SYLHET, Bangladesh (AFP) - Villagers marooned by floods that have stranded at least two million people in northern Bangladesh say they are running out of food and fresh water, as rescuers struggle to reach them.

People stranded in northeastern Sylhet district told an AFP correspondent travelling by boat they had been trapped in their villages for six days, adding food supplies were running low and they had no access to fresh water.

They said rescuers who are delivering emergency supplies of rice, biscuits and water purification tablets had yet to reach them.

"The waters are besieging us. We've been completely cut off for six days and we've not got any food or fresh water because the wells have gone under water," a resident of one flood-surrounded village said.

"We don't have boats so we're trapped. We're waiting for relief but none has come yet."

The country has been lashed by torrential monsoon rains that have hampered rescue efforts and caused rivers to overflow.

In neighbouring Sunamganj, officials told AFP by telephone Tuesday five people had died in flood-related accidents, bringing to 13 the number of people killed since the start of the weekend. [...]

A solar wind gust from the indicated coronal hole could reach Earth on July 16th or 17th. Image credit: SOHO Extreme UV Telescope

Sunspot 649 has produced three X-class solar flares: two on July 15th (0141 UT and 1824 UT) and one, so far, on July 16th (0206 UT).

None of these explosions hurled a coronal mass ejection directly toward Earth, so the chances for bright auroras remain low despite the high solar activity.

Strong solar activity should continue for days to come. Sunspot 649 has a tangled "beta-gamma-delta" magnetic field that harbors energy for more X-class solar flares. Meanwhile, another big sunspot appears to be hidden on the far side of the sun. Solar rotation will carry it over the sun's eastern limb, and into plain view, as soon as July 17th.

MYSTERY METEOR SHOWER?

Sea-rescuers were on alert in Finland on July 12th when reports of emergency flares poured in from the Gulf of Bothnia. They soon realized that no ship was in distress. The flares were "meteors." Johan Geisor was on a photo-expedition in the Gulf; he saw a bright fireball and took this picture of its smoky debris at 9:16 p.m. GMT: (continued below)

News reports of the event (#1, #2, #3, #4) describe a slow-moving fireball, red and sparkling, perhaps shedding fragments. This sounds remarkably like a piece of re-entering space junk--e.g., an old rocket engine or a satellite. Yet no such objects were scheduled to decay over Finland on July 12th. Likewise, no intense meteor showers were due. What was this display? Probably a small space rock disintegrating in Earth's atmosphere.

Comment: There have been two more X class flares today, Friday, including one that clocks in at 3.1. That is five in two days. And they're telling us the solar maximum was three years ago! Look at this graph:

CALGARY - A massive thunderstorm pummeled southwest Calgary with rain and hail on Thursday night, flooding roads, taking down power lines and spawning lightning strikes that started several small fires.

Some drivers were caught in pools of water a metre deep or stranded under overpasses. Others were involved in fender benders because visibility was so poor.

The force of the flooding was so strong that it washed away heavy manhole covers.

The drops were seen in cumulus congestus clouds

Scientists have observed the biggest raindrops recorded on Earth - which may be a whopping 1cm in size.

The monster water droplets were observed from the air, by atmospheric experts studying clouds.

They were recorded over Brazil and the Marshall Islands, a group of atolls and reefs in the north Pacific Ocean.

US scientists report in Geophysical Research Letters that a large fire may have influenced the formation of the huge raindrops recorded over Brazil.

"They are the biggest raindrops I have seen in 30 years of flying," Professor Peter Hobbs, co-author of the report told BBC News Online.

Professor Hobbs and colleague Arthur Rangno, of the University of Washington, US, recorded the droplets as being about 8.8mm and possibly as large as 1cm. He speculated that some of these giant droplets even reach the ground.

SASKATOON - A tornado touched down near the central Saskatchewan community of Conquest, Wednesday afternoon, but there were no reports of any damage.

The twister was spotted a few minutes before 3 p.m., just west of the community, about 75 kilometres southwest of Saskatoon.

A Conquest-area farmer, Lloyd Tyler, says he was taking in his hay crop when he saw dark thunderheads begin to rotate a few kilometres away. He says he saw the tail of a funnel cloud touch down briefly, just west of the community.

The area was also hit by intense hail, which Tyler says flattened his wheat crops and stripped the flower heads off his canola. He says he wasn't nervous watching the twister because it was headed away from his farm.

Funnel clouds were also spotted northwest of North Battleford.

MONTREAL - At least 3,000 people living in the western Quebec town of Témiscaming are stranded in their community.

Heavy rains have washed out the only two highways leading into town.

Water washed out a beaver dam Thursday morning, causing a huge hole to appear in the middle of Highway 101.

An estimated 200 homes have also sustained flood damage. Businesses including the local Tembec plant have shut down until the weather improves. [...]

CARSON CITY, Nev. - An army of firefighters struggled Thursday to contain an explosive wildfire that destroyed several luxury homes and threatened 550 other houses and businesses on the edge of Nevada's capital.

Five people have been hurt in the wind-whipped blaze, which quickly charred 8,500 acres of dry brush, grass and timber. At one point, flames came within a half-mile of the governor's official residence in Carson City, a town of about 50,000 people.

"It's absolute devastation up there," Sheriff Ken Furlong said.
Authorities said the fire was started by a person early Wednesday in a canyon near upscale homes and a waterfall on a creek popular with children.

Seven of the canyon homes were destroyed, and Assistant Fire Chief Stacey Giomi estimated their value at "several millions of dollars." Judy Staub, who lost her home of 22 years on Wednesday, called the destruction "just unreal" and said "everything was gone but an old antique wagon."

"People say, 'Judy, you have your children and your husband and your dog,' and I say, 'I know that.' But so many memories are gone," she said. "I never dreamed I'd experience something like this."

The fire moved up the slope away from homes, but Giomi said later winds could drive the fire back toward the city.

Authorities estimated that the fire would grow to 10,000 acres. About 800 firefighters, aided by air tankers and helicopters, were fighting the blaze.

"I've never seen a fire as bad as this fire," said Giomi, a 24-year veteran. [...]

Separate California blaze grows to nearly 16,000 acres

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- A wildfire that started burning Saturday in the Santa Clarita foothills northwest of Los Angeles forced the evacuation of more than 100 homes and the closure of several highways, officials said.

More than 750 firefighters and others were fighting the blaze fanned by 20 mph winds that had burned 2,500 acres in the Sand Canyon area and in Placerita Canyon outside Los Angeles.

