Fire officials worked together to help a horse get out of a sinkhole it fell into near Arroyo Grande, California on Tuesday.

Cal Fire San Luis Obispo's Twitter account posted multiple updates on the horse's rescue Tuesday.

The fire department first tweeted at 11:34am on a report of a 'horse stuck in hole' on Sunray Place.

The department quickly updated at 11:53am, writing 'Horse is trapped in a sink hole. The incident is off of Noyes Rd. USAR [Urban Search and Rescue] team is responding. Veterinarian has been contacted.'

A middle-aged couple from Ahmedabad was trampled to death by a wild elephant in Kerala's Periyar Tiger Reserve on Wednesday.

Bhupendra B Ravel (52) and his wife Jagriti (50) were killed by the elephant while they tried to click its photo during a trek in the Gavi forest region in the PTR. The camera flash is said to have provoked the elephant. The couple, accompanied by a forest tour guide, was on a trekking trip organised by the Kerala Forest Development Corporation.

Gavi, close to the Sabarimala temple, is a deep forest and has in the past few years emerged as a key centre for tourists interested in wildlife and forest trekking. Since there are a lot of wildlife including tigers and elephants in Gavi, there are restrictions on visitors and trekking is allowed only on the package run by the KFDC, which has arranged accommodation and other facilities for visitors within the forest.

For the first time, an employee of the state forest department was killed in an elephant attack in the state. On Tuesday late evening, Bharat Singh Chaudhary, a 49-year-old forester, was killed by a female leopard at Kolhu in Kotri area of the forest division.

Anil Dutt, principal chief conservator of forests, (wildlife) told TOI, "It is for the first time that a forest employee has been killed by an elephant in the state. During Monsoon last year, one daily wager of the department was killed by a leopard. In this particular case, the surprise factor made the elephant to charge at the employee. At the turn of the road, he came in contact with female elephant which got shocked with his presence. Both elephants and bears kill people due to the surprise element."

According to Nitishmani Tripathi, divisional forest officer of Lansdowne forest division, Bharat Singh was walking to his quarters from Kotri area to Kolhu section which is just one km away. Another employee was few meters behind him. It had become foggy by that time. Chaudhary heard the sounds of the elephant and held back for some time. After being assured that animal must have crossed over, he moved ahead. But the female elephant which was very much present there became insecure and attacked him.

Researchers who are building the highest-resolution map of the Greenland Ice Sheet to date have made a surprising discovery: two lakes of meltwater that pooled beneath the ice and rapidly drained away.

One lake once held billions of gallons of water and emptied to form a mile-wide crater in just a few weeks. The other lake has filled and emptied twice in the last two years.

Researchers at The Ohio State University published findings on each lake separately: the first in the open-access journal The Cryosphere and the second in the journal Nature.

Ian Howat, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State, leads the team that discovered the cratered lake described in The Cryosphere . To him, the find adds to a growing body of evidence that meltwater has started overflowing the ice sheet's natural plumbing system and is causing "blowouts" that simply drain lakes away.

"The fact that our lake appears to have been stable for at least several decades, and then drained in a matter of weeks - or less - after a few very hot summers, may signal a fundamental change happening in the ice sheet," Howat said.

The two-mile-wide lake described in Nature was discovered by a team led by researcher Michael Willis of Cornell University. Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics and professor of earth sciences at Ohio State, is a co-author of the Nature paper, and he said that the repeated filling of that lake is worrisome.

Each time the lake fills, the meltwater carries stored heat, called latent heat, along with it, reducing the stiffness of the surrounding ice and making it more likely to flow out to sea, he said.

Bevis explained the long-term implications.

A huge ash column exploded into the sky from one of Central America's most dangerous volcanoes on Wednesday, reaching airplane-level heights of the atmosphere.

Mexico's Colima volcano played host to a "strong vulcanian-type explosion" at 9:15 a.m. local time on Wednesday. The mountain belched an ash column more than 4 km above the summit, with volcanic matter rising to 29,000 ft (9 km). The resulting ash flow eventually drifted to the northeast, Volcano Discovery reported.

A webcam focused on the active stratovolcano captured the powerful blast.


A small pyroclastic flow that descended the steep slope of the volcano was generated during the explosion.

