Pre-Announcement Media Coverage

[John Smith]

We are seeing so many remarkable pre-announcement pieces showing up, this is a place to post and discuss them. This one for example, is making discoveries sound 'ho hum' which a few months/years ago were heralded as amazing breakthroughs. Today for example: 

"Nearly Every Star Hosts at Least One Alien Planet"

http://news.yahoo.com/nearly-every-star-hosts-least-one-alien-plane...

When a month or so ago they were making a BIG deal about finding one planet in the sweet zone which could possibly support life, son they they say 25% of them could support life! Including mention of red dwarfs, etc. The Zeta predicted evidence continues to build up!

Here is another blog that relates, describing a wobble:

NASA Scientists "Discover" a Wobbly Planet!?

https://poleshift.ning.com/forum/topics/nasa-scientists-discover-a-...

[casey a]

This looks like the establishment is trying to gauge what the public reaction/disbelief will be during the 6 days of darkness during stopped rotation for the side of Earth facing away from the Sun.

A satirical news outlet (like the Onion) reported "NASA Confirms Earth Will Experience 6 Days of Total Darkness".

However, the hoax story even drafts in some credible-sounding sources including Nasa chief Charles Bolden, who reportedly warned the public to stay calm. Some users even linked to a (real) video of Bolden talking about “emergency preparedness” – an official-sounding phrase that apparently bypasses common sense to hit the big button marked ‘PANIC’ in the brain.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-confirms-six-days-of...

The story was being widely circulated on facebook & twitter

[Starr DiGiacomo]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/11193003/Could-a-ts...

Could a tsunami strike Britain?

Twenty countries around the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, including the UK, are being tested for tsunami readiness. But how likely is it that disaster will strike?

In general, when we think of the devastation wreaked by tsunamis, we think of it being a long way away. Around the Indian Ocean, or the Pacific, where there are huge geological faults and therefore frequent earthquakes, the most common cause of tsunamis.

Anyone who has visited countries around the coasts of those oceans will have seen the warning systems and safety drills in place, ordering people to get to high ground if a tsunami warning is declared.

But there are few such systems in place in Europe, so Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Org...to determine how ready for a similar threat people are on countries around the Atlantic, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Malta, Monaco, Morocco, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom are involved in the test over the next three days, and another 19 countries will be examined in the future.

How likely is it that Britain will be hit by a tsunami?

The short answer is "not very". Most tsunamis are caused either by earthquakes in the ocean, or by huge undersea landslides, which themselves are usually caused by earthquake activity. (They can also be caused by meteor impacts - the Chicxulub impact that killed the dinosaurs is believed to have .... But if we are hit by a 10-mile-wide meteor again, we will probably have bigger problems.) We are lucky enough to live in a very seismically stable part of the world, and while tsunamis can travel long distances through seawater, most of our coastline is protected - either by the European continent, or Ireland.

While to Britain's north there is the seismically active region around Iceland, it is unlikely that there will be a truly major earthquake there, because it is not a "subduction zone", a place where two tectonic plates meet and one is driven underneath the other into the Earth's mantle.

Most major earthquakes, including the ones that caused the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the one that devastated Japan in 2011, and the Chilean earthquake of 2010, happen on subduction zones.

There is a possibility that a subduction zone is developing off the..., spreading there from the Mediterranean. However, since geological processes are usually measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of years, that is unlikely to be an urgent problem - and even when it happens, Britain will still be protected by the Iberian pensinsula.

(UPDATE: having said that, someone called @mushymelbowhead on Twitter has pointed me to this article which suggests that a tsunami may have killed 2,000 pe....)

How likely is it that other European countries will be hit by a tsunami?

