Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Shinmoedake volcano erupts again with big blast of ash, rocks

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© AP Photo/Kyodo NewsA dome of lava grows larger inside the crater of Mount Shinmoedake in the Kirishimna range on Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu Monday, Jan. 31, 2011. Officials urged more than 1,000 residents to seek safer ground on Monday and expanded a no-access zone around the 4,662-foot (1,421-meter) volcano that has exploded back to life. The volcano erupted last week for the first time in 52 years.
A revived volcano in southern Japan erupted Tuesday with its biggest explosion yet, shooting out a huge plume of gas, boulders and ash and breaking windows 5 miles (8 kilometers) away.

The danger zone around Shinmoedake volcano was widened to keep residents safe. The largest eruption since it burst back to life last week covered wide areas in ash, shot boulders onto distant roads, knocked down trees and broke hundreds of windows in hotels and offices.

No serious injuries have been reported since the initial eruption last Wednesday, but public broadcaster NHK said a woman suffered cuts from shattered glass in Tuesday's blast.

NHK said the eruption was five times larger than the initial activity last week, which was Shinmoedake's first major eruption in 52 years.

Japan's Meteorological Agency has restricted access to the mountain, and on Tuesday broadened the no-go zone to anywhere within a 2 1/2-mile (four-kilometer) radius of the crater. Two lodges and scattered homes are within the perimeter.

Dozens of domestic flights in and out of Miyazaki - about 590 miles (950 kilometers) southwest of Tokyo - were grounded last week and more cancellations followed. Train service was temporarily suspended in the area and many schools closed.

The local government also reported damages to crops.

Cloud Lightning

Massive, 'Life-threatening' Tropical Cyclone Roars Toward Australia's Flood-Ravaged Northeast

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© ReutersTropical cyclone Yasi passing near the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu heading towards the coast of Australia on Jan. 31.
Authorities scrambled to airlift hospital patients from the path of a cyclone roaring toward waterlogged northeastern Australia and urged low-lying communities to evacuate because of potentially deadly flash floods.

Cyclone Yasi was expected to slam into the coast of Queensland state Wednesday as a Category 4 storm and dump up to three feet (one meter) of rain on communities already saturated from months of flooding.

"This storm is huge and it is life-threatening," Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said. "I know many of us will feel that Queensland has already borne about as much as we can bear when it comes to disasters and storms, but more is being asked of us - and I am confident that we are able to rise to this next challenge."

Yasi was barreling toward the Queensland state coast as a strong Category 3 storm with winds up to 137 mph (220 kph), but was expected to turn into a Category 4 storm with wind gusts up to 155 mph (250 kph) by Wednesday.

Bligh said the military would airlift 250 patients from the waterfont Cairns Base and Cairns Private hospitals to Brisbane, the state capital.

Although there were no mandatory evacuation orders yet, residents in waterfront and low-lying areas from the cities of Cairns to Townsville were being advised to leave.

Fish

More dead fish found in Arkansas River

Ozark, Arkansas - A state Game and Fish Commission official says more dead drum fish - but far fewer than the number reported in a previous fish kill - have been found in the Arkansas River near the lock and dam at Ozark, in the same area where thousands of dead fish were found a month earlier.

A news release Monday from the wildlife agency said a fish kill spotted Friday involved only about 500 fish, compared with 83,000 in a fish kill reported Dec. 29.

G&FC assistant fisheries chief Chris Racey said that, as with the previous fish kill, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff will test sample fish. Testing on fish from the Dec. 29 kill did not determine a cause, but ruled out parasites, disease or toxic chemicals.

Meteor

Dome of the Rock UFO and Kazakhstan Comet - Something Chaotic This Way Comes

At 1 am Israel time (UTC+2) on the 28th of January 2011, two videos were recorded in central Jerusalem. Both videos appear to have filmed the same event from different positions: A white ball of light descends from the sky and hovers over and slightly to the East of the Dome of the Rock, approximately over the garden of Gethsemane. After about 30 seconds, the ball of light shoots off into the sky at high speed.

First video shot from about 4 kms to the South of the Dome:


Second video, shot from what appears be just a few hundred meters to the West of the Dome:


Strangely enough at exactly the same time (all three were filmed at 11pm UTC on the 27th Jan.), another interesting aerial phenomena was being recorded at least 1000kms to the North East in Kazakhstan...

Comment: I've just remembered that a similar event was filmed in Kazakhstan last year:


Note the date: June 30th, the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska cometary explosion over remote Siberia.

Our Connecting the Dots series discussed this other Kazakhstan event last summer.

Now, most Internet buzz seemed to connect this with the UFO that shut down Xiaoshan airport in the Chinese city of Hangzhou on the same night. In fact, the two events were generally confused as being one and the same. Here's a photo of the UFO over Hangzhou:

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At the time, we settled for the explanation that the spectacular display over Kazakhstan was a Russian rocket (its trajectory appears to be 'upwards' and the weird spiral over Norway the previous December had been claimed by the Russian government as one of its ICBM rockets)...

