May 12, 2013 – FRANCE – A second diagnosis of the new SARS-like coronavirus has been confirmed in France, the Health Ministry said on Sunday, in what appeared to be a case of human-to-human transmission. The new infection was found in a 50-year-old man who had shared a hospital room with France’s only other known sufferer, the ministry said in a statement.
May 12, 2013 – CANADA - A local state of emergency has been declared in a western Manitoba municipality after homes in Ochre Beach were destroyed and seriously damaged by a wave of lake ice. Area officials told CBC News the wind pushed built-up ice off Dauphin Lake on Friday evening and caused it to pile up in the community, located on the lake’s southern shore. The piles of ice, which were more than nine meters tall in some cases, destroyed at least six homes and cottages, according to the Rural Municipality of Ochre River. Another 14 homes suffered extensive damage, with some structures knocked off their foundations.
May 12, 2013 – TONGA - A strong 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck off the Pacific nation of Tonga US seismologists said, but no tsunami warning was issued. The under-sea quake hit at 08:46 am (2046 GMT Saturday), 139 kilometers (86 miles) from the town of Neiafu, on the south coast of the island Vava’u, at a depth of 205 kilometers, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said based on the depth of the quake, no tsunami was expected. The epicenter of the tremor was 353 kilometers north of the capital Nuku’alofa. Tonga, almost 2,000 kilometers northeast of New Zealand.
May 12, 2013 – MYANMAR – A tropical cyclone in the Andaman Sea is headed close to an area in Myanmar where tens of thousands of victims of ethnic and religious violence are living in makeshift camps, adding urgency to fears of what the United Nations has termed a looming “humanitarian catastrophe” for displaced families. Of the more than 130,000 people forced to flee their homes in rioting between Buddhists and Muslims over the last year in western Myanmar, around half are living in low-lying camps near the sea, the United Nations says.
May 12, 2013 – IRAN – A strong earthquake of 6.2 magnitude hit southern Iran early today, killing one child and injuring at least 20 others in remote, mountainous villages, state television reported. The US Geological Survey registered the quake at 0738 IST, measured at 85 kilometres (52 miles) southeast of the town of Minab, located in the southern Hormuzgan province and off the Strait of Hormuz. The quake was registered at a depth of 36.44 kilometres (22.64 miles).
May 12, 2013 – HEALTH - Terrible new forms of infectious disease make headlines, but not at the start. Every pandemic begins small. Early indicators can be subtle and ambiguous. When the Next Big One arrives, spreading across oceans and continents like the sweep of nightfall, causing illness and fear, killing thousands or maybe millions of people, it will be signaled first by quiet, puzzling reports from faraway places — reports to which disease scientists and public health officials, but few of the rest of us, pay close attention. Such reports have been coming in recent months from two countries, China and Saudi Arabia.
May 13, 2013 – MEXICO – Mexican authorities raised the alert level for the Popocatepetl volcano near Mexico City on Sunday morning after observing an increased level of explosive activity.
May 13, 2013 – CALIFORNIA - Homes are sinking in a California subdivision built on top of volcanic country. Eight homes have been abandoned so far and 10 more are under an imminent evacuation notice after cracks appeared in the ground and entire sections dropped 10 feet into the ground.
May 14, 2013 – SOLAR WATCH - The sun erupted for the second time in less than 24 hours Monday morning, releasing the most powerful solar flare so far of 2013. Monday’s solar flare, which peaked at 9 a.m. Pacific time, came just 14 hours after the second largest solar flare of 2013, which occurred on Sunday evening. A solar flare is a huge explosion in the sun’s atmosphere that sends out a burst of radiation.
May 14, 2013 – CHINA - Three more people have died in China from the new strain of H7N9 bird flu virus, raising the death toll to 35 while the total number of infections rose to 130, state media said today.
May 14, 2013 - Saudi Arabia - 4 more cases in Saudi Arabia: Saudi Arabia has confirmed four new cases of the SARS-like novel coronavirus in its Eastern Province, state media reported late on Monday, citing the health ministry.
