Worsening Weather, Earthquakes, Vortices, Volcanoes, CMEs ... What's Up?

[thorfourwinds]

Published on Mar 2, 2016
US Hazards Outlook
An area of upper-level low pressure is forecast to move inland from the east Pacific this weekend and then advance to the central U.S. by the middle part of next week, while an area of upper-level high pressure builds along the East Coast. Strong onshore flow is likely to persist along the West Coast through mid-March. Surface high pressure is forecast to prevail across the Bering Sea, while low pressure remains anchored over the Gulf of Alaska.

Strontium Milks
Published on Mar 5, 2016
Japan radiation SOURCE: http://jciv.iidj.net/map/list?
Usa radiation source: http://netc.com and http://radiationnetwork.com

Published on Mar 6, 2016
We've got a storm that might bring some parts of California over a foot of Rain & 5 feet of Snow. They say it is an atmospheric river. They are professional meteorologists, yo.

Rounds of heavy rain will heighten the risk of flooding and mudslides across California as storms persistently roll ashore into the second week of March.

Rain bypassed the state during most of February, but a shift in the weather pattern will steer storms into the California coast through Monday.

"Storms will usher in moderate to heavy rain across California and heavy snow to the Sierra Nevada [through Monday]," AccuWeather Meteorologist Brett Rathbun stated.

Over half a foot of rain could fall across northern California.

Across Southern California, a few gusty thunderstorms could accompany the rain on Monday.

Snow levels will fall throughout the weekend, allowing feet of snow to accumulate in the Sierra Nevada. Travel will be extremely difficult and dangerous through the mountain passes.

As these storms roll ashore, winds could gust up to 60 mph especially along the coast, potentially causing downed trees and power outages.

While this rain will help replenish depleted water reservoirs and put a dent in the long-standing drought, the large amount of rain in a short time frame may lead to hazards such as flooding, mudslides and debris flows.

Recent burn areas will be most susceptible to mudslides and debris flows, AccuWeather Western U.S. Weather Expert Ken Clark said.

[space otter]

ah thoughts of Cayce come to mind..



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/earth-poles-climate-change_us_5706c52ee4b0537661892db4

04/11/2016 08:45 pm ET | Updated 2 hours ago
Jacqueline Howard
Senior Science Editor, The Huffington Post ?

Chris D'Angelo
Associate Editor, HuffPost Hawaii

Climate Change May Be Causing Earth's Poles To Shift

Scientists solve mystery of why the planet's axis is tilting eastward.



The position of Earth's axis has dramatically shifted, likely because of melting ice sheets (fueled by climate change) and natural changes in water storage on land, according to a new study in the journal Science Advances.

Erik Ivins, senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-author of the study published on Friday, told The Huffington Post that the movement of water on Earth's surface affects the planet's distribution of mass — and its axis — much like adding weight to a spinning top.

"If you considered a spinning top, and then placed a piece of chewing gum on the top, it would start spinning around a new axis," Ivins said in an email. "On the Earth, since water can be transported in and out of the oceans to the land — affecting global mean sea-levels — this also changes the moments of inertia, in exact analogy to the piece of chewing gum on a spinning top."

The shifting axis might add to the effects of climate change on our stressed-out planet: Global temperatures are getting hotter. Weather events are becoming more extreme. Sea levels are rising.



NASA/JPL-Caltec 

Earth does not always spin on an axis running through its poles. Instead, it wobbles irregularly over time, drifting toward North America throughout most of the 20th Century (green arrow). That direction has changed drastically due to changes in water mass on Earth.


Earth, as many of us remember from grade school, spins on an axis. This axis is an imaginary line that stretches through the center of the planet from the North Pole to the South Pole, and is tilted at an angle of around 23.5 degrees with respect to the orbital plane that includes the sun and Earth.

Scientists have long known that Earth tends to wobble as it spins, causing its poles to drift slightly. However, a dramatic shift occurred around the year 2000, when the North Pole turned east.

