The Meteorological Office said it was also likely to be the driest 10-month stretch since records began in 1873.

Unparalleled levels of warm sunshine have already earned this year a place in the annals of weather history for the highest temperature, warmest summer nights and the sunniest September.

Previously, the brightest January to October in England and Wales occurred in 1995 - 34 years after these records began - with 1,604.8 hours of sunlight. [...]

The unit predicts that rainfall will increase during winters and decreaseduring summers. "We think there will be more extremes - more frequent summer droughts but possibly more frequent winter flooding," Dr Osborn said.

The mysterious cloud which chokes the capital's 16 million inhabitants each October "is striking a mortal blow at the government, which is incapable of facing the problem," Zakaria Azmi, a deputy from the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), said Wednesday during a debate of the parliamentary health committee. [...]

Health authorities in Wad Medani, capital of the central al-Jezira state, said an epidemic of what they considered to be asthma had afflicted 1,685 people since October 22, all of whom had since been cured.

The government-owned Al-Anbaa newspaper reported 11 people had died from the breathing difficulties. [...]

Resident Joseph Mogum in Wad Medani, about 176 km southeast of the capital Khartoum, said the grasshoppers gave off a strong smell which caused breathing problems. [...]

Packing maximum sustained winds of 115 kilometers per hour, the storm code-named "Melor" (local code name: Viring) slammed into the northeastern province of Isabela from the Pacific Ocean at 8 a.m. ( 0000GMT), the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa) said.

Melor has a very large footprint and stormy weather enveloped 23 northern provinces, the weather bureau said. [...]

The managers at the Freeport-McMoRan company had wrongly calculated that the slide would be slow enough and small enough to stop on a 90-metre wide step cut into the wall above the workers they left at the bottom of the pit.

Although heavy rain had fallen for five days, the managers did not realise how much water was trapped in the slope and that the debris would pour over the step onto the workers, according to information provided to the Herald by investigators.

Three weeks later, four bodies remain buried at the bottom of the pit, more than 4000 metres up in the mountains of Papua, just a few kilometres from the only glaciers in South-East Asia. [...]

The slippage has damaged forestry and farms and resulted in the closure of roads and bridges near the village of Derrybrien, Co Galway.

Thousands of tonnes of mud, water, trees and stones have moved down from a local mountainside, threatening some farmhouses. [...]

Heavy rain after long periods of dry weather during recent months is being partly blamed for the incidents.

Voting 55-43, the Senate defeated a modest measure to limit, but not significantly reduce, the emissions, which are a product of burning oil, coal and other hydrocarbon fuels. [...]

The bill's backers acknowledged that it had no chance in the Republican-led House and would have been vetoed by President Bush if it had cleared Congress.

Bill Kovacs, vice president for environment at the pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said, "environmentalists cannot win this, period. This was a very, very watered-down bill, and they still had a hard time pulling the votes together." [...]

A report published by international law firm Baker and McKenzie warns people were laying blame for global warming.

"The reality is that those who are going to be most exposed are the companies who have publicly taken an anti-climate change line," lawyer and report contributor Martijn Wilder told ABC radio.

"The main possible actions are a government suing a government or an environmental organisation suing a company.

"Or alternatively, as we're now seeing in the US, for governments or individuals suing the regulatory authorities for failing to deal with green house emissions."

The statistics from the report are sobering.

• One-fifth of the world's population - about 1.2 billion people - are in absolute poverty and try to live on less than a $1 a day.
• 420 million people live in countries which no longer have enough crop land to grow their own food.
• One-quarter of the developing world's crop land is too degraded to till and 500 million people live in regions prone to drought. By 2025, that number could increase fivefold to about 3 billion.
• About 30 percent of the world's surviving forests are seriously degraded and they are being cut down at the rate of 50,000 square miles a year.
• Wetlands have been reduced by 50 percent over the last century.
• A quarter of the world's mammal species and 12 percent of the birds are in danger of extinction.
• Carbon dioxide levels - a key contributor to global warming - are the highest they've been in hundreds of thousands of years.
• Global production of toxic waste has reached 300 million tons a year. [...]

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Pedestrians watched as hundreds of birds flew over the city before suddenly nose-diving to the ground from a height of 65 feet.

Bird expert Guenther Schleussner, from the Wilhelma Zoological and Botanical Gardens in Stuttgart, said the scenes were like something from a horror film.

"I've never seen anything like it in my life," he added.

Around 100 dead and injured birds covered the busy Steinhalden Street. Residents out for a Sunday stroll reporting a loud "thud" as the flock of kamikaze starlings hit the pavement.

The ornithologist added: "It's unbelievable, I'm stunned. This kind of behaviour in birds is very, very unusual."

Schleussner said the incident could have been down to a sudden squall or simply a "freak accident".

Then, just before noon, a strong gale tore the last remaining leaves off the trees, and temperatures dropped drastically within minutes. Falling trees and branches crashed on power lines, ripping them down. Most of Quesnel was left without power. Traffic lights went dead, and schools had to close early.

One day later, 1,000 households in the Quesnel area were still without power, and Thursday morning BC Hydro said the remaining 250 households would have electricity restored by evening that day. In fact, Thursday afternoon at about 3 o'clock, only 50 homes remained without power. [...]

