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EARTH

12/30/2004 Quake: On August 10th, 2001 an earthquake hit Sacramento and surrounding areas. A friend of mine from 2001 wrote to ask about the writeup I had on this site then. Here are the quake links updated from the ones I'd posted a few years ago. Have fun. Lots to explore and learn:

- Earthquake Links - All Checked 12/30/04

California Quake Museum
Northern California - USGS = U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park
Northern California - UCB = University of California, Berkeley
Southern California - USGS = U.S. Geological Survey, Pasadena
Southern California - Caltech = California Institute of Technology
Nevada - UNR = University of Nevada, Reno
US and World - USGS/NEIC = National Earthquake Information Center
Offshore = West Coast & Alaska Tsunami Warning Center
Pacific Northwest Quakes (oregon, washington)
Outline Maps Suitable for Hand Plotting Earthquake Locations
Current USGS Earthquake Maps for All Areas of the World
Recent Philippines earthquakes
United Kingdom (Great Britain) earthquakes
Damage Statistics For Recent Earthquakes Throughout the World (pics of quake damage)
Ground Motion Hazard lookup by Zip Code
Current Conditions at Long Valley caldera, California
Make your own seismogram
Recent Earthquakes USGS
Seismolinks (USGS) ( a link to more links)
Seismosurfing the Internet for Earthquake Data ( a link to more links)
UC Berkeley Seismographic Station Home Page
Fema Flood Maps ( select your county in USA & see map w/100yr flood data )
Tsunami (NOAA)

(Tsunami = huge tidal wave created by an earthquake at sea. My song "Fear of Success" originally had the lyric "Tsunami's rise, I'm paralized." I removed it because my friend Joe Grey thought it said "Salami's rise". - Xeno )

General Earth Links: Geomorphology, GIS, GPS, Remote Sensing, Maps

12/27-12/30/2004 Natural Disaster: (canada | reuters | voanews) This is really sad, especially the day after Christmas: Sunday, December 26, 2004 at 00:58:50 (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time. As many as 125,000 have died as a result of the world's most powerful earthquake in 40 years ( magnitude 9.0 ) which struck more than 6 miles deep beneath the Indian Ocean off the coast of Indonesia.

 

"One seismologist likened the power ... to a million atomic bombs the size of those dropped on Japan in World War II, and said the shaking had been so powerful it even disturbed Earth's rotation." -au

Indonesia's Sumatra Island was closest to quake epicenter. A tsunami (massive tidal waves) caused by the quake sped away from the epicenter at more than 500 mph and obliterated seaside towns in Asia and Africa, killing an estimated 23,000 people in nine countries.

The vast majority of victims were locals from India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and the Maldives, but hundreds were foreigners, enjoying Christmas in the sun at the busiest time of the year for the region's tourist trade.

Location: 3.251 degrees N, 95.799 degrees E. Depth: 6.2 miles - usgs

"Sunbathers and babies were swept off beaches by walls of water up to 10 metres (33 feet) high." -reuters

"WE JUST RAN FOR OUR LIVES"

"I have never seen anything like it before. Even if you're a good swimmer, you cannot survive," he said. -voa

"Witnesses said sea waters at first retreated far out into the ocean, only to return at a vicious pace. Some regions reported a crashing wall of water 20 feet high. "The water went back, back, back, so far away, and everyone wondered what it was a full moon or what? Then we saw the wave come, and we ran..." -abc

"The flood waters will have contaminated drinking water and food will be scarce..."

"Thousands were missing, an estimated 1 million were displaced and an estimated 250,000 were homeless." -ksbitv

"A TSUNAMI warning that could have saved thousands of lives was issued but not acted upon more than an hour before giant waves hit Sri Lanka and southern India.
... experts in Honolulu admitted they had forecast the disaster within 15 minutes of Sunday's earthquake off the coast of Sumatra but did not know who to pass the information to. "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration director Charles McCreery said." -au

Check the bay area quake probability map. Here are some things you should so After an Earthquake.

Survival lessons learned:
1) If you are at the beach and the tide goes way way out, run away!
2) Be in shape so you can run for your life when a 20 foot wall of water heads your way.
3) Be lucky.

