LOS ANGELES (AP) — Seismologists say a mild earthquake widely felt throughout Southern California was centered along the coast west of downtown Los Angeles.

No injuries were reported.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the magnitude-3.7 quake struck at 3:18 a.m. Wednesday. The quake initially was reported as a magnitude-3.8, but seismologist Kate Hutton says it was later found to be a 3.74 so it was downgraded.

The epicenter was 2 miles east-southeast of Marina del Rey near Culver City and Inglewood. A Sheriff’s Department dispatcher says it “wasn’t much of a quake” and no one called about it.

Dozens of people from as far away as Riverside and the San Fernando Valley logged onto the USGS website to report feeling the jolt.

Fire Department spokesman Matt Spence says firefighters rolled out of stations citywide and surveyed 470 square miles. No infrastructure or other damage was found.

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Volcano explodes in Japan

A volcano erupts in southern Japan spewing ash onto Kagoshima City. Rough cut (no reporter narration).

Video still of Sakurajima in southern Japan erupting on July 25, 2012. Source: Supplied

The eruption at one of Japan’s most active volcanoes showered ash on the streets of Kagoshima, which lies just 2km across a bay from the volcano.

Residents of Kagoshima donned face masks to protect themselves while sweeping away the ash.

The volcano has erupted more than 600 times this year and is expected to continue its intermittent eruptions.

Currently, the volcano warning there is at level three out of a possible five levels.

A level five would mean that the residents living near the crater would have to be evacuated, while level three warns people not to approach the volcano.

A firefighter died and 1,500 tourists were evacuated after forest fires fanned by strong winds broke out on Croatia’s Adriatic coast Monday, with the interior minister warning of a “very difficult” scenario.

“The situation is very difficult … we are doing everything possible to protect people’s lives and property,” Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic told commercial Nova television, as the fires continued to blaze out of control in the increasingly popular tourist area.

“Everything is ready for (further) evacuations,” said the minister, who visited the coastal resort of Selce, close to the northern port of Rijeka, where some 150 firefighters were battling the blaze.

A 45-year firefighter died while battling another blaze that broke out near Moscenicka Draga on the Istria peninsula, fire service official Slavko Gaus told national HRT television.

That fire was brought under control later in the day.

The inferno broke out in the morning in the hinterland of Rijeka, some 180 kilometres (110 miles) southwest of Zagreb, and spread towards Selce.

Strong winds of more than 100 kilometres (60 miles) an hour made tackling the fires very difficult as water-bombing planes could not be used, the authorities said.

In Selce some 1,500 tourists from two campsites, mostly Slovenians and Austrians, were evacuated while a number of other tourists left a nearby hotel, officials said.

Part of the Adriatic coastal highway was closed, police said.

The resort was cut off from electricity and phone lines were down, Nova television reported, showing footage of people in Selce covering their faces with scarves to protect themselves from the thick smoke and ashes.

The roofs of several houses also caught fire.

In fellow former Yugoslav republic Macedonia, 14 people were injured, five of them seriously, in a forest fire at Strumica, 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Skopje, the country’s farm minister said.

The minister, Lupco Dimovski, said there was information suggesting that this fire may heave been started deliberately

The Macedonia fire was still raging late Monday.

Australia’s feral camel population has dropped by an estimated 250,000 in recent years, but the arid outback is still home to the world’s largest wild herd, officials said Tuesday.

The Australian Feral Camel Management Project said about 750,000 camels were thought to roam the country’s desert heartland.

“Between 2001 and 2008, it was estimated that there could have been as many as a million feral camels in the outback,” said Jan Ferguson, the managing director of Ninti One, which manages the project.

“Since then, however, there has been a major drought, the feral camel management programme has come into effect and population survey techniques have been improved.”

Camels, first introduced as pack animals to help early settlers in the 19th century, roam wild in the states of Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland in the east, as well as the Northern Territory.

About 85,000 were culled under a plan to reduce their impact on sensitive areas and native animals but Ferguson said some populations were still too dense.

Wildlife scientist Glenn Edwards said the latest monitoring, under which about 50 camels fitted with special collars were tracked using satellites, provided a clearer picture of the extensive damage they caused.

“Feral camels can travel 70 kilometres (43 miles) in one day, and hundreds of kilometres within a week, over incredibly harsh terrain,” he said.

“We know that when they herd, they can converge on a natural waterhole used by native animals, and drink it dry within days.

“This has a devastating effect on the local flora and fauna and shows exactly why we need to control the population density of these animals.”

With few natural predators and vast sparsely-populated areas in which to roam, feral camels have put pressure on native Australian species by reducing food sources, destroying habitat and spreading disease.

