Event Time
2014-03-11 22:03:11 UTC
2014-03-12 08:03:11 UTC+10:00 at epicenter

Location
3.113°S 148.477°E depth=10.0km (6.2mi)

Nearby Cities
180km (112mi) SE of Lorengau, Papua New Guinea
264km (164mi) WSW of Kavieng, Papua New Guinea
326km (203mi) NW of Kimbe, Papua New Guinea
378km (235mi) NE of Madang, Papua New Guinea
714km (444mi) NNE of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

Technical Details

Event Time
2014-03-11 02:44:05 UTC
2014-03-11 01:44:05 UTC-01:00 at epicenter

Location
60.839°S 19.957°W depth=10.0km (6.2mi)

Nearby Cities
418km (260mi) ESE of Bristol Island, South Sandwich Islands
2879km (1789mi) ESE of Ushuaia, Argentina
3125km (1942mi) SE of Punta Arenas, Chile
3136km (1949mi) SE of Rio Gallegos, Argentina
2513km (1562mi) SE of Stanley, Falkland Islands

Technical Details

The Dubbo community have been asked to help solve a mystery that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of native birds, including galahs, correllas and cockatoos.

While there were indications the birds died from ingesting a pesticide, a spokeswoman from the NSW Environment Protection Authority said they were still waiting on final test results to confirm the cause of the deaths.

"The early indication is that pesticide was involved...(and) hopefully we will have the test results soon," she said.

In the meantime, the spokeswoman asked for any members of the community with information to call the EPA's EnviroLine on 131 555 to help investigators.

The NSW Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education Service (WIRES) also called for people with information to step forward, as the number of dead birds continued to rise.

I have already well covered the Met Office report into the recent storms, issued last month, but Dr Butina alerted me to one particular comment which I had missed. In the BBC article, Julia Slingo, introducing the report, is reported as saying:

"The UK had seen the most exceptional period of rainfall in 248 years."

Unsettled weather at this time of year was not unexpected - but the prolonged spell of rain, as well as the intensity and height of coastal waves, was "very unusual".

"We have records going back to 1766 and we have nothing like this," she said. "We have seen some exceptional weather. We can't say it is unprecedented but it is exceptional."

Dr Butina has his own full analysis here, which is worth a read. But, as soon as I read this statement again, I realised it simply was not true.

Let me explain.

A 10-metre whale died on Sunday after becoming tangled in a Tunisian fisherman's nets off the coast of Sidi Bou Said town north of the capital Tunis.

"At first, I thought it was a car bumper. Then I saw the whale's tail," the 24-year-old Bilel Jerbi told AFP.

He said the whale, whose species has yet to be identified, was already dying when he found it in his nets, although it was unclear what had killed it.

Jerbi then towed the carcass to port in Sidi Bou Said.

The marine mammal was around 10 metres in length and weighed "seven or eight tons", according to an official from the Tunisian coastguard.

"We have seen three- or four-metre-long whales before. But it's the first time for one of this size or weight," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

An earthquake with a magnitude 6.3 occurred in the ocean to the south of the Mexican coast today, the US Geological Survey reports.

The epicentre of earthquake shocks registered at 4:38 Moscow time was located 32km south-west of the town of Pinotepa Nacional in Oaxaca State. The seismic centre lay 35km deep. There is no information about damage or casualties.

A massive 6.9-magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of Northern California Sunday evening, 50 miles west of Eureka, Calif., according to the USGS.

The earthquake was recorded at around 10:18 p.m. Pacific and KTVU viewers say they felt it as far away as Redwood City.

"Felt the Eureka earthquake all the way down here in Redwood City. Friends up there say shaking lasted 30-60 seconds," wrote viewer Kristopher Rowberry on KTVU's Facebook page.

USGS seismologist Susan Hoover says more than 300 people have reported feeling the temblor on their website as of 10:49 p.m., according to the Associated Press.

By 11:15 p.m., that number had increased to 1300 people.

Event Time
2014-03-10 05:18:12 UTC
2014-03-09 21:18:12 UTC-08:00 at epicenter

Location
40.821°N 125.128°W depth=7.0km (4.3mi)

Nearby Cities
77km (48mi) WNW of Ferndale, California
81km (50mi) W of Eureka, California
85km (53mi) WNW of Fortuna, California
87km (54mi) W of McKinleyville, California
398km (247mi) NW of Sacramento, California

Technical Details

So I was walking with my dog in the evening just before sunset, we were traveling into vast fields of nature to escape common modern view. By accident I found a pond. It caught my interest since I saw a waterhole in the middle of it. Usually people drills waterholes in their ponds where fish lives, at winter time, so fish can breathe. I thought I will see some fishes and stuff... But as soon as I came closer, I noticed that it was evaporating.

You can't see this in the video since I was filming with my phone which has shitty camera. When I stepped on that frozen pond, farther away from that waterhole (where I was standing) ice was 20 centimeters thick or even more. And that waterhole looked like it was melted with fire or something... You can see around that waterhole that there is snow or maybe ice particles blasted away from the center of this waterhole.

Floods of the European Alps

Background

The authors write that "severe floods triggered by intense precipitation are among the most destructive natural hazards in Alpine environments, frequently causing large financial and social damage," and they say that "potential enhanced flood occurrence due to global climate change would thus increase threats to settlements, infrastructure, and human lives in the affected regions." However, they note that, currently, "projections of intense precipitation exhibit major uncertainties" and that "robust reconstructions of Alpine floods are limited to the instrumental and historical period," giving one reason to question whether global warming would lead to such a consequence.

What was done

In a study designed to reduce these uncertainties and extend reconstructions back in time beyond the instrumental period, Glur et al. developed "a multi-archive Alpine flood reconstruction based on ten lacustrine sediment records, covering the past 2500 years." More specifically, they studied ten lakes situated north of the Central Alpine arc along a montane-to-Alpine transect, spanning an elevation gradient from 447 to 2068 m asl," which allowed "the extraction of a synoptic, rather than a merely local rainfall signal revealed by a single-lake study." And to verify their approach to the subject, they compared the last 500 years of their Central Alpine flood reconstruction with an independently established flood record for that period that was based on historical documents, as developed and described by Schmocker-Fackel and Naef (2010).

What was learned

"Regarding the best-characterized climatic periods during the past 2500 years," the eight researchers report that "flood activity was generally enhanced during the Little Ice Age (1430-1850 C.E.; LIA) compared to the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950-1250 C.E.; MCA)." And they say that "this result is confirmed by other studies documenting an increased (decreased) flood activity during the LIA (MCA) in the Alps," citing the studies of Schmocker-Fackel and Naef (2010), Czymzik et al. (2010), Wilhelm et al. (2012) and Swierczynski et al. (2012).