Magnitude 8.8 OFFSHORE MAULE, CHILE February 27, 2010
•Magnitude 7.0 RYUKYU ISLANDS, JAPAN February 26, 2010
•Magnitude 6.9 CHINA-RUSSIA-NORTH KOREA BORDER REGION February 18, 2010
•Magnitude 5.9 OFFSHORE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA February 04, 2010
•Magnitude 7.0 HAITI REGION January 12, 2010

via http://www.usgs.gov/ – Science for a Changing word is very informative site, focused on biology, geography, geology, geospatial information, and water etc.

A huge wave reached a populated area in the Robinson Crusoe Islands, 410 miles (660 kilometers) off the Chilean coast, said President Michele Bachelet. There were no immediate reports of major damage there, she added.

Bachelet said the death toll was at 78 and rising, but officials had no information on the number of people injured. She declared a “state of catastrophe” in central Chile.

“We have had a huge earthquake, with some aftershocks,” Bachelet said from an emergency response center. She urged Chileans not to panic.

“Despite this, the system is functioning. People should remain calm. We’re doing everything we can with all the forces we have. Any information we will share immediately,” she said.

Powerful aftershocks rattled Chile’s coast — 19 of them magnitude 5 or greater and one reaching magnitude 6.9 — the U.S. Geological Survey reported.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center called for “urgent action to protect lives and property” in Hawaii, which is among 53 nations and territories subject to tsunami warnings.

Largest earthquake 2010

Magnitude 8.8 OFFSHORE MAULE, CHILE February 27, 2010
•Magnitude 7.0 RYUKYU ISLANDS, JAPAN February 26, 2010
•Magnitude 6.9 CHINA-RUSSIA-NORTH KOREA BORDER REGION February 18, 2010
•Magnitude 3.8 ILLINOIS February 10, 2010
•Magnitude 5.9 OFFSHORE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA February 04, 2010
•Magnitude 6.2 BOUGAINVILLE REGION, PAPUA NEW GUINEA February 01, 2010
•Magnitude 5.9 HAITI REGION January 20, 2010
•Magnitude 4.0 OKLAHOMA January 15, 2010
•Magnitude 7.0 HAITI REGION January 12, 2010
•Magnitude 6.5 OFFSHORE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA January 10, 2010
•Magnitude 4.1 SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA January 07, 2010
•Magnitude 6.8 SOLOMON ISLANDS January 05, 2010
•Magnitude 7.1 SOLOMON ISLANDS January 03, 2010
•Magnitude 6.6 SOLOMON ISLANDS January 03, 2010

How to help Haiti earthquake victims:
ShareThis

1. Make a donation hip hop star Wyclef Jean’s Yéle Haiti charity where you can text YELE to 501501 to give $5 to help with earthquake relief efforts.

2. Donate to the Red Cross, where you can text “HAITI” to “90999″ to donate $10 to the Red Cross.

Americans have already donated $11 million through text messages, but that’s still nothing compared to the damage done by this horrible natural disaster.

If you can donate, please do so. Several organizations are even holding food and medical drives collecting non-perishable foods and over the counter medical supplies.

31 major earthquake happened in the XX century.
Among them, the earthquake (Jan. 24, 1939) in Chile and in India (16 August 1950 ), which claimed 30 thousand lives. 14 thousand victims – the sad result of the earthquake in Turkey, 2003, August 17, 2400 people died in Taiwan on September 21 last year.

Forty major fires and explosions occurred in the 20 century.

- A powerful fire on Nov. 28, 1942 in a night club “Coconut Grove”, when 490 people were burned;
- Explosion on Nov. 9, 1963 in the mine Disorder (Japan), which claimed 447 lives;
- Explosion of two trains due to gas leakage June 3, 1983 in Bashkortostan, which killed 583 and wounded more than 700 passengers.

56 major crashes, including:
- The fall of the Turkish DC-10 shortly after takeoff in the Paris airport, which led to the death of all 346 passengers and crew;
- An explosion of Indian Boeing 4 over the Atlantic with 329 victims;
- The biggest disaster Canaria on March 27, 1977, which killed 582 passengers in a collision of two Boeing,
- Mysterious crash of an Egyptian airliner off the coast of the United States, which targeted 217 people.

44 worst shipwrecks, including:
- Loss of commercial ferries in Japan September 26, 1954, when sunk more than 1000 people;
- The collision of the passenger ferry Dona Pass “with an oil tanker near the coast of Manila on Dec. 20, 1967 caused the death of more than 4000 passengers;
- The collapse of “Lusitania”, shot down a German submarine May 6, 1915, killing nearly 1200 people
- And, finally, the most tragic event of the American Navy – the bombing of the Japanese aircraft warship “Arizona” at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 1, 1941. The number of victims amounted to 1177 people.

According to mashable.com United Nations officials said hours after the 7.0-magnitude quake struck at 4:53 p.m. that they still couldn’t account for a large number of U.N. personnel.

Communications were widely disrupted, making it impossible to get a full picture of damage as powerful aftershocks shook a desperately poor country where many buildings are flimsy. Electricity was out in some places.