The Placerita Canyon Nature Center, College of the Canyons at Rockwell and the McBean area of Santa Clarita were threatened by the fire, said Ron Haralson, inspector for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

The fire was reported just before noon, and was only 10 percent contained by evening. Parts of several highways were closed, including the northbound lanes of State Highway 14 between Interstate 5 and Placerita Canyon, south of Santa Clarita.

The cause of the blaze is unknown.

Another fire burned 2,000 acres near Hemet, southeast of Los Angeles in Riverside County. [...]

Surprise snowfalls prompted people in Sydney, Australia, to flock to the mountains today to catch a glimpse of what for them is a rare winter phenomenon.

Overnight snow dusted much of south-eastern Australia, including the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney and the rolling hills south of the city.

The unexpected wintry weather brought a warning from traffic officials to stay at home.

Snowfall is rare in the region and officials trying to deal with icy roads in the mountains advised curious sightseers to stay away.

"Of concern is a large number of people seem to be heading from Sydney up toward the Blue Mountains, presumably to look at the snow," said Roads and Traffic Authority spokesman Ken Boys.

"We are appealing to people to stay out of the area if they can."

No snow fell in Sydney itself, but a number of trees were toppled by strong winds which lashed coastal suburbs, whipping up huge waves that battered beaches.

Sunspot 652 on July 18th.
Credit: Andreas Murner.

The sunspot number soared this weekend when sunspot 652 and its companion 'spot 653 emerged over the sun's eastern limb. Sunspot 652 is big, about the size of the planet Jupiter, and easily seen from Earth. Both sunspot 652 and, especially, sunspot 649 pose a threat for powerful X-class solar flares.

NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of such a flare during the next 24 hours. Warning: Don't look directly at the sun!

Massive rainfall is threatening large parts of China from Tibet in the southwest to Beijing at the other end of the huge country, with thousands already evacuated because of floods, state media said Sunday.

Rainfall that is double the usual amount at this time of the year has so far cost the lives of three Tibetans, including two teenagers who were swept away by a flash flood, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Throughout the Tibetan area, officials are preparing for floods, spurred on by reports that parts of the capital Lhasa have seen precipitation hit record highs, according to the agency.

Another five people drowned in floods ravaging South Asia, police said Sunday, while authorities in India's eastern Bihar state called for more troops amid widespread looting of government food stores.

The latest deaths, in India's northeastern Assam and Meghalaya states, brings to at least 356 the number of people killed in the floods affecting Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal, according to the authorities in the various countries.

Some 23 million people, mainly in India and Bangladesh, have been affected or displaced by the flooding, which began with the annual monsoon rains in mid- June. [...]

In neighbouring Assam state, the news was equally grim.

Police said another two people drowned in Assam when their boats capsized in separate incidents.

"There are some signs of the water level marginally receding in certain areas, but the overall flood situation continues to be critical," Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi told AFP.

Drownings were also reported in the nearby state of Meghalayha.

"Three women were washed away by strong currents of the Myntdu river," a police official said by telephone from the state capital Shillong.

With the latest incidents, the total number of people dead or missing stands at 183 in India, 86 in Nepal, 68 in Bangladesh, 16 in Afghanistan and three in Bhutan, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. Media reports say the overall toll may be far higher.

Meanwhile, officials in Bangladesh said Sunday that the floods which have submerged large parts of the country worsened Sunday, with floodwater inundating low-lying areas close to the capital Dhaka.

"The waters have flooded low-lying areas in Dhaka district; 30,000 families in three sub-districts are affected," a district official told AFP.

Some 85,000 people were also marooned Saturday in Faridpur district 56 kilometres (35 miles) southwest of the capital, BSS said quoting local officials.

The flooding, which began last weekend, has mainly affected northern Bangladesh but began to inundate low ground in central Bangladesh several days ago.

In Nepal, officials said relief efforts were on a "war footing" after floods and landslides struck the landlocked nation but added that the waters were slowly receding.

In Bhutan, three people have been killed in floods and landslides in the past week, a Bhutanese official said by telephone from the capital Thimphu.

There was also severe flooding in Afghanistan, where at least 16 people were reported dead and more than 200 houses destroyed in the country's north.

Four people were injured when powerful wind gusts during a storm uprooted trees at a Swiss camping site, police said Sunday. [...]

The storm hit the site at Cheseaux-Noreaz on the shores of Lake Neuchatel in the west of Switzerland around 7:00 pm (1700 GMT) Saturday, uprooting five pine trees.

Some 200 campers had to spend the night at an official shelter, in hotels or their homes after the site was evacuated, police said.

Hailstorms and rain caused landslides and flooding in several Swiss regions late Saturday.

Two people have been killed and around 1,500 evacuated from their homes in New Zealand after floods and dozens of small earthquakes hit the country.

Civil defence authorities have declared a state of emergency in the Bay of Plenty region on the north-east coast of the North Island.

Officials say the emergency could remain in place for some days.

Bad weather has also hit Australia, where winter storms brought heavy snowfall to the east coast.

In New Zealand, the towns of Whakatane, Opotiki and Edgecumbe were worst affected by the rainfall, where 250mm fell in 48 hours.

One woman was killed when a huge mudslide hit her home near Whakatane, and another died after a large tree fell on her car near the town of Tauranga.

"There are a large number [of people] who won't be going home for a while," said Whakatane District Council spokeswoman Diane Turner.

"This area still looks like a large swimming pool," she said.

Farmers are desperately trying to herd their cattle onto higher ground.

Prime Minister Helen Clark and Civil Defence Minister George Hawkins are to visit the Bay of Plenty on Monday.

In the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales, an intense winter storm has whipped up gales and huge waves and left a thick blanket of snow.

"We seldom have snow to this extent and depth," an emergency services spokeswoman told reporters.

At least 46 children died as extreme cold blanketed more than half of Peru, hitting 158,000 persons, Foreign Minister Manuel Rodriguez said Tuesday as he announced 745,000 dollars in UN aid.

The cold wave, which came in June, has affected much of Peru's Andes mountains, where people live above 4,000 meters (13,000 feet), where temperatures have reached minus 25 C (minus 13 F).

Children have largely succumbed to pneumonia. Cold has also killed 300,000 hectares (741,000 hectares) of crops and 105,000 farm animals.

Some 250,000 people have been uprooted by pounding rains and devastating floods sweeping across China, as the death toll steadily climbed Wednesday.

So far, 381 people have died from rainfall-related disasters since the beginning of the year, with 98 people still missing and 45.7 million affected, according to the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.

