A frightening collision of weather systems is brewing and could create a tempest even worse than 1991's "Perfect Storm." This "Frankenstorm," as some are calling it, is set to strike the Northeast on or near the 21st anniversary of that historic squall.

On the one hand you have Hurricane Sandy barreling north, expected to hit somewhere on the U.S. East Coast in the middle of next week. At the same time, a cold front is moving across the middle of the country, bringing cold temperatures and snow.

The two will probably meet about the time the hurricane makes landfall and, together, could form an even bigger nor'easter (snor'eastercane, some have said). And that's bad news.

"In all likelihood, it will be worse than the Perfect Storm," said William Komaromi, a hurricane expert at the University of Miami.

One person has died and buildings were damaged after a powerful, 5.3 magnitude earthquake hit southern Italy in the middle of the night on Friday. An 84-year-old man died of a heart attack when the quake struck the province of Cosenza in the southern region of Calabria, Italy.The quake struck at 3.15am (0115 GMT), when most people were asleep in bed. Many people spent the rest of the night outdoors, afraid to return to their homes."I got up, it was the middle of the night, and ran out into the street. Outside there were lots of people and there was rubble all over the ground," Vincenzo Alberti, who lives in Mormanno, told Corriere della Sera.A hospital in the small town of Mormanno was evacuated after cracks emerged and many homes were damaged.

This morning, U.S. forecasters are predicting a convergence of Hurricane Sandy, an early winter storm in the west and cold arctic blast from north which would make for some very messy and expensive weather over the Northeast US and Atlantic provinces for the first half of next week.

"It'll be a rough couple days from Hatteras up to Cape Cod," said Jim Cisco, a forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "We don't have many modern precedents for what the models are suggesting."

Forecasting the weather 4 or 5 days before it happens is difficult because so much can change in that time. However, it's also difficult to dismiss the results when every piece of guidance you use starts pointing towards the same thing, with even greater certainty, each time you update your forecast.

That's what's happening right now.

The computer models forecasters use for guidance in making their forecasts showed the first indications of the merger of these weather systems, and the results of each subsequent model have made it more and more likely.

A giant moth with a 1ft (30cm) wingspan has been found on a windowsill in Greater Manchester.

The Atlas moth is the biggest moth in the world and is normally found thousands of miles away in South East Asia.

When it landed at a house in Ramsbottom, it was so large the Blackmore family "thought it was a bat".

The moth, which only lives for a week, has since died but 30 of its offspring are being reared at a butterfly farm in Bolton.

How the moth arrived in Ramsbottom is a mystery although it's believed to have escaped from a private collection.

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Event Time
2012-10-21 01:25:22 UTC+00:00 at epicenter

Location
66.296°N 18.685°W depth=9.9km (6.2mi)

Nearby Cities
18km (11mi) NNE of Siglufjordur, Iceland
73km (45mi) NNW of Akureyri, Iceland
283km (176mi) NNE of Reykjavik, Iceland
286km (178mi) NNE of Kopavogur, Iceland
291km (181mi) NNE of Hafnarfjordur, Iceland

Icelandic authorities warned people in the north of the island on Thursday to prepare for a possible big earthquake after the biggest tremors in the area for 20 years. The north Atlantic island, where almost 320,000 people live, is a hotspot of volcanic and seismic activity as it straddles a fault in the earth's surface.

The Civil Protection Department said in a statement that recent small quakes in an area under the sea about 20 km (12 miles) off the north of Iceland had prompted it to issue a warning to local people. It said such shocks, one of which was a magnitude 5.6, often led to stronger quakes. Warnings were issued when there were grounds to expect a natural or manmade event that could threaten health and human safety, it added.

"People are anxious because they don't know what might happen," said Amundi Gunnarsson, chief of the fire brigade in Fjallabyggd, one of the small towns in the area, and a member of the Civil Protection Department. "At the same time, life goes on as usual. People are going to work and children are going to school, but everyone is on alert," he told Reuters by telephone.

