SOTT
SIGNS
OF THE
TIMES
OF THE
TIMES
Welcome to Sott.net
The World for People who Think
Extreme TemperaturesS
From the Mount Washington Observatory website, a photo of the crew building a June snowman on Monday.
"We recently completed another stellar snow season up here so the writing was on the wall back in April-we were contemplating another summer snow session," explains resort spokesperson Brent Curtain.
To make some turns on the summer corn snow, tickets will cost $25 per person and rental skis and boards will be an additional $25. If you pre-purchase your tickets and rentals online at mountwashington.ca you get an additional 10 per cent discount.
The mountain is confirming that Linton's Loop will be open top to bottom that weekend but will determine if more runs can open closer to June 16. "We want to see what the weather brings over the next week before we commit to the number of runs we can open," adds Curtain.
© Austrian Times
As these local webcam pictures show Engadin which is protected by high mountains on all sides and is famous for its sunny climate is usually packed with guests at this time of year enjoying the landscapes and outdoor activities.
As the rest of the country struggled to cope with massive rainfall totalling in some areas over 60 meters per square metre, over a height of 1,500 metres towns and villages had to tackle snow.
Some high Valley roads were closed temporarily because of the snow.
For the rest of the week weather experts in Switzerland predicted similar extremes with more snow predicted and rain at least until Wednesday.
Parts of Europe are being gripped by unusual cold, even though the calendar says it's meteorological summer. Now children in Sweden are finding out what snow is like - in June! Strangest warming I've ever seen.
The English language The Local here writes that "Stockholm broke an 84-year-old cold record on Saturday, as the capital's temperature only reached 6 degrees Celsius, the lowest June maximum daily temperature the city has seen since 1928."
© NoTricksZoneWinter pounds Sweden – and it’s summer!
Just two days ago The Local here reported that snow blanketed northern parts."Indeed, you could be excused for thinking that the current chill is more like winter than summer. It was actually colder in the capital yesterday than on Christmas Eve. 'The temperature was a degree lower than it was at Christmas in Stockholm, so it is colder. And it's windier, too,' said SMHI's meteorologist Lisa Frost to newspaper Dagens Nyheter."
On Friday morning, the town of Börtnan in northern Sweden had survived night temperatures of minus 6 degrees Celcius - the coldest June temperature in Sweden for the past two decades.
© AFP/File, Fehim DemirSarajevo soccer players train in the snow in January.
Zulum said snow had previously covered the capital in May in 1962 and 1953, adding that it also fell in Sarajevo in May 2005, but immediately melted. Temperatures have plummeted in the past two days from 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit) on Saturday to 0.3 degrees Celsius on Monday.
© Amel Emric / AP PhotoA van drives on a road during snowy weather near Sarajevo, Bosnia, on Monday, May 14, 2012. Heavy snow covered central parts of Bosnia early Monday. After the weekend with record high temperatures, reaching mid 30's Celsius, citizens of Sarajevo woke up Monday with 10 centimeters of snow covering the city streets.
Weeks after Bosnians had stashed away their winter clothes and their memories of last winter's unbearably heavy snow, residents had to drag out the shovels Monday after waking up to a blanket of snow in the middle of an otherwise unusually hot May.
Some 50 remote villages in a mountainous area near the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo lost power due to the snow.
As every microbiologist knows, a good way to get bacteria to stay in an unchanged state is to freeze them. Digging down beneath the surface in areas such as Dawson City in Yukon, Canada reveals layers that have remained frozen since the ice-age and contain, among all the mammoths and toothy-tigers, frozen and uncontamined samples of bacteria.
The researchers focused on Actinobacteria; a soil bacteria with many strains still around in modern times. As a soil bacteria, modern Actinobacteria carries a whole arsenal of antibiotic and antifungal agents in order to protect itself in the cut-throat world of soil microbiotica. The researchers were looking to see what kind of antibiotic substances this ancient bacteria would have.
Snow in Morocco earlier this year
The 'Green Morocco Plan' was launched last year with the aim of remedying major obstacles that still hinder development of the agricultural sector, tackling everything from ensuring food security for 32 million Moroccans, to meeting the requirements of European markets, the biggest consumers of Moroccan produce.
However, the Plan does not do a thorough job of diagnosing climate factors, citing only drought, which it considers 'periodical', as an impediment to successful farming. The report does not address the sudden and unexpected arrival of cold weather, whose damages have been no less than disastrous.
Last February, more than 8,200 of the country's 8,700 hectares of potatoes, were ravaged. A further 14,000 of about 21,000 hectares reserved for sugarcane were also blighted by the cold. This is particularly significant since potatoes and sugar are two of Morocco's primary export commodities.
Previous studies have suggested the arrival of the last Ice Age nearly 13,000 years ago took about a decade - but now scientists believe the process was up to 20 times as fast.
In scenes reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The day After Tomorrow, the Northern Hemisphere was frozen by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream, which allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.
Geological sciences professor William Patterson, who led the research, said: 'It would have been very sudden for those alive at the time. It would be the equivalent of taking Britain and moving it to the Arctic over the space of a few months.'
