Earth ChangesS


Better Earth

Update: Thousands of birds fall from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas

Just before folks in Beebe rang in the New Year, many witnessed an uncanny resemblance to the Hitchcock movie The Birds. About 2,000 black birds fell from the sky off Windwood Drive, leaving quite the mess to clean up.

Folks Today's THV spoke with initially thought the birds were poisoned because they are what they call a nuisance around this time every year, but they are surprised to hear it is more of a mystery.

Stephen Bryant recalls, "Millions, millions fly over every night. You look up at the sky and it's just black and then last night at about 10:30 I came out here and saw a bird drop."

In a matter of hours on New Years Eve thousands of birds fell from the sky to their death.

Newspaper

US: Thousands of Dead Birds Picked Up in Arkansas Town

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© AP PhotoAn Environmental Services worker picks up a dead bird in Beebe, Ark. as other dead birds line the street behind him.
Environmental service workers finished picking up the carcasses on Sunday of about 2,000 red-winged blackbirds that fell dead from the sky in a central Arkansas town.

Mike Robertson, the mayor in Beebe, told The Associated Press the last dead bird was removed about 11 a.m. Sunday in the town about 40 miles northeast of Little Rock. He said 12 to 15 workers, hired by the city to do the cleanup, wore environmental-protection suits for the task.

The birds had fallen Friday night over a 1-mile area of Beebe, and an aerial survey indicated that no other dead birds were found outside of that area. The workers from U.S. Environmental Services started the cleanup Saturday.

Robertson said the workers wore the suits as a matter of routine and not out of fear that the birds might be contaminated. He said speculation on the cause is not focusing on disease or poisoning.

Several hundred thousand red-winged blackbirds have used a wooded area in the town as a roost for the past several years, he said. Robertson and other officials went to the roost area over the weekend and found no dead birds on the ground.

Cloud Lightning

India's Hidden Climate Change Catastrophe

Indian widow with picture of husband
© Abbie Traylor-SmithSugali Nagamma holds a portrait of her husband, who killed himself by swallowing pesticide in front of her
Naryamaswamy Naik went to the cupboard and took out a tin of pesticide. Then he stood before his wife and children and drank it. "I don't know how much he had borrowed. I asked him, but he wouldn't say," Sugali Nagamma said, her tiny grandson playing at her feet. "I'd tell him: don't worry, we can sell the salt from our table."

Ms Nagamma, 41, showed us a picture of her husband - good-looking with an Elvis-style hairdo - on the day they married a quarter of a century ago. "He'd been unhappy for a month, but that day he was in a heavy depression. I tried to take the tin away from him but I couldn't. He died in front of us. The head of the family died in front of his wife and children - can you imagine?"

The death of Mr Naik, a smallholder in the central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, in July 2009, is just another mark on an astonishingly long roll. Nearly 200,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves in the past decade. Like Mr Naik, a third of them choose pesticide to do it: an agonising, drawn-out death with vomiting and convulsions.

The death toll is extrapolated from the Indian authorities' figures. But the journalist Palagummi Sainath is certain the scale of the epidemic of rural suicides is underestimated and that it is getting worse. "Wave upon wave," he says, from his investigative trips in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. "One farmer every 30 minutes in India now, and sometimes three in one family." Because standards of record-keeping vary across the nation, many suicides go unnoticed. In some Indian states, the significant numbers of women who kill themselves are not listed as "farmers", even if that is how they make their living.

Mr Sainath is an award-winning expert on rural poverty in India, a famous figure across India through his writing for The Hindu newspaper. I spoke to him at a screening of Nero's Guests, a documentary film about the suicide epidemic and some of the more eye-popping inequalities of modern India.

Better Earth

Strong Earthquake Strikes Central Chile

A 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck the central coastal area of Chile on Sunday, some 70 kilometers (45 miles) northwest of Temuco, the U.S. Geological Survey said. There were no immediate reports of major damage or injury.

The quake, which stuck around 5:20 p.m. (3:20 p.m. ET), was felt as far away as Santiago, roughly 595 km (370 miles) north of where the USGS said the quake occurred. The epicenter was more than 10 miles underground, the USGS said.


Loreto Henriquez, manager of the Holiday Inn Express in Temuco, felt the quake for about a minute, describing it as loud and strong. She said people ran into the streets, but did not report any major damage.

Alarm Clock

US: Arkansas Department Of Health Warns About Fish Kill

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© 4029TV
Roseville -- The Arkansas Department of Health is advising people fishing near the Roseville Community Boat Ramp on the Arkansas River not to eat any of the dead fish that are floating in the water in that area.

The Department of Health said several thousands of drum fish have been killed and are lining the bank of the Arkansas River near the Roseville community.

The fish line a stretch of the bank about a mile long.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality are investigating the situation in an effort to determine the cause.

Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality investigator Travis Harmon said inspectors have considered a toxic dump and low oxygen levels but have nearly ruled out both.

