Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet (Feb. 21, 2014)

Enduring Weather
Residents from North America to Britain, weary of ice, blizzards and catastrophic flooding this winter, may have to get used to weeks or even months of such miserable conditions on a regular basis.  That's the conclusion of a Rutgers-NOAA study that found the jet stream is now taking a longer and more erratic path due to global warming.  The jet stream is a powerful, high-altitude river of air that transports weather systems around the planet.  It's fueled by differences in temperature between the Arctic and the middle latitudes.  And because temperatures across the Arctic have been rising two to three times more rapidly than in the rest of the world, those differences are now less and causing the jet stream to slow.  This is resulting in weather that remains the same for prolonged periods, like in the barrage of blizzards that buried parts of Canada and the United States and the onslaught of oceanic storms that has swamped and battered Britain.
Argentina Fireball
A meteor exploding over northern Argentina caused such a loud noise and strong shaking that many residents feared they had been hit by an earthquake.  Cloud cover prevented residents from seeing the trail left by the space debris when it entered the atmosphere above Santa Fe province on the morning of Feb. 18.  Officials said the explosion, which occurred at an altitude of about 45 miles, was heard in a nearly 200-mile radius.  Despite the loud blast, there were no reports of damage on the ground and no fragments were immediately found.  The director of the Santa Fe Astronomical Observatory, Jorge Coghlan, told the country's Clarin daily that the object could have originally been about 20 inches in diameter.
A Chilling Wind
A new and detailed study into the recent 13-year pause in global surface warming points to stronger trade winds in the Pacific as a primary cause.  Scientists recently explained that the deep oceans have been absorbing the brunt of excess solar radiation due to higher greenhouse gas levels, but they didn't know exactly how that was happening.  Research just published in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that the strengthening of the trade winds has churned the Pacific so much that heat is being drawn from the air down to waters between about 300 and 1,000 feet in depth.  The same churning brings up cooler waters, cooling the air above the ocean surface.  Further accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere is expected to eventually overpower the factors behind the pause in global warming.
Earthquakes
Islands of the eastern Caribbean were jolted by a 6.5 magnitude temblor centered beneath the Altantic Ocean about 115 miles northeast of Bridgetown, Barbados.  The shaking awakened residents and tourists alike on Barbados, as well as on St. Lucia.  No damage was reported.
*      Earth movements were also felt in northeastern Colombia, the far northern Philippines, western Greece, central Oklahoma and along the South Carolina-Georgia border.
Tropical Cyclone
Cyclone Guito steadily intensified as it passed southward through the Mozambique Channel.  Gales and locally heavy rain from the storm's spiral bands brushed Madagascar and Mozambique as the eye of the Category I storm remained well offshore.
Eruption
A powerful blast from Indonesia's Mount Kelud volcano killed four people and disrupted air transport across Java and the holiday resort of Bali.  The victims died after the roofs of their homes collapsed beneath the weight of accumulating ash.  The volcanic debris reached 8 inches deep in some areas.  The Feb. 14 eruption was so loud that it could be heard from 125 miles away and was said to be "like thousands of bombs exploding," by one nearby villager who feared "doomsday was upon us."  Kelud, located about 375 miles east of Jakarta, had been rumbling for several weeks prior to the violent 90-minute eruption.
Dolphin Rights
A Romanian politician introduced a bill in his country's parliament that would recognize dolphins as "non-human persons" and make the marine mammals equal to people before the law.  Remus Cernea claims dolphins deserve such rights because of their highly developed intelligence, personalities and behavior.  The legislation would ban the use of dolphins in live entertainment shows and give anyone who kills them the same sentences as those given to anyone who murders humans.  Cernea says he wants to protect the native dolphins that swim off his country's Black Sea coast, and to promote the rights of the species worldwide.  "This law asks you to make a huge step, philosophically speaking, to understand and to accept that somehow there is another species which is quite similar as we are," he told reporters.  The lawmaker concedes he has no support from his colleagues.