Damages 70% of the houses in Almazan


2 July 2014 The hail storm that dumped Wednesday in Almazan, Soria, has damaged 70% of the houses in this town of about 6,000 inhabitants, according to the Mayor José Antonio de Miguel.

The sixth installment in our new monthly series, the following video compiles footage of 'signs of the times' from around the world during June 2014 - 'earth changes', extreme weather and planetary upheaval.

While billions have been glued to TV screens for the soccer World Cup this past month, Nature put on a show that saw major flooding on every continent, not least in Brazil where 250 people were killed by flash-flooding and landslides, and a huge sinkhole swallowed streets just miles from one of the host nation's venues. Mid-18th century flood-level records were broken in the U.S. and E.U. There were also a LOT of tornadoes and waterspouts in places that don't normally see them.

The month began and ended with dramatic fireball appearances in the UK. The first one was really weird: a fireball turning circles in the sky! While many are attributing 'intelligence' to this burning object, accounts from previous eras of environmental and social upheaval describe such 'fire in the sky', whose gravity-defying behavior can be explained via plasma physics.

Then there were the hailstorms. 'Baseball-sized hail' used to mean something rare and freakish. Now it's positively common! Last month they were sweeping away piles of hail with diggers in Sao Paulo; this month they did likewise in eastern Spain, Tokyo and Turkey. The damage caused runs into billions of dollars. Iowa's corn crop was savaged, farmers in Turkey are devastated, and this year's fruit crop in Valencia, Spain, was all but wiped out.

Spectacular electrical storms in summertime aren't unusual, but snowfall in regions adjacent to territory scorched by wildfires are: despite earlier heatwaves, snow returned to much of Scandinavia, the Rockies and Western Canada. Speaking of wildfires, so far this year Russia has seen twice the number of wildfires reported last year, while in the U.S. they have already surpassed the 2013 total.

Get ready for the Greatest Show on Earth!

Event Time
2014-07-03 19:50:05 UTC
2014-07-03 07:50:05 UTC-12:00 at epicenter

Location
30.309°S 175.765°W depth=33.0km (20.5mi)

Nearby Cities
236km (147mi) ESE of Raoul Island, New Zealand
1018km (633mi) S of Nuku'alofa, Tonga
1079km (670mi) NE of Whakatane, New Zealand
1087km (675mi) NNE of Gisborne, New Zealand
1103km (685mi) ENE of Whangarei, New Zealand

Scientific Data

An Instagram user captured impressive footage of a lighting bolt striking the ground in New York last night

Adverse weather is affecting New York City at the moment, with severe thunderstorms washing over the area on Wednesday evening. The full force of the storm was documented on social media, with Instagram user Dinesh Penugonda capturing spectacular footage of a lighting bolt striking land, with the darkened but unmistakable silhouette of Manhattan in the background. You can see the video below.


Americans living along the country's east coast are revising their July 4 holiday plans as the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, Tropical Storm Arthur, grows in stature. It is close to reaching hurricane strength and residents in some southern states are currently evacuating threatened areas.

The high temperature soared to 96 degrees this afternoon in Philadelphia making today the hottest day of 2014. The combination of heat and humidity made it feel insufferable outside and also triggered severe thunderstorms, and flash flood warnings this evening. The CBS3 weather team counted over 10,000 lightning strikes since 6pm as storms were still raging furiously over New Jersey. Numerous house fires were sparked by lightning strikes across the region.

The concerns of wild weather are not over yet as the area goes under a Flash Flood Watch Thursday morning. Showers and thunderstorms along a stalled cold front will connect with tropical moisture from Arthur resulting in periods of heavy rain for the region Thursday afternoon. Rainfall amounts of 1-3″ could cause flooding along area streams and poor drainage flooding is also expected.

State Parks officials say people should avoid going near the decomposing carcass for health and safety reasons

A dead 35-foot-long humpback whale has washed up on a beach at Montaña de Oro State Park.

The whale washed up on a beach just north of Hazard Reef late Friday morning. Based on its size, the animal was probably a juvenile, said Vince Cicero, senior environmental scientist with State Parks.

Scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Marine Mammal Center examined the whale over the weekend and determined that it was too decomposed to do a necropsy.

"It had probably been dead a while before it washed ashore," Cicero said.

Antarctic sea ice has hit its second all-time record maximum this week. The new record is 2.112 million square kilometers above normal. Until the weekend just past, the previous record had been 1.840 million square kilometers above normal, a mark hit on December 20, 2007, as I reported here, and also covered in my book.

Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, responded to e-mail questions and also spoke by telephone about the new record sea ice growth in the Southern Hemisphere, indicating that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the sea ice growth was specifically due to global warming.

"The primary reason for this is the nature of the circulation of the Southern Ocean - water heated in high southern latitudes is carried equatorward, to be replaced by colder waters upwelling from below, which inhibits ice loss," Serreze wrote in an e-mail. "Upon this natural oceanic thermostat, one will see the effects of natural climate variations, [the rise] appears to be best explained by shifts in atmospheric circulation although a number of other factors are also likely involved."

It's now official - last month was the warmest June ever recorded in New Zealand.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research this afternoon confirmed an "exceptionally warm start to winter", with dozens of climate stations also placing in the top four for the warmest June ever recorded.

Record high mean temperatures for the month were recorded at Kerikeri, Tauranga, Te Puke, Dunedin, Stratford, Wanganui, Westport, Hokitika, Haast, Ranfurly, Secretary Island and Whenuapai at Auckland.

The nationwide average temperature in June 2014 was 10.3C, surpassing the previous record for warmest June in 2003.

Widespread overland flooding in Saskatchewan and Manitoba prompted the evacuation of some homes in western Manitoba on Tuesday night.

The Rural Municipality of Wallace issued a mandatory evacuation order for an area almost five kilometres south of the Trans-Canada Highway from Kirkella, Man., a community near the Saskatchewan border, east to Road 161W.

Residents in the affected area were urged to leave by 9 p.m. CT, as an influx of water was coming quickly. Evacuees were asked to report to a reception centre in nearby Virden, Man.

It wasn't immediately clear how many people were affected by the municipality's evacuation order.

Earlier in the evening, emergency officials in Virden put out an evacuation order for homes on the south side of Kenderdine Street, south of Highway 257 and east of Scallion Creek.

Knowing that her son was able to take a few steps from his hospital bed to a chair Wednesday morning was an immense relief, his mother said, but the enormity of his injuries also overwhelmed the Elgin woman.

Benjamin Hernandez, 15, was seriously hurt a day earlier when the car driven by his mother plunged into a sinkhole on a rural road south of the village of Burlington.

San Juanita Pineda was delivering newspapers in the pre-dawn hours and did not see the sinkhole that was 10 feet in diameter and deep enough that her Ford Taurus was lodged below ground level. A short time later, a pickup truck drove over the car in which the two were pinned.

Benjamin is in the pediatric intensive care unit of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood with a spinal fracture, a broken rib and a broken jaw, his mother said. He also lost some teeth.