Just as the most powerful space storm in 30 years is striking Earth, a congressional subcommittee will hear testimony today from scientists who would secure the future of space weather forecasting.

Congress has plans to ax the whole program.

On the chopping block is the Space Environment Center (SEC) in Boulder, Colorado, which predicted the major space storm that arrived Wednesday and continues to pummel the planet. In an unprecedented scenario, a second powerful storm left the Sun Wednesday afternoon and is en route.

The Senate has proposed eliminating the SEC's funding from the 2004 federal budget. Language in the House's bill would reduce the SEC's $8.3 million budget sharply. Either budget change would cripple the ability to forecast storms, expert say. And without the advance warning, satellites in space and power grids on Earth are much more vulnerable to serious damage. [...]

Global warming means more snow, not less, for the snowbound region along the eastern border between Canada and the United States, researchers said on Tuesday.

Their study of snowfall records in the Great Lakes region and elsewhere suggests there has been a significant increase in snowfall in the Great Lakes region since the 1930s but not anywhere else.

The team, at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, said that global warming does not mean sunnier weather everywhere. Other researchers have predicted that, as the climate gets warmer overall, it could mean colder temperatures in some parts of the world and more severe weather in general as weather patterns change.

For instance, warmer surface sea temperatures could fuel more violent hurricanes and typhoons.

In the Great Lakes region, warmer temperatures mean more snow, Adam Burnett, an associate professor of geography, writes in the November issue of the Journal of Climate. [...]

[...] Some of the consequences of accelerating CO2 buildup, such as melting polar ice and damage to forests, are well known. Others are relatively obscure, but no less devastating. Again, we're drawn back to the ancient record. Russell Graham, chief curator of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, has noted at least 63 sudden climatic changes in the last 1.6 million years, an average of one every 2,000 years.

As Gregg Easterbrook noted in "A Skeptical Guide to Doomsday," a 2003 Wired article, "Ten thousand years have passed since the current pleasantly temperate period began, so another sudden shift is overdue. The notion that greenhouse gases could trigger such a rapid change keeps serious scientists up at night. And since scientists today have little understanding of past climate flips, it's impossible to say when the next one will start." [...]

But global cooling does not simply cancel out global warming, preserving the status quo (as some simplistic analyses have claimed). William H. Calvin, a professor at the University of Washington, says, "We must be careful not to think of an abrupt cooling in response to global warming as just another self-regulatory device, a control system for cooling things down when it gets too hot. The scale of the response will be far beyond the bounds of regulation - more like when excess warming triggers fire extinguishers in the ceiling, ruining the contents of the room while cooling them down."

Calvin says the whole world could be chilled. "Tropical swamps decrease their production of methane at the same time that Europe cools," he wrote in Atlantic Monthly, "and the Gobi Desert whips much more dust in the air. When this happens something big, with worldwide connections, must be switching into a new mode of operation." [...]

At the end of the Permian era, 251 million years ago, 95% of all life went extinct - and the killer might have been foul-smelling hydrogen sulphide.

Life has been wiped out on a massive scale at least five times in geological history. [...]

In 1859, a geomagnetic storm was so powerful that it melted telegraph wires across Europe and America.

Although the eruptions last week knocked out satellites and brought the aurora to southern England, their magnetic fields were aligned in the same direction as the Earth's, limiting their impact.

Scientists say the Voyager 1 spacecraft is near the outer limit of the solar system, 26 years after its US launch.

The boundary is a region called "termination shock" where particles from the sun begin to slow down and clash with atomic matter from deep space.

Nasa says Voyager 1 is about 13.5bn kilometres from Earth and will not reach another system for 40,000 years. [...]

It's beautiful, but dangerous - this cloud puts on a stunning light show over the Antarctic but it is a grim warning that this year's hole in the ozone layer could be the biggest yet.

The stratospheric cloud is an ozone-eater, spotted recently by Australian scientists at Mawson station. Chemical reactions in such clouds convert normally inert man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into ozone destroyers. [...]

The biggest hole recorded was in 2000, when it was about 27 million square kilometres, but last year it had shrunk to about 20 million square kilometres.

Yesterday, however, NASA measurements showed that the hole was rapidly widening and now stood at more than 10 million square kilometres. It usually peaks in late September.

The Network of Concerned Farmers today released internal NSW Agriculture documents showing concerns over the trials of GM canola near the city of Wagga Wagga.

The documents show the canola, created by BayerCropscience to be resistant to a new type of herbicide, had spread from its small trial plot into a neighbouring wheat field. [...]

"If the GM industry can't even control a small strictly managed trial plot under one hectare, how do they expect to control 5,000 hectares of GM canola spread over 60 to 100 sites throughout NSW?" she told AAP. [...]

In recent years, previously unknown diseases have begun taking an alarming toll on species. West Nile virus, mad cow disease and chronic wasting disease (CWD) are just a few names on a long and growing list of wildlife parasites and diseases that have been making headlines as they threaten to ravage animal populations - and infect humans, often with tragic consequences.

They have become substitute predators - natural adaptations that help regulate animals in areas where predators and other 'keystone species' have been eliminated. [...]

Earthquake survivors in Zhangye City of northwest China's Gansu Province are battling sudden snow and the chilly temperature of 6 degrees Celsius below zero Thursday as they try to rebuild their lives.

