© Alamy
A United Airlines Boeing 767-300, similar to the one forced into an emergency landing at Shannon airport.
Severe turbulence, which recently forced the emergency landing of a transatlantic flight, is on the rise. But why and what can be done?
United Airlines Flight 880 was carrying more than 200 passengers from Houston, Texas, to London's Heathrow airport two weeks ago when it was battered by turbulence that threw people on to the cabin ceiling. Twenty-three people were injured. "We were flying along as smooth as can be and then were just slapped massively from the top as if someone had torpedoed us," one passenger told journalists.
The aircraft, a Boeing 767-300, made an emergency landing at Shannon airport and the injured were taken to University Hospital, Limerick. No one was seriously hurt but all went through a terrifying experience and one, say experts, which will increasingly affect flights.
"It is predicted there will be more and more incidents of severe clear-air turbulence, which typically comes out of the blue with no warning, occurring in the near future as climate change takes its effect in the stratosphere," Dr Paul Williams, a Royal Society research fellow at Reading University, said last week.
"There has already been a steady rise in incidents of severe turbulence affecting flights over the past few decades. Globally, turbulence causes dozens of fatalities a year on small private planes and hundreds of injuries to passengers in big jets. And as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere keep on rising, so will the numbers of incidents."
Comment: The earthquake ties for Oklahoma's strongest earthquake on record, the first coming in November 2011. No major damage was immediately reported. An increase in magnitude 3.0 or greater earthquakes in Oklahoma has been linked to underground disposal of wastewater from oil and natural gas production. State regulators have asked producers to reduce wastewater disposal volumes in earthquake-prone regions of the state.
Some parts of Oklahoma now match northern California for the nation's most shake prone, and one Oklahoma region has a 1 in 8 chance of a damaging quake in 2016, with other parts closer to 1 in 20. An estimated 10 million people felt the earthquake across Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Tennessee, and Alabama.