Earth ChangesS


Cloud Grey

Wild weather week for U.S. Atlantic coast

Steven Strouss
CBS News - Philadelphia
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 23:36 UTC
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© CBS3
The high temperature soared to 96 degrees this afternoon in Philadelphia making today the hottest day of 2014. The combination of heat and humidity made it feel insufferable outside and also triggered severe thunderstorms, and flash flood warnings this evening. The CBS3 weather team counted over 10,000 lightning strikes since 6pm as storms were still raging furiously over New Jersey. Numerous house fires were sparked by lightning strikes across the region.

The concerns of wild weather are not over yet as the area goes under a Flash Flood Watch Thursday morning. Showers and thunderstorms along a stalled cold front will connect with tropical moisture from Arthur resulting in periods of heavy rain for the region Thursday afternoon. Rainfall amounts of 1-3″ could cause flooding along area streams and poor drainage flooding is also expected.
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Attention

Dead Humpback whale washes ashore at Montaña de Oro, California

David Sneed
The Tribune
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 12:43 UTC
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© VERA VON RAUNERA dead humpback whale has washed up on the beach at Montaña de Oro.
State Parks officials say people should avoid going near the decomposing carcass for health and safety reasons

A dead 35-foot-long humpback whale has washed up on a beach at Montaña de Oro State Park.

The whale washed up on a beach just north of Hazard Reef late Friday morning. Based on its size, the animal was probably a juvenile, said Vince Cicero, senior environmental scientist with State Parks.

Scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Marine Mammal Center examined the whale over the weekend and determined that it was too decomposed to do a necropsy.

"It had probably been dead a while before it washed ashore," Cicero said.

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Igloo

Sea ice in Antarctic hits second all-time record in a week

Harold Ambler
Talkingabouttheweather.wordpress.com
Tue, 01 Jul 2014 10:08 UTC
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© The Cryosphere TodayA graph of the latest all-time record of Southern Hemisphere sea ice area, expressed as an anomaly.
Antarctic sea ice has hit its second all-time record maximum this week. The new record is 2.112 million square kilometers above normal. Until the weekend just past, the previous record had been 1.840 million square kilometers above normal, a mark hit on December 20, 2007, as I reported here, and also covered in my book.

Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, responded to e-mail questions and also spoke by telephone about the new record sea ice growth in the Southern Hemisphere, indicating that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the sea ice growth was specifically due to global warming.

"The primary reason for this is the nature of the circulation of the Southern Ocean - water heated in high southern latitudes is carried equatorward, to be replaced by colder waters upwelling from below, which inhibits ice loss," Serreze wrote in an e-mail. "Upon this natural oceanic thermostat, one will see the effects of natural climate variations, [the rise] appears to be best explained by shifts in atmospheric circulation although a number of other factors are also likely involved."
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Sun

Warmest June ever recorded in New Zealand

Jamie Morton
The New Zealand Herald
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 17:43 UTC
Thermometer
It's now official - last month was the warmest June ever recorded in New Zealand.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research this afternoon confirmed an "exceptionally warm start to winter", with dozens of climate stations also placing in the top four for the warmest June ever recorded.

Record high mean temperatures for the month were recorded at Kerikeri, Tauranga, Te Puke, Dunedin, Stratford, Wanganui, Westport, Hokitika, Haast, Ranfurly, Secretary Island and Whenuapai at Auckland.

The nationwide average temperature in June 2014 was 10.3C, surpassing the previous record for warmest June in 2003.
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Cloud Lightning

Canadian prairie flooding prompts evacuations in western Manitoba


CBC News
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 17:24 UTC
Sask Floods
© CBC News (Courtesy Mike Beckie)Roads and culverts have collapsed in a number of areas in southeast Saskatchewan due to torrential rains on the weekend. This section of Highway 2 is washed out just south of Imperial, Sask.
Widespread overland flooding in Saskatchewan and Manitoba prompted the evacuation of some homes in western Manitoba on Tuesday night.

The Rural Municipality of Wallace issued a mandatory evacuation order for an area almost five kilometres south of the Trans-Canada Highway from Kirkella, Man., a community near the Saskatchewan border, east to Road 161W.

Residents in the affected area were urged to leave by 9 p.m. CT, as an influx of water was coming quickly. Evacuees were asked to report to a reception centre in nearby Virden, Man.

It wasn't immediately clear how many people were affected by the municipality's evacuation order.

Earlier in the evening, emergency officials in Virden put out an evacuation order for homes on the south side of Kenderdine Street, south of Highway 257 and east of Scallion Creek.


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Arrow Down

Boy injured after car drives into sinkhole in Burlington, Illinois

Elena Ferrarin
Daily Herald
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 06:16 UTC
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A giant sinkhole swallowed a car in Kane County after Monday night's storms
Knowing that her son was able to take a few steps from his hospital bed to a chair Wednesday morning was an immense relief, his mother said, but the enormity of his injuries also overwhelmed the Elgin woman.

