Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Russia's Kamchatka Volcanoes Calm After Eruptions

Shiveluch Volcano in the Kamchatka Peninsula
© AP Photo/RTR, via APTNSmoke rises from the Shiveluch volcano in the Kamchatka Peninsula eastern Russia is this image taken from TV Thursday Oct. 28, 2010. Volcanic eruptions on Russia's far-eastern Kamchatka Peninsula have tossed massive ash clouds into the air, forcing flights to divert and blanketing a town with ashes.
Two volcanoes that erupted on the far-eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, blanketing a town with dust and spreading ash clouds across the Pacific, have mostly stopped spewing ash and flights are no longer diverted, Russian officials said Friday.

Eurasia's highest active volcano, the Klyuchevskaya Sopka, was pumping out insignificant amounts of dust and the Shiveluch volcano, 45 miles (70 kilometers) northeast, had ceased all activity, the Emergencies Ministry reported on its website.

Ash clouds from the remote volcanoes had billowed up to 33,000 feet (10 kilometers) after they erupted Thursday and had spread east across the Pacific Ocean.

Schools in the vicinity of the volcanoes remained closed Friday due to ash buildup. The powder had coated the nearby town of Ust-Kamchatsk, reducing visibility to only a few feet (meters) and turning buildings ghostly white.

Binoculars

Starving Bears Resort to Digging Up Coffins and Eating Human Bodies in Russia

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© AP PhotoScavengers: Desperate brown bears in Russia have resorted to digging up human bodies in cemeteries and eating them
Starving bears in northern Russia have resorted to digging up graves in cemeteries and eating bodies.

A scorching summer has destroyed the bears' natural food sources of forest berries and mushrooms, forcing them to look elsewhere.

Russian officials in the republic of Komi, which straddles the Arctic Circle, said that brown bears on several occasions had dug up coffins in rural cemeteries in a desperate search for food.

Two women in Vezhnya Tchova reported spotting the a figure they thought was wearing a fur coat leaning over a grave.

But when they approached, they realized it was a bear eating a human body and discovered the victims' clothes thrown across other graves.

Question

Mystery injury on seals caused by boats not sharks

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© UnknownSeals were found washed up with the horrific lacerations around the UK coast.
Seals washed up on the coast of Britain with mysterious 'corkscrew' injuries were not attacked by sharks, whales or fishermen, they were caught up in boats, according to scientists.

The bodies of seals have been washing up around the coast of Britain throughout the summer looking as if they have "been through a giant pencil sharpener".

The horrific injuries were such a concern that the police, scientists, the RSPCA and National Trust launched an investigation to find the culprit.

Bizarro Earth

Indonesia Disaster Toll Hits 377 as Volcano Erupts Again

Mount Merapi, Indonesia
© Reuters/Andry PrasetyoMount Merapi is seen emitting smoke from Sidorejo village, in Klaten, Central Java October 28, 2010, two days after its eruption.
Indonesia's Mount Merapi erupted on Thursday for the second time in a week, blasting vast plumes of ash into the sky, as the death toll from the initial eruption and a tsunami that hit remote western islands reached 377.

There were no immediate reports of new casualties after Merapi's second eruption. More than 40,000 people had fled or been evacuated from Merapi's slopes earlier in the week, but many started to return after the volcano appeared to become calmer.

Officials said the death toll from a tsunami that hit the remote western Mentawai islands on Monday had reached at least 343. The tsunami was triggered on Monday by a 7.5 magnitude quake. A day later, Mount Merapi on the outskirts of Yogyakarta city on Java island erupted, killing at least 34.

Bizarro Earth

Indonesia: Mount Merapi erupts, thousands flee in panic

Mount Merapi
© UnknownMount Merapi erupted three times on Tuesday, emitting searing clouds and volcanic ash
Mount Merapi erupted three times on Tuesday, emitting searing clouds and volcanic ash, a volcanologist said.

Hot ash rained down from the smoke-covered crater, injuring at least 20 people.

"We heard three explosions around 06:00 pm (1100GMT) spewing volcanic material as high as 1.5 kilometres and sending heat clouds down the slopes," government volcanologist Surono told AFP.

Before the latest eruption, people living in the shadow of Indonesia's most active volcano had been warned to evacuate or risk being killed.

Authorities had put an area 10 kilometres around the crater of Mount Merapi on red alert Monday, ordering 19,000 people to flee.