Villagers ransacked government offices in eastern India, accusing authorities of not supplying aid to cope with deadly floods caused by annual monsoon rains, police said Wednesday.

The district administrator's office in Madhubani town, Bihar state, bore the brunt of public anger, while there was also looting and violence in the flood-hit districts of Muzaffarpur, Samastipur, Kishanganj and Purnia.

"We're trapped in our college hostel and are falling ill due to the filthy conditions. Even snakes and scorpions have been pushed into rooms by the floods," said B. Mishra, a student at a medical college in Bihar's worst-hit Darbhanga district.

The floods have killed at least 237 people nationwide since the rains began in mid-June and affected 11 million Indians, officials say.

The temperature in central Tokyo hit a record 39.5 degrees Celsius (103.1 Fahrenheit) Tuesday as a heat wave continued to scorch many parts of Japan, the Meteorological Agency said.

The mercury reading for Tokyo's financial district at 12:58 pmwas the highest in the capital since the agency began recording data in 1923, surpassing the previous record of 39.1 Celsius reached on August 3, 1994, an agency official said.

While some 90 people were reportedly hit by heatstroke in the capital and surrounding areas, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi looked at the situation from an economic point of view.

"I hear summer clothes are selling well. So everything is not bad," he told reporters at his official residence. "There is some positive aspect in economic terms."

Comment: !!!! We suppose that all natural disasters, wars, and the like are really positive because they provide economic opportunity. All those houses to rebuild, roads to fix, coffins to make....

Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins.

Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major cause in many such cases.

[...] Objective radar evidence from this and other platforms – radar data from the North Sea's Goma oilfield recorded 466 rogue wave encounters in 12 years - helped convert previously sceptical scientists, whose statistics showed such large deviations from the surrounding sea state should occur only once every 10000 years.

Comment: Yup. Those scientists love seeing these catastrophic events as being "once in 10,000 years". The world is supposed to change smoothly, with no discontinuities that upset the apple cart of normative thinking.

People outdoors are exposed to higher levels of the sun's harmful ultraviolet (UV) rays than previously thought, a study shows.

Present measures of UV exposure - the Solar Index - are taken from how much sunlight hits flat surfaces.

But German researchers at Geo Risk Research in Munich say this underestimates levels hitting sloped surfaces.

HONG KONG (AFP) - As floods ravage Asia in what experts say are, in some cases, the worst in memory, analysts have warned such calamities are likely to increase with rapid economic development in the region.

While rain levels have remained pretty steady for the past few years, changes in land use, especially deforestation and urbanisation, that go hand in hand with economic growth have led to worse flooding, they say.

"Floods are as much man-made as they are natural disasters," said Hong Kong Chinese University geography professor David Chen.

"There is a gap between economic development and provisions for coping with the resulting impact it is having on the environment -- and floods are one of the outcomes."

The main cause of flooding is rain run-off. While most rainfall is absorbed into the soil and lakes in rural areas, in concrete and stone-built towns and cities precipitation literally swills around with nowhere to go.

"It's all about permeability," said Hong Kong Baptist University meteorologist Kenneth Wong. "Rural areas are more permeable, because the soil absorbs water and holds it, whereas cities don't.

"If they don't have adequate storm run-off drainage, then flooding occurs."

Deforestation does much the same thing in rural areas, removing vital tree and shrub roots that help hold the water in the soil.

The worst floods this year have happened in the areas of greatest economic and urban expansion, China and India. [...]

A sunspot group aimed squarely at Earth has grown to 20 times the size of our planet and has the potential to unleash a major solar storm.

The amorphous mix of spots, together called Number 652, has been rotating across the Sun and growing for several days. On Friday, it sat at the center of the solar disk.

Sunspots are areas of intense magnetic energy, cooler and darker than the surrounding surface of the thermonuclear furnace. Sometimes the magnetic fields let loose and huge amounts of radiation and charged particles are hurled into space.

The Sun's last bout of intense storminess occurred last fall, when a string of 10 major flares over two weeks knocked out satellites, damaged others, and forced the FAA to reroute airlines away from exposed polar routes.

No one can say if this sunspot group will let loose with a major storm, but it has the characteristics of a potentially big event.

"The implications of this spot have scientists on the edge of their seats," NASA said in a statement Friday. "If the active region generates coronal mass ejections (CMEs), massive explosions with a potential force of a billion megaton bombs, it will be a fairly direct hit to Earth and its satellites and power grids."

The Sun is now in a generally quiet period of a well-known 11-year cycle of activity. But sunspots and flares can occur at any time. Scientists do not fully understand why the spots appear or how they erupt.

Comment: Whoa! Last fall we had a 10 day period of major flares, and we have just seen a series of X class flares in July. Yet the journalist would have us believe that this is "normal" in a solar minimum, that "sunspots and flares can occur at any time". Sure, they can. But having so many X class flares in the period of a solar minimum is not "business as usual". During the 17th century, the sun passed through a 75 year solar minimum. The "normal" 11 year solar cycle was repressed. We believe this occurred when the Sun's dark star companion passed through the Oort cloud. The solar minimum was caused by the gravitational effect of the companion star. For more information, check out the article "Independence Day".

DHAKA - Water-borne diseases have broken out in Bangladesh as the death toll in flooding that has submerged half the country and blighted the lives of 30 million people rose to 202 Saturday, the official BSS news agency said.

Lack of clean drinking water and the collapse of sewage systems had led to the outbreak of water-borne diseases in flood-affected districts, BSS said, although it did not elaborate.

TEHRAN - One Iranian nomad was killed and 10 were injured after hailstones the size of billiard balls lashed northwestern Iran, Iranian media reported Sunday.

According to the press reports, some of the hailstones weighed up to 200 grammes (seven ounces) -- slightly heavier than a billiard ball with around four times the clout of a golf ball. A number of livestock were also reported dead.

The storm hit the area of Chalderan, in Azerbaijan Province, on Friday night.

Wind-fuelled fires prompted the evacuation of beaches and homes in Portugal on Sunday and forced the closure of the nation's busiest highway, officials said.

Three water-dropping helicopters and more than 200 firefighters were at the scene of the biggest blaze near Torres Novas, some 120 kilometres (75 miles) northeast of Lisbon, firefighters said.

Dozens of people were evacuated from the region because of the approach of the flames which have already engulfed at least four homes, they added.

CARLSBAD, New Mexico -- Heavy rain soaked rural parts of southeastern New Mexico on Sunday, temporarily stranding at least three motorists in high water.

More than 2 inches of rain fell late Saturday and early Sunday in the Guadalupe Mountains, running down canyons in Eddy County and flooding roads, National Weather Service meteorologist Todd Lindley said.