In an attempt to understand why, Ivins and his colleague Surendra Adhikari analyzed space geodetic and satellite gravimetric data from 2003 to 2015. This data allowed the researchers to unambiguously identify the causal mechanism for the Earth's drifting poles after 2003.

The researchers wrote in their study that the Earth's spin axis has been shifting 75-degrees eastward from its normal long-term drift direction since the early 2000s. That shift, they found, is being driven not only by melting ice sheets, but also a loss of water mass in Eurasia due to the depletion of aquifers and drought, according to a NASA release.

"This is the first time we have solid evidence that changes in land water distribution on a global scale also shift which direction the axis moves to," Adhikari, lead author of the study, told New Scientist.

Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona, who was not involved with the study, told The Guardian that "this highlights how real and profoundly large an impact humans are having on the planet."

While the findings are surprising, Ivins said, there is no need for alarm. The shift, he said, is relatively small, and there is no real chance that the amount of solar radiation reaching sensitive parts of Earth will increase.

"What the shift does tell scientists," Ivins said, "is that we have a new tool to probe past climate changes in a very quantitative and accurate way. To us, that is significant."




embedded links at article

[funbox]

Climate Change May Be Causing Earth's Poles To Shift

should the adj be switched in that conjecture?


boxfun

[space otter]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/resettling-the-first-american-%e2%80%98climate-refugees%e2%80%99/ar-BBsy4QS?li=BBnb7Kz
The New York Times
By CORAL DAVENPORT and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
10 hrs ago

Resettling the First American 'Climate Refugees'

1/8 SLIDES © Josh Haner/The New York Times

Isle de Jean Charles in southeastern Louisiana. A $48 million federal grant has been allocated to resettle its residents because of flooding.


ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La. — Each morning at 3:30, when Joann Bourg leaves the mildewed and rusted house that her parents built on her grandfather's property, she worries that the bridge connecting this spit of waterlogged land to Louisiana's terra firma will again be flooded and she will miss another day's work.

Ms. Bourg, a custodian at a sporting goods store on the mainland, lives with her two sisters, 82-year-old mother, son and niece on land where her ancestors, members of the Native American tribes of southeastern Louisiana, have lived for generations. That earth is now dying, drowning in salt and sinking into the sea, and she is ready to leave.

With a first-of-its-kind "climate resilience" grant to resettle the island's native residents, Washington is ready to help.

"Yes, this is our grandpa's land," Ms. Bourg said. "But it's going under one way or another."

In January, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced  grants totaling $1 billion in 13 states to help communities adapt to climate change, by building stronger levees, dams and drainage systems.

One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change. The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees.

"We're going to lose all our heritage, all our culture," lamented Chief Albert Naquin of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, the tribe to which most Isle de Jean Charles residents belong. "It's all going to be history."

Around the globe, governments are confronting the reality that as human-caused climate change warms the planet, rising sea levels, stronger storms, increased flooding, harsher droughts and dwindling freshwater supplies could drive the world's most vulnerable people from their homes. Between 50 million and 200 million people — mainly subsistence farmers and fishermen — could be displaced by 2050 because of climate change, according to estimates by the United Nations Institute for Environment and Human Security and the International Organization for Migration.


© The New York Times 

"The changes are underway and they are very rapid," Interior Secretary Sally Jewell warned last week in Ottawa. "We will have climate refugees."

But the problem is complex, said Walter Kaelin, the head of the Nansen Initiative, a research organization working with the United Nations to address extreme-weather displacement.

"You don't want to wait until people have lost their homes, until they flee and become refugees," he said. "The idea is to plan ahead and provide people with some measure of choice."

The Isle de Jean Charles resettlement plan is one of the first programs of its kind in the world, a test of how to respond to climate change in the most dramatic circumstances without tearing communities apart. Under the terms of the federal grant, the island's residents are to be resettled to drier land and a community that as of now does not exist. All funds have to be spent by 2022.

"We see this as setting a precedent for the rest of the country, the rest of the world," said Marion McFadden, who is running the program at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But even a plan like this — which would move only about 60 people — has been hard to pull off. Three previous resettlement efforts dating back to 2002 failed after they became mired in logistical and political complications. The current plan faces all the same challenges, illustrating the limitations of resettlement on any larger scale.

