Scientists have known for decades that hidden under those impressive vistas at sites such as Death Valley and Yellowstone National Park are magma pools that under the right conditions can trigger explosive eruptions.

Now, new research is changing scientists' understanding of the timing of those eruptions, and prompting them to call for greater monitoring of sites to help save lives when the next big volcano explodes.

Two recent papers highlight the shift. One looked at a Death Valley volcano thought to be 10,000 years old and found it last erupted just 800 years ago, and is still an eruption danger. The other found that large caldera volcanoes, such as the one under Crater Lake in Oregon, can recharge in a matter of decades, rather than the thousands of years previously thought.

A Blast from the past has left fascinating hints that volcanic eruptions could be predicted several decades in advance. Volcanoes can signal their intent to erupt days or months ahead of time, giving authorities a chance to evacuate and secure the area. Now evidence of the events leading up to a Bronze Age eruption suggests it might be possible to extend that warning period even further.

The Santorini volcano in the Greek islands lay dormant for 18,000 years before blowing its top around 3500 years ago, perhaps contributing to the demise of the Minoan civilisation. A close look at the pumices produced in the eruption shows that Santorini woke up around 100 years earlier. [ns]

A powerful earthquake injured scores of people, buckled buildings and caused power outages on the coast south of Lima early Monday morning, with no immediate reports of fatalities, officials said. Most people were injured when they fled their homes in panic, or when they were struck by collapsing walls.

The study says Haiti's 7.0-magnitude earthquake two years ago is likely to be the first of several quakes of a similarly powerful magnitude.

The Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake caused widespread damage in the Haitian capital and surrounding cities. Officials say the disaster killed 314,000 people and toppled thousands of crudely built homes. [yahoo]

Severe storms and possible tornadoes pounded the South on Monday, injuring more than 100 people and killing at least two in Alabama, including a man who lived in an area devastated by a deadly twister outbreak in the spring.

Homes were flattened, windows were blown out of cars and roofs were peeled back in the middle of the night in the rural community of Oak Grove near Birmingham. As dawn broke, residents surveyed the damage and officials used chainsaws to clear fallen trees.

Oak Grove was hit hard in April when tornadoes ravaged Alabama, killing about 240 people, though officials said none of the same neighborhoods was struck again. Officials had to reschedule a meeting Monday to receive a study on Alabama's response to the spring tornadoes. [weather ]

Experts in Japan have cautioned that the chances of a powerful earthquake striking Tokyo in the next four years could be as high as 70%, a more alarming scenario for the city's 13 million people than predicted by the government.

The earthquake research institute at Tokyo University said that in the worst case, an earthquake of magnitude 7 would hit the southern part of metropolitan Tokyo by 2016, while the chances of a similar disaster occurring within 30 years are as high as 98%.The government, by contrast, estimates the possibility of an earthquake that size striking the capital at 70% in the next three decades.

Winds toss SUVs as if they were matchbox cars. Trees and limbs become deadly projectiles hurtling toward homes. Families huddle in basements, storm shelters and interior bathrooms.

Those are just a few of the scenes played out every year when tornado season hits. It's a weather myth that tornadoes are solely features of spring or summer. Tornadoes can happen during winter as well.

Meteorologists can see a busy hurricane season brewing months ahead, but until now there has been no such crystal ball for tornadoes , which are much smaller and more volatile.This information gap took on new urgency after tornadoes in 2011 killed more than 550 people, more than in the previous 10 years combined, including a devastating outbreak in April that racked up $5 billion in insured losses. Now, a new study of short-term climate trends offers the first framework for predicting tornado activity up to a month out with current technology, and possibly further out as climate models improve, giving communities a chance to plan.

The study may also eventually open a window on the question of whether tornadoes are growing more frequent due to long-term climate warming. [sciday]

Imagine that, as you sit at your desk or in your living room reading this story, your entire city suddenly snaps a foot to the south.

That's what happened to the city of Kohat, Pakistan, in 1992. A magnitude-6.0 earthquake moved a 30-square-mile (80-square-kilometer) swath of land one foot (30 centimeters) horizontally in a split second, leveling buildings and killing more than 200 people.

