Earth ChangesS

Star

Adelaide bakes in 75-year heatwave

It has been 75 years since Adelaide has seen such an extraordinary heat wave in autumn, and the weather bureau says there is no relief in sight.

Adelaide is bracing itself for another week of searing heat in the mid to high thirties Celsius.

Cloud Lightning

Fears of a tsunami in the Mediterranean

The Mediterranean is at much higher risk than thought of a major quake of the kind that struck hundreds of year ago to trigger a huge tsunami that wiped out Crete and devastated coastal regions as far away as Egypt, Dubrovnic and Sicily.

The quake of magnitude 8 to 8.5 on 21 July of AD 365 claimed the lives of thousands of people in Alexandria alone and lifted a 200 mile stretch of the coastline of western Crete by up to 10 metres above sea level, tilting Crete to the north east.

Today, a Cambridge University team says it was surprised to find that this giant 10 metre uplift occurred in one go.

Morever, it has found that similar quakes could strike in as little as 800 years as stresses and strains build up in the seabed.

The study by Beth Shaw and her colleagues in the journal Nature Geoscience presents a fresh analysis of the Mediterranean seafloor, and suggests that a previously overlooked fault could be the source of the large earthquake that caused the destruction of AD365.

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©Telegraph UK
A Cambridge University team believes that the Mediterranean could be at risk from a devastating tsunami

Cloud Lightning

High winds forecast to batter large parts of Britain once again

A fresh wave of hurricane-strength winds was forecast to hit large parts of Britain this morning. Gales exceeding 80mph started at 4pm yesterday and were expected to combine with heavy snow to cause large-scale disruption to transport and power supplies.

The Met office issued a severe weather warning from 9pm yesterday until 3pm today for Northern Ireland, southwest Scotland, the North of England, North Wales and the Midlands.

Phoenix

Beck's Petrel Flies Back From Presumed Extinction

A bird not seen for almost 80 years has been discovered in the Pacific to the delight of conservationists.

Becks Petrel Pseudobulweria becki
©Hadoram Shirihai
Recently fledged juvenile Beck's Petrel Pseudobulweria becki, off Cape St George, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, August 2007.

Stop

Two killed as storm batters France and Britain

An Atlantic storm battered southern Britain and northern France on Monday, killing two people, sinking a trawler in the Channel and blowing a cargo vessel aground on the French coast.

The storm, which began late on Sunday, brought down trees and power lines and pounded coastal defences.

French maritime authorities said a 26-year-old man fell into the sea when his small boat was hit by a large wave on Sunday in the small port of Relecq-Kerhuon, near Brest in the far west of Brittany.

Cloud Lightning

Major storm sparks travel chaos and damage in Britain, France

LONDON - Heavy storms were expected to cause more travel chaos in Britain Tuesday, with France also preparing for more bad weather, after three vessels ran into problems in the Channel a day earlier.

Five French fishermen were rescued from a trawler which sank late Monday in gale-force winds off the Channel island of Guernsey, maritime officials said, while a body was separately recovered off the coast of Brittany in northwest France, feared to be that of a man missing since Sunday.

Tanker beached
©Unknown
Major storm sparks travel chaos and damage in Britain, France

Cloud Lightning

Get used to the wild weather: scientists

Fed up with unpredictable winter storms cancelling air flights, closing highways and dumping enormous amounts of precipitation?

Too bad.

Canadian scientists say get used to it.

Snowman

The media snowjob on global warming

Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism -- and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy -- can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.

The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors -- the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, -- not human sources are behind global warming.

Better Earth

US government sued over failure to protect polar bears

The US government agency responsible for compiling the country's list of endangered species will face a new legal challenge today over its failure to protect the polar bear. Environmental groups are set to sue the Bush administration in a federal court in California, claiming the Fish and Wildlife Service is now in breach of its own mandate.

The FWS was due to have decided by January 9 whether to classify the polar bear as threatened due to climate change.

Life Preserver

Operation to rescue 758 anglers-over off Sakhalin coast

An operation to rescue anglers from an ice-floe, drifting in the Sea of Okhotsk off the Sakhalin coast, has been successfully completed. According to the latest data of the Sakhalin branch of the Russian Ministry for Emergencies, as many as 758 people have been brought to the shore.

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©Unknown