Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Not in MSM: Toxic Bayou Corne sinkhole in Louisiana slowly swallowing up state

Last summer, a rural area of southeastern Louisiana known as Assumption Parish was changed forever following the unexpected formation of a giant sinkhole that suddenly appeared one day out of nowhere. This mysterious sinkhole, which was later dubbed the "Great Louisiana Sinkhole," has been gradually gaining in size now for about seven months, and it appears to be picking up speed, having reportedly swallowed up an entire acre of land in just one day, and three acres of land in under a week.

If this is the first time you are hearing about the Great Louisiana Sinkhole, you can thank the mainstream media for keeping the general public in the dark about its existence, and the very serious threat it poses not only to Louisianans but to all of humanity. An apparent product of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster of 2010, this anomalous sinkhole appears to be connected to underground salt domes that are collapsing, releasing toxic gases, oil, and possibly other materials.

In this particular case, degradation of salt domes near Napoleonville in Assumption Parish appear to be responsible for triggering the formation of the Great Louisiana Sinkhole, which has gained considerable size since it first appeared last August. According to the latest estimates, which are constantly changing as the sinkhole expands, more than 12 acres have already been swallowed up, and 20 more are in the process of sinking, with no end in sight.

Bizarro Earth

Unexplained huge crack forming on the Navajo Nation

Is the next Grand canyon forming....
Huge Crack
© The Navajo Post
Luepp, Arizona - It's not something you see every day on the Navajo Nation, but a crack in the earth has been forming for a long time now and no one seems to have a clear answer. It just sits east of Flagstaff on Luepp Rd and about one mile west of Leupp gas station.

It's gotten so big that they had to fenced it in.

Health

Tornado kills 10, injures 500 in Bangladesh

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Storm lasted 15 minutes and destroyed many homes and shops

A tornado ripped through 20 villages in eastern Bangladesh on Friday, killing 10 people and injuring about 500 others, a report said.

The Prothom Alo newspaper said the 15-minute storm destroyed many homes and shops and uprooted large numbers of trees in Brahmanbaria district.

Igloo

Even scientists are cooling on climate change

Ice Age
© Express, UKGlobal warming bets are off as we're told the world's temperature is static or falling.
We were the only MPs to vote against the 2008 Climate Change Bill, which is to say we had by then considered all the evidence and found it wanting.

For years we have endured insults.

Behind the scenes Fiona Bruce, normally the most courteous of broadcasters, called me a "flat-earther" to my face.

Others branded us "deniers" as if we were disputing the holocaust. The Al Gore film was accorded the status of Holy Writ. David Bellamy lost his job. Doubting scientists were scorned.

Nigel Lawson found it difficult to get his book An Appeal To Reason published.

Bizarro Earth

Elephant seal blocks traffic in Brazil

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A 10ft elephant seal weighing more than half a ton shuffles across a street in a southern Brazilian town, to the amazement of passersby. The marine mammal held up traffic for more then an hour on the main street of Balneário Camboriú. Police and fire officers splashed water on the seal to keep it wet before it eventually returned to the Atlantic.


Cloud Lightning

'Storm on steroids' - Australian driver races for his life against massive tornado in Victoria

Two Australian men made a dramatic escape from a tornado in New South Wales after the twister touched down only metres from their car. Daniel Clarke, 24, told Australia's 7 News channel how he was driving from the town of Mulwala to nearby Barooga when the tornado, which was around 50 metres wide at its base, appeared in a field next to them.

Nearby power lines exploded with a blue flash as they were hit by the whirling column of air. With rain and debris hammering the windscreen as the tornado advances towards them, Mr Clarke reverses at speed before performing a hand-brake turn in the road. But the twister continues to barrel through the adjoining field, travelling almost parallel to their car at a speed of approximately 50mph.


Cloud Lightning

24 dead as tornado, hailstorms lash south China

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At least 24 people died and scores were injured after a tornado carrying huge hailstones lashed southern China, causing widespread devastation and a ferry to capsize, domestic media reported Thursday.

The ferry overturned in a river in the south-eastern province of Fujian, causing the deaths of 11 people with four missing, web portal qq.com reported.

Nine people were killed in Dongguan, in Guangdong province in the south, according to the report. It showed images from the city of a car windscreen which appeared to have been smashed by egg-sized hailstones.

Many of the dead in Dongguan were trapped in collapsed buildings. Another 148 people were injured, including 11 who were critically ill, the report said.

The website put the death toll at 24, as did state-run news agency Xinhua.

Bizarro Earth

More weirdness - Thousands of dead prawns and crabs wash up on beach in Chile

Thousands of dead prawns have washed up on a beach in Chile, sparking an investigation. Hundreds of dead crabs were also washed ashore in Coronel city, about 530km (330 miles) from the capital, Santiago.


Fishermen suggested the deaths may have been caused by local power stations that use seawater as a cooling agent. The power firms have not commented. Experts are looking into water temperature and oxygen levels and other details to explain the deaths.

"We're investigating the Coronel Bay to establish the physical parameters of temperature, electric conductivity and, above all, the oxygen," said local environment official Victor Casanova.

Bizarro Earth

Sinkhole swallows Newcastle, California pond overnight

Overnight, a sinkhole swallowed a pond on Mark Korb's property in Newcastle, Calif. When he went to bed Saturday night, the pond was there. On Sunday, March 17 it was gone. How does that happen? While northern California is nowhere near as prone to sinkholes as Florida (see USGS sinkhole map), one clue might be the fact that the pond was man-made. While sinkholes don't need a human trigger; changes in drainage due to construction or agricultural irrigation have been known to activate mass outbreaks of sinkholes in Florida, and other parts of the country.


As The Christian Science Monitor reported earlier this month after a Florida man was swallowed in his bed by a sinkhole, "Drought followed by heavy rains can also instigate sinkholes as heavy, water-logged earth presses down on limestone caves suddenly devoid of buoyant water. The two previous deaths attributed to sinkholes both involved professional well drillers whose activities cracked the top of limestone caverns, causing collapse. Humans can [destabilize karst landscapes] by drawing down water tables or irrigate too much, increasing the weight of the mass of materials that sits on top of the void," says Jonathan Martin, a geologist at the University of Florida, in Gainesville. "Humans can modify the environment" enough to cause sinkholes.


Comment: Or, these more and more frequently sighted sinkholes could be caused by something more sinister than being man-made or 'agricultural irrigation'. See Sinkholes - A Sign of the Times? and do a cursory search here on SOTT for more recently discovered 'sinkholes'.


Cloud Precipitation

Global warming? Natural climate swings contribute more to increased monsoon rainfall than global warming

Natural swings in the climate have significantly intensified Northern Hemisphere monsoon rainfall, showing that these swings must be taken into account for climate predictions in the coming decades. The findings are published in the March 18 online publication of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

monsoon changes
© Owen Shieh, University of HawaiiNew evidence suggests that high-energy particles from space known as galactic cosmic rays affect the Earth's climate by increasing cloud cover, causing an "umbrella effect."
Monsoon rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere impacts about 60% of the World population in Southeast Asia, West Africa and North America. Given the possible impacts of global warming, solid predictions of monsoon rainfall for the next decades are important for infrastructure planning and sustainable economic development. Such predictions, however, are very complex because they require not only pinning down how manmade greenhouse gas emissions will impact the monsoons and monsoon rainfall, but also a knowledge of natural long-term climate swings, about which little is known so far.

To tackle this problem an international team of scientists around Meteorology Professor Bin Wang at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, examined climate data to see what happened in the Northern Hemisphere during the last three decades, a time during which the global-mean surface-air temperature rose by about 0.4°C. Current theory predicts that the Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon circulation should weaken under anthropogenic global warming.