Earth ChangesS


Cloud Lightning

Bangladesh faces "unusual" monsoon, fears flooding

Flood-prone Bangladesh is bracing for an unusual and unpredictable monsoon this year, with environment experts and officials blaming global warming, melting Himalayan glaciers, silted rivers and unplanned roads.

Heavy rains last week triggered landslides in the southern port city of Chittagong, burying at least 128 people alive.

Floods caused by days of torrential rain, described by weather officials as unusually heavy and devastating, inundated at least a dozen out of Bangladesh's 64 administrative districts.

Question

Florida: Marine Officials Warn Of Biting Dolphins

Marine researchers are warning about a growing number of dolphin bite cases in Sarasota County, according to a Local 6 News report.

Florida experts said wild dolphins are becoming more aggressive because boaters are feeding them.

"It seems reasonable to understand why you wouldn't feed a bear or something more dangerous-appearing, but these are wild animals," dolphin researcher Jason Allen said. "They are wild animals with lots of sharp teeth."

Better Earth

Freak winter is Europe's warmest for 700 years

Last autumn-winter season was Europe's warmest for more than 700 years, researchers say.

The last time Europeans saw similar temperatures to the autumn and winter of 2006-07, they were eating strawberries at Christmas in 1289, according to Jürg Luterbacher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and colleagues.

European climate measurements and temperature records stretch back several hundred years - UK records are the longest available, going back to 1659. Estimating historical temperatures beyond then involves scrutinising contemporary documents and diaries.

"People in churches, or doctors, wrote diaries, and usually they also included information about weather and climate. Climate historians can use and interpret this information and translate it into a temperature value," explains Luterbacher, who worked with climate historians to compare past and recent temperatures

Cloud Lightning

Search for Missing After Flash Flooding in NY Catskill Mountains

Severe thunderstorms caused flash flooding that washed out roads in the southern Catskill Mountains, and police said at least four people were reported missing Wednesday.

One death was blamed on the storms elsewhere in the state.

Up to eight inches of rain fell in two hours late Tuesday as the storms rolled across the region, washing out roads and homes and slamming trees into bridges in the rural area.

Cloud Lightning

Japan struggling with water shortages

Certain regions of Japan have begun taking precautionary measures in light of a growing water shortage across the Asian nation.

With Japan receiving a limited amount of rain during the first half of the year, authorities in certain regions have begun implementing new policies to stretch the nation's dwindling water supply, the Mainichi Shimbun reported Wednesday.

Question

Flashback Vanishing lake baffles Russians

Residents of a village in central Russia are trying to solve the mystery of a lake that disappeared overnight.

Russia's NTV channel showed a huge, muddy basin where the lake once was, in the village of Bolotnikovo.

©BBC

Question

Large lake in southern Chile disappears

A lake in southern Chile has mysteriously disappeared, prompting speculation the ground has simply opened up and swallowed it whole.

The lake was situated in the Magallanes region in Patagonia and was fed by water, mostly from melting glaciers.

©REUTERS/CONAF/Handout
Workers from Chile's National Forestry Corporation (CONAF) stand at the bottom of a dried lake in Magallanes, south of Santiago.

Bulb

Climate Change: Read the sunspots

The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change - and that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling

Snowman

Forget warming - beware the new ice age

In the 1970s, leading scientists claimed that the world was threatened by an era of global cooling.

Based on what we've learned this decade, says George Kukla, those scientists - and he was among them -- had it right. The world is about to enter another Ice Age.

Wolf

Prey not hard-wired to fear predators

Are Asian elk hard-wired to fear the Siberian tigers who stalk them" When wolves disappear from the forest, are moose still afraid of them?

No, according to a study by Wildlife Conservation Society scientist Dr. Joel Berger, who says that several large prey species, including moose, caribou and elk, only fear predators they regularly encounter. If you take away wolves, you take away fear. That is a critical piece of knowledge as biologists and public agencies increase efforts to re-introduce large carnivores to places where they have been exterminated. Berger's study is published in the latest issue of the journal Conservation Biology.