Hurricane warnings and watches were issued for portions of the North Carolina and Virginia coastlines Wednesday as forecasters warned Category 3 Hurricane Earl will be approaching the East Coast by late Thursday.
Preliminary data from an Air Force plane showed Earl could be restrengthening and may grow into a Category 4 hurricane later Wednesday, the National Hurricane Center said.
Mandatory evacuation orders were issued for Ocracoke Island, on North Carolina's Outer Banks, and Cape Lookout National Seashore, as well as for visitors to Hatteras Island.
Earl was downgraded to Category 3 early Wednesday, but was still a major hurricane. National Hurricane Center Director Bill Read told reporters that the cyclone's 10-mph reduction in winds was a "fluctuation" rather than a true weakening of intensity. CNN meteorologist Chad Myers compared it to Hurricane Katrina, which brought severe damage to the Gulf Coast when it slammed ashore as a strong Category 3 hurricane in 2005. [ NOAA ]
After slamming the Leeward Islandstoday, Hurricane Earl may track dangerously close to the East Coast of the United States later this week. The Leeward Islands will suffer a blow from Hurricane Earl's damaging winds and torrential rain today.
Tuesday into Wednesday, Earl is expected to be a major hurricane curving more to the northwest into the open waters of the southwestern Atlantic Ocean. The arrival of a new storm system should then turn Earl more to the northeast later in the week. That turn should spare the United States a direct hit from Earl. However, the AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center is concerned that Earl will still pass dangerously close to the East Coast.
North Carolina's Outer Banks and Massachusetts' Cape Cod are at greatest risk for being grazed by Hurricane Earl's wind and rain late this week. The hurricane may then threaten Nova Scotia and Newfoundland next weekend. It should be stressed that the exact track of Hurricane Earl for late this week is far from etched in stone. [ ACCUWEATHER.COM ]
Hurricane Earl lashed northern Leeward Islands with heavy rain and strong winds Monday after strengthening into a Category 2 storm. Hotels were shut tightly overnight as tourists sought shelter inside their rooms.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Earl could become a major hurricane Monday night or early Tuesday.
"It is possible that Earl could become a Category 4 hurricane as we get into the middle to late portions of the week," hurricane center specialist Michael Brennan said.
Hurricane warnings were in effect for Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, St. Kitts, Nevis, Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Barthelemy, St. Maarten, Saba, St. Eustatius, the British Virgin Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands. [ AP NEWS ]
With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere's recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country's tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.
Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.
"There's just a huge number of dead fish," says Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. "In the rivers near Santa Cruz there's about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river."
With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change, scientists are hurrying to coordinate research into the impact, and how quickly the ecosystem is likely to recover.
Five years after Katrina, much has been done to help bolster the Gulf Coast against devastation if another Katrina comes along. Still, problems remain, many tied to Mother Nature. Wetlands erosion , Diminishing delta, A city continuing to sink, Living too close to shore, Will the levees hold? [ MSNBC ]
The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by at least two meteorite impacts, rather than a single strike, a new study suggests.
Previously, scientists had identified a huge impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the event that spelled doom for the dinosaurs.
Now evidence for a second impact in the Ukraine has been uncovered. This raises the possibility that the Earth may have been bombarded by a whole shower of meteorites.
The new findings are published in the journal Geology by a team lead by Professor David Jolley of Aberdeen University.
When first proposed in 1980, the idea that a meteorite impact had killed the dinosaurs proved hugely controversial. Later, the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico, US, was hailed as "the smoking gun" that confirmed the theory.
Astronomers are predicting that a massive solar storm, much bigger in potential than the one that caused spectacular light shows on Earth earlier this month, is to strike our planet in 2012 with a force of 100 million hydrogen bombs.
Several US media outlets have reported that NASA was warning the massive flare this month was just a precursor to a massive solar storm building that had the potential to wipe out the entire planet's power grid.
Despite its rebuttal, NASA's been watching out for this storm since 2006 and reports from the US this week claim the storms could hit on that most Hollywood of disaster dates - 2012.
Similar storms back in 1859 and 1921 caused worldwide chaos, wiping out telegraph wires on a massive scale. The 2012 storm has the potential to be even more disruptive.
