Vigan City - Two successive earthquakes hit the Batanes Group of Islands early morning Tuesday.

Julius Galdiano of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology branch office in Sinait, Ilocos Sur said the first quake with 5.1 magnitude occurred at 1:22 a.m. Tuesday, with Intensity 5 felt at the center of the province while intensity 4 was felt in Batan Island.

The epicenter of the quake according to the United States Geological Survey was located 30 km south southeast of Basco, Batanes with a depth of 10 kilometers.

After 20 minutes or at 1:40 a.m, an aftershock was felt in the same place with a magnitude of 4.8 magnitude.

Galdiano also revealed that before the quakes, a weak temblor was also felt and was centered 80 kilometers northwest of Vigan City at about 10:28 p.m. last Monday.

According to Phivolcs, no damage had been reported from the quakes.

Columbus, Ohio - The massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck the west coast of Chile last month moved the entire city of Concepcion at least 10 feet to the west, and shifted other parts of South America as far apart as the Falkland Islands and Fortaleza, Brazil.

These preliminary measurements, produced from data gathered by researchers from four universities and several agencies, including geophysicists on the ground in Chile, paint a much clearer picture of the power behind this temblor, believed to be the fifth-most-powerful since instruments have been available to measure seismic shifts.

Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina and across the continent from the quake's epicenter, moved about 1 inch to the west. And Chile's capital, Santiago, moved about 11 inches to the west-southwest. The cities of Valparaiso and Mendoza, Argentina, northeast of Concepcion, also moved significantly.

Chiang Mai - There was a tremor in Burma's new jungle capital city of Naypyitaw last Friday afternoon following a minor earthquake. There were no damages, according to officials of the Meteorology department.

"There was an earthquake but we have not released a statement," an official of the Meteorology department in Naypyitaw told Mizzima.

Other government officials in Naypyitaw, when contacted, said they felt the quake though there were no damages.

The Meteorology department refused to provide further details on the quake.

Okcular - Hundreds of earthquake survivors huddled in aid tents and around bonfires Monday in eastern Turkey, seeking relief from the winter cold after a strong temblor knocked down stone and mud-brick houses in five villages, killing 51 people.

The damage appeared worst in the Kurdish village of Okcular, which was almost razed. At least 15 of the village's 900 residents were killed, the Elazig governor's office said, and the air was thick with dust from crumpled homes and barns.

The pre-dawn earthquake caught many residents as they slept, shaking the area's poorly made buildings into piles of rubble. Panicked survivors fled into the narrow streets of this village perched on a hill in front of snow-covered mountains, with some people climbing out of windows to escape.

Case in front of San Francisco federal judge could change future of 'mad scientist' food products on our dinner plates.

San Francisco - A case involving genetically modified (GM) food will be in front of a federal judge Friday in San Francisco.

Researchers say the future of generations of Americans hangs in the balance, as the judge could order a halt to the planting or harvesting of any GM "Roundup Ready" sugar beets in the U.S.

This would strike a blow to growers in the Red River Valley, where more sugar beets are grown than any other region. Most of these growers have already been using Roundup Ready seed varieties for two years.

Another error in the influential reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports has been identified. This one concerns the rate of expansion of sea ice around Antarctica.

While not an issue for estimates of future sea level rise (sea ice is floating ice which does not influence sea level), a significant expansion of Antarctic sea ice runs counter to climate model projections. As the errors in the climate change "assessment" reports from the IPCC mount, its aura of scientific authority erodes, and with it, the justification for using their findings to underpin national and international efforts to regulate greenhouse gases.

Some climate scientists have distanced themselves from the IPCC Working Group II's (WGII's) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, prefering instead the stronger hard science in the Working Group I (WGI) Report - The Physical Science Basis. Some folks have even gone as far as saying that no errors have been found in the WGI Report and the process in creating it was exemplary.

Such folks are in denial.

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago - changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign's fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media - even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC - are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying "It is too so!" In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

Date-Time:
Monday, March 08, 2010 at 17:03:18 UTC

Monday, March 08, 2010 at 02:03:18 PM at epicenter

Location:
25.707°S, 66.599°W

Depth:
19.3 km (12.0 miles) (poorly constrained)

Distances:
155 km (95 miles) SW of Salta, Argentina

185 km (115 miles) NW of San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina

215 km (135 miles) SW of San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina

1245 km (770 miles) NW of BUENOS AIRES, Argentina

Eight of France's departments were placed on snow alert Monday morning, when an unusually late cold snap caused heavy snowfall in the south of the country. Authorities are advising people not to travel, after around 250 motorists had to be towed from snow-blocked roads.

Up to 40 centimetres of snow fell overnight in France's central southern region, including Languedoc-Roussillon, Provence, the Rhône valley and Mid-Pyrénées.

Such snowfall is "exceptional", especially at the beginning of March, according to national weather bureau Météo France.

The forecaster expects the snow clouds to make their way east on Monday, concentrating over the Hérault department.

Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth's oceans, particularly off the United States' Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.

They warn that the oceans' complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.

In some spots off Washington state and Oregon , the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.

Areas of hypoxia, or low oxygen, have long existed in the deep ocean. These areas - in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans - appear to be spreading, however, covering more square miles, creeping toward the surface and in some places, such as the Pacific Northwest , encroaching on the continental shelf within sight of the coastline.

"The depletion of oxygen levels in all three oceans is striking," said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle.