Earth Changes
After all, a lot of the global warming enthusiasts appeared to have all sorts of impressive sounding scientific credentials and who's going to pay attention to a mere journalist with no academic background in climatology who claimed that global warming was a contrived myth and that there was every reason to believe that the current interglacial period of temperate weather has about reached its end.
In that series I wrote that one of the precursors of the onset of an ice age are violent tectonic events such as earthquakes of an ever increasing magnitude as was the quake that just devastated much of the Japanese islands. And despite the alarms issued by Al Gore and his cohorts much of the world has not been warming but instead experiencing some bitterly frigid winters because the polar ice caps have been growing.

NASA's Terra satellite's first view of northeastern Japan flooding following the earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan
"At this point, we know that one GPS station moved (8 feet), and we have seen a map from GSI (Geospatial Information Authority) in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass," said Kenneth Hudnut, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

A fisherman uses a plastic bag to catch fish as a large school of fish swims near the coast of Acapulco, Mexico, Friday, March 11, 2011. According to local fishermen, they had never seen such large schools of fish swim so close to the coast.
Delighted fishermen rushed out in wooden motor boats, abandoning their rods and nets and simply scooping the fish up with buckets.
"It was so much fun. There were about 20 or 30 fishermen and there were people who came with their kids to take advantage of it," fisherman Carlos Morales said.
The fishermen attributed the strange phenomenon to the unusual currents unleashed by tsunami that followed the earthquake in Japan.
The figure is more than half of the town's population of 17,000, Japan Broadcasting Corporation NHK announced on Saturday.
On Friday, an 8.9-magnitude earthquake, off the northeastern coast of Japan's main island, unleashed a 23-foot (7-meter) tsunami and was followed by more than 50 aftershocks for hours.
TIMOTHY ABRAM, PROFESSOR OF NUCLEAR FUEL TECHNOLOGY AT BRITAIN'S MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY
"By sampling the air around the station, you'd be able to tell how much radioactivity has been released. The thing they'll be looking for more than anything is whether there's any evidence of the fuel actually degrading," he told Reuters.
"If the fuel is substantially intact, then there'll be a much, much lower release of radioactivity and the explosion that's happened might be just due to a build-up of steam in the reactor circuit.
"The most probable (cause of the explosion) is the coolant, particularly if it's water, can overheat and turn to steam more rapidly than it was designed to cope with."
He said it was unlikely it would develop into anything more serious, but this would depend on the integrity of the fuel, which contains nearly all the radioactivity of the plant. He said he thought it would be "pretty unlikely" that the fuel itself had been significantly damaged.
Kyodo News said there were no immediate reports of casualties and no fresh tsunami alert was issued after the quake, which was followed by an almost equally strong quake in the same area half an hour later.
The quakes struck in the west of the main Honshu island, on the Sea of Japan coast and far from the offshore Pacific Ocean tremor that triggered a mammoth tsunami Friday that is feared to have killed more than 1,000 people.
The focus of both predawn quakes was in central Niigata.
The US Geological Survey put the strength at 6.2 and said it hit at a depth of only one kilometre (about half a mile).
Police said they had received reports of a landslide and avalanche in Tokamachi and another avalanche in Tsunan town, Kyodo reported.
The news agency also said wooden buildings including a town hall and a garage had reportedly been destroyed and some highways cracked in the village of Sakae in Nagano prefecture.
The first quake in the inland region struck at 4:00 am Saturday (1900 GMT Friday). The focus was in central Niigata but it also shook neighbouring Nagano, and a third quake later followed in the region.
A massive explosion has struck a Japanese nuclear power plant after Friday's devastating earthquake.
A huge pall of smoke was seen coming from the plant at Fukushima and several workers were injured.
Japanese officials fear a meltdown at one of the plant's reactors after radioactive material was detected outside it.
A huge relief operation is under way after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami, which killed more than 600.
Hundreds more people are missing and it is feared about 1,300 may have died.
The offshore earthquake triggered a tsunami which wreaked havoc on Japan's north-east coast, sweeping far inland and devastating a number of towns and villages.

NASA Earth Observatory image created by Robert Simmon and Jesse Allen, using earthquake and plate tectonics data from the USGS Earthquake Hazard Program, land elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) provided by the University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility, and ocean bathymetry data from the British Oceanographic Data Center’s Global Bathmetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO).
This map shows the location of the March 11 earthquake, as well as the foreshocks (dotted lines) and aftershocks (solid lines). The size of each circle represents the magnitude of the associated quake or shock. The map also includes land elevation data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission and ocean bathymetry data from the British Oceanographic Data Center.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the earthquake occurred at a depth of 24.4 kilometers (15.2 miles) beneath the seafloor. The March 11 earthquake was preceded by a series of large foreshocks on March 9, including an M7.2 event. USGS reported that the earthquakes "occurred as a result of thrust faulting on or near the subduction zone interface plate boundary."
Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 01:19:07 UTC
Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 02:19:07 PM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location:
16.727°S, 173.174°W
Depth:
10.9 km (6.8 miles)
Region:
TONGA
Distances:
106 km (65 miles) SE of Hihifo, Tonga
229 km (142 miles) NNE of Neiafu, Tonga
355 km (220 miles) SSW of APIA, Samoa
2528 km (1570 miles) W of Auckland, New Zealand










