Spanish TV captured dramatic images of a church bell tower crashing to the ground, landing just metres from a cameraman. Shocked residents and workers rushed out of buildings and gathered in squares, parks and open spaces. Old buildings were badly damaged. As night fell many people were still too afraid to return to their homes. "The whole of the centre of Lorca has been seriously damaged. There are thousands of very disorientated people." A doctor and her colleagues went into the streets and treated people with serious injuries, many of them "unconscious. The ambulances could not reach them. They took more than 40 minutes."
The earthquakes were felt over a wide area. "Unfortunately, we can confirm... deaths due to cave-ins and falling debris. We are trying to find out if there are people inside the collapsed houses." A number of aftershocks have been felt in the region after Wednesday's quake, and authorities fear the death toll could rise. Spain has hundreds of earthquakes every year but most of them are too small to be noticed. Murcia is the country's most seismically active area and suffered tremors in 2005 and 1999 [each 6 years apart]. Murcia is close to the large faultline beneath the Mediterranean Sea where the European and African continents meet. Photos
LARGEST QUAKES -
This morning -
5.2 TONGA REGION
5.0 ASCENSION ISLAND REGION
Yesterday -
5/11/11 -
5.2 HALMAHERA, INDONESIA
5.0 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.1 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.5 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.2 SPAIN
5.1 SAMOA ISLANDS REGION
5.0 EASTERN NEW GUINEA REG., P.N.G.
5.0 LOYALTY ISLANDS
5.0 LOYALTY ISLANDS
5.2 LOYALTY ISLANDS
5.1 LOYALTY ISLANDS
5.2 LOYALTY ISLANDS
5.9 LOYALTY ISLANDS
5.3 EAST OF NORTH ISLAND, N.Z.
5.0 MINDANAO, PHILIPPINES
Turkey plans new 'quake-proof' cities near Istanbul - Turkey plans to build two new cities near Istanbul and relocate up to 1.5 million residents who are most at risk from a possible earthquake in the metropolis.
TROPICAL STORMS -
Final warning was issued for TROPICAL STORM O3W (AERE) which was LOCATED APPROXIMATELY 230 NM SOUTH-SOUTHEAST OF SASEBO, JAPAN.
PHILIPPINES - Tropical Storm Aere left northern Luzon on Wednesday, but not before battering the Bicol region, leaving at least 26 people dead, millions worth of properties damaged, and placing two provinces under a state of calamity. At the peak of the summer season, tropical storm Aere caught many unprepared. Almost 400000 people were affected.
SEVERE RAIN STORMS, FLOODING, LANDSLIDES -
U.S. - Flood's crest delivers fresh misery in Mississippi. Floodwaters from the bloated Mississippi River and its tributaries spilled across farm fields, cut off churches, washed over roads and forced people from their homes Wednesday in the Mississippi Delta, a poverty-stricken region only a generation or two removed from sharecropping days. People used boats to navigate flooded streets as the crest rolled slowly downstream, bringing misery to poor, low-lying communities. Hundreds have left their homes in the delta in the past several days as the water rose toward some of the highest levels on record. The flood crest is expected to push past the delta by late next week. There is no reason to believe a levee on the Yazoo River would fail, but if it did, 107 feet of water would flow over small towns.
The Mississippi Delta, with a population of about 465,000, is a leaf-shaped expanse of rich soil between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, extending about 200 miles from Memphis, Tenn., to Vicksburg, Miss. Along the way are the towns of Clarksdale, Greenville and Yazoo City. While some farms in the cotton-, rice- and corn-growing delta are prosperous, there is also grinding poverty. President Obama on Wednesday signed a disaster declaration for 14 counties in Mississippi because of the flooding. The state is asking local officials to get in touch with people who might have no electricity and phones and thus no way to get word of the flooding.
SPACE WEATHER -
Crab Nebula's gamma-ray flare mystifies astronomers - The Crab Nebula has shocked astronomers by emitting an UNPRECEDENTED BLAST OF GAMMA RAYS, the highest-energy light in the Universe. The cause of the 12 April gamma-ray flare is a total mystery. It seems to have come from a small area of the famous nebula, which is the wreckage from an exploded star. The gamma-ray emission lasted for some six days, hitting levels 30 times higher than normal and varying at times from hour to hour.
The Crab Nebula is composed mainly of the remnant of a supernova, which was seen from Earth to rip itself apart in the year 1054. At the heart of the brilliantly coloured gas cloud we can see in visible light, there is a pulsar - a rapidly spinning neutron star that emits radio waves which sweep past the Earth 30 times per second. But so far none of the nebula's known components can explain the signal. "The origin of these high-energy gamma rays has to be some other source. It takes about six years for light to cross the nebula, so it must be a very compact region in comparison to the size of the nebula that's producing these outbursts on the time scales of hours."
Since its launch nearly three years ago, Fermi has spotted three such outbursts. These events are unleashing gamma rays with energies of more than 100 million electron-volts - that is, each packet of light, or photon, carries tens of millions of times more energy than the light we can see. But the Crab's recent outburst is MORE THAN FIVE TIMES MORE INTENSE THAN ANY OTHERS OBSERVED. What has perplexed astronomers is that these variations in gamma rays are not matched by changes in the emission of other light "colours". Follow-up studies using the Chandra X-ray telescope, for example, showed no variations in the X-ray intensity. "To have something that puts almost all of its energy into gamma rays is an UNUSUAL thing. We're looking at a big puzzle and are probably going to need a couple of years to understand it."
The best guess so far is that in a region near the neutron star, intense magnetic fields become opposed in direction, suddenly re-organising themselves and accelerating close-by particles to near the speed of light. As they move in curved paths, the particles emit the gamma rays seen by Fermi. "It's just so extraordinary that so many telescopes over so many years have been looking at the Crab and it's been constant all that time, and suddenly we discover that it's not."
