PNS | BUBANESWAr/BHAWANIPATNA

A powerful earthquake has shaken Greece’s island of Rhodes and southwestern Turkey. No deaths or serious damage have been reported, but officials say six people were hurt in Turkey by jumping out of buildings.

The Athens Geodynamic Institute says the quake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.8 struck at a depth of 37 kilometres in the Aegean Sea at 3:44 p.m. (1244 GMT) Sunday. That is between the Greek island of Rhodes and western Turkey.

Turkey’s Kandilli Observatory gave a stronger preliminary magnitude of 6.0, with aftershocks of 4.9 and 4.7. Areas of Turkey shaken by the quake included the popular Aegean resort town of Oludeniz, the Aegean port of Izmir, and the Mediterranean city of Antalya.

Police in Rhodes said there are no reports of injuries or damage.

No serious casualties were reported in Turkey either, but officials said half a dozen people who jumped out of windows in panic over the temblor were injured.

These regions of Greece and Turkey are in seismically active areas and suffer frequent earthquakes.

- AP

Dozens in hospital after 6.0 quake hits near Turkish resort

by Staff Writers
Ankara (AFP)

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Hundreds of residents and holidaymakers spent Saturday night in refuge centres after floodwater ravaged their homes and holiday caravans in west Wales.

Around 150 people were evacuated as caravan parks and villages near Aberystwyth were inundated when more than 5 inches (13cm), twice the local average rainfall for June, fell in 24 hours.

As high river levels remained a risk in some areas, police put the overall number of people who fled their homes at 1,000.

Andy Francis, of Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service, told the BBC: “There’s mass scale damage to caravan parks and private dwellings throughout the area.

“A lot of floodwater’s gone through them, leaving a huge amount of damage, and a residual danger as well from the biohazards; from sewerage, and other contaminants.

“Lots of sewers may have been damaged, and indeed gas and water supplies damaged, so my advice to anybody entering their properties this morning is to take sensible precautions.”

The Environment Agency said the rain had now passed the area while one flood warning for the River Teifi at Lampeter and Llanybydder remains in place.

Francis said high river levels remained a risk. “Please do not go near the water, it’s still extremely dangerous, and don’t try to drive through it either, because you will end up becoming a casualty and requiring rescue.”

Outside of Wales, flash floods also struck two villages near York, inundating properties. North Yorkshire fire crews said they pumped water out of Flaxton and Stockton-on-the-Forest after torrential rain on Saturday afternoon. The flooding was concentrated in Main Street in Flaxton and Sandy Lane in Stockton-on-the-Forest.

Meanwhile, tributes have been paid to the emergency services who ensured there were no serious casualties during the flooding in Wales. At one point, an inshore lifeboat team had to be airlifted to safety after getting into difficulties while helping to pluck a disabled man from a flooded caravan.

Four holiday camps along the River Lery were evacuated when the swollen waters breached its banks.

Dozens of people took refuge in a community centre in Talybont while three people were winched away from the Riverside caravan park in Llandre by RAF Sea King helicopters. Dyfed-Powys police said three people needed treatment for minor injuries.

Other rescues took place throughout the day at Aberystwyth Holiday Village in Penparcau, Sea Rivers caravan park in Ynyslas, Borth and Mill House caravan park in Dol-y-Bont, Borth.

2

11.06.2012

Forest / Wild Fire

USA

State of Colorado, [Fort Collins (Paradise Park) area]

June 1, 2, and 3, 2012 — south Michigan strange booms and 60ft trees snapped in half on clear day :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oKj_ptBOUE

June 6 into June 7 2012: South Michigan / North Indiana border — High radiation readings reported for multiple hours.. “unknown cause”.

http://sincedutch.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/672012-radiation-alert-on-multiple…

EPA and DHS HAZMAT team report: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/246498-Developing-Nuclear-Cover-Up-Extreme-…

Military movements over the area:

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/2236/320/Nuclear_Cover-Up:_Explosions,_Militar…

and finally… this site just got hacked… reporting Minot North Dakota holding a “nuclear containment drill” at this time:

http://naturalsociety.com/nuclear-base-running-containment-exercise-radiation…

Would like to remind EVERYONE that the same sort of thing happened at Byron Illinois nuclear power plant at the start of 2012 —- remember my chicago trip to measure??

There were mystery booms near byron nuclear plant west of chicago… then a mystery “tritium leak” that blew over downtown chicago…then a mystery EQ appeared on the USGS map a day later..

but NO radiation network or black cat systems stations were on at the time ..so we didn’t see what the actual numbers were..

The dramatic melt-off of Arctic sea ice due to climate change is hitting closer to home than millions of Americans might think. That’s because melting Arctic sea ice can trigger a domino effect leading to increased odds of severe winter weather outbreaks in the Northern Hemisphere’s middle latitudes – think the “Snowmageddon” storm that hamstrung Washington, D.C., during February 2010.

Cornell’s Charles H. Greene, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, and Bruce C. Monger, senior research associate in the same department, detail this phenomenon in a paper published in the June issue of the journal Oceanography.

“Everyone thinks of Arctic climate change as this remote phenomenon that has little effect on our everyday lives,” Greene said. “But what goes on in the Arctic remotely forces our weather patterns here.”

A warmer Earth increases the melting of sea ice during summer, exposing darker ocean water to incoming sunlight. This causes increased absorption of solar radiation and excess summertime heating of the ocean – further accelerating the ice melt. The excess heat is released to the atmosphere, especially during the autumn, decreasing the temperature and atmospheric pressure gradients between the Arctic and middle latitudes.

