Earth Changes
A bone-dry climate, which occurs in periods between ice ages, could make conditions just right for building up enough underground magma to fuel a giant volcanic eruption, said Allen Glazner of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He presented this idea here last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Following snowstorms in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Hebron the previous night, on Wednesday morning snow fell in the Negev desert and later reached the central hills and Jerusalem.
Due to the snowy conditions in southern Israel, Route 40 was blocked between Sde Boker and the Nifta prison, Route 31 was blocked between Mishmar Hanegev and Lehavim and Route 204 was blocked between Yeroham and Sde Boker.
Also in the South, hundreds of Beduins were injured when several tents collapsed near the Lehavim Junction due to the stormy weather.
Extreme weather conditions continued to sweep across Israel on Wednesday, causing havoc throughout the country.
Following snowstorms in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Hebron the previous night, on Wednesday morning snow fell in the Negev desert and later reached the central hills and Jerusalem.
Two residents were killed and more than 40 injured in the magnitude-6.7 tremor that hit offshore, near the southern Taiwanese town of Hengchun late Tuesday.
Up to a dozen fiber-optic cables cross the ocean floor south of Taiwan, carrying traffic between China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, the U.S. and the island itself. Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan's largest phone company, said the quake damaged several of them, and repairs could take two to three weeks.
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.
A village 31 miles away from the Shiveluch volcano, was covered with ash, and volcanic tremors were registered in the area, the seismology center spokesman said.
Elsewhere in the region, survivors and mourners visited mass graves, lit candles along beaches, observed two minutes of silence and erected warning towers in hopes of saving lives in the future.
Tuesday's first temblor registered a magnitude 7.1, and the second one, which followed eight minutes later, was a magnitude 7.0.
Idaho Department of Fish and Game and U.S. Department ofHomeland Security officials expected to have results Thursday from the tests on tissue samples from the ducks' abdominal tract and on water samples from the creek.
The battery of tests at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's national laboratory in Wisconsin, the University of Idaho and Washington State University were expected to rule out an avian flu outbreak.
Volusia County seemed hardest hit in Central Florida, though Lake, Osceola and Sumter counties also were slammed by the fast-moving storm. On the leading edge of a cold front, the deluge trampled the region with rain and high winds that knocked down trees and power lines and damaged dozens of homes.