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  • fire and ice are the 1st 2 topics today on CNN.

  • 10.

  • I'm Carla Zeus Hope your Thursday is going well, a resident of Sydney, Australia, says at one point this week she thought her house was on fire.

  • It wasn't but as the smoke blew into Sydney from the bush fires burning nearby, air quality dropped a hazardous levels.

  • Some Australians started complaining of burning eyes and the symptoms of asthma, and hes settled over Australia's largest city.

  • The state it's in New South Wales is home to almost eight million people.

  • It's been dealing with bushfires for much of this month.

  • They've destroyed hundreds of homes and killed four people, and more than 1300 firefighters are still fighting the blazes in New South Wales and in the state that forms its northern border, Queensland.

  • Meantime, one state west in South Australia, more than 100 schools have closed because of incredibly dangerous conditions.

  • The South Australian Bureau of Meteorology says any fires that start will be extremely hard to control.

  • A total ban on starting new fires is in place and like the ongoing power shut offs we told you about in California, electricity has been switched off to more than 10,000 people in South Australia.

  • Officials don't want equipment starting any new bushfires.

  • About 2.5 million acres of land have burned so far.

  • It's late spring time in Australia, when the region is prone to wildfires and high temperatures, strong winds and an ongoing drought are only making conditions Maur dangerous.

  • Forecasters predict that Thursday will be another hot and dangerous day with windy conditions on the eastern part of the convent.

  • 12th Trivia.

  • Where would you find 3/4 of Earth's freshwater Great Lakes, glacier, ice, global rivers or groundwater?

  • Glacier ice is the world's second largest water reservoir and its biggest freshwater reservoirs.

  • Glaciers cover about 10% of the world's total land area.

  • When you think of them, what might come to mind are these supermassive chunks of immovable ice, but some of them are anything but Gem.

  • Glacier, the smallest one in Montana's Glacier National Park, covers only about five acres, which is like five football fields, and the Alaska Almanac states that the state of Alaska alone is home to 100,000 glaciers.

  • Also, they move maybe not so fast that you can watch them drift like a boat over water.

  • But whether glaciers are crunching downward through valleys are spreading away from a central point.

  • These ice masses slip, slide, creep and crawl across the surface, scientists say.

  • Most of the world's glaciers are shrinking those summer getting larger, and investigations are taking place worldwide.

  • CNN's Holly Firfer recently took a tour of one that's said to be the largest U.

  • S glacier that's accessible by a car.

  • Glaciers Majestic and mysterious.

  • These icy giants make up about 10% of the world's landmass remnants of the last Ice Age, and they continue to transform as new layers of snow Barry and compressed the layers before it.

  • Here in Alaska, about 100 miles north of Anchorage, sits the Matanuska Glacier.

  • It's about 27 miles long, four miles wide, so we thought, Hey, why not hike it first?

  • We needed a guy in the winter.

  • Especially.

  • Glaciers can be dangerous because you can't see below the snow everything on the trail safe.

  • You take one step off the trail and there might be a hole there, so it is really important that we do stay on the trail.

  • So we joined guides Tiffany and John from Salmon Berry Tours for our Glacier Hike adventure.

  • We drive right up to the edge of it, and then we put on gear way.

  • Have spikes for our feet.

  • We put on helmets for precaution.

  • After a brief introduction to the glacier wear off, we got some moose tracks right over here Way.

  • Get up to some hires where there's some terrific views of the surrounding valley on all the while, we're looking around at the features of the glacier.

  • There's black ice, basil, ice ones and crevasses.

  • If you were wondering what those are, so were we.

  • But not for long.

  • Part of our adventure was the hike.

  • The other part was learning about these massive natural wonders.

  • A crevasse is a crack in the ice.

  • Various sizes, Some are small and some can swallow a vehicle.

  • Mullan's air holes in the ice.

  • Um, they form when flowing water flows off of it on.

  • It's sort of a rose into the glacier itself.

  • Creates a really amazing features, just kind of weird sort of carvings inside the ice, a giant hole in the ice.

  • Okay, then let's check it out.

  • So we're gonna go in here about two at a time.

  • You don't have to be perfectly physically fit way.

  • Always like to know if you have any limitations physically before you come out.

  • It's nothing extreme in terms of going up or down inclines.

  • But just be prepared for stepping on uneven surfaces worldly about a mile in, and the views are becoming even more spectacular every step you take.

  • Perhaps what's most remarkable, besides the dramatic landscapes, is the vastness and the stillness of the surroundings.

  • Sometimes when I take groups out there, I'll get to a point on the tour and I'll say, OK, let's just stop and let's just take a couple minutes and listen in silence and without fail after, like, a minute, just just kind of start looking around like feel that Can you people that come out they might be a little intimidated by the cold or about the drive way.

  • Take care of a lot of that.

  • And so we try to make it so that it's something that you can really, really take memories back.

  • It's not something people do every day, right?

  • Say that you walked on the glacier.

  • That's that's really unique.

  • Why do we hic up A new study out of University College, London may shed some light on why babies do that, but for you and me still a mystery, according to scientists and many moms out there, babies hiccup long before they're born.

  • In an effort to find out more, researchers monitored 13 hiccupping newborn babies, some of them premature and some of them full term by placing sensors on their heads and upper body's, They say hiccupping triggered a large wave of brain signals for the babies.

  • And one study authors theory is that the brain waves might help babies link the sound of the hiccup to the muscle contraction they feel in their die a friend.

  • The purpose that could serve is to teach babies to monitor their breathing, eventually helping them to control it.

  • But other scientists say this was a small study that doesn't prove that definitively.

  • Either way, why do we still do this as adults?

  • Researchers don't know.

  • They say there's no known advantages to why people continue to hiccup throughout the rest of their lives.

  • The same scientists who conducted this study have also examined babies, kicks in the womb, and they theorize that those could help a child create a sort of mental map of his or her own body from baby to baby.

  • That's the name of a giant panda who's been at the National Zoo since he was born there four years ago.

  • At that time, he was about the size of a stick of butter.

  • Now he's £240 of pure pandemonium, and he just arrived at his new home in China.

  • This is part of an agreement between the National Zoo and the Chinese government.

  • Beibei will now be cared for in a conservation and research center in China until he's old enough to go into its breeding program.

  • Though the giant panda is no longer an endangered species, it is still vulnerable as conservationists believe there are less than 2000 giant pandas in the wild.

  • It's hoped that Beibei will help increase their numbers, at least in captivity.

  • He was fed ex to China, literally in a direct flight on his own 777 private plane, and I'm not making this up.

  • They called it the Panda Express.

  • While babies move to China, got some people choked up.

  • We'd like to share something that went down while he was in Washington, D.

  • C.

  • Did you know that pandas are built to withstand falls from trees?

  • That's something I learned today on CNN 10.

  • While watching this footage of baby take a dive.

  • It's amazing the tree held up this long but there goes.

  • Not only was he unhurt, but he then showed us just how giant pandas scaled trees.

  • He was falling all over himself to do that.

  • And I'm not going out on a limb when I tell you that baby is OK and that he may may know the way.

  • Way to try.

  • Try again when it first you don't stay Treat.

  • I'm Carla Zoos Don't panda puns y'all.

  • There's something we all must bear on CNN test.

fire and ice are the 1st 2 topics today on CNN.

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