During some of the worst months of drought, thousands of thirsty camels even besieged a remote town in search of water, leaving residents scared to leave their homes.

Scores of people were injured and trees were ripped from the ground as a typhoon lashed Hong Kong packing winds in excess of 140 kilometres (87 miles) an hour, officials said Tuesday.

Authorities issued a hurricane warning for the first time since 1999 as Typhoon Vicente roared to within 100 kilometres of Hong Kong shortly after midnight, disrupting dozens of flights to the regional hub.

The alarm was downgraded to a strong wind warning by mid-morning as the cyclone passed to the west and weakened over the southern Chinese coast.

The storm brought down hundreds of trees and sent debris crashing into downtown streets as commuters made their way home from work on Monday evening, when people were told to seek shelter.

Ferry, bus and train services were suspended or ran at reduced capacity, the port and schools were closed, and 44 passenger flights were cancelled. More than 270 flights were delayed.

The stock exchange was also closed for the morning but reopened in the afternoon after authorities gave the all clear to go back to work.

“We haven’t experienced this for 10 years. I could hardly walk, the wind kept pushing me,” marketing research manager Alpha Yung, 28, told AFP as she went to work in the almost deserted streets.

Mignon Chan, a 21-year-old marketing assistant, said the storm was “crazy”.

“Last time I suffered this kind of weather I was small. It’s chaotic here, trees fell down, people fell down, but I still have to work. That’s the worst part,” she said.

Almost 140 people sought medical treatment and 268 people took refuge in storm shelters, officials said. Seventy-one people remained in hospital including one who was in a serious condition.

Local media reported that more than 100 commuters stayed in the Tai Wai train station overnight, unable to get home after services were suspended.

A landslide occurred in the upscale Peak neighbourhood but there were no casualties as a result, officials said.

“The wind and rain were pounding on my windows at home last night — bam, bam, bam — they were so strong that I couldn’t sleep,” security guard Tony Chan said as he cleared shattered glass on the street outside an office tower.

Ocean Park tourist attraction said it would remain closed for the day to carry out a “thorough inspection” of the property for possible storm damage.

In the nearby territory of Macau, three major bridges over the city’s harbour were closed overnight as the typhoon approached, the government said.

Mainland offcials said the typhoon hit Taishan city in Guangdong province at 4:00 am (2000 GMT Monday). There were no immediate reports of casualties but officials said damage was still being assessed.

Beijing authorities have reportedly ordered Chinese media to stick to positive news about record weekend floods, after the death of at least 37 people sparked fierce criticism of the government.

Censors also deleted microblog posts criticising the official response to the disaster in China’s rapidly modernising capital, which came at a time of heightened political sensitivity ahead of a 10-yearly handover of power.

City propaganda chief Lu Wei told media outlets to stick to stories of “achievements worthy of praise and tears”, the Beijing Times daily reported, as authorities tried to stem a tide of accusations that they failed to do enough.

Many Beijing residents took to the country’s popular microblogs, or weibos, to complain that some of the deaths could have been prevented if better warnings had been issued and the city’s ancient drainage systems modernised.

A call by the Beijing government for donations to an emergency flood relief fund was also criticised by microbloggers, with many ridiculing the authorities for asking ordinary people to pay for the damage.

On Tuesday, over 72,000 postings on a microblog thread focused on the call for donations were deleted.

David Bandurski, who monitors China’s Internet censorship at the Hong Kong-based China Media Project, said most of the microblog postings censored in China over the last two days related to the Beijing floods.

“There could be a number of reasons for this, but the overarching reason could be the upcoming change of leadership at the (Communist Party’s) 18th Party Congress,” Bandurski told AFP.

“This is an important political meeting, so when people are pointing responsibility at local government incompetence, everyone goes into sensitive mode… no one wants to take responsibility for anything.”

This year’s Congress will see President Hu Jintao step down from his position as head of China’s ruling Communist party in a leadership change that will usher in a new generation of leaders expected to be led by Vice President Xi Jinping.

Authorities were still clearing up the damage from Saturday’s disaster as the country’s top leaders gathered in Beijing on Monday for a meeting addressed by Hu that was given front-page coverage in state newspapers.

The China Daily, a state-run English-language newspaper with a predominantly foreign readership, ran an editorial on Tuesday urging Beijing authorities to improve the drainage system, which it said “leaves much to be desired”.

But much of China’s state-run media steered away from critical stories, focusing on human interest angles of residents helping each other out.

Senior Beijing leaders at an emergency meeting late Monday urged greater efforts to find those still missing, identify the bodies and repair flood-damaged roads.