More than 2,500 soldiers have again been sent out to help people in quake-hit areas.

Some 22,000 families in the city's quake areas have been relocated to cotton tents and sheds with heated brick beds or to relatives, while more than 10,000 families were still sheltering in makeshift tents on Thursday, said a spokesman of the city government. [...]

On Tuesday, 4 November 2003, this flare saturated the X-ray detectors on several monitoring satellites. The associated coronal mass ejection (CME) came out of the Sun's surface at about 2300 kilometres per second (8.2 million km/h). Only part of the CME is directed towards Earth, so we expect the Earth will receive only a glancing blow, since the source region is pointing away from us on the right on the limb of the Sun as seen from Earth.

How we classify solar flares Scientists classify solar flares according to their brightness in the x-ray wavelengths. There are three categories: X-class flares are big; they are major events that can trigger radio blackouts around the whole world and long-lasting radiation storms in the upper atmosphere.

M-class flares are medium-sized; they generally cause brief radio blackouts that affect Earth's polar regions. Minor radiation storms sometimes follow an M-class flare.

Compared to X- and M-class events, C-class flares are small with few noticeable consequences here on Earth.

The Gulf Stream continually warms Britain's coast and scientists say that without it, our climate would be like Alaska's.

Winters like the big freeze in 1962-63 would hit us all the time, we would have to live in minus 22C for months and ice storms would batter the land.

Greenland is said to be melting at a rate of 100 cubic km every year because of the greenhouse effect.

Experts believe the melt water from the ice could effectively switch off the Gulf Stream.

"It would be quick," says Dr Terry Joyce. "Suddenly one decade we are warm, the next decade we're in for the coldest winter we've experienced in 100 years. And we'd be stuck in it for 100 years."

Dr Richard Wood of the Met Office tells Horizon: "You would expect to see sea ice off the south coast for several miles."

"These are extreme temperatures for this time of year," said meteorologist Magnus Anglevik at the Meteorological Institute.

The reason that one had to look as far south as Turkey or the Canary Islands for such heat outside of Norway is a mild and damp wind coming off the Atlantic Ocean. This made Norway unseasonably warm, but also extremely windy in places.

It's only October, but some winter sports activists just can't wait any longer. With the weather cooperating, they don't have to.

Slalom ski and snowboarding centers at Filefjell, Faustablikk, Kvitfjell, Uvdal, and Oppdal all opened for business on Saturday. Bjorli at the very northern end of Gudbrandsdalen beat them all, opening October 19.

Geilo is reporting good cross-country conditions, but lifts won't start operating until early November. Dombaas and Beitostoelen are due to open next Saturday and most of the rest of southern Norway's resorts will be operating by November 22 [...]

The region, already reeling from the severe drought affecting many parts of the country, should have seen rains at the beginning of October. Aid agencies working in the remote lowland region, inhabited mainly by nomads, warn that without them the area is facing a renewed disaster. [...]

A humanitarian disaster is looming in western Sudan where over half a million people have been displaced by fighting, warns the United Nations. [...]

"Joint funding through DARPA will allow HAARP to quadruple in size from its current 960 kW output to 3.6 MW," Lampe says. "When completed in 2006, HAARP will then be the premier ionospheric research facility with beam-steering capabilities that other similar arrays worldwide don't have." Under terms of its experimental license, HAARP must transmit on a noninterference basis, and Lampe--who is ARRL liaison to HAARP--says the staff at the control center immediately shut down the transmitters when harmonics were detected on 75/80 meters during experiments last year. "Alaska hams monitor the bands and aid HAARP engineers by reporting RFI issues as soon as they happen," Lampe said.

Sponsors think a precise prehistoric time scale can help them better interpret what is happening to our planet and predict what may lie ahead as the world gets warmer. For example, they hope the project, called CHRONOS (Greek for "time"), will help settle arguments over the causes and effects of climate change on the evolution and extinction of species.

Project director Bruce Wardlaw, a geologist at the U.S. Geologic Survey in Reston, Va., said the purpose was to "produce a global time scale of Earth's history to solve problems for the benefit of society."[...]

"Climate can change on a dime," said Gerilyn Soreghan, who teaches geology at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

"We see more and more evidence for abrupt climate change," said Isabel Montanez, a geologist at the University of California in Davis. She said climate records showed that carbon dioxide - a "greenhouse gas," which contributes to global warming - was approaching its highest level in 20 million years, long before human ancestors appeared.[...]

"We are likely to, in a way, relive the past," Ward said.[...]

Welcome to the future.

Fires that charred nearly three-quarters of a million acres could presage increasingly severe fire danger as global warming weakens more forests through disease and drought, experts warn.

Hundreds of people were evacuated from flooded areas after the storms unleashed heavy rain, hail and high winds across a wide swath of central Argentina. [...]

David Phillips says higher sea temperatures will make hurricanes more commonplace in the region in coming years.

[...] Phillips says it's too early to tell if the extreme weather in Canada this year can be attributed to global warming.

But he says even the slightest rise in average temperature or sea level can have devastating effects.

The plant at Neustadt-Glewe in northeast Germany taps into water from 2000 metres (6600 feet)) underground, where its temperature reaches 97 degrees Celsius (206 degrees Fahrenheit).

