Hurricane Sandy, which on Thursday was barreling through the Bahamas as a Category 2 storm, may be taking aim at the northeastern United States and could make landfall along the Atlantic coast early next week. If so, forecasters say, the storm could become, to use a technical term from meteorology, a whopper.

"It really could be an extremely significant, historic storm," said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami, explaining that conditions are similar to those that created the famous "perfect storm" of 1991.

Hurricane prediction is, of course, an iffy business, said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman for the National Hurricane Center, who noted that the storm was still days from the East Coast and could weaken drastically or even shift course and race off into the Atlantic.

The chain of events that would make Hurricane Sandy develop into a grave threat to the coast involves a storm system known as a midlatitude trough that is moving across the country from the west. If the systems meet up, as many computer models predict, the storm over land could draw the hurricane in.

"Now you've got this giant storm complex with a lot of energy," Mr. Feltgen said. The combined systems could produce high winds, heavy rains and storm surges that would cause extensive damage.

With Halloween approaching, it's natural to wonder just a little bit more than usual about things that go "bump" in the night. But what about things that go "bloop" in the deep sea?

Poltergeists, witches and ghosts aren't the only source for spooky seasonal mystery. In fact, scientists monitoring the oceans have uncovered a handful of sounds that can't be explained - at least not with any certainty.

With names like "The Bloop," "Train" and "Julia," the sounds have been captured by hydrophones, or underwater microphones, monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Here are the six most mysterious noises ever heard in the sea, and what might have made them. [Listen to the Six Spooky Sounds]

1. The Bloop

The decidedly nonspooky nickname for this sound does little to dispel the mystery surrounding it. In 1997, NOAA hydrophones picked up one of the loudest sounds ever recorded off the southern coast of South America: the Bloop (which sounds like, well, a bloop), was recorded by two hydrophones nearly 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) apart.

The Bloop mimics marine animal sounds in some ways, but its volume is too great to be made by any sea creatures known to science. If your imagination is running away from you, you're not alone: Plenty of listeners have jokingly linked the Bloop to Cthulhu, a fictional part-octopus monster created by sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft in 1928.

Deep-sea monsters aside, NOAA holds the most likely explanation for The Bloop is that it was the sound of a large iceberg fracturing. These "icequakes" have been recorded in the Scotia Sea and sound very similar to the mystery 1997 Bloop. If a cracking iceberg were the source, according to NOAA, it would have likely been floating between the Bransfield Strait and the Ross Sea of Antarctica, or perhaps at Cape Adare in East Antarctica.

2011 meteorological autumn was unusual in that both a hurricane and an October snowstorm hit the north-east. They occurred two months apart, and the idea that either one would happen again in the near-term was not something high up on the probability scale. But if there is one thing more unpredictable than politics, it's the weather.

Government forecasters are warning that the US east coast is likely to be battered next week, not by a winter storm or a hurricane, but by an unusual combination of steady gale-force winds, flooding, heavy rain and possibly snow. It has already been dubbed the "snor'eastercane".

Hurricane Sandy is currently approaching the Bahamas. With 105mph winds and a central low pressure of 964 millibars, Sandy seems likely at this point to hit the east coast of the United States. Where and how Sandy will make her mark is still very much up in the up air.

Here's what we know for sure: the National Hurricane Center's latest track has Sandy staying well off the coast for the next 72 hours. Pretty much all weather models agree on this track. Most often that a storm such as Sandy would go out to sea at this point - following the warm waters of the Gulf stream.

Before the beginning of this hurricane season, back in May, forecasters thought this year would be an average one. Come August, when the season typically peaks, forecasters notched up their outlook, saying the season would in fact be busier than average.

Now it's October and it's been one of the busiest seasons on record, with 19 named storms so far this year, 10 of which became hurricanes, including Hurricane Sandy, which has the potential to strike the East Coast.

That puts the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season in rarified company. Only seven seasons since 1851 (as far back as hurricane records reach) have seen 19 or more named storms. Three of these have been within the last decade: the 2010 and 2011 seasons had 19 storms each and the 2005 season had a whopping 28 storms, the most on record, including Hurricane Katrina.

Originally the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted there would be nine to 15 named storms this year. Then, in August, it upped its prediction to 12 to 17 named storms, with five to eight of those becoming hurricanes. (Storms are named once they attain tropical storm status - defined as a rotating, organized storm with maximum sustained winds of at least 39 mph (63 kph). A tropical storm becomes a hurricane once its top winds hit at least 74 mph (119 kph).

It's relatively unusual to have more storms than forecast, said Gerry Bell, the lead hurricane season forecaster at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. So why has this hurricane season been busier than expected?

The underestimate can be blamed on El Niño, Bell told OurAmazingPlanet. Or rather, the lack of El Niño. Forecasters predicted that this climate pattern, characterized by warm surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, would have developed by now and stymied hurricane formation by its influence on the atmosphere. But it hasn't.

