Lightning Strike Kills 13 in Bangladesh, Unusual Summer Cyclonic Storm Blasts Arctic

Lightning strike kills 13 and wounds 20 in Bangladesh

August 11, 2012 – BANGLADESH – At least 13 people were killed and 20 wounded when lightning struck a makeshift mosque in a remote village in northeast Bangladesh on Friday, police said. The lightning strike occurred as people gathered for a special evening prayer known as taraweeh that is conducted during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. “Multiple lightning strikes occurred during a storm when nearly 35 people gathered at a house in the village of Saraswati where they turned a tin roof shed into a makeshift mosque for the month of Ramadan as a regular mosque was far away,” Dharmapasha police chief Bayes Alam told CNN. The village Saraswati is some 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the capital of Dhaka. Heavy rains in recent weeks have swollen the Saraswati River, making access to the village difficult. “As boats were the only mode of transport to go out of the village, it took several hours to take the critically wounded people to the hospital,” said Akm Mezanul Haque, the officer-in-charge of the Modhyanagar police station, who joined the rescue operation. Of the 13 killed by the lightning strike, Mohammad Shahabuddin, the imam, and two others died at the mosque, Alam said. Ten others were declared dead at a Dharmapasha area hospital, he said. Area residents and police took the wounded, many in critical condition, to the area hospital.

Unusual summer cyclonic storm blasts the Arctic

August 11, 2012 – ALASKA – A rare summer storm blasted the Arctic this week, beginning off the coast of Alaska, and moving over much of the Arctic Sea for several days before dissipating. Although the storm itself was uncommon — NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., estimates that there have only been about eight similarly strong August storms in the last 34 years — the real news behind the meteorological event is the stunning Aug. 6 photo taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. The cyclone is spinning toward the North Pole, with Greenland visible in the bottom-left of the image. Scientists are left speculating what the impact of such a storm could be. Arctic storms such as this one can have a large impact on the sea ice, causing it to melt rapidly through many mechanisms, such as tearing off large swaths of ice and pushing them to warmer sites, churning the ice and making it slushier, or lifting warmer waters from the depths of the Arctic Ocean. “It seems that this storm has detached a large chunk of ice from the main sea ice pack. This could lead to a more serious decay of the summertime ice cover than would have been the case otherwise, even perhaps leading to a new Arctic sea ice minimum,” said Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist with NASA Goddard. “Decades ago, a storm of the same magnitude would have been less likely to have as large an impact on the sea ice, because at that time the ice cover was thicker and more expansive.”