AFP UK

A cargo ship ran aground and broke into two off northern Japan, the coastguard said Thursday, with the crew of the Panama-flagged vessel taken to safety.

Aerial images showed the separated stern of the Crimson Polaris tipped upwards and the other part of the stricken boat listing into the sea.

A fuel leak from the ship has spread around 24 kilometres (15 miles), a coastguard spokesman told AFP, but the extent of any environmental impact was unclear.

“Crimson Polaris ran aground in Hachinohe port in Aomori,” said the spokesman, who declined to be named.

“All the 21 crew members — Chinese and Filipino — were rescued safely,” he said.

Three patrol boats and three aircraft were dispatched after the ship ran aground on Wednesday in the port off Japan’s northeastern coast.

Authorities were trying to contain the oil leak but had not yet been able to erect an oil fence around the boat, the spokesman said.

“The patrol boats will operate overnight” to avoid collisions, he said, adding that no other ship was known to be involved in the accident.

Turkish rescuers distributed food and relocated thousands of people into student dormitories Thursday as the death toll from flash floods that swept across several Black Sea regions rose to nine.

Heavy storms descended on Turkey’s northern stretches just as rescuers reported bringing hundreds of wildfires that have killed eight people since late July under near total control in the south.

Turkey has been grappling with drought and a rapid succession of natural disasters that world scientists believe are becoming more frequent and violent because of climate change.

Heavy rains late Tuesday produced flash floods that turned streets into running rivers and sparked mudslides that buckled roads in three northern regions.

Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli warned on Wednesday that the area was facing “a disaster that we had not seen in 50 or 100 years”.

Rescuers were forced to evacuate a regional hospital holding 45 patients — four of them in intensive care — in the region around the coastal city of Sinop on Wednesday.

Images on television and social media showed water rising to the level of street signs in some towns.

They showed stranded villagers being plucked off rooftops by helicopter and bridges collapsing under the force of the rushing water below.

Turkey’s disaster response authority said nine people had lost their lives in the northern Kastamonu province while the search for a person who disappeared in the northern city of Bartin continued.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office said he held a phone call with the heads of the affected regions Thursday and promised to provide all state assistance available.

The emergencies authority said more than 1,000 rescuers were working in the region while Turkish Red Crescent teams were distributing food packages and hot meals.

Officials said more than 5,000 spaces had been allocated in student dormitories to shelter those displaced by the floods.

Three villages suffered power cuts and mobile phone services was down in parts of the affected towns.

The disaster struck less than a month after six people died in floods caused by heavy rains in the northeast Rize province.

Turkey’s mountainous Black Sea regions frequently experience heavy rains that produce flash floods and mudslides in the summer months.

Officials said that all but three of the nearly 300 fires that had been ravaging Turkey’s Mediterranean and Aegean coasts since July 28 have been brought under control.

Hundreds of firefighters battled Thursday to contain new flare-ups in wildfire-ravaged areas of Greece, where summer infernos have caused what the prime minister described as the country’s “greatest ecological disaster in decades”.

However, rain overnight in some areas and falling temperatures appeared to have eased the situation after two weeks of devastating blazes, and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said “we can be more optimistic today” than previous days.

Greece’s most severe heatwave in decades has fanned blazes that have destroyed more than 100,000 hectares of forests and farmland, the country’s worst wildfire damage since 2007, the European Forest Fire Information System said Thursday. 

The fires have left three dead, hundreds homeless, forced thousands to flee, and caused economic and environmental devastation.

Greece is just one of a number of countries in the Mediterranean region that have been hit by a savage fire season which authorities have blamed on climate change.

Mitsotakis on Thursday described the “mega fires” as Greece’s “greatest ecological disaster in decades”.

“Climate crisis is here… and it tells us that everything must change,” he told reporters, pointing to other devastating fires in Turkey, Italy and Algeria.

The prime minister said firefighters, volunteers and locals had saved “countless” homes and businesses, but dozens of properties had been lost nonetheless.

Mitsotakis said that 150 homes have been lost in greater Athens over the last week, while the count is ongoing on the island of Evia, which accounts for more than half of the area burned nationwide.

– ‘Can’t take it anymore’ –

A fire service official told AFP on Thursday that “the fire fronts are still active” on Evia and in the Arcadia region of the Peloponnese peninsula and “fires are constantly flaring up” in both areas.