...but cometary fragments have been reported throughout history of performing 'unnatural' maneuvers themselves, sometimes slowing almost to a halt as they put on their show for us.

You have to wonder about spectacular mass 'UFO sightings' occurring at precisely the same times as these infinitely weirder visions entering or skirting our atmosphere.

Can we say "Cosmic COINTELPRO"?


Cloud Lightning

Best of the Web: Storm threatens 100 million in US with snow, ice, cold

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© Unknown
A mammoth storm threatens to dump mounds of fresh snow, sleet and ice on about 100 million already winter-weary people from the US heartland to the east coast, forecasters said Monday.

Blizzard, winter storm and freezing rain warnings were issued for more than 25 states, from North Dakota and Colorado down to New Mexico, then up through Texas, Kansas and Missouri to the Great Lakes region and across Pennsylvania to New England.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) urged residents to prepare in earnest for the fury of the storm as it barrels eastward across the country.

"A storm of this size and scope needs to be taken seriously," said FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, who warned that "it's critical that the public does its part to get ready."

Fugate urged residents in storm affected regions to "check on your neighbors, especially the elderly and young children -- those who can be most vulnerable during emergencies."

X

Sudden death tree fungus killing off UK forests

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© Unknown
A virulent infection first seen in the US is spreading like wildfire through Britain's woods and forests, causing million of trees to be cut down.

Phytophthora ramorum first surfaced in America and is known there as Sudden Oak death, responsible for a massive number of tree deaths amongst species of American oak. In 2002, a fungus was discovered on a viburnum plant is a Sussex garden and identified as Phytophthora ramorum. Since then, the plague has spread at an incredibly fast rate and is jumping species, with the English oak, around 100 other tree species and even rhododendrons falling prey to the pathogen.

Phytophthora ramorum affects tree bark, causing lesions which bleed black fluid, followed by blackening foliage and the death of the tree. According to the National Trust, this tree plague is far worse than Dutch Elm disease as the spores are now reproducing at an incredibly fast rate in one of England's commonest trees, the Japanese larch.

Bizarro Earth

US: Hundreds of Dead Fish Found in North Fort Collins

Sucker Fish
© 9News, Colorado
Fort Collins - More than 250 dead fish were found on a 150-foot stretch of shoreline near an irrigation ditch just north of Willox Street Saturday.

The fish, which were mostly sucker fish with some brown trout, were discovered by Fort Collins resident Bob Jackson. Jackson immediately informed local authorities, who sent out representatives from the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife.

"I walked the shoreline on the north side of Willox and took some samples that I turned into the health lab," Shane Craig, district wildlife manager and game warden for Fort Collins, said.

Craig says the fish most likely swam into the irrigation canals as the temperatures turned mild and became trapped in the canal after being released from the Horsetooth Reservoir.

When the water levels in the canal dropped, so presumably did the oxygen levels, Craig says.

Fish

Freezing temperatures cause fish kill at Franklin Island

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© Sunny SchlapperSunny Schlapper found these dead fish inside Franklin Island Conservation Area. The Missouri Department of Conservation attributed the fish kill to a sudden drop in temperature in early January.

Boonville - A sudden drop in temperature earlier this month led to, a state official said, what appears to be around 1,000 fish dying in Franklin Island Conservation Area.

A mid-Missouri resident found the fish and took photos on Jan. 9. Because of the snow, the Boonville Daily News was unable to confirm the dead fish until last week.

Joe Jerek, spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Conservation, said the fish kill was "nothing astronomical." He said staff from that area found around 100 dead fish and attributed the deaths to the steep drop in temperatures.

Fish

Massive Fish Kill, this time Dead Fish Wash up in Canada

People in Nanaimo were shocked to discover thousands of dead herring washed up on their Vancouver island beach. The sight was a new experience for some.



Biologists have taken samples to determine what caused the mass deaths, which may be attributable to toxins or disease. Brenda Spence of Fisheries and Oceans Canada told CBC News that there are diseases that are endemic to herring which can cause mass die-offs.

Bizarro Earth

High Risk of Big Quake in Chile

Chilean Quake
© Ian Salas/epa/CorbisPeople walk by a destroyed road in Santiago, Chile after an earthquake of 8.8 on the Richter scale that hit the country early Feb. 27, 2010.

The magnitude-8.8 earthquake that pummeled Chile in February 2010 did not relieve seismic stress the way scientists thought it might have, a new study suggests.

Quake risk thus remains high in the region, geologist Stefano Lorito of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome and his colleagues report online Jan. 30 in Nature Geoscience. In places, risk might even be higher than it was before last year's quake.

The geologic stress remains because instead of the ground moving the most where stress had been building the longest, the team reports, the greatest slip occurred where a different quake had already relieved stress just eight decades earlier.

Scientists would like to be able to point at a fault segment that built up stress the longest and say it was primed to go next. But the new work shows that stress buildup does not automatically translate to an earthquake happening right in that area, says geophysicist Ross Stein of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, who was not involved in the research. "It's a very logical approach," Stein says. "But I don't think it holds up."