Image of the Day: Indus River Flooding Viewed from Orbit, 17 August 2010

Indus River, 18 August 2009   Indus River, 17 August 2010   Caption by Michon Scott18 August 2010 By mid-August 2010, some 20 million people in Pakistan had been affected by the intense monsoon rains, according to news reports. Roughly a fifth of the country was underwater, and extensive damage to agricultural lands was expected […]

Attempts to tame Indus River contributed to disaster in Pakistan

By ROBERT MACKEYAugust 18, 2010, 6:57 pm In a radio interview broadcast on Wednesday, Daanish Mustafa, a scholar who studies the intersection of development and water resources, told the BBC that attempts to tame the Indus River, beginning during British rule in the 19th century, laid the foundations for the deadly floods that swept Pakistan […]

Russian forest fires pose major threat to bats

Bonn (Germany), 18 August 2010 – The catastrophic wildfires that have swept across Russia this summer have killed at least 50 people and could cost the country’s economy an estimated US$15 billion. But among the hidden victims of the fires are small, nocturnal animals that are fast losing their habitats. Russia’s bat population – which […]

Desperation grows over Pakistan flood damage

By WAQAR GILLANIPublished: August 17, 2010 LAHORE, Pakistan — With disastrous flooding spreading yet more widely in Pakistan, reports of looting and protests over food on Tuesday deepened the sense of desperation across Punjab Province, the country’s most populous region and its agricultural hub. Flood survivors told stories of taking the search for aid upon […]

Heat probably killed thousands in Moscow

By Dmitry SolovyovTue Aug 17, 2010 10:50am EDT MOSCOW (Reuters) – Several thousand Muscovites are thought to have died in July alone from this year’s unprecedented heatwave and August could add more fatalities to the grim statistics, a Russian scientist said on Tuesday. Moscow, a metropolis of over 10 million people, suffered from intense heat […]

Misery for ‘doomed orphans’ of Pakistan floods

By Sajjad Tarakzai (AFP)16 August 2010 NOWSHEHRA, Pakistan — Six million children are suffering from Pakistan’s devastating floods: lost, orphaned or stricken with diarrhoea, they are the most vulnerable victims of the nation’s worst-ever natural disaster. At relief camps in government schools and colleges, and in tent villages on the edge of towns and by […]

Fatal cloudburst devastates Himalayan desert town

By Anil Ananthaswamy 17 August 2010 15:12 Even as the world’s attention was focused on the floods in Pakistan, a rare and extreme cloudburst devastated the Himalayan town of Leh in Ladakh, India – normally one of the driest regions on Earth. Heavy rainfall is common elsewhere in the Himalayas, but not in Ladakh. The […]

Corals bleached and dying in overheated South Asian waters

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, August 16, 2010 (ENS) – The rapidly rising temperature of south Asia’s Andaman Sea has triggered coral bleaching and die-off that scientists working in Indonesia are calling one of the most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded. The coral die-off was indentified though monitoring by marine ecologists from the Wildlife […]

Image of the Day: Smoke and Fires Across Western Russia, 15 August 2010

A veil of gray shrouds western Russia as plumes of thick smoke pour from numerous fires blazing in the region on August 15, 2010, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Terra satellite captured true-color images as the satellite passed overhead. Two images have been merged to illustrate the expanse of the fires […]

Graph of the Day: Unusually Intense Monsoon Rains, 1 – 9 August 2010

Caption by Holli Riebeek12 August 2010 The first week of August 2010 brought extreme flooding and landslides to many parts of Asia. By August 11, floods in the Indus River basin had become Pakistan’s worst natural disaster to date, leaving more than 1,600 people dead and disrupting the lives of about 14 million people, reported […]

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