Earthquakes

USGS

LISS – Live Internet Seismic Server

GSN Stations

These data update automatically every 30 minutes. Last update: September 30, 2012 08:48:51 UTC

Seismograms may take several moments to load. Click on a plot to see larger image.

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Extreme Temperatures/ Weather

10 people killed/Hundreds Evacuated as Extreme Weather/ Floods sweep through Spain

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Storms / Flooding

Active tropical storm system(s)
Name of storm system	Location	Formed	Last update	Last category	Course	Wind Speed	Gust	Wave	Source	Details
Nadine (AL14)	Atlantic Ocean	11.09.2012	30.09.2012	Hurricane II	340 °	139 km/h	167 km/h	5.79 m	NOAA NHC

Tropical Storm data

Jelewat (18W)

Pacific Ocean

20.09.2012

30.09.2012

Typhoon I

35 °

120 km/h

148 km/h

6.10 m

JTWC

Tropical Storm data

Norman (EP14)

Pacific Ocean – East

28.09.2012

30.09.2012

Tropical Depression

25 °

46 km/h

65 km/h

3.66 m

JTWC

Tropical Storm data

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台風17号沖縄を直撃 Typhoon Jelawat Slams Okinawa

Published on Sep 29, 2012 by TyphoonHunter

Hundreds killed in Pakistan flooding

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) — Floods resulting from monsoon rains have killed 422 people and left nearly 3,000 injured across Pakistan, a disaster agency spokesman said Saturday.

Some 350,000 people have been forced from their homes and another 4.7 million people affected by the flooding since August 22, Ahmed Kamal of the National Disaster Management Authority said.

More than 15,000 villages have been affected and many houses destroyed or damaged in the past five weeks, he said.

Pakistan has suffered a series of devastating inundations, affecting millions of people, in recent years.

Pakistan, India hit by deadly flooding

Flooding last year killed 470 people and impacted 9.1 million others, Kamal said.

In the worst-affected area of Sindh province, in southeastern Pakistan, the waters submerged more than 4.5 million acres of farming land, damaging an estimated 80% of cash crops.

Many in the country were at that point barely recovering from massive and deadly flooding in August 2010, which left a fifth of the country submerged by water, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.

Those floods lasted for weeks, affecting more than 20 million people and leaving 1,985 people dead, Kamal said.

Much of the land inundated in 2010 was in Punjab province, Pakistan’s breadbasket, where many people live off the soil and their livestock. Great hardship followed for millions in the wake of the flooding.

Pakistan floods kill 371, affect 4.47 million

by Staff Writers
Islamabad (AFP)

Related Links
Bringing Order To A World Of Disasters
When the Earth Quakes
A world of storm and tempest

Breaking News: Spain Tornado Hits Fair As ‘Floods’ Kill 10

Published on Sep 29, 2012 by DynamoMor

Ten people have been killed in flash floods in southern Spain and a British woman is missing, while dozens were hurt as a tornado ripped through a fairground.

A 52-year-old British woman is among those missing after torrential rain hit the Andalusia and Murcia regions, and hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes.

The hardest hit provinces are Malaga in the south and Almeria in the southeast.

Among the dead are seven men, two women and a 10-year-old girl who was found drowned in a car.

Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office said it was investigating reports that the unnamed British woman has gone missing in Almeria.

In the region of Valencia, 35 people were reportedly injured after a tornado hit a fairground and flattened a Ferris wheel.
Spain Flooding has hit southern parts of Spain

Local media said all the injured were fairground workers and 15 were seriously hurt.

The twister damaged several other rides and cut electricity in the temporary fairground set up in the town of Gandia.

The funfair was closed to the public at the time because of a thunderstorm, reports said.

On the beach at El Saler, near Valenica, two cargo ships have run ashore and the ports of Valencia and Sagunto were temporarily closed on Saturday.

The flooding has also disrupted high-speed train services between Madrid and Valencia and various regional lines, while some bridges and roads have been made impassible.

Around 500 people have been moved from their homes, although some evacuees have begun to return home to clear up the mess with the help of local authority workers.

Forecasters say the heavy rain, which started on Friday morning, is moving east and will eventually head northwards toward Catalonia and the Balearic Islands.

The deluge comes after months of virtual drought and soaring summer temperatures all over Spain that triggered thousands of wildfires.

 

 

30.09.2012

Flash Flood

Spain

Andalusia, Alora

 

Flash Flood in Spain on Friday, 28 September, 2012 at 16:44 (04:44 PM) UTC.

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Epidemic Hazards / Diseases

Genetic Sleuthing Uncovers Deadly New Virus in Africa

ScienceDaily   — An isolated outbreak of a deadly disease known as acute hemorrhagic fever, which killed two people and left one gravely ill in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the summer of 2009, was probably caused by a novel virus scientists have never seen before.

Described this week in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, the new microbe has been named Bas-Congo virus (BASV) after the province in the southwest corner of the Congo where the three people lived.