An Army helicopter was used to rescue a trucker who was stuck atop his trailer in water about five feet deep, said Eddy County Emergency Manager Joel Arnwine. Two other motorists were rescued in separate incidents.

A flash flood watch was in effect through Sunday night for Eddy and Lea counties. The weather service reported another 1 to 2 inches of rain was possible in some areas late Sunday.

A man has been arrested in eastern India for beheading an 80-year-old neighbour after he dreamt the act would appease a raging river that had swept away several villages, police said Sunday.

Debu Saha, 22, beheaded 80-year-old Gobindra Mondal while he was sleeping in his home at Mahanandatola, 280 kilometres (173 miles) north of Calcutta, capital of West Bengal state, district police chief Sashikanta Pujari said.

"Saha has confessed to the killing. He said he had a dream that the flooding in Fulahar river can be checked if a human sacrifice is made," Pujari said.

The flooding of the Fulahar, a tributary of the mighty Ganga, has destroyed Mahanandatola and four other villages and kilometres of agricultural land in Malda district, leaving nearly 2,000 people homeless, said Soumitra Roy, a village council chief executive.

Satellites in low-Earth orbit over Southern Africa are already showing signs of radiation damage

SOUTHERN Africa is experiencing weird vibes, according to scientists studying one of the more profound upheavals awaiting planet Earth.

This forthcoming revolution is a reversal in the Earth's magnetic field, an event that occurs every 500,000 years or so.

Signs that the reversal is about to happen again are nowhere more apparent than over Southern Africa, according to Dr Pieter Kotze, head of the geomagnetism group at the Hermanus Magnetic Observatory in the southern Cape.

Satellites in low-Earth orbit over Southern Africa are already showing signs of radiation damage suffered as a result of the Earth's magnetic field weakening above our part of the planet. The field forms the magneto sphere, which, like the Earth's ozone layer, protects the planet from the sun's harmful radiation.

Other symptoms destined to become apparent in the years ahead include the aurora australis, or southern lights. Usually seen only over the South Pole, these will become visible closer to the equator as the Earth's magnetic field weakens and disappears. Eventually, on past form, the field will reappear but with magnetic north and south pole changing places, as they have done for billions of years.

According to an article in the New York Times this week, the change will be devastating for migratory animals such as loggerhead turtles, which use the Earth's magnetic field to migrate 8 000km around the Atlantic. Bees, swallows, cranes, salmon, homing pigeons, frogs and eagles may also lose their way between breeding and feeding grounds.

Humans will suffer, too. The (temporary) disappearance of the magnetic field ahead of its reversal will lead to increased occurrences of radiation-induced cancer, Kotze said.

Commenting on the New York Times report, Kotze said that the decay in the Earth's magnetic field was becoming increasingly apparent in "the South Atlantic anomaly", a huge deviation in the Earth's magnetic field discovere d with the help of the Hermanus Magnetic Observatory.

This month, the European Space Agency (ESA) approved a multimillion-euro space mission, called Swarm, to measure the anomaly, which stretches from Southern Africa towards South America.

The ESA's scientists believe that this anomaly, as revealed by the occasional "geomagnetic jerk" to which our part of the world is prone, will provide a clue to predicting the next "flip" in the Earth's magnetic field, now 250,000 years overdue - as these things go. Three ESA satellites, flying in low-Earth orbit (400km to 500km up) after their launch in 2009, will measure the variation over Southern Africa.

The observatory has also recorded a faster-growing deviation between true north and magnetic north over Southern Africa during the past 10 years, drifting steadily westward. Taken together, the blip and this drift point to an imminent reversal in the Earth's north-south magnetic alignment.

"W e should be able to work out the first predictions by the end of the [Swarm] mission," Gauthier Hulot, an ESA geophysicist and a colleague of Kotze's, told the New York Times.

The discovery of the "anomalous field behaviour over Southern Africa" drew wide attention, reported the US newspaper, because "it seemed consistent with what the [ESA's] computer simulations identified as the possible beginnings of a flip".

Kotze said that, "these are all indications that we have conditions similar to the last reversal, 780,000 years ago. So it means that we are due for another one soon." In geological terms, however, "soon" could mean anytime between tomorrow and the next 3,000 years.

Kotze said the anomaly was the result of "things happening" far below the Earth's surface.

At the boundary between the mantle and the outer core (more than 3,000km below Southern Africa) disruptions were occurring in the flow of the Earth's liquid outer core (mostly iron), he explained. This created "a reverse dynamo situation", which is becoming increasingly apparent as variations in the magnetic field above the Earth's surface.

PATNA, India (Reuters) - Hundreds of bodies have been found in eastern India in the last three days as waters receded from the worst flooding in more than a decade, officials said on Tuesday.

Touring Bihar, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh warned that millions of people in one of the country's poorest states could face disease and hunger in the wake of the flooding.

"The threat of epidemic spreading is real," he told a news conference, ordering a team of government doctors to visit the region.

At least 630 people are now confirmed dead in the two worst-affected Indian states of Bihar, in the east, and Assam in the northeast.

In Bihar, state relief minister Ram Vichar Rai said more than 320 bodies had been found in remote areas in the last 72 hours and he said the toll could rise sharply.

Singh flew over marooned parts of northern Bihar. He said the floods had caused massive damage and left a crisis in their wake.

"We must ensure people do not die of hunger, we will have to construct houses and ensure farmers are taken care of," he said.

Last year, nearly 500 people died in Bihar of water-borne diseases such as diarrhea after the floods ended. Officials said the floods were worse this year.

Television pictures showed people marooned on rooftops and in trees near the town of Samastipur in northern Bihar. A few were swimming in muddy brown water looking to salvage foods dropped by military helicopters.

Newspapers have reported looting of food by marauding mobs in the towns of Sitamarhi and Darbhanga in northern Bihar.

DHAKA, JULY 27 (OneWorld) - More than 320 people have died and at least 30 million are gripped by disease and starvation due to a massive flood that has turned a quarter of Bangladesh into a vast water world, destroying crops and hitting the country's thriving export economy.

The raging river waters, fed by the monsoon rain, have laid waste to crops in 42 of the country's 64 districts.

"You cannot imagine that underneath what looks like a vast sea lies my paddy field. My crops were standing just three days ago; I wasn't prepared to see my fields submerged like like this," laments farmer Shamsu Mia of Manikganj district, near the capital Dhaka.

