Experts warn to explore formations with caution

Winter enthusiasts have been flocking to Bradford Beach, the Doctors Park beach and other spots along the Lake Michigan shoreline since last week's blizzard to check out a bizarre lunar landscape of craters, boulders and rounded mounds carved from the shoreline ice shelf by wind and waves.

Many are climbing inside ice volcanoes - ice cones several feet high that form along the lake when waves force water up through the ice.

"It's pretty cozy in here; I'm not going to lie," said Marna Lamson, 24, of Milwaukee, as she huddled inside an ice volcano close to shore. "It's very sheltered from the elements. The bottom is snow and ice."

While they may be fascinating to explore, naturalists warn that ice volcanoes also can be treacherous. Even if they're not spouting water because the mouth that links them to the lake has frozen over, volcano bases can quickly change from snow and ice to water, depending on conditions.

Ice shelves also can break apart unexpectedly with changes in temperature and wave action, said Don Quintenz, director of education at the Schlitz Audubon Center in Bayside.

"You can fall through the ice, so you have to be very careful," he said. "I've studied the ice, and I'm still amazed by how fast things can get soft, and what was solid becomes unsolid."

This guest post was written by Donna O'Meara, an award-winning writer and photographer living in Hawaii, who has photos currently on view in "Extreme Exposure" at The Annenberg Space for Photography

I held my breath and clanked up the metal gangplank of The Spirit of Enderby, a privately leased Russian icebreaker that would be my new home for the next month. Following "in the footsteps of Scott and Shackleton," Enderby left port from Invercargill, New Zealand, bound for Mount Erebus on Ross Island in Antarctica.

The journey is only possible for about six weeks each Austral Summer -- January and February in the Southern Hemisphere -- when temperatures allow the ice to melt. For four weeks, we would rock and roll across the the Southern Ocean, the most dangerous and damned patch of water on Earth, to cross the Ross Sea and reach the base of the towering 12,400-foot high mountain.

A 'super pack' of wolves has been terrifying a town after leaving more than 30 horses dead in just four days.

Four hundred bloodthirsty wolves have been spotted prowling around the edges of Verkhoyansk, in Russia, attacking livestock at will.

Twenty four teams of hunters have been put together to get rid of the wolves, with a bounty of £210 for every wolf skin brought to officials.

Stepan Rozhin, an administration official for the Verkhoyansk district in Russia, said: 'To protect the town we are creating 24 teams of armed hunters, who will patrol the neighbourhood on snowmobiles and set wolf traps.

'But we need more people. Once the daylight increases, the hunters will start shooting predators from helicopters.'

A pack of wolves this size is unheard of, with the animals usually preferring to hunt in smaller groups of just six or seven.

The massive group is believed to be made from hundreds of packs and has left animal experts baffled.

Dr Valerius Geist, a wildlife behaviour expert, said the harsh Siberian winter - where temperatures plummet to minus 49C - had killed off the animal's usual prey.

He said: 'It is unusual for wolves to gather in such numbers or hunt large animal like horses.

'However, the population of their usual prey, rabbits, has decreased this year due to lack of food, so wolves have had to change their habits.

'Wolves are very careful to choose the most nutritious food source easiest obtained without danger - which in this case happens to be horses.

Transcript of radio broadcast.

Eleanor Hall: The wild weather associated with Cyclone Yasi caused more flooding in Victoria on the weekend. Heavy downpours on Friday night and into Saturday caused flash flooding across the state.

While Melbourne was deluged, once again the state's north-west seems to have suffered the worst of it. For some people it's their fourth flood in recent months, as Simon Lauder reports.

Floods and mudslides in Sri Lanka have forced 320,000 people to flee their homes and killed at least 11.

The Disaster Management Center said Monday the evacuees are being housed in 759 temporary camps after heavy rains last week forced them to flee. In addition to the 11 deaths, three people are missing.

Back-to-back storm systems and widespread cold will bring more harsh winter weather to the eastern two-thirds of the nation this week.

One storm will spread snow and rain along a path from the Tennessee Valley to the Northeast from today through Tuesday, while the next storm will bring significant snowfall to the central and southern Plains from late tonight into Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a new blast of arctic air will spread southward and eastward, with subzero low temperatures extending over a large area from the Plains to the Northeast on Tuesday night.

