Category: Natural Disaster

Super-volcanos can erupt at any time

An international team of researchers in 2014 concluded that super-volcanos could erupt at any time without outside triggers, making predicting such an event more challenging.

This is due to a phenomenon called the “buoyancy effect,” which occurs when the molten magma inside the super-volcano reaches critically high pressures due to the much denser rock around it, forcing it to the surface.

Tests conducted at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, suggest that the transition from solid to liquid magma alone can create pressures strong enough to crack more than six meters of the Earth’s crust above the caldera.

Using synchrotron X-rays, the scientists established that a super-volcano eruption might occur spontaneously, driven only by magma pressure without the need for an external trigger.


Super-volcano triggers recreated in X-ray laboratory
http://www.esrf.eu/home/news/general/content-news/general/supervolcano-triggers-recreated-in-x-ray-laboratory.html

It will not happen in our lifetime

When I hear the experts talk about Yellowstone and they make a prediction saying it will probably not blow for another so many years or so. I have to laugh at the arrogance of man. There is no doubt, in my mind, that on the day before it does explode, someone will have said, “We’re good, it won’t blow for another 900 years.”

A newly released study suggests that the Yellowstone supervolcano may be waning.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/researchers-eruption-yellowstone-supervolcano-eruption-most-cataclysmic-event

Could the human race survive a supervolcano

I found this video on Youtube tonight and thought some of you might like it.

Although supervolcanoes might occur infrequently, they are by no means insignificant. The aftermath of the eruption of Mount Toba pushed humanity to the brink of extinction, roughly 71,000 years ago.

When an extreme magnitude of volcanic materials are ejected into the atmosphere, sunlight can’t reach the Earth’s surface – making global starvation a very real threat.

Experts estimate that, following the Mount Toba supervolcano eruption, global surface temperatures might have dropped as much as 59 degrees Fahrenheit for roughly 1,000 years. Fortunately, there are steps we can take to prepare the human race for the looming threat of supervolcanoes.

The coming bad years

The coming bad years, economic collapse, and the end of the world as we know it.

Now that got your attention, didn’t it?

Sensational headlines sell, and that’s why people use them, but reader beware, people have been predicting “The end of the world as we know it” for a long time and it’s a moneymaker for a lot of them.

Bad days do come and go, so you should get prepared, but you don’t need to buy a lot of sensationalized “How To” books to do it.

Let’s take a look at the last 78 years of doomsday

The 1930 and 50s

The Cold War Civil Defense Programs promoted public atomic bomb shelters, personal fallout shelters, and training for children, such as the Duck and Cover films.

Survivalists cite the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 as an example of the need to be prepared.

The 1960s

Increasing vulnerability of urban centers to supply shortages and other systems failures caused many people to promote individual preparations.

Harry Browne began offering seminars on how to survive a monetary collapse in 1967, with Don Stephens providing input on how to build and equip a remote survival retreat.

Cuban Missile Crisis caused many people like my parents to build bomb shelters.

Robert D. Kephart began publishing his Inflation Survival Letter (later renamed Personal Finance). For several years the newsletter included a continuing section on personal preparedness. It promoted expensive seminars around the US on similar cautionary topics.

Don Stephens,  preparedness consultant, and survival bookseller popularized the term retreater to describe those in the movement, referring to preparations to leave cities for remote havens or survival retreats should society break down.

The 1970s

Howard Ruff warned about a socio-economic collapse in his 1974 book Famine and Survival in America. It was published during a period of rampant inflation in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. And championed the claim that precious metals, such as gold and silver, have an intrinsic worth that makes them more usable in the event of a socioeconomic collapse than fiat currency. Ruff later published milder variations of the same themes, such as How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, a best-seller in 1979.

Colonel Jeff Cooper wrote on hardening retreats against small arms fire. Corners with this simplified implementation of a Vauban Star are now called “Cooper Corners” by James Wesley Rawles, in honor of Jeff Cooper.

In both, his book Rawles on Retreats and Relocation and in his survivalist novel, Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse, Rawles describes in great detail retreat groups.

In 1975, Kurt Saxon began publishing a monthly tabloid-size newsletter called The Survivor, which combined Saxon’s editorials with reprints of the 19th century and early 20th century writings on various pioneer skills and old technologies. Kurt Saxon used the term survivalist to describe the movement, and he claims to have coined the term.

