Forum: AO News Feed

A magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck Sichuan Province in China at 8:47 a.m. local time (0047 UTC) on Saturday, April 20. The earthquake was initially reported as a 7.0-magnitude, then revised down to a 6.9, according to estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey. The quake was relatively shallow, occuring at a depth of 7.6 miles (12.3 kilometers), the USGS reported. The epicenter was 31 miles (50 kilometers) west-southwest of the city of Linqiong, China and 71 miles (114 km) from Chengdu. Read More...

Ever wondered what thunderstorms look like from space? Wonder no longer. A false-color image, taken by the GOES-13 satellite yesterday afternoon (April 17), shows a series of strong thunderstorms in the Midwest. The dark orange of the cloud tops indicate that they are very cold, a marked contrast to the warm, humid air surrounding it. (The warm air can't be seen since it is transparent in this image.) This contrast between cold, upper-level air and warm, humid air beneath powers instability in the atmosphere, which gives rise to thunderstorms and occasionally tornadoes, said Bob Henson, a meteorologist and science writer for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. Read More...

An earthquake of preliminary magnitude 6.0 struck today east of the Kuril Islands, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The temblor's epicenter was 82 miles (133 kilometers) southeast of Severo-Kuril'sk, Russia and 206 miles (333 km) south of Vilyuchinsk, Russia. It originated 11.6 miles (18.6 km) deep and struck at 19:58:40 UTC (06:58:40 a.m. local time, April 20), the USGS reports.Earthquakes of this size are considered major and can cause significant damage, especially with poorly built structures. Even well designed buildings can be damaged or, in some cases, destroyed depending on the severity of the quake and a building’s proximity to the epicenter. Earthquakes of this size are sometimes followed by significant aftershocks. Read More...

The U.S. East Coast's biggest tsunami threat lurks just offshore, according to research presented today (April 19) at the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting in Salt Lake City. Recent earthquake swarms off the Massachusetts coast highlight the threat of tsunamis from nearby earthquakes, rather than faraway islands, said John Ebel, a seismologist at Boston College.The geologic setting of the quakes off the Northeast appears similar to that of a magnitude-7.3 earthquake that struck in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in 1929, Ebel said. The resulting 32-foot (10 meters) tsunami swamped southern Newfoundland and triggered underwater landslides that severed transatlantic telephone cables. Read More...

When superstorm Sandy turned and took aim at New York City and Long Island last October, ocean waves hitting each other and the shore rattled the seafloor and much of the United States -- shaking detected by seismometers across the country, University of Utah researchers found.We detected seismic waves created by the oceans waves both hitting the East Coast and smashing into each other, with the most intense seismic activity recorded when Sandy turned toward Long Island, New York and New Jersey, says Keith Koper, director of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations. We were able to track the hurricane by looking at the 'microseisms' generated by Sandy, says Oner Sufri, a University of Utah geology and geophysics doctoral student and first author of the study with Koper. As the storm turned west-northwest, the seismometers lit up. Read More...

Rescuers are combing through leveled homes and apartment buildings in the hunt for survivors following Wednesday night's fire and explosion at a small fertilizer and grain-storage company near Waco, Texas.Initial estimates put the number of fatalities at up to 15, with more than 160 people injured. The blast had enough energy to trip US Geological Survey seismographs as a magnitude 2.1 quake.How did such a powerful explosion happen? Read More...

Do you want to know what life is like when your country, state or city transitions from relative peace and prosperity to a land plagued with violence, murder, bombing, kidnappings for ransom, and the absence of law order? We need only look to our southern neighbor, Mexico, where tens of thousands of people, many of them innocent bystanders, have been killed over the last several years. The majority of the blame falls on drug cartel activity, but has its roots in the collapse of the country’s economy due to corruption and greed. While the United States is not nearly as dangerous as Mexico, with millions of people in this country being forced out of jobs, out of their homes, and into poverty, much of what we see happening there today may be ‘normal’ on our own streets in just a few short years. When the danger is right outside of your front door, how will you survive? The following strategies and tips can provide you with some effective methods for keeping your family safe in...

Authorities in China say that members of a family infected with the H7N9 flu virus may have contracted the virus via human-to-human transmission, according to the website of the English language Chinese newspaper China Daily. The family's 87-year-old father was the first person in China to die of H7N9, according to the paper. The man's elder son was also infected, and his younger son may have been. Authorities are looking into how the sons may have caught the virus. Read More...

Yellowstone's underground volcanic plumbing is bigger and better connected than scientists thought, researchers reported here today (April 17) at the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting. We are getting a much better understanding of the volcanic system of Yellowstone, said Jamie Farrell, a seismology graduate student at the University of Utah. The magma reservoir is at least 50 percent larger than previously imaged. -- Knowing the volume of molten magma beneath Yellowstone is important for estimating the size of future eruptions, Farrell told OurAmazingPlanet. Read More...

A fertilizer plant explosion in the town of West, north of Waco, has killed as many as 70 people and injured hundreds. However, no official numbers have been released.Meanwhile, the residents of the town of 2,700 are being asked to evacuate due to ammonia fumes after the explosion of West Fertilizer. The plant is located at 1471 Jerry Mashek Drive, just off Interstate-35. School buses and ambulances are being used to evacuate residents from the area. Firefighters had been called to the plant to battle a small fire around 7 p.m. Crews were working to bring the blaze under control when the explosion happened around 7:50 p.m. Read More...

