Tornadoes have been few and far between this year — a relief to residents of Tornado Alley, but a letdown to scientists studying the swirling storms out in the field.

While tornadoes can occur at any time of year, spring is historically the most active period for the storms.

Many tornadoes have been spotted this year and several have caused damage to homes and businesses around the country, particularly in the usual hotspots of the Midwest and Southeast. But this storm season has been quieter than usual overall, particularly when it comes to the most intense killer storms.

To date, there have been 839 tornadoes this year, compared with 1,304 through the end of June last year.

"The trends in disasters, particularly from climate change, are of enormous concern," said John Holmes, U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

"We can only expect that this kind of trend is going to continue," he told a news conference.

According to an article in NewScientist, there may be a "super volcano" brewing under the mountain, which has been steaming and stewing since its notorious eruption on May 18, 1980.

Snippet from the Article : If the structure beneath the three volcanoes is indeed a vast bubble of partially molten rock, it would be comparable in size to the biggest magma chambers ever discovered, such as the one below Yellowstone National Park.

Every few hundred thousand years, such chambers can erupt as so-called supervolcanoes - the Yellowstone one did so about 640,000 years ago. These enormous eruptions can spew enough sunlight-blocking ash into the atmosphere to cool the climate by several degrees Celsius.

Could Mount St Helens erupt like this? "A really big, big eruption is possible if it is one of those big systems like Yellowstone ," Hill says. "I don't think it will be tomorrow, but I couldn't try to predict when it would happen."

Further measurements probing the structure of the crust beneath the other volcanoes in the area could help determine if the zone connects to them all, Hill says. He presented his team's results on 27 May at the Joint Assembly geophysics meeting in Toronto, Canada.

Besides shaking skyscrapers, a major hurricane could send the Atlantic Ocean surging into the nation's largest city, flooding Wall Street, subways and densely packed neighborhoods.

As a new hurricane season starts Monday , some scientists and engineers are floating an ambitious solution: Barriers to choke off the surging sea and protect flood-prone areas.

The plan involves deploying giant barriers and gates that would move into place — in some cases rising out of the water — for storms. One proposal calls for a 5-mile-long barrier between New Jersey and Queens.

No one has formally proposed the structures, which would require extensive government reviews and billions of dollars.

 See Also : 5 Worst Fears about Hurricanes

The researchers were able to pinpoint the exact timing of the massive eruption thanks to a layer of fossilized rock which showed mass extinction of different life forms -- clearly linking the volcanic blasts to a major environmental catastrophe.

"The abrupt extinction of marine life we can clearly see in the fossil record firmly links giant volcanic eruptions with global environmental catastrophe," said Paul Wignall, a professor and palaeontologist at the University of Leeds, who was the lead author of the research paper in the May 29 edition of Science.

The magnitude-7.1 quake struck at 2:24 a.m. (4:24 a.m. EDT; 0824 GMT) off the Caribbean coast of Honduras, 80 miles (130 kilometers) northeast of the beach town of La Ceiba,U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado. according to the

"People were running for the door," Alfredo Cedeno said from the reception desk at the Gran Hotel Paris in La Ceiba. "You could really feel it and you could see it—the water came out of the pool."

"It was an earthquake of great proportions," she said.

Many of the other faults in western Washington could be connected to the South Whidbey Island Fault in a network similar to the San Andreas Fault system in California, Craig Weaver, the regional earthquake coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey based in Seattle, said in an interview Wednesday.

Suzette Kimball, the USGS acting director, told Congress on Thursday that there was "strong evidence" other faults in western Washington were connected to the South Whidbey fault.

"It appears there is a very large (fault) system in the Cascade arc," she told the House interior appropriations subcommittee.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had a magnitude of 5.7 and was centered 90 miles (140 kilometers) southeast of the capital.

Radio Formula said there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

Residents across the metropolis of 20 million gathered on sidewalks, afraid to go back into their homes and offices while police surveyed streets.

A pair of new studies say that more people than ever lie in harm’s way from earthquakes , droughts , floods and other disasters , largely because of a surge in urban populations in developing countries.

Smaller or poorer countries can be devastated by disasters that are relatively inconsequential in places shielded by size or wealth, said one of the reports, a United Nations study that is being released Sunday in Bahrain. That study, the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, compared the impact of cyclones in the Philippines and Japan, for example. While more people in Japan are exposed to cyclones , the estimated annual death toll from such storms is 17 times higher in the Philippines, the study said.

