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The “inland tsunami” that swept through Australia’s Lockyer valley Monday killed at least ten and left 78 missing, authorities said Tuesday.

Military helicopters are currently scouring the floodwaters near Toowomba in Australia’s Queensland state for the missing 78 people.

A violent torrent of water streamed through the valley Monday, ripping houses from their foundations and tossing cars like toys as people clung to telephone poles and rooftops.

The raging channel slowed as it headed toward Brisbane, Australia’s third-largest city, where some fear floodwaters are set to strike next.

“This is a truly dire set of circumstances for the people of Queensland, with more flooding to come,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television, according to The Associated Press.

The steady deluge in Queensland, which has swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, began before Christmas. Monday’s devastating 6-foot wall of water brings the overall death toll to 20.

Authorities rescued over 40 Lockyer Valley residents from rooftops and evacuated thousands more. In the nearby town of Forest Hill, emergency services officers airlifted the entire population of 300 people to safety.

Search and rescue efforts were impeded by the unremitting rain and heavy thunderstorms.

Brisbane authorities are preparing for 6,500 buildings to be flooded by about 3 feet of water in the coming days, potentially affecting about 15,000 people in 80 suburbs.

Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson called Monday’s flash flood in Toowoomba “an inland instant tsunami,” AP reports. Officials warned that more flash floods could occur Tuesday.

Australian authorities say the death toll from the Queensland floods has risen to eight, with more than 70 missing after a flash flood tore through the city of Toowoomba Monday.

The sudden 2-meter torrent of water carried away cars and pedestrians and left people clinging to rooftops and telephone poles.

There are mounting fears that the floods will hit nearby Brisbane, Australia’s third-largest city.

Officials said more than 40 people were rescued from rooftops by helicopter.

Police have launched a major rescue operation for the 72 people still missing.

The state of Queensland has been swamped with heavy rains since before Christmas, causing the worst flooding in decades.

A winter storm system raged through the southeastern U.S. Monday morning, disrupting travel and dropping a snowy mix on areas that don’t normally see winter precipitation.

AirTran Airways scrapped all of its arrivals and departures in Atlanta Monday. Delta also cut 1,450 flights nationwide, about one-fourth of its schedule.

The system dumped freezing rain, snow and ice to a swath of land from northeast Texas through the Carolinas.The northern areas of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas can expect heavy snow, CNN meteorologist Dave Hennen reported. The southern regions of those states are likely to be hit with ice storms.

American Airlines also cut 100 flights in and out of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. That’s about a fifth of the airline’s domestic flights.

In anticipation of the hazardous conditions, governors in Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama have declared states of emergency.

An orange alligator photographed in South Florida this week is causing a stir.

Venice, Fla. resident Sylvia Mathen captured a photo of the rust-colored gator, which was sunbathing beside a neighborhood canal.

After the shot ran on a local television program, it generated a considerable amount of buzz. But experts say the gator’s pigment isn’t natural.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said Thursday that they don’t believe the color to be genetic. Instead, the creature was likely covered in paint or some other orange substance.

Officials say oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster still heavily pollutes the marshes along Louisiana’s coastlines.

State and parish officials gave the press a boat tour of the oil-fouled swamps of Barataria Bay, calling for a stronger cleanup effort from BP and the Obama administration.

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser called the state of the marshes “the biggest cover-up in the history of America,” The Associated Press reported Friday.

Robert Barham, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and an outspoken critic of the cleanup effort, also participated in the tour.

AP writer Harry Weber reported that oil is pooling in some areas and boom barriers are often absent or overwhelmed by oil.

“Clearly there is oil here in the marsh but we are working as a team to find a best way to clean it up,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer, who accompanied the press and officials on the tour.

The rapidly eroding marshes along the coast play a key role in protecting Louisiana from hurricanes.

The oil also endangers vulnerable reeds and grasses that feed microscopic marine life, with consequences that will reverberate up the food chain.

The BP oil spill, set off by a blowout on a Macondo rig on Apr. 20, leaked an estimated 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Bacteria consumed methane gas from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in four months, a report said Thursday.

Methane constituted 20 percent of the crude oil that erupted from the Macondo oil well in worst marine spill in the history of the petroleum industry.

A report published Thursday in the journal Science said a sudden bloom of bacteria ingested the methane completely by early September.

