Beyond the snow and some downed tree limbs, the weekend blizzard left another, more unusual calling card, as Vineyard fields were strewn with cylindrical pieces of snow.

The meteorological phenomena are called snow rollers. According to the National Weather Service, snow rollers are formed by strong but not too-strong winds and light snow falling on a layer of smooth, crusted-over old snow.

A small piece of snow is picked up by the wind and, as it rolls along, it collects more snow and becomes cylindrical in shape, sometimes with a hole extending lengthwise through the center. It's a bit like an oblong base of a snowman made by the wind. Snow rollers are said to be as large as a foot in diameter.

Snow rollers are rare, the weather service said, because of the combination of conditions required for them to form.

A HUGE volcano has seen a massive eruption of toxic ash and gas just hours after a major earthquake rocked the region, causing shopping centre evacuations.

The Karymsky volcano in Russian Kamchatka's eastern volcanic zone spewed ash up to 3km into the air, according to the Regional Emergencies Ministry.

Airlines have been placed on an "orange" warning to avoid the area following today's eruption.

It came less than 48 hours hours after a magnitude 7.3 earthquake tore through the region, followed by a series of at least seven less powerful aftershocks.

Terrified shoppers fled from a shopping mall after feeling the tremors inside.

The epicentre of the earthquake was within about 20 miles of the 1,486 metre-high magma mountain, prompting fears seismic activity is on the rise and there could be a catastrophic earthquake, volcanic eruption or both.

The quake struck an area close to the Ring of Fire, an arc of fault lines circling the Pacific Ocean.

It suffers many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but the National and Pacific Tsunami Warning Centers have said there is no current risk of a tsunami from the powerful quake.

The area has seen much volcanic activity this month.

A rare powerful magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck the region around the Balleny Islands, Antarctica on January 31, 2016.

The strong shallow earthquake was recorded at 5:39pm at a depth of 10 km 473km (294mi) NE of Young Island, Antarctica or 2475km (1538mi) S of Wellington, New Zealand.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey:

Earthquakes do occur occasionally in Antarctica, but not very often. There have been some big earthquakes - including one magnitude 8 - in the Balleny Islands.

The boundary between the Scotia Plate and the Antarctic Plate just grazes the north tip of the Antarctic Peninsula (again, look "northwest" from the Pole toward South America). There is also a hint of a line of seismicity off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula and some activity in the Kerguelen Plateau (in the Indian Ocean "northeast" from the Pole). The Kerguelen Plateau is within the Antarctic Plate but it is not part of the Antarctic Continent. As with the interior area of all tectonic plates, earthquakes can and do occur in Antarctica, but they are much less frequent than quakes on the plate boundaries.

Another reason why there are fewer quakes located in Antarctica than within other plates such as Australia or North America is because smaller quakes are much more likely to go undetected in Antarctica because there are very few seismograph stations. There are only 19 operating seismograph stations (as of 2005 )in all of the continent of Antarctica, and only one of them, at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, is in the interior of the continent. By comparison, there are 42 stations within the State of New Mexico. The closest seismograph station to the one at South Pole is 1350 km or about 840 miles. That's a big area to hide little earthquakes in!

Finally, the interior of Antarctica has icequakes which, although they are much smaller, are perhaps more frequent than earthquakes. The icequakes are similar to earthquakes, but occur within the ice sheet itself instead of the land underneath the ice. Some of our polar observers have told us they can hear the icequakes and see them on the South Pole seismograph station, but they are much too small to be seen on enough stations to obtain a location.

The mass of dead seabirds that have washed up on Alaska beaches in past months is unprecedented in size, scope and duration, a federal biologist said at an Anchorage science conference.

The staggering die-off of common murres, the iconic Pacific seabirds sometimes likened to flying penguins, is a signal that something is awry in the Gulf of Alaska, said Heather Renner, supervisory wildlife biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

"We are in the midst of perhaps the largest murre die-off ever recorded," Renner told the Alaska Marine Science Symposium on Thursday. While there have been big die-offs of murres and other seabirds in the past, recorded since the 1800s, this one dwarfs most of them, Renner said.

"This event is almost certainly larger than the murres killed in the Exxon Valdez oil spill," she said.

After that spill -- at the time, the nation's largest -- about 22,000 dead murres were recovered by crews conducting extensive beach searches in the four months after the tanker grounding, according to the Exxon Valdez Trustee Council, the federal-state panel that administers funds paid to settle spill-related claims for natural-resource damages.

Now, hundreds and thousands of dead murres are turning up on a wide variety of Alaska beaches, including nearly 8,000 discovered this month on a mile-long stretch in Whittier, she said. A preliminary survey in Prince William Sound has already turned up more than 22,000 dead murres there, she said. Starving, dying and dead murres are showing up far from their marine habitat, in inland places as distant as Fairbanks, hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Alaska coast, making the die-off exceptionally large in geographic scale.