For a time in the 1970s, the terms survivalist and retreater were used interchangeably. While the term retreater eventually fell into disuse, many who subscribed to it saw retreating as the more rational approach to conflict-avoidance and remote “invisibility.” Survivalism, on the other hand, tended to take on a more media-sensationalized, combative, “shoot-it-out-with-the-looters” image.

The Personal Survival Letter, published by Mel Tappan, was deemed by some to be one of the most important on survivalism and survivalist retreats in the 1970s. The majority of the newsletter revolved around selecting, constructing, and equipping survival retreats. Following Tappan’s death in 1980, Karl Hess took over publishing the newsletter, eventually renaming it Survival Tomorrow.

The 70s also saw survivalists established their first online presence with BBS and Usenet forums dedicated to survivalism and survival retreats.

The 1980s

In 1980, John Pugsley published the book The Alpha Strategy. After 28 years in circulation, The Alpha Strategy remains popular with survivalists. It is considered a standard reference on stocking food and household supplies as a hedge against inflation and future shortages.

Howard Ruff’s published his book How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years.

Bruce D. Clayton publishes a book called Life After Doomsday, which coinciding with a renewed arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, marking a shift away from economic collapse, famine, and energy shortages—which were concerns in the 1970s—to nuclear war. In the early 1980s

The 1990s

Interest in the survivalist movement picked up during the Clinton administration due in part to the debate surrounding the Federal Assault Weapons Ban and the ban’s subsequent passage in 1994. 

The interest peaked again in 1999 triggered by fears of the Y2K computer bug. Many books warned of widespread power outages, food and gasoline shortages, and other emergencies such as planes falling from the sky.

The 2000s

Another wave of survivalism began after the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequent bombings in Bali, Madrid, and London.

The fear of war, avian influenza, energy shortages, environmental disasters, global climate change, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina, also increased interest in survivalism topics.

During The Great Recession of 2008, many books were sold, offering survival advice for various potential disasters.

Online survival websites and blogs became popular discussing survival vehicles, survival retreats, emerging threats, and survivalist groups.

Economic troubles emerging from the credit collapse triggered by the 2007 US subprime mortgage lending crisis and global grain shortages prompted a broader cross-section of the populace to prepare.

The advent of H1N1 Swine Flu in 2009 piqued interest in survivalism, significantly boosting sales of preparedness books and making survivalism more mainstream.

Gerald Celente, the founder of the Trends Research Institute, identifies a trend he calls “neo-survivalism.” Average people were now making smart moves in intelligent directions to prepare for the worst.

The 2010s to Present

National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Preppers emerged recently to capitalize on the growing Prepper movent and, in the process, made a lot of preppers look like idiots in the minds of the viewer.

The 2012 doomsday phenomenon was a cash cow for booksellers that warned of a range of cataclysmic or otherwise transformative events that would occur on or around December 21, 2012.

The years following have seen many doomsday predictions come and go just as they have throughout history. The latest one said the end of the world as we know it would happen on December, 21, 2019. And it did not happen. Author Davis Montaigne predicted:

“On December 21, 2019, survivors will experience the first day of a pole shift – when the entire surface of the planet will shift out of position and move over the more fluid layers beneath the crust. Over the next few days, this will cause earthquakes and tidal waves and volcanic activity, which will almost completely destroy what is left of our civilization,” Montaigne predicts. “There is a mountain of evidence in historical, geological, and biological records showing such pole shifts have happened before. Even the Bible describes them repeatedly. I think that we will experience another pole shift for the week following December 21, 2019, getting worse each day until the natural disasters culminate on December 28 – Judgment Day.”

Oh well, better luck next time, Davis.

Bad days will come, they always do, and one of them very well may end it all, but don’t live in fear. Be prepared and enjoy your life on this amazing planet we call earth.

Here is a long list of other predictions if you are interested.

Most of the information above was referenced from Wikipedia.com.

Is tornado ally shifting east

As I sit at my computer tonight and watch reports of tornadoes touching down along the southeast, I have to wonder if Harold Brooks and Victor Gensini might be on to something.

