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Cloud Lightning

Colombia Declares State of Emergency Due to Flood

flood
© AP/Getty ImagesA girl crosses a flooded street in Bogota on Thursday during flooding that has affected 1.2 million people in Colombia.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has declared a state of emergency in 28 of the nation's 32 departments because of heavy rains and flooding that have affected some 1.2 million people.

He called on the international community to help and said the capacity of the Colombian government is overwhelmed.

Flooding and mudslides have killed at least 136 people, injured 205 and left 20 missing, the nation's Interior and Justice Ministry reported.

Emergency officials say the heavy rain has led to problems in 561 municipalities in the South American nation.

"Many have lost everything they had and the capacity of the government [to help them] has been overwhelmed. We're trying to find ways to get more resources and that's why we're calling on the business sector, the public in general, and the international community to help us because, unfortunately, the situation is getting worse," said Santos.

He declared the state of emergency after meeting Thursday with ministry officials. Santos made the announcement on national television, saying the declaration would help get aid to those who need it.

Bizarro Earth

Underneath Haiti, Another Big Quake Waiting to Occur

Haiti Earthquake
© Thony Belizaire/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesA day after the earthquake, a young woman climbs over shopping carts and the rubble of a collapsed store on January 13, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Last week, on the morning of Nov. 11, a tremor shook the Port-au-Prince suburb of Carrefour. It was a minor geological event, but given the still fresh and haunting memories of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hammered Haiti on Jan. 12 and killed some 230,000 people - many of them in Carrefour - even that mild shudder caused public panic. The only reported injuries, in fact, were due to people scrambling to take cover.

To geologists, it's good to see Haitians on such heightened alert. Most scientists believe the western hemisphere's poorest country is hardly out of the seismic woods - and after studying the Haiti quake data for the past 10 months, they're more convinced than ever that Haitians can expect another major quake sooner rather than later. That's largely because they've found, according to a new study by 10 prominent geologists, that the lion's share of the January temblor occurred not along the fault line they originally suspected, known as the Enriquillo - Plantain Garden fault zone, but on a previously unknown fault. (Faults separate plates in the earth's crust, which cause quakes when stress makes them collide.) As a result, says Falk Amelung, a University of Miami geologist and one of the report's authors, "the prospects of another serious event may be rather worse than we first thought."

When Amelung and other geologists started poring over information from the earthquake's satellite-radar images last January, they were flummoxed by a variety of features. One was the vertical motion the quake exhibited - unusual because the Enriquillo, which runs across Haiti's southern peninsula just below Port-au-Prince, is a strike-slip fault, the kind that almost exclusively displays horizontal motion when it ruptures. At the same time, the quake's horizontal movement was partly north-south, another anomaly for a strike-slip fault. "Those were the two important smoking guns" that made scientists question their early assumptions about the quake, says Eric Calais, a Purdue University geologist who is in Haiti as a science adviser to the U.N. Development Program and is a lead author of the study, which was published last month in Nature Geoscience.(See more about the January earthquake that devastated Haiti.)

Bizarro Earth

NASA satellite captures huge Alaska winter dust storm

Glacial dust travels far and wide. This satellite image from NASA shows one result of the glacial forces at work in Alaska, a dust storm blowing out into the Gulf of Alaska Wednesday from the Malaspina Glacier. The satellite, which has equipment that "sees" every point on the world every one-to-two days, is about 438 miles above the Earth. The receiving station for images from the MODIS equipment is on the roof of the International Arctic Research Center at UAF.

Image
© NASA
The satellite data continues to collect and has been archived since 2002 for the Terra satellite and since 2003 for a similar satellite, known as Aqua. The Fairbanks station picks up information from the these satellites about 15 times a day. The machines circle the earth from pole to pole every 108 minutes.

Here is what NASA says about the image:
Dust storms generally call to mind places like the Sahara Desert or the Arabian Peninsula, but dust storms occur at high latitudes as well. One such storm left streamers of dust over the Gulf of Alaska in mid-November 2010. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this natural-color image on November 17, 2010. Thin plumes of beige dust blow off the Alaskan coast toward the south-southwest. Roughly mimicking the shape and direction of the dust plumes, parallel lines of clouds occur farther south over the ocean.

Igloo

Canada: Arctic blast on its way

Edmonton Snowstorm
© Edmonton Sun
Bundle up. The cold temperatures expected to hit Edmonton later this week just got colder.

Earlier this week, weather officials were calling for temperatures to plummet to highs of -14C on Friday and continue throughout the weekend as a cold front moves through the region.

Now, Environment Canada Meteorologist John McIntyre said those temperatures are expected to dip a few degrees cooler, with lows near -20C throughout the weekend and into next week.

"By the weekend, it looks like the air flow is going to be straight out of the arctic," McIntyre said.

