Louisiana - Nobody quite knows what caused the ground in some parts of Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes to shake, but it certainly has people talking.

A little before 2 p.m. Wednesday, reports began flooding in to officials of tremors accompanied by a loud noise. The Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Office and Office of Emergency Preparedness received reports, but nobody has been able to narrow down a cause.

Lockport resident Bryan Comardelle had just sat down to watch television when he felt the rumble.

"It was just a sudden vibration," Comardelle said. "I live in a brick house, and it even made it shake."

Most reports are fairly uniform: one to four tremors reported in the southern reaches of the parishes all the way up into Raceland and Houma. Some people reported hearing a loud noise similar to thunder accompanying the rumbling.

"My wife described it as sounding like a garbage truck had just dropped a dumpster," Comardelle said.

After the first rumble, Comardelle joined his perplexed neighbors outside looking for the rumbling culprit or any sign of bad weather that could have caused the thunderous noise.

"It was clear outside, and then we felt more tremors," Comardelle said.

Storm-force winds are damaging properties and fanning fires across Tasmania.

Gusts of up to 100 kilometres an hour have brought down powerlines, sparking several fires.

The Tasmania Fire Service (TFS) is attending several fires, while Tasmania Police has issued hazard and road closure alerts.

The wild winds threatened to collapse a wall at Elwick Racecourse, facing Goodwood Road, just after 1pm.

Airlines Virgin and Qantas have diverted flights back to Melbourne, with one plane aborting a landing in Hobart.

About 9,300 households are without power in the Derwent and Huon Valleys and the Channel areas.

For years, proponents of genetically modified crops have hailed them as a critical tool for weaning farmers from reliance on toxic pesticides. On its website, the GMO-seed-and-agrichemical giant Monsanto makes the green case for its Roundup Ready crops, engineered to withstand the company's own blockbuster herbicide, Roundup:

Roundup agricultural herbicides and other products are used to sustainably an [sic] effectively control weeds on the farm. Their use on Roundup Ready crops has allowed farmers to conserve fuel, reduce tillage and decrease the overall use of herbicides. [Emphasis added.]

But in a just-released paper published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Sciences Europe, Chuck Benbrook, research professor at Washington State University's Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, shreds that claim. He found that Monsanto's Roundup Ready technology, which dominates corn, soy, and cotton farming, has called forth a veritable monsoon of herbicides, both in terms of higher application rates for Roundup, and, in recent years, growing use of other, more-toxic herbicides.

A pensioner awoke from sunbathing to find a fox was gnawing at his hand, his daughter-in-law claimed today.

In a letter in Country Life magazine Carey Tesler told how her 83-year-old father-in-law had asleep in a chair in the back garden when he woke by a "searing pain" to see a "mangy-looking fox eating his hand".

When the father-in-law's neighbour was also troubled by the fox, the neighbour telephoned his local council and asked them to come and get rid of the animal.

But he was left baffled to be asked if he still had the fox with him.

When the neighbour said no, the council officer replied: "Well next time you see this fox, throw a blanket over him, carry him into your car and drive him to your nearest RSPCA."

It is not clear which council Ms Tesler is referring to, however she lives in London.

Autumn has only just begun, but it's already snowing in Montana and North Dakota. But it turns out that it's not that weird an occurrence.

The town of Heart Butte, Mont., has already received 6 inches (15 centimeters) of snow, while other areas have recorded about 1 inch (2.5 cm), said Chris Zelzer, National Weather Service meteorologist in Great Falls, Mont. Areas throughout eastern Montana, North Dakota and western Minnesota are expected to receive an inch of snow or more today (Oct. 3) and tomorrow morning, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

This is the earliest measurable snowfall, defined as an inch of snow or more, for most of the area. On average, the first full inch of snow doesn't fall until Nov. 11 in Fargo and Nov. 15 in Grand Forks, N.D., according to the Grand Forks Herald.

In Chukotka, a polar bear attacked employees of Valkarkay polar station. According to New Politics portal, the bear came right up to the house, where the meteorologists lived, killed a leashed dog and tried to break into the house. The bear broke one of the doors, but the second one stopped the beast.

