Earth Changes

Earthquake Magnitude 5.7 - Puebla, Mexico

US Geological Survey
Fri, 22 May 2009 20:53 UTC

Date-Time Friday, May 22, 2009 at 19:24:18 UTC

Friday, May 22, 2009 at 02:24:18 PM at epicenter

Location 18.347°N, 98.267°W

Depth 56 km (34.8 miles) set by location program

Region PUEBLA, MEXICO

Distances 75 km (45 miles) NW of Huajuapan de Leon, Oaxaca, Mexico
80 km (50 miles) S of Puebla, Puebla, Mexico

90 km (55 miles) W of Tehuacan, Puebla, Mexico

150 km (95 miles) SE of MEXICO CITY, D.F., Mexico

Australia's Tasmanian devil declared endangered

Agence France-Presse
Thu, 21 May 2009 19:10 UTC

© Agence France-Presse/Torsten Blackwood
Australia's Tasmanian devil, the world's largest surviving marsupial carnivore, will be listed as endangered because of a contagious and deadly cancer, the government said

Australia's Tasmanian devil, the world's largest surviving marsupial carnivore, will be listed as endangered because of a contagious and deadly cancer, the government said.

"This disease has led to the decline of about 70 percent of the Tasmanian devil population since the disease was first reported in 1996," Environment Minister Peter Garrett said in a statement.

Devil facial tumour disease, which is spread through biting, kills the animals usually within three months by growing over their faces and mouths, preventing them from eating.

Australia: Residents of Northern New South Wales told to flee floods

ABC News
Fri, 22 May 2009 11:03 UTC

Thousands of residents in northern New South Wales have been asked to evacuate, as the Clarence and Wilson Rivers threaten to flood surrounding towns.

At least 9,000 Grafton residents have been told to leave, with the town predicted to flood tonight.

However, there are differing reports about the number of residents being asked to evacuate, with the SES putting the figure at about 20,000.

Australia: Tropical North Queensland Wakes To Coldest May Morning

ABC News
Fri, 22 May 2009 10:07 UTC

Two far north Queensland towns have experienced their coldest May morning on record.

Cooktown, north of Cairns, was 10 degrees Celsius at 6:00am AEST - two degrees below its previous record low.

Contaminants In Marine Mammals' Brains

Terra Daily
Fri, 22 May 2009 05:00 UTC

The most extensive study of pollutants in marine mammals' brains reveals that these animals are exposed to a hazardous cocktail of pesticides such as DDTs and PCBs, as well as emerging contaminants such as brominated flame retardants.

Eric Montie, the lead author on the study currently in press and published online in Environmental Pollution, performed the research as a student in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution-MIT Joint Graduate Program in Oceanography and Ocean Engineering and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).

The final data analysis and writing were conducted at College of Marine Science, University of South Florida, where Montie now works in David Mann's marine sensory biology lab.

Who's to blame for winter that just won't end? Maybe it's a dastardly Russian plot

Doug Speirs
Winnipeg Free Press
Thu, 21 May 2009 05:01 UTC

It was a dark and stormy night.

Ha ha ha! Just kidding. It was a dark and stormy afternoon. As hard as this is to believe, it was almost the end of (bad word) May.

Throughout the kingdom, the people were royally bummed out, partly because the economy was spinning slowly into the toilet, partly because everyone was terrified of catching a really nasty flu from pigs, but mainly because their land had been bewitched.

Once upon a time -- as all good stories are supposed to begin -- their kingdom was a place of warm and beautiful springs, the kind of springs you only read about in stories that begin with the words "once upon a time."

But now there was a darkness upon the land and their dreams of backyard barbecues and digging in the garden and going to the beach and baking their pasty white skin were being snowed under by The Winter That Refused To End.

Heavy rains leave 11 dead in Haiti

Agence France-Presse
Fri, 22 May 2009 04:56 UTC

© Agence France-Presse
Hundreds of homes were flooded and dozens destroyed in the constant downpour. Some 40 percent of the southern city of Cayes was underwater, authorities said.

Several days of heavy rain has swamped Haiti and left 11 people dead across the poverty-seeped Caribbean nation, officials said Thursday.

"We have counted 11 deaths in four regions of the country since the beginning of the week," Alta Jean-Baptiste, director of Haiti's Civil Protection Agency, told AFP.

According to Jean-Baptiste, five people died in the department of Artibonite, whose main city Gonaives was left devastated last year by three successive hurricanes.

Hundreds of homes were flooded and dozens destroyed in the constant downpour. Some 40 percent of the southern city of Cayes was underwater, authorities said.

Magma pulses may reveal Earth's 'heartbeat'

Catherine Brahic
New Scientist
Fri, 22 May 2009 03:15 UTC

© Martin Rietze / WestEnd61 / Rex
Evidence from distant parts of Earth's crust suggests the core is pulsing, sending up a regular batch of magma to the surface.

Earth may have a heartbeat. Evidence from Hawaii and Iceland hints that the planet's core may be dispatching simultaneous plumes of magma towards the surface every 15 million years or so.

If the hypothesis is true, it would revolutionise our ideas of what's happening far below our feet. Independent scientists contacted by New Scientist were split, with some scornful and others intrigued.

Rolf Mjelde of the University of Bergen and Jan Inge Faleide of the University of Oslo, both in Norway, used seismological data to measure the thickness of Earth's crust between Iceland and Greenland. Iceland is on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where magma wells up to form fresh crust.

Earth's 'hum' may reveal stormier climate

Catherine Brahic
New Scientist
Fri, 22 May 2009 03:08 UTC

The world is abuzz with climate change - in more ways than one. Swelling waves and rising sea levels can be detected in the way the planet "hums", says an oceanographer.

Peter Bromirski, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, says that seismic listening stations provide a long-term record of how the amount of energy reaching the world's shores is changing with climate change.

Most geologists who study seismology try to eliminate background noise in their data, but a handful of researchers have started to take a closer look at it.

They have identified at least three different types of "noise", including the Earth's hum, which was first discovered in 1998. The other two are called "microseisms" - tiny earthquakes - and have slightly different acoustic properties.