For over a century, the American Indians on the island fished, hunted, trapped and farmed among the lush banana and pecan trees that once spread out for acres. But since 1955, more than 90 percent of the island's original land mass has washed away. Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island, and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands' sediments. Some of the island was swept away by hurricanes.

What little remains will eventually be inundated as burning fossil fuels melt polar ice sheets and drive up sea levels, projected the National Climate Assessment, a report of 13 federal agencies that highlighted the Isle de Jean Charles and its tribal residents as among the nation's most vulnerable.

Already, the homes and trailers bear the mildewed, rusting scars of increasing floods. The fruit trees are mostly gone or dying thanks to saltwater in the soil. Few animals are left to hunt or trap.

Violet Handon Parfait sees nothing but a bleak future in the rising waters. She lives with her husband and two children in a small trailer behind the wreckage of their house, which Hurricane Gustav destroyed in 2008.

The floods ruined the trailer's oven, so the family cooks on a hot plate. Water destroyed the family computer, too. Ms. Parfait, who has lupus, is afraid of what will happen if she is sick and cannot reach a doctor over the flooded bridge.

Ms. Parfait, who dropped out of high school, hopes for a brighter future, including college, for her children, Heather, 15, and Reggie, 13. But the children often miss school when flooding blocks their school bus.

"I just want to get out of here," she said.

Still, many residents of Isle de Jean Charles do not want to leave. Attachment to the island runs deep. Parents and grandparents lived here; there is a cemetery on the island that no one wants to abandon. Old and well-earned distrust of the government hangs over all efforts, and a bitter dispute between the two Indian tribes with members on the island has thwarted efforts to unite behind a plan.

"Ain't nobody I talk to that wants to move," said Edison Dardar, 66, a lifelong resident who has erected handwritten signs at the entrance to the island declaring his refusal to leave. "I don't know who's in charge of all this."

Whether to leave is only the first of the hard questions: Where does everyone go? What claim do they have to what is left behind? Will they be welcomed by their new neighbors? Will there be work nearby? Who will be allowed to join them?

"This is not just a simple matter of writing a check and moving happily to a place where they are embraced by their new neighbors," said Mark Davis, the director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy.

"If you have a hard time moving dozens of people," he continued, "it becomes impossible in any kind of organized or fair way to move thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or, if you look at the forecast for South Florida, maybe even millions."

Louisiana officials have been coping with some of the fastest rates of land loss in the world — an area the size of Delaware has disappeared from south Louisiana since the 1930s. A master plan that is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars envisions a giant wall of levees and flood walls along the coast.

But some places, like the island, would be left on the outside. For those communities, wholesale relocation may be an effective tool, if a far more difficult and costly one.

"That's one of the things we need to learn from the creation of this model, which is how to do it economically," said Pat Forbes, the executive director of the state's Office of Community Development, the agency in charge of administering the federal climate grant.

A vast majority of the $1 billion disaster-resilience grant program is spent on projects to improve infrastructure, like stronger roads, bridges, dams, levees and drainage systems, to withstand rising seas and stronger storms.

But experts see places like Isle de Jean Charles as lost causes.

"We are very cognizant of the obligation to taxpayers to not throw good money after bad," Ms. McFadden of the Department of Housing and Urban Development said. "We could give the money to the island to build back exactly as before, but we know from the climate data that they will keep getting hit with worse storms and floods, and the taxpayer will keep getting hit with the bill."

With door-to-door visits, the state is only beginning to find out what the residents want in a new plan, Mr. Forbes said.

The location of the new community has not been chosen. Chiefs of the two tribes present on the island — the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw and the United Houma Nation — have debated who would be allowed to live there beyond the islanders themselves, and whether some islanders could resettle elsewhere. One of the planners involved in the resettlement suggested a buffer area between the new community and its surrounding neighborhood to reduce tension. Chief Naquin wants a live buffalo on site.

