Earth ChangesS


Cloud Lightning

Pre-Dawn Tornado Cuts a Deadly Swath Through Downtown Harrisburg, Illinois

Douglas Belkin
The Wall Street Journal
Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:35 UTC
Image
© Darrin Phegley/The Gleaner/Associated Press Judy Hudnall sifted through the debris left from Wednesday morning's storm in Henderson, Ky.
A band of violent weather stretching across the middle of the U.S. spawned thunderstorms and tornadoes in several states.

Hardest hit late Tuesday and early Wednesday was Harrisburg, Ill., a city of 9,000 where at least six people were killed after a tornado with winds measuring up to 170 miles an hour barreled through the downtown just before dawn, leveling buildings, such as the shopping mall above, and ripping off roofs.

"We had a 40-foot section of wall, which covered patients' rooms, just ... blown away, it's gone," said Vince Ashley, chief executive of Harrisburg Medical Center. A warning call 20 minutes before the storm gave the hospital time to evacuate patient rooms and avoid casualties.

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn declared Harrisburg a disaster area. Authorities said as many as 300 homes in Harrisburg were damaged or destroyed, and Mr. Ashley said his emergency room treated at least 50 people. "Head injuries, chest injuries, a lot of broken bones, everything down to cuts and bruises," he said.

Emergency officials said one person was dead from the storm in Cumberland County, Tenn., according to the Associated Press. At least 12 people were killed by the storms overall, the AP reported.
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Igloo

Doomsday Seed Vault's Birthday Brings 25,000 Gifts

Wynne Parry
Live Science
Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:02 UTC
Global Seed Vault
© Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity TrustThe Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 on Svalbard, Norway, above the Arctic Circle.

This week, the Doomsday Seed Vault in Norway is scheduled to receive nearly 25,000 samples of seeds from around the world, including those of grains that grow on one of the world's highest mountain ranges and a plant whose stems redden an Ecuadorean drink on the "Day of the Dead."

With these additions the now four-year-old vault, formerly known as the Svaldbard Global Seed Vault, would house more than 740,000 samples in an Arctic mountain on the Svaldbard archipelago.

"Our crop diversity is constantly under threat, from dramatic dangers such as fires, political unrest, war and tornadoes, as well as the mundane, such as failing refrigeration systems and budget cuts. But these seeds are the future of our food supply, as they carry genetic treasure such as heat resistance, drought tolerance or disease and pest resistance," Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, one of the entities responsible for the vault, said in a news release.

The vault is intended to act as a backup for living crop collections around the world; a fire in January destroyed unique varieties of bananas, yams, sweet potatoes and taro being duplicated at the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory in the Philippines, according to the trust.

Comment: The reader might be interested in this article: "Doomsday Seed Vault" - Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don't?

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Bizarro Earth

Nebraska Hit By First-Ever February Tornado

Brett Israel
OurAmazingPlanet
Wed, 29 Feb 2012 09:55 UTC
Tornado
© joonipuur/YouTubeAn image from the video of Nebraska's first-ever February tornado on record.
US: Destructive storms that tore across the U.S. overnight brought a never-before-seen February tornado to Nebraska.

Eyewitness reports, images and video suggest that a weak tornado touched down yesterday (Feb. 29) in a remote part of the state. The storm didn't cause any damage, said National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist Kenny Roberg, so that may be all the evidence that storm survey teams have to rate the storm. Storm survey teams are similar to forensic scientists; they assess the damage caused by severe storms and determine if tornadoes - or merely strong winds - are to blame.

The potential twister hit at 10:13 local time (11:13 EST) in Logan County, Neb., according to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. An off-duty NWS employee reported the tornado.

