earth

Chris Knight's avatar

The largest ejection of charged particles from the Sun since 2005 is currently speeding toward Earth at 5 million miles per hour. It’s due to hit us sometime tomorrow.

In recent months I have made it known that for the past number of years, I have been observing a correlation between this kind of solar activity and an increase in significant seismic activity. You can read about them here and here and here and most recently from October here. So in keeping with that, I am going to strongly suggest that this latest storm of energy which the Sun is throwing at us could possibly trigger severe earthquake activity.

Just something to maybe bear in mind these next few days and weeks…...

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…moved the axis of the entire Earth 10 inches from its previous position.

And the coastline of Japan has been permanently moved nearly 2 and a half meters.

Once again, I am reminded about how lacking in humility we are in regard to the world we live upon.

Try to think about the forces required to move something as big as the entire Earth by ten inches. Just ten inches.

In the first year of this blog’s operation, after the 2004 Indonesia earthquake/tsunami, I posted an excerpt from Jurassic Park (the super-incredible novel not the less-than-satisfying movie). It’s the scene toward the end where Ian Malcolm is telling Hammond about how the Earth cannot be destroyed. It’s perhaps worth reading again, and pondering....

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Here’s the link if you wanna look at it. It was about the massive discharge of highly-energized particles that the Sun threw out at the Earth early last week. As a result there were some astonishingly brilliant aurora reported at the northern latitudes.

Well anyway, in my post I wondered aloud if there might be any earthquake activity that would happen as a result, ‘cuz I’ve noticing for the past few years that whenever this planet gets hit by particles from a solar flare that it seems to agitate the inner workins enough to cause pretty good rumblin’ soon afterward.

I wrote that last Monday, August 2nd. Today, August 12th, there have been two earthquakes reported in the past several hours. A 6.0 quake hitting the island nation of Vanuatu and then a short while ago a 6.9 quake striking just over a hundred miles away from Quito in ...

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I may get called a “kook” from some quarters for writing about this. All I can really say in my own defense is that it’s something I’m sincerely curious about and I was told a long time ago that the only wrong question to ask is one that isn’t asked at all…

Slashdot is spreading the news this afternoon about a massive ejection of high-energy particles from the the sun. It’s headed toward Earth and should reach us sometime tomorrow. Among other things it means that we should be enjoying some lovely aurora, if you’re fortunate to live at a high-enough latitude.

Awright well, here’s the thing: I’ve noticed in the past several years that most every time we get hit by a solar flare, that there’s usually a massive earthquake that happens not very long afterward.

Considering that the inside of the Earth is a molten piezoelectric dynamo ...

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…it would possibly look like what Roy Prol has cooked up in this 3D animation. Prol took into account the Roche limit for Earth’s mass to calculate the size and distance of the rings from the surface, and also how the rings would look from various latitudes on Earth.

Check it out!

Thanks to Shane Thacker for this thought-provoking and beautiful find....

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It’s long been speculated that the Great Rift Valley in Africa will someday split entirely and create a new ocean, but now we have hard scientific evidence that it’s not just theoretical… it is happening now! In 2005 a massive, 35-mile long new rift opened up in Ethiopia (part of it pictured at top). According to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, it’s been confirmed that the same process that happens on the ocean floors of the Atlantic and elsewhere (think Mid-Atlantic Ridge) is taking place in eastern Africa. Someday that rift that you see in the photo will split apart completely and become a whole new ocean!

So consider buying up beachfront property now. It’ll be worth a lot of money… in a few million years or so....

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Just south of the equator and nearly two miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, researchers have discovered the hottest liquid water ever found on Earth, in a state that has never before been observed in the natural world. Hydrothermal vents are discharging water in a “supercritical” state (I’m thinking it’s analogous to plasma as a super-heated gas) that has been recorded to get as hot as 464 degrees Celsius. For us American folks, that’s a whopping 867 degrees Fahrenheit for liquid water! The conditions are so adverse surrounding the vents that computer modeling is the only way to study them, since regular equipment would melt from the heat.

Interesting stuff. Great fodder for discussion for any science and physics teachers out there who want to get their students thinking about how things like temperature and pressure affect water’s properties....

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