A massive sinkhole opened up in a residential neighbourhood in Windermere, Florida today that was 100 feet across and nearly 50 feet deep.

Luckily, no one was hurt in the freak accident, though the massive hole displaced a family of six, which had to be evacuated with aid of the fire department.

The cause of the sinkhole is unknown, but officials believe the dry weather conditions experienced in parts of the south could have contributed to the hole.

The full Moon has a reputation for trouble. It raises high tides, it makes dogs howl, it wakes you up in the middle of the night with beams of moonlight stealing through drapes. If a moonbeam wakes you up on the night of May 5th, 2012, you might want to get out of bed and take a look. This May's full Moon is a "super Moon," as much as 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full Moons of 2012.

Greenland's ice sheet is on the move, with new images showing its glaciers moving 30 percent faster than they were a decade ago.

Greenland and Antarctica are home to the two biggest blocks of ice on Earth. As climate changes, these glacier are shrinking and the water contained in them is moving into the oceans, adding to the already rising sea level.

A glacier's velocity is a measure of how fast the ice on the surface of the sheet is flowing toward the edges of the sheet.

This flow can be faster or slower, depending on how much the glacier is melting. The faster the flow, the more water and ice mass is lost from the glacier.

"You can think of the Greenland ice sheet as a really large lake that has hundreds of those little outlet streams that are acting like conveyor belts to move ice from the middle of the ice sheet, where it's getting added by precipitation, to the edges," study researcher Twila Moon, a graduate student at the University of Washington, told LiveScience.

After a mini heatwave and the wettest April on record, now parts of Britain are braced for a taste of some wintry weather.

Forecasters say it will be turning much colder as we head towards the weekend, with some areas seeing unseasonable frost and sub-zero temperatures.

Sky weather presenter Nazaneen Ghaffar said: "It's all thanks to a cold front slowly moving southwards across the UK on Friday. This will bring with it colder air into northern areas.

It'll be chilly for Scotland and Northern Ireland and northern Scotland could see a few wintry showers.

"On Saturday again some wintry showers are likely over the hills of Scotland."

Flood warnings and alerts remain in place after the recent heavy rainfall, with some rivers set to reach their peaks.

The Environment Agency is urging people to keep away from swollen rivers and not attempt to walk or drive through flood waters.

Residents of Morro Grande, São José dos Missing, reported that at 10am on Monday there was rain for about a minute of white ice grains (granular snow).

This was verified by the MetSul Meteorology, whose survey indicated freezing rain in Bento Goncalves, Caxias do Sul, San Marcos High Happy, Cinnamon, Capon Beautiful South, Ipe and Vacaria, San Joaquin in Santa Catarina, and possibly in Aparados and Serra Gaucho.

In the case of freezing rain, which looks like a kid sleet, precipitation leaves the cloud like snowflakes on a cold portion of the atmosphere. Then it goes through an intermediate layer of warmer air, but because it is not thick enough, it just melts part of the flakes. Before reaching the surface, however, the flakes are melted by a new layer of cooler air and they freeze yet again, precipitating in the form of ice.

The conditions were thus very conducive to the occurrence of winter precipitation (snow or freezing rain) with cold air temperatures and negative between 1500 and 2000 meters altitude, and the presence of a trough (an area of ​​lower pressure) on the River Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. It is one of the classic models for snow in southern Brazil: a continental high-pressure trough or cyclone ensuring moisture flow.

Source: Metsul Blog (In Portuguese)

A plume of volcanic smoke is seen rising from the appropriately-named Mount Asphyxia volcano, located on Zavodovski Island in the southern Atlantic. The image was acquired on April 27 by NASA's Aqua satellite.

Zavodovski is part of the South Sandwich Islands, a group of 11 British-owned islands located 217 miles southeast of South Georgia, off the tip of South America. Only 3.1 miles wide, the icy island is dominated by the 1,800-foot-high stratovolcano.

Aptly named, the sulphuric fumes from Asphyxia coupled with the stench of penguin droppings -- the island is a breeding ground for millions of chinstrap penguins -- can be suffocating for human visitors.

