Discovery
Volcano uproots lives: Cots, tents, and respirator masks poured into the eastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent as officials expected to start distributing them on Saturday, a day after a powerful explosion at La Soufriere volcano uprooted the lives of thousands of people who evacuated their homes under government orders.
Nations ranging from Antigua to Guyana offered help by either shipping emergency supplies to their neighbor or agreeing to temporarily open their borders to the roughly 16,000 evacuees fleeing ashcovered communities with as many personal belongings as they could stuff into suitcases and backpacks.
The volcano, which last erupted in 1979, kept rumbling as experts warned that explosive eruptions could continue for days or possibly weeks. A previous eruption in 1902 killed some 1,600 people.
“The first bang is not necessarily the biggest bang this volcano will give,” Richard Robertson, a geologist with the University of the West Indies’ Seismic Research Center, said during a press conference.
Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves asked people to remain calm, have patience and keep protecting themselves from the coronavirus as he celebrated that no deaths or injuries were reported after the eruption in the northern tip of St. Vincent, part of an island chain that includes the Grenadines and is home to more than 100,000 people. (AP)
US-Russian trio blast off to ISS:
A Russian-US trio of space travelers launched successfully Friday, heading for the International Space Station.
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov blasted off as scheduled at 12:42 pm (0742 GMT, 3:42 am EDT) aboard the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan.
They are set to dock at the station after a two-orbit, three-hour journey.
It’s the second space mission for Vande Hei and the third for Novitskiy, while Dubrov is on his first mission.
During their mission, the crew will work on hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science.
The launch comes three days before the 60th anniversary of the first human flight to space by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and the 40th anniversary of the first launch of NASA’s space shuttle. (AP)
BP spill rescue pelican returns:
A pelican rescued from the 2010 oil spill, cleaned of oil and released in Georgia has returned 700 miles (1,126 kilometers) to an island restored last year for pelicans and other seabirds.
It was among 5,000 oil-covered birds collected in and off Louisiana during the spill, and among 582 pelicans that were rehabilitated, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said in a news release Thursday.
Biologists don’t know just when it returned to Queen Bess Island. But a photo taken in March by a department biologist clearly shows the red band marked “33Z” that was put around the bird’s leg after its rescue on June 14, 2010, at the Empire jetties in Barataria Bay.
“It’s truly impressive that it made its way back from Georgia,’’ said Casey Wright, who spotted and photographed the pelican on a rock jetty on Queen Bess Island, which held 15% to 20% of Louisiana’s pelican nests even when only about 5 acres (2 hectares) were high enough for the big birds to nest. (AP)