A sharp tremor was recorded by USGS monitors just after 9 p.m. Wednesday at the site of the giant Louisiana sinkhole in Assumption Parish. The giant sinkhole appeared in August near the Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou areas.The Assumption Parish Police Jury says the tremor was large enough that the body wave phases could easily be identified. A body wave travels through the interior of the earth.
The preliminary location of the tremor was just SE of Oxy #3 cavern at a depth of 500m. There is no additional information specific to this seismic activity at this time. The sinkhole is now about four acres in size. Residents were forced from their homes on August third, two months after the bayous started bubbling. They are still evacuated from their homes.

Hurricane Sandy, which on Thursday was barreling through the Bahamas as a Category 2 storm, may be taking aim at the northeastern United States and could make landfall along the Atlantic coast early next week. If so, forecasters say, the storm could become, to use a technical term from meteorology, a whopper.

"It really could be an extremely significant, historic storm," said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami, explaining that conditions are similar to those that created the famous "perfect storm" of 1991.

Hurricane prediction is, of course, an iffy business, said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman for the National Hurricane Center, who noted that the storm was still days from the East Coast and could weaken drastically or even shift course and race off into the Atlantic.

The chain of events that would make Hurricane Sandy develop into a grave threat to the coast involves a storm system known as a midlatitude trough that is moving across the country from the west. If the systems meet up, as many computer models predict, the storm over land could draw the hurricane in.

"Now you've got this giant storm complex with a lot of energy," Mr. Feltgen said. The combined systems could produce high winds, heavy rains and storm surges that would cause extensive damage.

With Halloween approaching, it's natural to wonder just a little bit more than usual about things that go "bump" in the night. But what about things that go "bloop" in the deep sea?

Poltergeists, witches and ghosts aren't the only source for spooky seasonal mystery. In fact, scientists monitoring the oceans have uncovered a handful of sounds that can't be explained - at least not with any certainty.

With names like "The Bloop," "Train" and "Julia," the sounds have been captured by hydrophones, or underwater microphones, monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Here are the six most mysterious noises ever heard in the sea, and what might have made them. [Listen to the Six Spooky Sounds]

1. The Bloop

The decidedly nonspooky nickname for this sound does little to dispel the mystery surrounding it. In 1997, NOAA hydrophones picked up one of the loudest sounds ever recorded off the southern coast of South America: the Bloop (which sounds like, well, a bloop), was recorded by two hydrophones nearly 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) apart.

The Bloop mimics marine animal sounds in some ways, but its volume is too great to be made by any sea creatures known to science. If your imagination is running away from you, you're not alone: Plenty of listeners have jokingly linked the Bloop to Cthulhu, a fictional part-octopus monster created by sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft in 1928.

Deep-sea monsters aside, NOAA holds the most likely explanation for The Bloop is that it was the sound of a large iceberg fracturing. These "icequakes" have been recorded in the Scotia Sea and sound very similar to the mystery 1997 Bloop. If a cracking iceberg were the source, according to NOAA, it would have likely been floating between the Bransfield Strait and the Ross Sea of Antarctica, or perhaps at Cape Adare in East Antarctica.

2011 meteorological autumn was unusual in that both a hurricane and an October snowstorm hit the north-east. They occurred two months apart, and the idea that either one would happen again in the near-term was not something high up on the probability scale. But if there is one thing more unpredictable than politics, it's the weather.

Government forecasters are warning that the US east coast is likely to be battered next week, not by a winter storm or a hurricane, but by an unusual combination of steady gale-force winds, flooding, heavy rain and possibly snow. It has already been dubbed the "snor'eastercane".

Hurricane Sandy is currently approaching the Bahamas. With 105mph winds and a central low pressure of 964 millibars, Sandy seems likely at this point to hit the east coast of the United States. Where and how Sandy will make her mark is still very much up in the up air.

Here's what we know for sure: the National Hurricane Center's latest track has Sandy staying well off the coast for the next 72 hours. Pretty much all weather models agree on this track. Most often that a storm such as Sandy would go out to sea at this point - following the warm waters of the Gulf stream.