The Protección Civil (Civil Protection) said there is not a forecast of ash falling in the region, which is located in southwestern Mexico, according to Mashable. The volcano, which is also known as the 'Volcano of Fire,' straddles the states of Colima and Jalisco.

Hundreds of birds in the East Bay area of Northern California have been found covered in a mysterious goo that causes hypothermia.

About 100 seabirds had died at the International Bird Rescue's San Francisco Bay center, where rescue workers were cleaning dozens a day.

"The good news is that we have modified our wash protocol and it appears to be working on healthier birds," said International Bird Rescue's interim director, Barbara Callahan, in a statement. "However, some of the birds that have recently arrived are in much poorer condition, likely because they've had this substance on their feathers for several days now."

Magnitude
ML 4.7

Region
Eastern Turkey

Date time
2015-01-21 13:58:03.4 UTC

Location
38.25 N ; 42.86 E

Depth
4 km

Distances
214 km N of Al Mawşil al Jadīdah, Iraq / pop: 2,065,597 / local time: 16:58:03.4 2015-01-21
53 km SW of Van, Turkey / pop: 371,713 / local time: 15:58:03.4 2015-01-21
15 km N of Bahçesaray, Turkey / pop: 3,731 / local time: 15:58:03.4 2015-01-21

Source parameters provided by:
Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute -- Istanbul, Turkey (KAN)

We were told in October, before 2014 was over, that it was heading toward being the warmest year on record (Figure 1). The visual link of polar bears underscored the message. In fact, 2014 was among the coldest 3 percent of years of the last 10,000, but that doesn't suit the political agenda.
We know the headline referred to NOAA's projection, but the public only remember "warmest year". It is a routine of manipulation of headlines practiced by bureaucrats and supporters of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), from the start. The claim was not surprising, because NOAA was pushing 2014 as warm beginning in January with this headline "NOAA: January 2014 fourth-warmest on record." Various months were identified during the year, for example, "NOAA: August 2014 Was The Warmest On Record," noting August was the warmest by a fraction. But they had already reported,

The summer of 2014 is officially the hottest since the modern instrumental record began more than 130 years ago, according to the latest state of the climate report from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.

By October they were summarizing the year.

"This makes the first ten months of 2014 the warmest January to October period on record and puts 2014 on track to be the warmest year recorded in the NOAA archive, which dates back to 1880."

Bob Tisdale provided an excellent summary of the "Anticipation" for two surface records from GISS and NCDC. He was not surprised when these records appeared, showing 2014 was the warmest, according to them, by 0.02°C. Remember, this is from a record that is restricted by the historic record to measurements of 0.5°C. We also know the two satellite records, RSS and UAH, both show it was not the warmest year.

To counteract the headline you need something very dramatic, because there is nothing significant about the 2014 temperature as Tisdale plans to identify in an upcoming article titled, "The Uptick in Global Surface Temperatures in 2014 Doesn't Help the Growing Difference between Climate Models and Reality". He is interested in seeing how Gavin Schmidt, who replaced James Hansen at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), is carrying the torch. History shows that GISS readings are consistently higher than all other sources. It is just one indicator of the temperature adjustments made so the AGW hypothesis fits the political agenda.

Heavy rainfall in Borneo and Sumatra over the last 3 days has left parts of Malaysia and Indonesia struggling with yet more flooding. Malaysia is still recovering from the floods of December 2014 in the north of the country, which were some of the worst flooding seen in years.

Sarawak, Malaysia

In Borneo, over 5,000 people have been evacuated in the flood-hit state of Sarawak. This figure has dropped slightly from almost 7,000 earlier today. 38 relief centres have been set up to house those displaced by the floods.

The worst affected area is around the state capital of Kuching, where at one point almost 5,000 were staying in temporary accommodation. Just over 1,000 people have been displaced in Padawan.

One flood-related death has been reported in Mukah, when a teenage girl drowned after a boat capsized in rough waters.

Mozambique's National Disaster Management Institute today confirmed that 71 people have died in the flooding that has ravaged parts of the country over the last 10 days.

The worst affected province is Zambezia, where 49 of the victims died. The area has been badly hit by flooding after the Licugno river overflowed. The province of Nampula has also been badly affected by flooding caused by heavy rainfall over the last two weeks.

The country's authorities have set up 34 relief centres to house those displaced by the floods. It is understood that around 30,000 people are currently staying in the centres.