10/28/04 Earth / Space Here are some pics from last night's lunar eclipse:


10/25/04 Gardening Here are some links on growing food if you only have a small patch of sunlight: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 , 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26. Growing and storing food to survive the apocalypse? Well, your reasons may be nuts or not, but small vegetable gardening is fun. Grow yourself a salad! Could a person today "live off of the land" in an apartment with a small patch of sunlight?

"The secret to growing vegetables indoors, especially in the wintertime, is sunshine! Vegetable plants need at least four to six hours of full direct sunshine, preferably from big south-facing windows. The intensity of light falls off rapidly after it comes into a room, so plants should be right up by the window. ... Leafy vegetables such as lettuce and spinach can be grown with as little as four to six hours of sunlight. Root crops such as radishes, dwarf carrots, bunching onions, and beets need six to eight hours.

10/25/04 Earth / Technology (Biosphere2) "The $150 million Biosphere 2 first opened in 1991 as a massive closed system that would last for 100 years of testing nature, technology and human endurance. It is the world's largest experimental site and was given the mission name, Biosphere 2, in deference to the much larger Biosphere 1: the Earth itself. Two early human survival missions lasted for two years and six months respectively. Organizers have announced this month that visitors can enter the giant glass-covered pyramid for the first time.

The Biosphere 2 complex occupies 3.15 acres in Oracle, Arizona-- 20 minutes north of Tucson. Since opening in the early 90's nearly two million visitors have toured the sprawling site and the Bio2 complex. "In the past we had to limit the number of people that went inside which made it a premium tour," said Rick Neter, Director of Business Operations. "We are now able to offer the under-the-glass tour to everyone."

What awaits are mini-worlds, or biome habitats. The glass ceiling is so high, that one can create rain that is like real rain. The biomes feature a cliff above the one million gallon saltwater ocean, a walk through the upper and lower savannahs, thorn scrub, desert and technosphere, finally investigations inside the south lung complex.

... Among the aquatic types of biomes at Oracle, one finds an artificial ocean, coral reefs, lagoons, and beaches. Angelfish, parrot fish, and sergeant majors are among the 300 fish that inhabit this self-sustaining environment, alongside crustaceans, sea-urchins, sponges, and algae. Among the land forms in the greenhouse are an equatorial rainforesst (sic), desert, savannah, marsh and a three-chambered, managed forest."

... First sealed as a simulator of future closed space habitats, the longest period that the project tried to sustain its diverse ecosystems with eight human biospherians spanned September 26, 1991-1993. During this first mission, oxygen levels fell to threatening levels for human respiration, along with an accompanying fall in carbon dioxide which limited plant productivity. One cause of this anomaly was later diagnosed as adsorption of the gases into various parts of the concrete foundation (forming calcium carbonates for example). ... A second six month stint was undertaken in 1994. Since 1995, the Biosphere 2 management has been handled by Columbia University, with over 1200 graduate students spending a year in the center. (Take the PhotoTour)

 

10/25/04 Energy Oil hits new record high, are problems in Iraq are to blame? This link has info on why US oil prices are high today. Take your pick:

1) Worldwide supply is tight.
2) gasoline demand in the US is up despite high prices - 4.3% more than 2003. Americans simply refuse to conserve. This is not trivial considering that the US, with 5% of the world's population, consumes 45% of the gasoline produced on earth.
3) Gasoline demand is surging in China , where crude oil imports increased 30% in 2003.
4) Refinery capacity in the US is near its maximum. One refinery in California is to close later in 2004.
5) Oil tanker capacity for trans-oceanic shipping is also 100% reserved for the forseeable future, and shipping costs have nearly tripled.
6) The US deficit, around $500 billion in 2004, causes the value of the dollar to decline. Because oil is priced in dollars, no matter where in the world it comes from, producers want higher prices in order to maintain their income.
7) The US Government is buying at these high prices supplies for the strategic petroleum reserve . A minor impact, but some.
8) Local requirements for special gasoline blends to meet environmental regulations result in smaller batches, which are more expensive for refineries to produce. Applies especially to California.
9) Costs reflect distance from refineries (transportation cost) . In the US, 50% of gasoline is refined in the Gulf Coast.
10) Variations reflect local taxes. Federal excise tax on gasoline is about 23 cents per gallon; state tax averages about 23 centsper gallon; in California there is an additional 7.5% sales tax.
11) Economic woes in Venezuela are impacting US imports more than problems in the Middle East. US imports from Venezuela were down 19% in 2003, and Venezuela, Mexico, Canada, and Saudi Arabia are the US's main suppliers, normally at about 15% each but Venezuela in 2003 only provided about 12% of our imports...
12) Any time there is a problem with a pipeline or refinery , it can impact the supply of gasoline at least in local markets, and the price can spike.
13) Credit card fees paid by retailers amount to about 3.5%, or 7 cents a gallon at $2.00 per gallon. This is more than enough to eliminate all profit for the retailer, and in many cases results in an actual loss of several cents per gallon -- absorbed either through increased pump prices or in other elements of a retailer's business. Retailers with no other sources of profit may go out of business, further restricting ability to deliver gasoline. So don't blame the corner gas station -- even the company-owned ones. The latter may absorb such losses through profits elsewhere in the system, but a loss is still a loss.
14) In addition, about 300,000 to 400,000 barrels daily of Nigerian oil production are curtailed because of local political turmoil. - msn
15) Crude oil prices have stayed higher than expected, in part because it's taken longer to get Iraq back on line. - msn

What is the problem with Iraq?

"Flames and smoke gush from burning oil at a pipeline junction blown up by saboteurs near Beiji, northern Iraq in this Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2004 file photo. The breach shut down the pipeline ferrying crude oil from Kirkuk's huge oil field to an export terminal in Ceyhan, Turkey. Instead of being sold on the international market, oil burned on the desert and poured, still aflame, into the Tigris River. (AP Photo/US Army)"

Someone asked me how much oil the various countries in the world provide to the US. I found this here. This illustration below is a snapshot and the numbers vary from year to year. See this multi-year table from the Department of Energy for an even better picture. 1960 to 2003 US oil consumption has gone from 1.8 mbd to 12.3 million barrels per day.

"In 2002, Canada led the world in our sources of imports, at 17%, with Saudi Arabia (13.7%), Mexico (13.5%), and Venezuela (12%) in a virtual three-way tie for second. The year before the percentages were Canada - 15.4%, Saudi Arabia - 14%, Venezuela - 13%, and Mexico - 12.1%. Canada also led in 2001 and 2003. In 2002, US imports from the Persian Gulf region amounted to 19.8 percent of our total imports. The same year, a total of 40% came from OPEC member nations -- which include countries such as Venezuela and Indonesia that are outside the Persian Gulf". T

Comparing all oil imports from 1960 to 2003 from by the top countries of importance to the US to the period from just the last 5 years shows only one country increasing in oil import importance, the UK and Iraq. Analysis of multi-year table from the Department of Energy. Said another way, Iraq is the only major oil source for the US that has increased in importance over the past 5 years as compared to over the past 43 years. This does not include 2004 data.

1960-2003 1999-2003
% total US imports
change
 
2.87
3.74
0.87
 Iraq
11.54
4.79
-6.75
Nigeria
19.44
9.79
-9.65
Saudi Arabia
23.03
8.99
-14.04
 Venezuela
20.53
11.23
-9.3
 Canada
2.36
1.89
-0.47
 Columbia
13.31
8.92
-4.39
 Mexico
2.435
1.99
-0.445
 Norway
4.47
2.39
-2.08
 UK

10/25/04 Earth Multiple earthquakes in Japan, Mt. St. Helens is erupting, so is Manam, New Guinea.