The energy produced by the high temperature is converted into steam, which in turn drives a turbine on the surface to produce electricity.

The cause of the disappearance of about 70 percent of North American large mammals, including all horse species, has been hotly debated by scientists.

Some think hunting contributed to their disappearance but R. Dale Guthrie, of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, said climate change and a shift in vegetation from grasslands to tundra was probably to blame.

"Horses underwent a rapid decline in body size before extinction and I propose that the size decline and subsequent regional extinction...are best attributed to a coincident climate/vegetation shift," he said in a report in the science journal Nature.

Lightning lit up the region as fast-flowing water turned some streets to rivers Wednesday night. Water swept trash and other debris to the doorsteps of homes and stores.

"It was just unbelievable," said National Weather Service meteorologist Curt Kaplan. He said five inches of rain was recorded in just two hours in southern Los Angeles, nearing the previous record for the area of 5.9 inches -- "but that was in an entire day." Skies mostly cleared overnight.

[...] The Los Angeles County Fire Department responded to blazes caused by lightning strikes and rescued people trapped in elevators that lost power, said fire Capt. Mark Savage.

"It's been freaky," he said.

If you can remember back to the bitter winters of the late 1970s and early 80s you might also recall that there was much discussion in scientific circles at the time about whether or not the freezing winter conditions were a portent of a new ice age.

Over the past couple of decades such warnings have been drowned out by the great global warming debate and by consideration of how society might cope in future with a sweltering planet rather than an icebound one. Seemingly, the fact that we are still within an interglacial period, during which the ice has largely retreated to its polar fastnesses, has been forgotten - and replaced with the commonly-held view that one good thing you can say about global warming is that it will at least stave off the return of the glaciers.

Is this really true, or could the rapidly accelerating warming that we are experiencing actually hasten the onset of a new ice age?

Solar maximum is years past, yet the sun has been remarkably active lately. Is the sunspot cycle broken?

November 12, 2003: Imagine you're in California. It's July, the middle of summer. The sun rises early; bright rays warm the ground. It's a great day to be outside. Then, suddenly, it begins to snow--not just a little flurry, but a swirling blizzard that doesn't stop for two weeks. That's what forecasters call unseasonal weather.

It sounds incredible, but "something like that just happened on the sun," says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

The spot remains strong and today it set off a good-sized flare and kicked up more space weather. Two other large sunspots trail the first are due back next week. All three have continued to generate space weather while on the far side of the Sun, astronomers said. [...]

[...] Dr Stone says there are strong indications the El Nino pattern may return by autumn next year, with the chances of drought-breaking rain in the interim remain slim.

Perez, 24, and her father spent the night huddled on a raised mattress supported by chairs as icy water poured in waves through the door of their home in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

"It was like a lake around us," Perez said. "It was terrible."

The storm dumped about 5 inches of hail and rain on parts of Los Angeles County during a two-hour period Wednesday night, creating a winter white landscape in some areas that looked more like Minneapolis than Los Angeles. [...]

A motorist who drove past a roadblock was swept away by a creek in West Virginia, and two people were killed in separate weather-related accidents in New York, including one in which a tree fell on a vehicle. A Virginia teenager was seriously injured when a tree fell on her as she waited for a school bus on Wednesday.

Michigan and Ohio were the hardest hit by power outages, with about 375,000 customers affected in each state. The majority had electricity restored by late Thursday.

Heavy wind also knocked out power to thousands in Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. On the West Coast, meanwhile, Los Angeles was recovering from a freak storm that dumped 5 inches of rain and hail in some areas in less than two hours.

Gusts up to 74 mph knocked down trees and power lines in Michigan. Scores of school districts cancelled classes, and a live power line fell across Interstate 94 near the Detroit airport, creating a monster traffic jam.

Winds halted boat traffic on the Great Lakes, where waves of up to 16 feet were recorded on lakes Erie and Ontario. New York-area airports had flight delays of up to three hours Thursday.

Seven people were injured Wednesday night in Wooster, Ohio, when a tornado damaged a Rubbermaid plant. The twister, with winds of 110 to 130 mph, was on the ground for about 12 miles, said meteorologist Mark Adams of the National Weather Service.

"We've had substantial damage," Rubbermaid spokeswoman Keri Butler said Thursday. The company was still running its distribution site, but manufacturing was shut down.

Another tornado that hit Lexington Township near Alliance, about 50 miles southeast of Cleveland, had winds of 75 to 100 mph and damaged a few homes and a school, Adams said.

In West Virginia, heavy rain caused flooding Wednesday. A car that had driven around a fire truck and into a creek was found early Thursday, jammed under a bridge in Kanawha County's Loudendale area. The driver had been swept away.

Loudendale, in a narrow valley packed with houses, got more than 4 inches of rain Wednesday.

Jeff Blount surveyed the damage to his in-laws' store, where about 4 feet of water turned over display cases. An ice machine and 3,000-gallon kerosene tank were washed away.

"Mother Nature flushed it out like a toilet," Blount said of the building.

More than 100 students were stuck in shelters past midnight in adjacent Lincoln County. In South Charleston, Linda McCune was rescued from rising water at her home on her 60th birthday.

"I didn't think I was going to make it this time," McCune said. "I'd seen it coming up very, very fast."

