Fogbow

A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn't particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth's magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm seen for years. There wasn't much disruption this time—few people probably even knew it happened—but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Several hundred people in New Zealand were evacuated from their homes Monday with some recounting dramatic helicopter rescues as heavy rain caused widespread flooding in the Canterbury region.

Authorities declared a state of emergency after some places received as much as 40 centimeters (16 inches) of rain over the weekend and into Monday. Forecasters warned of possible heavy rain through Monday evening before conditions improved.

The military helped evacuate more than 50 people including several overnight in an NH-90 military helicopter.

One man was clinging to a tree near the town of Darfield when he jumped into floodwaters and tried to swim to safety but was swept away, the military said.

Helicopter crews scoured the water for 30 minutes before finding the man and plucking him to safety. The military helicopter also rescued an elderly couple from the roof of their car.

Meteorological summer (June through August) began at 12 a.m. Tuesday, and already heat and wildfire concerns in the Golden State are ramping upward. Much of California’s Central Valley from Bakersfield to Redding is under an excessive heat warning, with temperatures in spots expected to spike over 105 degrees.

The combination of hot temperatures and low humidity will bring elevated wildfire concerns, jump-starting a season that’s already feared to be worse than normal. It comes amid an “extreme” to “exceptional” drought gripping much of the state in an era characterized by longer fire seasons and more extreme fire behavior.

Longer-range outlooks continue to favor a bull's eye of anomalous heat parked over the Four Corners region, supporting a prolonged and more severe fire season in the West.

Thousands of spiders have created large webs after the Victoria floods in an attempt to reach higher ground

Residents in eastern Victoria have been taken aback after waking up to vast, alien-like sheets of spider webs laying across paddocks and roadsides.

The East Gippsland town of Traralgon was one of the hardest-hit areas by recent flooding and wild weather. While its neighbour Sale avoided the brunt of the damage, flooded roads and paddocks disrupted the local spider populations, which are now seeking higher ground on road signs, trees and any tall grass they can find.

“It’s just incredible, when they blow in the winds they look like waves,” said Jena Beatson, who saw the spiders on her first trip into Sale from Longford after the roads were cut off by flood waters.

“It does look creepy the way it covers all the signs and everything. You can’t really see it in the photos but there are spiders all over. It’s like thousands and thousands of spiders.”

Actually, according to Dr Ken Walker, a senior curator of entomology at the Melbourne Museum, it is millions.

“It’s a semi-regular occurrence in Victoria in wintertime when we get most of our rain. Spiders can make a wide range of different silks and one of the silks they use for this behaviour – ballooning – it’s a very, very thin little silk that they use … to fly away with the breeze. They could fly 100km,” he said.

“What’s happened is there’s been a massive flooding event pretty quickly … so they’re using the ballooning not to escape for hundreds of kilometres but to almost throw up a lasso on top of the vegetation. It hooks on to the tops of the vegetation because it’s lighter than air, and then they quickly climb up.”

This phenomenon, sometimes called the gossamer effect, is caused by “vagrant hunter” spider species, which live on the ground and do not build a web. They also do not create webs after ballooning away from a flood. In fact, Walker said, each spider only threw up a single thread, meaning every tiny line of silk represented a different animal.