May 14, 2013 – GRAY, TN (WJHL) - A Tri-Cities man has video of what appears to be a large chunk of ice that he says fell from the sky on Wednesday (May 8) and landed in a yard in Gray, TN. Andy Miller says his children were playing outside along Keeview Drive off Hales Chapel Road around 4 p.m. when they heard what sounded like a rocket. “A megacryometeor is a very large chunk of ice which, despite sharing many textural, hydro-chemical and isotopic features detected in large hailstones, is formed under unusual atmospheric conditions which clearly differ from those of the cumulonimbus cloud scenario (i.e. clear-sky conditions). They are sometimes called huge hailstones, but do not need to form in thunderstorms.”
May 14, 2013 – ALASKA - Another volcano in Alaska is heating up, with seismic instruments signaling a possible eruption. The Alaska Volcano Observatory says tremors were detected Monday at Pavlof Volcano 1,000 km southwest of Anchorage.
May 14, 2013 – PACIFIC - A deep 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck near the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific on Tuesday, the US Geological Survey said, but no tsunami warning was issued.
May 14, 2013 – BRITAIN – Dark, menacing and bubbly – these images show the outstanding phenomenon which materialized over the skies in Shropshire. The skies above Telford formed into dark clouds which turned into grey and imposing bubbles and resembled the advent of an alien landing. The imposing clouds left onlookers questioning their existence and how they had formed. In fact, the clouds, known as the lesser-spotted mammatus – appeared as a lobe and were packed full of ice and rain. According to local forecasters, the clouds created a large thunderstorm which drenched much of Britain over the weekend. The clouds are associated with the powerful storms which can sometimes occur in the summer and are a sign of massive quantities of water vapour. Phil Spencer, a 39-year-old truck driver from Telford, was left baffled by the sudden change in the weather. He said: “I went to Morrisons and looked up and noticed all these weird and wonderful shapes in the sky. It was only there for five or 10 minutes and then just literally went as quickly as it came in.” –Express UK
May 14, 2013 – CHINA – Something very strange started oozing out of the streets in the Chinese city of Nanjing on Saturday night. Generally, when weird things start erupting from the ground in Asian countries it’s in the form of a giant b-movie monster, but this invasion was a whole lot realer, and a whole lot smellier. 
May 15, 2013 – INDIA - India’s west coast is far more vulnerable to monster earthquakes and tsunamis than believed till now, scientists have said in dramatic new findings that could force a rethink on the country’s preparedness for natural disasters on a coastline that hosts its biggest nuclear reactor. Undersea earthquakes as strong as the 2004 Sumatra temblor that spawned a tsunami killing over 220,000 could also strike under the Arabian Sea, off the coast of Pakistan and Iran, striking those countries, India, Oman and further inland, a team of British and Canadian scientists has said. India’s Arabian Sea coast is home to the 1400 MW Tarapur Power Station near Mumbai, India’s largest operational nuclear plant that in 2011 was also identified by a government expert panel as the least prepared of the country’s atomic power complexes to handle a scenario like the one at Fukushima in Japan in 2011. The country is also in the process of setting up a 10,000 MW nuclear power complex at Jaitapur that has faced local opposition.
May 15, 2013 – ALASKA - U.S. Forest Service Geologist Jim Baichtal, who is based on Prince of Wales Island, and Anchorage geologist Sue Karl were looking at some hydrographic surveys, something geologists tend to do. When we were done, I noticed the area from Thorne Arm to Rudyerd had been surveyed,” Baichtal said. “I zoomed in and there was this large… some kind of volcano, and two other dome-like structures.” Karl added that, “This new NOAA survey allowed us to see things that people had never seen before.” Karl said a modern example of a similar eruption is Surtsey, a volcanic island in Iceland, which erupted from the sea floor in the 1960s, building itself up and eventually breaching the surface to form the island. Karl points out that when the newly discovered volcano erupted, sea levels also were lower than they are now, but even with that, “We still have too much depth. We have to call on glacial loading and rebound.”
