The earthquake that the Bulgarian capital Sofia experienced at 3 am on Tuesday has been the strongest in its history since 1858, i.e. in 154 years, historical records indicate.

On Tuesday, Bulgaria’s territory saw over 60 weak aftershocks after the 5.8-5.9-magnitude it experienced early Tuesday morning, according to the Geophysics Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

All of the 60 aftershocks had magnitudes of over 1 on the Richter scale, and their epicenters were around the western Bulgarian city of Pernik, where the initial earthquake hit at about 2:58 am on Tuesday. Some of the major aftershocks had a magnitude of 4.2-4.7, and were felt in Pernik and Sofia.

On September 30, 1858, when the future Bulgarian capital was still only a provincial town in the Ottoman Empire, it suffered an earthquake that had an estimated magnitude of 6.6-7.0 on the Richter Scale, damaging some 80% of its buildings.

As a result of the earthquake, 19 out of the 24 then mosques in Sofia saw their minarets collapse, while only two out of the seven churches remained operational. The 1858 earthquake claimed 4 lives in Sofia, and created huge cracks in the ground outside of the town.

The May 22, 2012, earthquake in Sofia, Pernik, and other parts of Western and Southern Bulgaria luckily, also pales in comparison with the strongest earthquake in the country ever – the March 17, 1942, earthquake in the southeastern town of Chirpan

Another strong earthquake in Bulgaria was the 1977 quake with its epicenter in Vrancea, Romania, which killed between 100 and 250 people in the Bulgarian Danube town of Svishtov, according to various estimates.

The latest earthquake in Sofia is comparable to the December 7, 1986 earthquake in Northeastern Bulgaria, which killed two people, and destroyed 150 buildings in the town of Strazhitsa.

After 2000, Bulgaria has seen a total of seven earthquakes with a magnitude beyond 4 on the Richter scale. The strongest one was in 2009 in the Black Sea near the town of Shabla, with a magnitude of 4.8.

New quake shakes nervous Christchurch

A possible tornado damaged 15 homes in North Port on Thursday evening, leaving one family homeless,

According to a news release from the City of North Port:

At about 6:30 pm Firefighters received a call of structural damage to a home from a tornado. When firefighters arrived on scene they discovered roof damage to a mobile home in the Holiday Park community. A flurry of calls came in from the Highland Ridge community nearby, and that is where several more homes received damage.

Three fire engines, three ambulances and three command cars responded to assess the damage to the neighborhood. While firefighters conducted a ground survey, the Sarasota Sheriff’s helicopter surveyed from the air.

“The damage was relatively minor and there were no injuries to citizens or first responders,” said Battalion Chief James Woods, “that’s the outcome we want”.

Only one family was displaced for the night, with enough damage to the house that the power had to be disconnected.

James and Elsie Hudson’s home at the corner of Talbrook and Gable lost its roof in the storm.

“I didn’t know what it was,” Elsie Hudson told SNN. “When I ran to the back to the lanai, everything was gone.”

The winds had taken off part of the home’s roof, and rain water was flowing into the living room, she said. The power was disconnected and the couple decided to stay with relatives.

The Red Cross was on scene to help storm victims, SNN Local News 6 was reporting.

The storm struck suddenly, and although the National Weather Service had been monitoring throughout the evening, inclement weather was not evident on the radar.

Tornado in USA on Saturday, 26 May, 2012 at 05:21 (05:21 AM) UTC.

Tornado Confirmed on Ground near Wausau, Wisconsin

Weather officials have confirmed a tornado touched down about two miles south of Marathon City in Marathon County, and was on the ground intermittently for about five minutes.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or major structural damage.

Jeff Last is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. He says that at about 7 p.m. Thursday, a Wisconsin State Patrol officer saw the tornado touch down. It was on the ground off and on for several miles as it moved northeast.

Last says the tornado lifted off the ground about two miles northwest of Rib Mountain State Park.

He says the storm was fast-moving.

Local authorities are surveying the area. So far, they have seen several downed trees.

Streamline winds also downed trees as storms moved across the state.

Source: The Associated Press

Hurricane Bud heading for area near Puerto Vallarta

Late-season storm could bring summer snow to Sierra, California

Pollution is warming the atmosphere through summer thunderstorm clouds, according to a computational study published May 10 in Geophysical Research Letters. How much the warming effect of these clouds offsets the cooling that other clouds provide is not yet clear. To find out, researchers need to incorporate this new-found warming into global climate models.

