Tuesday, Jun 09th
Last update07:52:22 AM GMT
Environmental Glance
Cuba experienced a shake on the afternoon of Monday, June 8, as a preliminary 6.1 magnitude earthquake hit off the Western coast of the island.
According to the United States Geological Survey, the earthquake was reported at around 1 p.m. ET. The 6.1-magnitude earthquake was reported at a depth of 6.2 miles with an epicenter about 65 miles northwest of Mantua, Cuba.
Spectrum News said that vibrations from Monday’s earthquake were felt by local reporters at a facility in St. Petersburg, Florida.
A magnitude 7.8 earthquake centered at sea shook part of the southern Philippines early Monday, causing damage in a key coastal city, knocking down power and setting off 1-meter (3-foot) tsunami waves along nearby coasts, officials said.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. asked people to immediately go to higher ground in Philippine areas vulnerable to a tsunami, and Indonesian and Malaysian authorities also issued warnings to their nearby coastal areas.
There were no immediate reports of casualties, and it was not clear if people were trapped or injured in the collapse of at least one small building in General Santos, a tuna-processing city of more than 700,000 people that is also a commercial hub in the south.
The strongest earthquake to hit the Philippines this year was was centered at sea about 13 kilometers (8 miles) southwest of General Santos and was caused by movement in the Cotabato Trench at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology. It struck at 7:37 a.m., the institute's director, Teresito Bacolcol said.
Modern roads in the United States will last for decades. And yet the damage they cause in our national forests is immediate.
Since 2001, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has protected more than 58m acres of national forests from development, barring road construction and timber harvests. The policy came to be with huge bipartisan support; almost 2 million people submitted comments on it, the majority of whom championed the protections.
Now the US secretary of agriculture, Brooke L Rollins, is working to rescind the “Roadless Rule”, opening up public lands – our lands – for logging and other development to the highest bidder.
This is just one prong in the Trump administration’s campaign to remake public lands in ways that most Americans would find.
An enormous marine heatwave off the US west coast is ringing alarm bells among ocean and atmospheric scientists as new data shows its ecological and environmental effects are intensifying.
The unusual area of warm water has persisted since peaking in size during September 2025 and still stretches thousands of miles from the California coastline – more than halfway across the Pacific – affecting a vast triangle-shaped region of oceanic habitats from Hawaii to British Columbia and southward to Mexico.
As recently as early April, marine scientists had hoped that the heatwave might diminish and the worst of its effects might be avoided. However, new projections released last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) show it is now expected to expand and strengthen in the months to come.
Scientists say the effects may already be far reaching. A surge in the marine heatwave would accompany the formation of El Niño in the tropical Pacific – resulting in an atmospheric and oceanic mélange that could influence everything from record-breaking temperatures on land to disrupted marine food chains.
Authorities in Orange county, California have ordered the evacuation of 40,000 people over concerns about a chemical leak that threatened to spill or explode.
The problem arose on Thursday at a facility owned by GKN Aerospace in the town of Garden Grove, where a storage tank holding methyl methacrylate began off-gassing and threatened to fail. The chemical, which is highly flammable, is used to fabricate resins and plastics.
Local authorities originally responded to the incident with a hazmat team on Thursday, ordering local residents to evacuate. They lifted the order later that day, but the problem worsened due to “damage to a valve on the tank” that “created additional operational challenges, preventing complete mitigation”, Garden Grove authorities wrote in an evacuation order.
By Friday, new evacuation orders had expanded to residents in six cities.
The Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate justice organization that popularized calls for a Green New Deal, took credit for disrupting Donald Trump’s rally in New York state on Friday.
“The activists arrested were activists with Sunrise Movement,” a spokesperson for the group confirmed to the Guardian in an email.
Video posted on social media by the movement, recorded at two points during Trump’s speech to supporters at Rockland Community College, showed two activists protesting the president’s mass deportation campaign and his war on Iran.
More than 17,000 people were under evacuation orders in southern California on Tuesday as a wildfire threatened suburban homes.
The wind-driven Sandy fire was reported on Monday in the hills above Simi Valley, about 30 miles (48km) north-west of Los Angeles.
By Tuesday evening, the fire had consumed about 1,698 acres (683 hectares) and destroyed at least one home, according to the Ventura countyThe flames were initially pushed by gusts that topped 30mph (48km/h), but firefighters were aided by calmer winds overnight, said a department spokesperson, Andrew Dowd.
“We’ve made a lot of progress against this fire with those improved weather conditions,” Dowd said. Crews hoped to make further progress before winds increased again, he said.
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