Earth ChangesS


Cloud Lightning

Canada: Residents cleaning up after wind storm blows through Prairies

Edmonton - Carol Quiring had to fish about three metres of eavestroughing out of her hot tub after winds gusting up to 100 kilometres per hour tore through parts of Alberta Friday night.

It was part of a storm system that was also being blamed for blasting out windows and flinging construction debris around in Winnipeg Saturday.

Ms. Quiring, who lives in a north Edmonton neighbourhood, looked out her back door Saturday morning and noticed that the cover on her hot tub had slid several centimetres.

When she looked more closely, she could see a three-metre long chunk of metal eavestroughing sticking out of the pool.

Thinking that the wind had blown her neighbours' eavestrough down, she knocked on a few doors looking for the owner.

Frog

Many New Species Discovered In Hidden Mozambique Oasis With Help Of Google Earth

Chamelon
© Julian Bayliss/KewScientific surveying Mount Mabu -- Mozambique - found a wealth of wildlife including Pygmy Chamelons.
Space may be the final frontier, but scientists who recently discovered a hidden forest in Mozambique show the uncharted can still be under our noses. BirdLife were part of a team of scientists who used Google Earth to identify a remote patch of pristine forest. An expedition to the site discovered new species of butterfly and snake, along with seven Globally Threatened birds.

The team were browsing Google Earth - freely available software providing global satellite photography - to search for potential wildlife hotspots. A nearby road provided the first glimpses of a wooded mountain topped by bare rock. However, only by using Google Earth could the scientists observe the extent of woodland on the other side of the peak. This was later discovered to be the locally known, but unmapped, Mount Mabu. Scientific collections and literature also failed to shed light on the area.

Bizarro Earth

US: 4.4-Quake Rattles Area Near Bakersfield, California

A small earthquake struck the desert area of Kern County Saturday, it was reported.

A preliminary report from the U.S. Geological Survey said the 4.4-magnitude quake hit at 1:09 p.m. It was centered eight miles from the sparsely populated town of Randsburg.

Bizarro Earth

Pequannock Residents Witness Earthquake

Three vacationing in Costa Rica report they were near epicenter.

Joan Ackerman, 79, Mary Stuermer, 87, and Irene Stevens, 84, of Cedar Crest retirement home in Pompton Plains, had just sat down to eat in a ramshackle roadside restaurant just north of San Jose in Costa Rica when their vacations were abruptly interrupted by a magnitude 6.1 earthquake that shook the country, killing at least 23 on Jan. 8.

The family-owned eatery was close to the epicenter of the earthquake, the Poas Volcano.

Bizarro Earth

Earthquake Strikes Off Eastern Japan

A 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck off large areas in eastern Japan, including Tokyo, early today, but there were no immediate reports of any damage, officials said.

The country's meteorological agency said there was no risk of a tsunami.

Phoenix

Scientist see holes in glacier at Alaska volcano

Anchorage - Geologists on Saturday spotted expanded holes in the glacier that clings to the north side of Alaska's Mount Redoubt, and rivulets of water streaming down its side, as they closely monitored the volcano for a new eruption.

Scientists with the Alaska Volcano Observatory on Friday flew close to Drift Glacier and saw vigorous steaming emitted from a football field-size area on the north side of the mountain. By Saturday, they had confirmed the area was a fumarole, an opening in the earth that emits gases and steam, and that it had doubled in size overnight.

Stormtrooper

Kentucky deploys full Army Nat'l Guard for storm cleanup

Mayfield - Gov. Steve Beshear deployed every last one of his Army National Guardsmen on Saturday, with his state still reeling after a deadly ice storm encrusted it this week.

More than half a million homes and businesses, most of them in Kentucky, remained without electricity from the Ozarks through Appalachia, though temperatures creeping into the 40s helped a swarm of utility workers make headway. Finding fuel - heating oil along with gas for cars and generators - was another struggle for those trying to tough it out at home, with hospitals and other essential services getting priority over members of the public.

Cloud Lightning

Nearly 1 million without power 5 days after ice storm

Utility crews worked in subfreezing temperatures Saturday to try to put the power back on for nearly a million customers left without electricity by an ice storm that crippled parts of several states this week.

Thousands of people in ice-caked Kentucky awoke in motels and shelters, asked to leave their homes by authorities who said emergency teams in some areas were too strapped to reach everyone in need of food, water and warmth.

A 20-degree temperature boost was forecast across much of the region, a boon to the power crews but one that carried with it the threat of flooding.

Dozens of deaths have been reported and many people are pleading for a faster response to the power outages. About 536,000 homes and businesses across Kentucky were without power, down from more than 600,000, the largest outage in state history.

Ladybug

Feds apologize but insist birds had to be poisoned

Blame it on the Bard.

Hundreds of birds that dropped dead on Somerset County cars, porches and snow-covered lawns, alarming residents over the weekend, were all of a rather foul breed of fowl -- the notorious European starling, which the United States Department of Agriculture killed on purpose.

The starling, a prominent figure in Shakespeare's "Henry IV," has become a royal nuisance in North America. They have been invading farms and pushing out native wildlife since a New York City group infatuated with the playwright released about 100 imported starlings in Central Park in 1890 and 1891.

It was part of an ill-conceived plan by the American Acclimatization Society to make European immigrants feel at home by filling America with all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare's works.

Bizarro Earth

5.2 magnitude earthquake jolts eastern Indonesia

A 5.2 magnitude earthquake hit Maluku waters in eastern Indonesia Saturday afternoon, but there was no immediate report of casualties or material damage, said the Indonesian Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG), quoted by the national Antara News Agency.