In Sterling, Va., the winds hurled a tree onto a 14-year-old, injuring her as she waited for her bus. And in Victor, N.Y., outside of Rochester, a 37-year-old woman died after winds blew a large tree onto her car.

Wind-whipped flames gutted most of a 42-unit apartment complex Thursday in Newark, N.J., leaving up to 80 people homeless.

In western North Carolina, a visitors center on the Blue Ridge Parkway had its roof ripped off Thursday morning. Parkway officials closed a 12-mile stretch of the road. [...]

"It's really a one-two punch because the winds are strong," he said. "It's funnelling in this very cold, fresh Arctic air into the lower Great Lakes as well. That, of course, coupled with the moisture in the lower lakes generates snow flurries and snow squalls, creating very low visibility and reports of whiteouts."

Gusting winds in upstate New York intensified Thursday, creating near-blizzard conditions. In the Midwest and East, more than 830,000 customers, including 330,000 in Michigan, lost power as gusts of up to 120 km/h knocked down trees and power lines and closed schools.

High winds were expected to continue as the cold front moved eastward, dropping rain and snow and resulting in delays of up to 45 minutes at New York-area airports. [...]

Amazingly, there were no significant injuries. [...]

[...] China harvested 450 billion kilograms of crops this year, less than the average 500 billion kilograms output in the past ten-plus years and prices of some staple grains rose.

On Thursday night, 17 people died in Phuoc Thanh commune, Quang Nam province, including 15 gold miners killed when a landslide buried their makeshift huts.

"The workers were swept away when they were sleeping in their makeshift camp. We have not been able to identify the deceased as most of them came from other provinces in the north," said an official from Quang Nam people's Committee on Saturday.

Glaciologists say the amount of sea ice floating around the continent has decreased by about 20 per cent in the past 50 years.

The total amount of sea ice around Antarctica has dropped by about 500,000 square kilometres.

The impact of the unusually early and heavy snowfall on the city's trees alone is expected to leave municipal authorities with a bill of 110 million yuan (13 million dollars), the Beijing Today newspaper said.

Following the November 13 storm, the city's streets were littered with branches and felled trunks, as millions of trees had been stretched to breaking point and beyond because they had yet to shed their leaves. [...]

At least eight people have died in the storms since Wednesday, including three motorists hit by falling trees.

More than 1.4 million customers lost power, and by Friday evening, lights were still out for about 260,000, including nearly 79,000 in Pennsylvania.

Another person is still missing after severe floods hit nine provinces cutting off several villages and burying sleeping people alive.

An official said tens of thousands houses were submerged and over 3,000 collapsed or were completely destroyed.

The whales, thought to be mostly females with a young calf, were stranded over a five kilometre (three mile) stretch of beach at the mouth of Manukau Harbour, drawing a crowd of about 1,500 curious onlookers Sunday.

It was not clear why the animals became marooned but it was "a significant stranding event" of sperm whales, the like of which had not been seen for 20 to 30 years, Department of Conservation (DOC) officer Karl McLeod. [...]

Thrills for this small club of eclipse junkies are almost guaranteed, for the only place where "totality" can be enjoyed is in part of Antarctica, its iceshelf and the waters just north of it - the wilderness of the midnight Sun.

They say the new product could help many areas of the world that are subject to extreme weather conditions. The powder absorbs water from storm clouds.

The Florida based company, Dyn-o-mat, used a military aircraft to drop four tonnes of its powder on to a developing storm cloud.

The cloud disappeared from radar screens, which were monitoring the experiment. [...]

[...] Several monkey species face extinction...

The George River herd, which numbers about 800,000 free-roaming caribou, migrates from the northernmost reaches of Quebec to the Labrador Sea at this time each year, but the final stretch of this year's trek has been dramatically altered by a stretch of unseasonably warm weather. [...]

Ward, Ph.D., a seismologist at the UC Santa Cruz Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and his colleagues have developed computer-simulation programs to model the potential impact of an asteroid crashing into the ocean, resulting in 300-foot high waves.

[...] Ward's models suggest that the impact, if an asteroid like the ones that have previously hit Earth slams into the Atlantic Ocean, could create waves that travel at more than 500 miles an hour.

The results of Ward's computer modeling appeared in the June issue of the "Geophysical Journal International."

Ward says that if a collision were to occur in the Pacific Ocean, coastal towns like Santa Cruz could be completely submerged.

[...] Ward says that Santa Cruz has earthquakes big enough to cause a tsunami every 50 years or so, which could cause large waves to head onshore.

There was a tsunami associated with the 1989 earthquake. However, it was small and barely noticeable.

Ward thinks that an earthquake of a magnitude 7.5 could cause a 15-foot tsunami to reach the Santa Cruz shoreline in a matter of minutes under certain conditions.

[...] In 1965, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.5 - the largest earthquake ever recorded - occurred off the coast of Chili, breaking nearly 600 miles of coastline. The quake caused 20 feet of uplift and sent 10-foot high tsunamis towards Japan.

[...] Last week's rains fell just before the rice harvest, destroying crucial crops as well as devastating shrimp farms, leaving thousands without food.

The good news is that skies should clear later today. It will remain warm and perhaps partly cloudy, but for those who were injured by flying debris, spent hours trapped in their cars or lost the roofs over their homes, a few clouds never looked so good. [...]