A diminished latitudinal pressure gradient is associated with a weakening of the winds associated with the polar vortex and jet stream. Since the polar vortex normally retains the cold Arctic air masses up above the Arctic Circle, its weakening allows the cold air to invade lower latitudes.

The recent observations present a new twist to the Arctic Oscillation – a natural pattern of climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere. Before humans began warming the planet, the Arctic’s climate system naturally oscillated between conditions favorable and those unfavorable for invasions of cold Arctic air.

“What’s happening now is that we are changing the climate system, especially in the Arctic, and that’s increasing the odds for the negative AO conditions that favor cold air invasions and severe winter weather outbreaks,” Greene said. “It’s something to think about given our recent history.”

This past winter, an extended cold snap descended on central and Eastern Europe in mid-January, with temperatures approaching minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit and snowdrifts reaching rooftops. And there were the record snowstorms fresh in the memories of residents from several eastern U.S. cities, such as Washington, New York and Philadelphia, as well as many other parts of the Eastern Seaboard during the previous two years.

Greene and Monger did note that their paper is being published just after one of the warmest winters in the eastern U.S. on record.

“It’s a great demonstration of the complexities of our climate system and how they influence our regional weather patterns,” Greene said.

In any particular region, many factors can have an influence, including the El Nino/La Nina cycle. This winter, La Nina in the Pacific shifted undulations in the jet stream so that while many parts of the Northern Hemisphere were hit by the severe winter weather patterns expected during a bout of negative AO conditions, much of the eastern United States basked in the warm tropical air that swung north with the jet stream.

“It turns out that while the eastern U.S. missed out on the cold and snow this winter, and experienced record-breaking warmth during March, many other parts of the Northern Hemisphere were not so fortunate,” Greene said.

Europe and Alaska experienced record-breaking winter storms, and the global average temperature during March 2012 was cooler than any other March since 1999.

“A lot of times people say, ‘Wait a second, which is it going to be – more snow or more warming?’ Well, it depends on a lot of factors, and I guess this was a really good winter demonstrating that,” Greene said. “What we can expect, however, is the Arctic wildcard stacking the deck in favor of more severe winter outbreaks in the future.”

Until now, studies of Earth’s climate have documented a strong correlation between global climate and atmospheric carbon dioxide; that is, during warm periods, high concentrations of CO2 persist, while colder times correspond to relatively low levels. However, in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, paleoclimate researchers reveal that about 12-5 million years ago climate was decoupled from atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. New evidence of this comes from deep-sea sediment cores dated to the late Miocene period of Earth’s history.

During that time, temperatures across a broad swath of the North Pacific were 9-14 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today, while atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations remained low–near values prior to the Industrial Revolution.

The research shows that, in the last five million years, changes in ocean circulation allowed Earth’s climate to become more closely coupled to changes in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

The findings also demonstrate that the climate of modern times more readily responds to changing carbon dioxide levels than it has during the past 12 million years.

“This work represents an important advance in understanding how Earth’s past climate may be used to predict future climate trends,” says Jamie Allan, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research.

The research team, led by Jonathan LaRiviere and Christina Ravelo of the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), generated the first continuous reconstructions of open-ocean Pacific temperatures during the late Miocene epoch.

It was a time of nearly ice-free conditions in the Northern Hemisphere and warmer-than-modern conditions across the continents.

The research relies on evidence of ancient climate preserved in microscopic plankton skeletons–called microfossils–that long-ago sank to the sea-floor and ultimately were buried beneath it in sediments.

Samples of those sediments were recently brought to the surface in cores drilled into the ocean bottom. The cores were retrieved by marine scientists working aboard the drillship JOIDES Resolution.

The microfossils, the scientists discovered, contain clues to a time when the Earth’s climate system functioned much differently than it does today.

“It’s a surprising finding, given our understanding that climate and carbon dioxide are strongly coupled to each other,” LaRiviere says.

“In the late Miocene, there must have been some other way for the world to be warm. One possibility is that large-scale patterns in ocean circulation, determined by the very different shape of the ocean basins at the time, allowed warm temperatures to persist despite low levels of carbon dioxide.”

The Pacific Ocean in the late Miocene was very warm, and the thermocline, the boundary that separates warmer surface waters from cooler underlying waters, was much deeper than in the present.

The scientists suggest that this deep thermocline resulted in a distribution of atmospheric water vapor and clouds that could have maintained the warm global climate.

“The results explain the seeming paradox of the warm–but low greenhouse gas–world of the Miocene,” says Candace Major, program director in NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences.

Several major differences in the world’s waterways could have contributed to the deep thermocline and the warm temperatures of the late Miocene.

For example, the Central American Seaway remained open, the Indonesian Seaway was much wider than it is now, and the Bering Strait was closed.

These differences in the boundaries of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, would have resulted in very different circulation patterns than those observed today.

By the onset of the Pliocene epoch, about five million years ago, the waterways and continents of the world had shifted into roughly the positions they occupy now.

That also coincides with a drop in average global temperatures, a shoaling of the thermocline, and the appearance of large ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere–in short, the climate humans have known throughout recorded history.

“This study highlights the importance of ocean circulation in determining climate conditions,” says Ravelo. “It tells us that the Earth’s climate system has evolved, and that climate sensitivity is possibly at an all-time high.”

Other co-authors of the paper are Allison Crimmins of UCSC and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Petra Dekens of UCSC and San Francisco State University; Heather Ford of UCSC; Mitch Lyle of Texas A and M University; and Michael Wara of UCSC and Stanford University.