Roberg said his NWS office in North Platte, Neb., checked their tornado records, and this is the first tornado known to hit Nebraska during the month of February. Tornado records began in 1950, so one could have struck before then. It's also possible that a February tornado has struck since 1950, but if it hit a remote part of the state, it could have easily gone unrecorded.
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Igloo

On the Footsteps of Climate Change: The Ice Age Cometh to Podgorica, Montenegro

Zeljko Mihajlovic
YouTube
Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:47 UTC
Podgorica is the capital and largest city of Montenegro. Montenegro is situated on the southern Balkan Peninsula connected with the Adriatic Sea. In Podgorica, we have modified Mediterranean climate with warm dry summers and mild winters. Podgorica is particularly known for its exceptionally hot summers: temperatures above 40 ° C. The highest recorded temperature of 45.8 ° C measured on 16 August 2007. The snow is almost an unknown event in Podgorica. This winter the situation is completely different in Podgorica and especially the Northern part of Montenegro is blocked by snow, unprecedented in the last half century.

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Alarm Clock

Aftershocks of 2011 killer earthquake still hitting near Japan


Nola.com
Wed, 29 Feb 2012 10:42 UTC
Japon aftershocks
© U.S. Geological Survey
It's been almost one year since the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami devasted eastern Japan, but major aftershocks continue to occur. The original "undersea megathrust" quake just off Japan's coastline on March 11, 2011, was a magnitude 9.0, one of the worst ever recorded.

At about 8:30 a.m. today, Central time, a magnitude 5.7 quake ocurred near the island of Honshu, 77 miles east southeast of Tokyo , according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The Geological Survey's PAGER earthquake risk site indicates this most recent tembler may have been perceived as moderate shaking by 962,000 people in Japan, and may have caused some moderate damage to vulnerable buildings.
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Cloud Lightning

13 killed as tornadoes rake Midwest states


MSNBC
Wed, 29 Feb 2012 10:35 UTC
US: Branson, Missouri - At least 13 people were killed overnight as a line of tornadoes marched across the Midwest, flattening areas in several towns, including the tourist hub of Branson. Forecasters warned more twisters could strike the Tennessee Valley and southern Appalachians through Wednesday evening.

Ten of the deaths occurred in Harrisburg, Ill., officials said in updating an earlier death toll of three. A possible tornado swept through the town around 5 a.m. local time, destroying 35-40 homes, according to local TV station KFVS12.

Three other deaths were reported in Missouri, where storms included a suspected tornado that hit a mobile home park outside the town of Buffalo. One person died there and around a dozen people were injured. Two others died in the Cassville and Puxico areas.

The rough weather also knocked out power to all of Buffalo's 3,000 residents.

At least 8 people were injured when a suspected tornado ripped through Harveyville, Kan., on Tuesday night, NBC News reported. At least three of the injured are in critical condition, according to weather.com, and 40 percent of the town suffered damage.

NBC affiliate KSHB TV reported that an apartment complex and a church were among the damaged buildings in the town of about 250 people.

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Bizarro Earth

SOTT Focus: The Cs Hit List 06: Let's Do the Planetary Twist to the Tune of the Brothers Heliopolis

Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:39 UTC
OK, it's time for more weirdness. As we covered in a recent SOTT Report, accounts and recordings of strange noises heard all over the world went semi-viral on YouTube in January this year, and some are even receiving mainstream media coverage. Some YouTube pundits claim they're all faked, a couple of scientists say they're 'normal' and nothing to worry about, and many are freaking out as the phenomenon is feeding the '2012-apocalypse-oh-my-God-we're-all-gonna-die' hysteria. So what's really going on?

The hype appears to have started with these videos from Kiev, Ukraine, posted on 3 August and 11 August 2011, respectively. (Although, as we'll see later, these were not the first accounts.)



(See here for a translation of the uploader's account of the sounds and analysis and here for a summary of the associated thread, with additional analyses and accounts.)

