Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Huge Volcanic Blast Spurs More Indonesians to Flee

Mount Merapi Eruption
© Trisnadi/AP Mount Merapi spews volcanic material as it erupts.
Indonesia's deadly volcano erupted Wednesday with its biggest blast yet, shooting searing ash miles into the sky and forcing hasty new evacuations of panicked people from villages and emergency shelters.

Soldiers loaded men, women and crying children into trucks as rocks and debris hurled in the air and down the mountain's slopes. No new casualties were reported immediately after the booming explosion that lasted more than an hour.

"This is an extraordinary eruption, triple from the first" on Oct. 26, said Surono, a state volcanologist.

Cloud Lightning

India: Andhra faces cyclone threat, 20 killed in rains

Andhra Pradesh is facing the threat of a cyclonic storm while heavy rains in the coastal region have claimed 20 lives and damaged crops in over 100,000 hectares, officials said Tuesday.

Nearly 400,000 people were affected, dozens of villages and residential areas in several towns remained inundated as rains under the influence of a trough of low pressure over Bay of Bengal and vigorous northeast monsoon caused havoc in north and south coastal districts.

Over 26,000 people were evacuated from low-lying areas in four districts while the authorities alerted the armed forces for possible deployment. At least 20 people were killed in rain-related incidents in the last three days, according to the disaster management department.

Phoenix

Indonesian Volcano Grounds Planes; Evacuated Residents Restless to Go Home

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© VOA Photo - S. SchonhardtEvacuees gather to watch television to stave off boredom
Thousands of Indonesians forced from their homes because of Mount Merapi's continued eruptions are restless to leave the evacuation shelters. And the volcano's ash clouds now are forcing airlines to cancel some flights.

A week after Indonesia's most active volcano began shooting searing gas clouds from its crater, restless evacuees say they are tired of living in hot, cramped shelters. But repeated explosions signal that the volcano, known here as "Fire Mountain," is not ready to let them go home.

Continued blasts have not deterred many families from heading back up the mountain. They go to check on their homes and cattle. At night, they return, packing into overcrowded camps to sleep on thin mats among thousands.

Sun

Swaziland: Panic Over Sun's Strange Appearance

Halo Around Sun
© Times of SwazilandHalo around sun.
Mbabane - It was an unusual day for many, and some thought the world was coming to an end yesterday.

This was due to a circle of light (a halo) that was seen in the morning hours surrounding the sun. A halo, in simple terms, refers to a circle of light or radiance. This caused a lot of panic for many people as most were of the view that the world was coming to an end.

The Times of Swaziland office was inundated with calls from the public who wanted to find out about the halo around the sun.

This is similar to a rainbow line, though this time it was just around the sun. According to a statement from the Swaziland Meteorological Department, this phenomenon is known as a 22 Degree Halo.

The rainbow-like circle around the sun is caused by the bending of the sun's light due to tiny hexagonal ice crystals in the upper atmosphere.

Red Flag

Monsanto's Superweeds Come Home to Roost: 11 Million U.S. Acres are Infested

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© New York Times
There's been much recent news about Monsanto paying farmers to use its competitors' herbicides, in what many see as a last ditch effort to address the spread of superweeds created by the company's "Roundup Ready" (RR) GMO crops. Environmental scientists warned even before Monsanto's "herbicide tolerant" GMO crops were approved that they would hasten the evolution of resistant weeds.

For these scientists, the issue was obvious: introduction of high doses of a single chemical year after year would result in the exact conditions needed to breed resistance: weeds with resistance genes would be the only weeds that could survive and breed, leading to superweeds that are unaffected even by massive herbicide spraying.

Of course, Monsanto denied these early warnings. In a 1997 paper, Monsanto scientists claimed that weed resistance was such a complex genetic phenomena that Round up Ready crops would be unlikely to lead to resistant weeds.

Bad Guys

Goodbye Global Warming, Hello Biodiversity

After three decades of trying to push the global warming scam to a point where billions could be made selling and trading bogus "carbon credits", the global schemers have abandoned it in the wake of 2009 revelations that a handful of rogue climate scientists were literally inventing the data to support it.

