#disaster-mapping

#disaster-mapping

Minden Hills has been under a state of emergency since Tuesday, with flooding affecting homes and roads, and the local arena being converted into an evacuation center.

The town declared a state of emergency Tuesday at 2:00 p.m., citing an increasing level of water on its Gull River which flows directly through the town and more rainy, warmer weather forecasted for the next five to ten days.

We created Earth in Action to provide a lens into what's happening on our planet, as it happens. Whether it's something typical, like the current air temperature, or an extreme event like a major dust storm, we wanted to provide an opportunity for people to see them.

In North Oaks, Minnesota, property lines extend to the middle of the street, which means the entire city is considered private property.

I watched my mom and the attitude she takes to life. She always believes there is a 'better' coming; even if you can't see it now, it is coming soon.

Google tasked Gemini with sorting through 5 million news articles from around the world and isolating flood reports. It transformed this data into a geo-tagged series of chronological events. Next, researchers trained a model to ingest current weather forecasts and leverage the Groundsource data to determine the likelihood of a flash flood in a given area.

While humans have assembled a lot of weather data, flash floods are too short-lived and localized to be measured comprehensively, the way the temperature or even river flows are monitored over time. That data gap means that deep learning models, which are increasingly capable of forecasting the weather, aren't able to predict flash floods.

The winter we had this year, it was colder than last year, so the snow held more water. That water ends up in our waterways. Mississauga is home to many bodies of water, including rivers, lakes, stormwater ponds and Lake Ontario, which increases flooding especially this time of year.

Along coastlines, where tides are typically magnified, they profoundly affect navigation, commerce, coastal flooding, water properties and sediment transport. Tides impact the flooding of rivers and, thus, influence the extent of their floodplain, which has cascading effects on biogeochemical and ecological processes.

In Grazalema, Spain's wettest town, a year's-worth of rain fell in a fortnight and overloaded the karst aquifer beneath it. Water rushed into homes through floors, walls and even electricity sockets. Authorities ordered everyone to evacuate. I felt a lot of fear, said Sanchez Barea, a guesthouse owner whose home is one of hundreds still in an exclusion zone.

A lack of insurance coverage in Southeast Asia threatens an increasingly important hub for supply chains, as the region is battered by tropical storms, major flooding, and other natural disasters. Total losses from natural disasters across Asia-Pacific last year totaled $73 billion, yet just $9 billion was insured, according to Germany reinsurance company Munich Re. That makes Asia one of the world's least insured regions against natural disasters.

To capture the biological impact of this extreme environment, I used a comprehensive suite of sensors and biomarker analyses. I wore a wireless electroencephalograph (EEG) system to monitor brain activity, sleep stages and neural signatures of stress and adaptation; the Oura Ring to continuously track sleep patterns, heart-rate variability and circadian-rhythm shifts; and the glucose monitor to follow metabolic responses in real time.

As the Class of 2026 prepares to enter the workforce this summer, they-like last year's graduates and those already in the job market-are facing what economists now call a "low hire, low fire" economy. Whether this is driven by AI or other economic factors remains hotly debated, but the causes are beside the point for new grads looking for jobs postgraduation in an economy marked by a pullback in early-career hiring.

Life doesn't pause for grief or fear. You might be going through something devastating but you're still packing lunches, still driving your kids to baseball practice, still showing up to work. One minute I find myself prepping for a whole home presentation and the next minute I'm checking the news, hoping and praying that no one has been killed on the streets today.

"Fire-hardened homes are the future of the state of California," said El Dorado County Supervisor George Turnboo.

Across history, the relocation of capital cities has often been associated with moments of political rupture, regime change, or symbolic nation-building. From Brasília to Islamabad, new capitals were frequently conceived as instruments of centralized power, territorial control, or ideological projection. In recent decades, however, a different set of drivers has begun to shape these decisions. Rather than security or representation alone, contemporary capital relocations are increasingly tied to structural pressures such as demographic concentration, infrastructural saturation, environmental risk, and long-term resource management.

Wildfire prevention has traditionally relied on blunt tools, such as rigid inspection cycles and emergency power shutoffs. Now a new generation of technology start-ups is pitching a more targeted approach: using artificial intelligence to help utility companies decide what to inspectand where to intervenebefore a spark becomes a blaze. The stakes are rising. In 2025 more than 77,000 wildfires were reported in the U.S.significantly more than the past decade's averageand burned more than five million acres.