Earth Changes
TEMPERATURES plummeted to a record breaking -12C this morning as winter made its presence felt across Australia's south east.
AUSTRALIA may have just recorded its coldest temperature of 2017 as a series of cold fronts barrelled across the country's south east on Sunday.
NSW and Victoria both had a freezing start to the day dropping to -12C in the mountains. Qantas has been forced to de-ice planes at Melbourne — a task usually only needed in Canberra and Hobart.
Sunday will still be chilly for Melbourne, Canberra and Hobart but temperatures will rise further north.
South of the Murray, the mercury in Ballarat fell to -2.1C, in Bairnsdale to -3.5C and at Mount Hotham to -7.8C.
But that's nothing on NSW and the ACT where residents of Orange woke to a low of -6.3C, and Canberra fell to -7C. But the mountain resort of Perisher knocked it out of the winter ballpark slumping to -12.1C at 3.30am.

As frightening as it is spectacular, summer lightning is both a sight to behold and a force to avoid.
On Monday, a 27-year-old swim instructor in Florida was walking to work when lightning struck an antenna atop a pole that was 75 yards away from her. The effects of the indirect lightning strike were so serious that she was hospitalized. She said she felt the shock, describing as a burning sensation. A surveillance camera caught her stopping short as the strike occurs, then bolting toward the office door.
Do you need an excuse to turn the heater on in winter? Low ambient room temperatures will thicken your blood.
Moderate cold accounted for as many as 6.6% of all deaths. Extreme temperatures (either cold or hot) were responsible for only 0·86%.
Join the dots — will we save more lives by:
a) making homes cold now in the hope that lower "carbon" emissions will,
b) mean less deaths from heat in 90 years time despite people probably having better access to heaters and air conditioners?
Would you sacrifice ten years of your life...
An evacuation alert was issued for Williams Lake and surrounding areas in Cariboo Regional District on Saturday.
"All individuals in the City [Williams Lake] and the above areas must evacuate immediately," the order stated.
Around 12,000 people live in the city, and the same number of people in the surrounding areas were also ordered to evacuate, CBC Canada reported.
Following an increase of earthquakes over the past days, an intense seismic crisis started 22:20 local time last night - sign of the magma moving towards the surface.
The eruption itself, when the magma reached the surface, began at around 00:50 this morning from a new fissure on the SSW slope of Dolomieu crater near the Chateau Fort cinder cone.
The local government said it expects the flooding to subside by September.
Flood-water levels are almost 2 feet high, submerging the Sangguniang Bayan headquarters, the police station and several houses.
The mercury hit 1 degree Celsius on Wednesday morning at Schefferville and the slush has been seen by many citizens. According to Francois Desy, who lives in the community with almost 200 people, the snow was visible a little more in altitude, on the small mountains near the city. Some white spots were visible on the mountains at low altitude.
Up to five centimetres come down in the city's first snowfall for decades, causing havoc in the Chilean capital.
More than 280,000 people have reportedly been left without power in Santiago after a rare blanket of snow hit the Chilean capital.
About 3-5cm of the white stuff came down on Saturday in what some reports say is the first snowfall there for 20 years.
A security guard at a medical facility died from an apparent heart attack while trying to clear snow, according to reports, while trees struck electricity lines.
And two other people - a 15-year-old girl and her grandmother - were thought to have been injured after they suffered electric shocks from a damaged cable.
The snow has also led to treacherous driving conditions.
Greece's Institute of Geodynamics says that a magnitude 5.3 earthquake has rattled the island of Crete. The earthquake occurred on Saturday at 11:30 pm local time off the southern coast of Crete, at a depth of 10 kilometres.
The Institute reported that the epicentre is near the coastal town of Ierapetra and about 60 kilometres southeast of the island's largest city, Heraklion.
Although the temblor was felt strongly in the eastern part of Crete, according to local media, no casualties or damages have been reported so far. Three aftershocks, each of a magnitude of 3.5, have occurred within half an hour of the main quake.
Greece lies in an especially earthquake-prone zone and tremors of this magnitude are not considered exceptional.

A man picks up sandbags to reinforce the barrier he built to keep the flood water from reaching his house Friday, July 14, 2017, in Gurnee, Ill. Illinois officials said Friday that several thousand buildings have been affected by “unprecedented” flooding north of Chicago, and the damage is expected to worsen this weekend as water flows down rivers into the state from Wisconsin.
Heavy rains have left large swaths of the region under water. Severe flooding has closed roadways and knocked out power.
The flooding is being called unprecedented. Authorities say two months of rain have fallen in just 12 hours in Gurnee, north of Chicago. It's not uncommon to see flooding here, 1.6 trillion gallons of water fell this week on portions of Wisconsin and Illinois, where Bruce Rauner is the governor.
"Folks think because it's not raining anymore, things are just fine or getting better -- they're not," Rauner says.
In Lake County, Illinois, 5,800 buildings have reportedly been damaged by flood water. Forecasters say flooding in the northern Chicago suburbs will get worse over the next few days as water flows down rivers into the state from Wisconsin.













Comment: Last month snow and heavy rains disrupted mining operations in the desert region of northern Chile.