10/23/04 Earth (abc) "KASHIWAZAKI, Japan Oct 23, 2004 - A series of powerful earthquakes and aftershocks rattled northern Japan on Saturday, killing at least seven people and injuring more than 700 as buildings crumbled, a bullet train derailed and roadways were torn apart." This city "produces petrochemicals" and "oil refineries were established in the city in the early 20th century" - britannica It had a nuclear plant as of January 1997... and still does:

"A major nuclear power plant operated by Tokyo Electric in Kashiwazaki was operating normally." - omaha

The same source says, "The first quake hit at 5:56 p.m. and was centered about 12 miles beneath the surface, the Meteorological Agency said. At least six more tremors hit over the following hours, including quakes of magnitude 6.2 and 5.9, the agency said."

 

10/15/04 Biology (cbc | seattlepi ) Scientists call it the Humboldt or jumbo flying squid. "A jumbo flying squid surprised a fisherman in British Columbia, worrying scientists who say its appearance could be another sign of global climate change." [emphasis added] This jumbo flying squid is a, "6 1/2-foot, 44-pound Dosidicus gigas ... a purple-bodied cephalopod with two eyes, eight sucker-covered arms and two curly tentacles... This is an animal that should be down in South America, not in British Columbia or Alaska."

9/29/04 Earth ( abcnews ) Scientists Find Movement Inside Mount St. Helens in Signs of Possible Eruption

9/28/04 Earth The best PR. In this case, PR = Population Reduction. We need about 4 billion fewer people to maintain our standard of living. Unfortunately, "every 20 minutes, the human population grows by about 3,000" people according to overpopluation.org. If my calculations are correct, that's an increase of 78,840,000, or about 79 million per year. This is quick rough review of different types of PR.

WORLD WAR: "During the nearly six years that World War 2 raged, approximately 61 million individuals (miliary and civilian) lost their lives." That's about 10 million / year. War in Iraq has killed many, ( up to 13,806 in Iraq so far) but that's a drop in the bucket unless it becomes much larger. War is horrible. Bad way to go.

PLAGUES: The two biggest plagues in history took out about 25 million people each. Today it would be controlled with antibiotics.

CANCER: 6.2 million died in 2000 worldwide. Cancer will take about 555,500 people per year in the US according to one estimate (also see this).

AIDS: Some say the archetects of humanity created AIDS to help lower our population. AIDS has killed many, and it is still killing ( 3.1 million people per year ), so far, AIDS is the best Grim Reaper Helper, but it is not enough.

HEART DISEASE: 1.3 million in 2002. Mostly due to air pollution, poor diet and lack of exercise.
TUBERCULOSIS: 1 million in 2002.
STROKE: 800,000 in 2002.

CAR CRASHES: Road accidents killed 800,000 people, mostly in developing countries. "In the US, each year there are about 40,000 deaths per year in automobile accidents vs. about 200 in air transport."

WEATHER: Natural disasters are on the rise. "Events including earthquakes and volcanoes, floods and droughts, storms, fires and landslides killed about 83,000 people in 2003"

BIRTH CONTROL: The most humane way would be to educate people and provide birth control so they stop breeding, and lower our numbers over time. That won't work because some people consider having many kids to be a religous right/duty and people feel entitled to have offspring.

I vote for weather as the best "PR". Use our secret weather weapons to create huge earthquakes, tidal waves, tornados, hurricanes, etc. This is really the most fair, as long as we don't destroy the planet in the process. This way will kill many people, but it also gives the average person a fighting chance. I think this is better than creating a nuclear war engineering another big disease worse than AIDS. We'd never know if it was a natural or unnatural disaster.

9/27/04 Earth. 2004 Hurricane Season May Be Costliest on Record

"Overall, this has been a very destructive and costly hurricane season," said meteorologist Stu Ostro of the Weather Channel. "The official totals are not in yet, but this will likely go down as the costliest hurricane season on record in the U.S."

 

8/18/04 Earth. Study Finds Climate Shift Threatens California. A study released monday by scientists at "several universities and research institutions, including Stanford University, the University of California and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography." found that if "fossil fuel use continues at its present pace, ... summertime high temperatures could increase by 15 degrees in some inland cities, putting their climate on par with that of Death Valley now. That scenario also foresaw a reduction of 73 percent to 90 percent in the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada, resulting in disrupted water supplies from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Central Valley." Also forcast were "disruptions to the state's wine and dairy industries and a seven fold increase in heat-related deaths in Los Angeles."

Global warming is real. I hope Rush Limbaugh followers won't wait until they fry to death to say "Gee. Whaddayaknow. Those liberal environmental wackos were right! Crap." Now is the time to do something. Our oil, auto and drug industries are making huge profits by ignoring the environment. Unfortunately, this short sighted greed is killing people (see: asthma epidemic, heart attacks from air pollution, etc.) and the problem is going to get much worse.

6/11/04 Earth Walk or drive? This guy recommends a bicycle as the most efficient. It all Depends What You Mean By "Efficient".

"... the real average speed (in terms of miles travelled per life hours invested) of the private automobile in America is somewhere between 10 mph and 20 mph.

... The bottom line is that the car subtracts enough hours from our lives that even with its occasional bursts of high speed, the lifetime average miles per hour is just not that impressive.

Not enough "time efficiency" is gained to justify the extraordinary inefficiencies of weight and energy use. "

6/9/04 Earth \ Biology (ABS CBN | Scotsman | Reuters | Times of India) "Chimpanzees share 99.4 percent of functionally important DNA with humans and belong in our genus, Homo , according to a recent genetic study." - discovery

Welcome to the family tree. Now die. Our species will soon destroy our closest biological relative completely and forever.

Study: Chimps could be extinct in 50 years. JOHANNESBURG - "Humanity's closest relative the chimpanzee could be extinct in around 50 years because it is hunted for meat (by humans) and threatened by deforestation ..."

How long until soylent green? In only 12 years, we may also eradicate the last Koala bear. - "Koalas could be wiped out along Australia's eastern seaboard within 12 years because of urban and agricultural sprawl..." - manilatimes Koalas have fingerprints that are indistinguishable from those of humans. Welcome to the fingerprint club. Now die. Extinction is natural, isn't it?

"The extinction of species has always been a natural part of evolution. The fossil record shows that since life originated about four billion years ago the vast majority of species that have existed are now extinct. Extinct species outnumber living ones by a factor of perhaps a thousand to one. Today we are in the middle of a sixth extinction event that began about 50,000 years ago

You may hear the above from your republican friends who want to wear blinders regarding human responsibility. Remove the blinders:

... but is now accelerating in an alarming speed! This extinction event is not a natural event, but is caused directly or indirectly by humans. " - petermaas

"Because human populations are growing so fast animals and plants are disappearing 1000 times faster than they have in the past 65 million year[s].  Scientists estimate that in the 21st century 100 species will become extinct every day." - nhptv

GENEVA (Reuters) - Some 11,170 plant and animal species face extinction. - stopextinction

6/4/04 Earth. ( seattlepi) Thursday AM, June 3rd about 2:40 AM, night turned briefly to day as a meteor passed overhead. Security cameras at Harborview Medical Center show the event. (Click photos for video.) Another video composite here.

A friend of mine sent some comments from live journals of people who experienced the event:

"OK, I'm sitting at my computer at 2:45 am, and there is a bright double flash of light from the west that lights up my office for a second. About two minutes later, I hear a sustained rumbling from the same direction, like fireworks, that lasts maybe 20 seconds--but no one shoots off a large fireworks display at 2:47am on a Thursday at the beginning of June..."

"I was trying to sleep last night when my bedroom was LIT UP with bright white light. It was so short, I thought I might have imagined it. But, it was real. Ha! Nya to my little Dove-ling who last night said "Go back to bed Mulder".

Witnesses along a swath of the sound from that extended north from Tacoma and Whidbey Island in Washington state to B.C.'s lower mainland, about 275 kilometres to the north, and as far away as Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, 420 kilometres to the east, said the sky lit up brilliantly. Many reported booming sounds as if from one or more explosions.

Did it hit?

Each day hundreds of meteors hit the Earth's atmosphere, but most burn up before hitting the Earth's surface. This one was "about the size of a computer monitor" and was not a piece of space junk according to Geoff Chester, a spokesman for the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

If this was a space rock, and not something military-related, (a spent rocket engine or satellite), then I expect someone will find it in the next few days. According to Ann Salahuddin, 44, "It looked like it burned out before it hit. It went out and it went down into the hillside there above Capitol Lake." Thurston County Officers were unable to locate anything.

