Ordinary Compasses Thrown Off by Changes in Earth's Magnetic Field

[Note: This is one of the better articles I've seen lately on the Magnetic Field of the earth, and best explains the science behind the ongoing shift.--Lori]

The Earth's magnetic field is changing at an increasing rate, throwing off airports and altering the aurora borealis -- and its effect on ordinary compasses could mean the difference between homeward bound and hopelessly lost.

Earth’s northernmost magnetic point -- or magnetic north -- is distinct from its geographic North Pole, and scientists have long known that the magnetic poles are on the move.

But the magnetic poles have been moving faster lately, sliding towards Siberia at 34 miles per year at a speed that's accelerated 36 percent over the last 10 years, according to the United States Geological Survey, or USGS.

Since compasses rely on magnetic north to point you in the right way up the trail, the average $2-dollar model could very well point you in the wrong direction. Depending on location and journey length, unaware hikers or boaters could find themselves hundreds of miles off course if they don’t calibrate for the shift, experts said.

“At Washington D.C., the compass points 10 degrees to the west of true north," Jeffrey Love, USGS advisor for geomagnetic research, told FoxNews.com. "And this is increasing at Washington at a rate of about 1/10 of a degree per year.”

But don't touch that calibration dial just yet: The accuracy of compasses fluctuates with the field, he said, meaning compasses are more or less accurate depending on where you use them.

“It's different at different places on the earth,” Love said. Read More

Snow Falls on San Francisco After a 35-Year Wait

SAN FRANCISCO — As a Pacific storm coincided with a blast of cold Canadian air over their fair city, residents here saw snow late Friday, a long-absent visitor for a city accustomed to fog, sweater-weather and other nearly bone-chilling accoutrements.

Predictions had called for the possibility of the first significant snowfall in San Francisco since February 1976, when all of an inch fell, according to the National Weather Service. And just before midnight, several high-lying city neighborhoods, including Twin Peaks, at some 900 feet, reported light snowfall.

The scattering of flakes capped a weeklong flurry of activity among civic leaders and commuters — as well as dreams of flying down some of the city’s famous inclines. Read More

Christchurch earthquake leaves third of city buildings facing demolition

One third of the buildings in central Christchurch were so badly damaged in last week's earthquake they may need to be demolished, authorities in New Zealand have warned, as the death toll from the country's worst-ever disaster reaches 145, with 200 still missing.

The city's central business district will take several months to recover, earthquake recovery minister Gerry Brownlee said, adding that "most of the services, in fact all of the services that are offered in the CBD, will need to relocate elsewhere".

Damaged buildings will need to be bulldozed and rebuilt "so that people can have confidence about coming back into the area to transact any business that's here", he added. One in three of the central city's buildings were severely damaged in the quake and must be demolished, according to earthquake engineer Jason Ingham. Read More

Bay of Fundy tidal proposal moves ahead

Atlantis' AK 1000 turbine will be installed in the Bay of Fundy.

Multi-billion dollar corporations are investing resources, time and money into developing tidal power in Nova Scotia, but if we’re to believe provincial authorities and the corporations’ reps, the corporations have no idea if they’ll make money or not.

Last year the province issued a Request for Proposal for development of a tidal facility in the Fundy Ocean Research Centre. The new facility will hook into a transmission line recently built with federal funds, and any power generated would be bought by Nova Scotia Power. The idea was that the new facility would help develop tidal technology, which has recently seen a major setback with the failure of a turbine installed by OpenHydro, a company owned in part by Emera, the parent company of Nova Scotia Power.
Read More

How climate change models could get better, thanks to NASA

NASA is set to launch satellite Glory early Wednesday. It will measure incoming sunlight and atmospheric particles, both key to crafting better climate models.

In the dark of night, scientists expect to launch a satellite they hope will provide new insights into the energy the sun provides for Earth's climate in the light of day.

At 2:09 a.m. Pacific Standard Time Wednesday, NASA is launching Glory on a mission that will give the most accurate measurements yet of incoming sunlight, as well as highly accurate measurements of the size, distribution, and effects of tiny particles in the atmosphere known as aerosols, planners say.

The satellite's data should help atmospheric scientists improve climate models. Better models not only would increase scientists' knowledge of how the climate system operates, but also would help them make more accurate projections of the effects of global warming – even as atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to rise, as a result of burning fossil fuels and land-use changes. Read More

Ancient megadroughts preview warmer climate: study (Reuters) - Ancient megadroughts that lasted thousands of years in what is now the American Southwest could offer a preview of a climate changed by modern greenhouse gas emissions, researchers reported on Wednesday.

How to Make Oatmeal . . . Wrong

By MARK BITTMAN
There’s a feeling of inevitability in writing about McDonald’s latest offering, their “bowl full of wholesome” — also known as oatmeal. The leading fast-food multinational, with sales over $16.5 billion a year (just under the GDP of Afghanistan), represents a great deal of what is wrong with American food today. From a marketing perspective, they can do almost nothing wrong; from a nutritional perspective, they can do almost nothing right, as the oatmeal fiasco demonstrates.

One “positive” often raised about McDonald’s is that it sells calories cheap. But since many of these calories are in forms detrimental rather than beneficial to our health and to the environment, they’re actually quite expensive — the costs aren’t seen at the cash register but in the form of high health care bills and environmental degradation. Read More

Quake in New Zealand

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP) — A powerful earthquake collapsed buildings at the height of a busy workday in New Zealand's city of Christchurch, killing at least 65 people and trapping dozens Tuesday in one of the country's worst natural disasters.

"It is a just a scene of utter devastation," Prime Minister John Key said after rushing to the city within hours of the quake. He said the death toll was 65, and may rise. "This may be New Zealand's darkest day," he told TV One News.

It was the second time a major quake hit the city of 350,000 in five months. Tuesday's 6.3-magnitude temblor struck closer to downtown than a quake that heavily damaged Christchurch last September but caused no deaths when it struck before dawn on a weekend.

Video footage Tuesday showed some multistory buildings collapsed in on themselves, and others with walls that had collapsed into the streets, strewn with bricks and shattered concrete. Sidewalks and roads were cracked and split, and thousands of dazed, screaming and crying residents wandered through the streets as sirens blared. Groups of people helped victims clutching bleedings wounds, and others were carried to private vehicles in makeshift stretchers fashioned from rugs or bits of debris. Read More

7 Ways the Earth Changes in the Blink of an Eye

Earthquakes not only rattle the Earth, but they radically change the landscape. The Chilean earthquake that struck on Feb. 27 changed the country's landscape by raising the ground by more than 8 feet (2.5 meters) near the coast and sinking land farther inward, a recent study found. See more amazing pictures

Watching the ice melt
Watchdog Earth is keeping an eye on earth changes and the environment both in Louisville, Ky., and globally. Join award-winning environmental writer James Bruggers in this daily discussion.

Of evolving earth and environment…
This generation will soberly remember the years 2010-2011 as the time and era when the earth struck back. Pollution, destructive over-fishing and commercial exploitation are threatening the planets cradle of life. There are signs that marine life is falling right at the bottom of the food web as the result of global warming, which could set in train a series of aggravating feedback effects on climate change.

Bevis Ph.D. ’78 Measures Greenland’s Melting Ice
When you step on a spring-loaded scale, the spring compresses, computes your weight, and then decompresses as you step off the scale. Prof. Michael Bevis Ph.D. ’78, Ohio State University, is applying this concept of springs to the Greenland Ice sheet, using the Earth as a spring. The Earth is almost a perfect elastic; when you take mass off the Earth’s crust, the surface rises, much like a spring would. Bevis first discovered this phenomenon when studying the Amazon River and since applied it to Greenland for climate change research.

Earthquakes in the United States

Rash of Arkansas Earthquakes Occur Near Tip of Western KY
HOPKINS COUNTY, KY—In an Arkansas town around 300 miles from the tip of Western Kentucky, a rash of approximately 50 or more earthquakes have occurred since last Sunday, February 13th, with one measuring in at a whopping 4.1 on the Richter scale. As members of the Arkansas Geological Survey have since stated, the majority of these disturbances are emanating from a city called Guy.
According to a report written by Barry Wright of Greenbrier, AR, this is a somewhat common occurrence for the area.
Geohazard supervisor, Scott Ausbrooks, explains to Wright that, “The last swarm [of earthquakes] lasted for about three years, but the first six months to a year was really intense.” This “swarm” occurred in 1982. Read More



Arkansas Earthquakes Related to Hydraulic Fracking? (& Mass Bird & Fish Deaths?)

Satellites to predict earthquakes, claim scientists

Thawing permafrost may speed global warming: study

WASHINGTON — Global warming could cause up to 60 percent of the world's permafrost to thaw by 2200 and release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that would further speed up climate change, a study warned.

Using projections based on UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado estimated that if global warming continues even at a moderate pace, a third of the earth's permafrost will be gone by 2200.

If the planet warms at a faster pace, the world could see 59 percent of the permanently frozen underground layer of earth thaw out; as that happens, organic matter that has been trapped in the permafrost for tens of millennia will begin to decay, releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

The NSIDC scientists then used a model to predict how much carbon the thawing permafrost would release and came up with the staggering figure of 190 gigatons by 2200. Read More

Devastating floods are now twice as likely thanks to climate change, scientists claim

Deutsche Bank’s Asset Management Division Releases Investing in Climate Change 2011 Report

Our Kitchen Table: Diverse, Stable Food Systems

Our Kitchen Table, now in their fourth year, works to help families form sustainable food systems -- starting in their own backyard. This year, OKT has received a $360,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation "to strengthen the capacity of southeast urban neighborhood residents in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to address food and environmental health disparities impacting vulnerable children, families, and individuals by creating resident owned gardens and managed Healthy Food Demonstration Sites."

Outside of a press release, what does this mean, exactly? In a conversation with Executive Director Lisa Oliver-King, she explains the mission of OKT and what they hope to accomplish with these new funds. A quick explanation is that OKT connects food-growers, that is, residents in various neighborhoods who can grow food in their own gardens, and then share with other growers producing different foods. Read More

Sustainable Food Starts with Organic Seeds

Roots of Change: A network for a sustainable food system.

Recovering Addicts Plant a Forest of Regeneration

From kicking our oil dependence to building an ocean recovery alliance, it's common to borrow metaphors from the world of addiction when it comes to discussing the environmental challenges we face, and how to fix them. But sometimes the connection is literal. In fact, one group is planting an entire forest to celebrate each individual recovery from addiction—one tree, and one addict, at a time.

The idea for the Phoenix Forest comes from the Phoenix Futures network of drug and alcohol treatment providers. The group has already planted 700 trees—one for every service user who successfully completed one of its drug recovery programs last year. And the plan is to do the same next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. Eventually there will be a whole forest, and each individual tree will stand for one life that has been turned around from addiction. Read More

Chemtrail articles bring world-wide response

WHITE MOUNTAINS - Two articles published in the Dec. 24 edition of The Independent that dealt with the controversial subject of chemtrails have brought in responses from people across the globe.

One of the articles, "Legislators confronted with chemtrail concerns," talked about former Senator Karen Johnson's trip to the Capitol to provide the Governor and legislators with a packet of information and a DVD documentary titled "What in the world are they spraying." Johnson was interviewed for the documentary and has been active in bringing attention to the subject of chemtrail spraying.

The other article, "Are the cloud-like streaks in the sky chemtrails or is it all a con tale?" presented information from government Web sites and documents, and researchers that support the facts that the government is involved in artificially altering the weather.

Within hours of the articles appearing on the paper's Web site, e-mails and phone calls came in from around the world, including Japan, Australia, Ireland and all parts of this country. Read More

Magnetic Polar Shifts Causing Massive Global Superstorms

(CHICAGO) - NASA has been warning about it…scientific papers have been written about it…geologists have seen its traces in rock strata and ice core samples…

Now "it" is here: an unstoppable magnetic pole shift that has sped up and is causing life-threatening havoc with the world's weather.

Forget about global warming—man-made or natural—what drives planetary weather patterns is the climate and what drives the climate is the sun's magnetosphere and its electromagnetic interaction with a planet's own magnetic field.

When the field shifts, when it fluctuates, when it goes into flux and begins to become unstable anything can happen. And what normally happens is that all hell breaks loose.

Magnetic polar shifts have occurred many times in Earth's history. It's happening again now to every planet in the solar system including Earth. Read More

Note: The earth is currently under the influence of Ardra--a sign in Vedic Astrology--which means the Teardrop and rules vicious storms. This is the Astrological reason behind the extreme weather and the Blizzard of 2011. The storms will lessen when Ketu (the moon's south node) moves into a new sign, Mrigasira, on March 6, 2011.

Blizzard roars through US's snow-weary midsection

Origin of the North Atlantic Freeze

"It is not clear whether the decreased polarity between the Azores High and the Iceland Low may also be related to a weakening of the North Atlantic Thermohaline Current (NATC), emanating from the Gulf Stream. If and when the NATC collapses, the North Atlantic would undergo longer term cooling..."

Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleo-climate scientist at the Australian National University, writes: As predicted by the IPCC-2001 report, global warming trends tracking toward 2100 are likely to be expressed by an increase in weather variability. Expect these to include a series of heat waves, fires, floods, hurricanes and cold fronts, the consequence of an increase in the energy level (temperature) of the atmosphere/ocean system:
For the uninitiated, the weather and the climate are not to be confused. Weather events comprise transient and regional variations in atmospheric conditions on a scale of a few days to few weeks, whereas climate trends occur on a global multi-annual to decade-long time scales.
The effects of global warming, at a mean of +0.8 degrees C since the early 20th century but +4 to +5 degrees C in the polar regions, include enhanced collision of warm and cold air masses, which can perpetrate snow storms. The current North Atlantic freeze is no exception. Read More

Rising Seas Look Inevitable

by Sid Perkins for Science Now
It may be too late to stop the seas from eventually rising and flooding Earth's coastlines. Even if humans manage to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions completely by the year 2100, ocean warming set in motion by the end of this millennium could trigger the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and flood New York City, Hong Kong, and other coastal cities, a new study suggests.
Sea level rises when meltwater from land-based masses of ice, such as glaciers, flows into the ocean. But sea level also increases when heat from the atmosphere gets mixed into the upper layers of the ocean, causing that water to expand. In recent decades, this thermal expansion has provided, on average, only about one-quarter of the 1.8 millimeters of sea level rise seen each year, but its contribution is increasing, studies suggest. Read More

2010 ties 2005 for warmest year on record: US

WASHINGTON — Last year tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record for global surface temperature, US government scientists said in a report on Wednesday that offered the latest data on climate change. The Earth in 2010 experienced temperatures higher than the 20th century average for the 34th year in a row, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. Overall, 2010 and 2005 were 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit (0.62 Celsius) above the 20th century average when taking a combination of land and water surface temperatures across the world, it said. Those two years were also the highest in temperature since record-keeping began in 1880. "If the warming trend continues, as is expected, if greenhouse gases continue to increase, the 2010 record will not stand for long," said James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Read More

Huge winter storm slams U.S. Midwest, Northeast

From New Mexico to Maine!
(Reuters) - A huge winter storm pummelled the United States on Wednesday, bringing parts of the Midwest to a standstill, delivering another wintry swipe to the Northeast, and disrupting businesses, flights and other transport.

Major automakers shut down plants in six Midwestern states and Ontario. The storm also paralyzed grain and livestock movement.

The storm, touching some 30 states and a third of the U.S. population, stretched from New Mexico to Maine as it moved towards the northeast where an ice storm wreaked havoc on New York City's morning commuters.

Chicago was set to get its biggest snowfall in more than 40 years. Some 20 inches (54 cm) of snow was forecast to pile up by late Wednesday. Snowfalls of a foot (30 cm) or more were recorded from Oklahoma City to Kansas City and Indianapolis.

The website flightaware.com, which tracks airline cancellation information, said more than 5,000 flights had been cancelled in the United States so far on Wednesday. That followed thousands of flight cancellations on Tuesday.

Power was out for more than 375,000 customers from Texas to New England, and into Canada.

Treacherous ice, rather than deep snow, hit New York City. The heavily used commuter rail service between New Jersey and New York was suspended due to ice build-up on the overhead power lines, authorities said. Read More

Thundersnow in the Blizzard of 2011

Brrr! Bitter freeze follows snowstorm in central U.S.

Australian Dollar Falls as Cyclone With 180 mph Winds Hits Coast

Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Australia’s dollar fell from almost a one-month high as Cyclone Yasi, with winds stronger than Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans, reached the country’s northeast coastline.

The Aussie weakened against the greenback as thousands of people evacuated low-lying areas in the city of Cairns before Yasi makes landfall. The storm is estimated to be more powerful than a 2006 storm that wiped out most of Australia’s banana crop and devastated sugar cane fields.

“The cyclone is probably weighing on Aussie,” said Amelia Bourdeau, a currency strategist in Stamford, Connecticut, at UBS AG. “In addition to the floods in Queensland, this may be something that negatively impacts the first quarter gross domestic product in Australia.” Read More

Earth Changes: Why the Moon is getting further away from Earth

Prehistoric Earth Changes: The Moon is believed to have formed after a massive collision between the Earth and an asteroid.

The Moon is not only beautiful, it is vital to our ecosystems and wildlife

The speed at which the Moon is moving away from Earth could affect life on the planet, but this could take billions of years to happen, writes space scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

It's easy to take the Moon for granted, even on a clear night when it can light up the sky. It really feels as if it has always been there just as it is now, throughout history. But that's not strictly true.

It is thought that the Moon was formed when a proto-planet about the size of Mars collided with the early Earth around 4.5bn years ago. The debris left over from impact coalesced to form the Moon. Computer simulations of such an impact are consistent with the Earth Moon system we see in the 21st Century.

The simulations also imply that at the time of its formation, the Moon sat much closer to the Earth - a mere 14,000 miles (22,530.8 kilometres) away, compared to the quarter of a million miles (402,336 kilometres) between the Earth and the Moon today. Read More

How Meditation May Change the Brain

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic.

He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours daily, one hour in the morning and one in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life.

I’ll admit I’m a skeptic.

But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes. Read More

Greg Braden and the Time of Change: 2012 and a New World Age

by Robyn Hessinger

Here is an excerpt from our conversation, and a little bit more about Gregg: he is a New York Times best selling author and internationally renowned as a pioneer in bridging science and spirituality. His books include Fractal Time, The God Code, and The Divine Matrix. Gregg’s work is now published in 17 languages and 27 countries.

Care2: Tell us a bit about the concept of Fractal Time.

Gregg Braden: I think anyone reading the words of this conversation knows that this is no ordinary time in the history of our planet or our civilization or our lives. And in fact the best minds of our time do tell us that we are living an unprecedented time where the greatest threats to our survival, the greatest crises and the greatest magnitude of those crises are all converged into this narrow window of time over a course of just a few years. And my question, if that’s true, is why?

As a scientist I wanted to understand why. And what I quickly began to understand was that we are in fact living a rare, precious moment in the history of our world and of our civilization that most people are identifying around a date that signals the end of a cycle on the Mayan calendar: the winter solstice December 21 of 2012. But the more I researched, what I found, and it was very clear, that it’s less about the date of 2012 and more about a window of time or zone of opportunity. Read More