But residents in the worst hit district of Fangshan on the mountainous southwestern outskirts of China’s sprawling capital told AFP the government was doing little to help find their missing loved-ones.

“The government doesn’t help at all, every family is responsible for searching for their own family members,” said Wang Baoxiang, whose 30-year-old nephew had been missing since going out in Saturday’s rains.

According to official assessments released Monday, seven people remained missing, but in the badly hit Fangshan district, locals told AFP reporters that at least 10 people were missing in one small village.

Tuesday’s Beijing Daily quoted mayor Guo Jinlong as saying any increases in the death toll should be reported immediately, amid suspicion that the authorities may be underplaying the impact of the floods.

Guo also urged journalists to “correctly guide public opinion”, code words in China that which mean to only portray the government in a positive light.

“The news media has played a very good role in timely reporting the developments in emergency response operations, correctly leading the public opinion… and playing a role in boosting morale,” Guo said.

“The focus of our rescue work and news propaganda must now be moved toward the suburban areas, especially those areas severely hit by the disaster like Fangshan.”

IDF Quarantines Yoav Base Amid ‘Outbreak’

IDF chief medical officer Gen. Itzik Kreis on Tuesday ordered the Yoav base in the Golan Heights quarantined after several soldiers fell ill with a bacterial infection.

Arutz Sheva has learned many soldiers at the base, including soldiers working in the kitchens, complained of itching all over their bodies.

As a result, the base has been sealed and a full sanitization effort is underway. All equipment, personal belongings, textile goods, and even personnel files are being removed in order to be cleansed.

Arutz Sheva further learned that all mattresses on the base were removed and will be replaced. Hazmat teams are spraying and disenfecting structures, vehicles, and grounds, as well.

Meanwhile, IDF medical personnel are screening soldiers and isolating those affected to ensure the infection does not spread.

The IDF spokesperson’s office has thus far declined to comment on the exact nature and full extent of the infection.

For the first time, scientists have identified tropical and subtropical species of marine protozoa living in the Arctic Ocean. Apparently, they traveled thousands of miles on Atlantic currents and ended up above Norway with an unusual-but naturally cyclic-pulse of warm water, not as a direct result of overall warming climate, say the researchers.

On the other hand: arctic waters are warming rapidly, and such pulses are predicted to grow as global climate change causes shifts in long-distance currents.

Thus, colleagues wonder if the exotic creatures offers a preview of climate-induced changes already overtaking the oceans and land, causing redistributions of species and shifts in ecology. The study, by a team from the United States, Norway and Russia, was just published in the British Journal of Micropalaeontology.

The creatures in question are radiolaria-microscopic one-celled plankton that envelop themselves in ornate glassy shells and graze on marine algae, bacteria and other tiny prey.

Different species inhabit characteristic temperature ranges, and their shells coat much of the world’s ocean bottoms in a deep ooze going back millions of years; thus climate scientists routinely analyze layers of them to plot swings in ocean temperatures in the past. The new study looks at where radiolarians are living now.

In 2010, a ship operated by the Norwegian Polar Institute netted plankton samples northwest of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, about midway between the European mainland and the North Pole. When the coauthors analyzed the samples, they were startled to find that of the 145 taxa they spotted, 98 had come from much farther south-some as far as the tropics.

Furthermore, the southern radiolaria were in different sizes and apparently different stages of growth for each species, indicating they were reproducing, despite the harsh conditions.

It was the first time since modern arctic oceanographic research began in the early 20th century that researchers had spotted a living population of such creatures in the northern ocean.

Coauthor O. Roger Anderson, a specialist in one-celled organisms at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said, “When we suddenly find tropical plankton in the arctic, the issue of global warming comes right up, and possible inferences about it can become very charged. So, it’s important to examine critically the evidence to account for the observations.”

He said the invaders were apparently swept up in the warm Gulf Stream, which travels from the Caribbean into the north Atlantic, but usually peters out somewhere between Greenland and Europe. Oceanographers have previously shown that sometimes pulses of warm water penetrate along the Norwegian coast and into the arctic basin; such pulses have occurred in the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s.

Further, the authors say that well-dated fossils of foraminifera-protozoans closely related to radiolaria-found on the arctic seafloor suggest that warm-water plankton may have temporarily established themselves at least several times before-around 4200 and 4100 BC, and again around 220, 370 and 1100 AD.

“All the evidence is that this isn’t necessarily immediate evidence of global warming of the ocean,” said Anderson. Lead author Kjell Bjorklund, of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum said of the invaders, “This doesn’t happen continuously-but it happens.”

That said, oceanographers have noted that such pulses seem to be coming more often and penetrating further-”exactly what one would expect from global warming,” said Rainer Froese, an oceanographer at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research who tracks fish global populations. Could this be the start of a switch in currents predicted by climate models?

