Earth ChangesS


Attention

Strong quake stirs panic in Indonesia capital

A powerful magnitude-7.5 earthquake under the Java Sea rattled Indonesia's capital early today, violently shaking tall buildings and sending panicked residents into the streets.

There were no immediate reports of damage, and geophysicists said there was little risk of a tsunami. The quake was centered about 65 miles east of Jakarta at a depth in the Earth of 180 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Bulb

Natural forces offset global warming last two years: study

Natural weather variations have offset the effects of global warming for the past couple of years and will continue to keep temperatures flat through 2008, a study released Thursday said.

But global warming will begin in earnest in 2009, and a couple of the years between 2009 and 2014 will eclipse 1998, the warmest year on record to date, in the heat stakes, British meteorologists said.

Existing global climate computer models tend to underestimate the effects of natural forces on climate change, so for this analysis, Met Office experts tweaked their model to better reflect the impact of weather systems such as La Nina, or fluctuations in ocean heat and circulation.

Cloud Lightning

Storms batter Ohio, Pa., killing 1

A storm system spawned tornados as it swept across the upper Midwest and into Pennsylvania, killing at least one person, flooding basements and leaving thousands of homes and businesses without power early Friday.

In western Pennsylvania, Allegheny County and Pittsburgh officials declared a state of emergency as residents dealt with flooding and damage from the torrential downpours.

The worst damage in Ohio was across the north-central part of the state, where the National Weather Service confirmed a tornado in Shelby and were investigating tornado reports in several counties, meteorologist Walter Fitzgerald said.

©Richelle via WKYC
NBC affiliate WKYC obtained this storm photograph from a viewer who said it was taken over Richland County, Ohio, on Thursday. The formation is known as a supercell, a well organized and notably intense thunderstorm.

Cloud Lightning

Cities incite thunderstorms, researchers find

Summer thunderstorms become much more fierce when they collide with a city than they would otherwise be in the open countryside, according to research led by Princeton engineers.

Alexandros A. Ntelekos and James A. Smith of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science based their conclusion on computer models and detailed observations of an extreme thunderstorm that hit Baltimore in July of 2004.

Their modeling suggests that the city of Baltimore experienced about 30 percent more rainfall than the region it occupies would have experienced had there been no buildings where the city now sits.

While thunderstorms are thought of as being purely forces of nature, the Princeton research suggests that man's built environment can radically alter a storm's life cycle.

Cloud Lightning

1 of deep ocean's most turbulent areas has big impact on climate

More than a mile beneath the Atlantic's surface, roughly halfway between New York and Portugal, seawater rushing through the narrow gullies of an underwater mountain range much as winds gust between a city's tall buildings is generating one of the most turbulent areas ever observed in the deep ocean.

In fact, the turbulence packs an energy wallop equal to about five million watts -- comparable to output from a small nuclear reactor, according to a landmark study led by Florida State University researcher Louis St. Laurent and described in the August 9 edition of the journal Nature.

The study -- an international collaboration of scientists from the United States and France -- documents for the first time the turbulent conditions in an undersea mountain range known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It provides never-before-seen evidence that deep water turbulence swirling in the small passageways of such mountains is generating much of the mixing of warm and cold waters in the Atlantic Ocean.

Snowman

Heavy snowfall causes $250 million damage in Chile

Heavy snow in Chile, the worst in eight years, has caused an estimated $250 million worth of damage, Spain's news agency EFE said Friday citing local authorities.

"The losses, so far, total some $250 million and at least 38,000 jobs have been lost temporarily," the news agency said citing Luis Schmidt, the head of the National Agriculture Society.

Bizarro Earth

Floating Arctic ice shrinking at record rate

The area of floating ice in the Arctic has shrunk more than in any summer since satellite tracking began in 1979, and it has reached that record point a month before the annual ice pullback typically peaks, experts said.

Bizarro Earth

Greenhouse gas warming might thin heat-trapping clouds, reducing the predicted impact by as much as 75%: UAH Scientists

The widely accepted (albeit unproven) theory that manmade global warming will accelerate itself by creating more heat-trapping clouds is challenged this month in new research from The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Instead of creating more clouds, individual tropical warming cycles that served as proxies for global warming saw a decrease in the coverage of heat-trapping cirrus clouds, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville's Earth System Science Center.

That was not what he expected to find.

Cloud Lightning

South Asia floods toll passes 2,000 mark

The death toll from the worst monsoon floods to hit South Asia in decades passed 2,000 Thursday even as torrents of muddy water receded from millions of acres of farmland and rains shifted west.

Thousands of villages remained under water and threatened by disease, while millions were still displaced, mainly in India and Bangladesh, where the severe floods also destroyed valuable crops.

Cloud Lightning

Sudan: More Flooding Predicted As Death Toll Exceeds 70

Sudanese authorities have said forecasts show the level of the Blue Nile River will continue to rise and the situation remains critical in many of the country's states after weeks of torrential rains and flooding that have left more than 70 people dead.

The level of the river, which runs through eastern and southeastern Sudan, has been rising steadily over the past weeks, forcing hundreds of families living along its path to abandon their homes.