No matter how technologically advanced humans become, we'll always spend a good portion of our time pathetically flailing at nature and the various disasters it attempts to grind us down with. Which makes it all the more awesome that many have actually chosen to live right on the bulls-eye of mother nature's bazooka practice target. As we all go blithely about our daily lives, just remember ... Read More...

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Today at BoingBoing, Maggie Koerth-Baker has a fascinating Q A with communications engineer and entrepreneur Brough Turner about how mobile-phone networks respond to sudden spikes in call volume, as occurred April 15 in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. Mobile phones are everywhere, but beyond spotting the odd cell tower here and there, few of us understand how they connect up to the rest of the world, and the Turner Q A does a nice job of breaking down the complex infrastructure in simple terms. Read More...

Supervolcanoes (Super-Volcano-Compilation.html) are volcanic eruptions thousands of times more powerful than normal volcanic eruptions. These types of eruptions cause significant local ecological disturbances and have profound effects on global climate (natural-disasters.html). On the scale of geological time they occur quite frequently.Volcanologists categorize eruptions by the amount of volcanic ash ejected upon eruption using the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI). The VEI consists of 8 levels, with VEI-8 eruptions considered “supervolcanic eruptions” ejecting 1000 cubic kilometers of ash or more. Read More...

Thousands of people are homeless and desperate for aid in south-western Pakistan following a deadly earthquake in neighbouring Iran toppled scores of mud brick homes and killed at least 36 people, officials said on Wednesday.The Pakistani army has deployed several hundred soldiers to help the relief effort in Mashkel, the area of Baluchistan province hit hardest by Tuesday's magnitude 7.8 earthquake. At least 35 people were killed and 150 injured in Pakistan, according to Pakistan's national disaster management authority. Iran's main state TV channel said on Wednesday that only one person was killed in Iran – a woman who was struck by falling rocks while she was collecting herbs – and that 12 people were injured. An estimated 700 houses were reported damaged in Mashkel in Pakistan, and more remote areas were being assessed, the disaster management agency said. Read More...

San Francisco's Exploratorium has always set the bar for experiential science learning. Its newly completed space full of new exhibits (and old favorites) should help it keep revolutionizing hands-on science education for years more.Visit San Francisco's Pier 15 anytime on or after April 17 and you'll get to take in a bridge enveloped in manmade fog, a 3-D topographic map of the Bay Area with data sets projected onto its surface, mouse stem cell research, and items from patients who lived at a now-shuttered mental institution. It's all part of the new Exploratorium (http://www.exploratorium.edu), a $300 million upgrade to the mother of all experiential learning science museums. Read More...

Carbon-dating of a structural beam from a Guatemalan temple confirms that the Mayan Long Count calendar did end on December 2012, leaving no room for further doomsday prophecies and miscalculations claims.The Long Count is a complex system of bars and dots that consists of five time units: Bak’tun (144,000 days); K’atun (7,200 days), Tun (360 days), Winal (20 days) and K’in (one day). The days are counted from a mythological starting point. Read More...

The strongest earthquake to hit Iran in more than 50 years was a subduction-zone quake — the same tectonic setting underlying deadly temblors in Japan, Chile and Indonesia. The magnitude-7.8 Khash earthquake struck 51 miles (82 kilometers) beneath the Earth's surface, where the Arabian Plate dives under the massive Eurasian Plate, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported. The quake hit today (April 16) at 3:14 p.m. local time (6:44 a.m. EDT). Shaking was felt from New Delhi to Dubai, and dozens of people have been reported killed by collapsed structures, according to news reports. The USGS said that there will be more than a 47 percent chance of more than 1,000 fatalities. Known as the Makran subduction zone, the plate boundary has produced some of the Middle East's biggest and deadliest earthquakes. For example, in November 1945, a magnitude-8.0 earthquake in Pakistan triggered a tsunami within the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, killing more than 4,000 people. Read More...

After Monday's bombing at the Boston Marathon, many people casting around for an explanation have focused on the date: April 15, a holiday in Massachusetts and the middle of a month with a history of violence. It's not yet known whether the perpetrator or perpetrators of the bombing, which killed three, chose April 15 for its associations with tax day or with Massachusetts' Patriots' Day, a commemoration of the first battles of the Revolutionary War. The month could simply be a coincidence, given that the Boston Marathon, always held on the third Monday of April, was a convenient target. Nevertheless, some have speculated about the symbolism. On NBC, reporter Tom Llamas told Matt Lauer that over the last 20 years in this country several terrorist attacks and school shootings have taken place around this time of the year. He cited the Virginia Tech shooting, which took place April 16, 2007; the Columbine school shooting, which occurred April 20, 1999, and the Oklahoma City bombing, which took...

The deadly attacks in Boston Monday left a city and a nation searching for answers. But it has also drawn attention to an odd historical phenomenon that happens around this time of April.April 15 will be forever linked with the horrific bombings in Boston during the Boston Marathon. At least three people were killed and another 144 were injured during the bombings. April 16, 2007 was the date of the Virginia Tech University massacre where Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 students and faculty to death and injured 23 others before committing suicide. Read More...