Was the recent earthquake in Los Angeles a warning of more to come? 'Earthquake Storms' author John Dvorak shares his thoughts.

On March 17, a mild earthquake rattled countless Los Angeles-area residents awake shortly before their alarms went off at 6:30 a.m. The Monday morning temblor was the first notable L.A.-area quake in years.

A lengthy vacation from earthquakes certainly sounds nice. But John Dvorak, a geophysicist who now works at a astronomical observatory in Hawaii, warns that a quake break can just be the calm before the earthquake storm.

He makes his case that the Golden State is in for trouble in his readable and aptly named new book "Earthquake Storms: The Fascinating History and Volatile Future of the San Andreas Fault."

But it's not just Californians who should pay attention to his exploration of earthquake science, the unfolding mysteries of geology, and the gaps in our seismic knowledge.

As he notes in an interview, plenty of other parts of the country are vulnerable to earthquakes, including the Northwest, the Midwest, the South and - yes - even the Big Apple.

Event Time:
2014-03-29 04:09:42 UTC
2014-03-28 21:09:42 UTC-07:00 at epicenter

Location:
33.919°N 117.944°W depth=7.5km (4.6mi)

Nearby Cities:
1km (1mi) S of La Habra, California
4km (2mi) W of Brea, California
5km (3mi) NNW of Fullerton, California
6km (4mi) E of La Mirada, California
546km (339mi) W of Phoenix, Arizona

A lightning strike in Kent which caused a building to catch fire caused delays of more than four hours for hundreds of Eurostar passengers travelling to the UK.
Hundreds of Eurostar passengers were stranded for hours as they tried to get to the UK after a lightning strike in Kent disrupted power in the Channel Tunnel.

Lightning triggered a fire at a building close to the entrance at Ashford, causing delays to all Eurostar services on Thursday evening.

The fire started just after 8pm and a spokesman said the "procedure was to close down the track until the fire was under control."

He said this led to one train bound for Paris being returned to London and three others heading for London to be "severely delayed."

The spokesman said "several hundred" people would have been affected by the delays, which were between three to four and a half hours long.

Hekla volcano, one of Iceland's most active volcanoes, could be close to erupting, a University of Iceland geoscientist claims.

The most prominent sign of an impending eruption is bulging ground on the northern side of the volcano. This surface swelling indicates magma (molten rock) is rising under the volcano, pushing up the ground as it fills fractures and pipes beneath Hekla. According to GPS monitoring of the expanding surface, there is now more magma underneath Hekla than before the volcano's last eruption in 2000, University of Iceland geophysicist Páll Einarsson said in a report published in the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið on Monday (March 17). Hekla volcano "could erupt soon," Einarsson said.

A magnitude 5.1 earthquake was reported Friday evening one mile from La Habra, California, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 9:09 p.m. Pacific time at a depth of 0.6 miles.11:50 p.m.

USGS scientist Lucy Jones' advice for Friday night: "Don't put your child to bed under a tall bookcase that could fall over him tonight."

Updated at 11:30 p.m.

Fullerton police say the corner of Rosecrans and Gilbert avenues is closed because of a water main break.

Updated at 11:28 p.m.

Southern California Edison says about 3,000 customers are without power.

These two intrepid news reporters certainly earned their money this week.

This incredible video shows the moment severe snow storm conditions actually blew Mark Robinson and Chris Scott out of shot while doing pieces to camera.

Coincidentally the pair were explaining that the winds had got up to 170km/h when they knocked off their feet.

"The only storm I can compare this too is a hurricane," one can be heard saying.

"This has the added bonus of having the snow in the air... like standing in a sand blaster," they say before being literally blown away.

Unsurprisingly the clip has proved popular online with over 85,000 people tuning in less than a day.

A sinkhole opened up on a property on Dole Road in Wahiawa Thursday afternoon.

Police were called, and they covered it up and blocked it off.

The resident says this is not the first time this has happened on the property.

Amateur video showed the hole before it was covered.

The curious gathered around it but with the ground saturated by a recent downpour, no one wanted to stand on the edge for too long.

Sasha Terry came home after a doctor's appointment, and found the scene in her front yard.

At first, it was just a couple of feet deep.

A sinkhole opened in Pinner Road, Northwood, this morning (Friday) and has got the experts perplexed.

Police were called to Pinner Road in Northwood at at 9.50am this morning after a sinkhole opened up.

There are no reported injuries but it is not yet clear whether any vehicles were affected.

Hillingdon Council has been made aware and the area has been cordoned off and the road and surrounding ones closed.

Matt Williams, who was at the scene, said road diversions are going down Addison Way towards Northwood. As of 12.15pm there was a back log of traffic building up down Joel Street.

It has been a freaky 12 hours for Northwood - yesterday a crane crashed in to a property in Murray Road.

Update: Theories about the sinkhole being caused by a collapsed drain are ruled out. Road to reopen at 6pm.

As spring arrives - albeit slowly - East Coasters are saying goodbye a to an especially punishing winter.

Those feeling sentimental can relive the endless series of snowstorms and fiendishly cold weather in a new time-lapse video from NASA.

The animation stiches together imagery taken from space by NOAA's GOES-East satellite every day from January 1 to March 24, 2014.


The creator, Dennis Chesters, of the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement: "The once-per-day imagery creates a stroboscopic slide show of persistent brutal winter weather."

And brutal it was. Cold air escaping the polar vortex repeatedly blasted Canada and the continental United States. Two inches of snow humbled Atlanta in late January, creating epic traffic jams stranding hundreds of people in their cars for hours. Ice storms that followed in February left thousands without power in Georgia and South Carolina. The Great Lakes' ice cover reached historic levels, growing to 91 percent in early March.

Major cities reported astounding tallies of winter snow. Residents of Washington, D.C. saw 30.3 inches (76.9 centimeters) of snow during the 2013-2014 season - nearly double the city's average snowfall of 15.3 inches (38.8 cm), according to the National Weather Service. A whopping 80 inches (203 cm) of snow fell on Chicago, far exceeding the typical 34.4 inches (87.3 cm).

The GOES-East satellite is perched in a geostationary orbit, meaning it hovers over the same part of the globe all the time, moving in tandem with Earth's rotation. The spacecraft captures images of the Northern Hemisphere every half hour and then takes a shot of the entire Western Hemisphere every three hours, according to NOAA.

The images of clouds taken by the GOES satellite are used by the National Weather Service to monitor storms. The 2014 winter weather video also incorporates true-color imagery of the land and sea obtained with NASA's Earth-watching NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites.

A Canadian high school student named Bronwyn Delacruz never imagined that her school science project would make headlines all over the world. But that is precisely what has happened. Using a $600 Geiger counter purchased by her father, Delacruz measured seafood bought at local grocery stores for radioactive contamination.

What she discovered was absolutely stunning. Much of the seafood, particularly the products that were made in China, tested very high for radiation. So is this being caused by nuclear radiation from Fukushima?

Is the seafood that we are eating going to give us cancer and other diseases? The American people deserve the truth, but as you will see below, the U.S. and Canadian governments are not even testing imported seafood for radiation. To say that this is deeply troubling would be a massive understatement.