Gusts of up to 62mph made waters around islands unsafe; and Hurricane Ernesto passed over Bermuda
Hundreds of people were evacuated as flash flooding struck homes and holiday lets in the Balearic Islands last week, with many parts receiving about 100mm of rain within 24 hours.
Heavy downpours and severe thunderstorms hit the islands on Wednesday and Thursday, bringing hail and strong winds. The local authorities told people not to leave their homes on Wednesday, when the weather was at its worst. The town of Sóller, on Mallorca, received the highest 24-hour total of 114mm, but 68mm of this fell within just one hour, with 19mm falling in 10 minutes.
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08/19/2024 - 03:24
08/18/2024 - 23:00
While tourists flock to the Italian island in greater numbers, a water crisis is intensifying for its rural population
For the first time in four generations of his family’s farming history, Vito Amantia’s threshers have lain silent this year. The 650,000kg of wheat that his farm would usually produce in a year has been lost, parched and withered under the scorching sun and relentless drought.
“A seasoned farmer doesn’t need to check the weather forecast to understand what the weather will be like,” says Amantia, 68, who farms on the Catania plain in eastern Sicily. “Already last January, I knew it would be a disastrous year. The wheat seedlings that normally reached 80cm stopped at 5cm. Then they dried up.”
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08/18/2024 - 12:44
Attendees who fell ill suffered from dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke in 96F temperatures
More than 100 people were treated for heat-related illness at a Colorado airshow on Saturday, with attendees describing a lack of shade and free water on festival grounds as temperatures soared to 96F (36C) highs.
The Colorado Springs fire department said those who fell ill at the Pike’s Peak regional airshow suffered conditions such as dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke, according to KRDO.
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08/18/2024 - 05:00
The death of a young woman falling from the famous – and ever more popular – Half Dome in Yosemite ignites debate
In 1974, Scott Crollard, a teen on a church youth group trip, casually climbed cables to help reach the lofty summit of Half Dome, whose name describes a unique rock formation in California from which you can see the Yosemite Valley some 5,000ft below.
“I remember sitting on the edge of the lip of Half Dome with my buddy and just gazing over the edge. And when he got off, he kind of nudged me, and I darn near fell off the thing just because we were so nonchalant about it,” said Collard, now a 65-year-old retired emergency room physician in St Louis who again ascended Half Dome in 2017 with more appreciation for its magnitude.
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08/17/2024 - 15:00
Cattle at a Queensland feedlot were fed red seaweed for 200 days in one of the longest trials of the additive – but experts say it’s not farm-ready
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It takes a tasty treat to lure a cow’s head into the narrow channel of a solar-powered contraption mounted to the back of a trailer.
Once inside, and munching away at the sweet pellet, sensors measure the potency of the animal’s methane-laden burps. By the water trough, another device calculates the cow’s weight, and over the fence tubs of feed on scales record how much it eats.
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08/17/2024 - 12:00
Travel companies are reporting a surge of interest in people wanting to get away from light pollution and into nature
For the campers at the Dark Skies site near the Cambrian mountains in Wales, the blackness of the pitches is an important draw.
“When people come, they are blown away by the night sky,” said Tanya Jordan, who owns the site and holiday cottages nearby. “We get people who know about it and come for that reason.”
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08/17/2024 - 10:15
Convicted of non-violent offences in Insulate Britain action, Dr Diana Warner is second GP to have licence suspended, which a medical tribunal ruled could damage patient trust
A retired GP has become the second doctor to have their medical licence suspended after being convicted of non-violent offences during peaceful climate protests.
Dr Diana Warner, who worked as a GP for 35 years in surgeries around Bristol, was imprisoned for a total of six weeks for twice breaching private anti-protest injunctions banning people from blocking traffic on the M25 in 2021 and 2022. She was also jailed for six weeks for gluing her hand to the dock during her plea hearing at a magistrates court in east London in 2022.
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08/17/2024 - 01:00
Exclusive: Most popular routes can be reached quickly by train, as government mulls expansion proposal
More than half of the journeys taken from London City airport last year can be reached in six hours or less by train, data reveals.
The Labour government is preparing to make the final call on the airport’s application to significantly increase its passenger numbers. The airport wants to increase capacity from 6.5 million to 9 million passengers a year by putting on more weekend and early morning flights.
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08/16/2024 - 12:00
When canec, Hawaii’s building material, is damaged, it can release toxic dust like asbestos – requiring special cleanup
When fire engulfed Lahaina last year, some of the older structures that burned contained canec, a historic Hawaiian-made building material made of solid sugarcane waste and potentially harmful inorganic arsenic.
To date, the US army corps of engineers (USACE) has hauled off an estimated 14,000 tons of ash suspected of arsenic contamination from the drywall-like material once manufactured in Hilo.
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08/16/2024 - 11:15
Barely audible to human ears, healthy soils produce a cacophony of sounds in many forms -- a bit like an underground rave concert of bubble pops and clicks. Special recordings made by ecologists show this chaotic mixture of soundscapes can be a measure of the diversity of tiny living animals in the soil, which create sounds as they move and interact with their environment.