The area hadn't experienced many temblors before, making the earthquake an unusual occurrence. Now, 20 years later, geologists have used satellite and seismic data to track down the cause of that rare quake — an equally rare type of fault. [msnbc]

The UK could stand "at most a week" of disruption if a natural or man-made disaster struck before severe problems, economic and social, that would bring chaos to the country, according to a new report from the international affairs thinktank Chatham House.

The authors blame a complacent reliance on the globalised economy and the widespread adoption of "just-in-time" business models that stress lean, ultra-efficient operations with little slack built in for any unforeseen circumstances or stock held in reserve. With public services and businesses being run as if constantly in crisis mode, even in normal circumstances, there is little flexibility when a real crisis strikes.

• It's similar in size to Mount Pinatubo, which in 1991 gave us the biggest eruption of the 20th century
  
• Billions of tons of ash and magma would be ejected
• Southern England would be covered in ash

A sleeping super-volcano in Germany is showing worrying signs of waking up.

It's lurking just 390 miles away underneath the tranquil Laacher See lake near Bonn and is capable of ejecting billions of tons of magma. This monster erupts every 10 to 12,000 years and last went off 12,900 years ago, so it could blow at any time.

Research is continuing on the now-shuttered injection well at Youngstown and seismic activity, but it might take a year for the wastewater-related rumblings in the earth to dissipate, said John Armbruster of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.

Brine wastewater dumped in wells comes from drilling operations, including the so-called fracking process to extract gas from underground shale that has been a source of concern among environmental groups and some property owners. Injection wells have also been suspected in quakes in Ashtabula in far northeast Ohio, and in Arkansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, Armbruster said. [yahoo]

This is the time of year when some otherwise sensible people offer a prediction as to how the World's economy will unfold during the forthcoming year. Such forecasts are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless because the evolution of the economy depends on events that cannot be predicted with the requisite accuracy. 

For example, the Atlantic Island of La Palma, just off the northwest coast of Africa, periodically sheds a few trillion tons of congealed lava into the ocean setting off a tsunami of such destructiveness as to make the 2011 Japan tsunami look like a ripple on the surface of a rock pool.

...far bigger than anything ever witnessed in modern times. It will surge across the entire Atlantic in a matter of hours, engulfing the whole US east coast, sweeping away everything in its path up to 20km inland. Boston would be hit first, followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami and the Caribbean. [bbc]

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not issue a tsunami warning. The USGS gave the quake a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 before downgrading it to 6.8.

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The idea that the world will end with the coming of the new year, as some claim the ancient Maya predicted , has spawned a series of proposed methods for this planetary disaster - galactic forces , Earth's magnetic poles flipping, the eruption of a  supervolcano.

Though it has been shown that the Mayans did not in fact predict 2012 would bring the end of the world, there have been supervolcano eruptions in Earth's past that have wrought significant destruction. One such eruption may have been the cause of a major ancient mass extinction event.

But is another supervolcano eruption on the way? At the dawn of the new year, researchers say - Don't hold your breath.

Many of us may remember the jaw-dropping images of the May 22, 2011, tornado that tore through Joplin, Mo., killing 158 people and leaving an incredible 14-mile path of destruction. But that system was only one of the record-breaking tornado events this year. Data compiled by meteorologist Jeffrey Masters shows that when deaths, damage and financial losses are considered, 2011 can be called the worst U.S. tornado year on record.

Masters, who runs the Weather Underground, a Web site that provides local forecasts, analyzes severe weather and turns raw storm data from the National Weather Service into captivating maps and data visualizations, has posted a compilation of record and near-record tornado events for 2011. Some notable stats from his post are below. A blow-by-blow description of the year’s major tornadoes, as well as a list of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history, can be found on NOAA’s 2011 tornado review page. [sciam]

In a year when disaster caused unprecedented economic losses around the globe, Australia may have been on the right track when it started passing the hat.

It was in February that the Australian government introduced a flood levy to help pay for the damage that Mother Nature wrought upon Queensland state.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the government needed money to pay for repairs in the wake of "the most expensive season of natural disasters our nation has ever known."

It wouldn't be long before other countries found themselves wrestling with similar challenges, determining how to rebuild in the face of record disaster. [ctv.ca]

As a storm that killed more than 650 in the southern Philippines raged outside the store where she works, Amor Limbago worriedly called home to check on her parents, but their cellphones just kept ringing and later went dead.

