Earth Changes
BBCSun, 10 Jun 2007 10:47 UTC
At least nine people have been killed by heavy storms that are continuing to lash eastern Australia, officials say.
Gale-force winds and rising flood waters have forced the evacuation of thousands of people in New South Wales.
More than 130,000 homes remain without electricity around Newcastle and in Sydney.
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| ©AFP/Torsten Blackwood
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| A helicopter lowers salvage equipment to the 'Pasha Bulker' which ran aground in wild seas near Newcastle. Rescue workers are urging thousands of people to evacuate their homes after deadly storms lashed Australia's east coast.
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Rain storms and floods have killed at least 23 people across southern China in recent days and made thousands homeless, Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.
"Millions of people are suffering," it said.
Storms killed seven people and left four missing in the southern province of Guizhou on Friday and Saturday. Nearly 20,000 hectares (77 sq miles) of cropland were flooded and 3,000 houses destroyed, Xinhua said.
Robert Imrie
APFri, 08 Jun 2007 13:55 UTC
Cleanup crews assembled Friday to salvage remnants of a northern Wisconsin resort demolished by one of at least five tornadoes that swept across the state.
Severe thunderstorms spawned tornadoes, produced baseball-size hail and dropped more than 6 inches of rain Thursday across the Upper Midwest, killing a swimmer in Illinois. In Wisconsin, at least two people went to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
"It's been a year of extremes," said Mel Goldstein, former head of the meteorology department at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury and a forecaster on WTNH-New Haven. "It's been wacky weather."
MADISON, Wis. -- A mysterious ailment killing honeybees nationwide might be hitting Wisconsin bees harder than first suspected.
Colony Collapse Disorder has made headlines recently because bee pollination is needed for a third of all U.S. food crops.
Comment: For more information on Bee disappearances read the comprehensive SOTT editorial,
To Bee or not to Be.
Monitoring the saltiness of the ocean water could provide an early indicator of climate change. Significant increases or decreases in salt in key areas could forewarn of climate change in 10 to 20 years time. Presenting their findings at a recent European Science Foundation (ESF) conference, scientists predicted that the waters of the southern hemisphere oceans around South Africa and New Zealand are the places to watch.
Palaeoclimate data shows that the ocean's currents (like the Gulf Stream and its North Atlantic deep water partner) are capable of shifting gears very suddenly, but until now it wasn't clear how this occurred. Using a combination of modern observations, numerical models and palaeoclimate data scientists are increasingly realising that salt is the key.
Their results reveal that a build up of salty water can stimulate deep water circulation, while a diluting of the waters is linked to sluggish flow. "Salt plays a far more important role that we first thought," says Professor Rainer Zahn, a palaeoclimatologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain.
Salt increases the density of water. Once a pocket of water becomes salty enough it sinks, drawing in additional water from surrounding areas, and initiates an ocean circulation loop called thermohaline overturning.
If you didn't sleep well Wednesday night, especially in the northwest Denver metro area, blame Mother Nature.
A powerful area of low pressure passing to the north of Colorado produced hurricane-force winds in and near the foothills west of Denver.
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Sustained winds of 50 to 70 mph hammered the northwest Denver metro area late Wednesday and early Thursday, with numerous gusts between 80 and 90 mph.
In an ironic twist to a sad story, public interest in Kamchatka's Geyser Valley, hit by a pair of devastating mudflows Sunday, has suddenly spiked, a local tour agency representative said Friday.
Inquiries regarding visits to the geyser field have risen sharply. "People, especially foreigners, want to see the result of the natural disaster with their own eyes, the representative said.
Two mudslides June 3 buried nearly two-thirds of the valley, which features some 200 thermal pools and 90 erupting geysers covering an area of 2.5 square miles on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia's Far East.
A spokesman for the Natural Resources Ministry said Thursday that some 30 geysers had survived intact, 10 had been irretrievably lost and the rest were underwater and expected to recover.
Warren County witnessed a few weeks of near normal weather in March and April, but that pattern did not last long.
May turned out to be one of the warmest and driest on record.
The spring of 2007 March through May was also one of the warmest on the record books.
USGSFri, 08 Jun 2007 14:26 UTC
Despite some rainfall at the end of the month, streamflows during May in North Carolina were at or near record low levels, particularly in the western part of the state.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has been monitoring and recording streamflow for more than 100 years at many locations throughout North Carolina, including the French Broad River at Asheville, which has been continuously monitored since 1895. Streamflows at this location in May were at or below the streamflow recorded on the same date in 2002, during the most recent severe drought.
Comment: For more information on Bee disappearances read the comprehensive SOTT editorial, To Bee or not to Be.