Bizarro Earth

Chile - Earthquake Magnitude 7.1 - Araucania

Chile Quake_020111
© USGSEarthquake Location
Date-Time:
Sunday, January 02, 2011 at 20:20:16 UTC

Sunday, January 02, 2011 at 05:20:16 PM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
38.360°S, 73.281°W

Depth:
16.9 km (10.5 miles)

Region:
ARAUCANIA, CHILE

Distances:
70 km (45 miles) NW of Temuco, Araucania, Chile

90 km (55 miles) SSE of Lebu, Bio-Bio, Chile

130 km (80 miles) SW of Los Angeles, Bio-Bio, Chile

595 km (370 miles) SSW of SANTIAGO, Region Metropolitana, Chile

Bizarro Earth

Vesuvius's Big Daddy: The Supervolcano That Threatens All Life in Europe

Two thousand years ago Mount Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii. Today, a larger, far more deadly supervolcano lurks on the other side of Naples. If it erupts, Campi Flegrei could wipe out all life in Europe. So why are British scientists battling the Italians for the right to poke at it with drilling rods?

Campi Flegrei
© Daily Mail, UKThe Campi Flegrei caldera is a supervolcano. While a new eruption here would be more likely to result in the creation of another Vesuvius-like cone, the worst-case scenario could see it obliterating much of life in Europe.
Naples, Italy, The Near Future

It begins with a swarm of 1,000 small earthquakes that ripple under the pavements of Naples. Air-conditioning units fall from the sides of buildings and tiles slip from the walls. Inside the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology's control centre, a bank of screens indicates that the quakes aren't being generated by the giant Mount Vesuvius, which looms over the city.

These quakes are coming from something far bigger, from one of the largest and most dangerous volcanoes in the world: the Campi Flegrei caldera. Vesuvius, which destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii, incinerating and suffocating thousands, is nothing more than a pimple on the back of the sleeping dragon of Campi Flegrei, an active four-mile-wide sunken volcano. A call is quickly put through to Civil Defence and the Italian Ministry of the Interior: the city must be evacuated immediately.

A short distance away, the ground around the ancient town of Pozzuoli is stretching, swelling, doming. Fumaroles - vents emitting columns of steam rich in CO2 - open up in the broken Tarmac. Four-and-a-half miles below the surface a bolt of magma has escaped the main reservoir and is rising upwards, changing and solidifying. As it reaches groundwater, it's converted into a sponge-like stone. As the water boils away it feeds critical amounts of gas into the sponge, and the pressure builds until finally it explodes like a malfunctioning boiler.

Cloud Lightning

Australia's Queensland faces 'biblical' flood

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A senior official has described the flooding in Queensland, Australia, as a disaster of "biblical proportions".

State Treasurer Andrew Fraser said the economic impact would be severe, with huge costs compounded by lost income from mining, farming and tourism.

Rockhampton, where 77,000 people live, is the latest city bracing for impact, amid warnings of 30ft (9m) floodwaters.

More than 20 other towns have already been left cut off or flooded across an area larger than France and Germany.

The crisis has been triggered by Australia's wettest spring on record. At least six river systems across Queensland have broken their banks. The floods have affected about 200,000 people, and many have been evacuated.

"We're still directly battling floodwaters, we haven't seen the peak of the flood yet at centres like Rockhampton," said Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who toured the stricken areas.

Arrow Down

A Sign for the New Year: 1,000 Birds Fall From the Sky in Beebe, Arkansas

Black Birds
© KTHVOver 1,000 birds fell out of the sky over Beebe, Arkansas just before midnight.
Friday night, ringing in the New Year took on a whole different meaning for the citizens of Beebe. Around 11:30 p.m., enforcement officers with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission began getting reports of dead black birds falling from the sky in the city limits of Beebe.

Officers estimated that most of the birds were dead, but some were still alive when officers arrived. The blackbirds fell over a one-mile area in the city. AGFC wildlife officer Robby King responded to the reports and found hundreds of birds. "Shortly after I arrived there were still birds falling from the sky," King said. King collected about 65 dead birds that will be sent to the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission lab and the National Wildlife Health Center lab in Madison, Wisconsin.

The AGFC has flown over the area to gauge the scope of the event. There were no other birds found outside of the initial area.

Bizarro Earth

"Biblical" Floods Threaten Australian Homes

foods
© Agence France-PresseThe floods prompted a message of support from the Queen, who said she had been following the news "with great concern"
Flood waters swept through vast areas of northeastern Australia Saturday, threatening to inundate thousands more homes in a disaster one official said was of "biblical proportions".

As Queen Elizabeth II sent her "sincere sympathies" to Queenslanders who rang in a damp new year, helicopters were being used to deliver food and other supplies to isolated towns.

Up to 200,000 people have been affected by the floods, which have hurt the nation's lucrative mining industry and cut off major highways as the water rushes through sodden inland regions to the sea.

"In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Queensland State Treasurer Andrew Fraser told reporters in flood-hit Bundaberg.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who on Friday toured inundated regions, said the floods had been devastating and would clearly have an economic impact.

"We're still directly battling floodwaters -- we haven't seen the peak of the flood yet at centres like Rockhampton -- so the people of Queensland in many places are doing it tough today," she said.