Even if she weren't an expert, the bird die-off would be obvious to Renner. She lives in Homer, where the beaches are "littered" with murre carcasses, she said.

Herders in Marsabit County are counting loses following an outbreak of a mysterious disease that is killing camels.

Bubisa and Shuur in Marsabit North Sub-County are the worst hit by the calamity with ward representative Pius Yatani describing the situation as alarming.

"I received the report on January 19 on the deaths and so far more than 500 camels have perished. I believe the disease may have erupted earlier,'' said Turbi-Bubisa Ward Rep.

Mr Yatani said he had appealed to the county government for urgent intervention.

He said a team of vets was already on the ground supplying vaccines donated by the county government to the pastoralists.

Over 150,000 US households were left without electricity as gusts of an El Nino-driven storm downed trees and power poles is Southern California. Gusts of wind up to 115mph were recorded, with locals taking to social media to share the aftermath.

The storm, accompanied by heavy rain, hit the west coast, causing massive outages and flooding on Sunday night.

When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.

Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars' worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.

When Goldfinger looked at his watch, it was quarter to three. The conference was wrapping up for the day. He was thinking about sushi. The speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his talk. The earthquake was not particularly strong. Then it ticked past the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week. The shaking intensified. The seats in the conference room were small plastic desks with wheels. Goldfinger, who is tall and solidly built, thought, No way am I crouching under one of those for cover. At a minute and a half, everyone in the room got up and went outside.

Australian scientists have witnessed the rare eruption of an Antarctic volcano off the coast of the frozen continent.

The scientists, from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), filmed the volcanic event by chance while aboard research vessel "Investigator" studying the fringe of Antarctica's Heard Island.

The crew, working in conjunction with the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), were actually looking to study underwater volcanoes before the land-based variety caught their attention.

Heard Island, a remote sub-Antarctic region, is home to Big Ben, an active volcano which is believed to have only erupted three times since the turn of the century.

Given the island's isolation, viewing Big Ben - which is mostly covered in ice throughout the year - during an eruption is considered a geoscientific rarity. Often, satellite images provide the only evidence that an eruption has occurred.

A catastrophic disaster is now taking place outside of Los Angeles endangering hundreds of thousands of people. Officials say they have "entirely lost control of the entire (gas) field" meaning explosive methane gas is now leaking from "many places." Workers at the scene of the Porter Ranch gas field in the Aliso Canyon say some of the leaks are so loud, the hissing sound can be heard 1/2 mile away.


If this continues, multiple massive explosions are very likely to take place once the methane comes into contact with the pilot light of a stove, or hot water heater. This could set off "rolling explosions a few hundred feet in the air, knocking down all the houses and buildings nearby as it goes!"

Worse, toxic benzene is now also confirmed to be coming out of the ground and entering the atmosphere in such large quantities, that people can be killed merely from walking through it. Benzene can be absorbed through the skin. Once a sufficient amount enters the body, there is no treatment and no cure; all the person can do is wait to die.

The graphic above was made from actual measurements of Benzene; the higher the red color goes, the worse the concentration. Fatal levels are the highest ones near the well and gas field.

An avalanche near McBride, B.C., has killed five snowmobilers, say local authorities.

RCMP say they were notified of two separate GPS beacon activations in the Renshaw area east of McBride around 1:30 p.m. PT, at which point they activated the Robson Valley Search and Rescue Team. There were at least three separate groups of snowmobilers caught in the slide, say RCMP. Six to eight people lost their snowmobiles and had to be shuttled off the mountain.

"We are a small and mostly tight-knit community," McBride Coun. Sharon Reichert said. "We live in a rugged country where many in the community enjoy the outdoors. That comes with danger, and today, our worst fears have been realized." RCMP said search and rescue technicians were on the scene almost immediately, and a helicopter was deployed.

Donita Kuzma, the regional coroner with the BC Coroners Service, said police conducted interviews with people as they came down the mountain to see if there were any other snowmobilers still missing. "It's a very busy time of year with snowmobilers," said Kuzma, adding that there were many of them in the area for the weekend. BC Emergency Health Services said it also transported one person to hospital in stable condition.

Human-triggered avalanche

Avalanche Canada said it had received a report of what appears to be a "very large, significant avalanche event" in the North Rockies. "There are layers of concern in the snowpack in many parts of this region (and others) and a fairly significant weather event added rain and snow to the snowpack over the last few days," said Karl Klassen with Avalanche Canada.

"This may have produced stresses in the snowpack capable of producing large avalanches and this condition could take several days to settle and bond." Klassen said the avalanche was human-triggered.