June 17, 2013 – SAUDI ARABIA – Thirty-three people are dead from MERS, a coronavirus that the World Health Organization (WHO) is calling a “threat to the entire world”. MERS, for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, is a newly discovered virus that causes severe respiratory infection. There have been 58 laboratory-confirmed cases world-wide since the virus was discovered last September. Saudi Arabia claims about half of all cases of MERS. Some 30 people have died. Alarm bells are not over what has been MERS has done, but for what it has the potential to do. These statistics were published by WHO on June 14.
June 18, 2013 – GEOLOGY - A new subduction zone forming off the coast of Portugal heralds the beginning of a cycle that will see the Atlantic Ocean close, as continental Europe moves closer to America. Published in Geology, new research led by Monash University geologists has detected the first evidence that a passive margin in the Atlantic Ocean is becoming active. Subduction zones, such as the one beginning near Iberia, are areas where one of the tectonic plates that cover Earth’s surface dives beneath another plate into the mantle — the layer just below the crust. Lead author Dr João Duarte, from the School of Geosciences said the team mapped the ocean floor and found it was beginning to fracture, indicating tectonic activity around the apparently passive South West Iberia plate margin. “What we have detected is the very beginnings of an active margin — it’s like an embryonic subduction zone,” Dr Duarte said. “Significant earthquake activity, including the 1755 quake which devastated Lisbon, indicated that there might be convergent tectonic movement in the area.
June 18, 2013 – MEXICO – A powerful two-punch earthquake shook western Mexico early Sunday, knocking out electricity and cellular phone service in parts of this sprawling capital. There were no immediate reports of serious damage or fatalities. Initial readings put the quake at a magnitude of 5.8 at around 12:30 a.m., with the epicenter about 90 miles south of Mexico City in the northern part of Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located.
June 18, 2013 – MEXICO – Mexico’s active Popocatepetl volcano has registered a massive explosion spewing ash and incandescent rock almost 4 kilometers high. Authorities have warned that winds could blow the ash cloud as far away as Mexico City. Inhabitants of villages up to 25 kilometers from Popocatepetl (colloquially known as ‘Don Popo’) rushed out of their houses when the massive explosion reverberated through their homes. Esther Matinez, resident of Amecameca municipality, told Mexican publication La Jornada that the blast was like a rocket explosion.
June 18, 2013 – SPACE – Meanwhile on the farside of the sun, an un-numbered active region is seething with activity, and appears capable of significant eruptions. NASA’s STEREO-Behind spacecraft is stationed over the sun’s east limb with a good view of the hot spot (circled): During the early hours of June 18th, a long-duration flare from this active region hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) over the sun’s eastern limb. However, none of the rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) were in the line of fire. In a few days, the sun’s rotation will carry the active region around the eastern limb and onto the Earth-side of the sun. Then we will have a direct view of the underlying sunspot group and be able to better assess its potential for future flares.
June 18, 2013 – INDIA - Rains on Tuesday claimed 11 more lives in North India, taking the toll to 73, even as 71,440 pilgrims bound for the Himalayan shrines remained stranded in monsoon-ravaged Uttarakhand, apart from 1,700 people stuck in Himachal Pradesh. Though rescue efforts picked up in flash flood and landslide-hit areas of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand with a let-up in the rains and decrease in water level in the Ganga and its tributaries, the whole of Uttarakhand still wore a marooned and devastated look. Hundreds of homes and roads were washed away. Flash floods, cloudbursts and subsequent landslips in Uttarakhand have claimed 44 lives, left as many injured and destroyed 175 houses.
June 18, 2013 – BRAZIL - What started as small protests about higher bus fares has swelled into nationwide, massive anti-government demonstrations in Brazil. Last night, reports O Globo, more than 100,000 protesters filled the streets of Rio de Janeiro, while an additional 65,000 hit the streets of São Paulo. Nothing tells the story quite like this video of the streets of Rio posted by Lucio Amorim on Twitter: Reporting from São Paulo, NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro tells our Newscast unit that people on the streets are demanding that the government pay attention to them. “The cost of living here is extremely high, there’s a massive rate of inflation, and so people say that they are fed up, that they want their government to do something for them,” Lourdes said.
June 18, 2013 – PAPUA NEW GUINEA - An eruption with a small ash plume was reported this morning and VAAC Darwin issued an advisory. A low level ash plume was also visible on Nasa’s Aqua Modis image at 15:45 UTC. This is the volcano’s second eruption this year. The volcano unleashed an ash cloud in early January. –Volcano Discovery
June 19, 2013 – ALASKA - Taking advantage of an intense heat-wave that broke long-standing records yesterday, residents of Anchorage, Alaska headed to the beach at Goose Lake. As The Anchorage Daily News reports, the National Weather Service recorded a high temperature of 81 degrees in the city, beating the previous record set in June of 1926. The AP reports that in other spots, it got in even hotter: “All-time highs were recorded elsewhere, including 96 degrees on Monday 80 miles to the north in the small community of Talkeetna, purported to be the inspiration for the town in the TV series, ‘Northern Exposure’ and the last stop for climbers heading to Mount McKinley, North America’s tallest mountain. One unofficial reading taken at a lodge near Talkeetna even measured 98 degrees, which would tie the highest undisputed temperature recorded in Alaska. “That record was set in 1969, according to Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the online forecasting service Weather Underground. “This is the hottest heat wave in Alaska since ‘69,’ he said.