Karel Zelenka, a Catholic Relief Services representative in Port-au-Prince, told U.S. colleagues before phone service failed that “there must be thousands of people dead,” according to a spokeswoman for the aid group, Sara Fajardo.

“He reported that it was just total disaster and chaos, that there were clouds of dust surrounding Port-au-Prince,” Fajardo said from the group’s offices in Maryland.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in Washington that U.S. Embassy personnel were “literally in the dark” after power failed.

“They reported structures down. They reported a lot of walls down. They did see a number of bodies in the street and on the sidewalk that had been hit by debris. So clearly, there’s going to be serious loss of life in this,” he said.

The Diocese of Norwich, Connecticut, said at least two Americans working at its Haitian aid mission were believed trapped in rubble.

Alain Le Roy, the U.N. peacekeeping chief in New York, said late Tuesday that the headquarters of the 9,000-member Haiti peacekeeping mission and other U.N. installations were seriously damaged.

“Contacts with the U.N. on the ground have been severely hampered,” Le Roy said in a statement, adding: “For the moment, a large number of personnel remain unaccounted for.”

Felix Augustin, Haiti’s consul general in New York, said a portion of the National Palace had disintegrated.

“Buildings collapsed all over the place,” he said. “We have lives that are destroyed. … It will take at least two or three days for people to know what’s going on.”

An Associated Press videographer saw the wrecked hospital in Petionville, a hillside Port-au-Prince district that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians, as well as many poor people. Elsewhere in the capital, a U.S. government official reported seeing houses that had tumbled into a ravine.

Kenson Calixte of Boston spoke to an uncle and cousin in Port-au-Prince shortly after the earthquake by phone. He could hear screaming in the background as his relatives described the frantic scene in the streets. His uncle told him that a small hotel near their home had collapsed, with people inside.

“They told me it was total chaos, a lot of devastation,” he said.

The earth is a natural greenhouse and is kept warm by water vapors, carbon dioxide (CO2), and other gases in the atmosphere, which absorb the sun’s energy and radiate it back toward the earth. This type of warming is called “natural greenhouse effect.” “Enhanced greenhouse effect,” on the other hand, causes global climate change due to excessive levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.a
Without the atmosphere to create a greenhouse-type effect, the average temperature on Earth would be just 5° Fahrenheit (F).g
.Natural levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have varied throughout history between 180 and 300 parts per million (ppm). Today’s CO2 levels hover around 380 ppm, representing a 25% increase over the highest recorded natural levels.b
In the year 1997 alone, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increased by 2.87 ppm; this increase is more than any other year on record.a
The year 2005 was the warmest on record, and the years 1998 and 2007 are tied for the second warmest. The eight warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998.a
Scientists expect a 3.5° F increase in average global temperatures by the year 2100, resulting in the warmest temperatures in the past million years. During the Pliocene epoch 1.8 million years ago, when the earth’s temperatures were roughly equivalent to today, sea levels were 12-18 feet higher.a
Geologists believe sea levels could rise between seven and 23 inches by the end of the century if current warming trends continue.f
8.Worldwide, one hundred million people live within three feet of sea level, and much of the world’s population is clustered in coastal areas.
And so on!

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Copenhagen failed for a number of reasons. Lack of political will; a reluctant population not truly understanding or accepting the tremendous risk mankind faces now and in the future are only two of them. But overall, the pure process of the United Nation’s negotiations was based on a false premise.

Negotiations require a give and take. For that to happen, each party must have something to offer. In Copenhagen, 140 countries had nothing to offer but their moral outrage and pleas for justice and that has rarely proved to move the West.

New Zealand Herald: Copenhagen called climate ‘crime scene’
The United Nations process at Copenhagen was slammed as “appalling” by New Zealand’s climate change ambassador yesterday, in comments to international media.

Adrian Macey’s strong words were overshadowed only by those of the Sudanese ambassador, who compared the deal to the Holocaust and said it would condemn Africa to widespread deaths from global warming.

The Prague Post: Czechs expected more from Copenhagen conference – minister
Czech Environment Minister Jan Dusik expected more from the U.N. Copenhagen climate conference, and he views the states’ final agreement, in which they take key countries’ efforts against global warming into account, as an intermediate step, he told CTK today.

Dusik said a legally binding document on fighting climate changes could be signed in Mexico next year, after the planned negotiations of experts as well as politicians.

“It is a wasted chance. The positive aspect is that agreement of the important players has been achieved and also a result for us to base our further work on,” Dusik said.

He said the Czech delegation did not expect a legally binding agreement to be achieved in Copenhagen. Nevertheless, the Czechs expected the summit’s final talks to touch on more issues, and “mainly to be supported by all delegates,” Dusik (nominated by the Green Party) said.

He said the Copenhagen conclusions change nothing in the Czech Republic’s commitment to reduce green house gas emissions by 20 percent.

Saudi Gazette: Climate talks a halting step toward goal
The Copenhagen climate conference “failed” long before it even opened. It may not “succeed” until long after it ends. For the moment, then, negotiators must satisfy themselves with something in between, an “outcome,” one whose shape Thursday was in the hands of the United States and China.

