KOFU, Yamanashi Pref. — A 20-meter-long crack was found halfway up Mount Fuji in Yamanashi Prefecture after a 6.4-magnitude earthquake hit on March 15, 2011, centered around eastern Shizuoka Prefecture, local authorities revealed Tuesday.

Opening up: In a photo taken in March 2011, a crack can be seen near a shrine at the Fifth Station of Mount Fuji. Experts say it is unlikely to be a sign of an impending eruption or any other abnormality. KYODO

They ruled out the possibility of an eruption.

“No abnormalities have been observed regarding Mount Fuji and the mountain shows no signs of an eruption,” an official at the Meteorological Agency said, indicating the crack was caused not by volcanic activity but by the temblor.

Both the width and depth of the crack were several centimeters, and it has subsequently been covered by sand and pebbles, according to the Yamanashi Prefectural Government.

“Nothing has happened after more than a year (since the discovery of the crack), so Mount Fuji is probably not going to erupt,” said Shigeo Aramaki, head of the Yamanashi Institute of Environmental Sciences, who inspected the crack in June last year.

Nagano rocked

A strong quake hit central Japan at around 12:49 p.m. Tuesday, the Meteorological Agency said.

The quake measured lower 5 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale to 7 in the Nagano Prefecture municipalities of Nakano and Kijimadaira.

Seismic intensity of 4 was recorded in other places in the prefecture, as well as in parts of neighboring Niigata Prefecture, including in Joetsu, the agency said. The estimated magnitude was 5.0. Its focus was estimated to be 20 km deep.

Residents of a flood-devastated Russian region on Tuesday picked through damaged homes and collected donated clothing amid ongoing criticism of the way officials handled the disaster.

In the worst affected town of Krymsk, the lack of sanitation and high temperatures provoked fears of a disease epidemic, and officials sought to allay the concerns.

Russia’s chief sanitary doctor, Gennady Onishchenko, insisted that the infection level in Krymsk was “stable” after tabloid website Lifenews reported that 50 people had been hospitalised in an infections ward.

He called the reports of mass infections “an irresponsible lie,” speaking to the RIA Novosti news agency.

The authorities of the affected Krasnodar region slightly raised the death toll, saying on their website that “according to the latest official information, the number of those who suffered from the flooding has reached 30,000 and 172 people have died.”

Meanwhile the head of A Just Russia opposition party, Sergei Mironov, appealed to Putin to dismiss the governor of the southern region, Alexander Tkachev, for “improper conduct of his duties,” the Interfax news agency said.

Tkachev responded defiantly. “If they put Mironov here, would it be any different? I doubt it. Try first, then judge,” he told Vesti FM radio station.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev ordered officials to finish rebuilding the around 400 houses destroyed by November at the latest.

The regional authorities said in a statement on Tuesday that 80 percent of the town of Krymsk now had electricity while they planned to fully restore running water on Wednesday.

They complained of rumours sweeping the town including one that people were being asked to sign statements saying they had been warned of the flooding in order to receive compensation, calling these “nonsensical.”

Yet business daily Kommersant on Tuesday cited one woman, Polina Nailushkina, 54, as saying she had been told to sign such a statement to register as a victim, after her sister and brother-in-law died in the floods.

The authorities have been widely criticised for failing to adequately warn residents of the swiftly rising flood water and evacuate them, with many dying trapped in their homes at night.

Nailushkina told Kommersant that she had been awake on a night shift with a working television and telephone but had heard nothing.

LONDON

The conflict in Mali could turn a cholera outbreak that has already killed 60 people in the Sahel this year into a serious regional epidemic, the UN children’s agency said Tuesday.

While the semi-arid belt running across Africa, separating Sahara from savannah, is regularly hit by cholera outbreaks, this year’s epidemic has concentrated mostly around Mali and Niger, UNICEF said in a statement.

This has been aggravated by the the massive displacement of people fleeing conflict in northern Mali, and further endangers children already suffering acute malnutrition.

“Malnutrition, displacement, and now rains in some parts of the Sahel create the ideal breeding ground for cholera, which hits young children hardest,” said Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF acting regional director for West and Central Africa.

Last week, an outbreak in northern Mali left two children dead and 34 other people sick, according to Mali’s Ministry of Health.

Since March northern Mali has been occupied by armed groups dominated by Islamists who have enforced sharia law and destroyed ancient cultural treasures.

The UNICEF statement said that overall in 2012, some 700 people in West and Central Africa had died from cholera and more than 29,000 cases were reported.

Cases had shot up in the Sahel since mid-June, especially near the Niger River where that country’s health ministry reported nearly three times as many cholera patients compared to the same period last year.

In Niger some 400,000 children are expected to require life-saving treatment for severe malnutrition this year.

Crops failed across a massive swathe of eight countries after late and erratic rains in 2011, leaving some 23 million people across the Sahel facing hunger, aid agencies have reported.

However funding needs have not been met.