Adds Mohammad Kashem, who cultivates fisheries in a pond in the Kanchpur area in suburban Dhaka, "All my fish were swept away."

Flood waters have damaged over 700 kilometers of dams in different places of the country. Experts say it could take at least US $20 million to repair the damage.

But the Water Development Board (WDB) fears the worst is yet to come.

"If the flood waters linger, more embankments will be damaged and the amount of loss will increase further," warns the WDB's chief engineer (monitoring) Amir Khasru. [...]

According to a Health Ministry report, a total of 17,669 people have fallen sick and 14 have died since July 14 due to waterborne diseases or illness. Unofficially, the tally is at least five to six times higher. [...]

But what could really hurt is a blow to the country's bottomline. Bangladesh's main foreign exchange earner, the readymade garments manufacturing sector, is hemorrhaging. Production in many factories has stopped or drastically reduced either because floodwaters have entered the units or because many workers can't get to work.

Villagers who have taken shelter in elevated portions of highways, embankments and rooftops say it's one of the worst floods in living memory. But similar deluges have occurred in the country back in 1988 and 1998 when two-thirds of Bangladesh was under water. The 1998 flood killed more than 700 people and rendered 21 million homeless.

According to back of the envelope calculations by the Agriculture Ministry, the crop damage totals around US $330 million. It reports that out of about 700,000 hectares of farmland in 38 districts, crops in at least 525,000 hectares may have been destroyed. [...]

LISBON (AFP) - Hundreds of firefighters continued to battle against wildfires in Portugal on Monday after scorching weekend weather triggered blazes across southern Europe.

More than 1,100 firefighters were battling some 20 blazes which raged in 14 of Portugal's 18 regions as temperatures soared above 40 degrees (104 degrees Fahrenheit) across much of the country for the third consecutive day.

Firefighters were also trying to bring a dozen fires under control in neighboring Spain reports said, where four people have died as a result of a heatwave, while the fire risk remained extremely high in already hard-hit southern France.

One Portuguese fireman suffered serious burns and a fire truck was destroyed by flames near the central town of Castelo Branco, news agency Lusa reported.

There were no other reports of injuries in any of the fires.

More than 200 firefighters alone were at the scene of the largest blaze which was burning on the Serra da Arrabida mountain range some 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of Lisbon.

It first broke out at the popular weekend get-away on Sunday, prompting the evacuation of three nearby beaches and two camp sites, but was considered put out early Monday.

Just after noon on Monday however the blaze restarted prompting police to once again evacuate the three beaches because the wind-fueled flames were moving towards the Atlantic ocean, firefighters said.

The fire has destroyed more than 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of land, including a large part of a protected area which is rich in Mediterranean plants and birds, the mayor of the nearby city of Setubal told state television RTP.

"Watching this mountain burn is seeing a unique spot in the world burn," Carlos de Sousa said.

Meanwhile Spanish firefighters were battling 12 blazes, including seven which broke out on Monday in the southern province of Huelva, Spanish television network Telecinco reported.

Weather forecasters said the heatwave gripping Spain and Portugal is set to last until at least Wednesday.

Four people have died as a result of the high temperatures sweeping parts of Spain in recent days, local officials said.

Wildfires in parts of southern France have also burned nearly 2,900 hectares of land over the weekend and forced the evacuation of some 2,000 residents. [...]

BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) -- Burning of the Amazon jungle is changing weather patterns by raising temperatures and reducing rainfall, accelerating the rate at which the forest is disappearing and turning into grassland, scientists said on Tuesday.

Wide-scale burning by loggers and farmers of the Amazon has risen sharply over the past two decades, changing the region's cloud cover and reducing the amount of rain in some deforested areas that are turning into grassland or savanna.

"All the models indicate the same thing, 'savannization,"' Pedro Leite Silva Dias of the University of Sao Paulo said at a conference on research on Amazon deforestation.

Silva Dias said the worst-case scenario for the Amazon, a continuous tropical forest larger than the continental United States, is that at current burning and deforestation rates, 60 percent of the jungle will turn into savanna in the next 50 to 100 years. The most likely outlook is that 20 to 30 percent will turn into savanna, according to forecasting models.

Destruction of the Amazon, home to up to 30 percent of the globe's animal and plant species, reached its second-highest level last year. An area of 5.9 million acres (2.38 million hectares), bigger than the state of New Jersey, was destroyed as loggers and farmers hacked and burned the forest in 2003.

About 85 percent of the Amazon is still standing.

The Amazon experts are presenting the latest findings of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia, the world's largest experiment on jungle deforestation.

The experiment, which includes U.S. space agency NASA, has found increasing evidence that the Amazon is slowly getting drier due to burning, with unpredictable consequences for its survival and weather patterns.

The experiment has monitored the Amazon since 1998, using research towers and a unique satellite image system.

As the climate becomes drier and reduces the colossal amount of water vapor over the Amazon, the effects will spread internationally, the experts said.

"Clouds over the Amazon are not in their normal state. The repercussions of this are going to be felt far away," said Meinrat Andreae of Germany's Max Planck Institute of Chemistry. "This leads to significant changes of global (cloud) circulation."

Experts have found that burning of the Amazon, accounts for 75 percent of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions, making Brazil one of the world's top 10 polluters.

The scientists said the Amazon's climate is already getting hotter due to global warming. Burning in the area itself is accelerating that process.

NIMES, France (AFP) - Residents and tourists in parts of southern France were contemplating vast tracts of still-smouldering and blackened land left behind by scrub fires, including one huge blaze that threatened the 2,000-year old city of Nimes overnight.

More than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) have been consumed since the fires first broke out last weekend in dry wooded areas frequently at risk in the hot summer months.

Authorities suspect several of them were started deliberately or through criminal negligence. At least three firemen have been hurt.

The most recent flared up Tuesday 15 kilometres (10 miles) northwest of Nimes. Fanned by winds gusting at 70 kilometres (40 miles) per hour, it licked at the outer suburb of Marguerittes, destroying several houses, forcing evacuations and cutting a motorway, officials said.

Around 700 firemen backed by eight water-bombing aircraft and desperate locals battled throughout the night to contain the fire, a task still underway Wednesday.

"You'd think you were on the moon," a municipal official in charge of local historic sites, Vivian Mayor, said as he surveyed the razed land with eyes reddened by soot and sadness.

"There are no flowers, no insects. You can't hear any sounds of the bush. It's a catastrophe for the flora and fauna," he said.

The destruction was all the more heartbeaking for the region because it had planted many of the trees and plants wiped out this time since a similar blaze in 1989. [...]