Experts say a "swarm" of small earthquakes off the northwest coast of Vancouver Island are part of the normal seismic activity in the area, and they could continue for several more days.

A 4.0 magnitude earthquake that struck just after midnight on Tuesday morning was the eighth small quake with a magnitude between 3.8 and 4.7 to strike the region since April 22.
Pacific Geoscience Centre Seismologist Gary Rogers said the activity is focused along a 20-kilometre stretch along an area called the Raveer Delwood Fault, located about 200 kilometres offshore.

"In the very thin crust that we have out there off our west coast of Vancouver Island, it often fractures in a series of small earthquakes, usually about this size being the maximum."

Rogers said more small earthquakes are expected in the area over the next week.

"They often go on for days. There's been a lot of smaller ones, so eventually they'll wind down, but typically, what we've seen in the past is that most of these swarms last a few days to a week or so."

Southern England and Wales were on high flood alert Tuesday, with thousands of homes at risk from a deluge that has killed one person after Britain's wettest April in over 100 years.

Rivers were being closely monitored as flood defences held back muddy water from over 25,000 homes, the Environment Agency said. A total of 40 warnings of expected flooding and 152 alerts for possible floods were in place Tuesday.

"There is still a risk of flooding across many parts of England and Wales with particular focus on Somerset, Dorset and Devon," the agency said Monday evening, ahead of a night of thunder and heavy showers.

Forecasters the Met Office said Tuesday that heavy rain was starting to ease but "there will still be a good deal of standing water and a continued risk of localised flooding since river levels remain high".

Gulf of Alaska Keeper, a non-profit organization that estimates it has cleared nearly 1,000,000 pounds of plastic debris from Alaskan coasts over the past 10 years, is reporting "tons" of what it believes is likely tsunami debris washing up on the coasts of the Kayak and Montague islands. Chris Pallister, president of Gulf of Alaska Keeper, told Alaska's KTUU TV that "It's a staggering mess [...] the magnitude of this is just hard to comprehend and I've been looking at this stuff a long time."

In an email to The SunBreak, Pallister let loose:

In my opinion, this is the single greatest environmental pollution event that has ever hit the west coast of North America. The slow-motion aspects of it have fooled an unwitting public. It far exceeds the Santa Barbara or Exxon Valdez oil spills in gross tonnage and also geographic scope. (I was in Prince William Sound during the during the Exxon Valdez oil spill and so have a sense of comparison).

Tens of thousands of miles of coastline from California to the Aleutian Islands are going to be hit with billions of pounds of toxic debris. NOAA's latest estimate is that 1.5 million tons of largely plastic debris will hit the western United States coast. That is 30 billion pounds. We expect Alaska to get the largest percentage of that with much of it lodging on northern Gulf of Alaska beaches. Most of this will be plastic which is full of inherent toxic chemicals that will leach into the environment for generations.

Possibly worse are the millions of containers full of anything from household chemicals to toxic industrial chemicals that are floating our way. They will eventually burst upon our shores...in sensitive inter-tidal spawning and rearing habitat, endangering shorebirds, marine mammals, fish and everything in between. We are already finding empty and partially full containers of tsunami related chemicals and fuel drums along the northern Gulf of Alaska shoreline. The heavier fuller containers will come later because the wind doesn't push them as fast toward the Gulf of Alaska as they are more current driven. The light-weight, high-windage debris such as Styrofoam, buoys, bottles, empty containers and drums have already arrived in staggering quantities.

Everyone is careful to say the debris is only "suspected" of having come from Japan's March 2011 tsunami; there is plenty of marine debris on the ocean in general. Here is Pallister on the scope of the everyday marine debris problem.

• Evidence was found in a rare mineral that records global temperatures
• Warming was far-reaching and NOT limited to Europe
• Throws doubt on orthodoxies around 'global warming'

Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times areas as far apart as Europe and Antarctica both warmed up.

It then cooled down naturally and there was even a 'mini ice age'.

A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that the 'Medieval Warm Period' approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn't just confined to Europe.

In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica.