Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

USGS: Earthquake Magnitude 6.2 - 134km ESE of Iwo Jima, Japan


USGS
Sun, 29 Jun 2014 01:57 UTC
Earthquake 6.2 Iwo, Japan
© USGS
Event Time:
2014-06-29 05:56:31 UTC
2014-06-29 15:56:31 UTC+10:00 at epicenter

Location:
24.401°N 142.591°E depth=43.2km (26.8mi)

Nearby Cities:
134km (83mi) ESE of Iwo Jima, Japan
1068km (664mi) NNW of N. Islands Municipality, N. Mariana Islands
1069km (664mi) NNW of Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands
1091km (678mi) NNW of JP Tinian Town pre-WW2, N. Mariana Islands
1191km (740mi) SSE of Shimoda, Japan

Scientific data
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Attention

At least a million dead fish found in South Carolina

Julie Roy
News2
Fri, 27 Jun 2014 10:34 UTC
At least a million fish caracaras line the banks and water ways of the Winyah Bay in Georgetown County after a massive fish kill occurred earlier this week.

Officials with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources were on the scene and said it was one of the largest fish kills they had seen."It was up to a million animals; certainly hundreds of thousands," said Dean Cane. Cane is a marine biologist with DNR.
Image
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Blue Planet

Giant 'whirlpools' in the ocean are driving the weather?

Michael Slezak
New Scientist
Fri, 27 Jun 2014 11:08 UTC
Ocean whirlpool 1
The 90-mile-wide whirlpool, spotted off the coast of South Africa by Nasa's Terra satellite in February 2012.
Giant "whirlpools" in the ocean, up to 500 kilometers across, are driving the world's climate on a scale previously unimagined. We just don't know exactly how yet.

The bodies of swirling water, called mesoscale eddies, are 100 km to 500 km in diameter. They form when patches of water are destabilised by obstacles like islands. The eddies carry huge volumes of water and heat across the oceans, until they slowly stop spinning over days or months and reintegrate with the surrounding water.

The assumption was that they gradually diffused the heat they carried in all directions as they travelled, which would hardly do anything to the climate. Now, for the first time, the amount of water and heat they carry has been measured and it turns out the eddies have a big effect after all.

Comment: Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection: The Secret History of the World - Book 3

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Health

Black bear attacks Morgantown area woman, West Virginia


pittsburgh.cbslocal.com
Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:08 UTC
Image
© Mt. Lebanon Police dash cam
A Morgantown area woman is recovering after being attacked by a black bear.

Kelly Dale tells The Dominion Post that she walked into a dangerous situation Wednesday night, when she found herself between a mother bear and its cub. The enraged bear swatted at her head and straddled her after knocking her down.

The attack lasted only about five seconds but left Dale with a lacerated scalp, bruised ribs and a sprained ankle.

Dale says that as a mother herself, she really can't blame the bear. In her words: "She was just doing what she was supposed to do."

Earlier this month, officials were investigating a bear sighting in Mt. Lebanon.

A black bear was seen leaving Mt. Lebanon and Castle Shannon, headed into Bethel Park. A Mt. Lebanon Police dash cam captured the bear running across the road.
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Cloud Lightning

Monsoon floods kill 11 in India, maroon thousands


appealdemocrat.com
Sat, 28 Jun 2014 01:48 UTC
India flooding
© Anupam NathAn Indian woman wades through the floodwaters in Gauhati, India, Friday, June 27, 2014.
Indian authorities rushed food and drinking water Saturday to thousands of people marooned by monsoon rains and mudslides that left at least 11 dead in the remote northeast.

Residents waded through waist- and knee-deep water in several parts of the Assam state capital, Gauhati, which was hit by nearly 60 millimeters (2.3 inches) of pounding rain on Thursday night. The average four-month monsoon rainfall is 89 centimeters (35 inches).

"Inflatable boats and makeshift banana rafts have become a mode of transport in the heart of Gauhati. This is something I didn't imagine," said Rani Das, a researcher who could not reach her office on Saturday.
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Cloud Lightning

Paraguay floods lead to evacuation of thousands


BBC
Fri, 27 Jun 2014 15:41 UTC
Paraguay flood
© APMore than 200,000 people have been evacuated due to the floods.
Tens of thousands of people in Paraguay have been evacuated after torrential rains caused extensive flooding.

Carlos Silva, the governor of the state of Neembucu, in the southeast, said the rains have destroyed crops, flooded homes and blocked roads.

Mr Silva also said that United Nations and Red Cross officials have evaluated the situation and he is hoping to get help from abroad.

Worst affected have been people living near the Paraguay and Parana rivers.
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Bell

The rise of the 'Super Weed' around the world

Rani Molla
Wall Street Journal
Mon, 23 Jun 2014 20:09 UTC
Image
© Associated Press
"Super weeds" are becoming increasingly common.

Texas cotton growers are petitioning the Environmental Protection Agency to let them use propazine, an alternative herbicide to Monsanto's glysophate, which is currently used, to combat a "super weed" that has developed resistance to it. According to the Weed Science Society of America, these herbicide-resistant weeds were first reported in the 1950s - soon after farmers began using the first major synthetic herbicides - and are on the rise.

It's a case of typical evolutionary processes: A farmer sprays their field with an herbicide, most of the weeds die, a few that are best adapted for the herbicide will live on and reproduce. After repeated herbicide use, these super weeds can actually come to dominate the weed population. Weeds have evolved to be resistant to herbicide after herbicide, starting with synthetic auxins, then triazines, then ACCase inhibitors, then ALS inhibitors and now glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, according to Director of the International Survey of Herbicide-Resistant Weeds Ian Heap, who helps run Weedscience.com, the central repository for scientifically backed, peer-reviewed herbicide-resistance cases.

Comment: The rise of 'Super Weeds' has been an ongoing problem for years!

For a more in depth look at the 'Superweed' issue plaguing America's industrial agribusiness industry read the following articles:
So the dramatic recent increases in resistant weeds have occurred despite years of urging farmers to use additional chemicals to avoid resistance. Weed scientists now say that superweeds from GMO crops infest over 11 million acres of US farmland - nearly five times more acreage than just three years ago - at a cost to US farmers of $1 billion a year.

What irks many farmers facing superweed problems and rising costs (not to mention consumers facing the prospects of more chemicals sprayed on our food and environment) is that Monsanto markets the use of a single herbicide as the main benefit of its GMO Roundup Ready crops. Even after all the publicity about this GMO failure, the "Council for Biotechnology Information," a front-group funded by Monsanto and other GMO crop producers, continues to put forth this now laughable claim.


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Black Cat

Tiger jumps onto boat, snatches man and leaps back into Sunderbans jungle, India

Monotosh Chakraborty
The Times of India
Fri, 27 Jun 2014 11:52 UTC
Image
© PTI photoThis is the fourth time that a human was killed by a tiger in the Sunderbans this year.
The danger of venturing into the prohibited areas of Sunderbans was revealed again on Thursday morning when a tiger jumped from the bank of a creek and leapt back with a man in its jaws. This is the fourth time that a human was killed by a tiger in the Sunderbans this year.

The victim, 62-year-old Sushil Majhi, lived in Lahiripur near Datta river, less than kilometre from a creek that runs deep into the forest. Along with his son Jyotish, 40, and adopted daughter Molina, Majhi would often row up the creek to catch crabs.

On Thursday, at the crack of dawn, the three set out on a boat to the forests of Kholakhali, an area where fishing is banned.
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Cloud Lightning

Torrential rainfall in Oslo, Norway smashes all historical records


thelocal.no
Fri, 27 Jun 2014 10:15 UTC
Image
© Magnus Aabech/NTB ScanpixA van crashes through deep water on Oslo's ring road.
The torrential rainfall that descended on Oslo on Thursday smashed all historical records, with a colossal 44.5mm of rain falling in just a single hour between four and five on Thursday afternoon.

Water streamed down the city's streets on Thursday afternoon, causing gridlock in much of the city centre, while hailstorms left parts of the city covered in a layer of freak summer ice.

The previous highest rainfall rate the city has seen since records began in 1937 came came in 1980, when 41.5mm of rain fell in an hour over the summer.

"It seems as though we had nearly one month's rainfall in three hours," Marit Helene Jensen told Aftenposten after the rain subsided yesterday evening.

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Snowman

Boy builds snowman in late June in Mörrum, southern Sweden


thelocal.se
Fri, 27 Jun 2014 10:02 UTC
Image
David Odenhammer, 7, (he's the one on the right) poses beside his June snowman
Sweden's meteorological agency SMHI warned of storms hitting the south on Thursday and the town of Mörrum wasn't spared.

"The hailstorm must have lasted about ten minutes and it was absolutely crazy. There was several inches of it on the ground," Göran Odenhammer, father and occasional snowman builder, told The Local.

Odenhammer and his seven-year-old son David ventured outside to inspect the hail and did what comes naturally - have fun in the snow/hail during the Swedish summer.
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