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) - Deaths from monsoon rains across South Asia reached 1,238 on Wednesday as Bangladesh remained awash in the worst floods in six years, and water-borne diseases began taking their toll.

Diarrhea caused by drinking dirty water has killed 46 people and afflicted about 80,000 this month, according to the government's Health Directorate. Relief workers warned that the situation could worsen as rivers around Bangladesh's inundated capital, Dhaka, continued to swell.

The annual monsoon flooding, fed by melting snow and torrential rains, has left millions across South Asia marooned or homeless. At least 731 people have died in India, 102 in Nepal and five in Pakistan, according to reports from officials, compiled by The Associated Press.

Esa tasked two of its Earth-scanning satellites to monitor the oceans with their radar

The shady phenomenon of freak waves as tall as 10 storey buildings had finally been proved, the European Space Agency (Esa) said on Wednesday.

Sailors often whisper of monster waves when ships sink mysteriously but, until now, no one quite believed them.

As part of a project called MaxWave - which was set up to test the rumours - two Esa satellites surveyed the oceans.

During a three week period they detected 10 giant waves, all of which were over 25m (81ft) high.

Strange disappearances

Over the last two decades more than 200 super-carriers - cargo ships over 200m long - have been lost at sea. Eyewitness reports suggest many were sunk by high and violent walls of water that rose up out of calm seas.

But for years these tales of towering beasts were written off as fantasy; and many marine scientists clung to statistical models stating monstrous deviations from the normal sea state occur once every 1,000 years. The waves exist in higher numbers than anyone expected.

"Two large ships sink every week on average," said Wolfgang Rosenthal, of the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany. "But the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'."

To prove the phenomenon or lay the rumours to rest, a consortium of 11 organisations from six EU countries founded MaxWave in December 2000.

As part of the project, Esa tasked two of its Earth-scanning satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, to monitor the oceans with their radar.

The radars sent back "imagettes" - pictures of the sea surface in a rectangle measuring 10 by 5km (6 by 2.5 miles), which were taken every 200km (120 miles).

Around 30,000 separate imagettes were produced by the two satellites during a three-week period in 2001 - and the data was mathematically analysed.

Esa says the survey revealed 10 massive waves - some nearly 30m (100 ft) high.

"The waves exist in higher numbers than anyone expected," said Dr Rosenthal.

Ironically, while the MaxWave research was going on, two tourist liners endured terrifying ordeals. The Breman and the Caledonian Star cruisers had their bridge windows smashed by 30m waves in the South Atlantic.

Sailors often whisper of monster waves when ships sink mysteriously The Bremen was left drifting for two hours after the encounter, with no navigation or propulsion.

Now that their existence is no longer in dispute, it is time to gain a better understanding of these rogues.

In the next phase of the research, a project called WaveAtlas will use two years' worth of imagettes to create a worldwide atlas of freak wave events.

The goal is to find out how these strange cataclysmic phenomena may be generated, and which regions of the seas are most at risk.

Dr Rosenthal concluded: "We know some of the reasons for the rogue waves, but we do not know them all."

DALLAS - An estimated foot of rain fell during fierce storms overnight in parts of North Texas, flooding homes and highways and knocking out power to thousands. One man died in a weather-related wreck that toppled power lines onto his vehicle and cut power to homes.

Southern Dallas County was especially hard hit by flooding, with 175 to 200 homes damaged by high water in the suburb of Lancaster. Flood waters damaged the Lancaster police headquarters.

The National Weather Service, which estimated up to 12 inches of rain fell in Lancaster, issued new flash flood warnings early Thursday for the Dallas-Fort Worth area as more thunderstorms developed.

Lancaster police evacuated residents from more than 240 homes early Thursday after Ten-Mile Creek rose out of its banks alongside one subdivision.

"It's a mess out here," dispatcher Debbie Brand said. "We had to get those people out of their houses."

Authorities made more than 80 high-water rescues in South Dallas County, said Sgt. Don Peritz, a spokesman for the Dallas County Sheriff's Office.

An estimated 35,000 TXU Electric Delivery customers were without power early Thursday, the utility said. And parts of Interstates 20, 35 and 45 were closed for a time by high water.

Lancaster Police Lt. Jim Devlin said the town's police station began to flood late Thursday. A leaking roof caused the ceiling of the 911 call center to collapse, and calls were routed through the Dallas County Sheriff's Department. Dispatchers used handheld two-way radios to communicate with officers.

Devlin said 50 to 100 residents said they suffered major damage in the storms, which intensified overnight after an upper-level low pressure system moved into the Dallas-Fort Worth area Thursday evening.

The Waxahachie Police Department brought in a boat to help with rescues.

One motorist was killed when his pickup truck knocked over a utility pole in a weather-related wreck and live wires fell onto his vehicle in the Dallas suburb of Oak Cliff. The victim, who was not immediately identified, could not be pulled from his vehicle for some time. The impact of the wreck cut power to about 15 homes.

In the northeast Fort Worth suburb of Haltom City, fire-rescue officials rescued a 16-year-old boy who had been swept into a flood-swollen creek that also flooded the Skyline Mobile Home Park, threatening 12 homes, and firefighters were evacuating residents.

"If the weather continues to get worse, it could be a problem," Deputy Chief Wes Rhodes said. "As long as we stay ahead of it, we're all right."

Four people in Carrollton were rescued from a car trapped in rising waters. Flood waters also caught motorists at Dallas intersections.

Wind gusts of 58 mph were measured at Alliance Airport, and trees were uprooted in Lewisville and elsewhere. Dallas-based Southwest Airlines delayed some flights and canceled others at Love Field. Flights were also delayed at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

DALLAS (AP) - Fierce overnight storms dropped up to 13 inches of rain in the Dallas area, flooding highways and homes, knocking out power to thousands and collapsing the roof of a 911 call center.

Authorities had more than 80 calls for high-water rescues, and rain washed out the dirt beneath a stretch of railroad track. [...]

Wind gusts of 58 mph were measured at Fort Worth Alliance Airport. Dallas-based Southwest Airlines delayed some flights and canceled others at Love Field, and flights were also delayed at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming.

The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts by several seabird species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the first major impact of climate change on Britain.

In what could be a sub-plot from the recent disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, a rise in sea temperature is believed to have led to the mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food chain - the sandeel, the small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto sustained larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds in their millions. [...]

