Earth ChangesS


Windsock

Tornado comes ashore in Hampshire, UK - 100 homes damaged

Image
© Ian Hoult
About 100 homes have been damaged by a "tornado" on Hayling Island in Hampshire, police have said.

Havant Council said properties in Blackthorn Road and Ilex Walk were damaged by high winds at about 08:00 BST.

The council said there were no reported injuries and its officers were assessing the damage to properties.

Kayla Killshaw-Laing, who was staying on the island overnight, described the experience as "horrendous".

Hampshire Constabulary has received calls regarding damaged vehicles, power lines, and beach huts.

Highway teams are currently clearing up debris around the area.

He said: "We drove down to survey the damage and were quite shocked by what we saw... the neighbouring hut was lifted too."

Umbrella

Japan's shocking, deadly deluge from Typhoon Wipha: 33 inches of rain in 24 hours

Image
© AFP PHOTO / JIJI PRESS JAPAN OUTJIJI PRESS/AFP/Getty ImagesJapan’s Ground Self Defense Force soldiers remove debris to search for survivors after a landslide buried houses caused by heavy rain of typhoon Wipha at Oshima island, 120km south of Tokyo on October 16, 2013.
Here's an astonishing statistic: Typhoon Wipha dumped 33 inches (850 mm) of rain in 24 hours on Oshima Island, 75 miles south of Tokyo.

It is the greatest rainstorm to occur on Oshima, populated by 8,200 people, since records began in 1991 reports the AP. It also twice the entire average rainfall for the month of October, notes the Wall Street Journal.

"People on this island are somewhat used to heavy rainstorms, but this typhoon was beyond our imagination," Yutaka Sagara, an island resident, told the AP.

Incredibly, 17 inches (426 mm) fell in 4 hours and nearly 5 inches in one hour.

Those are unfathomable rainfall rates and, thus, it is no surprise they led to destructive mudslides and fatalities.

At least 17 people are dead from the typhoon and 45 to 50 missing according to wire reports. 16 of the 17 casualties occurred on Oshima.

Nuke

Unprecedented deluge leaks radioactive water from Fukushima nuclear plant into Pacific Ocean

Image
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says water has overflowed 12 barriers around tanks holding radioactive water. Tokyo Electric Power Company says some of the water may have reached the ocean.

The utility says workers found water overflowing from five barriers Sunday afternoon. They found additional overflows in seven barriers Sunday evening.

TEPCO says the barriers are 30-centimeter-high. Some of them have already contained at least 20-centimeters of rain water. But workers can pump out only a couple of centimeters a day.

More than 100 millimeters of rain was recorded at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant over four hours on Sunday afternoon.

The operator of the crippled plant also says workers released some of the water accumulated inside barriers into the ground. The utility says the water met safety standards for radioactivity approved by the Nuclear Regulation Authority.

Bizarro Earth

The ocean is broken

Ivan
© The Herald, AustraliaIvan Macfadyen aboard the Funnel Web.
It was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.

Not the absence of sound, exactly.

The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.

And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.

What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.

The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.

"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.

But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.

No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.

Evil Rays

3.6 earthquake shakes Israel's Tiberias area

A 3.6-magnitude earthquake shook Israel's Tiberias area Sunday morning, officials said. There were no reports of injuries or damage.

The quake's center was about three miles northeast of Ginosar, near Lake Kinnere, Ynetnews.com reported.

Residents of the area wrote Ynetnews.com about how objects shook in their homes.

"I felt like someone was pushing me off the chair," said Noa Boganim from Tiberias.

Michael from Tiberias wrote: "I felt as if I was dizzy, the computer screen fell down."

This was the third quake to strike Israel in four days, The Jerusalem Post reported.

Heart - Black

Poachers kill 300 Zimbabwe elephants with cyanide

Cyanide has been used to kill 300 elephants in Zimbabwe's biggest nature reserve - three times the original estimate - as new photos show the scale of the slaughter

Image
© APWorkers look at a rotting elephant carcass in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe
Poachers in Zimbabwe have killed more than 300 elephants and countless other safari animals by cyanide poisoning, The Telegraph has learned.

The full extent of the devastation wreaked in Hwange, the country's largest national park, has been revealed by legitimate hunters who discovered what conservationists say is the worst single massacre in southern Africa for 25 years.