Benjamin Hernandez, 15, was seriously hurt a day earlier when the car driven by his mother plunged into a sinkhole on a rural road south of the village of Burlington.

San Juanita Pineda was delivering newspapers in the pre-dawn hours and did not see the sinkhole that was 10 feet in diameter and deep enough that her Ford Taurus was lodged below ground level. A short time later, a pickup truck drove over the car in which the two were pinned.

Benjamin is in the pediatric intensive care unit of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood with a spinal fracture, a broken rib and a broken jaw, his mother said. He also lost some teeth.


Comment:


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Blue Planet

Canada: Sinkhole closes west Quebec highway


CBC News
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 19:08 UTC
Quebec Sinkhole
© CBC NewsPolice closed Highway 148 in both directions after a 10-metre wide sinkhole opened Wednesday morning in the highway's eastbound lane.
Pontiac Mayor Roger Larose says he warned the province a month ago about problems with a highway culvert that likely caused a large sinkhole to appear on Highway 148 on Wednesday.

On Wednesday morning a large sinkhole 10 metres deep and 10 metres wide formed on Highway 148's eastbound lanes, closing the highway in both directions between the communities of Quyon and Luskville, both of which are part of the municipality of Pontiac.

Pontiac Mayor Roger Larose said Wednesday he and his staff told the provincial government a month ago that the culvert was blocked.

He said workers did come to fix the problem, but said the culverts should have been monitored.

"They should have been aware of this before us. They aren't organized and I sure am not impressed," said Larose.

A spokesperson with Quebec's transportation ministry told CBC News recent heavy rains and the Canada Day storm may have contributed to the sinkhole's formation over the culvert.

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Arrow Down

Schoolgirl survives fall into 25ft deep sinkhole in Shuttlewood, UK

David Raven
Daily Mirror, UK
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 05:43 UTC
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Daisy-Mae Jones, 7, fell the equivalent height of a two-storey house and incredibly walked away with just cuts and bruises

A seven-year-old girl miraculously survived falling 25ft into a sinkhole.

Schoolgirl Daisy-Mae Jones, fell the equivalent height of a two-storey house while she was playing in a field near her home.

Her terrified mother Janine struggled to find little Daisy-Mae at first because of the thick grass, and the search party were led by the schoolgirl's cries for help until they found the hole.

A nearby builder helped to rescue her - and incredibly, she walked away with just cuts and bruises.

Describing the horrifying ordeal, mum Janine, 39, of Shuttlewood, Derbys., said: "Her friends came to tell us what had happened but the grass in that field is tall and thick, so it took a while to find her.

"We just had to keep calling her, and listening out. When we found her she was crying and covered head to toe in clay and mud. It was terrible."
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Arrow Down

Pollution returning to the source: Ocean plastic eaten by marine life may be ending up on your plate

Kristina Bravo
Yahoo News
Tue, 01 Jul 2014 18:06 UTC
turtle eats plastic bag
© greenrock.orgMarine life like turtles mistakenly ingest plastic bags or get caught up in them, resulting in a painful death.
From water bottles to the microbeads in our face wash, we send millions of tons of plastic into the ocean every year. Not only does it amount to $13 billion in damages to the environment, but it costs the lives of the marine animals that end up choking on our garbage. A new study has found even grimmer news: About 99 percent of the ocean's plastic is missing, and there's a chance that a large amount is ending up on our dinner plates.

The study, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported data collected from all major ocean gyres in 2010 and 2011. When researchers used mesh nets to determine how much plastic the garbage patches have, they didn't find as much trash as expected.

"We can't account for 99 percent of the plastic that we have in the ocean," lead researcher Carlos Duarte told Science. "There is potential for this plastic to enter the global ocean food web.... And we are part of [it]."

According to Duarte, there's a good chance that marine wildlife is eating the ocean's plastic, which could look like fish food after waves and sunlight break it down into tiny pieces.

Comment: See also:

88% of world's oceans covered by plastic garbage - report
Plastic in Bird's Stomachs Reveals Ocean's Garbage Problem
The great Pacific garbage patch: We are literally filling up the Pacific ocean with plastic

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Attention

Two dead humpback whales wash up on Australian beaches


The Coffs Coast Advocate
Wed, 02 Jul 2014 14:38 UTC
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© NPWSA new-born humpback male washed up on the beach north of Scott’s Head on late Friday afternoon.
The joy of the annual whale migration has been tempered by the discovery of two dead mammals on Coffs Coast beaches.

The pair of deceased humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) were reported to the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Services (NPWS) within 24 hours over the weekend.

The first whale was a new-born male which washed on the beach north of Scotts Head on late Friday afternoon.

The second whale was a humpback that had been previously seen resting within metres of rocks at Bonville Headland last Wednesday.

It had been monitored throughout that day by staff from Dolphin Marine Magic, ORRCA Inc and the NPWS before it swam off into open water late Wednesday afternoon. This whale later washed up dead on Bonville Beach around midday on Saturday.

Staff from Dolphin Marine Magic (DMM) were dispatched to both sites to collect biological samples and measurement data from the animals.
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