If there is one lesson to be learned from and about environmentalists, it is that they are utterly relentless. The ultimate goal is one-world government directed from the United Nations by unelected bureaucrats who are soulless strangers to the truth, to morality, to humanity.

The United States supports this abomination to the tune of billions every year.

The United Nations is a place where some of the world's dictatorships have delegates representing them on its Human Rights Council, where a vast Oil-for-Food scandal flourished while Saddam Hussein held power in Iraq, where a single agency's sole purpose is to ensure that Palestinians remain refugees six decades after the rebirth of Israel.

Frog

Frozen Ark project collects 1000th animal DNA sample

Red Eyed Frog
© PAThe Frozen Ark Project are focusing on amphibians and sea corals.
Scientists from the University of Nottingham's Frozen Ark project have now collected over 1000 gametes, cells and DNA from endangered animals.

The samples have been frozen for possible resurrection by cloning technology in the future.

Ann Clarke, from the project, said: "They [the samples] are all to be used for a conservation of last effort before the animal goes extinct."

The material already held includes that of the endangered yellow sea horse.

The Frozen Ark project began in 2004 after scientists witnessed the extinction of the Polynesian tree snail.

Ann Clarke said: "When you watch a species die out it sharpens the mind and we thought we had to try and do this."

Animal species are dying out at an unprecedented rate according to scientists.

Bizarro Earth

New eruption could be looming in Iceland, experts warn

Iceland Volcano
© AFPThe sun sets in a sky dusted with ash from Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano, in May.
Reykjavik - An Icelandic volcano has shown signs it could be about to burst into life, just months after an eruption from another volcano caused Europe's biggest air shutdown since World War II, experts said Monday.

"The water levels have tripled in (the river) Gigja since last night," water measurement specialist Gunnar Sigurdsson of the Icelandic Meteorological Institute told AFP.

The water flooding into the Gigja, on the Vatnajoekull glacier in eastern Iceland, comes from an icy lake in the crater of the Grimsvoetn volcano.

Due to increased thermal temperatures, the lake and surrounding glacier area has melted, filling the crater to a point where it has spilled over and caused a so-called river-run, which in turn could easily set off an eruption.

"When a river-run occurs, the pressure, in this case, in Grimsvotn, decreases, and with less pressure, there is a chance of an eruption from the volcano," Thorunn Skaftadottir, a geophysicist also with the Icelandic Meteorological Institute told AFP.

"This is not guaranteed," she pointed out, since an eruption "can only happen if the volcano has collected enough magma."

Bizarro Earth

Germany: Sinkhole Swallows Car Overnight

sinkhole
© Deutsche Presse-AgenturNovember 1st 2010. Tiefenort, Germany. Depth is about 65 feet (20m).
A large sinkhole opened up overnight in the middle of residential area in Thuringia, sucking a nearby auto into its depths and forcing authorities to evacuate residents, police said on Monday.

The crater, measuring some 40 by 15 metres, appeared in the town of Schmalkalden, a police spokesperson said. The hole is believed to be some 20 metres deep, she added.

No-one was injured in the incident, but another vehicle near the hole is in danger of falling into the hole.

A number of homes in the vicinity were evacuated, and a large contingent of police and fire fighters were out trying to secure the site.

Authorities remain uncertain of what may have caused the sinkhole.

Comment: From The Telegraph, UK:

An unexplained 25m "crater" has appeared beneath a village in central Germany, swallowing a car




Cloud Lightning

Flash floods leave four dead in Vietnam

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© UnknownLast month's floods killed more than 130 people in Vietnam.
Flash floods and landslides triggered by heavy rains have left four people dead and two more missing in south-central Vietnam, officials say.

The National Steering Committee on Flood and Storm Control reported a downpour of 165 to 545 millimeters of rain over the last three days in the worst-hit region, DPA reported.

Flood waters have destroyed nearly 600 houses in central and southern parts of the country. More than 5,000 hectares of rice paddies have gone underwater.

More rain has been forecast for the coming days.

This is the latest in a series of deadly storms hitting Vietnam this autumn. Last month's floods killed 134 and left six missing in Vietnam.

Figures show that annual heavy rains and floods have killed an average of 750 people in the pacific nation for each of the past 10 years.