Earth ChangesS


Igloo

Jet Stream Gone Haywire! "Significant" Snow Falls for Europe Predicted by Mid-Week

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© North News & Pictures LtdTwo young boys enjoying one of the first snow falls of winter in Teesdale, County Durham. Forecasters are predicting a plunge in temperatures and more significant snowfalls across much of the country
Britain is set to shiver in temperatures as low as minus ten this week with 'significant' snow falls hitting the country, the Met Office warn.

The last time the mercury plummeted this low was in March - at the summit of a Scottish mountain.

The north and the east of the country are in line for heavy snow, although forecasters say this could spread across Britain as we head to the weekend.

For the start of the week temperatures will be average, with daytime highs of seven or eight Celsius.

But as December nears this will fall, with a north easterly wind battering the coast and bringing showers with it.

Rural parts of the country could see overnight temperatures as low a -10C, said Met Office forecast Alex Fox.

He said: 'The last time temperatures reached that low was on the night of the 9th and 10th of March this year at the top of Braemar, a mountain in Scotland that's 1,000ft above sea level.

That gives us an idea of how cold things are going to get.

Comment: Looks like Europe is in for trouble weather-wise. Next weekend, freezing temps, snow and maybe even storms at the same time. The Jet stream appears to have stopped or broken down over Europe. Check out this image:

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You see the UK and Ireland, Northern France, Germany etc. and Scandinavia in the bottom center? Usually the Jet stream goes straight across Northern Europe acting as a buffer against the freezing Arctic weather. But now it has looped down over Spain with another arm over North Africa. Apparently that has never happened before.

Here's an image from the US earlier this year:

June 2009 North America jet stream
© AccuWeather
It's the same deal, "chilly air forced southward" because of a distortion in the normal flow of the Jet stream. Thing is, that happened over North America in June, it's happening over Europe in winter.

Here's an article with a video explaining what happened in India, Russia and China this year as a result of a similar strange break down/up of the Jet Stream (ignore the 'global warming' nonsense).

Russian Drought, Pakistan Floods, Chinese Landslides All Linked To Bizarre Jet Stream Change


Alarm Clock

Moderate quake hits Indonesia

A moderate 5.6-magnitude earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra today, the US Geological Survey(USGS) said, but there were no immediate reports of damage.

The quake hit at 4.55 am (7.55am AEDT today) 95 kilometres east-southeast of the city of Padangsidempuan in North Sumatra at a relatively deep 213km, USGS said.

Bizarro Earth

US: Earthquake Magnitude 3.9 - Arkansas

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© USGS
Date-Time:
Saturday, November 20, 2010 at 19:06:35 UTC

Saturday, November 20, 2010 at 01:06:35 PM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
35.319°N, 92.303°W

Depth:
4.5 km (2.8 miles)

Region:
ARKANSAS

Distances:
3 km (2 miles) ESE (102°) from Guy, AR

10 km (6 miles) SW (228°) from Quitman, AR

11 km (7 miles) E (89°) from Twin Groves, AR

29 km (18 miles) NNE (28°) from Conway, AR

65 km (40 miles) N (2°) from Little Rock, AR

411 km (255 miles) SSW (207°) from St. Louis, MO

Cloud Lightning

Colombia Declares State of Emergency Due to Flood

flood
© AP/Getty ImagesA girl crosses a flooded street in Bogota on Thursday during flooding that has affected 1.2 million people in Colombia.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has declared a state of emergency in 28 of the nation's 32 departments because of heavy rains and flooding that have affected some 1.2 million people.

He called on the international community to help and said the capacity of the Colombian government is overwhelmed.

Flooding and mudslides have killed at least 136 people, injured 205 and left 20 missing, the nation's Interior and Justice Ministry reported.

Emergency officials say the heavy rain has led to problems in 561 municipalities in the South American nation.

"Many have lost everything they had and the capacity of the government [to help them] has been overwhelmed. We're trying to find ways to get more resources and that's why we're calling on the business sector, the public in general, and the international community to help us because, unfortunately, the situation is getting worse," said Santos.

He declared the state of emergency after meeting Thursday with ministry officials. Santos made the announcement on national television, saying the declaration would help get aid to those who need it.

Bizarro Earth

Underneath Haiti, Another Big Quake Waiting to Occur

Haiti Earthquake
© Thony Belizaire/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesA day after the earthquake, a young woman climbs over shopping carts and the rubble of a collapsed store on January 13, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Last week, on the morning of Nov. 11, a tremor shook the Port-au-Prince suburb of Carrefour. It was a minor geological event, but given the still fresh and haunting memories of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hammered Haiti on Jan. 12 and killed some 230,000 people - many of them in Carrefour - even that mild shudder caused public panic. The only reported injuries, in fact, were due to people scrambling to take cover.

To geologists, it's good to see Haitians on such heightened alert. Most scientists believe the western hemisphere's poorest country is hardly out of the seismic woods - and after studying the Haiti quake data for the past 10 months, they're more convinced than ever that Haitians can expect another major quake sooner rather than later. That's largely because they've found, according to a new study by 10 prominent geologists, that the lion's share of the January temblor occurred not along the fault line they originally suspected, known as the Enriquillo - Plantain Garden fault zone, but on a previously unknown fault. (Faults separate plates in the earth's crust, which cause quakes when stress makes them collide.) As a result, says Falk Amelung, a University of Miami geologist and one of the report's authors, "the prospects of another serious event may be rather worse than we first thought."