The devastation was particularly severe in Sugar Land, where four office buildings were hit by a midday tornado, which broke scores of windows and tore off roofing.

Throughout Sugar Land, several dozen vehicles were damaged by flying debris and 16 people were injured, though none seriously. Eight were taken to nearby hospitals for treatment, a police spokesman said.

One of those was the driver of a tractor-trailer that was tossed onto its side on West Airport near Industrial Boulevard in the city's business park / industrial area. [...]

As the afternoon wore on, traffic snarls abounded. Floodwaters shut down the main lanes of the Katy Freeway at Washington, Silber, Fry and Barker-Cypress. High water also plagued motorists on the Eastex Freeway at FM 1960, and for a time blocked Texas 288 -- a major ambulance route to the Texas Medical Center. [...]

Flooded streets also hampered emergency services. A firefighter had to wade to a flood victim in northwest Houston when no vehicle could be found that would pass through the high water. An ambulance crew could not reach a patient in the Inwood Forest area at Antoine and Victory. That person's condition was not life-threatening. [...]

The object is about 570 km across, making it one of the largest bodies of its kind found in modern times.

The new body, made of rock and ice, is designated 2003 VS2. Re-examining past records, astronomers have found it in images taken as far back as 1998.

The object is one of the largest yet found in the Kuiper Belt, a region of space littered with small rocky worlds orbiting the Sun.

It was discovered by the automated Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (Neat) project using a large telescope at Mount Palomar in California, US.

Such orbits are stable as they allow the object to approach Neptune's orbit without any possibility of collision. Pluto, currently the most distant true planet, is in such an orbit.

Because of the similarity, 2003 VS2 has been dubbed "Plutino", or "little Pluto".

Since the first Kuiper Belt Object was discovered in 1992, several hundred have been found, and many of them are in the Neptune resonance condition, too.

But the sun certainly is demanding everyone's attention now, three weeks into perhaps the most dramatic and unexpected chain of eruptions ever observed venting from its seething, bubbling surface.

There have been as many as 11 salvos since Oct. 19. And the fireworks could reach a new crescendo by Thanksgiving, the busiest holiday in the United States for air travel, just one of the things that can be disrupted.

"There's been nothing quite like this,'' said Bill Murtagh, a space weather forecaster for the National Oceanic and Space Administration in Boulder, Colo. "Another big blow is not what anyone needs." [...]

Scientists studying the problem are looking everywhere from Mars, which suffered a magnetic crisis four billion years ago and has been devoid of a magnetic field, an appreciable atmosphere, and possibly life ever since, to a laboratory at the University of Maryland, where a team headed by physicist Dan Lathrop has re-created the molten iron dynamo at Earth's core by using 240 pounds of highly explosive molten sodium. The most visible signs of Earth's magnetic field are auroras, which are caused by charged particles from space interacting with the atmosphere as they flow into the north and south magnetic poles.

But the warning signs of a declining field are subtler -- though they are evident in every clay dish that was ever fired. During high-temperature baking, iron minerals in clay record the exact state of Earth's magnetic field at that precise moment. By examining pots from prehistory to modern times, geologist John Shaw of the University of Liverpool in England has discovered just how dramatically the field has changed. "When we plot the results from the ceramics," he notes, "we see a rapid fall as we come toward the present day. The rate of change is higher over the last 300 years than it has been for any time in the past 5,000 years. It's going from a strong field down to a weak field, and it's doing so very quickly."

At the present rate, Earth's magnetic field could be gone within a few centuries, exposing the planet to the relentless blast of charged particles from space with unpredictable consequences for the atmosphere and life. Other possibilities: the field could stop weakening and begin to strengthen, or it could weaken to the point that it suddenly flips polarity -- that is, compasses begin to point to the South Magnetic Pole. [...]

Such a reversal of polarity seems to happen every 250,000 years on average, making us long overdue for another swap between the north and south magnetic poles. [...]

Some researchers believe we are already in the transition phase, with growing areas of magnetic anomaly -- where field lines are moving the wrong way -- signaling an ever weaker and chaotic state for our protective shield. [...]

[...] Each semester the class covers five of the possible topics, which include volcanos, earthquakes, floods, and impacts from outer space, tornados, hurricanes and tsunamis. Each topic uses a different learning approach, but all include movie clips. The objective of the class, which is for non-science majors, is to teach critical thinking, how science works and how to make decisions on science-based topics.

"It is much better to have people learn critical thinking on something they do not already have an opinion on," Furlong told attendees today (Nov. 4) at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle. "No one has religious or political opinions on hurricanes."

The students can begin to understand the issues surrounding observation versus interpretation. They can learn how to determine the specific information needed to understand something and also how to get that information.

"Why use movie clips?" Asks Furlong. "Because while students will laugh at a movie clip that is obviously and patently scientifically wrong, they would not laugh at a newspaper article that contained incorrect information."

AURORA WATCH: A coronal mass ejection (CME) is heading toward Earth; it was hurled into space by an M-class explosion near sunspot 484 on Nov. 18th (0800 UT). Sky watchers at all latitudes should be alert for auroras when the CME arrives after nightfall on Nov. 19th or 20th

CHARLESTON, West Virginia (AP) -- A storm system plowed through the central Appalachians and drenched the Eastern Seaboard on Wednesday, causing flooding that killed at least two people, left dozens stranded and forced others to flee their homes.