This is being seen in the North Sea in particular, where the water temperature has risen by 2C in the past 20 years, and where the whole ecosystem is thought to be undergoing a "regime shift", or a fundamental alteration in the interaction of its component species. "Think of the North Sea as an engine, and plankton as the fuel driving it," said Euan Dunn of the RSPB, one of the world's leading experts on the interaction of fish and seabirds. "The fuel mix has changed so radically in the past 20 years, as a result of climate change, that the whole engine is now spluttering and starting to malfunction. All of the animals in the food web above the plankton, first the sandeels, then the larger fish like cod, and ultimately the seabirds, are starting to be affected." [...]

"This is an incredible event," said Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth. "The catastrophe [of these] seabirds is just a foretaste of what lies ahead.

"It shows that climate change is happening now, [with] devastating consequences here in Britain, and it shows that reducing the pollution causing changes to the earth's climate should now be the global number one political priority."

First you hear a savage cracking sound, next the rolling crash of thunder.

Then as the icebergs rip away from the margin of the ice-sheet they plunge into the grey waters of the Atlantic with a roar that echoes around the mountains.

Nothing prepares you for the sheer scale and drama of events in this forbidding terrain and all the signs are that the changes at work here are gathering pace. [...]

In 2001 NASA scientists published a major study based on observations by satellite and aircraft. It concluded that the margins of the Greenland ice-sheet were dropping in height at a rate of roughly one metre a year.

Now, amid some of the most hostile conditions anywhere on the planet, Carl Boggild and his team have recorded falls as dramatic as 10 metres a year - in places the ice is dropping at a rate of one metre a month. [...]

The latest data shows the melting picking up even more speed. [...]

Dr Boggild is all too aware of how easily he could be accused of jumping onto a climate change bandwagon. But he is adamant that the results he has gathered so far are reliable.

"We can say for certain that the rate of melting has increased and we can say for certain that the height of the ice-sheet is falling, even allowing for increased ice-flow.

"There is no doubt that something very major is happening here." [...]

Just before we leave, there is another roar as more icebergs crash into the ocean.

Many more icebergs falling into the sea will cause two things to happen - the sea-level will rise and the injection of freshwater could disrupt the ocean currents, including the Gulf Stream.

What happens in this remote barren land has the potential to affect us all.

DURBAN, South Africa (AFP) - A heavy snowfall in South Africa's eastern KwaZulu-Natal province has wreaked havoc on roads, causing accidents and power outages in the usually warm sub-tropical area, local officials said Thursday.

Two people were killed and another injured in car crashes on Wednesday, police said.

While snow in the southern hemisphere winter is common in the province's Drakensberg mountain area, the local weather bureau said it is usually confined to the upper slopes and that it rarely falls further down.

More snow was expected to roll in over the province early next week. [...]

Nine mostly elderly people have died in a heatwave in the Canary Islands, Spanish officials said Thursday, taking the country's death toll in four days of extremely hot weather to 19. [...]

More than 100 people have been hospitalized in the Canary Islands, located to the southwest of Spain as the country grapples with a major heatwave.

Flooding that has left millions of Bangladeshis without adequate food or fresh water will continue for weeks, experts said Thursday as the death toll rose to more than 450. [...]

The flooding which at one point submerged two-thirds of Bangladesh was now affecting about half the country, with the death toll now at 452, the agency said. [...]

Low-lying Bangladesh which is criss-crossed by a network of 230 rivers suffers annual flooding caused by monsoon rains and melting ice from the Himalayas.

Since July 10, the flooding has also claimed hundreds of lives across other parts of south Asia including northeastern India and Nepal.

Three people were killed and about 2,000 left stranded by major flooding that cut off roads and railway lines in northern and central Romania, the envuironment ministry said Thursday. [...]

Summer has brought unusual contrasts in the weather here, with 14 people struck down by lightning and 27 others killed by heatstroke since the beginning of July. [...]

Portuguese officials were on Thursday evacuating residents of a village in the touristic Algarve province as a fire that has been blazing out of control for three days started advancing on their homes. [...]

Dozens of homes and thousands of hectares (acres) of land have been destroyed by flames in a wave of wildfires that has swept Portugal since the weekend when temperatures soared above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in much of the country.

Its famously tepid and wet weather has been the butt of jokes for generations, yet even Britain is now taking global warming seriously, with the publication Friday of emergency plans to deal with heatwaves.

The national heatwave plan has been drawn up by the government's Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson in response to sweltering temperatures across much of Europe last year which killed an estimated 15,000 people.

The bulk of those who died that summer, notably in France, where the death rates became something of a national scandal, were old or otherwise vulnerable. [...]

Britain's summers have grown decidedly hotter in recent years, notably in the south of the country, which last summer saw temperatures climb above the 100-degree Fahrenheit mark (37.8 Celsius) for the first time in recorded history.

China is facing a "very grave" situation as the death toll from rains and floods jumped to 439, with more than 20,000 people injured and massive losses to property and farmland, the government said Wednesday.

Disaster relief officials said 1.46 million people had been forced to flee their homes and no let up was in sight.

"The flood situation is very grave, especially in Hunan, Henan, Hubei and Yunnan provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region," said Wang Zhenyao, director of the Ministry of Civil Affair's Disaster Relief Department.

He said this year's floods were the worst in decades.

While the annual rains and floods usually strike hardest in rural areas, this year big cities like Beijing and Shanghai have felt the effects with both experiencing freak weather.

"The country has witnessed extreme weather recently in big cities, such as Beijing's unprecedented rainstorm earlier this month, which paralyzed local transportation," Wang was quoted as saying by China Daily.

"The rainstorm in Shanghai on July 12 can be said to be a very rare disaster which happens only once a century." The storm claimed seven lives.

Since late June incessant heavy rains have been pounding large swathes of China, sparking severe mountain torrents, mud-rock flows and landslides.

The inclement weather has claimed 439 lives so far this year, with 21,600 injured, the majority over the summer months, according to figures from the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

Natural disasters in general, including earthquakes and heavy snow, have killed 659 people.

Landslides caused by floods have led to 275,000 houses collapsing while another one million have been damaged, forcing 1.46 million people to flee to safety, the statistics show.

At least 5.16 million hectares (12.74 million acres) of farmland has been ruined by the rains, mostly in Hunan, Henan and Hubei provinces in central China and Yunnan and Guangxi in the south.
Total economic losses so far are pegged at 21.95 billion yuan (2.65 billion dollars).

"Disasters like torrential rain, typhoons, mountain torrents and storm tides are likely to occur throughout China at any moment in the days ahead since the entire country is now in its major flood season," the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters warned. [...]

Last year, floods claimed more than 1,900 lives and left millions homeless. The worst floods in recent years happened in 1998 when more than 4,000 people died.