Pollution strengthens thunderstorm clouds, causing their anvil-shaped tops to spread out high in the atmosphere and capture heat – especially at night, said lead author and climate researcher Jiwen Fan of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

“Global climate models don’t see this effect because thunderstorm clouds simulated in those models do not include enough detail,” said Fan. “The large amount of heat trapped by the pollution-enhanced clouds could potentially impact regional circulation and modify weather systems.”

Clouds are one of the most poorly understood components of Earth’s climate system. Called deep convective clouds, thunderstorm clouds reflect a lot of the sun’s energy back into space, trap heat that rises from the surface, and return evaporated water back to the surface as rain, making them an important part of the climate cycle.

To more realistically model clouds on a small scale, such as in this study, researchers use the physics of temperature, water, gases and aerosols – tiny particles in the air such as pollution, salt or dust on which cloud droplets form.

In large-scale models that look at regions or the entire globe, researchers substitute a stand-in called a parameterization to account for deep convective clouds. The size of the grid in global models can be a hundred times bigger than an actual thunderhead, making a substitute necessary.

However, thunderheads are complicated, dynamic clouds. Coming up with an accurate parameterization is important but has been difficult due to their dynamic nature.

Inside a thunderstorm cloud, warm air rises in updrafts, pushing tiny aerosols from pollution or other particles upwards. Higher up, water vapor cools and condenses onto the aerosols to form droplets, building the cloud. At the same time, cold air falls, creating a convective cycle. Generally, the top of the cloud spreads out like an anvil.

Previous work showed that when it’s not too windy, pollution leads to bigger clouds . This occurs because more pollution particles divide up the available water for droplets, leading to a higher number of smaller droplets that are too small to rain. Instead of raining, the small droplets ride the updrafts higher, where they freeze and absorb more water vapor. Collectively, these events lead to bigger, more vigorous convective clouds that live longer.

Now, researchers from PNNL, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Maryland took to high-performance computing to study the invigoration effect on a regional scale.

To find out which factors contribute the most to the invigoration, Fan and colleagues set up computer simulations for two different types of storm systems: warm summer thunderstorms in southeastern China and cool, windy frontal systems on the Great Plains of Oklahoma. The data used for the study was collected by different DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement facilities.

The simulations had a resolution that was high enough to allow the team to see the clouds develop. The researchers then varied conditions such as wind speed and air pollution.

Fan and colleagues found that for the warm summer thunderstorms, pollution led to stronger storms with larger anvils. Compared to the cloud anvils that developed in clean air, the larger anvils both warmed more – by trapping more heat – and cooled more – by reflecting additional sunlight back to space. On average, however, the warming effect dominated.

The springtime frontal clouds did not have a similarly significant warming effect. Also, increasing the wind speed in the summer clouds dampened the invigoration by aerosols and led to less warming.

This is the first time researchers showed that pollution increased warming by enlarging thunderstorm clouds. The warming was surprisingly strong at the top of the atmosphere during the day when the storms occurred. The pollution-enhanced anvils also trapped more heat at night, leading to warmer nights.

“Those numbers for the warming are very big,” said Fan, “but they are calculated only for the exact day when the thunderstorms occur. Over a longer time-scale such as a month or a season, the average amount of warming would be less because those clouds would not appear everyday.”

Next, the researchers will look into these effects on longer time scales. They will also try to incorporate the invigoration effect in global climate models.

Reference: Jiwen Fan, Daniel Rosenfeld, Yanni Ding, L. Ruby Leung, and Zhanqing Li, 2012. Potential Aerosol Indirect Effects on Atmospheric Circulation and Radiative Forcing through Deep Convection, Geophys. Res. Lett. May 10, DOI 10.1029/2012GL051851.

Constituting the highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro is slowly building up its snow cover, allaying the fears of prominent scientists who had predicted witnessing the eminence lose its famous white hat. The drifts are slowly thickening on the top point of this summit, giving new hopes to Mount Kilimanjaro environmental watchdogs and tourists that the peak may not lose its beautiful snowy cap, as scientific experts have long been warning.