May 15, 2013 – UNITED KINGDOM – It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas – so it’s rather odd that we find ourselves in mid-May. Snow fell across parts of Britain last night while another area had a month’s rain in just 24 hours as winds of up to 65mph battered the country’s coastlines in unusual weather for the month. Up to 3in of snow fell in Princetown in Dartmoor, Devon, Rhayader in Powys, and Newcastle-on-Clun in Shropshire – while Pembrey, Carmarthenshire, had 3in of rain in the 24 hours until 7am today. Local woman Sheila Coates told BBC Radio Devon: ‘It’s crazy. Last night I couldn’t see out of my front window for the snow. I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never known weather like it at this time of year.’
May 15, 2013 – GEOLOGY – A flurry of earthquakes continues across the planet over the past 72 hours, showing few signs of abatement. Seismic tension continues to build across the Pacific Plate, the Cocos plate (Central America), and the Nazca plate, near South America. Tectonic plate agitation appears to be increasing, along with volcanic pressures under many of the world’s major volcanoes. -TEP
May 15, 2013 - Alaska - 55th volcano erupts in Alaska: Scientists say small lava flows have been detected on two restless volcanoes in Alaska. The Alaska Volcano Observatory says satellite images Tuesday show the lava partly down a flank of Pavlof Volcano in a low-level eruption 625 miles southwest of Anchorage. Geophysicist Dave Schneider says minor steam and ash emissions are visible from the community of Cold Bay 37 miles away. Pavlof is the second Alaska volcano to erupt this month.
May 15, 2013 - Texas- Possible tornadoes cut a wide swath through north Texas on Wednesday night, killing at least six people and injuring more than 100 others, officials said
May 16, 2013 – SAUDI ARABIA – Two health workers in Saudi Arabia have become infected with a potentially fatal new SARS-like virus after catching it from patients in their care – the first evidence of such transmission within a hospital, the World Health Organization said. The new virus, known as novel coronavirus, or nCoV, is from the same family of viruses as those that cause common colds and the one that caused the deadly outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that emerged in Asia in 2003.
May 16, 2013 – BANGLADESH - A tropical storm has lashed coastal areas of Bangladesh, killing 12 people, destroying thousands of huts and forcing up to a million people to flee. Officials had prepared for a cyclone, but the storm, called Mahasen, weakened considerably before making landfall.
May 16, 2013 – ISRAEL - In a clear warning to Syria to stop the transfer of advanced weapons to Islamic militants in the region, a senior Israeli official signaled on Wednesday that Israel was considering additional military strikes to prevent that from happening and that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, would face crippling consequences if he retaliated. “Israel is determined to continue to prevent the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah,” the Israeli official said. “The transfer of such weapons to Hezbollah will destabilize and endanger the entire region.” “If Syrian President Assad reacts by attacking Israel, or tries to strike Israel through his terrorist proxies,” the official said, “he will risk forfeiting his regime, for Israel will retaliate.” The Israeli official, who had been briefed by high-level officials on Israel’s assessment of the situation in Syria, declined to be identified, citing the need to protect internal Israeli government deliberations.
May 17, 2013 – CANTERBURY, NZ - A magnitude 4.2 earthquake hit Canterbury this afternoon. The quake struck at 3.59pm at a depth of 7 kilometers and was centered 25km southwest of Christchurch. GeoNet rated the intensity of the quake as “strong.” The last widely-felt quake to hit the region was on the second anniversary of the February 2011 earthquake, when a 3.9 quake rocked the city.
May 17, 2013 – LOS ANGELES, CA. – The Southern California coastline felt a “real good jolt” yesterday at about 1 p.m. A 4.0 magnitude earthquake rumbled just off the coast of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. No serious problems were reported in relation to the earthquake, though the shake-up certainly was frightening.
May 17, 2013 – OREGON – The Cascadia Subduction Zone runs along the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States to Vancouver Island in Canada. This major fault line is capable of producing megathrust earthquakes 9.0 or higher, though, due to a dearth of observations or historical records, this trait was only discovered within the last several decades from geology records. The 1700 Cascadia event was better documented in Japan than in the Americas. Records of the “orphan tsunami”—so named because its “parent” earthquake was too far away to be felt—gave earth scientists hints that this subduction zone was capable of such massive seismic activity. Geological studies provided information about the earthquake, but many critical details remained lost to history. “Previous research had determined the timing and the magnitude, but what we didn’t know was how the rupture happened,” says Benjamin Horton, associate professor and director of the Sea Level Research Laboratory in the department of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania. “Did it rupture in one big long segment, more than a thousand kilometers, or did it rupture in parcels?”