In the north of Evia, where hundreds have been evacuated by boat, 858 firefighters including reinforcements from Ukraine, Romania and Serbia, were battling the flames.

And there was fresh concern in Athens after a new fire broke out on Thursday morning in the industrial zone of Aspropyrgos, 20 kilometres (12 miles) northwest of the capital.

At the height of the fires in early August, the flames had reached the gates of Athens, filling the sky of the city of four million inhabitants with grey smoke.

But after weeks of punishing temperatures often well over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), a lower 33 degrees Celsius was forecast for Thursday.

The falling temperatures and overnight rain in Evia, the Peloponnese and central Greece had helped improve the situation, said Stathis Koulis, the mayor of Gortynia.

The village of Gortynia in a mountainous area of Arcadia 200 kilometres (120 miles) west of Athens has become the primary focus in the Peloponnese, with deep ravines posing a challenge to firefighters.

Twenty villages have been evacuated in the area over the past few days and 680 firefighters, including more than a hundred sent to help from France, and five water-dropping aircraft have been relentlessly battling the flames.

“I can’t take it anymore,” said farmer Kostis Angelou as he wandered between the corpses of his goats, all 372 of them burnt by a fire that devoured forests on Evia.

The 44-year-old managed to survive by spending hours under an irrigation water pipe, surrounded by flames.

“A saint saved me,” he said.

– Climate ‘code red’ –

The latest extreme weather events come after a “code red” report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published on Monday warning that the world is warming far faster than previously feared.

The Mediterranean has been singled out as a “climate change hotspot”, with increasing temperatures and aridity lengthening fire seasons and doubling the areas potential burnt, according to draft IPCC assessment seen exclusively by AFP.

Algeria announced three days of national mourning starting Thursday for the 69 dead killed in blazes there.

Five have died in fires in Italy, where what is believed to be a new European record of 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 Fahrenheit) was registered in Sicily on Wednesday — beating the previous high recorded in Greece in 1977.

Eight people were killed in fires in Turkey’s south earlier in the month, while in the north the death toll rose to five on Thursday from flash floods that have swept across several Black Sea regions.

Thousands of stranded Indians were rescued Thursday from flooded villages along the Ganges after the river rose above its danger level in the country’s most populous state.

The waterway surged to two metres (6.5 feet) above normal in the city of Allahabad, which has experienced its worst flooding in decades after days of torrential rain.

Across Uttar Pradesh state more than 600 villages were reportedly cut off by the rising waters, prompting a major rescue effort by authorities.

M.P. Singh, a district magistrate in Allahabad, told AFP that 225 boats had been sent out to help people trapped on rooftops and the upper floors of their homes.

He estimated 4,500 people had been rescued in and around the city.

About 100 kilometres (60 miles) downriver in the holy city of Varanasi, the ghats — ceremonial piers used for Hindu cremations on the river — were flooded and closed.

Varanasi magistrate Sanjay Kumar said the river was one metre (3.3 feet) above its danger mark in the area and thousands of people had been rescued.

Normally the ghats operate 24 hours and handle hundreds of cremations each day.

V.N. Mishra, head of Varanasi’s Sankat Mochan Temple, said it was a “desperate” situation and people were instead lighting funeral pyres for the dead away from the river “even if it means cremating in back lanes and on rooftops”.

The Uttar Pradesh government said 940 flood shelters had been set up for the homeless where food rations were being handed out.

Hundreds have died in India’s monsoon season since June, with the states of Maharashtra and West Bengal badly hit.

Italian firefighters said Thursday they had battled more than 500 blazes overnight as another death was reported, taking the total toll linked to wildfires to four over the past week.

An anticyclone dubbed Lucifer is sweeping across Italy, sending temperatures soaring and causing what is believed to be a new European record of 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 Fahrenheit) in Sicily on Wednesday.

Southern Europe has experienced intense heatwaves and wildfires this summer, with deaths also recorded in Greece and Turkey, as experts warn that climate change increases the intensity and frequency of such extreme weather events.

The searing heat is due to continue in Italy for several days and risks fuelling fires that have already plagued much of the country’s south in recent weeks, notably in Sicily and the region of Calabria.

The burned body of a 79-year-old man was found in the Reggio Calabria area on Wednesday, while another man, aged 77, died in the same region after trying to shelter his herd from the flames, news agencies reported.

