How big is the storm that is threatening much of Australia with 190 mph winds? About this big, according to our friends at NASA:
In a way, though, it’s fortunate that the storm will be hitting a relatively rich, relatively well-off country like Australia, which is on the fortunate side of the disaster gap. Less than 3 years ago …
A few weeks ago when the floods first hit eastern Australia, I wrote about their potential impact on the Great Barrier Reef as fresh water plumes send sediment and nutrients into the waters offshore. Here’s my longer take in this week’s international editions of the magazine on why the world’s largest protected coral system is in …
As terrible floods rage simultaneously around the world—inundating half of Australia, killing more than 50 people in the Philippines and hundreds in Brazil—it’s natural to want a scapegoat. Well, you can blame the “little girl”—the weather phenomenon known as La Nina, which many meteorologists are blaming for the …
Residents of Brisbane, Australia must have woke up Thursday morning with at least some sense of relief. The swollen Brisbane River that runs through the nation’s third largest city did not reach the catastrophic levels as they were predicted to overnight. With at least 25 dead and a dozen still missing, Australia did not face an easy …
One of the surprising facts about the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which struck the island country a year ago today, is that by seismic standards it wasn’t all that big. The temblor was 7.0 on the Richter scale—strong, but hardly record-breaking. The earthquake that hit Chile a month and a half later was an 8.8—some 500 times …
It’s another miserable day for flood-stricken Queensland, with parts of Brisbane being evacuated after the city’s river burst its banks on Tuesday afternoon. Local reports say the Brisbane roads that haven’t been closed due to flooding are choked with fleeing residents.
Yesterday, flash floods roared through a valley nearby, crashing …
A report by a British parliamentary committee looking into the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster warned on Tuesday that Britain is not ready to handle a spill of the kind suffered by BP in the Gulf of Mexico, but found that a moratorium on drilling around British coasts was unnecessary because British safety standards are “superior to …
So far 2011 has not treated Australia well. Vast areas of the county’s northeastern Queensland state have been hit by some of the worst flooding on record. Tremendous rains—thanks in part to an unusually strong La Nina weather pattern—fell in late December, triggering floods that have affected half the state’s 715,000 sq. mi. …
As New York shovels out of the snow and LA digs out of the mud, Australians are facing their own onslaught of extreme weather. The worst floods in half a century have hit the central and southern parts of Queensland, forcing at least 1000 residents to evacuate their homes with warnings that the worst may be yet to come as rivers in the …
CSI Sharm el-Sheikh: What is causing the normally harmless sharks of the Red Sea to start mauling holidaymakers in Egypt?
Shark experts have this weekend converged on the popular resort to investigate a series of attacks that have killed one tourist and badly injured four others. But they have already reached consensus on a general …