June 19, 2013 – SOUTH CAROLINA – On the seafloor just off of the U.S. East Coast lies a barely known world, explorations of which bring continual surprises. As recently as the mid-2000s, practically zero methane seeps — spots on the seafloor where gas leaks from the Earth’s crust — were thought to exist off the East Coast; while one had been reported more than a decade ago, it was thought to be one of a kind. But in the past two years, additional studies have revealed a host of new areas of seafloor rich in seeps, said Laura Brothers, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. New technologies have allowed scientists to keep locating new seeps, including one that may be the largest in the world. The findings have changed geologists’ understanding of the processes taking place beneath the seafloor. “These newly discovered [seafloor] communities show that there is much more seafloor methane venting then we previously thought, and suggests that there are many more seeps out there that we don’t know about,” Brothers said.
An even larger, previously unknown vent was found off the coast of Virginia, in research by Steve Ross, a scientist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and Sandra Brooke, a scientist at Florida State University. Discovered near the Norfolk submarine canyon, the vent is the largest in the Atlantic, and possibly in all of the world’s oceans, Ross told LiveScience. North America’s continental shelf, the underwater edge of the continent that borders the Atlantic Ocean basin, is littered with underwater canyons etched by rivers thousands of years ago when the region was above sea level. These canyons remain little explored, Ross said. But he is helping to change that through his work aboard the Okeanos Explorer, a ship owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which for the last three years has been working to explore these submarine canyons. Scientists locate the seeps by producing images of methane gas bubbles (and where they originate) using multi-beam sonar, which calculates the amount of time and distance it takes for sound waves to travel from the ship to the bubbles and back. The same technique also produces detailed imagery of the seafloor. Remote-operated vehicles can then be dispatched to bring back photos of the ocean bottom, Ross said. All of these techniques are being used to document the gas seeps, he said.
June 19, 2013 – TURKEY – German and Turkish scientists on Tuesday said they had pinpointed an extremely dangerous seismic zone less than 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the historic heart of Istanbul. Running under the Sea of Marmara just south of the city of some 15 million people, this segment of the notorious North Anatolian fault has been worryingly quiet in recent years, which may point to a buildup in tension, they wrote. “The block we identified reaches 10 kilometers (about six miles) deep along the fault zone and has displayed no seismic activity since measurements began over four years ago,” said Marco Bohnhoff, a professor at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, near Berlin. “This could be an indication that the expected Marmara earthquake could originate there.” The North Anatolian fault, created by the collision of the Anatolia Plate with the Eurasia Plate, runs 1,500 kilometers (950 miles) along northern Turkey. At the western tip of the fault, an earthquake took place in 1912 at Ganos near the Aegean Sea. On its eastern side, a domino series of earthquakes in 1939, 1942, 1951, 1967 and 1999 displaced the stress progressively westwards, bringing it ever closer to Istanbul. What is left now is a so-called earthquake gap under the Sea of Marmara, lying between the two fault stretches whose stress has been eased by the quakes. The “gap” itself, however, has not been relieved by an earthquake since 1766. Seeking a more precise view of the gap, the GFZ and Istanbul’s Kandilli Earthquake Observatory set up a network of seismic monitors in the eastern part of the sea. They calculate that the Anatolian fault normally has a westward motion of between 25 and 30 millimeters (one to 1.2 inches) per year.
Emergency personnel respond to the scene of a reported
shooting outside the Kellum Law Firm and a Wal-Mart in Greenville, N.C., Friday,
June 21, 2013.
/ WNCT According to the station, Greenville Police Chief Hassan Aden confirmed a suspect was in custody at about 1:15 p.m.
Police reportedly fired on the shooter after he turned the weapon on authorities. Aden said the shooter's condition is unknown, the station reports.
Aden reportedly said both the Kellum Law Firm and the Wal-Mart in Greenville are now considered crime scenes. He added that the victims were shot in both locations, according to the station. Another was reportedly shot outside the retail store.
The station reports witnesses said that a man with a rifle and a bullet-proof vest walked up and shot an insurance adjustor who was hiding behind a car.
The condition of the victims was not immediately available.
June 20, 2013 – CHILE – A magnitude-5.7 earthquake shook central Chile on Wednesday, causing buildings to sway in the capital but apparently causing no major damage. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake struck at 17:29 p.m. local time and its epicenter was about 60 kilometers (37 miles) east-north-east of Los Andes, Chile. Officials discarded the possibility of a tsunami and said there were no immediate reports of deaths or damages. Chile is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries. A magnitude-8.8 quake and the tsunami it unleashed in 2010 killed more than 500 people and destroyed 220,000 homes. –ABC
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