Covered in mist for most of the day, Mount Kilimanjaro is the most tourist-attractive site in Tanzania, pulling in tens of thousands of foreigners and locals each year. The snow, which once had disappeared on some parts of the mountain, is piling up again gradually, making a beautiful picture out of the Kibo peak.

Sources from Kilimanjaro environmental groups said this precipitation could rise to cover most areas of the mountain, but the effects of climate change and global warming could still affect the peak’s snow layers, which have been becoming thinner and thinner.

Environmentalists had warned that this highest peak in Africa could lose its ice cover and glaciers between 2018 and 2020 unless global campaigns to save the mountain’s ecology were taken and a stop put to rampant tree-felling and unchecked agricultural activity on its slopes.

The writer of this article observed during this week’s flight closer to the mountain, recovering snow piled up, covering the whole mountain peak.

Despite several warnings by scientists over disappearing snow, new hopes are rising to see this highest peak in Africa regain its face through stringent environmental protection campaigns.

Kilimanjaro Area Governor Mr. Leonidas Gama said environmental degradation has to be checked by all possible means lest Kilimanjaro residents live to regret it, adding that after inspecting the natural plants and plantation forests on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro aboard a hired helicopter, he found people harvesting timber, and livestock grazing in different areas, with total impunity.

“The situation has become alarming and has to be arrested now, to restore the former glories of the mountain, the highest peak in Africa, one of the World Heritage sites and an absolute destination choice of foreign visitors to our country,” Gama said.

He said residents should be sensitized to the need to lend their hands to reforestation practices, so as to ensure that the region becomes once again a choice place to live in, with all its natural resources intact. He expressed the need to deploy security organizations to curb the ever-worsening scourge of timber-harvesting from natural and reserved forest areas.

This reporter observed with enthusiasm during the recent flight around the mountain’s peak that there was a deepening of the snow, which had once practically disappeared.

Standing freely and majestically with its frozen cover gleaming in the sun, our beloved Kilimanjaro has been in great danger of losing its eye-catching glaciers. The mountain is located some 330 kilometers and 3 degrees south of the equator.

Mount Kilimanjaro is an awesome and magnificent peak, one of the prides of Africa, and one of the chief free-standing mountains in the world. It is composed of three independent peaks – Kibo, Mawenzi, and Shira – covering a total area of 4,000 kilometers.

The snow-capped Kibo, with permanent glaciers covering its entire tip, is the highest at 5,895 meters altitude and is the most attractive sight, pulling in over 40,000 foreign and local tourists per year.

This peak is indeed considered one of the leading tourist attractions in Tanzania, due to its beautiful appearance and its strange geological characteristics.

Global warming effects are being felt in most parts of Africa with important impacts indeed on tourist sites, included in which are Tanzanian wildlife parks and Mount Kilimanjaro’s unique ecosystem.

A US Airways Express flight crew reported seeing what looked like a flare with a smoke trail in the vicinity of its aircraft while on approach to Philadelphia International Airport on Tuesday.

According to authorities, what the crew witnessed remains a mystery. The aircraft with 34 passengers and three crew members landed safely.

Flight 4321, originating from Elmira-Corning Regional Airport, was about 500 feet above the ground in Philadelphia when the incident took place.

After landing in Philadelphia, the aircraft taxied to the gate, according to US Airways spokesman Liz Landau. Runway 17 was closed for about 30 minutes after the incident for investigation, the FAA said. Law enforcement authorities are investigating the incident.

The aircraft involved was a Bombardier Dash 8 twin engine plane operated for US Airways by Piedmont Airlines.

CNN’s Aaron Cooper contributed to this report.

Source: 2012 Cable News Network, Inc.

Strange objects over Blue Springs, Missouri

(US) Strange lights in the night sky over Blue Springs have UFO investigators interested.

Neighbors say in the past two weeks they have seen multi-colored lights in the sky, and the Missouri UFO Network is now conducting its own investigation. The video of these orbs hovering is causing quite the debate in Blue Springs and is the topic of discussion in the quiet suburb.

Robert Kover first noticed it two weeks ago and went down to get a closer look. He was confronted by a neighbor who thought he was spying on women, until he handed her his binoculars.

“I showed her the star that in the sky, just to get somebody else’s perspective on it, and they said they had never seen anything like it before,” Kover said.

