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Sat, 23 Oct 2021
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Bizarro Earth

USGS: Earthquake Magnitude 6.0 - ENE of Tairua, New Zealand

NZ Quake_160413
© USGS
Event Time
2013-02-16 05:16:18 UTC
2013-02-16 17:16:18 UTC+12:00 at epicenter

Location
36.130°S 178.045°E depth=204.5km (127.1mi)

Nearby Cities
219km (136mi) ENE of Tairua, New Zealand
223km (139mi) NNE of Whakatane, New Zealand
240km (149mi) NE of Tauranga, New Zealand
274km (170mi) NE of Rotorua, New Zealand
639km (397mi) NNE of Wellington, New Zealand
Technical Details

Bizarro Earth

USGS: Earthquake Magnitude 6.2 - SE of Caburan, Philippines

Philippines Quake_160213
© USGS
Event Time
2013-02-16 04:37:36 UTC
2013-02-16 12:37:36 UTC+08:00 at epicenter

Location
5.759°N 125.838°E depth=98.2km (61.0mi)

Nearby Cities
28km (17mi) SE of Caburan, Philippines
65km (40mi) ESE of Malapatan, Philippines
68km (42mi) ESE of Lun Pequeno, Philippines
70km (43mi) E of Glan, Philippines
971km (603mi) W of Koror Town, Palau

Technical Details

Bizarro Earth

Mysterious shaking in Morristown, Tennessee

Image
Late Tuesday afternoon dozens of concerned neighbors called Hamblen County 911 to report the earth shaking and the sound of a large blast.

At first the the US Geological Survey reported there was no earthquake in the area.

That prompted local emergency management officials to spend Wednesday looking at other options.

10News spoke with TDEC (Tennessee Department of Environmental Conservation) who ruled out fracking or quarry activity.

Then, we checked with the University of Memphis Center for Earthquake Research and Information, sponsored by the USGS.

Geologist Gary Patterson went and pulled the records from sensors on Tuesday and says he could see activity consistent with an earthquake or quarry blasting.

Emergency Managment Agency Director Chris Bell says there was no licensed blasting in the Hamblen County area on Tuesday.

Bizarro Earth

USGS: Earthquake Magnitude 6.6 - 134km WSW of Druzhina, Russia

Image
© USGS
Event Time:
2013-02-14 13:13:53 UTC
2013-02-15 01:13:53 UTC+12:00 at epicenter

Location:
67.580°N 142.593°E depth=10.1km (6.3mi)

Nearby Cities:
134km (83mi) WSW of Druzhina, Siberia
860km (534mi) NE of Markha, Russia
866km (538mi) NE of Yakutsk, Russia
979km (608mi) NNW of Magadan, Russia
2973km (1847mi) NNE of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Question

Strange smell sends Sharjah residents out of buildings last night

Strange Smell
© Chandra Balan
Residents ran out of their buildings scared at 2am to ascertain the source of smell fearing fire in their neighbourhoods as fog – or smoke – began to engulf the whole area. But all were clueless as no one could spot fire in the area.
Many residents of Buhairah, Al Khan and Al Taawun areas in Sharjah rushed out of their buildings due to a strong smell which was prevalent in all the areas.

A resident on the morning walk today, said the smell is still there.

Residents ran out of their buildings scared at 2am to ascertain the source of smell fearing fire in their neighbourhoods as fog - or smoke - began to engulf the whole area. But all were clueless as no one could spot fire in the area.

"I think a building is on fire," guessed one resident. "I think a leaked gas tanker passed through this area which caused this smell," conjectured another resident while all the searching for source of smell. But most of them claimed that it smelled like plastic or rubber is burning.

The smell started with fog - or we can call it smoke also - which strengthened residents' belief that there's a huge fire in a nearby building. The smell lasted until the fog - or smoke - disappeared.

Map

Extinction-level super volcano growing in the Pacific, unfortunately

super volcano
Bad news, everyone - you have another near-certain world-ending catastrophe to look forward to.

Scientists have confirmed that two continent-sized chemical blobs of partially melted rock are converging in the Pacific, and look set to create a massive new volcano which could prove cataclysmic to life on Earth. (In 100 million years.)

Geologist Michael Thorne at the University of Utah reports in Earth and Planetary Science that the collision is slowly happening 1,800 miles beneath the ocean.

He says that the collision could lead in two possible directions - both of which are bad, and would wipe out millions of species.

One is just a massive single eruption, which would kill us all, the other is a thousand-year flood basalt eruption, which would also kill us.

Bizarro Earth

Tigris and Euphrates river basin has lost Dead Sea-sized quantity of water

River Basin
© Shutterstock/Sadik Gulec
Already strained by water scarcity and political tensions, the arid Middle East along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is losing critical water reserves at a rapid pace, from Turkey upstream to Syria, Iran and Iraq below.

Unable to conduct measurements on the ground in the politically unstable region, UC Irvine scientists and colleagues used data from space to uncover the extent of the problem. They took measurements from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, and found that between 2003 and 2010, the four nations lost 144 cubic kilometers (117 million acre feet) of water - nearly equivalent to all the water in the Dead Sea. The depletion was especially striking after a drought struck the area in 2007. Researchers attribute the bulk of it - about 60 percent - to pumping of water from underground reservoirs.

They concluded that the Tigris-Euphrates watershed is drying up at a pace second only to that in India. "This rate is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents," the scientists report in a paper to be published online Feb. 15 in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Arrow Down

Major landslide at Lyme Regis, England

Coastguards were scrambled after fears that people might be trapped beneath a major landslide at Monmouth Beach, Lyme Regis, yesterday (Monday).

Rescue officers and the Portland-based helicopter were both initially despatched to establish whether members of the public on the beach at the time had been caught in the landslide.

But eye witness accounts reported to coastguards on scene and aerial surveillance quickly established that no persons were in immediate danger.


Cloud Lightning

Devastating tornado tears through southern Mississippi, seven more twisters spotted in Alabama

A swarm of tornadoes tore through several counties in southern Mississippi and Alabama on Sunday, injuring at least 10 people and ripping apart hundreds of homes and other buildings, including parts of the University of Southern Mississippi, authorities said.

The Forrest County seat of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and the adjacent town of Petal, both about 100 miles southeast of Jackson, the state capital, bore the brunt of storms that struck less than an hour before dark.

The tornado that plowed through the Hattiesburg area was believed to have reached three-quarters of a mile in diameter at times, said Anna Weber, a National Weather Service meteorologist.


Additional images

Comment: Here's another dramatic video of this F4 tornado:




Bizarro Earth

Is the Earth cooking up another supervolcano?

Image
Every few million years or so, the Earth burps up a gargantuan volcano. These aren't like volcanoes in our lifetimes; these "super volcanoes" can erupt continuously for thousands of years. While they might be rare, you'd best look out when one hits. The ash and volcanic gases from these volcanoes can wipe out most living things over large parts of the planet. Michael Thorne, a seismologist at the University of Utah, has some clues about what causes these big eruptions. Thorne uses seismic waves to get a picture of what's going on about 1,800 miles beneath the Earth's surface, where the planet's core meets the outer mantle.

Think of the Earth as an avocado, and the pit is the core. The stuff you make guacamole with is the outer mantle. Thorne has been watching two enormous piles of rock that sit on the boundary between the core and the mantle. One pile is underneath the Pacific Ocean; the other under Africa. Scientists have known about them for 20 years, but Thorne saw something different. "I think this is the first study that might point to evidence that these piles are moving around," Thorne says.