The most recent pulse began in the early 1980s, and has lasted more or less to the present. Even without that, the arctic ocean itself is warming rapidly; with progressive loss of summer sea ice over past decades, average surface temperature has gone up as much as 5 degrees centigrade (9 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1950 in some patches.

Physical oceanographers have different ideas on the mechanics of how more southerly water–and the things living in it–may arrive in the arctic. However, most agree that it will happen if climate keeps warming, said Arnold Gordon, head of Lamont’s division of ocean and climate physics, who was not involved in the research.

For one, a countercurrent running near Greenland, the North Atlantic Polar Gyre, normally wards off the Gulf Stream; but that gyre is predicted to slow with warming. Atlantic currents might also respond to changing wind patterns, or to the increasing fresh water now pouring into the northern ocean from melting sea ice and glaciers. Either way, this could draw more southerly water into the north, said Gordon.

Louis Fortier, an arctic oceanographer at Laval University in Quebec, said of the recent injections of southerly waters, “Whether or not [such] intrusions are signs of this predicted increased advection in response to climate change, nobody can tell yet, I believe. But for me, the observations so far certainly support the models.”

Paul Snelgrove, a specialist in cold-ocean studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, agreed. “The question is, are these kinds of incursions becoming more frequent and stronger? If it continues, the case would become more persuasive. Right now, this study is not a definitive test, but it seems like an intriguing teaser as to what might happen.”

Whatever the answer, this is the first time a living population of southern radiolaria has been found so far north. Radiolaria live only about a month, so it must have taken 80-some generations for some species to make the five- to seven-year trip, say the authors. On the way, successive generations could have adapted to colder waters.

In 2009, the surface water in the sample area measured an extraordinary 7.5 degrees C (about 45.5F). A year later, when the samples were taken, it was down to a more normal level of 3.5C (38F), and yet the radiolarians were still there.

However, the fast-changing nature of the ocean makes their presence in the arctic hard to interpret, said Paul Wassman, an arctic biologist at the University of Tromso in Norway. Marine creatures routinely travel vast distances on currents.

Water temperatures may vary widely in the same latitude. Populations of some creatures may live for a while in a narrow tongue of temperate water, then wink out once that gets too diluted, he said.

Bjorklund, Anderson and their coauthor Svetlana Kruglikova of the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanography in Moscow note that it is uncertain whether the southern invaders are still there; they have not gotten any new samples since 2010.

In any case, changes in global ocean ecology are already being detected in many places. Warmer-water species are marching poleward, much as creatures are on land, where butterflies have been shifting ranges northward about 6 kilometers per decade, and amphibians and migratory birds are breeding an average of two days earlier.

A 2011 global study on the impact of climate change on fisheries says that many marine species are moving poleward or into deeper, cooler waters in response to warming–among other places, along the U.S. east coast, the Bering Sea, and off Australia.

The North Sea, off Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, has warmed about 2 degrees F in the last 50 to 100 years; there, 15 of 36 fish species studied have moved northward; fish more common nearer the Mediterranean-anchovy, red mullet, sea bass-are being caught by commercial fishermen, while cod, which prefer colder waters, are moving out.

There is also evidence that zooplankton similar to the radiolaria are shifting northward in the North Atlantic. In the Pacific, poisonous algal blooms harmful to the shellfish industry are being detected farther north, into Alaskan waters.

In the arctic itself, earlier and faster melting of sea ice in the summer appears to be shifting plankton species assemblages toward smaller types. This could ultimately damage the food web that feeds much larger creatures, including seals, walruses and whales, said Jody Deming, a biologist at the University of Washington who studies arctic microbes.

In an email, Deming said the new paper “presents an intriguing observation (warmer species making it into Arctic waters and surviving at least on the short term), but without more knowledge of how living radiolarians fit into the larger ecosystem, as both prey and predator, potential impacts on the whole ecosystem cannot be predicted reliably or at all really.”

The big question, said Bjorklund, is what happens next. In the future, radiolaria may serve as useful indicators of how currents, and ecology, are changing. There are at least 60-some radiolaria species peculiar to the arctic; they may be quite different from the new arrivals, but too little is known about the life cycles of either group to say how either will react if they meet on a long-term basis, and how this might affect arctic ecosystems.

Of the southerly radiolaria, Bjorklund said, “Will they adapt? Will they perish? Will they mix with the native fauna?” He said that he and his colleagues are anxious to receive new samples to find out.

Copies of the paper, “Modern incursions of tropical Radiolaria in the Arctic Ocean” are available from the authors or the Earth Institute press office.