“You can’t treat malnutrition and ignore cholera,” said Fontaine. “But without more funding soon, we risk undoing a lot of work already done to treat and prevent malnutrition in children.”

Severe droughts, floods and heat waves rocked the world last year as greenhouse gas levels climbed, boosting the odds of some extreme weather events, international scientists said Tuesday.

The details are contained in the annual State of the Climate report, compiled by nearly 400 scientists from 48 countries and published in the peer-reviewed Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The report itself remains “consciously conservative” when it comes to attributing the causes of certain weather events to climate change, and instead refers only to widely understood phenomena such as La Nina.

However, it is accompanied for the first time by a separate analysis that explains how climate change may have influenced certain key events, from droughts in the US and Africa to extreme cold and warm spells in Britain.

“2011 was notable for many extreme weather and climate events. La Nina played a key role in many, but certainly not all of them,” said Tom Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Climatic Center.

Last year was among the 15 warmest since records began in the late 1800s, and the Arctic warmed at about twice the rate of lower latitudes with sea ice at below average levels, according to the report.

Greenhouse gases from human pollution sources like coal and gas reached a new high, with carbon dioxide emissions exceeding 390 parts per million — up 2.10 parts per million from 2010 — for the first time since modern records began.

Despite the natural cooling trend brought by back-to-back La Nina effects, which chill waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, 2011 was among the 12 highest years on record for global sea surface temperatures.

The double La Nina punch influenced many of the world’s significant weather events, like historic droughts in East Africa, the southern US and northern Mexico, said the report.

La Nina trends also were associated with the wettest two years on record in Australia.

An accompanying analysis in the same journal, titled “Explaining Extreme Events,” examined the links between human-driven climate change and six selected weather crises in 2011, including the Texas drought that lasted half the year.

The authors found that “such a heat wave is now around 20 times more likely during a La Nina year than it was during the 1960s,” said Peter Stott, climate monitoring and attribution team leader at the UK Met Office.

“We have shown that climate change has indeed altered the odds of some of the events that have occurred,” he told reporters. “What we are saying here is we can actually quantify those changing odds.”

Looking at Britain’s unusually warm November 2011 and the cold snap of December 2010, scientists found that frigid Decembers are half as likely to occur now compared to 50 years ago, and hot Novembers are 62 times more likely.

However, a close look at the floods along the Chao Phraya River that swamped Thailand last year showed that climate change was not to blame, but rather human activities increased construction along the flood plain.

The damage caused by the floods was unprecedented, but the amount of rain that actually fell “was not very unusual,” said the analysis by experts from NOAA and Britain’s Met Office along with international colleagues.

While it remains hard to link single events to human-caused climate change, “scientific thinking has moved on and now it is widely accepted that attribution statements about individual weather or climate events are possible,” the report added.

The key is analyzing to what extent climate change may be boosting the odds of extreme weather, said the report, likening the phenomenon to a baseball player who takes steroids and then starts getting 20 percent more hits than before.

Scientists can consider steroids as the likely cause for the increase in hits, but must still take care to account for natural variability in the player’s swing.

Strange Vortex Discovered on Saturn Moon Titan

• By Tanya Lewis

Biological Hazard in Philippines on Wednesday, 11 July, 2012 at 10:22 (10:22 AM) UTC.

11.07.2012

Biological Hazard

Thailand

Province of Chiang Mai, [Chiang Mai Welfare School, Mae Rim district]

Biological Hazard in Thailand on Wednesday, 11 July, 2012 at 10:20 (10:20 AM) UTC.

Heat blamed for fish kills in southern Minn. lakes

• Article by: Associated Press

The city of Naples in southern Italy is battling an infestation of large red cockroaches brought on by the unseasonally warm weather and unhygienic conditions, health officials said on Tuesday.

Pest control personnel are spraying sewers with poison around the clock to try and hold off an invasion by the roaches, which can be up to seven centimetres long and thrive in heat, humidity and organic decomposition.

The infestation has reignited a debate about problems with waste disposal in Naples, a mafia-linked sector that has been beset by chronic problems.

Local health agency director Maurizio Scoppa said the hot weather and garbage being left out overnight for early morning pick-up were major factors.

“The problem of managing the sewers and the garbage is one of the causes of this phenomenon,” Scoppa told AFP, pointing out that city authorities did not have enough staff to be able to carry out sewer inspections.

Some health experts have warned of a heightened risk of typhoid and hepatitis A but a spokeswoman for city hall dismissed the possibility.

“There is no health risk. There is no emergency situation, this is just a phenomenon that affects only some areas,” Maria Bonacci said.

“Other experts reject any danger to the health of inhabitants,” she said.

Bonacci said talk of an “invasion” of cockroaches was exaggerated but agreed that their number this summer was significantly higher than previous years.

She blamed the previous city administration for “not cleaning the sewers.”

Red cockroaches of the same type as the ones in Naples — also known in Italian as “cockroach of the ships” — are common in tropical climates around the world and are spread to port cities by global shipping.