EARTHWEEK
Hawaiian eruption
Fountains of lava emerged from cracks in the ground that formed in a Hawaiian neighborhood as Kilauea volcano erupted suddenly on the Big Island.
Residents in the Leilani Estates subdivision were immediately ordered to evacuate due to the mounting lava threat.
Most people had already been on high alert due to a swarm of powerful tremors before the eruption.
Earthquakes
At least 76 people were injured by a magnitude 5.3 quake that rocked southwestern Iran.
• Earth movements were also felt in the Greek capital of Athens, Guam, islands of the eastern Caribbean, eastern Tennessee, coastal Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Longest-lived
The world’s oldest known spider was killed at the age of 43 by a wasp attack in Western Australia.
Scientists at Curtin University said the trapdoor spider was the subject of a long-term study and outlived the previous record-holder by 15 years, mainly from living her entire life in one burrow.
“We’re really miserable about it,” lead researcher Leanda Mason told The Telegraph. “We were hoping she could have made it to 50 years old.” Trapdoor spiders ambush small prey that have the misfortune of passing by their burrows.
Magnetic shift?
Recent speculations that Earth’s magnetic field is in the early stages of reversal have been discounted by an international team of researchers.
A significant weakening of the field over the last two hundred years or more, and an expanding weak area in the field between South America and Africa, has some scientists concerned. But geomagnetism expert Richard Holme of the University of Liverpool says that the last comparable weakening periods, approximately 49,000 and 46,000 years ago, did not result in flips. The last reversal happened 780,000 years ago.
Simian revenge
A Sudanese farmer was rescued from a savage attack by a monkey, said to be the father of a young monkey the farmer killed years ago. Khartoum’s SudaNow reports the Central Darfur farmer’s wife was able to beat the attacking primate to death as it was biting her husband. The magazine reports monkeys once dug up seeds the farmer had planted until he chased them away about five years ago, killing the assaulting monkey’s offspring in the process. Locals say they have witnessed monkeys stalking their enemies for decades after being wronged.
Antarctic relief
An audacious plan to tow Antarctic icebergs to South Africa to help solve the worst water crisis there in a century is being proposed by a marine salvage expert.
Nick Sloane told Reuters that he and his crew are looking for investors to fund the project, which would have chunks of the ice chopped into a slurry and melted to provide millions of gallons of drinking water per day.
Cape Town has for months been facing the prospect of all water taps being turned off due to depleted reservoirs.
“We want to show that if there is no other source to solve the water crisis, we have another idea no one else has thought of yet.”
Remote cyclone
Tropical Cyclone Flamboyan briefly attained Category-1 force as it churned the central Indian Ocean.