Rather more likely. Portugal has already been hit by two very major earthquakes in (relatively) recent history, despite not lying on a subduction fault - it was these anomalous quakes in 1755 and 1969 that led researchers to consider the "developing subduction zone" hypothesis mentioned above. (The 1755 earthquake triggered a huge tsunami; it is estimated that 100,000 people died in Lisbon.) But the Mediterranean in general is steadily shrinking, as the African tectonic plate is subucted beneath the Eurasian plate; this is, of course, a subduction zone, and seismically active. In 1908, somewhere between 60,000 and 120,000 people died in Messina and Reggio, southern Italy, after a major (magnitude 7.1) earthquake shook the seabed on the narrow strait between the mainland and Sicily; thousands of the deaths were caused by 36-foot waves crashing into the coast around the epicentre. It is possible that the tsunami was caused by an undersea landslide triggered by the quake.

Other countries around the Mediterranean, including Turkey, have suffered devastating earthquakes. And in the Black Sea, in 1901, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake caused 15.... Major earthquakes are rare everywhere, but there are enough seismically active zones in Europe to make a tsunami early-warning system worthwhile.

What about "megatsunamis" caused by landslides?

We've really only talked about earthquake tsunamis so far, with the (possible) exception of the Messina-Reggio quake of 1908. But there has been a great deal of talk about the possibility of a megatsunami - one hundreds or thousands of feet tall - caused by a huge landslide; specifically, a landslide on the island of La Palma in the Canaries.

The hypothesis is that a huge shelf of rock, nearly the size of the Isle of Wight, could c..., perhaps triggered by an earthquake or volcano. The rock would hit the water faster than the water could get out of the way, goes the story, and would cause a wave 3,000 feet tall which would still be 150 feet tall by the time it hit the US Atlantic coast; the death toll would be enormous, perhaps millions.

It is dramatic and frightening, but almost certainly false; seismologists and geologists are near-universally agreed that it couldn't happen. The risk of landslide-triggered tsunamis is real in small bodies of water - in 1963, one major landslide fell into a lake behind a dam in Italy, causing a huge wave that overtopped the dam and roared down the val....

But there are no recorded episodes of this happening on an oceanic scale. And the La Palma rock is unlikely to collapse in one vast lump - research published in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems found that previous Canary Island landslides have happened in stages, not all at once. As this blog on the American Geophysical Union puts it, "this scare should be consigned to the garbage can once and for all".

[sourabh kale]

Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change on CBC's The National
A copy of the 2009 video about the Canadian Inuits observation of the sun moon and stars being out of place on main stream media
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UMOKp2Mbofk

[John Smith]

'Earth-size' UFO spotted orbiting the sun in NASA Images [Report] http://www.examiner.com/article/earth-size-ufo-spotted-orbiting-the... 

Front and Center Yahoo News. More of preparing the mind's of the masses...

[Ryan X]

Worldwide Surge in 'Great' Earthquakes Seen in Past 10 Years

[Shaun Kazuck]

Seems they "accidentally" triggered the Emergency Broadcast System in a few states today.  The message claimed to be from the White House itself.  Give that fact, it feels like another test to see how the public would react.

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/false-emergency-tv-warning-se... 

[Corey Young]

Quite an interesting article that helps to shine a light on previous catastrophes (without actually saying it) and what might have happened to prehistoric humans....hint....that site was not always at its present day level!!!!

Ice age Andes settlement found at record high altitude

12,400-year-old site in Peru shows ice age humans more adaptable than thought

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ice-age-andes-settlement-found-at...

 

 

The 12,400-year-old settlement was found in a cave called the Cuncaicha rock shelter, located nearly 4,500 metres above sea level. That makes it the highest ice age human settlement ever found

The site is more than 2,000 metres higher than the famous Inca archeological site Machu Picchu — where travellers already risk becoming ill from altitude sickness — and just 880 metres lower than the Mount Everest base camp in the Himalayas.

 

 

This article definitely gets people thinking and 'talking'...more pre-announcement prep!