Limbago, 21, rushed home as soon as the flash floods receded and confirmed her worst fear: Her parents and seven other relatives were gone, swept away from their hut by the river. They had eagerly planned a small Christmas dinner in that hut just days earlier.

"I returned and saw that our house was completely gone," a weeping Limbago told The Associated Press from Cagayan de Oro city. "There was nothing but mud all over and knee-deep floodwaters." [abc]

Two top U.S. hurricane forecasters, famous across Deep South hurricane country, are quitting the practice of making a seasonal forecast in December because it doesn’t work.

William Gray and Phil Klotzbach say a look back shows their past 20 years of forecasts had no predictive value.

The two scientists from Colorado State University will still discuss different probabilities of hurricane seasons in December. But the shift signals how far humans are, even with supercomputers, from truly knowing what our weather will do in the long run. [link]

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People keen to witness the devastating effects of a natural disaster can now take a virtual tour through Japan's tsunami-hit communities.

Google Street View has digitally archived vast areas of the north-eastern disaster zone.

The massive project to document the damage and rebuilding effort is aimed at providing the world with an accurate picture of the devastation caused by the natural disaster.

The internet giant announced in July that it was trying to map the 44,000km of affected roads following the March 11 magnitude nine earthquake which triggered the tsunami. [dm]

Until a year ago, if you wanted to fly into a storm in the name of science, you had to strap yourself into an airplane and hold on tight. Now, thanks to a new radar fleet, scientists can create models that let them fly into these dangerous storms from the safety of the computer lab.

Tools such as these "fancy new radars" will help forecasters in the future to better predict severe weather and improve scientists' understanding of climate change, said Gerald Mace, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah. Mace talked about how these new radars will help scientists plug gaps in their climate models by giving unprecedented looks inside storms during a talk today (Dec. 8) the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

"We all know that our ability to predict climate is not where we want it to be at this point," Mace said. "The majority of this uncertainty is due to the clouds in these models." [msnbc]

Magnitude 6.5 quake kills at least three people and causes panic from Mexican capital to resort of Acapulco.

A magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck Mexico's western Guerrero state on Saturday night, shaking buildings and causing panic from Mexico City to the Pacific resort of Acapulco. Officials said at least three people died but there were no reports of widespread damage.

The US Geological Service said the epicentre was 40.3 miles (65km) underground, about 26 miles south-west of Iguala in Guerrero and 103 miles south-south-west of Mexico City. [guardian]

While Earth seems to be getting slammed with frequent mega-earthquakes lately, big quakes are not on the rise.

That's the message from two studies presented here this week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Two research teams using different statistical methods both found that the global risk of big earthquakes is not higher than usual. Neither team found any evidence that big earthquakes can trigger other big earthquakes over long distances.

"We tend to see patterns in random processes, that's just something we do," said Andrew Michael, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who presented his work Wednesday. "In particular, people expect when something's random for it to be uniformly spread out, but, in fact, really random processes have a lot of clustering in them."

America smashed the record for billion-dollar weather disasters this year with a deadly dozen - and still counting.

With an almost biblical onslaught of twisters, floods, snow, drought, heat and wildfire, the U.S. in 2011 has seen more weather catastrophes that caused at least $1 billion in damage than it did in all of the 1980s, even after the dollar figures from back then are adjusted for inflation.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration added two disasters to the list Wednesday, bringing the total to 12. The two are the Texas, New Mexico and Arizona wildfires and the mid-June tornadoes and severe weather. NOAA uses $1 billion as a benchmark for the worst weather disasters.

The fissures now scar the seafloor where peaceful clam beds once lay, according to Takeshi Tsuji, a researcher at Kyoto University in Japan. Along with seismic studies, the fissures, revealed by manned submersible vehicles that investigated the seafloor after the quake, show how the crust around the quake's epicenter expanded and cracked.

Tsuji and his colleagues had a unique opportunity to see how the seafloor changed after the magnitude-9.0 quake struck on March 11. Before the quake, the researchers had taken video and photographs of the seafloor on the continental side of the Japan Trench, near where the crust would later rupture, generating an enormous tsunami that killed about 20,000 people. [msnbc]