Becky Neely said it was vibrating red, green and blue lights.

“It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, but with binoculars we could see it fairly well, and it was off in the distance,” Neely said.

Teresa Price saw it as well, at least twice. The same night Kover and Neely did and again when she was walking her dogs the following week. However, this time, things were even more bizarre.

“It was up in the sky and then it just dropped and stayed stationary in that lower position,” Teresa Price said.

Price had seen KCTV5′s recent news report on domestic drones that are now being used by local governments and law enforcement agencies and thought that was what it was.

“It kind of made me think that there is some sort of drone out there. Why is it out at night? I don’t know,” Price said.

Kover called the KCTV5 Investigative Hotline and posted a sighting on a UFO spotters website. The night of a interview, KCTV5′s Dave Jordan spotted similar sightings.

Kover was contacted by Margie Kay with the Missouri UFO Network, who decided to investigate for herself the following night.

Kay interviewed everyone who claimed to have seen the UFOs and then set up telescopes to watch the sightings herself. Neighbors came out hoping to see similar activity that captivated the community.

As the sky darkened, one of them appeared. Kay initially dismissed it.

“I am 90 percent sure we are looking at Vega in this instance, and they’re some other planets out right now,” said Margie Kay with the Missouri UFO Network.

But she came to a different conclusion after others starting appearing. And after she put in a call to a colleague to take a look at what she thought was Vega, that person described it as Pure White.

“That is not what we are seeing. We’re seeing colors in this. I see green in this one and in the other I see red, green and blue,” Kay said. “I don’t think it’s a planet at this point. I don’t know what it is. It’s unidentified.”

KCTV5 contacted Blue Springs police, and they have said they haven’t received any calls about this. KCTV5 also contacted NORAD, and a spokesman said that he did hear about similar sighting, but he wasn’t sure if it was in Missouri because that division of NORAD monitors the entire Midwest.

Hundreds of endangered antelopes dying in Kazakhstan

Comparing detailed measurements taken during the Australian Antarctic program’s 2012 Southern Ocean marine science voyage to historical data dating back to 1970, scientists estimate there has been as much as a 60 per cent reduction in the volume of Antarctic Bottom Water, the cold dense water that drives global ocean currents.

In an intensive and arduous 25-day observing program, temperature and salinity samples were collected at 77 sites between Antarctica and Fremantle. Such ship transects provide the only means to detect changes in the deep ocean.

The new measurements, which have not yet been published, suggest the densest waters in the world ocean are gradually disappearing and being replaced by less dense waters.

“The amount of dense Antarctic Bottom Water has contracted each time we’ve measured it since the 1970s,” said Dr Steve Rintoul, of CSIRO and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC. “There is now only about 40 per cent as much dense water present as observed in 1970.”

The ocean profiles also show that the dense water formed around Antarctica has become less saline since 1970.

“It’s a clear signal to us that the oceans are responding rapidly to variations in climate in polar regions. The sinking of dense water around Antarctica is part of a global pattern of ocean currents that has a strong influence on climate, so evidence that these waters are changing is important,” Dr Rintoul said.

The research was carried out by more than 50 scientists on the Australian Antarctic Division’s research and resupply vessel Aurora Australis, which sailed to Commonwealth Bay, west along the Antarctic coast, and returned into Fremantle.

The Australian Antarctic Division’s Chief Scientist, Dr Nick Gales, said the findings of the oceanographic study are profoundly important.

“Not only will this research improve our understanding of ocean currents, but will also feed into our knowledge of how the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic continent drives the world’s climate processes,” Dr Gales said.

Dr Rintoul was Chief Scientist on the recent voyage and has made a dozen voyages to the Southern Ocean. “When we speak of global warming, we really mean ocean warming: more than 90 per cent of the extra heat energy stored by the earth over the last 50 years has gone into warming up the ocean.

The Southern Ocean is particularly important because it stores more heat and carbon dioxide released by human activities than any other region, and so helps to slow the rate of climate change” Dr Rintoul said. “A key goal of our work is to determine if the Southern Ocean will continue to play this role in the future.”

The causes of the observed changes in the Southern Ocean are not yet fully understood. Changes in winds, sea ice, precipitation, or melt of floating glacial ice around the edge of Antarctica may be responsible. Data collected on the latest voyage will help unravel this mystery.