May 17, 2013 – OTTAWA, CAN – Earthquakes Canada is reporting a 5.1-magnitude earthquake just west of Ottawa that was felt as far away as Toronto. The federal agency that monitors earthquakes revised its original report, saying it registered a 5.1-magnitude temblor with an epicenter located about 21 kilometers (13 miles) northeast of Shawville, Quebec, about an hour’s drive outside Ottawa.
May 18, 2013 – SPACE – A massive explosion from a meteor which crashed into the Moon was visible to the naked eye on Earth, NASA says. A boulder-sized meteor slammed into the moon in March, causing an explosion so bright anyone looking up at the right moment would have spotted it, NASA said. NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office is reporting the discovery of the brightest impact seen on the Moon in the eight years the monitoring program has run the National Geographic reports. About 300 lunar impacts have been logged over the years but this latest impact, from March 17, is considered much, much brighter than anything else observed.
May 18, 2013 – SPACE – It’s 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sticky black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth, it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby. Asteroid 1998 QE2 will make its closest pass to Earth on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. PDT. Scientists are not sure where this unusually large space rock, which was discovered 15 years ago, originated from. But the mysterious sooty substance on its surface could indicate it may be the result of a comet that flew too close to the sun, said Amy Mainzer, who tracks near-Earth objects at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. It might also have leaked out of the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, she said. We will know more after the asteroid zips closer to Earth and scientists using the Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, Calif., and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico can get a better look at it. Astronomers at both observatories plan to track it closely from May 30 to June 9, according to a JPL release. At its closest approach the asteroid will still be 3.6 million miles from our planet (about 15 times the distance between the Earth and the moon), but it will be close enough for these powerful radar antennas to see features as small as 12 feet across. “With radar we can transform an object from a point of light into a small world with its own characteristics,” Lance Benner, JPL’s principal investigator for Goldstone radar observations, said in a statement. There is no chance that asteroid 1998 QE2 could collide with Earth this go-around, and its next close approach won’t be until 2119.
May 18, 2013 – NORTH KOREA – North Korea has launched three short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan, apparently as part of a military drill, South Korea’s defense ministry said. US and South Korean forces had been on heightened alert for a medium-range ballistic missile test in recent weeks amid tensions triggered by North Korea’s nuclear test in February.
May 18, 2013 – JAPAN - An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.9 jolted northeastern Japan on Saturday, but no tsunami warning was issued, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. The earthquake was later upgraded by the USGS to a 6.0 magnitude.
May 18, 2013 – CHILE - Chilean Navy discovers more than 600 dead animals in Punta de Choros, a small fishing town north of La Serena. The bodies of sea lions, cormorants and penguins littered a seven mile stretch of beach in Punta de Choros, northern Chile on Sunday.
May 18, 2013 – NORTH KOREA – A 4.8 magnitude earthquake struck in the Yellow Sea, 76km WSW of Ongjin, North Korea. The earthquake struck under the sea at a depth of 13.50 km (8.39 mi). Many residents, living along coastal regions in South Korea, reported they felt the shaking inland.
May 18, 2013 – MEXICO – FOR the villagers closest to Popocatepetl, a Mexican volcano showing alarming signs of an imminent eruption, contingency plans are somewhat lacking. The village president has no telephone line, there is no doctor and the man with the key to the emergency refuge, a disgraced former mayor, has fled town. El Popo, as the 17,887 ft volcano is known, burst into life a fortnight ago, spewing clouds of ash and chunks of rock over nearby towns during eruptions that have grown in intensity. It is potentially one of the world’s most destructive volcanoes because of its proximity to Mexico City.
May 18, 2013
There have been:
- 37 earthquakes today
- 243 earthquakes in the past 7 days
- 280 earthquakes in the past month
- 11,285 earthquakes in the past year
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