A brief but burly storm moved through Great Falls on Tuesday evening on a northeast trajectory that took it through northcentral Montana.

The storm knocked out power about 6 p.m. Tuesday, affecting around 2,000 customers in the downtown Great Falls area, according to NorthWestern Energy spokeswoman Michelle Sullivan.

The brief outage occurred when wind blew two power lines together. Sullivan said NorthWestern crews responded to several scattered outages Tuesday night all over Great Falls. One was caused by a broken pole, one by a broken power line, and others by trees or branches falling on lines.

As of 9 p.m. Tuesday, firefighters with Great Falls Fire/Rescue said they still were responding to calls related to outages or down power lines.

Sullivan said NorthWestern workers also were sent to repair outages in Portage, Carter and Fort Benton.

"Our crews are pretty busy," she said.

When asked what I would like to write about for this issue of the Dot Connector, the first thing that came out of my mouth was "The Golden Age and how we got from there to where we are now and what it all means." That is the topic that has been exercising my thinking for a number of years and I gave it an overview in Witches, Comets and Planetary Cataclysms (DCM Issue 11), where the topic was how the feminine energy of our society was debased step-by-step over millennia, as a consequence of planetary cataclysm beginning with the Great Deluge, also known as the Flood of Noah. But noticing what has happened is not the same as explaining why and how it could happen sociologically speaking. In that article I wrote the following:

"Regarding the alleged Flood of Noah, we can say that at more than one point in our known history, civilizations and cultures have collapsed and/or disappeared or been destroyed by no-one-knows-what...

Researchers in the fields of archaeology and history are baffled by the lack of any direct archaeological or written explanations for the causes (as opposed to the effects), though there is a rich body of myth and folklore that very well might provide the answers if analyzed correctly...

Some decades ago, certain natural scientists became intrigued by the problem and, concentrating on the Bronze Age collapses listed above, realized that the range of evidence suggested natural causes rather than human actions like invasion or warfare. So, they all started talking about climate change, volcanic activity, and earthquakes. At present, these types of explanations are actually included in some of the standard historical accounts of the Bronze Age period, though many problems still remain: no single explanation appeared to account for all the evidence.

Immanuel Velikovsky upset everyone by suggesting that the Exodus - but only the Exodus - was caused by a bombardment of rocks, dust, carbons and so on as a result of Venus running amok in the Solar System. He collected an amazing assortment of myths and legends from around the world that strongly suggested that some sort of global cataclysm was being described, but when, where and how, exactly, it happened was rather iffy. There were others who wrote and talked about these matters before Velikovsky, including Ignatious Donnelly, who deserves an honorable mention for ascribing the myths to the Great Flood of Noah which he claimed was actually the destruction of Atlantis as described by Plato. Whether or not there was an advanced civilization known as Atlantis is not our concern here, but whether or not there was a flood, and when it may have occurred, is."

A record-breaking rain fell throughout the Bay Area much of the day Tuesday as a hefty storm system doused the region.

While rain was heaviest in the North Bay, the most surprising figures came in San Francisco where Tuesday's rainfall of just over three quarters of an inch marked the most precipitation to fall on the date since 1849 (the year of the earliest recorded rainfall statistics in the entire state) according to KTVU Channel 2 Chief Meteorologist Bill Martin.

Tuesday's rain also lifted monthly totals to make this the second wettest June since the Gold Rush Era.

One positive result of the late rain would be that the saturation of dried brush around the Bay Area should shorted the fire season in the region by about a month, Martin said.

The messy afternoon commute could also be blamed on the unseasonable rainfall as the wet roadways led to accidents and slowed freeway traffic.

In San Francisco, a branch of a tree weighed down by wet leaves split and fell on Hyde Street. The branch narrowly missed parked cars and temporarily stopped cable cars service.

A controversial new theory attributes climate change not to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels but water vapor. In an unpublished paper, Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences argues that the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the past hundred years could be due to atmospheric changes resulting from the Tunguska Event, a massive explosion over Siberia on the June 30th, 1908 that is thought to have resulted from an asteroid or comet entering the earth's atmosphere and exploding. Shaidurov says that the event could have caused "considerable stirring of the high layers of atmosphere" and triggered the subsequent rise in global temperatures.

La Niña ended in the Philippines in June but would continue to make its presence felt through heavier rains up to September, the country's weather bureau announced on Wednesday.

And with this, Ondoy-like rains remain a possibility, said Science undersecretary Graciano Yumul, who supervises the Philippine Atmostpheric, Geophysical and Astronomic Services Administration. Yumul noted that there was also La Niña in the country in 2009.

"The southwest monsoon would last until September. So when a storm makes landfall and combines with the monsoon, and they bring heavy rains, it would be Ondoy-like," Yumul said.

This was what happened with Tropical Storm Ondoy, which directly hit Luzon in September 2009. Ondoy's rains, coupled with the monsoon, submerged most of Metro Manila, killing hundreds.

