Tropical Storm Florence, presently circulating in the south-central Atlantic Ocean, may move north and east and make landfall somewhere along the US East Coast later this week. If the storm reaches this area of the ocean, unsually warm water will cause it to increase rapidly in strength. This is the same effect that has been present in the Gulf of Mexico since the early part of this century.
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A series of 70 major earthquakes that have occurred around the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire has prompted fears that California may be hit by the dreaded "Big One", an anticipated earthquake with a magnitude powerful enough to have catastrophic consequences for the state. The sequence of earthquakes struck Indonesia, Bolivia, Japan and Fiji, but so far no major seismic activity has been reported in California. But could this recent rash of earthquakes mean that the "Big One" could be close behind?
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It mightn’t be quite a case of the flapping of a Brazilian butterfly’s wings causing a tornado in Texas, but a team of climate researchers has found a correlation between melting Arctic sea ice and the formation of tornadoes in the United States, with fewer tornadoes being reported when northern sea ice is unseasonably low.
"A relationship between Arctic sea ice and tornadoes in the US may seem unlikely," says study co-author Jeff Trapp, an atmospheric sciences researcher with the University of Illinois at Urbana. "But it is hard to ignore the mounting evidence in support of the connection."
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