To escape from the predator, the explorers climbed onto the roof and called for help. The nearest settlement - Pevek - was 70 kilometers away.

Armed policemen arrived on an offroad vehicle. One of them fired his rifle three times in an attempt to scare the bear away. The beast stubbornly refused to leave, and the policeman had to kill the animal.

Monterey, California, U.S. - Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef is dying, and little will be left less than 10 years. More than half of the coral in the 2,300 km long reef has died over the past 27 years, according to a scientific survey released Monday.

Unless Australians act with urgency, only five to 10 percent of the 3,000 individual coral reefs off the eastern coast of Australia will remain, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We are losing an entire ecosystem in the best-managed coral reef system in the world," said Katharina Fabricius of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), and study co-author.

"This is the first thorough analysis of all the survey data on the GBR (Great Barrier Reef)," Fabricius told IPS.

During the upcoming 2012-13 winter season, The Weather Channel will name noteworthy winter storms. Our goal is to better communicate the threat and the timing of the significant impacts that accompany these events. The fact is, a storm with a name is easier to follow, which will mean fewer surprises and more preparation.

Hurricanes and tropical storms have been given names since the 1940s. In the late 1800s, tropical systems near Australia were named as well. Weather systems, including winter storms, have been named in Europe since the 1950s. Important dividends have resulted from attaching names to these storms:

• Naming a storm raises awareness.
• Attaching a name makes it much easier to follow a weather system's progress.
• A storm with a name takes on a personality all its own, which adds to awareness.
• In today's social media world, a name makes it much easier to reference in communication.
• A named storm is easier to remember and refer to in the future.

The question then becomes: "Why aren't winter storms named?" In fact, in Europe the naming of weather systems has been going on for a long time. Here in the U.S., summer time storms including thunderstorms and tornadoes occur on such a small time and space scale that there would be little benefit and much confusion trying to attach names to them. However, winter weather is different. Winter storms occur on a time and space scale that is similar to tropical systems.

Heard Island on the Kerguelen Plateau in the southern Indian Ocean consists primarily of the emergent portion of two volcanic structures. The large glacier-covered composite basaltic-to-trachytic cone of Big Ben comprises most of the island, and the smaller Mt. Dixon volcano lies at the NW tip of the island across a narrow isthmus. Little is known about the structure of Big Ben volcano because of its extensive ice cover. The historically active Mawson Peak forms the island's 2745-m high point and lies within a 5-6 km wide caldera breached to the SW side of Big Ben.

A new study in the journal Science by a team of international of researchers led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research have found that the sunspot cycle has a big effect on the earth's weather. The puzzle has been how fluctuations in the sun's energy of about 0.1 percent over the course of the 11-year sunspot cycle could affect the weather? The press release describing the new study explains:

The team first confirmed a theory that the slight increase in solar energy during the peak production of sunspots is absorbed by stratospheric ozone. The energy warms the air in the stratosphere over the tropics, where sunlight is most intense, while also stimulating the production of additional ozone there that absorbs even more solar energy. Since the stratosphere warms unevenly, with the most pronounced warming occurring at lower latitudes, stratospheric winds are altered and, through a chain of interconnected processes, end up strengthening tropical precipitation.

At the same time, the increased sunlight at solar maximum causes a slight warming of ocean surface waters across the subtropical Pacific, where Sun-blocking clouds are normally scarce. That small amount of extra heat leads to more evaporation, producing additional water vapor. In turn, the moisture is carried by trade winds to the normally rainy areas of the western tropical Pacific, fueling heavier rains and reinforcing the effects of the stratospheric mechanism.

The top-down influence of the stratosphere and the bottom-up influence of the ocean work together to intensify this loop and strengthen the trade winds. As more sunshine hits drier areas, these changes reinforce each other, leading to less clouds in the subtropics, allowing even more sunlight to reach the surface, and producing a positive feedback loop that further magnifies the climate response.

These stratospheric and ocean responses during solar maximum keep the equatorial eastern Pacific even cooler and drier than usual, producing conditions similar to a La Nina event. However, the cooling of about 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit is focused farther east than in a typical La Nina, is only about half as strong, and is associated with different wind patterns in the stratosphere.