More than a year and a half after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan, many fish in the area contain levels of radioactive cesium that are just as high as they were soon after the disaster.

The finding suggests that the region's coastal-dwelling fish are still being exposed to new sources of cesium, possibly from the seafloor or from contaminated groundwater that's flowing into the ocean. And even though most fish sampled in the new study had levels of cesium below safe limits for consumption, some fish contained surprisingly large amounts.

Japan has already closed fisheries near Fukushima to reduce human exposure. The new results suggest that it may be a long time before levels of radiation in the ocean decline after nuclear disasters like the Fukushima meltdown.

"If (the cesium) is in the seafloor, it could be many years or even decades for that to go away," said Ken Buesseler, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Mass. "That implies we're going to have an issue in coastal fisheries for a long time to come in Japan. We certainly can't say we're out of the woods yet."

"Just because you haven't read about it in the news" lately, he added, "doesn't mean it has gone away."

Because the Japanese rank among the most voracious consumers of seafood in the world, the country's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has been closely monitoring radiation levels in coastal fish since the Fukushima disaster in March of 2011.

Locusts will probably spread to North Africa in coming weeks as swarms form in Chad and are about to gather in Mali and Niger after summer rains, the United Nations' Food & Agriculture Organization said.

The FAO has alerted Algeria, Morocco, Libya and Mauritania to prepare for the arrival of desert locust swarms, the Rome- based agency wrote in an e-mailed statement today. The conflict in Mali, which has asked for international military assistance to help it deal with an Islamist occupation of the country's northern region, makes it unlikely all locust infestations there will be found and treated, the FAO said.

"Prevailing winds and historical precedents make it likely the swarms, once formed, will fly to Algeria, Libya, southern Morocco and northwestern Mauritania," Keith Cressman, the FAO's senior locust forecasting officer, was cited as saying in the statement. "Once there, they could damage pastures and subsistence rain-fed crops."

An earthquake, the strongest since 1957, occurred last night in Quang Nam Province's Bac Tra My District, where the Song Tranh 2 Hydropower Plant is located, panicking thousands of local residents.

A series of tremors measuring 4.6 on the Richter scale broke out in the district at 9:42 pm Monday and lasted for about three seconds, said Le Van Tuan, chief of the district People's Committee's Secretariat.

Thousands of locals rushed out of their houses in panic after they heard loud blasts and felt the ground shaking, houses' walls cracking, and things inside the houses falling, Tuan said.
"Many items on a table in my house fell down to the floor and my children cried and screamed when hearing explosions that sounded like the sounds of bombings," he said.

Oxygen's ups and downs in the early atmosphere and ocean

UC Riverside-led research team finds evidence for a dramatic rise in early oxygen about 2.3 billion years ago followed, more surprisingly, by an equally impressive fall

Riverside, California - Most researchers imagine the initial oxygenation of the ocean and atmosphere to have been something like a staircase, but with steps only going up. The first step, so the story goes, occurred around 2.4 billion years ago, and this, the so-called Great Oxidation Event, has obvious implications for the origins and evolution of the first forms of eukaryotic life. The second big step in this assumed irreversible rise occurred almost two billion years later, coinciding with the first appearances and earliest diversification of animals.

Now a team led by geochemists at the University of California, Riverside challenges the simple notion of an up-only trend for early oxygen and provides the first compelling direct evidence for a major drop in oxygen after the first rise.

"Our group is among a subset of scientists who imagine that oxygen, once it began to accumulate in the ocean-atmosphere system, may have ultimately risen to very high levels about 2.3-2.2 billion years ago, perhaps even to concentrations close to what we see today," said Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry and the principal investigator of the project. "But unlike the posited irreversible rise favored by many, our new data point convincingly to an equally impressive, and still not well understood, fall in oxygen about 200 million years later."

On Tuesday, October 23, PBS's "Frontline" program will broadcast a special titled "Climate of Doubt." It promises to go "inside the organizations" that helped turn the tide of public opinion, and then of elected officials, away from excessive concern over the possible threat of man-made global warming.

The Heartland Institute is likely to be a central figure in this program as we welcomed "Frontline" producer Catherine Upin and her crew to our Seventh International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago in May. Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James M. Taylor also gave a three-hour interview to the film crew in August. Earlier this year, The Economist called Heartland "the world's most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change."

We hope the program is accurate and fair, but past experience both with PBS and other mainstream media outlets leads us to predict it will be neither. Several Heartland staff will be watching the program and commenting live via Twitter and on our blog, Somewhat Reasonable.

Event Time
2012-10-24 00:45:36 UTC
2012-10-23 18:45:36 UTC-06:00 at epicenter

Location
10.118°N 85.348°W depth=39.5km (24.5mi)

Nearby Cities
10km (6mi) NE of Hojancha, Costa Rica
11km (7mi) ESE of Nicoya, Costa Rica
30km (19mi) ESE of Santa Cruz, Costa Rica
44km (27mi) SW of Canas, Costa Rica
140km (87mi) W of San Jose, Costa Rica

Technical Details