A major challenge is the lack of observations at high latitude, where much of the ocean is covered by sea ice in winter. During the voyage scientists deployed nine drifting profilers, called Argo floats, which will transmit profiles of temperature and salinity every 10 days for the next five years. These ice-capable floats in the seasonal ice zone in the Australian sector of the Southern Ocean are funded through Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System.

“The Argo floats have revolutionised our ability to measure the ocean, particularly in winter when ship observations are very rare,” said Dr Rintoul. “On this voyage, we deployed a new kind of float designed to survive encounters with the sea ice. These floats will allow us to see how dense water forms in winter for the first time.”

The Aurora Australis visited Commonwealth Bay as part of a celebration of the centenary of Sir Douglas Mawson’s Australian Antarctic Expedition. Dr Rintoul’s team had the opportunity to repeat oceanographic measurements made by Mawson’s team 100 years ago, obtaining one of the few century-long records obtained anywhere in the ocean.

“Our measurements collected in 2012 are quite different to those collected by Mawson in 1912,” Dr Rintoul said. “This is an indication of a change in the ocean currents that may be related to a reduction in the amount of dense water formed near Antarctica.”

“Mawson’s expedition really marked the transition from the “Heroic Age” of Antarctic exploration to a period where science was the primary motivation for Antarctic expeditions. I think he would have gotten a real kick out of the idea that measurements made by his team a century ago are still useful and that Australian scientists are continuing his legacy by studying Antarctica and its connection to the rest of the globe.”

Picture a turtle the size of a Smart car, with a shell large enough to double as a kiddie pool. Paleontologists from North Carolina State University have found just such a specimen – the fossilized remains of a 60-million-year-old South American giant that lived in what is now Colombia.

The turtle in question is Carbonemys cofrinii, which means “coal turtle,” and is part of a group of side-necked turtles known as pelomedusoides. The fossil was named Carbonemys because it was discovered in 2005 in a coal mine that was part of northern Colombia’s Cerrejon formation.

The specimen’s skull measures 24 centimeters, roughly the size of a regulation NFL football. The shell which was recovered nearby – and is believed to belong to the same species – measures 172 centimeters, or about 5 feet 7 inches, long. That’s the same height as Edwin Cadena, the NC State doctoral student who discovered the fossil.

“We had recovered smaller turtle specimens from the site. But after spending about four days working on uncovering the shell, I realized that this particular turtle was the biggest anyone had found in this area for this time period – and it gave us the first evidence of giantism in freshwater turtles,” Cadena says.

Smaller relatives of Carbonemys existed alongside dinosaurs. But the giant version appeared five million years after the dinosaurs vanished, during a period when giant varieties of many different reptiles – including Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the largest snake ever discovered – lived in this part of South America.

Researchers believe that a combination of changes in the ecosystem, including fewer predators, a larger habitat area, plentiful food supply and climate changes, worked together to allow these giant species to survive. Carbonemys’ habitat would have resembled a much warmer modern-day Orinoco or Amazon River delta.

In addition to the turtle’s huge size, the fossil also shows that this particular turtle had massive, powerful jaws that would have enabled the omnivore to eat anything nearby – from mollusks to smaller turtles or even crocodiles.

Thus far, only one specimen of this size has been recovered. Dr. Dan Ksepka, NC State paleontologist and research associate at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, believes that this is because a turtle of this size would need a large territory in order to obtain enough food to survive.

“It’s like having one big snapping turtle living in the middle of a lake,” says Ksepka, co-author of the paper describing the find.

That turtle survives because it has eaten all of the major competitors for resources. We found many bite-marked shells at this site that show crocodilians preyed on side-necked turtles. None would have bothered an adult Carbonemys, though – in fact smaller crocs would have been easy prey for this behemoth.”

The paleontologists’ findings appear in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. Dr. Carlos Jaramillo from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Dr. Jonathan Bloch from the Florida Museum of Natural History contributed to the work.

“New pelomedusoid turtles from the late Palaeocene Cerrejon Formation of Colombia and their implications for phylogeny and body size evolution” Authors: Edwin Cadena, Dan Ksepka, North Carolina State University; Carlos Jaramillo, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama; Jonathan Bloch, Florida Museum of Natural History Published: In the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology