Galveston -- Hundreds of thousands of dead fish have washed up on the beach in Galveston, where crews went to work Monday to remove the dead fish.

Peter Davis of the Galveston Island Beach Patrol said Sunday the small shad fish likely were killed by low oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico.

Davis estimated hundreds of thousands of fish have died.

Galveston County health officials said the water is fine for beachgoers.

Biologist Steven Mitchell with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said calm conditions and summer heat may have contributed to the fish kill.

He said there's a possibility of a dead zone in the water off Galveston.

Testing is expected this week.

Date-Time:
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 02:59:42 UTC
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 12:59:42 PM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
49.796°N, 145.113°E

Depth:
625.7 km (388.8 miles)

Region:
SEA OF OKHOTSK

Distances:
160 km (100 miles) ENE (66°) from Poronaysk, Russia

361 km (225 miles) NNE (28°) from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia

445 km (277 miles) SSE (160°) from Okha, Russia

1630 km (1013 miles) NNE (14°) from TOKYO, Japan

Thousands of people were without power, buildings were ripped apart and airplanes were damaged at an area airport after storms raged through north Texas.

Aerial footage showed damage to at least 15 small planes and several buildings at Fort Worth's Meacham International Airport after winds reached more than 70 mph.

As the storm tore through the airport, many of the airplanes were tossed around the tarmac and walls and roofs of the nearby buildings were pulled off.

In nearby Denton County, northwest of Fort Worth, The Dallas Morning News reported several structures, including a home and barns, were also damaged.

More than 22,000 people were still without power on Monday, a figure down from the around 50,000 people that had lost power due to the bad weather, the newspaper reported.

No injuries were reported.

Germany is being invaded by what is estimated to be over a million raccoons. Worried residents have been driven to take extreme measures to deter or eradicate the furry pests, but experts fear the nocturnal marauders are here to stay.

A retired man in Harleshausen, a suburb of the central German city of Kassel, had nothing more in mind than removing the tarp covering his lawn furniture. But then a hissing animal with markings like a safecracker's mask shot toward him and sank its teeth into his left hand. It was a female raccoon intent on protecting her young, and she next attacked the man's foot. The struggle lasted a minute or so before the man staggered into his house bleeding.

That altercation is symptomatic of a nuisance that's spreading through the country. Procyon lotor, the common raccoon, is not native to Germany, but its range is increasing. The population will soon number over a million, according to forest biologist Ulf Hohmann.

These predatory mammals originally from North America can weigh over 10 kilograms (22 pounds). They're known for their intelligence, and many Native American legends assign raccoons the trickster role that Germans associate with Reynard the Fox in European fables. Both the real-life trapper Daniel Boone and the fictional hero of the Leatherstocking Tales novels wore fur caps made from raccoon pelts, easily identifiable by their bushy black and white tails.

The first raccoons were brought to Germany in around 1920 to be bred in captivity for their pelts. Their controlled introduction into the wild occurred on April 12, 1934, when Prussian hunting and game authorities released two pairs of raccoons near the Edersee, a reservoir near Kassel. Their stated purpose was to "enrich the fauna" of the area.

Exposure to radioactive material released into the environment have caused mutations in butterflies found in Japan, a study suggests.

Scientists found an increase in leg, antennae and wing shape mutations among butterflies collected following the 2011 Fukushima accident.

The link between the mutations and the radioactive material was shown by laboratory experiments, they report.

The work has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Two months after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in March 2011, a team of Japanese researchers collected 144 adult pale grass blue (Zizeeria maha) butterflies from 10 locations in Japan, including the Fukushima area.

When the accident occurred, the adult butterflies would have been overwintering as larvae.

My papers and those of Jan-Erik Solheim et al predict a significant cooling over Solar Cycle 24 relative to Solar Cycle 23. Solheim's model predicts that Solar Cycle 24, for the northern hemisphere, will be 0.9º C cooler than Solar Cycle 23. It hasn't cooled yet and we are three and a half years into the current cycle. The longer the temperature stays where it is, the more cooling has to come over the rest of the cycle for the predicted average reduction to occur.

So when will it cool? As Nir Shaviv and others have noted, the biggest calorimeter on the plant is the oceans. My work on sea level response to solar activity (link) found that the breakover between sea level rise and sea level fall is a sunspot amplitude of 40:
As this graph from SIDC shows, the current solar amplitude is about 60 in the run-up to solar maximum, expected in May 2013:

"Connect the Dots" for this one. Mother Nature has just proven how idiotic some one the arguments trying to link global warming and severe weather are: in this case, the "global warming makes more tornadoes" argument has just gone down in flames.
Given how hot July was in the USA, setting a new record high temperature for the continental United States, and given that the U.S. is the world's tornado capital, and given the wailing of paid political shills like Joe Romm, Brad Johnson (who tried to get traction for a Twitter meme of #poisonedweather going) and weepy Bill McKibben, that tornadoes are exacerbated by global warming, you'd think Nature would have come through for them in July. By their twisted "logic", with record heat, it would naturally come to pass that July had a record number of tornadoes, right? As John Belushi would say: "But nooooooo...."

At least 10 people were killed and dozens injured after the earthen wall of a reservoir collapsed in eastern China, flooding a rural area, state media said Sunday. The 29-metre (96-foot) wall, part of a reservoir in Zhejiang province, collapsed early Friday, following heavy rainfall after Typhoon Haikui passed through the area, the China Daily newspaper said.

The paper put the death toll at 10 while the official Xinhua news agency said Saturday that 11 people died and 27 were injured. Local officials in Shenjiakeng village, where the accident took place, could not be immediately reached for comment. The collapse flooded a 'large area' of the village with water and silt, affecting 80 families and damaging at least a third of homes, China Daily said.

A swarm of more than 150 earthquakes over two days last month caused a previously dormant volcano to erupt beneath the Pacific Ocean, a scientist said Monday. The eruption of the Havre Volcano, about halfway between New Zealand and Tonga, is believed to have caused a floating island of pumice larger than 4,000 square miles that was encountered by a New Zealand navy ship last week. Cornel de Ronde, principal scientist of New Zealand's Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, told Radio New Zealand the source of the pumice had been identified in cooperation with French researchers in Tahiti who monitor earthquakes in the southwest Pacific.
"When they looked at their physical records they saw that on July 17th and 18th, there were some 157 earthquakes of magnitudes between 3.0 and 4.8," he said. De Ronde said they occurred near the time of the first sighting of the pumice 'raft.' When the institute looked at its database, it found the Havre volcano, which it had previously surveyed. It was a caldera volcano, like White Island off the west coast of New Zealand's North Island, which erupted last week, but the Havre was not thought to have erupted before, he said. De Ronde said the pumice island was so light that it had floated several hundred kilometers from the volcano when it was encountered by the HMNZS Canterbury, which took samples last week.

In Komatsu city Ishikawa, more than 10,000 earthworms were found dead in a parking lot. Ishikawa prefecture is facing Japan / Korea Sea. Mr. Kobayashi is living near the parking lot. He comments he found earthworms dead in the evening of 8/5/2012. It kept increasing and now it's scattered around in the 250 m2 of the area. There are about 500 dead worms in the space for one car. Because 16 cars can park there, more than 10,000 worms are dead in the whole area including the passageway.

A former director of an insect's museum visited the place to comment it is rare to see this many worms dead at once. It's an ordinary type of earthworm. He assumes they came from the near greenery to the parking lot for water because of the intense heat and died there.