“They did a good job on it and that was much earlier than expected,” said John Kessler, a chemical oceanographer at Texas A&M University, according to AP.

University of California Santa Barbara geochemistry professor David Valentine, one of the study’s lead authors, said the discovery proves that the bacteria play a vital role in preventing heat-trapping greenhouse gases on the ocean’s floor from entering the earth’s atmosphere.

“They do serve an important function, and as we see here under certain conditions these bacteria can be very effective at preventing the methane from reaching the atmosphere,” Valentine told AFP.

Valentine added that previous research showed that other types of bacteria also ingested the ethane and propane released by the explosion.

The researchers also said bacteria consumed some of the crude oil itself, but it is not yet clear how much.

Millions of dead fish littered the shores of the Chesapeake Bay this week, the Maryland Department of the Environment said.

Officials are still investigating the incident but have pointed to lower-than-average water temperatures as a likely cause of death from cold stress.

“Our theory is that it was a very rapid temperature drop,” MDE spokeswoman Dawn Stoltzfus said, according to msnbc.com. “Obviously, these are fish that are susceptible to very cold temperatures.”

An estimated 2 million fish reportedly washed ashore beginning last week in Calvert County and Kent Island. The fish were chiefly juvenile spot fish, which are about 3 to 6 inches in length.

Stoltzfus said the MDE is assessing water quality in the area.

“So far, there don’t appear to be any water quality or pollution issues that have contributed to this fish kill,” Stoltzfus said.

The bay has not seen a fish die-off this significant since 1976, when 15 million dead fish washed ashore, msnbc.com reported Thursday.

Thousands of dead crabs have washed up on U.K. shores, the latest in a recent slew of mass animal die-offs around the world.

Scientists say prolonged cold weather is what caused more than 40,000 Velvet swimming crabs to wash up along Britain’s east coast in the county of Kent. Britain has endured its coldest December in 120 years, which caused sea temperatures to drop below average, the Daily Mail reported Wednesday.

The country’s largest swimming crabs, also known as devil crabs, may have moved closer to the shoreline due to warmer weather caused by climate change, coastal warden Tony Sykes told the newspaper.

“We believe the sudden temperature drop causes the crabs to suffer from hypothermia and die,” he said.

Coast Project Manager Tony Childs said there was no cleanup planned, and that officials would let nature run its course.

“As happens with the circle of life in nature, we expect the crabs to be naturally dispersed from our shores very quickly by our local seagulls,” he said.

Activists with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society led an attack on Japanese whalers on a mission in Antarctica, whaling authorities said Wednesday.

The Institute of Cetacean Research, which organizes the whaling program, says militant activists aboard the international organization’s “Gojira” speedboat threw glass bottles at the Yushin Maru-2 harpoon ship and threw ropes at its propeller, in the second clash between the two groups this week.

Two of the Sea Shepherd’s ships engaged in a similar confrontation against the Japanese whaling ship Yushin Maru-3 on New Year’s Day, AFP reports.

The Institute of Cetacean Research denounced the attacks, insisting on the legality of the whaling mission.

A loophole in the country’s 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling allows Japan to kill hundreds of whales each year for “lethal research,” AFP reports.

Environmental organizations and anti-whaling nations like Australia and New Zealand condemn the practice as cruel and unnecessary.

A panel appointed to study the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico says the blowout was caused by a series of risky decisions intended to save time and money.

The seven-member commission also claims the incident could happen again without significant reforms.

A 48-page excerpt of the report was released Wednesday prior to the full document’s publication early next week.

“The blowout was not the product of a series of aberrational decisions made by rogue industry or government officials that could not have been anticipated or expected to occur again,” the report said. “Rather, the root causes are systemic and, absent significant reform in both industry practices and government policies, might well recur.”

BP’s Macondo well began uncontrollably gushing crude oil on April 20, setting off the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry.

The panel contends that BP, Transocean and Halliburton company personnel did not adequately consider the risks involved in a series of time-saving steps.

“The most significant failure at Macondo — and the clear root cause of the blowout — was a failure of industry management,” panel members concluded. “Better management of decision-making processes within BP and other companies, better communication within and between BP and its contractors and effective training of key engineering and rig personnel would have prevented the Macondo incident.”

Bob Graham, a former Florida senator, and William K. Reilly, a former EPA administrator, were appointed by President Barack Obama last May to lead the commission designed to identify the underlying causes of the blowout.