Dozens of videos have been uploaded since then, some obviously faked, others perhaps not. For example, at least 28 videos posted in the months since Kiev obviously use the sound from the original video played over random video footage, sometimes with staged 'Oh-my-God-what-is-that?' dialogue. And, no, as far as I can tell, none of them use samples from the films Red State or War of the Worlds, as some have claimed. The similarity is striking (trumpet-like blasts, metallic rumbles and such), but truth has been known to resemble fiction. And it wouldn't be the first time that similar strange noises have been heard, both in recent times and the murky depths of history recorded in myth and legend.
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Attention

Mutated, Two-Headed Trout Found in Idaho, US

Gayne C. Young
Outdoor Life.com
Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:14 UTC
Mutated Fish
© Outdoor Life.com

I'm not a scientist -- I don't even play one on TV.

But even with my limited knowledge of the scientific world, I know enough to say without fear of reprisal that two-headed fish are not generally an indicator of a healthy watershed. The two-headed fish in question is a trout and was just one of many abnormal fish that were regulated to an appendix of a scientific study commissioned by the J.R. Simplot Company.

Despite the presence of fish with two heads and fish with facial, fin, and egg deformities, the mining company's report concluded that the waters it is accused of polluting in southern Idaho are fairly safe. So safe in fact that the company feels it would be just peachy to allow the water's high selenium (a metal byproduct of mining that is toxic to wildlife) levels to remain as is, even though they are higher than are permitted under regulatory guidelines.

In a move that's stranger than a multi-headed fish, the EPA actually described the mining company's report as "comprehensive." This led many scientists to shake their single head in disbelief and call for further investigation. Among those that found the EPA's assessment fishy was Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer of California, who heads the chamber's Environment and Public Works Committee. According to the New York Times, she requested the federal Fish and Wildlife Service to go over the initial report. The agency did and concluded that the study was "biased" and "highly questionable."
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Info

Rare whale caught on film for first time


The Mirror, UK
Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:55 UTC
Shepherd's beaked whale_1
© David Donnelly/antarctica.gov.auA Shepherd's beaked whale.
Australian scientists have captured what they believe to be the first video of an extremely rare whale, the Shepherd's beaked whale, which has been spotted for sure only a handful of times since its discovery a little over 70 years ago.

A pod of the unusual cetacean, which can grow as long as a bus (7 metres or 21 ft) and weigh as much as a sedan car (up to 3 tonnes) was spotted frolicking amongst dolphins and pilot whales in the Eastern Bass Strait, off the coast of Victoria and Tasmania, in January.

"What is so unique about this sighting is, we got so many photographs and HD video, so really it's indisputable," said Mike Double, a research scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division, a government research unit for Antarctica.

Known as Tasmacetus shepherdi, the whales are distinguished by their melon-shaped foreheads, fat bellies and a prominent beak. They were first discovered in 1937 but because they are an offshore species, they have remained elusive.
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Fish

Dozens of dead marine mammals, turtles in Gulf this year, NOAA says

Mark Schleifstein
The Times-Picayune
Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:07 UTC
female dolphin
© Ted Jackson / The Times-PicayuneScientists run tests on a pregnant female dolphin during a research study trip in Barataria Bay, Monday August 15, 2011.
Reports of dozens of stranded dolphins, whales, and sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico continue to pile up in the first two months of 2012, with federal officials tallying 48 marine mammals, mostly dolphins, and 87 sea turtles. Only a handful of marine mammal strandings were of live animals that may have been saved. None of the turtles were alive.

There continues to be concern that the high numbers of dead animals, especially the dolphins and whales, may be linked in some way to health problems either caused or exacerbated by toxic chemicals left behind by the BP Gulf oil spill.

The new tally comes as BP prepares to defend itself in federal court against charges it violated the Oil Pollution Act and the Clean Water Act.

In October, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists announced that tests on five of 21 bottlenose dolphins found dead in Louisiana waters or stranded on beaches since February 2010 showed they were infected with brucellosis, a bacterial infection more often linked to death of cattle, bison and elk in the United States.
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