In Maryland, a boy drowned in a rain-swollen creek and three construction workers were caught in floodwaters while working on a storm drain, killing at least one, authorities said. Another was missing and presumed dead.

Schools were closed in parts of West Virginia and North Carolina, but more than 250 students became stranded by high water at three West Virginia schools and prepared to bed down there for the night. Thousands of people lost power.

"It's huge, it's turning creeks into rivers and fields into ponds and lakes," said Jessica Perrine of Red Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. [...]

The flightless bird has come to be synonymous with extinction since it died out about 300 years ago. Fully grown dodos weighed about 23 kilograms or 50 pounds.

Dodos were hunted by humans for their attractive grey-blue feathers. The bird also fell prey to cats, rats and pigs, which were introduced to its home of Mauritius and surrounding islands.

The last confirmed sighting of a flightless dodo was in 1662 on Mauritius.

It is difficult to peg the date of demise for a species since rare individuals may survive undetected after what is thought to be the last sighting.

The hole is a thinner-than-usual area in the protective layer of gas high up in the Earth's atmosphere. It has been forming in the extremely low temperatures that mark the end of Antarctic winter every year since the mid-1980s, largely due to chemical pollution.

This year, the hole peaked at 10.81 million square miles in mid-September - matching the record size set three years ago. [...]

Was it the Northern Lights, shooting stars -- or both?

It depends which federal agency you ask.

According to the National Weather Service, the "red ball of light" described by frantic callers to radio programs and police stations throughout the Bay Area Thursday night was the aurora borealis, better known as the Northern Lights, rarely seen this far south. It was visible across the country.

According to the U.S. Coast Guard, however, it was a part of the legendary Leonid meteor shower, as tiny rocks burn up while plunging from space. It should have peaked before dawn Nov. 19, said Joshua Taylor, a petty officer with the U.S. Coast Guard. [...]

If you buy the aurora hypothesis, then you're blaming the sun, like Steve Markkanen of the National Weather Service. The sun has been throwing quite a fit recently, spewing out electrically charged particles that make Earth's upper atmosphere glow spookily like a silk scarf or a child's balloon when you electrify it by rubbing it in the dark. [...]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported on its Web site Thursday that the geomagnetic storm activity during the previous 24 hours was "extreme," the worst possible rating. Typically, the site notes, "extreme" geomagnetic storm activity can mean that people as far south as Florida and southern Texas can see the light. It could affect radio transmissions and disorient space satellites. By Thursday evening, however, the rating had decreased to "strong," two stages below "extreme." In "strong" geomagnetic storms, light can be visible as far south as Illinois and Oregon. [...]

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At least nine people have died and emergency crews from Tennessee to Pennsylvania have rescued dozens of drivers from vehicles stalled in high water as the storms moved northeastward.

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Using data taken by a long-forgotten scientist who set up an experiment on top of the Eiffel Tower in the 1890s, it found that the air in Paris today is just as dirty as it was 110 years ago, at a time when the city was expanding at breakneck speed and was recklessly burning coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels. [...]

But the figures show that the particulates spewed up by coal have been replaced by those from burning petrol and diesel.

The website of Airparif, the agency that monitors airquality in Paris, says that the daily average level of fine particulates in 2001 was 70 microgrammes per cubic metre of air.

The goal is to bring this down to 50 in 2005 by encouraging cleaner vehicles and greater use of public transport. [...]

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The zebra fish were originally developed to detect environmental toxins, but Alan Blake and colleagues at Yorktown Technologies, L.P. licensed them to sell as pets. [...]

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All counties, except for Los Alamos, were declared a disaster. [...]

The Weather Bureau is predicting more rain over the next few days across the ACT and in New South Wales.

Spokesman Cameron Henderson says over the last two days Canberra alone has received 53 millimetres of rain.

"Now that's actually the heaviest fall that we've had over a two day period for the whole of the year," he said.

"You actually have to go back to February 2002 to find a two day period that's had a higher rainfall than what we've seen over the past two days."

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"Our nights were once lit up by ghee or candles. But since the solar power station went into operation last year, nights are as bright as days," said Zhoima, a herdsman in Oulaxiuma.

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Six to 8 inches of snow was expected by the end of the day in much of Minnesota, the National Weather Service said.

The storm was blamed for at least one traffic death, the state Department of Public Safety said. [...]

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Southern Nevada Water Authority officials attributed the increase to last month's record high temperatures and lower-than-normal rainfall. [...]

The water authority's board of directors is expected today to designate Jan. 1 as the start of a "drought alert," prompting even tougher watering restrictions. [...]

Lake Mead provides 90 percent of Southern Nevada's water supply and sits at slightly less than 60 percent of capacity, leaving a growing white ring that hovers above the waterline. The lake is reeling from the effects of depressed snowpack in Wyoming and Colorado, which feeds the seven states of the Colorado River basin. [...]

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The spectacle was the first recorded total eclipse of the Sun in Antarctica.

A group of around 300 stargazers, eclipse chasers and scientists in a Boeing 747 plane got a spectacular view of the phenomenon at exactly 2240 GMT.