Their paper titled “Spatial trends in United States tornado frequency” has a lot of data that supports a shift of tornado ally toward the east with a decrease in the Plains. If this trend continues, states like Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky will see a lot more activity in the future.

I guess time will tell. Regardless we should all be prepared for tornado activity because they can touch down in any state if conditions are right.

A tornado forms when a mesocyclone lowers below a cloud base and begins to take in cool, moist air from the downdraft region of a storm. The convergence of warm air in the updraft and cool air causes a rotating wall cloud to form. Then an area of quickly descending air known as the rear flank downdraft (RFD) focuses the mesocyclone’s base, causing it to draw air from a smaller and smaller area on the ground. As the updraft intensifies, it creates an area of low pressure at the surface. This pulls the focused mesocyclone down, in the form of a visible condensation funnel. As the funnel descends, the RFD also reaches the ground, fanning outward and creating a gust front that can cause severe damage a considerable distance from the tornado. Usually, the funnel cloud begins causing damage on the ground (becoming a tornado) within a few minutes of the RFD reaching the ground.

An atmospheric dust veil and the hunger years

An atmospheric dust veil covered the earth in the years 535/536 CE and brought about death and hunger to millions.

It is believed to have been caused by volcanic eruptions in the tropics or an impact disaster from space; regardless, the devastation had to be overcome by those with the will to survive.

The words from those who wrote about it tell a story we may live someday if another deathly dust veil encircles our world.

The Byzantine historian Procopius recorded of 536, in his report on the wars with the Vandals.

“For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed. And from the time when this thing happened, men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.”

As you can see in his description, the people at that time had resorted to waring with one another as a pestilence (a fatal epidemic disease) fell upon them. Starvation was pushing them to their moral limits just as we would be today.

Michael the Syrian, of Byzantine, also wrote of the veil.

“The sun was eclipsed for 18 months. For only three hours in the morning, it would give light, but a light that resembled neither day nor night.”

In his writings, we see that the sun only gave light for three hours in the morning. Can you imagine the fear most people would have felt not knowing the cause fo their suffering?

A cloud, dust veil, or dry fog that darkened the earth for a year was mention by others, saying that it caused cold, drought, and food shortages.

Michael the Syrian also wrote.

“During that year, fruit did not reach the point of maturity, and all the land became as though transformed into something half-alive, or like someone suffering from a long illness.”

The Gaelic Irish Annals recorded the following:

“A failure of bread in the year 536 AD” – the Annals of Ulster

“A failure of bread from the years 536–539 AD” – the Annals of Inisfallen

It also snowed in August of that year, in China, which ruined crops in Qingzhou and other provinces, and a dense, dry fog entered Eygpt.

The 536 events and ensuing famine may have also been responsible for the deposition of hoards of gold by Scandinavian elites at the end of the Migration Period. Their gold appears to no longer hold value for them as they sacrifice it to appease the gods trying to get the sunlight back.

Nothing was more important to them than the life-giving rays of the sun.

Other various historical sources from the sixth century describe “a sun that hardly cast a shadow.”

Some today believe this event could be the source of the Legend of the Fimbuwinter, the harsh, cold period of three years of winter without a summer that takes place before Ragnarock, the twilight of the gods–the end of the known world and the birth of a new era.

I can certainly believe the people of that time must have felt as if they were reborn into a new era after the veil lifted returning life to the planet.

Will the sun be taken away from us again one day? I don’t know, but there is no need to live in fear because there is nothing we can do about it. What we can do is live a prepared life and strengthen our minds to become the survivors of our time.

A volcanic winter is a reduction in global temperatures caused by volcanic ash and droplets of sulfuric acid and water obscuring the sun and raising earth’s albedo (increasing the reflection of solar radiation) after a massive, particularly explosive volcanic eruption. Long-term cooling effects are primarily dependent upon the injection of sulfur gasses into the stratosphere, where they undergo a series of reactions to create sulfuric acid, which can nucleate and form aerosols. Volcanic stratospheric aerosols cool the surface by reflecting solar radiation and warm the stratosphere by absorbing terrestrial radiation. The variations in atmospheric warming and cooling results in changes in tropospheric and stratospheric circulation. Reference Wikipedia.com