It was discovered by an international research consortium that included the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and University of California, Davis (UCD), Global Viral, the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon, the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Metabiota and others.

“Known viruses, such as Ebola, HIV and influenza, represent just the tip of the microbial iceberg,” said Joseph Fair, PhD, a co-author and vice president of Metabiota. “Identifying deadly unknown viruses, such as Bas-Congo virus, gives us a leg up in controlling future outbreaks.”

“These are the only three cases known to have occurred, although there could be additional outbreaks from this virus in the future,” said Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of laboratory medicine at UCSF and director of the UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center, who spearheaded the UCSF effort to identify the virus. Chiu and his team continue to work on new diagnostics to detect the virus so that health officials in Congo and elsewhere can quickly identify it should it emerge again.

One odd characteristic of the Bas-Congo virus, Chiu said, is that while a number of other viruses in Africa also cause deadly outbreaks of acute hemorrhagic fever — Ebola virus, Lassa virus and Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever virus to name a few — the new virus is unlike any of them.

Genetically it is more closely related to the types of viruses that cause rabies, which are known to infect people with a very different sort of disease — a neurological illness that is uniformly fatal if untreated but may take months to develop.

An antibody test developed in this study was applied to the one patient who survived and to others who had come into contact with him. It suggested that the disease may be spread from person to person but likely originated from some other source, such as an insect or rodent.

The identity of this animal “reservoir” and the precise mode of transmission for the virus remain unclear and are currently being investigated by Metabiota and the central African members of the consortium through the PREDICT Project of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats Program. (http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/ohi/predict/index.cfm)

How the New Virus Emerged

In the summer of 2009, a 15-year old boy in a small rural community called Mangala village suddenly fell ill and developed a bleeding nose, bleeding gums and bloody vomit. He rapidly worsened, dying within three days of the first signs of illness.

A week later, a 13-year old girl who attended the same school and lived in the same neighborhood as the boy came down with a similar, serious illness. She declined just as rapidly and also died within three days. One week after that, the male nurse who cared for this girl began showing the same symptoms, and he was transferred to a hospital in Boma, a nearby port city that sits along the Congo River upstream from Africa’s Atlantic coast.

Members of the consortium, who had initiated a project to diagnose unusual cases of severe hemorrhagic fever, obtained blood samples collected from the nurse by the Congolese doctors and sent them to the laboratory of Eric Leroy, PhD, doctor of veterinary medicine at the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon. There the samples were tested for traces of any known virus, but nothing was found. The Metabiota scientists then solicited the expertise of Chiu at UCSF and Eric Delwart at the Blood Systems Research Institute (BSRI) in San Francisco to aid in the diagnosis.

The researchers ultimately identified a completely new virus as the cause of the mysterious illness through a powerful strategy for identifying novel pathogens known as “deep sequencing,” in which millions of DNA sequences are generated from a clinical sample and then pieced together using computer algorithms combined with human analysis.

Distinct Attributes of Bas-Congo

The Bas-Congo virus belongs to a family of viruses known as the rhabdoviruses, a large family of viruses that infect plants, insects and mammals, including humans. The most famous member of this family is the virus that causes rabies. But even among the rhabdoviruses, Bas-Congo is something of an outlier, being very genetically distinct from other members of the family.

What’s most unusual about this virus, though, said Chiu, is what it does to people.

No other rhabdoviruses are known to cause the acute, rapid and deadly hemorrhagic fever seen in the three cases in the Congo. Rabies, for instance, can be a deadly disease if untreated, but the course of rabies in humans is nothing like the rapid and deadly onset seen with the Bas-Congo virus. There is some precedent, however, for hemorrhagic disease from rhabdoviruses in the animal kingdom: fish rhabdoviruses are known to cause hemorrhagic septicemia — acute bleeding and death — in affected fish.

The third patient had enormous amounts of BASV in his bloodstream just two days after he fell ill — more than a million copies in every milliliter of blood.

The BASV sequence was also used to design an antibody test for the virus, an effort led by Graham Simmons at the BSRI, another member of the consortium. Antibodies are blood immune proteins produced in response to an infection. The antibody test allowed the researchers to screen both the third patient with acute hemorrhagic fever and other people who had come into contact with the third patient, including the nurse who cared for him in the Boma hospital. High levels of BASV-specific antibodies were found in the third patient, establishing that he indeed had been infected with Bas-Congo virus. The same antibodies were also found in the second nurse, even though he never actually became sick.

“What this suggests is that the disease may be transmissible from person to person — though it’s most likely to have originated from some other source,” said Nathan Wolfe, PhD, founder and chairman of Global Viral, and a co-author on the paper. “The fact that it belongs to a family of viruses known to infect a wide variety of mammals, insects and other animals means that it may perpetually exist in insect or other ‘host’ species and was accidentally passed to humans through insect bites or some other means.”