When Amelung and other geologists started poring over information from the earthquake's satellite-radar images last January, they were flummoxed by a variety of features. One was the vertical motion the quake exhibited - unusual because the Enriquillo, which runs across Haiti's southern peninsula just below Port-au-Prince, is a strike-slip fault, the kind that almost exclusively displays horizontal motion when it ruptures. At the same time, the quake's horizontal movement was partly north-south, another anomaly for a strike-slip fault. "Those were the two important smoking guns" that made scientists question their early assumptions about the quake, says Eric Calais, a Purdue University geologist who is in Haiti as a science adviser to the U.N. Development Program and is a lead author of the study, which was published last month in Nature Geoscience.(See more about the January earthquake that devastated Haiti.)

Bizarro Earth

NASA satellite captures huge Alaska winter dust storm

Glacial dust travels far and wide. This satellite image from NASA shows one result of the glacial forces at work in Alaska, a dust storm blowing out into the Gulf of Alaska Wednesday from the Malaspina Glacier. The satellite, which has equipment that "sees" every point on the world every one-to-two days, is about 438 miles above the Earth. The receiving station for images from the MODIS equipment is on the roof of the International Arctic Research Center at UAF.

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© NASA
The satellite data continues to collect and has been archived since 2002 for the Terra satellite and since 2003 for a similar satellite, known as Aqua. The Fairbanks station picks up information from the these satellites about 15 times a day. The machines circle the earth from pole to pole every 108 minutes.

Here is what NASA says about the image:
Dust storms generally call to mind places like the Sahara Desert or the Arabian Peninsula, but dust storms occur at high latitudes as well. One such storm left streamers of dust over the Gulf of Alaska in mid-November 2010. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this natural-color image on November 17, 2010. Thin plumes of beige dust blow off the Alaskan coast toward the south-southwest. Roughly mimicking the shape and direction of the dust plumes, parallel lines of clouds occur farther south over the ocean.

Igloo

Canada: Arctic blast on its way

Edmonton Snowstorm
© Edmonton Sun
Bundle up. The cold temperatures expected to hit Edmonton later this week just got colder.

Earlier this week, weather officials were calling for temperatures to plummet to highs of -14C on Friday and continue throughout the weekend as a cold front moves through the region.

Now, Environment Canada Meteorologist John McIntyre said those temperatures are expected to dip a few degrees cooler, with lows near -20C throughout the weekend and into next week.

"By the weekend, it looks like the air flow is going to be straight out of the arctic," McIntyre said.

Igloo

Bad weather strands thousands near Everest

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© Narendra Shrestha / EPA file The autumn season, from September to November, is popular among Western trekkers in Nepal. Thousands of climbers visit the Solukhumbu region, home to Mount Everest, above, every year.
Helicopter rides back from Mount Everest after a week on the slopes of the world's tallest mountain might sound like a trekker's delight, but for the tourists trapped in the remote region of Nepal, the extended stay was not on the itinerary.

Around 2,000 foreign tourists and their porters have spent the past five days stuck in a tiny village 9,186 feet up the slopes of a hill near Everest due to bad weather, with Nepali army helicopters set to begin flying the stranded sightseers to safety on Friday.

They have been trapped in Lukla, the gateway to Mount Everest in east Nepal, after thick cloud and blustering winds forced airlines to cancel their flights to and from the remote region, officials said on Friday.

Tens of thousands of trekkers and climbers visit the Solukhumbu region in east Nepal, home to Mount Everest, every year.

Many start their trek from windswept Lukla village where a small airstrip is carved into the rugged mountainside.

Bizarro Earth

7.5-magnitude quake? Fault found in Rockies

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© Unknown
Scientists have mapped a previously unknown and active seismic fault in the northern Rockies capable of unleashing an earthquake with a magnitude as high as 7.5.

The newly discovered fault in central Idaho does not lie in a densely populated area.

But Glenn Thackray, chairman of Idaho State University's geosciences department, said the 40-mile-long fracture in the Earth's crust at the base of the Sawtooth Mountains near the tiny mountain town of Stanley is cause for some concern.

"There's a chance in the next few decades there will be an earthquake on this fault, and if it does happen it will be a rather large earthquake," he said.

A 7.5 tremor is considered a major earthquake, capable of widespread heavy damage.

Bizarro Earth

US: Earthquake Magnitude 3.3 Shakes Eastern Nebraska

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© Unknown
A moderate earthquake centered near Schuyler rattled eastern Nebraska on Thursday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The quake occurred at 7:02 a.m. CST about three miles underground and registered a preliminary magnitude of 3.3, the USGS said.

Platte County emergency services director Tim Hofbauer and the sheriff's office said there were no reports of injuries or damage.

Lennie Hiltner, Schuyler police chief, said he had stopped by a car dealership when he heard a loud noise but didn't feel anything shake. He and others at Reinecke Motor Co. quickly inspected the building but found no damage.

Several people called the police department to report hearing the noise.