Those on board the specially chartered Qantas plane, on a round-trip from Melbourne, had paid up to AU$12,000 (UKP 5,096) and came from as far afield as Houston, Texas, US.

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The sea area around Trondheim, Oslo and Bergen will now also be studied, in order to map the presence of caffeine in the water. The study also focuses on seeking traces of certain pain-killing and anti-depressive substances. [...]

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MUSICAL symphonies played on the giant rotating blades of wind turbines are being considered by one of Scotland's leading power companies in an attempt to engage the public with the growing energy-generating source.

ScottishPower has commissioned Alex Hamilton, an environmental artist, to come up with ideas and works to change the public's perception of wind farms and turn them into radical recreational areas. [...]

He also suggests that detachable instruments could be made, which would fix to the end of the blades and work in a similar way to an Aeolian harp. Named after the Greek god of the wind, an Aeolian harp is a small box across which are stretched strings tuned to resonate in unison, producing rising and falling harmonies when air moves over them.

Mr Hamilton said: "Music and harmonies could then be created by using different attachments producing different notes, and it would then be possible to commission musicians for a programme of concerts in the park environment."

If the project wins ScottishPower's approval, the wind music would not be permanent, and would only be produced at scheduled times. [...]

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Typhoon Lupit has struck the Micronesian atoll Ulithi, which is no more than five metres above sea level, generating huge seas with waves of up to 10 metres high.

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The long-finned pilot whales and bottle-nosed dolphins were washed up at Point Hibbs, south of the fishing town of Strahan.

David Pemberton, curator at the Tasmanian Museum, was among scientists who flew over the remote spot in a helicopter. He said the mammals had probably been dead for several days.

Scientists are baffled as to why whales become stranded. "When it's a mixed stranding like this, you start to get suspicious about external factors," Pemberton said. [...]

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The small, flat insects, which feed on human blood, have been re-appearing in hotels, hostels, shelters, public housing and private homes across the country.

Bed bugs were all but wiped out after the Second World War thanks to strong pesticides.

But they have been crawling back into beds across the country due, in part, to international travel.

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SAN DIEGO -- Is America's blood supply at risk? That is the question the Food and Drug Administration is asking after Chagas disease -- an infection from Latin America -- showed up in the United States in higher numbers. [...]

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So far, the damage has been relatively minor in comparison with significant communications disruptions three years ago. The culprits this year are three volatile sunspots that began erupting last month and set off blackouts in Sweden, damaged satellites and forced some airlines to divert flights from polar routes to escape extra radiation.

And now, after a three-week lull while the Sun's rotation spun them out of view, the sunspots are back within striking distance. The one with the potential to produce the most fireworks, Region 507, is expected to fix its sights squarely on Earth just as Thanksgiving arrives. While all three have decayed a bit, 507 is still roughly eight times the size of Earth. [...]

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The sum is urgently needed to combat the destruction of the planet's last few gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans and secure their natural habitat, it said. [...]

The creatures' biggest enemy is mankind, which is encroaching on its habitat and ripping through ape populations for poaching, bushmeat and the live animal trade.

Less than 10 percent of the remaining forest home of the Great Apes in Africa will be left relatively undisturbed by 2030 if road-building, the construction of mining camps and other schemes continue at their present pace, UNEP said.

"Research indicates that the western chimpanzee has already disappeared from three countries -- Benin, the Gambia and Togo," UNESCO expert Samy Mankoto, a specialist on biosphere reserves in Africa, said. [...]

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BirdLife Fiji researchers rediscovered the long-legged warbler (Trichocichla rufa), last seen in 1894, and managed to photograph it for the first time ever. They also recorded its "beautiful warbling songs". [...]

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In addition, the average global temperature will increase by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius by 2100 up from 1990, and the average sealevel worldwide will increase by 0.09 to 0.88 m, according to the third assessment report issued in 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes.

Based on this report, the experts predicted the output changes of global wheat, corn and rice in years 2020, 2050 and 2080, only to find that crop output in most developing countries will shrink,while that in developed countries in the northern hemisphere will increase.

Owing to global warming, China's crop output will shrink, while farming costs will increase, said Qin Dahe, director of the China Meteorological Administration (CMA).

Climate changes will also affect river routes, the frequency of droughts and floods, and the quality of underground water, plunging many countries into water supply difficulties.

Global warming will also exacerbate the incidence of some infectious diseases carried by insects, food or water in less-developed areas.

However, some experts claimed that the expected climate changesmay result in increased agricultural output in the middle- and high-latitude areas, a reduced death rate from cold, increased wood output and less energy consumption.

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Officers from the Tasmania state Nature Conservation Branch arrived on Flinders Island late Friday and found nine sperm whales dead and one alive but stranded on a sandbank. [...]

"Now it's in deeper water and it's resting," Brennan said. "It's upright and it's breathing freely, so we're hoping it'll eventually swim away." [...]

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Temperatures are near freezing and the city has opened an emergency shelter in the local high school. [...]

The storm also caused ferry cancellations, spot flooding and road closures. So much rain fell, about 100 millimetres overnight, that it created small rivers in some areas.

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More than 20,000 customers were waiting for service to be restored early Sunday, according to Hydo One, a provincially owned power supplier.

About 80,000 customers lost their electricity late Friday and early Saturday. The storm toppled trees and damaged transmission lines.

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