Their deaths follow those of a 53-year-old woman and her 35-year-old nephew, also in Reggio Calabria, who died last Friday trying to save the family olive grove.

The fire service on Thursday morning reported making 528 interventions in the past 12 hours, 230 in Sicily, “where the situation is currently under control”, including in the Madonie mountain range, near Palermo.

Regional authorities in Sicily have declared a state of emergency as a result of the fires, while 50 voluntary fire-fighting teams from around Italy have flown in to help battle the blazes. 

The fire service reported 100 interventions overnight in Calabria, with particularly difficult blazes in the areas of Reggio Calabria, Catanzaro and Cosenza. 

An anticyclone is an area of high atmospheric pressure that in summer brings dry, hot weather. 

Across the Mediterranean, Algeria has also been hit by fires, with the North African country starting three days of mourning on Thursday after the death toll rose to 69.

The Mediterranean has been singled out as a “climate change hotspot”, with increasing temperatures and aridity lengthening fire seasons and doubling the areas potential burnt, according to a draft UN assessment seen exclusively by AFP.

Climate change could magnify the atmospheric cooling effects of once-in-a-century volcanic eruptions, but also lessen the impact of smaller eruptions, according to new research released Thursday.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge and the UK Met Office examined how rising temperatures are likely to affect the ash and gases shot into the atmosphere by volcanoes.

The emerging “feedback loops” between the changing climate and eruptions were not accounted for in this week’s landmark scientific report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said lead author Thomas Aubry of Cambridge’s Department of Geography.

“It could shed new light on the evolution of future volcanic influences on climate,” he said of the study.

“Even if volcanoes have a limited influence on climate compared to human greenhouse gas emissions, they are an important part of the system.” 

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, used climate and volcanic plume models to project future changes. 

It also looked back at the worldwide impact of Mount Pinatubo’s eruption in the Philippines in 1991, the second largest of the 20th century.

The giant plume of ash and gas generated a layer of haze that caused global temperatures to drop by as much as 0.5 degrees Celsius the following year. 

– ‘Relatively minor’ climate impact-

The study found that climate change, by warming the atmosphere, will allow future Pinatubo-sized plumes to rise even higher — blocking more sunlight, dispersing aerosols faster and heightening the cooling effect worldwide by up to 15 percent.

“However, the effect of volcanic aerosols only persists for one or two years, while anthropogenic greenhouse gases will affect the climate for centuries,” the researchers said.

And for smaller outbursts such as the 2011 Nabro eruption in Eritrea, which tend to occur annually, the cooling effect will be reduced by about 75 percent under a high-end warming scenario. 

“This is because the height of the tropopause –- the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere above it -– is predicted to increase, making it harder for volcanic plumes to reach the stratosphere,” the scientists said.

“Aerosols from volcanic plumes confined to the troposphere are washed out by precipitation in a matter of weeks, making their climatic impacts relatively minor and much more localised.” 

Human activities have already warmed global temperatures by more than 1.0 degree Celsius since 1850 and under the IPCC projections, the world is on course to reach 1.5C of warming around 2030, a decade sooner than previously forecast.

That assumes there is no major volcanic eruption in the next decade, the UN report said, while stressing that any cooling effects would be temporary.

Rain overnight in wildfire-ravaged areas of Greece have helped “improve the situation” on Thursday, a local mayor said, but hundreds of firefighters were still battling to contain new flare-ups.

Fires fanned by Greece’s most severe heatwave in decades — which authorities have blamed on climate change — have burnt through nearly 100,000 hectares over the last fortnight, leaving three dead, hundreds homeless, thousands forced to evacuate, and economic and environmental devastation in their wake.

“The fire fronts are still active” on the island of Evia and the Arcadia region of the Peloponnese peninsula and “fires are constantly flaring up” in both areas, a firefighting official told AFP.

And a new fire broke out on Thursday morning in a forested area of Aspropyrgos, 20 kilometres (12 miles) northwest of Athens.

After weeks of punishing temperatures often well over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), a lower 33 degrees Celsius was forecast for Thursday.

The falling temperatures and overnight rain in Evia, the Peloponnese and central Greece had helped “improve the situation,” said Stathis Koulis, the mayor of Gortynia.

The village of Gortynia in a mountainous area of Arcadia 200 kilometres (120 miles) west of Athens has become the primary focus in the Peloponnese, with deep ravines posing a challenge to firefighters.