Yumul added that La Niña's residual effects would usually be felt three months after it left. This means that the country would experience heavier rains, whether it would come from a typhoon, a storm, a low pressure area, the tail end of a cold front or any other weather disturbance.

"What does La Niña bring? A lot of water. So now, in all that had happened - the cold front, southwest monsoon, ITCZ - there has been a lot of water," he said.

A mudslide hit Highway 1 Wednesday, trapping at least one driver and leaving work crews scrambling to remove debris and eliminate the possibility of further victims.

Front-end loaders and trucks worked into Wednesday night on the stretch of highway between Chilliwack and Hope in an attempt to clear the road before the rush of vacationers descends on the highway for the long weekend.

The slide left a mess five metres deep and 60 metres wide across the eastbound lanes of the highway, about 100 metres from the Herrling Island exit.

"We weren't able to see that there was [anyone else trapped] by foot, but the equipment, as it begins to move the debris will make a determination if there's anyone else impacted," said RCMP Sgt. Peter Thiessen.

"The mudslide is large enough that it could easily cover a number of vehicles and we wouldn't know it until we uncovered them."

A woman whose vehicle was flipped over and pushed against the median escaped with minor injuries, said B.C. Attorney-General and Chilliwack-Hope MLA Barry Penner. Penner toured the site Wednesday afternoon and said cleanup crews began work at about 3:45 p.m., after geotechnical experts concluded the area was safe.

A sinkhole up to 100m long and 50m deep has opened up on a south-east Queensland beach.

The hole appeared at Inskip Point, Rainbow Beach, on Saturday night and continued to grow yesterday. It is estimated to be up to 50m deep.

Hervey Bay man Ron Morgan told the Fraser Coast Chronicle he could only watch in shock as a small hole turned into a gaping chasm 30 metres wide and kept on growing.

An underwater landslide is thought to have caused a small tsunami that sent holidaymakers and anglers scattering in Cornwall. Witnesses reported the sea being sucked out, or receding, before a wave struck the coast on Monday morning.

No damage was caused by the wave, thought to have been about 40cm (16in) high and causing a surge up to 90cm (3ft) by the time the seawater pushed into the Yealm estuary, 70 miles up the coast near Plymouth, Devon, but many people, along the south coast, up to Hampshire, were left baffled by the phenomenon.

There were reports that static electricity in the air at the time made people's hair stand on end.

Simon Evans, who was digging for bait on the shore at Marazion, near Penzance, described the event as akin to a horror film. He said: "It was really eerie ... the weather was really foggy but extremely warm and close, and the sea was as calm as a millpond.

"One minute I was stood at the water's edge then when I turned around the water had retreated around 50 yards.

"It was surreal, I couldn't believe what had happened. I had no idea what caused it, but I didn't really want to hang about and find out."

He said that having heard about tsunamis, he "jumped in the car and got out of there".

Pieces of rock and seafloor from deep in the Pacific Ocean near Costa Rica may help explain why Japan's deadly magnitude 9.0 quake was so large.

Nearly one mile of sediment cores (cylinders of earth drilled out from the ground) collected from the ocean floor off the coast of Costa Rica reveal detailed records of some two million years of tectonic activity along a nearby seismic plate boundary, where one tectonic plate dives beneath another, called a subduction zone. It was the rupture of a subduction zone that generated the Japan temblor.

The scientific drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution retrieved the samples during a recent monthlong expedition called the Costa Rica Seismogenesis Project (CRISP). Participating scientists aim to use the samples to better understand the processes that control the triggering of large earthquakes at subduction zones.

More than 80 percent of global earthquakes above magnitude 8.0 occur along subduction zones.

"It's critical to understand how subduction zone earthquakes and tsunamis originate - especially in light of recent events in Japan," said Rodey Batiza of the National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean Sciences. "The results of this expedition will also help us learn more about our own such zone off the Pacific Northwest."

Epic floods, massive wildfires, drought and the deadliest tornado season in 60 years are ravaging the United States, with scientists warning that climate change will bring even more extreme weather.

The human and economic toll over just the past few months has been staggering: hundreds of people have died, and thousands of homes and millions of acres have been lost at a cost estimated at more than $20 billion.

And the United States has not even entered peak hurricane season.

"This spring was one of the most extreme springs that we've seen in the last century since we've had good records," said Deke Arndt, chief of climate monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

While it's not possible to tie a specific weather event or pattern to climate change, Arndt said this spring's extreme weather is in line with what is forecast for the future.

"In general, but not everywhere, it is expected that the wetter places will get wetter and the drier places will tend to see more prolonged dry periods," he told AFP.

"We are seeing an increase in the amount (of rain and snow) that comes at once, and the ramifications are that it's a lot more water to deal with at a time, so you see things like flooding."

More than 6.8 million acres in the central United States have been swamped after record spring rainfall overwhelmed rivers already swollen from the melting of a heavy winter snow pack.

Some levees burst under the pressure as the mighty Mississippi River swelled to more than three miles (nearly five kilometers) in width. Others were intentionally breached in order to ease pressure and protect cities downstream.