What has been decided, and what was essential for the islanders' support, is that the move be voluntary.

"I've lived my whole life here, and I'm going to die here," said Hilton Chaisson, who raised 10 sons on the island and wants his 26 grandchildren to know the same life of living off the land.

He conceded that the flooding has worsened, but, he said, "we always find a way."

[thorfourwinds]

BPEarthWatch
Published on May 4, 2016

METEORS FROM HALLEY'S COMET:
Earth is entering a stream of debris from Halley's Comet, source of the annual eta Aquariid meteor shower. Forecasters expect the shower to peak on the nights around May 5th and 6th with 30+ meteors per hour. The best time to look, no matter where you live, is probably during the dark hours before sunrise on Friday.

Got clouds? No problem. You can still experience this meteor shower by listening to it. Meteor radar echoes are being streamed live on Space Weather Radio, http://spaceweatherradio.com/ and http://www.livemeteors.com/ Solar and Quake Links @ http://www.bpearthwatch.com

Debris from Halley's Comet:
The eta Aquarid Meteor Shower
SpaceWeather.com

The 2016 eta Aquarid meteor shower peaks on the nights around May 5th and 6th. The shower can be seen from both hemispheres, but the southern hemisphere is favored with twice as many meteors as the northern hemisphere--60 meteors per hour in the south vs. 30 per hour in the north. The best time to look, no matter where you live, is during the hours just before local sunrise.

astronomy binoculars
Eta Aquarids are flakes of dust from Halley's Comet, which last visited Earth in 1986. Although the comet is now far away, beyond the orbit of Uranus, it left behind a stream of dust. Earth passes through the stream twice a year in May and October. In May we have the eta Aquarid meteor shower, in October the Orionids. Both are caused by Halley's Comet.

The shower is named after a 4th-magnitude star in the constellation Aquarius. The star has nothing to do with the meteor shower except that, coincidentally, meteors appear to emerge from a point nearby. Eta Aquarii is 156 light years from Earth and 44 times more luminous than the Sun.

The constellation Aquarius does not rise very far above the horizon in the northern hemisphere, and that's why northerners see relatively few meteors. But the ones they do see could be spectacular Earthgrazers.

Earthgrazers are meteors that skim horizontally through the upper atmosphere. They are slow and dramatic, streaking far across the sky. The best time to look for Earthgrazers is between 2:00 to 2:30 a.m. local time when Aquarius is just peeking above the horizon.

Experienced meteor watchers suggest the following viewing strategy: Dress warmly. Bring a reclining chair, or spread a thick blanket over a flat spot of ground. Lie down and look up somewhat toward the east. Meteors can appear in any part of the sky, although their trails will point back toward Aquarius.

Tidbits:
    Eta Aquarid meteoroids hit Earth's atmosphere traveling 66 km/s (147,638 mph).
    Typical eta Aquarid meteors are as bright as a 3rd magnitude star.

[thorfourwinds]

Published on May 5, 2016
Scientists are Now Warning of Over 100 Years of Back Pressure building along the 800 Miles of the San Andreas Fault Zone in California.
Solar and Quake Links @ http://www.bpearthwatch.com

[space otter]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/sea-level-rise-claims-five-islands-in-solomons-study/ar-BBsJQqk?li=BBnb7Kz

AFP
10 hrs ago

© Provided by AFP At least 11 islands across the northern Solomon Islands have either totally disappeared over recent decades or are currently experiencing severe erosion, an Australian study shows 

Five islands have disappeared in the Pacific's Solomon Islands due to rising sea levels and coastal erosion, according to an Australian study that could provide valuable insights for future research.

A further six reef islands have been severely eroded in the remote area of the Solomons, the study said, with one experiencing some 10 houses being swept into the sea between 2011 and 2014.

"At least 11 islands across the northern Solomon Islands have either totally disappeared over recent decades or are currently experiencing severe erosion," the study published in Environmental Research Letters said.

"Shoreline recession at two sites has destroyed villages that have existed since at least 1935, leading to community relocations."

