Earth ChangesS


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US: Poisonous New Pseudoscorpion Found in Colorado Cave

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© Dave SteinmannThe new pseudoscorpion is top of the food chain in Glenwood Caverns.
Nearly blind animal has venom-tipped pincers.

Unless you've been living in a cave, you probably haven't run across this new species of poisonous, nearly blind pseudoscorpion.

The 0.5-inch-long (1.3-centimeter-long) species, Cryptogreagris steinmanni, was discovered recently in high-altitude caverns near Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

Pseudoscorpions are essentially scorpions that lack a stinging tail. However, the new species does have long, venom-tipped pincers that likely help it nab agile prey, such as springtails, in the gloom.

Most likely, the new pseudoscorpion lives only in Glenwood Caverns and Historic Fairy Caves, the study authors say.

"A lot of these caves are islands, almost like an isolated environment where invertebrates ... evolve into being adapted to underground life," said biospeleologist David Steinmann, a zoology department associate with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Steinmann collected the new species after it was discovered in 2000 by tour guide Micah Ball.

With its primitive eyes and pale color, the arachnid is perfectly suited to its dark, chilly existence and has probably been scurrying through the passages for millions of years, Steinmann said.

Cloud Lightning

Sugar Shortage Looms as Storm Ruins Australian Crop

sugar cane
© Eric Taylor/Bloomberg
Sugar cane being harvested on a farm in Australia.
Sugar Supply Shortage Looming

World sugar output will probably fall short of demand, said Rabobank, after a cyclone with winds stronger than Hurricane Katrina destroyed homes and smashed crops in Australia, driving prices to 30-year highs.

Tropical Cyclone Yasi ripped through northern Queensland, a region growing a third of the country's cane, cutting output potential in the area by about 50 percent, producers group Canegrowers said Feb. 4. The storm, which the government says may have wiped out at least A$500 million ($507 million) of agricultural production, raised speculation that the world's third-largest sugar exporter may struggle to match last year's output that was the lowest in two decades.

"The whole house was shaking and vibrating," said Gerry Borgna, 53, whose family has supplied cane to a mill at Tully, about 140 kilometers (87 miles) south of Cairns, since the 1920s. "We could hear things flying past and we thought it was part of the house." At the farm, power lines were lying across the road, a shed stood precariously and cane was pushed over. "To me, this is a disaster," he said.

Raw sugar soared to 36.08 cents per pound on ICE Futures U.S. in New York on Feb. 2, the highest level since 1980, as the storm bore down on Queensland, and traded at 33.03 cents today.

Cloud Lightning

SOTT Focus: Cyclones, Earthquakes, Volcanoes And Other Electrical Phenomena

Tornado and Lightning
© Unknown
Recent events provide us with a great case study of the cosmic forces that may lie behind large storms such as cyclones, hurricanes, blizzards and much more. The recent events I speak of include the major blizzard that swept across the Midwestern and Eastern US as well as the punishment Cyclone Yasi inflicted on eastern Australia earlier last week. Both of these storms grew to enormous sizes during a time period that coincided with the Earth being lashed by a solar storm just following a New Moon. As strange as this may sound, this isn't the first time that celestial alignments along side of solar activity have spurred such events. If a correlation between these factors exists, as we suspect, then this overturns much of what is commonly believed about Earth weather and, as we'll see, even geology.

To understand how this all works, let's start with the sun. On January 31st a massive coronal hole opened up on the sun, hurling another sledgehammer of charged particles in the direction of Earth. This was due to impact us sometime between February 2nd and February 4th. Not only this, but we recently passed through a new Moon on February 2nd. But why is the Moon of any significance here, one might ask?

As James McCanney explains in an interview he did for Spectrum Magazine in 2003:
The [New] Moon moves in front of Earth, breaks that electrical flow [between the sun and Earth], and then moves out of the way. It gives us tremendous bombardment after that Moon moves out of the way, the first and second day after the New Moon. That's the condition that has been identified as being one of the leading causes of kicking-off major hurricanes and storms. What it does is: The Moon is interacting with the solar electric field. It's that CHANGE which causes the storms, and causes the environment around Earth to change, and thus affects Earth weather.
So the picture we're painting is this: The sun blasts a massive front of solar wind in the direction of the Earth. As the New Moon moves out of the way of the sun and Earth, this, by itself, creates a significant increase in charged particles hitting the Earth. With the excess of charged particles from this solar storm hitting us near simultaneously, all of this excess charge ends up in the radiation belts surrounding the Earth. The Earth then finds ways to discharge this imbalance such as these two major storms we've seen. One storm takes the form of a massive blizzard covering about half of the US. The other takes the form of a cyclone storm, Yasi, that pounds the already flooded east coast of Australia. Increased volcanic and earthquake activity was also noted during this time as well.

Bizarro Earth

The Seattle Earthquake of 2001 - Precursor to the big one?

If you were living in Seattle in 2001 and felt the "Nisqually" earthquake - a magnitude 6.8 quake that was centered near Olympia on February 28, 2001 -- you just knew that possible serious business was on the way - as in thinking, "Uh oh. Is THIS the big one?"

It was that much of a jolt. Some folks in Seattle said they have never in a previous earthquake felt the entire earth heave like they did in that one.

Scientists have long known that Seattle is on a collision course with the "big one," they just don't know the date, that's all.

To that end a reader sent us recently a link to a Nat'l Geographic Video on that Seattle quake with a note that said we (since everyone around here now reads our fine publication) should make sure everyone in the area is aware of it because everyone who lives in these parts should know what's what with that earth moving thing.

We thought that sounded reasonable since there are 13 major earthquake faults (count em' 13!) known so far in the Puget Sound area.

Attention

SOTT Focus: FEMA Requests Millions of Rations For 'Catastrophic Disaster In New Madrid Fault System'

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New Madrid Fault Zone area (on the right)
The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recently put out a tender or 'Request For Information' (RFI) for a LOT of emergency rations. The reason, in their own words, is: "to identify sources of supply for meals in support of disaster relief efforts based on a catastrophic disaster event within the New Madrid Fault System for a survivor population of 7M to be utilized for the sustainment of life during a 10-day period of operations"

Is there something they're not telling us? It's interesting to note that many of the recent animal 'die-offs' happened in the region of the New Madrid fault zone which stretches 150-miles (240 km) southward from Cairo, Illinois; through Hayti, Caruthersville and New Madrid in Missouri; through Blytheville into Marked Tree in Arkansas. It also covers a part of West Tennessee, near Reelfoot Lake, extending southeast into Dyersburg.

It's true that the area has been rocking and rolling of late with the the U.S. Geological Survey reporting, more than 500 measurable earthquakes in central Arkansas since September 2010. A magnitude-3.8 earthquake that shook north-central Indiana on December 30th 2010 was called "unprecedented". It was strong enough to actually cause cracks along the ground and it was felt in portions of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and Kentucky.

In addition, the sun appears to be spewing out some major solar flares recently. The effects of the associated solar radiation on earth is very poorly understood, at least that's what they tell us.

If the US government knows, or even suspects, that a major quake is likely, they need to tell the people in the area in advance!

The FEMA RFI is reproduced below, with a screen-shot in case it disappears.

Snowman

Meteorologists At A Loss to Explain The Winter Weather

Another huge snowstorm moved through the mid-Atlantic and Northeast states last week, and forecasters are calling for more snow this week and possibly next. In New York City last Thursday, 19 inches of snow landed in Central Park. That snowfall brought the city's January snowfall total to 36 inches, well above the 1925 record of 27.4 inches. The snowy winter has people upset because previous winters have not been so bad, although last year when a blizzard descended on Washington, D. C., President Obama was moved to describe the storm as a "snowmageddon." He was quick to point out that his daughters didn't quite understand why school was cancelled since in Chicago this was a normal winter experience.

This winter has brought 51.5 inches of snow to Boston, easily topping the city's winter average of 42.3 inches. The record snowfall for the city was experienced during the 1995-1996 winter when Boston was buried under 107 inches of snow. New York so far this winter has experienced 56 inches of snow, although its record was also experienced in 1995-1996 when 75 inches fell.

Besides the dramatic snowfall records this winter, average temperatures also have been colder than normal. Importantly, the winter weather has impacted much more of the United States than normal. On January 11th, every state except Florida had snow on the ground, including Hawaii where there were seven inches atop the dormant volcano Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii. Slightly over 70% of the nation's aerial extent was snow covered that January day as shown in Exhibit 6.
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© NOAAExhibit 6. January 11, 2011, Shows Snow In 49 States

Cloud Precipitation

Australia: Victorian towns put on flood watch


Torrential rain boosted by the remnants of tropical cyclones Yasi and Anthony led to flash floods in Victoria, with parts of Melbourne battered by high winds and people rescued from rising waters in Mildura.

Lightning strikes cut power to 30,000 homes when a belt of storms hit late yesterday.

The Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade said it was overwhelmed by calls for help from disabled people.

In one emergency, fire crews helped a wheelchair-bound man who was up to his hips in water inside his home in the suburb of Mulgrave. Firefighters also rescued a girl swept away in a flash flood who managed to grab a tree branch in Ashwood, south-west of Melbourne.

Many roads in regional Victoria were cut, and the Monash Freeway was closed outbound at Toorak Road, with traffic causing long delays last night.

Between 50 and 100 millimetres of further rain was forecast for the weekend.

Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: Pulsating Auroras

During the geomagnetic storm of Feb. 4th, Fredrik Broms of Kvaløya, Norway, witnessed an episode of elusive pulsating auroras. "The sky was filled with patches of green that oscillated in brightness," he explains. A snapshot with his Nikon D3 caught the phenomenon in mid-pulse:

Pulsating Auroras
© Fredrik Broms
"The patches didn't move much, but their intensity changed. When one patch got brighter another became more diffuse and so on," Broms describes.

Reports of pulsating auroras go back more than a century, but until recently no one knew what made the aurora borealis behave like a strobe light. Researchers from UCLA solved the puzzle in 2009-10. Using data from NASA's THEMIS spacecraft, they discovered that auroras pulse in sync to 'chorus waves' in Earth's magnetosphere. This is a type of plasma wave that, apparently, can modulate the flow of solar wind particles down to Earth during geomagnetic storms. It sounds cool, too--hence the name 'chorus.'

Bizarro Earth

Downgraded Yasi extends into South Australia

A severe weather warning has been issued for parts of South Australia as the downgraded Cyclone Yasi sweeps into the state.

State Emergency Service (SES) duty officer Darryl Wright said reports were coming in on Friday afternoon of heavy rains in many parts of the Flinders Ranges, north of Adelaide.

The Bureau of Meteorology was forecasting rainfall of between 50 and 100mm in some areas, increasing to up 200mm in the northwest pastoral district, north of Coober Pedy.

The bureau said a severe thunderstorm warning and a flood watch was current for some districts.

"We have received reports that a number of creeks in the northern Flinders Ranges, including the Bandioota Creek near Blinman, have started to flow," Mr Wright said.

Cloud Lightning

Australia: More Flooding Forecast for Victoria

Aussie flood
© n/a
MARK COLVIN: Victorians are being warned to prepare for heavy rain and possible flash flooding this weekend as a tropical air mass from Cyclone Yasi moves south.

North-east and central Victoria are expecting to be the hardest hit and some of those areas still haven't recovered from flooding in January.

Samantha Donovan reports.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Many Victorians are still cleaning up after flooding rains last month. But with an air mass from ex-tropical Cyclone Anthony and Yasi feeding into a strong Southern Ocean weather system, the north-east and central areas in particular are facing a new flood threat.

Tim Wiebusch is with the Victorian State Emergency Service.

TIM WIEBUSCH: The north-east of the state is our main concern given the likelihood of seeing at least between 100 to 150 mils and maybe localised totals up to 200 millimetres. This will result initially in flash flooding and then, potentially, right through to major riverine flooding along the Goulburn, Broken, Mitta Mitta, Kiewa, Ovens Catchments and may affect places like Benalla, Wangaratta and right through the Ovens valley, including places like Bright and Myrtleford.