An iceberg more than four times the size of Manhattan has been slowly drifting along Canada's eastern seaboard, according to NASA.


Chunks of the giant iceberg - dubbed Petermann Ice Island - have broken off and rubbed up against some Canadian shores, though NASA said the iceberg was not likely to hit land, but probably run aground on the sea floor just off the coast, posing a real danger to offshore oil rigs and ships at sea.

An unusual weak coastal earthquake struck the Hadera and Netanya area. The earthquake was felt in Israel and in the Gaza strip.

The current epicenter area can be called as very unusual.

We have NO trace of any historic important earthquakes in the past.

For a lot of people it will be a unique experience.

EMSC reports a magnitude of 4.3 at a depth of 30 km (can be compared as the same intensity as USGS).

Three large explosions from the Sun over the past few days have prompted U.S. government scientists to caution users of satellite, telecommunications and electric equipment to prepare for possible disruptions over the next few days.

"The magnetic storm that is soon to develop probably will be in the moderate to strong level," said Joseph Kunches, a space weather scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center, a division of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He said solar storms this week could affect communications and global positioning system (GPS) satellites and might even produce an aurora visible as far south as Minnesota and Wisconsin.

An aurora, called aurora borealis or the northern lights in northern latitudes, is a natural light display in the sky in the Arctic and Antarctic regions caused by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude atmosphere.

Major disruptions from solar activity are rare but have had serious impacts in the past.

A glacier in Tajikistan is on a speed kick, scientists say, moving more since June than it has at any time in the last 22 years.

The Medvezhiy glacier, located in the Pamir Mountains, has moved almost 3,300 feet since June 3, NewScientist.com reported Thursday.

These fishermen thought they were in the middle of the classic horror movie The Fog when they saw this amazing cloud form on the horizon.

They had been fishing in the English Channel when a huge cigar-shaped cloud suddenly appeared miles in front of them.

The mile-long bank of cloud rolled silently and eerily towards their boat, 30 miles south of Dartmouth, Devon, and within a few minutes the vessel Gemini was shrouded in a dense mist.

Menacing and beautiful in equal measure, Mount Etna illuminates the cathedral of Zafferana Etnea with its latest violent eruptions.

In these stunning pictures, Europe's most active volcano appears to be spewing lava right onto the 19th century church.

The Sicilian municipality was in no immediate danger because the lava flowed into a valley, but flights had to be cancelled overnight because of the resulting ash.

Catania's Fontanarossa airport was shut from midnight to 7am this morning.

More than 200,000 coastal residents in eastern China have evacuated and thousands of ships have been called back to shore ahead of the arrival of Typhoon Muifa, a powerful tropical storm that has already battered the Philippines, Taiwan and Japan.

Zhejiang province moved 206,664 people from its coastal areas while another 80,400 residents were evacuated in Fujian province, according to local government websites. Thousands of ships along the east coast had also been called back to shore, the statements said.

Typhoon Muifa was forecast to hit China sometime between Sunday morning and late Sunday afternoon, China's Central Meteorological Administration said. The storm is expected to make landfall in either northern Zhejiang or southern Jiangsu and skim the coast as it heads north.

Anchorage - Leona Baldwin's husband saw it first, and she got on the marine radio to alert others in the remote Alaska village of Kivalina that a strange orange goo was sitting on top of the town's harbor.

The news attracted all the townspeople, anxious to get a gander of the phenomenon that covered much of the harbor and then began washing ashore Wednesday.

The next day it rained, and residents found the orange matter floating on top of the rain buckets they use to collect drinking water. It was also found on one roof, leading them to believe whatever it was, it was airborne, too.

By Friday, the orange substance in the lagoon had dissipated or washed out to sea, and what was left on ground had dried to a powdery substance.

Samples of the orange matter were collected in canning jars and sent to a lab in Anchorage for analysis.

Until results are known, Kivalina's 374 residents will likely continue to wonder just what exactly happened in their village.

"Certainly at this point it's a mystery," said Emanuel Hignutt, a chemist with the state Department of Environmental Conservation lab in Anchorage.

On the evening of the 5th of August 2011 the Aurora Borealis, Northern Lights were seen as far South as Southern England! At approximately 18:00 Universal Time (19:00 BST) the Earth's magnetosphere was hit by a coronal mass ejection from the sun, triggering a powerful geomagnetic storm and Aurora.

This storm measured 8 on the K index (aurora richter scale) which ranges from 0 - 9 so this was a big storm.

It is quite common to see Aurora in Northern Scotland, but at approximately midnight, aurora was seen as far south as Berkshire, Wiltshire and Hampshire in Southern England. It is incredibly rare to see aurora this far south - the last time I remember was in 2003.

I was incredibly lucky to briefly see the pale greenish hue of the aurora through clouds from my back garden in West Berkshire.

On the late evening of 1 August 2011, a conspicuous lava flow started to descend the northern slope of the Sciara del Fuoco at Stromboli. This marks the first lava effusion outside the crater terrace since the emission of a small lava flow in the night of 11-12 December 2010.

Around 2100 GMT on 1 August, a vast accumulation of incandescent material appeared at the base of vent N1, the northernmost of the various active vents that lie within the crater terrace at about 750 m elevation on Stromboli. A few minutes later, this material started to collapse and slide, and then developed two small lobes of lava, the more easterly of which descended slowly on the steep slope of the northern portion of the Sciara del Fuoco, repeatedly generating collapse and small landslides derived from the loose material that the slope is made of. The lava then accumulated on the flat area where the hornitos of the 2002-2003 eruption had been located, before making its way down the steep slope below that flat area (as is shown in the two bottom frames in the figure above). On the late morning of 2 August, the lava flow had descended to about 500 m elevation and was advancing very slowly. During the early afternoon of the same day, feeding of the lava flow appeared to diminish.

This lava flow represents the first major summit overflow at Stromboli for several decades, the most recent similar event being the eruption of November 1975. During the subsequent eruptions, in 1985-1986 and 2002-2003, lava effusion occurred from eruptive fissures on the upper northern slope of the Sciara del Fuoco, whereas in 2007, the main effusive vent was located at 400 m elevation. Differently from these eruptions, the usual Strombolian activity from the summit craters has not ceased with the onset of lava effusion on 1-2 August 2011.