Earth ChangesS


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Sudden death tree fungus killing off UK forests

Image
© Unknown
A virulent infection first seen in the US is spreading like wildfire through Britain's woods and forests, causing million of trees to be cut down.

Phytophthora ramorum first surfaced in America and is known there as Sudden Oak death, responsible for a massive number of tree deaths amongst species of American oak. In 2002, a fungus was discovered on a viburnum plant is a Sussex garden and identified as Phytophthora ramorum. Since then, the plague has spread at an incredibly fast rate and is jumping species, with the English oak, around 100 other tree species and even rhododendrons falling prey to the pathogen.

Phytophthora ramorum affects tree bark, causing lesions which bleed black fluid, followed by blackening foliage and the death of the tree. According to the National Trust, this tree plague is far worse than Dutch Elm disease as the spores are now reproducing at an incredibly fast rate in one of England's commonest trees, the Japanese larch.

Bizarro Earth

US: Hundreds of Dead Fish Found in North Fort Collins

Sucker Fish
© 9News, Colorado
Fort Collins - More than 250 dead fish were found on a 150-foot stretch of shoreline near an irrigation ditch just north of Willox Street Saturday.

The fish, which were mostly sucker fish with some brown trout, were discovered by Fort Collins resident Bob Jackson. Jackson immediately informed local authorities, who sent out representatives from the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife.

"I walked the shoreline on the north side of Willox and took some samples that I turned into the health lab," Shane Craig, district wildlife manager and game warden for Fort Collins, said.

Craig says the fish most likely swam into the irrigation canals as the temperatures turned mild and became trapped in the canal after being released from the Horsetooth Reservoir.

When the water levels in the canal dropped, so presumably did the oxygen levels, Craig says.

Fish

Freezing temperatures cause fish kill at Franklin Island

fish,kill
© Sunny SchlapperSunny Schlapper found these dead fish inside Franklin Island Conservation Area. The Missouri Department of Conservation attributed the fish kill to a sudden drop in temperature in early January.

Boonville - A sudden drop in temperature earlier this month led to, a state official said, what appears to be around 1,000 fish dying in Franklin Island Conservation Area.

A mid-Missouri resident found the fish and took photos on Jan. 9. Because of the snow, the Boonville Daily News was unable to confirm the dead fish until last week.

Joe Jerek, spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Conservation, said the fish kill was "nothing astronomical." He said staff from that area found around 100 dead fish and attributed the deaths to the steep drop in temperatures.

Fish

Massive Fish Kill, this time Dead Fish Wash up in Canada

People in Nanaimo were shocked to discover thousands of dead herring washed up on their Vancouver island beach. The sight was a new experience for some.



Biologists have taken samples to determine what caused the mass deaths, which may be attributable to toxins or disease. Brenda Spence of Fisheries and Oceans Canada told CBC News that there are diseases that are endemic to herring which can cause mass die-offs.

Bizarro Earth

High Risk of Big Quake in Chile

Chilean Quake
© Ian Salas/epa/CorbisPeople walk by a destroyed road in Santiago, Chile after an earthquake of 8.8 on the Richter scale that hit the country early Feb. 27, 2010.

The magnitude-8.8 earthquake that pummeled Chile in February 2010 did not relieve seismic stress the way scientists thought it might have, a new study suggests.

Quake risk thus remains high in the region, geologist Stefano Lorito of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome and his colleagues report online Jan. 30 in Nature Geoscience. In places, risk might even be higher than it was before last year's quake.

The geologic stress remains because instead of the ground moving the most where stress had been building the longest, the team reports, the greatest slip occurred where a different quake had already relieved stress just eight decades earlier.

Scientists would like to be able to point at a fault segment that built up stress the longest and say it was primed to go next. But the new work shows that stress buildup does not automatically translate to an earthquake happening right in that area, says geophysicist Ross Stein of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, who was not involved in the research. "It's a very logical approach," Stein says. "But I don't think it holds up."

Fish

Fish develop red spot fungus after floods

fish,dead,redspot,fungus
© AAP
Fish in Brisbane waterways are starting to develop a red spot fungus from flood contamination, while authorities are rushing to fix a treatment plant to stop a sewage leak.

The Oxley sewerage plant was flood damaged a fortnight ago.

Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM) director general John Bradley said Oxley Creek's enterococci levels, which indicate sewage contamination, were "250 times higher" than normal.

Bizarro Earth

Tonga - Earthquake Magnitude 6.0

Tonga Quake_310111
© USGSEarthquake Location
Date-Time
Monday, January 31, 2011 at 06:03:26 UTC

Monday, January 31, 2011 at 07:03:26 PM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location
21.943°S, 175.510°W

Depth
68.6 km (42.6 miles)

Region
TONGA

Distances
95 km (60 miles) SSW of NUKU'ALOFA, Tonga

360 km (225 miles) ESE of Ndoi Island, Fiji

400 km (245 miles) SSW of Neiafu, Tonga

1905 km (1180 miles) NNE of Auckland, New Zealand

Cloud Lightning

Storm could end dry spell in California

A Pacific storm was expected to slam into the West Coast on Sunday, ending a long dry spell in California as it brings rain and snow to the higher elevations.

Winter weather advisories were posted for the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, where as much as a foot of new snow is expected. Rain could make its way into Southern California late in the day and into Monday.

Farther to the north, snow was expected to fall in Idaho and Montana before creeping into the Dakotas late Sunday. Winter weather advisories were posted for much of the area in anticipation of up to 10 inches of snow and wind gusts as high as 25 mph.

Cloud Lightning

US: Multi-Day Dangerous, Destructive Winter Storm

us,weather map
© National Weather Service

A multi-day, multi-region potentially historic and destructive winter storm will unleash its fury beginning Monday and will last through Wednesday.

When everything is said and done, the storm may very well impact a third of the population of the United States; approximately 100 million people.

Its reach will be felt from the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies to the Ohio Valley to the coast of New England.

Accompanied with the winter storm will be a severe thunderstorm threat across the South capable of producing damaging winds, hail and a few tornadoes.

Our Midwest storm coverage will be categorized into the four factors: heavy snow, destructive ice, tornadoes and bitter cold. To find out more on the various factors, click on each of the images above.


Bizarro Earth

Swarm of nine earthquakes at Mount St. Helens

Mount St. Helens, Washington - A series of nine small earthquakes shook an area near Mount St. Helens over the weekend.

mt.st.helens
© Susan Wyatt/ KING 5 News
Seismologists at the University of Washington have been monitoring the quakes.

A 2.6 quake occurred at 2:26 p.m. on Saturday about six miles north of the volcano. Another quake, a 2.5, occurred at 2:44 p.m. in the same area. The depth for both quakes was two miles. Another quake occurred six miles north-northwest at 10:48 p.m. That measured 2.2 and was 2.2 miles deep.

Smaller quakes, ranging from magnitude 1.3 to 2.2, occurred on Sunday.