An early report by a man who identified himself as University of Washington astronomy professor Bradley Hammermaster on a call to KIRO Radio is now being called a hoax. The man said a car-sized meteor might have hit near Chehalis, Washington and a team was being formed to find it.

"Pieces of the meteor were probably traveling about 700 miles per hour when they slammed to the ground, said Dick Pugh, a field scientist for the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory of Portland State University. Six have been recovered in Washington, and four have been found in Oregon. They fetch quite a bit of money because of the scientific information they can yield about the origins of the solar system, Pugh said. Meteorites are about 4.5 billion years old." - source not given. I think the "six" refer to previous meteors such as the one in this photo.

Oregonlive says, "Based on dozens of eyewitness accounts, Pugh said the fireball appeared to be speeding west to east at a 45-degree angle toward the Centralia-Chehalis area. Observers reported seeing white, yellow, orange, blue and green colors. They "varied because it depends on where you were and what kind of atmosphere you're looking through," he said. People in Chehalis reported smelling sulfur, a rotten-egg odor, which is typical of a meteor burning up, Pugh said."

The photo above from here is a 15 ton iron space rock (medium octahedrite) found in 1902 in Oregon City.

5/17/04 Earth. Here is a great site you can use to watch animated weather RADAR images.

 

Why watch these? Above are normal cloud formations. One guy collects strange ring patterns that show up on normal weather RADAR from time to time. Images are between 10-19-1999 and 2-14-2000 and many happen over US military bases. Some sort of testing? Whatever this is, unless there is come equipment glitch, it changes weather over several states.

"This "bull's-eye" ring is centered at or very near the Greater Peoria Airport AGS, USAF in Illinois. The ORBIT site noted the ring as being over the Tevatron particle accelerator facitlity, which is purportedly the most powerful facility of it's type." - wprus

More here:

What I find interesting are the series of rings that happen hours or days apart in the same location despite different weather conditions.

 

11-18-99: "26 hours after the 11-17 Fort Knox ring, this one appears in apparently the exact same location. When I found this ring, I consulted my friend, Rusty, who told me of previous occurrences where she had observed rings appearing in the same place several days in a row, followed by earthquakes in the same vicinity."

5/28/04 Earth. (CNN | SfGate) Proof of weather modification experiments, or global warming? NASA says the Earth is shining brighter because there have been more clouds on Earth over the past few years. More clouds mean a brighter Earth because more sunlight is reflected. This may help to cool the Earth if the clouds also block the heat of the sun.

".. scientists see the earthshine effect as a kind of sentinel, warning that the pace of global warming may have speeded up in recent years."

For years I've been reading about chemtrails. Some say they are secret weather experiments to cool off the planet or to get rid of industrial waste. (The solution to pollution is dilution.) Another ideas is that there are more clouds because the Earth is heating up and more clouds are a natural response, a sort of built in defense mechanism to maintain a certain temperature rage. This pattern may mirror patterns such as the regular changes in sunspots.

5/10/04 Earth (Time ) A NASA study warns that jet vapor trails are heating the planet.
"For all the worries over global warming, there's one quick, though impractical, way to turn down the heat: ground all the jets. That's one conclusion to be drawn from a new NASA study linking the world's rising temperatures to the proliferation of wispy cirrus clouds that can form as a result of trails of condensation left by airliners. ...

The only way to prove the point is to keep the jets on the tarmac and see what happens. That's exactly what occurred in 2001, between Sept. 11 and 14, when U.S. air travel was shut down following the terrorist attacks. During that period, the swing between daytime highs and nighttime lows sometimes measured more than twice as much as usual, perhaps owing to a reduction in cirrus clouds that allowed collected solar heat to radiate away. "

Interesting. Without jet trails temperature variations would be more extreme. Is there some conscious attempt to control our weather?

On 9/11/01 I remember a clean sky. I could see mountains usually covered by smog. Planes were grounded and few people were driving. It was a frightening time but the sky was beautiful.

For years people have believed chemical sprays are coming from some jets in addition to normal exhaust trails. There are many theories: A reflective substance to fight global warming is one. The NASA study says the opposite, that jet trails trap heat rather than cool our planet.

For more on the conspiracy theory angle, check out the stop-chemtrails site. Even if all conspiracy theories on this topic are wrong, NASA and the chemtrail people share a common view, "Something is coming from jets, it's not good for us, and it needs to be stopped."

3/23/04 Earth. (reuters | bbc) US has begun filling its strategic reserve of oil. As a result, gas prices in US at an all time high. Could it be that we know oil is running out?

Current inventory shows: 700 million barrels. This oil is stored in natural salt caverns 2000-4000 feet below the surface.

"Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.  This is not the wacky conclusion of a religious cult, but rather the result of diligent analysis sourced by hard data and the scientists who study global and related geo-political events." - lifeaftertheoilcrash.

Happy thoughts: Do not fear change. Learn what might happen and prepare. Help others over their fear of change.

More on this topic: See our Politics Archives.

3/18/2004: Read about an alleged attempted takeover of the Sierra Club.

2/16/2004: Is Your Planet Running Out of Oil? What can you do?

First, seek facts. Look at these graphs of oil production in 42 countries. World peak oil is predicted to be 2006. After that we start running out. This has been known for years. The paper was presented in 1998.

What should you do? Invest in gold and alternative energy. Also, get a car like the Toyota Prius. It gets 59 miles to the gallon in the city and 51 mpg on the highway. Learn how to make your ethanol fuel, then get an autothermal chemical reactor. No problem.

1/7/2004: Global Warming International Study: Feared mass extinction could kill a quarter of all species of plants and animals on earth by 2050 and would be "one of the worst since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. ... emissions from cars and factories could push temperatures up to levels not seen for one million to 30 million years by the end of the century." Luckily, according to Rush Limbaugh,"Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming" - See, I Told You So (1993)

1/5/2004: Fireballs spotted today over Santiago de Compostela, Madrid and around the coast of Valencia in the east of Spain worry thousands. Bright flashes were spotted around 6:00 p.m. (converts to 1700 GMT, or 9:00 AM Mon Jan 05 2004 in US/Pacific time ) in a swathe across the northern half of Spain."Experts think the fireballs may have been part of a meteorite burning as it fell through the atmosphere to Earth. "I heard a big explosion, like an earth tremor, and a white cloud of smoke formed," one eyewitness said. Police later searched the area where they thought the fireballs would have fallen in northern Spain, but they couldn't find any pieces of it." The BBC reports, "Behind a disco in Castellon province the fireballs started a small fire."

This was interesting to this editor because last night (1/4/2004) in Sacramento, CA around 5:30 PM I saw quite a large blue and white flamed shooting star that burned up very low in the sky. In addition to these fireballs today, Spain has been attacked recently by giant ice balls. 20-to-30-pound ice balls have fallen to the ground from completely cloud-free skies. They aren't from jets. (Sometimes jets flush toilets and the waste freezes as it falls to earth.) CNN says "the current giant hail lacks the coloration of jet waste. And the chunks are too scattered and infrequent to have likely come from a comet." One NASA site reports, "ice objects in Spain and, recently, in Italy are originated by an atmospheric unknown phenomenon or, more probably as in other occasions, due to natural ice formation on the fuselage or ejection of on-board water in aero planes. In any case a cosmic origin is highly improbable." It isn't just Spain and Italy, either. Ice has also fallen in East India and England. Not to alarm anyone, but there are reports that this is due to global warming.

According to about.com, Professor Jesus Martinez Frias, the geologist investigating the ice falls in Spain, told BBC News, "The most surprised person of all by this phenomenon is me." His preliminary examination of the ice revealed that it appeared to be nearly 100 percent frozen water. After further analysis, Martinez told a packed news conference that the ice pieces had probably been formed through sudden temperature drops in the stratosphere. This was the most likely explanation, he said, for the "very unusual" phenomenon, and that similar cases had been reported in China and Brazil in 1995 where blocks as heavy as 440 pounds crashed to Earth.

 

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