Blaze Closes South Entrance To Rocky Mountain National Park

Colorado -- A house fire spread to 15 additional homes in Estes Park around noon on Saturday.The fire, in a cabin on High Drive also spread to nearby wildland, sending a thick plume of black smoke into the sky over Estes Park.The Woodland Heights Fire was reported just after noon and was burning near the south entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. It was estimated at 20 acres in size at 2:30 p.m.

Yellowstone geyser enthusiasts are reporting that a handful of Yellowstone National Park geysers appear to be active again after periods of dormancy, including one geyser that last erupted almost two decades ago.

Morning Geyser, quiet for 18 years, is now active, and there is news that an electronic monitor on Echinus in Norris Geyser Basin picked up an eruption. North Goggles Geyser has also started erupting more regularly than the lone annual display it has typically shown over the past few years. The last time it was this active was 2004. Joining the list of newly reactivated thermal features are Fan and Mortar geysers, which may be beginning an active cycle.

Green flashes at sunset are rare. Indeed, they were once thought mythological. Blue flashes are rarer still. On June 21st Göran Strand of Frösön, Sweden, saw them both in a single sunset:

"Tonight the weather was incredibly clear and fine, so I went out to photograph the sunset--and this was the result," says Strand. "The time interval between the first and last frames is 1 minute and 14 seconds."

Green flashes are formed when the prismatic action of the atmosphere splits the setting sun into basic R-G-B colors. Temperature inversions create a mirage, magnifying the green into an eye-catching flash.

Blues flashes are formed in the same way, but they are generally harder to see than green flashes, because blue flashes blend into the surrounding blue sky. When the air is exceptionally clear, however, the blue flash emerges.

For more rare sights occuring right now, browse the new Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery.

Weld County - Glenn Fritzler's family has been farming their 320 acres for 57 years. It is productive land that has helped them build their family. To succeed here, it took hard work, good soil and one thing they can't do without: water.

"Water to us is actually more valuable than gold," Fritzler said.

In recent years, that has not been a problem. Heavy snows and rains allowed Fritzler and other farmers in Weld County to irrigate their fields with surface water from the South Platte River. This year is different.

Because of the dry winter and spring the South Platte River is not flowing at a level to allow farmers, like Fritzler, to continue to use it as an irrigation source. Unless conditions change Fritzler will not receive any more above surface water for their crops.

"We have no surface water," Fritzler said. "We have an abundance of groundwater, but we do not have the permission to use it."

Date-Time
Friday, June 22, 2012 at 04:31:17 UTC

Friday, June 22, 2012 at 03:31:17 PM at epicenter

Location
54.302°S, 158.727°E

Depth
9.9 km (6.2 miles)

Region
MACQUARIE ISLAND REGION

Distances
24 km (14 miles) NW of Macquarie Island, Australia

1111 km (690 miles) SW of Invercargill, New Zealand

1165 km (723 miles) SW of Gore, New Zealand

1253 km (778 miles) SSW of Queenstown, New Zealand

Following up this article..1.32E+9 of cesium leaked from decontamination system of Areva

Tepco is assuming the broken water gauge caused the leakage of contaminated water.

On 6/15/2012, 3 Tepco workers worked inside of Areva's facility from 3PM to 5PM. The actual time to be inside of the building of the facility was very short but the highest dosage was 1.33 mSv (gamma ray).(Beta ray was 0 mSv.)

Currently this facility is treated as a back-up system, but the actual Fukushima worker Happy11311 tweeted like these below,

た だいまっ (^O^)今日も無事コツコツでした。それにしてもアレバはお荷物でし(>_<)そのうちアレバ装置の建屋は線量高くて入れなくなるでし。ア レバ社にいくら予算を使ったかわかんないけど、ほとんど働いてないくせにメンテナンスも出来ないくらい線量高いし...。

- ハッピーさん (@Happy11311) 6月 14, 2012

<Translate>

The Areva's facility is really a burden. Soon nobody can enter the building where the facility is located. I don't know how much money they spent on the facility, but now it's too radioactive to maintain though it's hardly worked.

<End>

A home in Hudson, Fla., along Florida's west coast, was ripped apart Wednesday after a massive sinkhole opened beneath it.

No one was inside the house, belonging to 79-year-old Susan Minutillo, when it quietly crumbled to the ground, neighbors said.

"You just look over there and the whole back end of the house just flipped right down into the hole," neighbor Mike Richards told First Coast News in Jacksonville, Fla.

Ironically, Minutillo was having her home evaluated for the risk of sinkholes when the ground opened up. As crews were surveying her property, she stepped out to run an errand, and by the time she got home, about half of her house was already in the ground, according to Pasco County Fire Rescue crews.

A back bedroom, bathroom and sunroom were swallowed by the natural disaster, exposing the remaining parts of the house.

Climate change itself is already in the process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human use of fossil fuels is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming. That is because natural climate cycles have already turned from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more.

That is one of the most interesting conclusions to come out of the seventh International Climate Change Conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, held last week in Chicago. I attended, and served as one of the speakers, talking about The Economic Implications of High Cost Energy.

The conference featured serious natural science, contrary to the self-interested political science you hear from government financed global warming alarmists seeking to justify widely expanded regulatory and taxation powers for government bodies, or government body wannabees, such as the United Nations. See for yourself, as the conference speeches are online.

What you will see are calm, dispassionate presentations by serious, pedigreed scientists discussing and explaining reams of data. In sharp contrast to these climate realists, the climate alarmists have long admitted that they cannot defend their theory that humans are causing catastrophic global warming in public debate. With the conference presentations online, let's see if the alarmists really do have any response.

The Heartland Institute has effectively become the international headquarters of the climate realists, an analog to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has achieved that status through these international climate conferences, and the publication of its Climate Change Reconsidered volumes, produced in conjunction with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Those Climate Change Reconsidered volumes are an equivalently thorough scientific rebuttal to the irregular Assessment Reports of the UN's IPCC. You can ask any advocate of human caused catastrophic global warming what their response is to Climate Change Reconsidered. If they have none, they are not qualified to discuss the issue intelligently.

Last week we began discussing the potential for a depression or named storm to form over the Gulf of Mexico or western Caribbean later this week or weekend.

A enhanced pulse of thunderstorms, triggered by the Madden-Julian Oscillation, has arrived in the eastern Pacific, central America and the western Caribbean Sea from off southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Out of this spun up Hurricane Carlotta, which sliced into southern Mexico last week.

Now, winds aloft over the Gulf of Mexico are forecast to become more favorable for low pressure to form and consolidate at least sufficient convection to be deemed either a tropical depression or tropical storm ("Debby" is the next named storm in the list), possibly as soon as late Friday.

Grey skies could not darken the mood as hundreds turned out to celebrate the summer solstice at Britain's ancient Stonehenge site. They partied through the shortest night and into the longest day at the structure which dates back to 3100 BC.