Earth Changes
The U.S. Geological Survey reported the 3.5 magnitude quake struck at 8:53 Wednesday night, centered two miles north-northwest of Auburn.
Nemaha County authorities reported no injuries.
The quake was felt by people in several nearby Nebraska towns, including Peru, Nebraska City, and Dunbar. It also was felt across the Missouri River in Hamburg, Iowa; and Rock Port, Mo.
Though not known for its earthquakes, Nebraska has experienced several notable shakes since its founding as a state in 1867.
Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North)
Several inches of snow fell in East Anglia and Cambridgeshire with a peppering of showers in other parts of the country, including the Midlands and Essex. The Met Office also issued severe weather warnings for very heavy snowfall in London, the North East, Yorkshire and Humber and the East Midlands
Local authorities and transport agencies were on high alert last night, with fleets of gritters and de-icing lorries ready to be dispatched to keep key commuting routes clear today.
As commuters anticipated disruption this morning, a spokesman for Transport for London insisted that lessons had been learnt after snowfall brought the entire bus network to a standstill in February and paralysed other public transport links.
Portuguese scientists have found a depression on the Atlantic Ocean floor they think may be an impact crater.
The roughly circular, 6km-wide hollow has a broad central dome and has been dubbed the "Fried Egg" because of its distinctive shape.
It was detected to the south of the Azores Islands during a survey to map the continental shelf. If the Fried Egg was made by a space impactor, the collision probably took place within the past 17 million years.
This is the likely maximum age of the basaltic sea-floor rock which harbours the feature. "To be sure, we need to take samples and make a profile of the sediment layers to determine if there really is a central uplift from an impact," explained Dr Frederico Dias from EMEPC (Task Group for the Extension of the Portuguese Continental Shelf).
"Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days," Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark's Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. "There's a good chance of a white Christmas."
Delegates from 193 countries have been in Copenhagen since Dec. 7 to discuss how to fund global greenhouse gas emission cuts. U.S. President Barack Obama will arrive before the summit is scheduled to end tomorrow.
Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn't had a white Christmas for 14 years, under the DMI's definition, and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as minus 4 Celsius (25 Fahrenheit).
DMI defines a white Christmas as 90 percent of the country being covered by at least 2 centimeters of snow on the afternoon of Dec. 24.

Many people from the evacuated villages have been creeping back to look after their crops and animals.
The picturesque Mayon volcano continued to spout spectacular fountains of ash into the sky amid a series of minor eruptions, heightening concerns that a major explosion could occur at any time.
Earthquakes inside Mayon also increased due to the enormous pressure of the ever-increasing amount of lava on its slopes, according to the government's volcanology institute.
"The important thing is that people should not be in those danger zones when a hazardous explosion happens," said chief government volcanologist Renato Solidum.
The so-called danger zone is a radius of six to eight kilometres (3.5 to five miles) from Mayon, and nearly 50,000 people have been evacuated from those areas since the volcano began spewing lava on Monday.
Australia's prime minister had a Copenhagen photo opportunity whistle stop in his dedicated jet and expended more fuel on this trip than the Arkaroola Wilderness Resort does in a year. Your taxes payed for 114 Australian bureaucrats to attend this junket yet some 71 UK delegates attended.
The UK Taxpayers' Alliance calculated the conference cost as much as the GDP of Malawi. If such funds were used to provide electricity and drinking water to Malawian families, then land clearing, wood and dung burning and disease would decrease. Now, that would have been true environmentalism!

Al Gore's office admitted that the percentage he quoted in his speech was from an old, ballpark figure
The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change "spin" row.
Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.
In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: "These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years."
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
"It's unclear to me how this figure was arrived at," Dr Maslowski said. "I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this."

Richard Pain, 45, a Sydney film-maker and environmentalist, is planning to swim 9000 kilometres across the Pacific Ocean.
"I realize it's completely mad," said the filmmaker, 45, who is selling his Randwick home to raise some of the money needed for the project.
"But I'm aware there is a lot of green fatigue in the broader population. This is a way to try and raise awareness by doing something more compelling. It's like trying to do an environmental version of Super Size Me."
After a two-year, $3.5 million study, the U.S.-Canadian panel concluded there was no reason to stem the flow from Lake Huron by placing structures in a river that connects Huron with Lake Erie to the south.
The report disagreed with Georgian Bay Forever, a Canadian environmental charity that has commissioned engineering studies of the St. Clair River. Those studies found that human activities, primarily dredging during the early 1960s, enlarged the river bottom and increased the volume of water moving down the river from Lake Huron to Lake Erie.
Because of that, the group says, Lake Huron is losing up to 12 billion gallons per day in addition to its normal outflow - enough to fill 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.









Comment: This article might be of interest as well: Fireball: Curious Events In Nebraska: Dec. 16, 2009