The scientists said the five that had vanished were all vegetated reef islands up to five hectares (12 acres) that were occasionally used by fishermen but not populated.

"They were not just little sand islands," leader author Simon Albert told AFP.

It is feared that the rise in sea levels will cause widespread erosion and inundation of low-lying atolls in the Pacific.

Albert, a senior research fellow at the University of Queensland, said the Solomons was considered a sea-level hotspot because rises there are almost three times higher than the global average.

The researchers looked at 33 islands using aerial and satellite imagery from 1947 to 2014, combined with historical insight from local knowledge.

They found that rates of shoreline recession were substantially higher in areas exposed to high wave energy, indicating a "synergistic interaction" between sea-level rise and waves, which Albert said could prove useful for future study.

Those islands which were exposed to higher wave energy -- in addition to sea-level rise -- were found to have a greatly accelerated loss compared with the more sheltered islands.

"This provides a bit of an insight into the future," he said.

"There's these global trends that are happening but the local responses can be very, very localised."

For now, some communities in the Solomons are already adapting to the changed conditions.

"In addition to these village relocations, Taro, the capital of Choiseul Province is set to become the first provincial capital globally to relocate residents and services due to the threat of sea-level rise," the study said.


........................................

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/08/18/3472645/pacific-island-town-relocate-climate-change/


......................................

http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2015/the-vanishing-island/

[space otter]

ah just another side of the ice melting...sigh...i'm getting real close to turning off all media and just growing my veggies....sigh


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elena-e-giorgi/ice-caps-melt-prehistoric_b_9805334.html

THE BLOG
Ice Caps Melt, Prehistoric Virus Escapes. No, It's Not a Movie.
05/13/2016 03:58 pm ET

Elena E. Giorgi
Scientist, Photographer, and Writer

A couple of months ago I talked about the connection between global warming and the Zika virus. Today I would like to discuss another interesting side effect we might observe in the next decades thanks to global warming. The ice caps will melt. Big deal, we already knew that. But have you ever thought of the stuff trapped in that ice that's going to thaw? What if some of that stuff isn't really dead, just dormant, waiting to come back? Sounds like fiction, but it's not.

Up until a few years ago the general notion was that viruses were small. How small? Let's think in terms of genome units: viruses usually carry a handful of genes, either coded into DNA or RNA, and you can think of these as longs strings of four letters: A, C, T (or U if it's RNA), or G. The letters are called nucleotides, and the genome of most common viruses is typically in the order of tens of thousands of nucleotides long. By comparison, the human genome, with its 3 billion nucleotides, is enormous.

The notion of viruses being "small" compared to living cells was turned upside down with the discovery of megaviruses in 2010 (over one million bases) and, in 2013, of the pandoraviruses, a family of viruses that can reach a staggering 2.5 million bases in genome size.

Before you freak out: so far these gigantic viruses have only been found in unicellular organisms called amoebas, not in humans or any other animals. Amoebas acquire their nutrients through phagocytosis and that's also how the gigantic viruses infect them: the cell membrane forms a vesicle around the viral particle and engulfs it.

Two specimens of pandoraviruses have been found in shallow water sediments, one in Chile and the other one in Australia. They were both so big that they could be seen with just an optical microscope, reaching 1 ?m in length and 0.5 ?m in diameter. The researchers found over 2,000 genes in these pandoraviruses, of which over 90% looked nothing like any other previously known gene. In fact, they appear to be unrelated to the previously discovered megaviruses. So what are they? A fourth domain of life? A completely isolated niche in the tree of life? Or could they be — as the sci-fi writer in me wants to think — the remnants of a completely different form of life, one that existed so long ago that these gigantic particles are all there is left of it?

I thought I was original when I raised that hypothesis, but I wasn't. The researchers who'd first discovered the pandoraviruses posed the exact same question and, in order to find an answer, they went digging through fossils. They took a sample of Siberian permafrost layer (corresponding to late Pleistocene sediments older than 30,000 years) and used it to inoculate a particular culture of amoebas (called Acanthamoeba castellanii). Lo and behold, they indeed observed particles of a prehistoric giant virus multiplying in the amoeba culture, making it the most ancient eukaryote-infecting DNA virus revived to date! The observed viral particles were examined through transmission electron microscopy and found to have many similarities with the pandoraviruses, only they were even bigger.

