Monday, May 20th
Last update02:11:22 AM GMT
Environmental Glance
Easter Sunday has been confirmed as the coldest Easter day on record, with the lowest temperature recorded as -12.5C in Braemar, in the Scottish Highlands .
The previous coldest Easter day since modern records began in 1960 was Easter Monday in 1986, which dipped to -9.8C, the Met Office said. Average temperatures for this time of year are between 10C and 13C.The prolonged cold spell covering the UK could last until mid-April, forecasters say.
An Exxon Mobil crude oil pipeline ruptured near Mayflower, Arkansas, spilling thousands of barrels of oil, the company said.
Exxon shut the 20-inch Pegasus pipeline, which carries crude oil from Pakota, Illinois, to the Gulf Coast, after the leak was discovered on Friday afternoon. Exxon said a few thousand barrels of oil had been observed.
Local media reported the spill occurred in a subdivision, and city of Mayflower police said the oil had not reached the nearby Lake Conway.
A formal complaint filed with New York's lobbying board asks it to investigate whether Artists Against Fracking, a group that includes Yoko Ono and other A-List celebrities, is violating the state's lobbying law, according to the document obtained by The Associated Press.
The Independent Oil & Gas Association, an industry group that supports gas drilling, filed the complaint Tuesday with the state's Joint Commission on Public Ethics.
The Headley family built their house a few years ago, just before the gas-drilling boom hit. They had a chance to buy the gas rights but chose not to. Now, they wish they had, because they're sharing their 115-acre farm with the Marcellus Shale industry.
A puddle along a country road in southern Fayette County is a natural spring, an artesian well, but it's not the spring that's making it bubble.
David Headley told Action News investigator Jim Parsons that he wasn't really sure when he first noticed it, but he said, "We've seen it bubbling now for the last couple of years."
A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.
A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.
Such seismic activity isn't normal here. Between 1972 and 2008, the USGS recorded just a few earthquakes a year in Oklahoma. In 2008, there were more than a dozen; nearly 50 occurred in 2009. In 2010, the number exploded to more than 1,000.
These so-called "earthquake swarms" are occurring in other places where the ground is not supposed to move. There have been abrupt upticks in both the size and frequency of quakes in Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, and Texas. Scientists investigating these anomalies are coming to the same conclusion: The quakes are linked to injection wells. Into most of them goes wastewater from hydraulic fracking, while some, as those in Prague, are filled with leftover fluid from dewatering operations.
Who ever saw this coming? Yesterday, a Canadian Pacific train carrying crude oil jumped the tracks in Parkers Prarie, Minnesota and immediately spilled 20,000 to 30,000 gallons of crude onto the snowy, frozen fields.
Fourteen cars of the 94-car, mile-long train (stop and picture that for a moment) left the tracks during an emergency braking maneuver, the cause of which is yet unclear. The National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an immediate review.
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