Event Time:
2013-04-16 10:44:20 UTC
2013-04-16 15:14:20 UTC+04:30 at epicenter

Location:
28.107°N 62.053°E depth=82.0km (51.0mi)

Nearby Cities:
83km (52mi) E of Khash, Iran
168km (104mi) NE of Iranshahr, Iran
192km (119mi) SE of Zahedan, Iran
232km (144mi) SSW of Rudbar, Afghanistan
606km (377mi) NE of Muscat, Oman

Technical Data

Bluebells blanketing woodlands this time last year fail to show as chilly conditions prompt stalks to grow more slowly

People desperate for the arrival of spring may have to wait another few weeks for one of the key signs of the season - bluebell blooming.

The cold weather means the bluebells normally carpeting woodlands at this time of year are weeks late, as the chilly conditions have caused the stalks to grow more slowly, the National Trust said.

Bluebell flowering is predicted to be three to four weeks away, and the peak could be delayed until mid May or later.

The late arrival of bluebells after the coldest March since 1962 contrasts with last year, when one of the warmest and driest Marches on record saw the flowers peak by this time.

In 2009 the inventor of the renowned hockey stick graph Michael Mann and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Science where they attempted to refute the global significance of the Medieval Warm Period. The idea behind the paper was to show that the warmth in some areas was offset by cold in other parts of the world. To show this the authors searched out places that were colder than normal 1000 years ago.

The problem was the Atlantic region, which had an excellent amount of data to support the Medieval warmth. Here the temperatures stood at least at today's levels. Therefore Michael Mann searched around for other regions where far less data was available and found the Central Eurasian region would do just fine. The scarcity of available data left lots of room for interpretation. This is how the authors plotted a huge region of cold over a large swath of Central Eurasia during the Medieval Warm Period, which supposedly offset the inconvenient Atlantic warmth.

A Chinese team of scientists led by He YuXin of the University of Hong Kong, however, took a very close look at Mann's liberally interpreted data and his postulated Central Eurasian cold zone. Using sediment cores extracted from two different lakes and using the so-called alkenone method, the Chinese scientists reconstructed the temperature development over the past 2000 years for the northern Tibetan Plateau, which according to Mann was significantly colder 1000 years ago.

The surprise was big when the new, hard data showed the opposite was in fact true. It turns out that the region of the theoretical cold in the northern Tibetan Plateau during the Medieval Warm Period was indeed not colder but was warmer than today, see Science Bulletin.

A team of scientists led by HE YuXin of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Hong Kong examined two lake cores extracted from the Tibetan Plateau in order to reconstruct the past temperature development.

The two cores coming from two different lakes go back 2600 and 2200 years respectively.

Here's the paper's abstract (my emphasis):

Considerable efforts have been made to extend temperature records beyond the instrumental period through proxy reconstructions, in order to further understand the mechanisms of past climate variability. Yet, the global coverage of existing temperature records is still limited, especially for some key regions like the Tibetan Plateau and for earlier times including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Here we present decadally-resolved, alkenone-based, temperature records from two lakes on the northern Tibetan Plateau. Characterized by marked temperature variability, our records provide evidence that temperatures during the MWP were slightly higher than the modern period in this region. Further, our temperature reconstructions, within age uncertainty, can be well correlated with solar irradiance changes, suggesting a possible link between solar forcing and natural climate variability, at least on the northern Tibetan Plateau.

You can downnload or read the entire paper here.

Images in this story may be disturbing to some readers.

Salt Lake City - Several hundred birds are struggling for survival Monday after they accidentally landed at Dugway Proving Grounds where they are unable to take off again.

A group of eared grebes, a kind of migratory water fowl also known as black-necked grebes, were apparently fooled by the late snow and cold April weather and landed at an area they mistook for water at Dugway Proving Ground, according to spokesperson Paula Thomas.

Because the birds are water-bound, they can't take off from dry land. Several hundred birds were either trapped and struggling or dead when discovered by staff Monday morning, Thomas said.

South Florida is under attack, and the non-native species threatening to wreak havoc seems innocent enough: It's not the giant Burmese pythons that made a home in the Everglades in 2000, nor a ravenous, land-walking fish like the Asian carp that have been eating through waterways farther up north.

No, this foreign invader is a snail.

Those having a beer at Sloppy Joe's Bar in Havana Cuba today, will be hoping they wake up tomorrow remembering their time there.

For above the newly-refurbished and somewhat iconic bar, high in the sky occurred an atmospheric phenomenon known as a 'sun dog'.

The sun was surrounded by a bright ring, caused by a refraction of sunlight by small ice crystal in the atmosphere.

Chemicals used to disperse Gulf of Mexico spill blamed for marine deaths and human illness
Hundreds of beached dolphin carcasses, shrimp with no eyes, contaminated fish, ancient corals caked in oil and some seriously unwell people are among the legacies that scientists are still uncovering in the wake of BP's Deepwater Horizon spill.

This week it will be three years since the first of 4.9 billion barrels of crude oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, in what is now considered the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. As the scale of the ecological disaster unfolds, BP is appearing daily in a New Orleans federal court to battle over the extent of compensation it owes to the region.

Infant dolphins were found dead at six times average rates in January and February of 2013. More than 650 dolphins have been found beached in the oil spill area since the disaster began, which is more than four times the historical average. Sea turtles were also affected, with more than 1,700 found stranded between May 2010 and November 2012 - the last date for which information is available. On average, the number stranded annually in the region is 240.

Contact with oil may also have reduced the number of juvenile bluefin tuna produced in 2010 by 20 per cent, with a potential reduction in future populations of about 4 per cent. Contamination of smaller fish also means that toxic chemicals could make their way up the food chain after scientists found the spill had affected the cellular function of killifish, a common bait fish at the base of the food chain.

Deep sea coral, some of which is thousands of years old, has been found coated in oil after the dispersed droplets settled on the sea's bottom. A recent laboratory study found that the mixture of oil and dispersant affected the ability of some coral species to build new parts of a reef.

Event Time
2013-04-14 01:32:27 UTC
2013-04-14 11:32:27 UTC+10:00 at epicenter

Location
6.504°S 154.548°E depth=64.3km (40.0mi)

Nearby Cities
105km (65mi) WSW of Panguna, Papua New Guinea
114km (71mi) WSW of Arawa, Papua New Guinea
347km (216mi) SE of Kokopo, Papua New Guinea
498km (309mi) ESE of Kimbe, Papua New Guinea
677km (421mi) WNW of Honiara, Solomon Islands

Technical Details

Dead birds found in Marabella

EMA puzzled

Two days after more than 100 dead and sick corbeaux were found at the heliport in Chaguaramas, dead birds have turned up near the shoreline at Marabella.

Judith Lewis, of Bayshore, said several dead doves, pigeons and blackbirds were found underneath and in front of her house Thursday and yesterday.

Sixty-year-old Lewis said: "(Thursday) morning I got up and saw a pigeon under my house. Then my grandson came later in the evening and said there were two blackbirds under my house. When I looked around I saw four of them. This morning I saw a dove under the house and a pigeon dead by the neighbour. Another neighbour said she got four birds dead under the dog kennel. Now look four more birds dead by the shore."