Earth Changes
A local official in the area told ISNA that six villages had been completely destroyed and 60 villages had been 50 to 70 percent destroyed. The U.S. Geological Survey measured the first quake at 6.4 magnitude and said it struck 60 km (37 miles) northeast of the city of Tabriz at a depth of 9.9 km (6.2 miles). A second quake measuring 6.3 struck 49 km (30 miles) northeast of Tabriz 11 minutes later at a similar depth.
The second quake struck near the town of Varzgan, Fars news agency said. "The quake was so intense that people poured into the streets through fear," it said.
USGS data
Over ten people have so far been struck dead by lightning in the districts of Mitooma, Buikwe, Alebtong, Jinja, Kaliro, Agago, Amuru, Kabarole among others and the cases of lightning seem to be rampant today compared to past years.
In an interview with Uganda Radio Network, Benon Fred Twinamatsiko, a physicist at Makerere University department of physics says that lightning is rampant today because the sun is maximizing its 11th year solar cycle.
He explains that in the process of completing the cycle, the sun emits gases into the earth, which cause enormous electrical discharge. He adds that the discharge causes imbalances between positive and negative charges on earth and clouds leading to lightning.
Twinamatsiko says that the solar cycle which takes 11 years will end in 2013 and when it's about to end natural calamites like floods, lightning and earthquakes frequently happen.
He explained that lightning strikes target unprotected buildings with no lightning conductors, trees, stepless grounds and when a person is found in such places at a time of rainfall it becomes easier for their body to work as a channel of lightning and are easily struck dead or paralyzed.
14 year old Tristan Barger of Chelsea, AL, died Wednesday night at about midnight at Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola from injuries suffered from a lightning strike.
Barger and his step father were struck by lightning Monday as they were trying to get back to their boat at Shell Island near Panama City Beach. The family was walking on the beach on the last day of their vacation when the storm hit.
The lightning strike occurred as people gathered for a special evening prayer known as taraweeh that is conducted during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
"Multiple lightning strikes occurred during a storm when nearly 35 people gathered at a house in the village of Saraswati where they turned a tin roof shed into a makeshift mosque for the month of Ramadan as a regular mosque was far away," Dharmapasha police chief Bayes Alam told CNN.
The village Saraswati is some 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the capital of Dhaka.
Although the storm itself was uncommon - NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., estimates that there have only been about eight similarly strong August storms in the last 34 years - the real news behind the meteorological event is the stunning Aug. 6 photo taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite. The cyclone is spinning toward the North Pole, with Greenland visible in the bottom-left of the image. Scientists are left speculating what the impact of such a storm could be.
From NASA:
Arctic storms such as this one can have a large impact on the sea ice, causing it to melt rapidly through many mechanisms, such as tearing off large swaths of ice and pushing them to warmer sites, churning the ice and making it slushier, or lifting warmer waters from the depths of the Arctic Ocean.More information on the abnormal Arctic weather this summer can be found here, courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
"It seems that this storm has detached a large chunk of ice from the main sea ice pack. This could lead to a more serious decay of the summertime ice cover than would have been the case otherwise, even perhaps leading to a new Arctic sea ice minimum," said Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist with NASA Goddard. "Decades ago, a storm of the same magnitude would have been less likely to have as large an impact on the sea ice, because at that time the ice cover was thicker and more expansive."
Louisiana officials are investigating whether an underground salt cavern may be responsible for a large sinkhole that has swallowed 100-foot-tall cypress trees and prompted evacuations in a southern Louisiana bayou.
The state's Department of Natural Resources ordered Texas Brine Company, which mines the cavern, to drill a well into the cavern to see whether it caused the dark gray slurry-filled hole nearby.
Measurements taken Monday showed the sinkhole measures 324 feet in diameter and is 50 feet deep, but in one corner it goes down 422 feet, said John Boudreaux, director of the Office of Homeland Security in Assumption Parish, about 30 miles south of Baton Rouge.
Assumption Parish Police said Thursday the sinkhole has since grown another 10 to 20 feet.

Drought conditions plague much of the United States after a summer of scorching temperatures and a lack of rain. The dryness is affecting America's farmland, threatening crops like soybean and corn.
With much of the corn crop already lost, farmers are holding out hope for some weather relief that could help salvage the harvest of soybeans and other. But the latest data from the government Friday showed that the damage to the food supply chain already has been done.
"This is worse than 2008 -- we're in kind of a perfect storm scenario," said Ana Puchi-Donnelly, senior agricultural commodities trader at London-based Marex Spectron. "We won't really know until the whole crop is harvested. We're talking about the worst drought in the last 50 to 70 years in one of the hottest years on record."
Shriveling supplies have sent grain prices soaring. Corn futures set an all-time high Friday to levels roughly 50 percent higher than the end of May, before the drought took hold. Soybean prices also jumped this week to more than 25 percent above pre-drought levels.

A Pakistani villager carries an ailing peacock at Buphohar village in Thar desert in Sindh province last week. Dozens of wild peacocks have died suddenly in Pakistan, prompting experts to fear an outbreak of the highly contagious Newcastle disease.
That was the question Pakistanis were raising last week as reports persisted from the Thar desert area of southern Sindh province about peacocks whirling themselves to death in mad dances that appeared to have no earthly explanation.
By midweek, more than 120 peacock deaths had been reported - and the toll would keep rising - but the government would only acknowledge that 11 peacocks had died. Newspapers carried photos of children carrying corpses of the magnificently plumed fowl.
It turned out that the answer to the strange deaths was relatively simple: The peafowl were suffering from Newcastle disease, a contagious viral infection that causes dehydration, affects the brain and often causes the birds to spin.
The disease - known as Ranikhet in Pakistan - hit Thar and six other districts in Sindh. Thar alone is estimated to have 70,000 peacocks.
The peacock is wild in the province. Some poor villagers, including members of the Hindu community, keep the birds for their valuable feathers.
Friday, August 10, 2012 at 18:37:44 UTC
Friday, August 10, 2012 at 10:37:44 AM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location
52.695°N, 167.469°W
Depth
19 km (11.8 miles)
Region
FOX ISLANDS, ALEUTIAN ISLANDS, ALASKA
Distances
97 km (60 miles) ESE of Nikolski, Alaska
1420 km (882 miles) SW of Anchorage, Alaska
1452 km (902 miles) SW of Knik-Fairview, Alaska
1591 km (988 miles) SE of Anadyr', Russia
The article, by Noel M. Burkhead of the US Geological Survey, examines North American freshwater fish extinctions from the end of the 19th Century to 2010, when there were 1213 species in the continent, or about 9 percent of the Earth's freshwater fish diversity. At least 57 North American species and subspecies, and 3 unique populations, have gone extinct since 1898, about 3.2 percent of the total. Freshwater species generally are known to suffer higher rates of extinction than terrestrial vertebrates.
Extinctions in fishes are mostly caused by loss of habitat and the introduction of nonindigenous species. In North America, there are more freshwater fish species in a typical drainage to the east of the Great Continental Divide than to the west, where a greater proportion of species have gone extinct or are found nowhere else.











Comment: This solar maximum has been dismal - the sun is far quieter than usual. So something else must be responsible for he increased electrical storm activity:
From Chemtrails, Disinformation and the Sixth Extinction, we read: