Japanese Fish Predicts Earthquakes?
If it’s well known that animals have a heightened perception of developing weather patterns, this would be no exception, via motherboard.tv:
Japan is bracing itself for bad times after scores of the usually rare, giant Oarfish have washed ashore and been caught in coastal fisherman’s nets.The sightings started after the ‘quake in Chile and the 6.4 magnitude earthquake in Taiwan. The rash of tectonic shifting around the Pacific “Ring of Fire” is causing concern that Japan is next, and these gigantor fish aren’t helping.
The Oarfish is traditionally known as a messenger fish from the sea gods, and it’s tidings are usually grim. The fish can grow up to five metres in length and usually found at depths of 1, 000 ft. Long and slender with a dorsal fin that runs the…
Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says
Alex Morales writes on Bloomberg:
The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.
“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”
The changes can be modeled, though…
Massive Earthquake In Chile Followed By Tsunami
Robin Henry reports for the Times:
A massive earthquake on the coast of Chile has killed at least 76 people, flattening buildings and triggering a tsunami.
The 8.8-magnitude quake, the country’s largest in 25 years, shook the capital Santiago for a minute and half at 3:34am (0634 GMT) today.
A tsunami warning has been extended across all Pacific islands and the Pacific rim, including most of Central and South America and as far as Australia and Antarctica.
The wave has already caused serious damage to the sparsely populated Juan Fernandez islands, off the Santiago coast, local radio reported. The quake hit near the town of Maule, 200 miles southwest of Santiago, at a depth of 22 miles underground.
The epicentre was just 70 miles from Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, where more than 200,000 people live…
Solar Storms Could Be Earth’s Next Katrina
By Jon Hamilton for NPR:
A massive solar storm could leave millions of people around the world without electricity, running water, or phone service, government officials say.
That was their conclusion after participating in a tabletop exercise that looked at what might happen today if the Earth were struck by a solar storm as intense as the huge storms that occurred in 1921 and 1859.
Solar storms happen when an eruption or explosion on the surface of the sun sends radiation or electrically charged particles toward Earth. Minor storms are common and can light up the Earth’s Northern skies and interfere with radio signals.
Every few decades, though, the sun experiences a particularly large storm. These can release as much energy as 1 billion hydrogen bombs.
How Well Can We Weather The Solar Storm?
The exercise,…
Haiti in Context: Trying to Visualize the Disaster
Posted on the Rasmussen College website:
150,000 is a big number by anyone’s standards, but for a small country like Haiti, it is unfathomable. This is what America would look like if we lost a proportionate number of our citizens to a natural disaster…
The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti
F. William Engdahl writes on Global Research:
Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.
Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another — the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3…
Scientologists Using Touch to ‘Heal’ Haitian Earthquake Victims
Charles Onians writes on the AP via Yahoo News:
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Amid the mass of aid agencies piling in to help Haiti quake victims is a batch of Church of Scientology “volunteer ministers”, claiming to use the power of touch to reconnect nervous systems.
Clad in yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the controversial US-based group, smiling volunteers fan out among the injured lying under makeshift shelters in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital.
A wealthy private donor provided his airplane to fly in 80 volunteers from Los Angeles, along with 50 Haitian-American-doctors, in a gesture worth 400,000 dollars, said a Parisian volunteer who gave her name as Sylvie.
“We’re trained as volunteer ministers, we use a process called ‘assist’ to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication,”…
The Real Story About Relief in Haiti
From Collective Evolution:
Haiti was hit on January 12th 2010 with a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that caused a great deal of “devastation” to close to 3,000,000 of Haiti’s population.
Whether this earthquake was caused by the government using HAARP or whether it was a natural disaster is not the question here. If we look in the right places, away from the mass manipulating that’s going on, we will see what is actually going on in Haiti.
Disaster strikes and the first on the scene is the world police themselves, THE UNITED STATES. They jump in and take control of the airport in Haiti, supposedly assisting with aid. No aid here, only military with lots of guns to make sure those fallen concrete bricks don’t try to steal any of the food they are supplying. You are seeing what looks a lot more like a war than a natural disaster…
Haitians Flee in Fear as Big Aftershock Hits
Those solar-powered Bibles must really be working, reported by the AP via Yahoo News:
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A powerful aftershock sent Haitians screaming into the streets on Wednesday, collapsing buildings, cracking roads and adding to the trauma of a nation stunned by an apocalyptic quake eight days ago.
The magnitude-5.9 jolt matched the strongest of the aftershocks that have followed the huge quake of Jan. 12 that devastated Haiti’s capital.
The new temblor collapsed seven buildings in Petit-Goave, the seaside town closest to the epicenter, according to Mike Morton of the U.N. Disaster Assessment and Coordination agency, but there were no reports of people crushed or trapped, perhaps because the earlier quake frightened most people into sleeping outside.
Wails of terror erupted in Port-au-Prince, where the aftershock briefly interrupted rescue efforts amid the broken concrete of…
Haitian Earthquake Survivors Get Solar-Powered Bibles
Reported by Reuters via news.au.com:
As international aid agencies rush food, water and medicine to Haiti’s earthquake victims, a US faith-based group is sending Bibles to Haitians in their hour of need.