And while the disaster itself is probably unavoidable, knowing which areas will be most affected can do a great deal to mitigate the aftermath. For example, where will the strongest ground movement occur, and how long will the shaking last?

Obviously, when it comes to new construction in an area with a high probability of an earthquake in the relatively near future, this knowledge is invaluable. Engineers crave this sort of data when they are designing the buildings of tomorrow.

Enter the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), an institution funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U. S. Geological Survey in recognition of the seismic hazard that looms over Southern California like the heavy Los Angeles smog. In an effort to better understand when and where the next Big One will hit hardest, SCEC is taking advantage of the recently launched, NSF-funded supercomputer known as Kraken.

Eventually one will come to your coast, it could be in 2009 or it may be 100 years from now, but the potential for great disaster requires you to be ready just like when you put on your car seat belt each time you start your car, never expecting to get in a crash."

The volcanoes in the central African nation could be about to erupt, threatening Goma, which has a population of more than half a million people, scientists said Thursday. They made their observations on visits to the two volcanic peaks of Nyiragongo and Nyamulagira.

"The eruption could be tomorrow, or the day after — or at any other time," said Dieudonne Wafula, the head of Goma's Volcanological Observatory.

Nice. We are the viruses.

While in theory it would be extremely difficult to truly destroy this planet , it's not such a stretch for some scientists to imagine us making it a place that doesn't support humans. The planet would go on, the thinking goes, but it'd get rid of us much like we shake the flu.

The scenario, proposed by scientists, is undergoing further examination to verify radiocarbon dates and to rule out other causes of the upheaval.

Sedimentary deposits from more than 20 cores in New York and New Jersey indicate that some sort of violent force swept the Northeast coastal region in 300BC.

Such a wave today would flood Wall Street and the Long Island Expressway.

Pigs are notorious incubators of influenza viruses and can be infected with more than one type of virus from different species. This is why they are believed to be critical in the evolution of new influenza flu viruses that can jump the "species barrier" from animals into humans to cause pandemic flu.

40 CASES IN UNITED STATES...
EU: Don't travel to USA and Mexico...
*US calls EU travel warning unwarranted...
**Russia to check all planes from Americas...
STATE DEPT ISSUES TRAVEL WARNING...
UK INVESTIGATING 17 POSSIBLE CASES...
**2 CONFIRMED...
Has globalization made us more catastrophe-prone?
PIG SICK: NYC...
BLOOMBERG: 28 cases from 1 school...
Flu could boost gov't intervention further...
CDC: No vaccine prevents...
Outbreak Triggers Global Mobilization...

The heavily populated coast of Guadeloupe will have little warning if a tsunami is triggered by the collapse of a volcano on the nearby island of Dominica.

A team of geologists, led by Dr Richard Teeuw from the University of Portsmouth, have discovered that a flank of the volcano Morne aux Diables ("Devils' Peak") shows signs of collapse and if so, a million-ton chunk of rock could crash into the sea, producing tsunami waves up to almost 3 metres (10 feet) high.

Such a rock fall could also weaken three million tones of rock upslope, potentially resulting in much larger landslides and waves of up to five metres.

While global warming is widely accepted as a reality by scientists and many governments and industrial leaders, progress to curb greenhouse gases and other forms of pollution remains limited. The current economic climate will likely make pollution control efforts more difficult, analysts say.

Recent studies, as well as the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have pointed to some of the likely effects of uncurbed greenhouse gas emissions: rising global temperatures, rising sea levels, Arctic sea ice melt, the disappear of glaciers, epic floods in some areas and intense drought in others.

These effects are intensified when combined with other forms of pollution the world's rising population.

Humans will face widespread water shortages. Famine and disease will increase. Earth’s landscape will transform radically, with a quarter of plants and animals at risk of extinction.

Analysis of sediments in a Ghanaian lake shows the last of these "megadroughts" ended 250 years ago.

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers suggest man-made climate change may make the situation worse.

But, they say, the droughts are going to happen again anyway, and societies should begin planning for them.

If the predictions are accurate, 2009 would be much calmer than last year, which was one of the most active seasons on record with 16 tropical storms, including eight that became hurricanes.