Date-Time
Monday, February 07, 2011 at 19:53:42 UTC

Tuesday, February 08, 2011 at 06:53:42 AM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location
7.157°S, 155.284°E

Depth
413.9 km (257.2 miles)

Region
SOLOMON ISLANDS

Distances
110 km (65 miles) SSW of Arawa, Bougainville, PNG

150 km (95 miles) WSW of Chirovanga, Choiseul, Solomon Islands

930 km (580 miles) ENE of PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea

2265 km (1400 miles) N of BRISBANE, Queensland, Australia

Nearly blind animal has venom-tipped pincers.

Unless you've been living in a cave, you probably haven't run across this new species of poisonous, nearly blind pseudoscorpion.

The 0.5-inch-long (1.3-centimeter-long) species, Cryptogreagris steinmanni, was discovered recently in high-altitude caverns near Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

Pseudoscorpions are essentially scorpions that lack a stinging tail. However, the new species does have long, venom-tipped pincers that likely help it nab agile prey, such as springtails, in the gloom.

Most likely, the new pseudoscorpion lives only in Glenwood Caverns and Historic Fairy Caves, the study authors say.

"A lot of these caves are islands, almost like an isolated environment where invertebrates ... evolve into being adapted to underground life," said biospeleologist David Steinmann, a zoology department associate with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Steinmann collected the new species after it was discovered in 2000 by tour guide Micah Ball.

With its primitive eyes and pale color, the arachnid is perfectly suited to its dark, chilly existence and has probably been scurrying through the passages for millions of years, Steinmann said.

Sugar Supply Shortage Looming

World sugar output will probably fall short of demand, said Rabobank, after a cyclone with winds stronger than Hurricane Katrina destroyed homes and smashed crops in Australia, driving prices to 30-year highs.

Tropical Cyclone Yasi ripped through northern Queensland, a region growing a third of the country's cane, cutting output potential in the area by about 50 percent, producers group Canegrowers said Feb. 4. The storm, which the government says may have wiped out at least A$500 million ($507 million) of agricultural production, raised speculation that the world's third-largest sugar exporter may struggle to match last year's output that was the lowest in two decades.

"The whole house was shaking and vibrating," said Gerry Borgna, 53, whose family has supplied cane to a mill at Tully, about 140 kilometers (87 miles) south of Cairns, since the 1920s. "We could hear things flying past and we thought it was part of the house." At the farm, power lines were lying across the road, a shed stood precariously and cane was pushed over. "To me, this is a disaster," he said.

Raw sugar soared to 36.08 cents per pound on ICE Futures U.S. in New York on Feb. 2, the highest level since 1980, as the storm bore down on Queensland, and traded at 33.03 cents today.

Recent events provide us with a great case study of the cosmic forces that may lie behind large storms such as cyclones, hurricanes, blizzards and much more. The recent events I speak of include the major blizzard that swept across the Midwestern and Eastern US as well as the punishment Cyclone Yasi inflicted on eastern Australia earlier last week. Both of these storms grew to enormous sizes during a time period that coincided with the Earth being lashed by a solar storm just following a New Moon. As strange as this may sound, this isn't the first time that celestial alignments along side of solar activity have spurred such events. If a correlation between these factors exists, as we suspect, then this overturns much of what is commonly believed about Earth weather and, as we'll see, even geology.

To understand how this all works, let's start with the sun. On January 31st a massive coronal hole opened up on the sun, hurling another sledgehammer of charged particles in the direction of Earth. This was due to impact us sometime between February 2nd and February 4th. Not only this, but we recently passed through a new Moon on February 2nd. But why is the Moon of any significance here, one might ask?

As James McCanney explains in an interview he did for Spectrum Magazine in 2003:

The [New] Moon moves in front of Earth, breaks that electrical flow [between the sun and Earth], and then moves out of the way. It gives us tremendous bombardment after that Moon moves out of the way, the first and second day after the New Moon. That's the condition that has been identified as being one of the leading causes of kicking-off major hurricanes and storms. What it does is: The Moon is interacting with the solar electric field. It's that CHANGE which causes the storms, and causes the environment around Earth to change, and thus affects Earth weather.

So the picture we're painting is this: The sun blasts a massive front of solar wind in the direction of the Earth. As the New Moon moves out of the way of the sun and Earth, this, by itself, creates a significant increase in charged particles hitting the Earth. With the excess of charged particles from this solar storm hitting us near simultaneously, all of this excess charge ends up in the radiation belts surrounding the Earth. The Earth then finds ways to discharge this imbalance such as these two major storms we've seen. One storm takes the form of a massive blizzard covering about half of the US. The other takes the form of a cyclone storm, Yasi, that pounds the already flooded east coast of Australia. Increased volcanic and earthquake activity was also noted during this time as well.