Not just any Bible.
These are solar-powered audible Bibles that can broadcast the holy scriptures in Haitian Creole to 300 people at a time.
Called the “Proclaimer,” the audio Bible delivers “digital quality” and is designed for “poor and illiterate people”, the Faith Comes By Hearing group said. According to their website, the Proclaimer is “self-powered and can play the Bible in the jungle, desert or … even on the moon!”
The Albuquerque-based organisation said 600 of the devices were already on their way to Haiti. It said it was responding to the Haitian crisis by “providing faith, hope and love through God’s…
Haitian Police Admit Gangs Have Taken Over Port-au-Prince
Sounds like a comic book or some Hollywood movie, an earthquake freeing prisoners, if only. Bruno Waterfield writes in the Telegraph:
Haitian authorities conceded they had lost their battle to maintain order in Port-au-Prince after the leaders of the city’s crime gangs reclaimed their old turf since being freed when the national prison collapsed last week.
The gangsters have stepped into the law and order vacuum, notably in the sprawling shanty town of Cite Soleil which they dominated before being locked up following police operations supported by United Nations troops over the last three years.
“Even as we are digging bodies out of buildings, they are trying to attack our officers,” said Aristide Rosemond a Cite Soleil police inspector.
The Haitian authorities, already weak and reliant on UN forces, are now crippled by heavy…
More People Will Die in Haiti This Week Than Hiroshima
Bob Ellis writes on ABC’s Drum Unleashed:
Fewer deaths occurred in Hiroshima in August 1945 than in Port-au-Prince last week and more people will die there soon than in Rwanda in 1994. Yet the modern global world was unprepared for it, so busy were they with Terrorism, which has killed fewer people in the last thirty years than quarrelsome Americans with handguns in the last eight months.
When are we going to get the arithmetic right, and distinguish what threatens us mightily from what threatens us barely at all?
Cuba, a socialist state, is well-prepared for natural disaster and few die there in the hurricane season, and rebuilding happens quickly. The United States, a capitalist nation, was ill-prepared for Hurricane Katrina though experts had warned for years of broken dykes, inundation, chaos, disease…
It’s Idiotic to Blame Anything Other Than Geology for the Haitian Earthquake
Christopher Hitchens writes on Slate:
On Nov. 1, 1755 — the feast of All Saint’s Day — a terrifying combination of earthquake and tsunami shattered the Portuguese capital city of Lisbon. Numerous major churches were destroyed and many devout worshippers along with them. This cataclysmic event was a spur to two great enterprises: the European Enlightenment and the development of seismology. Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were only some of those who reasoned that no thinkable deity could have desired or ordained the obliteration of Catholic Lisbon, while other thinkers — Immanuel Kant among them — began to inquire into the possible natural causes of such events.
Today, we can clearly identify the “fault” that runs under the Atlantic Ocean and still puts Portugal and other countries at risk, and it took only a…
Greg Palast: The Right Testicle of Hell — History of a Haitian Holocaust
Greg Palast writes on GregPalast.com:
1. Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported that the President of the United States promised, “The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days.” “In a few days,” Mr. Obama?
2. There’s no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF “austerity” plans.
3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, “My sister, she’s under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?” Should I tell her, “Obama will have Marines there in ‘a…
Survey the Devastion in Haiti With Google Earth; Red Cross Pulls in $8 Million
You can now get a satellite’s-eye view of the devastation in Haiti with Google Earth: check out their Google’s Haiti relief and imagery page.
It’s been reported today (via Newser) that the Red Cross has pulled in $8 million in donations through this service:
Text HAITI to 90999 to donate ten bucks to the Red Cross
Danny Glover On Haiti: Dumb As Pat Robertson?
What is it with the disaster in Haiti? First outspoken conservative wingnut Pat Robertson states on air that Haiti is ‘Cursed by a Pact With The Devil’ and now leftie B-Movie star Danny Glover says “When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Who’s dumber, Robertson or Glover?
The Haiti Disaster and Superstition
Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette
The current disaster in Haiti is a tragedy of epic proportions. The cleanup, which will almost certainly never happen in any meaningful way, would take years if given the full weight of the world’s productive resources that it deserves…
An Easy Way to Help in Haiti Using Your Cellphone
For those interested in helping immediately, simply text “HAITI” to “90999″ and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts, charged to your cell phone bill.
A Drop of Water Can Start A Forest Fire
Sounds like a joke, but it’s for real. Truly bizarre. Reports LiveScience:
Many gardeners swear you should not water in the midday because water droplets on plants can magnify the sun’s rays and burn leaves. But the idea has never been rigorously tested, until now.
“This is far from a trivial question,” said biophysicist Gabor Horvath at Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary. “The prevailing opinion is that forest fires can be sparked by intense sunlight focused by water drops on dried-out vegetation.”
Horvath and colleagues used both experiments and computer modeling to figure out the physics that goes on. The results varied depending on the type of leaf.
On smooth surfaces, such as a healthy maple leaf, no leaf burn occurred.
But on leaves with small wax hairs, such as those of the floating fern,…