Hurricanes Bertha in July, Gustav in August, Ike in September, Omar in October and Paloma in November were all intense storms that wreaked serious damage in the United States and the Caribbean.

Of 12 predicted tropical cyclones for 2009, six were forecast to become hurricanes, including two expected to develop into intense or major hurricanes Category Three or higher.  Earlier predictions from the group had called for 14 tropical cyclones -- or what forecasters call "named storms" -- this hurricane season, lasting between June 1 and December 30. 

A magnitude 6.9 earthquake has hit at sea near the Kuril island chain between northern Japan and Russia, but there have been no reports of damage or casualties.

Japan's Meteorological Agency says the quake struck at 1:24 p.m. (0424 GMT) Tuesday in the waters near the Kurils, about 500 miles off the northeastern coast of Hokkaido. The earthquake occurred about 6 miles below the sea surface. It posed no danger of a tsunami.

Russia seized the island chain in the closing days of World War II. The disagreement over the four islands, called the Kurils in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan, have kept the two countries from signing a formal peace treaty.

 Source : Fox... Faux News

As Earth and the moon grind through their gravitational ballet, our planet gets tugged hard near the equator. The force is so strong that as the moon passes overhead each day, it pulls Earth's surface up 11.8 inches.

Scientists have known about this effect for over a century and have speculated that it might cause earthquakes. Writing in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Laurent Metivier of Paris Diderot University in France and a team of researchers now claim they've found a distinct connection between solid Earth tides and earthquakes .

All round the paddock in which the dead had been laid out under a line of trees, there were other signs of the unbearable lightness of modern disaster: a woman in a blush-pink dressing gown who stood at the end of the line of coffins making the sign of the cross as the tears gushed down her cheeks; a man in a souvenir cap advertising Radio 101 who sat on a rock with his head bowed, just a yard or two from the grimly swathed bodies of his neighbours; the woman in the spangled Playboy bunny top who was pleading with her half-delirious, tear-stained friend not to go back into the centre of the village where rescue workers were burrowing in the ruins of what until 3.30am yesterdayhad been a pretty little village under the snow-capped Apennines.

Onna had about 300 inhabitants. One of the team of undertakers said they had already removed five. And within a half an hour another three corpses had been added to the sad line in the paddock, carried out of the centre by weary-looking rescue workers, their faces caked in powdery dust.

In villages and towns nearby a similar ritual was being observed. By last night more than 150 people had been confirmed dead, 1,500 injured, in Italy's deadliest earthquake for nearly 30 years.

Some 5,000 rescuers are picking through rubble in the walled medieval city and nearby towns and villages, some of them said to have been virtually destroyed.

Tents are being put up in tennis courts and on football pitches to house some of the 30,000-40,000 homeless.

The number of people injured has been put at 1,500.

ITALY MUZZLED SCIENTIST WHO FORESAW QUAKE...
6.3 MAG; EAST OF ROME...
MAY HAVE 'VIRTUALLY DESTROYED' ENTIRE TOWNS...
60 pulled alive from rubble...
Damage to Historical Monuments 'Significant'...

The quake struck 53 miles northeast of Rome, said the US Geological Survey.

Some residents in the old town of l'Aquila, east of Rome in the mountainous Abruzzo region, ran out into the streets as buildings in the centre of the town collapsed.

Journalist Nick Pisa told Sky News: "A students' halls of residence has collapsed and emergency services say people are trapped there.

"A church bell town has also collapsed. One local council member has described the centre of the town being strewn with rubble and masonry. He could hear people calling for help.

"He said he had been told that a man and a woman had been killed."

Officials later confirmed two fatalities.

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The quake hit at 1:55pm (0355 GMT) with an epicentre about 31 kilometres (19 miles) east-southeast of the coastal town of Wewak, at a depth of 10 kilometres (6.2 miles), the USGS said.

The tremblor was not expected to generate a tsunami, said assistant director of the PNG government's Geological Survey Department Chris McKee.

"I've had no reports of any damage and a 6.3 magnitude quake is unlikely to generate a tsunami," he told AFP.

Papua New Guinea was last hit by a major earthquake on March 25, when a 6.0 magnitude quake hit 117 kilometres (73 miles) south-southwest of Rabaul, without significant damage.

The impoverished country is home to many active volcanoes and sits on the Pacific "Ring of Fire" where several tectonic plates collide. The region is frequently rocked by earthquakes.