While central and southern China are awash with water, northern and eastern regions are suffering severe drought or scorching temperatures. [...] the cities of Shanghai and Hangzhou in the east and Chongqing and Chengdu in the southwest are sizzling in temperatures of up to 38 degrees

[...] A new study led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, has shed new light on significant changes in the deep sea over a 14-year period.

Scripps Institution's Henry Ruhl and Ken Smith show in the new issue of the journal Science that changes in climate at the surface of the ocean may be impacting communities of larger animals more than 13,400 feet below the ocean surface.

Important climatic changes such as El Nino and La Nina events are well known to affect regional and local areas, but Ruhl and Smith describe how such changes also can extend to the deep ocean, one of Earth's most remote environments. [...]

"The ocean is a source of food for human populations, but it's also a place of waste disposal," said Smith. "It's important to consider how you impact the deep sea. In that view it's puzzling that we don't study the deep sea in more detail."

A strong typhoon has slammed into southwestern Japan, bringing torrential rain, strong winds and high waves to the Pacific coast.

The Meteorological Agency said Typhoon Namtheum hit Kochi prefecture in the Shikoku region, 600 kilometers (375 miles) southwest of the capital Tokyo, shortly after 4:00 pm (0700 GMT).

It was moving northwest at a speed of 20 kilometers per hour and packing a maximum wind speed of 126 kilometers per hour, it said.

Weather and emergency officials issued warnings for possible landslides and other natural disasters in Shikoku and the Chugoku and Kyushu regions, also likely to be touched by the typhoon as it heads towards South Korea.

In the 24 hours to 3:00 pm Sunday, the agency expected the regions to see rainfall of up to 500 millimeters (nearly 20 inches).

There were no reports of major injuries because of the storm.

In Hyogo prefecture, 450 kilometers southwest of Tokyo, strong wind blew a canopy off an office building and an 86-year-old building manager broke his nose in the accident, police said.

The storm forced more than some 127 domestic flights to be cancelled, national broadcaster Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) said.

Other major media reported dozens of people in the Shikoku region had voluntarily evacuated their houses and left for schools and other temporary shelters.

ELLENSBURG, Wash. - High winds that fanned a wildfire across up to 300 acres in the eastern Cascade foothills began to die down, but firefighters said they didn't expect the blaze to be out for some time.

Pushed by 25 mph gusts Friday, the fire burned four buildings and forced the evacuation of about 200 residences. No injuries were reported.

"The fire's still rolling," Kittitas County Undersheriff Clayton Myers told 90 to 100 evacuees at a high school.

The fire started about noon Friday near Interstate 90 between Cle Elum and Ellensburg. Myers said its cause was unknown but considered suspicious, the fourth suspicious Kittitas County fire in the past week.

Cleo Aho, 68, of Cle Elum, said firefighters came to her door and gave her five minutes to get her cat and dog and leave her home.

"It's not long enough," she said. "Five minutes goes so fast ... You don't think it's ever going to happen to you."

Helicopters dropped water and planes spread fire retardant around the edges of the two housing developments. Myers said every piece of fire equipment available was at the scene to try to protect homes, some of which are cabins.

Authorities hoped to direct the fire from nearby timber and toward open prairie.

Friday morning, authorities in central Washington ordered the evacuation of 100 houses after a wildfire near Lake Chelan grew to 9,800 acres in 24 hours. The fire was burning about 2 1/2 miles from the nearest home.

On Thursday, it destroyed a dock and picnic shelter at a campground, said Mike Ferris, a Forest Service spokesman.

The lightning-sparked fire, which began Monday, burned only 145 acres as of Thursday before raging across grassy hillsides, brush and trees.

In Oregon, high winds Friday fanned a wildfire burning near the Warm Springs Indian Reservation to 11,000 acres. The blaze was 40 percent contained, and no homes were threatened, officials said.

In Nevada, a wildfire started by a truck crash in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest was 70 percent contained Friday. The fire blackened 290 acres on steep mountain slopes about 35 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

No structures burned, but five firefighters suffered minor injuries and 15 homes were evacuated, along with a Girl Scout camp and a youth correctional facility. Many residents in the 350-home Kyle Canyon community left voluntarily.

HOHHOT, July 31 (Xinhuanet) -- Heicheng, the largest and best preserved ancient city site along the Silk Road that linked China with Central and Western Asia, is being devoured by flowing sand.

About 25 km to the southeast of Dalai Hubu Township in north China's Inner Mongolia, the archeological site is well known for its ten-meter-high city walls and a pagoda dating back to the Xixia Dynasty (1038-1227).

Given that the dynasty established by Dangxiang, a branch of the Qiang nationality, left no official written documents, Heicheng has been viewed as priceless by archeologists worldwide.

[...] After its founding in 1949, the People's Republic of China initiated two large-scale archeological research projects in 1983 and 1984 respectively. From then, archeologists excavated hundredsof tombs owned by Muslims of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) crucial to the study of Islamic culture's spread in China.

A group of scientists has come up with a new explanation for the origins of spicules - jets of plasma that shoot up from the solar surface at speeds of around 90,000 kilometres per hour: the solar matter is propelled into space by sound waves entering the solar atmosphere.

Using observational data from two satellites (TRACE and SOHO) and an the Swedish Solar optical telescope, scientists at Sheffield university and the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics lab, have determined that the jets occur periodically, about every five minutes or so.

Professor Erdélyi von Fáy-Siebenbürgen then developed a computer simulation of the events, incorporating the effects of compression waves, or sounds waves, in the sun. He explained that the compression waves are most likely caused by two things: the oscillation of the sun itself, and convection cells - areas of rising and falling solar matter. Convection cells on Earth cause thermals, breezes, thunderstorms and other weather patterns. In the sun, they cause compression waves..

The compression waves are usually damped before they reach the solar atmosphere, von Fáy-Siebenbürgen said, but occasionally they get through. When this happens, the compression of the atmosphere forms a shock wave, propelling matter upwards in the form of a plasma jet. The research solves an astrophysical puzzle that has baffled scientists for over 120 years since the spicules were first discovered.

His model produced jets at virtually identical intervals: "I would say it is around 99 per cent accurate," he told The Register today. "We were very surprised by the accuracy of the model. It is something we are very proud of," he said.

Although relatively small compared to full scale solar flares, spicules are interesting for the same reasons: they may contribute to the solar wind. This flow of highly charged particles causes the Aurorae Borealis and Australis, but can also knock out satellites and even bring down electrical systems on Earth during particularly vigarous solar storms.