"The general consensus among general astronomers (and certainly solar astronomers) is that this coming Solar maximum (2012 but possibly later into 2013) will be the most violent in 100 years," News.com.au quoted astronomy lecturer and columnist Dave Reneke as saying.
It's not just our country that's a little over-crowded - our whole solar system is too.
A fascinating colour-coded video illustrates how we have become increasingly aware of the number of asteroids flying close to Earth as telescopes improve.
The footage shows the discovery of every new asteroid over the past three decades and charts it on an increasingly congested map of the solar system.
Created by British astronomer Scott Manley, the three-minute clip - which is the equivalent of two months per second - starts with a sprinkling of white 'dust' around the edge of the planets. [ DAILYMAIL UK ]
Hurricane Danielle became a Category 4 storm early Friday far out over the Atlantic as it headed in Bermuda's direction and threatened to bring dangerous rip currents to the U.S. East Coast.
Danielle's maximum sustained winds increased to near 135 mph (215 kph) with some additional strengthening possible.
Danielle was located early Friday about 545 miles (875 kilometers) southeast of Bermuda and moving north-northwest near 12 mph (19 kph). The hurricane is forecast to pass well east of Bermuda on Saturday night. But large waves and dangerous surf conditions were expected in Bermuda over the next few days, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.
Swells from Danielle would also begin arriving on the East Coast of the U.S. on Saturday and were likely to cause dangerous rip currents through the weekend.
Also in the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Earl was moving west with maximum sustained winds near 45 mph (75 kph). Forecasters said Earl could become a hurricane by Saturday night. [ GUARDIAN UK ]
New Orleans has only gradually resurrected itself after the city drowned five years ago this week following Hurricane Katrina. That process echoes an unpleasantly familiar drama that has played out countless times around the world during human history.
Building on the coasts and near the fertile floodplains of a river has allowed settlements access to water for trade and agriculture since the earliest days of Egypt and Mesopotamia, according to Greg Aldrete, a historian at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay. That choice has often come back to haunt people when the floodwaters rose.
"That tension has existed since the very dawn of civilization," Aldrete told LiveScience. "People tend to build cities in floodplains." [Graphic:What Happened in New Orleans]
Disaster has frequently followed, even if none has quite rivaled the biblical flood which set Noah's ark afloat. The Mississippi River broke through the levees and displaced hundreds of thousands of Americans in seven states in 1927. China has historically suffered great loss of life through floods, including the 1931 flooding of the Yellow River that may have killed millions. [ LIVE SCIENCE ]
A galactic "super-volcano" in the massive galaxy M87 is erupting and blasting gas outwards, as witnessed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NSF's Very Large Array. The cosmic volcano is being driven by a giant black hole in the galaxy's center and preventing hundreds of millions of new stars from forming
Astronomers studying this black hole and its effects have been struck by the remarkable similarities between it and a volcano in Iceland that made headlines earlier this year.
At a distance of about 50 million light years, M87 is relatively close to Earth and lies at the center of the Virgo cluster, which contains thousands of galaxies. M87's location, coupled with long observations over Chandra's lifetime, has made it an excellent subject for investigations of how a massive black hole impacts its environment. [ SCIENCE DAILY ]
Earthquakes strike along California's San Andreas Fault more often than scientists previously thought, a new study suggests. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and Arizona State charted temblors that occurred there stretching back 700 years.
They found that large ruptures have occurred on the Carrizo Plain portion of the San Andreas Fault — about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles — as often as every 45 to 144 years. But the last big quake was in 1857, more than 150 years ago.
The researchers said that while it's possible the fault is experiencing a natural lull, they think it's more likely a major quake could happen soon.
Scientists are taking a hard look at a proposal to keep a high-tech, yet low-cost, eye on the heavens for asteroids or comets that may have Earth in their crosshairs.
The proposal is dubbed ATLAS short for the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System and calls for two telescopes to serve as an early warning system against incoming asteroids. Scientists hope such a system could provide many hours or days notice of an impending Earth impact.
Leading the ATLAS effort here are space scientists John Tonry and Robert Jedicke of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.
As sketched out, the proposed ATLAS project would include two observatories separated by about 60 miles that can simultaneously scan the entire night sky visible from their locations twice a night. Each observatory would be composed of four commercially available telescopes, with two at each site observing the same region of the sky. ( 5 reasons to care about asteroids.) [ MSNBC ]