The research consortium includes San Francisco-based Global Viral, Metabiota, UCSF, BSRI, as well as researchers with the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon; the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Montpellier, France; the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, TX; the University of California, Davis; the University of California, Los Angeles; Stanford University; and the Howard Hughes Medical Center.

This work was funded by support from Google.org, the Skoll Foundation, the government of Gabon, Total-Fina-Elf Gabon, and the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes de la France, the U.S. Department of Defense Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, Division of Global Emerging Infections, Surveillance Operations (AFHSC GEIS) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (DTRA-CBEP), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats Program, PREDICT project. Additional funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health provided via grant numbers R01-HL083254, R01-HL105770, R56-AI089532, and R01-HL105704 and by an Abbott Viral Discovery Award.

* Global Viral was previously known as Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.

**Metabiota was previously known as Global Viral Forecasting Inc.

29.09.2012

Epidemic Hazard

USA

State of Indiana, Riley

Epidemic Hazard in USA on Saturday, 29 September, 2012 at 17:34 (05:34 PM) UTC.

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Climate Change

High-Arctic heat tops 1,800-year high, says study

 by Kim Martineau

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Solar Activity

2MIN News Sept 29. 2012

Published on Sep 29, 2012 by Suspicious0bservers

Pole Shift Video: http://youtu.be/uI10tKuLtFU

TODAY’S LINKS
More on the Mars Pics: http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=2015&category=Science
Sinkhole: http://www.bayoubuzz.com/component/k2/item/104287-the-smell-of-the-bayou-corn…
Arctic Temps: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-high-arctic-tops-year-high.html
More on the Mars Pics: http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=2015&category=Science

REPEAT LINKS
Spaceweather: http://spaceweather.com/ [Look on the left at the X-ray Flux and Solar Wind Speed/Density]

HAARP: http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/data.html [Click online data, and have a little fun]

SDO: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/ [Place to find Solar Images and Videos - as seen from earth]

SOHO: http://sohodata.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/soho_movie_theater [SOHO; Lasco and EIT - as seen from earth]

Stereo: http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/images [Stereo; Cor, EUVI, HI - as seen from the side]

SunAEON:http://www.sunaeon.com/#/solarsystem/ [Just click it... trust me]

SOLARIMG: http://solarimg.org/artis/ [All purpose data viewing site]

iSWA: http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov/iswa/iSWA.html [Free Application; for advanced sun watchers]

NASA ENLIL SPIRAL: http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov:8080/IswaSystemWebApp/iSWACygnetStreamer?timestamp=…
NOAA ENLIL SPIRAL: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/wsa-enlil/

US Wind Map: http://hint.fm/wind/

NOAA Bouys: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/

NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory: http://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/Default.php

RSOE: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php [That cool alert map I use]

GOES Xray: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sxi/goes15/index.html

JAPAN Radiation Map: http://jciv.iidj.net/map/

LISS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitoring/operations/heliplots_gsn.php

Gamma Ray Bursts: http://grb.sonoma.edu/ [Really? You can't figure out what this one is for?]

BARTOL Cosmic Rays: http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu//spaceweather/welcome.html [Top left box, look for BIG blue circles]

TORCON: http://www.weather.com/news/tornado-torcon-index [Tornado Forecast for the day]

GOES Weather: http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/ [Clouds over America]

RAIN RECORDS: http://www.cocorahs.org/ViewData/ListIntensePrecipReports.aspx

EL DORADO WORLD WEATHER MAP: http://www.eldoradocountyweather.com/satellite/ssec/world/world-composite-ir-…

PRESSURE MAP: http://www.woweather.com/cgi-bin/expertcharts?LANG=us&MENU=0000000000&…

HURRICANE TRACKER: http://www.weather.com/weather/hurricanecentral/tracker

INTELLICAST: http://www.intellicast.com/ [Weather site used by many youtubers]

NASA News: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/

PHYSORG: http://phys.org/ [GREAT News Site!]

QUAKES LIST FULL: http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/seismologist.php

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Space

Earth approaching objects (objects that are known in the next 30 days)
Object Name	Apporach Date	Left	AU Distance	LD Distance	Estimated Diameter*	Relative Velocity
(2012 RH10)	03rd October 2012	2 day(s)	0.1260	49.0	98 m – 220 m	12.90 km/s	46440 km/h
(2012 QE50)	09th October 2012	8 day(s)	0.0809	31.5	450 m – 1.0 km	11.47 km/s	41292 km/h
(1994 EK)	14th October 2012	13 day(s)	0.1356	52.8	230 m – 520 m	12.22 km/s	43992 km/h
(2012 PA20)	15th October 2012	14 day(s)	0.1502	58.5	100 m – 230 m	10.36 km/s	37296 km/h
(2012 RV16)	18th October 2012	17 day(s)	0.1270	49.4	310 m – 700 m	16.14 km/s	58104 km/h
1 AU = ~150 million kilometers,1 LD = Lunar Distance = ~384,000 kilometers Source: NASA-NEO

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Sinkhole

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