 

 

[sourabh kale]

Earth 'opening up': Seismologists confirm a global surge of great earthquakes from 2004-2014
http://m.phys.org/news/2014-10-global-surge-great-earthquakes-.html
The last ten years have been a remarkable time for great earthquakes. Since December 2004 there have been no less than 18 quakes of Mw8.0 or greater – a rate of more than twice that seen from 1900 to mid-2004. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and massive damage has resulted from these great earthquakes. But as devastating as such events can be, these recent great quakes have come with a silver lining: They coincide with unprecedented advances in technological and scientific capacity for learning from them.
"We previously had very limited information about how ruptures grow into great earthquakes and interact with regions around them," said seismologist Thorne Lay of the University of California at Santa Cruz. "So we are using the recorded data for these recent events to guide our understanding of future earthquakes. We've gained a new level of appreciation for how one earthquake can influence events in other zones."
High on the list of areas ripe for a great quake is Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest, where the risk for great quakes had long been under appreciated. Evidence began surfacing about 20 years ago that there had been a great quake in the region in the year 1700. Since then the view of the great quake risk in Cascadia has shifted dramatically.

"We don't know many details about what happened in 1700," said Lay. There were no instruments back then to observe and record it. And so the best way to try and understand the danger and what could happen in Cascadia is to study the recent events elsewhere.

Over the last decade Lay and his colleagues have been able to gather fine details about these giant earthquakes using data from an expanded global networks of seismometers, GPS stations, tsunami gauges, and new satellite imaging capabilities such as GRACE, InSAR, and LandSAT interferometry. Among the broader conclusions they have come to is that great quakes are very complicated and idiosyncratic. Lay will be presenting some of those idiosyncrasies at the meeting of the Geological Society of America in Vancouver on Oct. 21.

"What we've seen is that we can have multiple faults activated," said Lay. "We've seen it off Sumatra and off Japan. Once earthquakes get going they can activate faulting in areas that were thought not physically feasible."

The great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of Dec. 26, 2004, for instance, unzipped a 1,300 kilometer long segment of the subduction zone and unleashed one of history's most destructive, deadly tsunamis. Much of the rupture was along a region with very limited plate convergence. In Japan, the Kuril Islands, and the Solomon Islands, great mega-thrust ruptures have ruptured portions of the subduction zones that were thought too warm or weak to experience earthquakes.

"These earthquakes ruptured right through areas that had been considered to have low risk," said Lay. "We thought that would not happen. But it did, so we have to adjust our understanding."

Perhaps the best recent analogy to Cascadia is off the coast of Iquique, Chile, said Lay. There had been a great quake in 1877, and a conspicuous gap in quakes ever since. Like the 1700 Cascadia earthquake, there is little data for the 1877 event, which killed more than 2,500 people. In both subduction zones, the converging plates are thought to be accumulating strain which could be released in a very large and violent rupture. On April 1 of this year, some of that strain was released offshore of Iquique. There was a Mw8.1 rupture in the northern portion of the seismic gap. But it involved slip over less than 20 percent of the region that seismologists believe to have accumulated strain since 1877.

"We have no idea why only a portion of the 1877 zone ruptured," said Lay. "But clearly, 80 percent of that zone is still unruptured. We don't have a good basis for assessment of how the rest will fail. It's the same for Cascadia. We don't know if it always goes all at once or sometimes in sequences of smaller events, with alternatin

[casey a]

Senior Chinese Official meets John Kerry ahead of APEC summit.

"The purpose of my visit to Boston and then to Washington is really to pave the ground for President Obama's visit to China in November and also for participation of the President in the APEC informal leadership meeting to be hosted by China," said the Chinese official.

The APEC summit will be taking place in Beijing on 10 & 11 November (5 days before the G20 summit in Australia).

-Consisting of 21 Pacific Rim members, it represents 40 % of world population & 50 % of world GDP.

This includes the U.S., China & Russia.

-Xi and Obama will meet on the sidelines of the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting.

[Both China & Australia have ramped up security in anticipation of the summits]

[casey a]

On the heels of U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, meeting with the defense ministers of the western Hemisphere and

President Obama meeting with the defense chiefs of 20 countries RE: ISIS,

Prime Minister David Cameron met with leaders of 53 countries in the Asia-Europe Meeting. The leaders represent more than half the GDP of the world & 60 % of the global population.

(The premise of this meeting however has been slated to addressing the Russia/Ukraine situation.)

The 2014 U.N. Climate Change Conference is scheduled to take place from December 1-12, 2014.