Date-Time:
Monday, April 05, 2010 at 10:05:42 UTC

Monday, April 05, 2010 at 07:05:42 PM at epicenter

Location:
0.169°S, 125.012°E

Depth:
10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program

Distances:
185 km (115 miles) S of Manado, Sulawesi, Indonesia

230 km (140 miles) ESE of Gorontalo, Sulawesi, Indonesia

1500 km (930 miles) NNW of DARWIN, Northern Territory, Australia

2130 km (1320 miles) ENE of JAKARTA, Java, Indonesia

Los Angeles - The strong earthquake that rocked Baja California on Sunday probably occurred on a fault that hadn't produced a major temblor in over a century, scientists said.

Preliminary data suggest Sunday's 7.2-magnitude quake originated on the Laguna Salada fault, which stretches 43 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border. The last time it unleashed a similar-sized quake was in 1892. Since then, the fault has produced occasional magnitude-5 temblors.

In recent days, Baja California's wine-growing region west of the epicenter has been rattled by small quakes between magnitudes 3 and 4.

Whether they were foreshocks to the deadly magnitude-7.2 that struck 38 miles south of Mexicali is not yet known.

"It's such a chaotic system" of faults that needs more researching, said Erik Pounders, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Baja quake appeared to have ruptured about 30 miles of the fault, stopping at the border. Dozens of aftershocks were recorded on both sides of the border within hours of the quake with the largest registering 5.4.

A powerful 7.2-magnitude earthquake rocked the U.S.-Mexico border region Sunday, causing power outages in both countries as it sent out seismic waves felt from Los Angeles to Arizona and Tijuana.

The quake happened at 3:40 p.m. PT in the Mexican state of Baja California, about 60 kilometres southeast of Mexicali, the state's capital city, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The area has been hit by 3.0-magnitude quakes all week.

More than 900,000 people live in the greater Mexicali area.

The Easter bunny may be hopping cold these days as winter-like temperatures, created by cool, northerly winds, continue to plague the Islands for the third consecutive day.

This morning's low temperature broke three records for this date.

It was 59 degrees at Honolulu Airport at 6 a.m. breaking the 19-year record of 61 degrees. Yesterday's low at the airport also set a record.

Kahului Airport on Maui was downright chilly this morning where a 54-degree reading was recorded. The previous record was 57 degrees.

This morning's record low also was the lowest temperature ever recorded in April at Kahului.

Hilo Airport on the Big Island was 61 degrees, breaking by 1 degrees the low reading recorded in 1959, 1965, 1973 and 1981.

Lihue Airport on Kauai recorded a 60-degree reading, a degree above its record low for this date.

Date-Time:
Sunday, April 04, 2010 at 22:40:40 UTC

Sunday, April 04, 2010 at 03:40:40 PM at epicenter

Location:
32.128°N, 115.303°W

Depth:
10 km (6.2 miles) (poorly constrained)

Distances:
26 km (16 miles) SW (225°) from Guadalupe Victoria, Baja California, Mexico

60 km (38 miles) SSE (165°) from Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico

62 km (38 miles) SW (233°) from San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora, Mexico

167 km (104 miles) ESE (105°) from Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico

Port-au-Prince - Mud invades every inch of the saggy handmade tent Mimose Pierre-Louis now calls home.

It spatters the pink bedsheet that serves as her wall, crawls up the acacia branch that plays the role of wobbly tent pole and forms the floor she lies on. Near one end of the tent, a steep slope leads several hundred yards up to the Petionville Club, where elites once played tennis and luxuriated poolside with rum sours. A foot from the other side of the tent, the earth drops 15 feet into a stinking canal-turned-open-sewer since the Jan. 12 earthquake that left more than 1 million Haitians homeless.

Here in Port-au-Prince's largest encampment, a hillside inhabited by as many 70,000 people, Pierre-Louis lives on the edge as the ferocity of Haiti's April-May rainy season approaches.

Confronted with the challenge of destructive rains and floods, international relief agencies have launched an ambitious logistical operation aimed at protecting the Pierre-Louises of this wrecked city. They hope to carve new drainage outlets in the most vulnerable of the hundreds of camps by mid-April and to relocate people living in the most precariously perched tents.

At least 20 people have been killed in central Peru after heavy rains sparked a mudslide that engulfed a small village, officials have said. The mudslide struck the village in the Huanuco region. At least another 25 people are reportedly missing.

At least 120 homes had been damaged or destroyed, the officials added.

With wobbly legs but no red nose, the first of 19 expected reindeer calves has been born at an Alaska farm that's the only reindeer research facility in North America.

Workers discovered the 17-pound newborn calf Thursday at the University of Alaska Fairbanks research farm. The other 18 pregnant does are expected to give birth within a week or so.

The newcomers don't have names yet, but that'll soon change. The research program hosts an annual contest to name its new calves, with the winners receiving birth certificates for the reindeer they've named.

Computer models that have figured prominently into the climate studies organized through the United Nations show that the warming trend evident in the latter half of the 20th century would continue and even accelerate into the new millennium. But the climate has not cooperated and in fact the newest research shows that a cooling trend has taken hold that could persist for decades.

Dr. Don Easterbook, a geologist and professor emeritus at Western Washington University, has concluded that sea surface temperatures will experience a drop that could last for the next 25 to 30 years based on his observations of the Pacific Decadal Oscilliation or PDO, a weather phenomenon that reverts between warm and cool modes. He's not alone.

Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics with the National Autonomous University of Mexico sees evidence that points to the onset of a "little ice age" in about 10 years that could last for much of the 21st Century. The U.N. computer models are not correct because they do not take into account natural factors like solar activity, he said in a lecture.

This view is also advanced in a paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia. The authors anticipate that sun's activity will diminish significantly over the next few decades.

In reality, the main arguments underpinning man-made global warming have been unraveling for quite some time Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), has observed.

"The alarmists have a problem," Cohen explained. "The climate isn't doing what they theory says it should be doing. The temperature is not rising in a linear fashion, which the man-made global warming theory says it should be doing. Instead there has been virtually no warming over the past 10 years, which is insignificant in geological terms, but very significant when you consider the alarmist theory."

Argentinian investigators have found flamingos and mysterious microbes living in an alkaline lagoon nestled inside a volcano in the Andes. The organisms, exposed to arsenic and poisonous gases, could shed light on how life began on Earth, and their hardiness to extreme conditions may hold the key to new scientific applications.

In 2009, a team led by María Eugenia Farías, a microbiologist at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Tucumán, Argentina, discovered living stromatolites in the Socompa and Tolar Grande lagoons high in the Andes (see 'High window on the past'). Stromatolites - collections of photosynthetic microorganisms and calcareous concretions - are thought to have been common more than 3.5 billion years ago.

After that discovery, scientists in Argentina decided to look at lakes and lagoons in the Puna de Atacama, a desert plateau that sits more than 4,000 metres above sea level, in an attempt to understand what life might have looked like on the early Earth.