A pivotal meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007 set a two-year timetable for the world to produce a grand new agreement to cut even deeper into the greenhouse-gas emissions largely blamed for global warming.

Every one of the thousands attending that UN conference saw the problem, however: The US administration of President George W. Bush had blocked progress on climate change for seven years, and would do so for one more.

When President Barack Obama took charge last January, he had just 11 months to work with international partners to negotiate a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which had imposed modest emissions cuts on industrialized nations, and which the US had rejected.

With time so short, the new US leadership needed a long run of luck. But its luck ran out with this year’s drawn-out and distracting US health care debate.

The Economic Times (India): Investors give cautious thumbs up to climate deal
Businesses and investment analysts cautiously welcomed a climate deal struck in Copenhagen on Friday, but complained that it was unclear how its commitments would be translated into law.

The private sector is expected to supply most capital to drive a global shift to a greener economy away from burning fossil fuels.

Businesses and in particular the energy sector say they need clear carbon targets so that they can invest appropriately – for example in power plants which may last for more than 40 years.

New York Times: U.N. Climate Talks ‘Take Note’ of Accord Backed by U.S.
With the swift bang of a gavel on Saturday morning, a prolonged fight between nations small and large over an international pact to limit climate risks that was forged the night before by the United States and four partners came to a somewhat murky end.

The chairman of the climate treaty talks declared that the parties would “take note” of the document, named the Copenhagen Accord, leaving open the question of whether this effort to curb greenhouse gases from the world’s major emitters would gain the full support of the 193 countries bound by the original, and largely failed, 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Washington Post: Climate talks end without real agreement

After two weeks of rancor and uncertainty, the U.N.-sponsored climate talks ended Saturday morning with negotiators choosing to “take note” of an agreement brokered by the United States but failing to adopt it as an official decision of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The anti-climactic ending to an intense final round of negotiations underscored the incomplete nature of the accord, which provided for monitoring emission cuts in individual countries but set no overall global target for cutting greenhouse gases and no deadline for reaching a formal international treaty.

The United Nations’ top climate official, Yvo de Boer, acknowledged that the agreement, known as the Copenhagen accord, has yet to bind large and small nations to either definitive emission reductions or financial commitments.

“The challenge for the coming year will be to capture that, and to turn it into something real, measurable and verifiable, in every sense of those three words, a year from now in Mexico City,” he told reporters.

Describing what it means “to take note” of the accord, de Boer added, “That is a way of recognizing that something is there, but not going so far as to associate yourself with it.”

E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday, on www.anelegantchaos.org.

A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission.

An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.

“We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites,” the spokesman stated.

“Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.

“This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation.

“We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry.”

Earthquake Details
Magnitude 7.9
Date-Time Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 10:16:09 UTC
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 05:16:09 PM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location 0.789°S, 99.961°E
Depth 80 km (49.7 miles) set by location program
Region SOUTHERN SUMATRA, INDONESIA
Distances 45 km (30 miles) WNW of Padang, Sumatra, Indonesia
220 km (135 miles) SW of Pekanbaru, Sumatra, Indonesia
475 km (295 miles) SSW of KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia
960 km (590 miles) NW of JAKARTA, Java, Indonesia

Location Uncertainty horizontal +/- 8.9 km (5.5 miles); depth fixed by location program
Parameters NST= 42, Nph= 42, Dmin=521.5 km, Rmss=1.28 sec, Gp= 47°,
M-type=teleseismic moment magnitude (Mw), Version=8
Source USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)

The Associated Press reported that The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre issued a tsunami alert for Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Thailand.

The Indonesian agency said the tremor had a magnitude of 7.6 and its epicentre was just off the coast of Sumatra.

The quake struck at sea at 5.16pm (2016 AEST) 78 kilometres southwest of Padang city in West Sumatra province, the agency said on its website.

The US Geological Survey put the strength at 7.9.

The steps you can help people experiencing an earthquake:
Give to an established organization, which will use monetary contributions to provide medical supplies, water purification and shelter materials as well as food and clothing.

Contribute online using your credit card by visiting JustGive.org or the American Red Cross website (redcross.org).

Call any of the organizations to contribute by providing your credit card information. Phone numbers are listed on the Web sites.

Mail a check or money order to any of the organizations. Most Web sites have forms that can be printed out to include with your donation.

Specify that you wish your contribution to go to earthquake relief when you make the donation.

Donate your time as a volunteer instead of or in addition to making a monetary contribution. Visit websites like VolunteerAbroad.com and VolunteerInternational.org to explore opportunities overseas.
Also visit http://www.secretsofsurvival.com/survival/earthquake.html to learn what is this and what to do if it happend with you.

According to television footage, police and military helicopters were sent to rescue people confined to their homes. Dozens of cars were also swept away. A fire truck could be seen lying on its side.
Two international highways linking Istanbul to the borders with Greece and Bulgaria were closed temporarily, Anatolia reported.
On Monday, a Cambodia-flagged freighter broke into two and sank in heavy storms off the coast of Istanbul. All 12 crew members were rescued.
More rain was forecast for the area Wednesday.