Igloo

Bad weather strands thousands near Everest

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© Narendra Shrestha / EPA file The autumn season, from September to November, is popular among Western trekkers in Nepal. Thousands of climbers visit the Solukhumbu region, home to Mount Everest, above, every year.
Helicopter rides back from Mount Everest after a week on the slopes of the world's tallest mountain might sound like a trekker's delight, but for the tourists trapped in the remote region of Nepal, the extended stay was not on the itinerary.

Around 2,000 foreign tourists and their porters have spent the past five days stuck in a tiny village 9,186 feet up the slopes of a hill near Everest due to bad weather, with Nepali army helicopters set to begin flying the stranded sightseers to safety on Friday.

They have been trapped in Lukla, the gateway to Mount Everest in east Nepal, after thick cloud and blustering winds forced airlines to cancel their flights to and from the remote region, officials said on Friday.

Tens of thousands of trekkers and climbers visit the Solukhumbu region in east Nepal, home to Mount Everest, every year.

Many start their trek from windswept Lukla village where a small airstrip is carved into the rugged mountainside.

Bizarro Earth

7.5-magnitude quake? Fault found in Rockies

Image
© Unknown
Scientists have mapped a previously unknown and active seismic fault in the northern Rockies capable of unleashing an earthquake with a magnitude as high as 7.5.

The newly discovered fault in central Idaho does not lie in a densely populated area.

But Glenn Thackray, chairman of Idaho State University's geosciences department, said the 40-mile-long fracture in the Earth's crust at the base of the Sawtooth Mountains near the tiny mountain town of Stanley is cause for some concern.

"There's a chance in the next few decades there will be an earthquake on this fault, and if it does happen it will be a rather large earthquake," he said.

A 7.5 tremor is considered a major earthquake, capable of widespread heavy damage.

Bizarro Earth

US: Earthquake Magnitude 3.3 Shakes Eastern Nebraska

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© Unknown
A moderate earthquake centered near Schuyler rattled eastern Nebraska on Thursday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The quake occurred at 7:02 a.m. CST about three miles underground and registered a preliminary magnitude of 3.3, the USGS said.

Platte County emergency services director Tim Hofbauer and the sheriff's office said there were no reports of injuries or damage.

Lennie Hiltner, Schuyler police chief, said he had stopped by a car dealership when he heard a loud noise but didn't feel anything shake. He and others at Reinecke Motor Co. quickly inspected the building but found no damage.

Several people called the police department to report hearing the noise.

Info

Locust plague encroaches on Melbourne

Australia's worst locust plague in 70 years has marched into metropolitan Melbourne as federal and state authorities met to consider their plan of attack.

Federal Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig today met with ministers and officials from NSW, South Australia, Victoria and Queensland to discuss the response to the swarms.

Senator Ludwig said the response so far had been "extremely efficient", but with the pests taking to the wing the time had come to discuss realistic approaches to controlling the swarms.

There had been an increase in reports of fledgling or young adult locusts, with swarms even spotted in Melbourne, he said.

"There has been a sudden influx of locusts into parts of the Melbourne metropolitan area," Senator Ludwig said in a statement.

Question

African Pelicans migrate in wrong direction and end up in Siberia.

Lost Pelicans
© AllvoicesZoo officials holding pink pelicans at an aviary in Barnaul in the Altai region. The birds were migrating to Africa.

A small flock of African pink pelicans apparently bamboozled by the warm weather in Siberia flew north from Kazakhstan instead of south as any properly functioning pelican GPS system should have told them. Vladimir Pyagin from the village of Suslovo said:"I left home early in the morning and what a sight!" "When I got closer, I immediately realized they were pelicans. ... Everybody in the village started trying to catch them to save the exhausted birds from the dogs""

Residents captured four of the exotic pelicans. They were moved to a zoo in the regional capital Barnaul. The other three birds in the flock were able to fly off.

Members of the Bird Conservation Union said the pelicans were flying back to their native Africa from Kazakhstan but obviously lost their way. The head of the Union said: "This is a unique case. Some reports suggest pelicans last flew here over 100 years ago,"

Bizarro Earth

Flashback Mysterious crack still begs answers

Nearly 200 yards long, 5 feet deep in parts


Menominee Township, Michigan - Nestled just beyond the tree line of Eileen Heider's 53 acres, is Menominee County's newest tourist attraction.

"It's amazing, I want to get back there and check the rest of it out," said Kevin Clermont of Wallace, Michigan, who stopped on his way home from work to sightsee.

Heider and neighbors heard an explosion-like sound Monday morning. Heider found the nearly 200-yard-long crevice, which measures five-feet deep in parts, Tuesday.

"I was sitting in my recliner and the recliner started to vibrate," said Heider. "And it's not electric."