Twenty villages have been evacuated in the area over the past few days and 680 firefighters, including more than a hundred sent to help from France, and five water-dropping aircraft have been relentlessly battling the flames.

Greek firefighters have been bolstered by more than 1,200 reinforcements from numerous countries particularly in Europe, as well as vehicles and equipment.

In just eight days, 568 fires have been recorded across Greece.

– ‘Can’t take it anymore’ –

Nearly 100,000 hectares of forests and farmland have burned since July 29 in Greece’s worst wildfires since 2007, the European Forest Fire Information System said.

“I can’t take it anymore,” said Kostis Angelou as he wandered between the corpses of his goats, all 372 of them burnt by a fire that devoured forests on Evia.

The 44-year-old farmer managed to survive by spending hours under an irrigation water pipe, surrounded by flames.

“A saint saved me,” he said.

The Mediterranean has been hit by a savage fire season, with Algeria announcing three days of national mourning starting Thursday for the 69 dead killed in blazes there.

Italy has also been hit by fires, and the island of Sicily recorded 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 Fahrenheit) on Wednesday, which if confirmed would be a new European record, beating Greece’s previous high.

Eight people were killed in fires in Turkey’s south earlier in the month, while in the north the death toll rose to five on Thursday from flash floods that have swept across several Black Sea regions.

The latest extreme weather events come after a “code red” report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published on Monday warning that the world is warming far faster than previously feared.

The Mediterranean has been singled out as a “climate change hotspot”, with increasing temperatures and aridity lengthening fire seasons and doubling the areas potential burnt, according to draft IPCC assessment seen exclusively by AFP.

Russian scientists sounded the alarm on Wednesday over a huge oil slick in the Black Sea, with the World Wildlife Fund saying at least 100 tonnes of oil have leaked off the city of Novorossiysk.

After it emerged that the slick was much larger than initially reported, investigators launched a pollution probe and the General Prosecutor’s Office said officials were studying the coast between the resort town of Anapa and Novorossiysk.

The area is home to some of the country’s best beaches popular with Russian tourists.

A leak occurred at a sea terminal near the southern port city at the weekend as the Greek-flagged Minerva Symphony was loading oil.

On Monday, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which controls the terminal, said the spill was contained, estimating that oil had spread over 200 square metres (2,150 square feet) and involved around 12 cubic metres (423 cubic feet) of oil.

By early Sunday, “the situation was back to normal” and posed no threat to either the local population or wildlife, said the consortium.

CPC’s shareholders include Russia’s Rosneft, US oil giant Chevron and Italy’s Eni.

The WWF and Russian scientists said the oil slick was much more serious than initially reported and could harm the environment. 

The conservation group said it had launched its own surveillance and found the slick had covered an area of 94 square kilometres by Sunday.

Greenpeace, which said it was asking for more information from officials, claimed the polluted area could be 400,000 bigger than initially reported.

– Dolphinarium sounds alarm – 

The WWF estimated that at least 100 tonnes of oil — “and most likely even more” — had been released into the Black Sea.

“Despite the prompt involvement of rescue teams, the oil spread over a colossal area,” the WWF said on Facebook, adding that marine wildlife could be affected.

Aleksei Knizhnikov, head of the responsible industry programme at WWF Russia, said the slick was drifting north, having already reached Abrau-Dyurso — famed for its wine-making industry — and might later reach the Utrish Nature Reserve.

“We can say that there is no objective information about the scale of the spill on the part of regulatory authorities,” he told AFP.

The Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences said it was also monitoring the pollution and citing data from satellite images said that the oil had spread over an area of nearly 80 square kilometres. 

“On August 8, the oil slick spread from the shore into the open sea over a distance of 19 kilometres,” the institute said in a statement.

Victoria Glushchenko of Greenpeace Russia said in a statement that if the estimates of the space research institute were correct, “this spill will threaten fish, birds and marine ecosystems in the area”.

“In addition, the health of people, including tourists, who will find themselves in the pollution zone, is at risk,” she added.

Staff at a dolphinarium outside the resort town of Anapa said they had seen oil slicks on the surface and were working to protect their marine mammals.

“As soon as you put your hand in the water, the skin gets covered in a greasy film,” the dolphinarium said on Instagram.

On Wednesday afternoon, Russian authorities said they were looking into the situation.

