CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH A GIGANTIC JET

When you see lightning, run! That's what NOAA advises in lightning safety brochures. On Oct. 15th, however, pilot Chris Holmes had no place to go when lightning started to crackle in thunderstorms around his aircraft.

"I was flying 35,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula when a super cell started pulsing with light," he says. "It wasn't just ordinary lightning, though. The cell was creating lots of sprites and jets leaping up from the thunderhead." At a distance of only 35 miles, he video-recorded this:

A baffling phenomenon was spotted above the Macclesfield skies - an upside down rainbow.

The bizarre sighting, which, to use its scientific name, is a 'circumzenithal arc,' was captured by resident Graham Brinkhurst over Craig Road.

He was left puzzled by the rainbow and quickly took a snap of it - with the top of houses also included to prove it was real.

His research then told him that although circumzenithal arcs are not uncommon, they are rarely seen.

Graham said: "My photos were taken very quickly before the phenomena disappeared.

Satellite images have captured a usually invisible phenomenon known as atmospheric gravity waves pulsing through clouds off Western Australia's north-west.

Thunderstorms in the Pilbara and Kimberley on Monday and Tuesday triggered the waves, which spread out over the Indian Ocean and combined with a plume of dust to create a spectacular and rarely-seen display.

Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) senior meteorologist Adam Morgan said atmospheric gravity waves were basically ripples in the sky.

"When you think of waves in the ocean, they're a type of gravity wave," he said.

A rare 'upside-down rainbow' has been spotted in the sky above Hull.

Lee Middleton was walking near Swinderby Garth in Bransholme on Tuesday afternoon when his five-year-old son Tyler saw the unusual phenomenon.

He said: "Tyler saw it first and shouted that their was a rainbow in the sky.

"As I looked it blew my mind, the colours are the opposite way round to a rainbow I think - it was so strange, I had never seen anything like it.

"Of course we've all seen rainbows but a rainbow in the sky without rain? Incredible sight."

According to the Met Office, the 'upside-down rainbow' was actually a circumzenithal arc.

Scientists report that they may have found the earliest written record of a solar storm in ancient Assyrian tablets.

Recent analyses have found evidence of an extreme solar storm that left energetic particles in tree rings and ice cores across the world sometime around 660 BCE.

With this in mind, a research team in Japan and the United Kingdom wondered if they'd be able to find evidence of this storm in ancient astrological records — and they may have found something in Assyrian tablets.

Back in the 19th century, archaeologists uncovered thousands of tablets dating back to the Assyrian empire in Mesopotamia, which documented treaties, stories, including the now-famous epic of Gilgamesh, and astrological reports. These reports included observations of the planets, phenomena like comets and meteorites, and of course, predictions of omens.

The researchers (today's researchers) scanned through a collection of these astrological reports in search of auroral-type events, which they define as "reddish luminous phenomena in the sky" and are caused by the Sun's particles interacting with the atmosphere. Many of the reports weren't dated, but the researchers could at least produce date ranges based on the astrologer who wrote the report.

They found three reports that seemed to mention auroral phenomena: one reporting a "red glow," another a "red cloud," and a third reporting that "red cover[ed] the sky," according to the paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Let's consider the following scenario - the Earth is at risk for a disruptive event. This event has, conservatively, about a 0.2% chance of happening on any given year. But that is the most conservative estimate, at the high end it could be more like 12% over the next decade. Either way the chance of this type of event happening in the 21st century is quite high, and no matter what it is inevitable.

The result will likely be taking out power grids, possibly world wide in a worst-case scenario. Reasonable recovery will take about a year, with full recovery taking about a decade. Just imagine what would happen if we lost our power grid for a year. No digital banking, no internet, no household power. The most conservative estimate of how much such an event would cost is $2 trillion dollars, but experts are increasingly leaning toward $20 trillion as being a closer estimate (and this figure will only go up in the future).

So here's my question - what do you think we should spend now to avoid a high probability of civilization collapse over the next century costing tens of trillions of dollars and growing? I am not talking about global warming, or environmental degradation, the death of the bees, an asteroid strike, or massive crop failure. I am talking about a coronal mass ejection (CME) - a solar storm.

A CME is actually the greatest threat to civilization that we face, in terms of probability and effect. In fact I think we are underestimating the chaos that a worst-case scenario would cause. Imagine going without power for a year. I know, there are people around the world who live without power, and the residents of Peurto Rico recently experienced something similar. But if this happened on a global scale, there's no one coming with aid. Global infrastructures on which we all depend would collapse. How many people would starve or freeze? How much wood would be burned to keep warm or cook until the power comes back on? There are so many downstream effects that we cannot anticipate.

At least 10 people were killed and around 140 injured as Typhoon Hagibis made landfall in Japan at 7 pm Saturday (local time), with wind speeds of 144 kmph and heavy rains.

Hagibis, which means "speed" in the Filipino language of Tagalog, is reportedly the worst storm Japan has seen in 60 years. The same day, Japan was also struck by an earthquake, measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale, off its south-eastern shore.

As Hagibis wreaked havoc, social media was flooded with shocking images of the storm's impact — trucks falling like dominoes, roofs flying off buildings, and flooded streets.

Hagibis raised the water level by a metre along several parts of the Japanese coast. Six million people have been affected by the typhoon, which is expected to head out to sea again by end of the day Sunday.

Earth is soon set for another close shave with a hurtling space rock as an 111-foot asteroid is poised to skim past our planet on its closest approach for 115 years.

First spotted by astronomers only earlier this week, the asteroid dubbed 2019 TA7 is set to fly by Earth at a speed of over 22,500 miles per hour at 6:53pm ET on Monday, data from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reveals.

The new celestial visitor is estimated to measure up to 111 feet in diameter and is among a group of recently discovered asteroids that have been traveling close to Earth in recent days.

Since sprites were discovered in the late 1980s, researchers have photographed thousands of the strange upward-reaching lightning bolts. Their oversized cousins, Gigantic Jets, are far more rare. Only dozens have been photographed. It is no wonder, then, that observers are still seeing new behaviors in this type of powerful "super sprite." On Oct. 2nd, photographer Frankie Lucena may have recorded the first example of a "double Gigantic Jet."

"In the past, I've captured Gigantic Jet events that split into two, but this is the first time I've seen a Gigantic Jet that fired a second time just as the first jet was beginning to fade out," explains Lucena. "They shared the same channel of ionization, so it is considered to be a single event."

What seems to be record heat touted non-stop in the Netherlands matches the accounts in 1540 of "The Solar Year" with temperatures so hot the people of the day though the event would be remembered for generations to come as crops didn't grow, water ran out and there were plagues and mice infestations. Quebec moves up mandatory snow time dates two weeks and strange plasma sighted in the skies of Chile that matches petroglyphs globally.