Pictures taken by the hunters, which have been obtained exclusively by The Telegraph, reveal horrific scenes. Parts of the national park, whose more accessible areas are visited by thousands of tourists each year, can be seen from the air to be littered with the deflated corpses of elephants, often with their young calves dead beside them, as well as those of other animals.

There is now deep concern that the use of cyanide - first revealed in July, but on a scale that has only now emerged - represents a new and particularly damaging technique in the already soaring poaching trade.

Zimbabwean authorities said that 90 animals were killed this way. But the hunters who captured these photographs say they have conducted a wider aerial survey and counted the corpses of more than 300.

Bizarro Earth

Second rare oarfish washes up in Southern California

Oarfish
© Mark Bussey/OceansideA 13.5 foot oarfish was found along the coast in Oceanside, Calif. on Friday.
For the second time in a week, the rare, serpentine oarfish has surfaced on a Southern California beach.

Beach goers at Oceanside Harbor crossed paths Friday afternoon with the deep-sea monster when its carcass washed ashore, Oceanside Police Officer Mark Bussey said. The fish measured 13 ½ feet long.

The discovery came just days after an 18-foot dead oarfish was found in the waters off Catalina Island.

"The call came out as a possible dead whale stranded on the beach, so we responded and saw the fish on the sand right as it washed up," Bussey said.

Oceanside police then contacted SeaWorld San Diego, the Scripps Research Institute and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Suzanne Kohin of NOAA Fisheries Serivice responded, measured and took possession of the oarfish for research, Bussey said.

Bussey added that people on the beach were "flabbergasted" to see the fish.

Comment: See also.

18-foot oarfish caught by Catalina marine science instructor in California

Something amiss deep down? Bizarre-looking oarfish washes ashore on Cabo San Lucas beach

Appearance of "Earthquake fish" spook Japanese

Rare "King of Herrings" Found off Swedish Coast

England: Monster of deep washes up on beach


Water

Copersucar blaze: Brazil's Santos port fire destroys one of world's biggest sugar terminals

180,000 tonnes of sugar have been destroyed - driving prices up to the highest in a year.
brazil sugar factory blaze
© AFP/Getty ImagesFirefighters attempt to extinguish a fire in a warehouse with sugar at the port of Santos, the biggest of Latin America, some 60 km of Sao Paulo, Brazil on 18 October, 2013.
A fire that blazed through Brazil's Santos port has ravaged six warehouses, destroying 180,000 tonnes of raw sugar in the Copersucar terminal.

The fire hit all of the sugar giant's warehouses at the port, driving prices up to the highest in a year.

Operations at the world's biggest sugar trader, which sees nearly a fifth of world sugar exports pass through its trading desks, have now been paralysed.

Santos port authority Codesp said the fire started in the conveyor system responsible for transporting sugar through Copersucar's warehouses at around 6am (9am GMT).

Fire fighters battled for six hours to extinguish the flames and warn it could keep smoldering for two days.

In a statement, Codesp said: "Facilities involved in the accident are totally destroyed."

Television footage showed a mountain of sugar three stories high engulfed by flames inside a warehouse, surrounded by overhanging conveyor belts and waiting ships that appeared to have been toppled over.

International sugar markets reacted quickly. ICE March raw sugar prices rose more than six per cent to a one-year high on news of the fire before paring gains. The March contract settled up 2.5 per cent at 19.48 cents per lb.

Newspaper

LA Times bans letters from climate skeptics

Image
The Los Angeles Times is giving the cold shoulder to global warming skeptics.

Paul Thornton, editor of the paper's letters section, recently wrote a letter of his own, stating flatly that he won't publish some letters from those skeptical of man's role in our planet's warming climate. In Thornton's eyes, those people are often wrong -- and he doesn't print obviously wrong statements.

"Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published," Thornton wrote. "Saying 'there's no sign humans have caused climate change' is not stating an opinion, it's asserting a factual inaccuracy."

What amounts to a ban on discourse about climate change stirred outrage among scientists who have written exactly that sort of letter.

"In a word, the LA Times should be ashamed of itself," William Happer, a physics professor at Princeton, told FoxNews.com.

"There was an effective embargo on alternative opinions, so making it official really does not change things," said Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism at The Rockefeller University in New York.

Nuke

6,500 times spike in radiation at Fukushima water tank; "nobody really knows how to dodge disaster"