The researchers named the giant virus pithovirus and hypothesized that there may be more gigantic viruses frozen out there that could be released from the ice as global warming takes over. Unlike pandoraviruses, though, these pithoviruses showed many more similarities to present-day viruses that normally infect humans and animals. This prompted the researchers to raise the alarm: the average temperature of the surface of the Arctic permafrost has increased by 3 °C during the past 100 years, faster than the average global temperature. Could there be more pathogens lurking in there waiting to be released again?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I just got an idea for the my next post-apocalyptic thriller.

References

Philippe, N., Legendre, M., Doutre, G., Coute, Y., Poirot, O., Lescot, M., Arslan, D., Seltzer, V., Bertaux, L., Bruley, C., Garin, J., Claverie, J., & Abergel, C. (2013). Pandoraviruses: Amoeba Viruses with Genomes Up to 2.5 Mb Reaching That of Parasitic Eukaryotes Science, 341 (6143), 281-286 DOI: 10.1126/science.1239181

Legendre, M., Bartoli, J., Shmakova, L., Jeudy, S., Labadie, K., Adrait, A., Lescot, M., Poirot, O., Bertaux, L., Bruley, C., Coute, Y., Rivkina, E., Abergel, C., & Claverie, J. (2014). Thirty-thousand-year-old distant relative of giant icosahedral DNA viruses with a pandoravirus morphology Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111 (11), 4274-4279 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1320670111

[funbox]

ah just another side of the ice melting...sigh...i'm getting real close to turning off all media and just growing my veggies....sigh

if only Otters could curb their inquisitiveness eh

funbox

[space otter]

 





anything is possible.. especially since i have curbed my desire to smack certain others who bug me on forums by just ignoring them...mostly

bwhahahahahahahahahah

[funbox]

anything is possible.. especially since i have curbed my desire to smack certain others who bug me on forums by just ignoring them...mostly

bwhahahahahahahahahah

the speed at which you move about this forum, one cares not for blinking, im certain they don't even know the blow has landed , or perceive  that mildly lingering fishy odour that appears like lightning afterwards

funbox

[space otter]

mildly lingering fishy odour

that's the best you can come up with  in your self proclaimed word-smithing...tsk tsk

guess i ate those lily-of-the-valley for nothing this morning...sigh

garden time

[funbox]

mildly lingering fishy odour

that's the best you can come up with  in your self proclaimed word-smithing...tsk tsk

guess i ate those lily-of-the-valley for nothing this morning...sigh

garden time

indeed it is.. but I didn't know that shrubs helped in an otters digestion...?

you are an otter, aren't you ?

funbox

[space otter]

since you ask

no I am NOT an otter..silly boy.. otter is just one of my spirit totems I wish to personify..
I used to be sky otter but broadened my scope and became space otter (on line)

(just so you will know) this is a quote
otter is very curious and will not start a fight unless attacked first.. otter is friendly and believes other creatures are friendly unless proven otherwise.. otters energy creates space for others to enter their lives without preconceptions or suspicious

so I use one of my spirit totems as a balanced female energy
the avatar I found was of an otter waving and then  a another with space helmets
I thought the avatar representation was true
as is the lack of avatar now
oh fyi one of my other spirit totems is a badger..just so you know I have more than one side

I do hope your avatar isn't a true portrait of your intent on line
but the way you chase people around pecking at them  maybe you should change it to angry bird


now for clarity
lily of the valley, sometimes written lily-of-the-valley,
scientific name Convallaria majalis /?k?nv??l??ri? m??d?e?l?s/,
is a sweetly scented, highly poisonous woodland flowering plant
that is native throughout the cool temperate Northern Hemisphere

to me irony here is funny 

[funbox]

then you must also like mashpotatoe



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