Earth Changes
Tropical Cyclone Nargis struck early Saturday with winds of up to 120 mph, the military-run Myaddy television station said.
Shari Villarosa, the top American diplomat in Yangon, said trees and electricity lines were down in the city after the storm's whipping winds and torrential downpour.
"Our Burmese staff have lost their roofs," she told The Associated Press. "There is major devastation throughout the city."
Five regions of the impoverished Southeast Asian country have been declared disaster zones.
At least 351 people were killed, including 162 who lived on Haing Gyi island off the country's southwest coast, state-run television said. Many of the others died in the low-lying Irrawaddy delta.
Authorities were able to confirm Saturday that 50 homes burned Wednesday in a fire caused by humans in the Manzano Mountains, southeast of Albuquerque, said Linda Peters, a fire information officer. Nine homes had burned earlier.
Oxygen-starved waters are expanding in the Pacific and Atlantic as ocean temperatures increase with global warming, threatening fisheries and other marine life, a study published today concludes.
Most of these zones remain hundreds of feet below the surface, but they are beginning to spill onto the relatively shallow continental shelf off the coast of California and are nearing the surface off Peru, driving away fish from commercially important fishing grounds, researchers have found.
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| ©Erhardt Krause / Sacramento Be |
| NEAR SAN FRANCISCO: Scientists think that oxygen-poor zones may explain the Pacific Ocean invasion of jumbo, ƒsor Humboldt, squid. Fisherman Steve Consulo holds one. |
Quakes aren't uncommon there, but analysts just do not know what has caused 344 of them in the area in the past week, the strongest of which was magnitude 4.7.
This information - the most accurate and comprehensive of its kind - was discovered by Shuhab Khan, assistant professor of geology, and Richard Engelkemeir, a geology Ph.D. student, using advanced radar-like laser technology. Although geologists have long known of the existence of faults in Southeast Texas, only recently have UH researchers produced a comprehensive map pinpointing the locations of the faults. A Houston-area map showing active surface faults is available here.
While the ground moving beneath Houstonians feet is not felt at the magnitude of recent earthquakes in San Antonio and Illinois, this shaky ground could mean trouble for buildings, roads and pipelines located on one of these hundreds of faults traversing the region's surface.
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| ©Shuhab Khan and Richard Engelkemeir |
| Pictured is a Houston-area map showing the locations of salt domes and known active surface faults interpreted on lidar imagery. |
The eruption of the Chaiten volcano caught local authorities by surprise, as experts say it has been dormant for at least 450 years.










