Four people died while two others were injured when their boat was struck by lightning at Habiganj's Ajmiriganj Upazila.

Local police OC Taimur Bakht Chowdhury said that this happened on Wednesday at Birat Union of the Upazila.

The boat was heading to Ajmiriganj town, when the lightning struck leaving the four dead on the spot.

Those killed have been identified as Musa Mia, 50, Khitish Sutradhar, 20, Ranjit Sutradhar, 45 and Prosen Sutradhar, 22.

The injured have been taken to the Ajmiriganj Upazila Health Complex.

At least eight persons were killed and 16 injured when lightning struck them in different parts of Odisha this evening.

LightningReports from Jagatsinghpur district said three persons were killed and three others were seriously injured when lightning struck them at Nimakala village under Tirtol police station limits.

While one person was killed in Dikshitpada village under Nischintakoili block in Cuttack district, a girl student of Sathibakuda village under Chandbali block in Bhadrak district was killed while lightning struck her while she was on the way to her house. Besides, a daily wage labourer of Bideipurpal village under Basudevpur block in the district also succumbed to lightning.

Another person of Patilo village under Anandpur block in Keonjhar district was killed while an old woman was killed and a boy was seriously injured when lightning struck them at Chakadagagua village under Mahakalapada block in Kendrapara district.

IceAgeNow - seismologist Chris Goldfinger has warned that a gigantic Earthquake, just of the coast of the Pacific Northwest, with the potential to kill over 10,000 American people, is many decades overdue.

According to The New Yorker;

San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing "the big one." That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.

Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The "Cascadia" part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The "subduction zone" part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth's continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.

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A second day of showers and thunderstorms in southern and central California was expected to bring heavy rain and set more rainfall records in what is usually a dry month. Rain began to fall Sunday afternoon in parts of Los Angeles County's mountains, the valley north and inland urban areas to the east. Later in the day, the city got a repeat of scattered showers and occasional downpours from Saturday as remnants of Tropical Storm Dolores off Baja California bring warm, muggy conditions northward. "We have a chance of some more heavy rain in L.A. County this evening, thunderstorms, lightning, possibly some localized street flooding," said National Weather Service meteorologist Joe Sirard. Rainfall Saturday broke records in at least 11 locations, including five places that had the most rain ever recorded on any day in July, Sirard said.

July is typically the driest month of the year in Southern California. Because of that, the 0.36 inches of rain in downtown Los Angeles Saturday exceeded the 0.24 inch recorded July 14, 1886, which had been the wettest July day in nearly 130 years, Sirard said. "It looks like we're probably going to get more rain downtown this evening," Sirard said. "It looks like there's a good chance the monthly record is going to go up. Really, this is super historic." The record is especially significant, he said, because downtown Los Angeles has the longest recording climate station, dating to July 1, 1877. The storm brought flash floods and power outages and turned Los Angeles County's typically packed coast into empty stretches of sand when the threat of lightning forced authorities to close 70 miles of beaches. The popular Santa Monica Pier and its nearby beaches were shuttered.

Last summer, a lightning strike killed a man at Venice Beach and injured about a dozen people. Los Angeles County's beaches remained open Sunday, despite reports of thunderstorms in the mountains and western San Diego coast during the afternoon. AJ Lester of the Los Angeles County Fire Department's Lifeguard Division said he has been in touch with weather officials and was tracking rain reports. Signs warned beachgoers to avoid storm drain flows into the ocean because of Saturday's sometimes heavy rain.

Astounding footage shows the moment a rare underwater volcano erupts off the coast of Taiwan. As the drone flies above the underwater Kueishantao volcano, off the coast of Taiwan's Gueishan Island, the amazing recording captures the moment the mighty volcano erupts deep in the ocean.
The footage was captured by marine scientist Mario Lebrato with Spanish film-maker Daniel Meana, 31, as they were working offshore on a research project with Taiwan Ocean University. Mario commented on the footage: "In the video you can see more than 30 vents, which expel sulphur and carbon dioxide. The seawater comes out of the vents at around 100C, but then gets cooled down by the surrounding water."

Studies find airplane crews at high altitude are exposed to potentially harmful levels of radiation from cosmic rays.

"Neutrons which don't reach the ground do reach airline altitude," said Adrian Melott, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas. "Flight crews get a lot more radiation dose from neutrons. In fact, during solar particle events, airplanes are diverted away from the North Pole, where a lot more cosmic rays come down."

But could these cosmic rays pose hazards even at sea level? In recent years, research has suggested congenital birth defects down on Earth's surface could be caused by these "solar particle events" — spikes in cosmic rays from the sun that touch off the northern lights and sometimes hamper communications or the electric power grid.

For a long time jackals have been known to most Europeans only through documentaries on African wildlife. But one species - the golden jackal (canis aureus) - is now advancing northward and westward across Europe from its traditional range along the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts as far as Switzerland and Estonia. This has resulted in considerable confusion - should jackals be protected as a native species everywhere in Europe? Yes, says legal scholar Arie Trouwborst of Tilburg University.

Trouwborst studied the expansion of jackals with biologists of the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (Trondheim). The results have recently been published in Biodiversity and Conservation (open access).

The golden jackal, also known as 'European coyote', has so far been spotted in thirty European countries including ones without historic records of the species (see distribution map below). The drivers of this expansion are not yet fully understood. Other large carnivores such as the wolf are also spreading, but they can be characterized as comebacks (recoveries).

The floods in Indus River and Chitral River have caused several villages and towns to inundate, Dunya News reported.

According to details, at least fifty villages have been disconnected from Ghotki while over a hundred villages have been inundated in Layyah.

Dozens of towns in Rahim Yar Khan and Dera Ghazi Khan have also been struck by the inundation while dozens of houses have also been affected in various areas including Kalash Valley.

According to details, the embankment at Rasulpur area of Rahim Yar Khan could not bear the pressure of the flood wave and broke down, causing several areas including Rasulpur, Kacha Mahazi, Kacha Chohan to inundate.

At least eight villages have also been flooded in Muzaffargarh area and the local administration has established as many as eighteen relief camps to deal with the emergency.

A 30-foot-by-50-foot (9-by-15-meter) section of Interstate 10 over a desert wash ‒ or dry riverbed ‒ in southeastern California west of Arizona has collapsed amid heavy rain, causing indefinite closure of a route used by 27,000 vehicles per day.

The eastbound section of the bridge over the normally dry Tex Wash in Desert Center, just east of the Coachella Valley and about 50 miles (80km) west of the Arizona border, collapsed on Sunday afternoon during the second day of record rainfall in Southern California. Though the westbound section of the interstate remained intact, it was also closed because it was compromised by flooding waters and will also need extensive repairs, the California Department of Transportation said.

Video compilation of extreme weather events (and general environmental chaos) from the past month or so.

Record high temperatures in Germany were immediately followed by unusually strong storms and hail. Record rainfall in China was followed by a record heatwave there. In the US, there's been a record heatwave in the West, and record rainfall in the South. There's been record cold in Australia, and record heat in Pakistan. Volcanoes erupted in Indonesia, Japan and Mexico, while there was a strong earthquake in China and an earthquake swarm in Iceland... And in between all that; powerful storms and record rainfall.

Things be intensifying!