Climate ModificationOfficials in the capital of China’s...

Climate Modification

Officials in the capital of China’s Hubei province have announced plans to lower the city’s average daytime summer temperature by at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit through a series of environmental measures. Wuhan is one of the hottest cities along the Yangtze River, and government leaders feel summer’s oppressive heat stunts its economic and social development. Part of the scheme involves planting thousands of trees and introducing duckweed into lakes. It’s believed that the plants will be able to increase relative humidity in the metropolitan area. Large and tall chimneys are being banned because they both disperse heat and absorb it from sunlight.

Floods

Flooding caused by torrential rains across Sumatra and southern Malaysia killed at least nine people, including a man who drowned in Jakarta. Reports from Sumatra said that 130 houses and bamboo huts were ripped apart by the raging waters. It was the second onslaught of severe flooding in the region this year.

Earthquakes

Central parts of Ecuador were still rumbling from aftershocks of a devastating temblor that killed at least 21 people March 29. Hardest hit were the mountain towns of Salcedo, Pumuli and Latacunga. In southeastern Greece, several buildings were damaged on Samos Island by a magnitude 5.3 temblor. Earth movements were also felt in southern Italy, India’s Punjab state, Taiwan, eastern Indonesia’s Sumba and Sulawesi islands, northern Japan and the Kuril Islands, the Fox Islands in Alaska’s Aleutian chain and along the California- Nevada border.

Worms From the Deep

Giant worms more than six feet in length have been brought up alive from a depth of 8,000 feet in the Pacific Ocean by a French- American scientific team. Leaders of the French oceanic research institute IFREMAR announced that they had found the worms while studying organisms that manage to live near hot springs rising from the eastern Pacific trough.

Rest Stop

Researchers along the Gulf of Mexico coast have discovered that migrating monarch butterflies have added offshore oil rigs to their route from Mexico to a small part of the Louisiana coast which has the trees and milkweed they need for roosting and feeding. Dr. Gary Noel Ross, a retired educator and butterfly researcher, believes the huge metal platforms originally confused the insect’s magnetic sensors used for navigation. They have now added the rigs as checkpoints on their annual migration northward to Canada, using them to rest overnight before completing the “Trans- Gulf Express” part of the route. Offshore workers say that the monarchs sometimes approach in such numbers that they look like a huge, billowing cloud of smoke.

Additional Sources: U.S. Climate Analysis Center, U.S. Earthquake Information Center and the World Meteorological Organization