'Super typhoon' Dujuan, which has been sweeping across northern Taiwan, has killed two people and displaced 12,000, while also cutting electricity to about half a million Taiwanese. More than 300 people have been injured.

The storm also hit the Chinese coastal city of Putian on Tuesday morning, according to Xinhua, but no reports of damage followed.

In Taiwan, flying debris was thrown about like paper, with gusts of wind so strong they knocked people off their feet, tore up trees and smashed windows. Multiple landslides were also registered.

Spectacular footage of the Ubinas Volcano in south-west Peru erupting on Monday, sending clouds of ash up 4,000 metres into the air. Marco Rivera, a coordinator for local volcano-observation group Ingement, says a body of heat was also observed inside the crater of the active volcano. Authorities have issued an ash alert for towns and communities surrounding the volcano.

A major earthquake was reported by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) on Sept. 28, 2015, following a series of tremors in South America. Today's seismic activity so far has produced a 5.4 magnitude earthquake, 32 miles northwest of San Antonio de Los Cobres, Argentina. During the last 10 days, the adjoining countries of Argentina and Chile have experienced tremors measuring between 5.4 and 6.6 on the Richter Scale. Also, this morning, Honduras, which is approximately 3900 miles north of Argentina experienced 5.1 magnitude tremor, only 30 minutes earlier.

The seismic activity occurred on the Nazca plate region, which includes the offshore plate that has been jolting Chile's coastal city, Coquimbo, for the past several weeks. The largest tremor measured an 8.3 on the Richter Scale Sept. 17, 2015. CNN reported one million people were evacuated before this earthquake, which also put the region on a tsunami watch, as far away as New Zealand, over 6,000 miles from the epicenter.

A 3.9 magnitude earthquake struck Northern California's Redwood Valley area Monday and was quickly followed by a 2.7 aftershock, according to the U.S. Geological Survey

A quake hit the region about 2:30 p.m., followed a half-hour later by the aftershock, officials said.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

In August, a 4.0 earthquake shook up the Bay Area, with an epicenter in Oakland.

Just three days after a mother-son team spotted a hooded oriole in Juneau, two National Park Service interpreters spotted a yellow-throated warbler outside their offices in Bartlett Cove. It's the first time the bird has been seen in Alaska.

Steve Schaller said he and Emma Johnson spotted the bird Sept. 22.

"When we first spotted it, it sort of looked like a yellow-rumped warbler, but then we started to notice its behavior was different, and it had a longer beak," Schaller said. "We started realizing that this was something new."

Right now, the bird is feeding on insects, he said.

"It's coming up to the windows on the sides of the building, nabbing spiders and other insects," he said.

A burst water main has opened up a huge sinkhole in the middle of a busy road.

The dangerous hole has swallowed three lanes on Glen Eira Road in Caulfield North, Melbourne, and has stopped traffic in both directions.

VicRoads received a report about the hole at around 2.18am on Tuesday, sending South East Water to repair the damage.

Rain wreak havoc in hilly regions of Kozhikode causing damages and losses. A woman died after being struck by lightning. The dead has been identified as Kattippara Mampalikkara Surendran's wife Pushpa.

At Parappan Koyilil three houses were damaged after a tree fell on it. More agricultural and financial losses are being reported as it continues to rain heavily.

A lightning strike killed one worker and injured four others while they were loading cassava onto a truck in Battambang province's Kamrieng district on Sunday afternoon, police said yesterday.

According to Pich Kin, the O'Da commune deputy police chief, survivors told authorities that they were loading cassava to take it into Lumphat village when a torrential rainstorm swept in, but the five continued working.

"Suddenly, the lightning struck - and it sounded like a bomb - right into the cassava pile where they were loading them onto the truck. It hit Sem Borie hard and he died instantly at the site," Kin said, referring to the 25-year-old victim. "Another four workers including a four-month pregnant woman fell unconscious."

Pean Manet, a technical officer at the Kamrieng district police station, said that the two women injured in the lightning strike, Thear Keun, 20 and Yi By, 22, were treated at the Ta Krei commune health centre.

There is increasing concern that a weather event in the Pacific will bring bitter winter conditions to the UK and northern Europe.

Australian meteorologists warned last week that Britain is set to be battered by fierce snowstorms and freezing temperatures that could affect food stocks as the first El Nino cycle for five years kicks in.

And now the Met Office has backed up these claims saying: 'It could be big, it's possible. We're getting a pretty strong signal.'

It is, for our home planet, an extremely warm year.

Indeed, last week we learned from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the first eight months of 2015 were the hottest such stretch yet recorded for the globe's surface land and oceans, based on temperature records going back to 1880. It's just the latest evidence that we are, indeed, on course for a record-breaking warm year in 2015.

Yet, if you look closely, there's one part of the planet that is bucking the trend. In the North Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland and Iceland, the ocean surface has seen very cold temperatures for the past eight months:

What's up with that?

First of all, it's no error. I checked with Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, who confirmed what the map above suggests — some parts of the North Atlantic Ocean saw record cold in the past eight months. As Arndt put it by email:

For the grid boxes in darkest blue, they had their coldest Jan-Aug on record, and in order for a grid box to be "eligible" for that map, it needs at least 80 years of Jan-Aug values on the record.

Those grid boxes encompass the region from "20W to 40W and from 55N to 60N," Arndt explained.

And there's not much reason to doubt the measurements — the region is very well sampled. "It's pretty densely populated by buoys, and at least parts of that region are really active shipping lanes, so there's quite a lot of observations in the area," Arndt said. "So I think it's pretty robust analysis."

Thus, the record seems to be a meaningful one — and there is a much larger surrounding area that, although not absolutely the coldest it has been on record, is also unusually cold.

At this point, it's time to ask what the heck is going on here. And while there may not yet be any scientific consensus on the matter, at least some scientists suspect that the cooling seen in these maps is no fluke but, rather, part of a process that has been long feared by climate researchers — the slowing of Atlantic Ocean circulation.