The head of the environment watchdog Rosprirodnadzor Svetlana Radionova said she was personally in charge of the case.

The general director of the consortium, Nikolai Gorban, reported to Energy Minister Nikolai Shulginov about the spill clean-up and containment work.

“The minister stressed the need to verify information on the volume of the oil spill,” the energy ministry said.

In January, jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny released an investigation alleging that oligarchs had built an opulent Black Sea palace for President Vladimir Putin. Putin has denied owning the mansion, which is south of Novorossiysk. 

Scientists on Italy’s side of the Mont Blanc massif are constantly monitoring a melting glacier, where the risk of collapse due to rising temperatures threatens the valley below.

The Planpincieux glacier, at an altitude of about 2,700 metres (8,860 feet), hangs over the hamlet of Planpincieux, underneath the south face of the Grandes Jorasses within the Mont Blanc massif in Italy’s picturesque northwest corner. 

Known as a “temperate” glacier, it is already at a melting point, as opposed to polar glaciers that are still frozen to bedrock.

That means the Planpincieux glacier can slide faster, via water just under its surface, making it more unpredictable and dangerous for the Val Ferret valley below, experts say.

“We’ve got a significant temperature rise and this causes a more rapid formation of the sub-glacial water flow, an important underground circulation of water,” Valerio Segor, the Aosta Valley region’s director of natural risk management, told AFP.

In years past, the Planpincieux glacier was lodged in a more stable position on the rock, and was thicker with fewer fractures, said Paolo Perret, a glacier expert at the Courmayeur-based Safe Mountains Foundation.

But due to rising temperatures caused by climate change, “the glacier withdrew to a smooth and steep surface which causes it to be in an unstable position,” Perret said.

The movements are not insignificant, with the glacier in extreme cases slipping as much as 150 centimetres (4 feet 9 inches) in a day, he said.

By contrast, the Whymper serac, a polar glacier above it looming nearly 4,000 metres above sea level, can slide between two and 20 centimetres per day, said Perret, resulting in “imminent collapses”.

A massive block of ice from the Whymper serac measuring 15,000 square metres tumbled to the ground last October, a day after authorities had prohibited access to paths underneath. 

Movements of the Planpincieux glacier — and those above it — are closely monitored via radar, and the region’s safety plan anticipates a variety of potential scenarios.  

The “extreme scenario” would be the fall of an 800,000 metre cube of ice to the village and road below, said Segor. 

“But there are no absolute guarantees that it will really behave in that way.”

An asteroid known as Bennu will pass within half the distance of the Earth to the Moon in the year 2135 but the probability of an impact with our planet in the coming centuries is very slight, scientists said Wednesday.

OSIRIS-REx, a NASA spacecraft, spent two years near Bennu, an asteroid that is about 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide, observing its size, shape, mass and composition and monitoring its orbital trajectory around the sun.

Using its robotic arm, the spacecraft also collected a sample from the surface of the asteroid that will help researchers determine the future trajectory of Bennu.

The rocks and dust collected by OSIRIS-REx are scheduled to return to Earth on September 24, 2023.

Bennu was discovered in 1999 and is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid.

It will make a close approach with Earth in September 2135.

Scientists want to figure out how Earth’s gravity and a phenomenon known as the Yarkovsky effect will affect its future trajectory and the potential for an impact on a subsequent orbit.

“The OSIRIS-REx data give us so much more precise information, we can test the limits of our models and calculate the future trajectory of Bennu to a very high degree of certainty through 2135,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist with the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

“We’ve never modeled an asteroid’s trajectory to this precision before,” said Farnocchia, lead author of a study published in the journal Icarus.

“The impact probability overall is very small,” he stressed. “We shouldn’t be worried about it too much.”

Farnocchia said the risk from Bennu “is smaller than from the undiscovered population of objects of similar size.”

Researchers determined Bennu’s total impact probability between now and the year 2300 at about one in 1,750, or 0.057 percent.

“We are still looking for what we don’t know out there — the objects that haven’t been found yet,” said Lindley Johnson of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

Johnson said researchers were studying ways to redirect the orbit of an asteroid should it ever become necessary to do so.

He said an asteroid impacting Earth would cause a crater about 10 to 20 times the size of the object and spawn an area of devastation about 100 times the size of the crater.  

But, Johnson added, “We really don’t think we need to do anything about Bennu.”