"This eruption is certainly bigger than the 2006 eruption during which the heat clouds occurred for only seven minutes after the eruption," Surono said.

Cloud Lightning

2 Weeks of Flooding in Thailand Kills 57 People

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© AP PhotoA Thai boy sits inside his home surrounded by floodwaters near the Chao Phraya River, in Bangkok on Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010.
Heavy downpours that caused rivers to burst around Thailand have killed 57 people in nearly two weeks of flooding that officials are calling the worst in decades, authorities said Wednesday.

The flooding has affected more than 3 million people in 36 of Thailand's 76 provinces, government medical and disaster agencies said. The floods have eased in a third of those provinces.

More than 4 million sandbags were used to erect walls this week in Bangkok along stretches of the Chao Phraya River, which has swelled with runoffs from upper provinces that officials feared could inundate the capital.

So far, flooding in Bangkok has been minimal but riverside residents were warned to be on alert through Friday, after which current high-tide levels were expected to subside.

Meteor

Flashback SOTT Focus: Cosmic Climate Change is Underway

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Plane Madness

If you thought the volcanic eruption in Iceland was awesome, wait till you see what Mother Nature has in store for us. Increased seismic activity around volcanoes suggests we can look forward to more spectacular eruptions in the months ahead. Mount Redoubt in Alaska is stirring from its slumber while Mount Etna in Italy threatens to enter a new eruptive period. Preparations are being made to evacuate 3,000 people from the Gaua Volcano on the Pacific island of Vanuatu as renewed activity suggests a large eruption is imminent. The Ischia Volcano off the coast of Naples in Italy has some observers worried, although as SOTT.net pointed out in its Connecting the Dots installment for March, it's the 13 major underwater volcanoes off Italy's southern coast that are scientists' primary concern. Somebody had better contact air traffic controllers in central America and explain to them the intricacies of ash particles and jet propulsion. When an eruption at Guatemala's Santiaguito Volcano sent a plume of ash 30,000 feet into the atmosphere and dusted a large swathe of western Guatemala late April, regional airspace remained open for business. Either politicians there care nothing for airlines' safety or they know something the "experts" in Europe do not.

Bizarro Earth

Indonesia struggles as tsunami, volcano tolls rise

damaged building in a village flattened by Monday's earthquake triggered tsunami
© AP Photo/Achmad IbrahimThis aerial photo shows a damaged building in a village flattened by Monday's earthquake triggered tsunami on Pagai island, West Sumatra, Indonesia, Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010. Planes and helicopters packed with rescue workers and supplies landed for the first time Wednesday on remote Indonesian islands that were pounded by a 10-foot (three-meter) tsunami, sweeping away villages and killing at least 154 people.
Mentawai Islands - Helicopters with emergency supplies finally landed Wednesday on the remote Indonesian islands slammed by a tsunami that killed at least 272 people, while elsewhere in the archipelago the toll from a volcanic eruption rose to 30, including the mountain's spiritual caretaker.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono cut short a state visit to Vietnam to rush home to deal with the dual disasters that struck Indonesia within 24 hours, straining the country's ability to respond.

The first aerial surveys of the region hit by the 10-foot (three-meter) tsunami revealed huge swaths of land underwater and the crumbled rubble of homes torn apart by the wave. One house lay tilted, resting on the edge of its red roof, with tires and slabs of concrete piled up on the surrounding sand.

Two days after an undersea earthquake spawned the killer wave, the casualty count was still rising as rescuers landed for the first time on the Mentawai island chain, which was closest to the epicenter and the worst hit. Bad weather had kept them away previously.

Bizarro Earth

US: Massive storm sweeps across country

Storm spawns twisters, downs power lines and leaves considerable damage in its wake

A powerful, 2,200-mile-wide wind storm plowed across the middle of the country Tuesday, spawning tornadoes and brutal wind gusts stretching from the front range of the Rocky Mountains to the eastern Great Lakes.

"It's a huge storm, and it's dominating the wind pattern and the weather over a big chunk of North America," said WGN-TV meteorologist Tom Skilling in Chicago. "And we're not done with this storm yet. The wind is going to blow for another couple days."

Wind gusts Tuesday were in excess of 60 miles per hour in parts of the Midwest, and several tornadoes were reported in Illinois and Wisconsin.

Cloud Lightning

Video: Tornado Makes Landfall in Texas

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A powerful tornado that is associated with the giant storm currently sweeping across the US Midwest made land-fall in Texas yesterday, Oct. 25fth 2010.