**Perhaps we are being pushed - individually
and collectively - into a higher level of functioning...
an opening: a door onto a new relationship to time,
where only half our task is getting life to do what we want it to do.
The other half is discovering where life itself wants us to go.** Marjorie Kelly
LARGEST QUAKES -
Live Seismograms - Worldwide (update every 30 minutes)
This morning -
5.1 BANDA SEA
Yesterday -
3/7/13 -
5.5 VANUATU
5.0 PRINCE EDWARD ISLANDS REGION
5.5 TAIWAN
VOLCANOES -
Volcano Webcams
Indonesian Volcano Erupts, Thousands Evacuated - Around 1,500 people were evacuated Wednesday after the Tangkuban Perahu volcano in Western Java spewed lava and ash. The volcano began to spew volcanic material during the early morning and later the mountain spewed a 200 meter high column of ash. In response, the administration of Western Java has prohibited the entry of tourists and others in a 1.5-kilometer area around the crater.
TROPICAL STORMS -
In the Indian Ocean -
Category 1 Tropical Cyclone Sandra was located approximately 710 nm northwest of Noumea, New Caledonia.
Tropical cyclone Sandra forms off Australia's east coast - The tropical cyclone that has formed 1,000 km (600 miles) off Australia's northeast coast is likely head further out to sea, Australia's weather bureau said on Friday, sparing the region's coal and sugar industries and coastal communities. Sandra was 1200km east of Cairns, Friday morning, heading towards Solomon Islands. but is likely to "stay away from the Queensland coast" and track towards New Caledonia.
EXTREME HEAT & DROUGHT / CLIMATE CHANGE -
Recent HEAT SPIKE UNLIKE ANYTHING IN 11,0000 YEARS - A new study looking at 11,000 years of climate temperatures shows the world in the middle of a dramatic U-turn, lurching from near-record cooling to a heat spike.
Research released Thursday uses fossils of tiny marine organisms to reconstruct global temperatures back to the end of the last ice age. It shows how the globe for several thousands of years was cooling until an UNPRECEDENTED reversal in the 20th century. Scientists say it is further evidence that modern-day global warming isn't natural, but the result of rising carbon dioxide emissions that have rapidly grown since the Industrial Revolution began roughly 250 years ago.
The decade of 1900 to 1910 was ONE OF THE COOLEST IN THE PAST 11,300 years — cooler than 95 percent of the other years, the marine fossil data suggest. Yet 100 years later, the decade of 2000 to 2010 was ONE OF THE WARMEST. Global thermometer records only go back to 1880, and those show the last decade was the hottest for this more recent time period.
"In 100 years, we've gone from the cold end of the spectrum to the warm end of the spectrum. WE'VE NEVER SEEN SOMETHING THIS RAPID. Even in the ice age the global temperature never changed this quickly."
Data indicates that it took 4,000 years for the world to warm about 1.25 degrees from the end of the ice age to about 7,000 years ago. The same fossil-based data suggest a similar level of warming occurring in just one generation: from the 1920s to the 1940s. Actual thermometer records don't show the rise from the 1920s to the 1940s was quite that big. Before this study, continuous temperature record reconstruction only went back about 2,000 years. The temperature trend produces a line shaped like a "hockey stick" with a sudden spike after what had been a fairly steady line. That data came from tree rings, ice cores and lake sediments.
The end of the last ice age coincides with a "really important time for the history of our planet." That's the time when people started to first domesticate animals and start agriculture, which is connected to the end of the ice age. The climate had been gently warming out of the ice age with a slow cooling that started about 6,000 years ago. Then the cooling reversed with a vengeance.
The study shows the recent heat spike "has no precedent as far back as we can go with any confidence, 11,000 years arguably." Scientists may have to go back 125,000 years to find warmer temperatures potentially rivaling today's. However, another outside scientist, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thinks temperatures may have been notably warmer just 12,000 years ago, at least in Greenland based on research by some of his colleagues. Several outside scientists praised the methods used in the study, but said it might be a bit too oriented toward the Northern Hemisphere.
The general downward trend of temperatures that reversed 100 years ago seemed to indicate the Earth was heading either toward another ice age or little ice age from about 1550 to 1850. Or it was continuing to cool naturally until greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels changed everything. The reason the globe warmed after the ice age and then started cooling about 6,000 years ago has to do with the tilt of the Earth and its distance from the sun. Distance and angle in the summer matter because of heat absorption and reflection and ground cover.
"We have, through human emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, indefinitely delayed the onset of the next ice age and are now heading into an unknown future where humans control the thermostat of the planet," said an atmospheric scientist. [SITE NOTE - Do I think the global warming is man-made? Hemlines, stock markets and global temperatures fluctuate - make of it what you will. My opinion fluctuates.]
HEALTH THREATS -
Salmonella resistance to 2 key drugs increasing - A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that resistance to two key antibiotics used to treat severe Salmonella infections is growing more common in the United States, although the prevalence in 2009 was still under 5%.
RECALLS & ALERTS
