Michael Snyder – March 9, 2022

On top of everything else, now a highly pathogenic avian influenza pandemic is ripping across the United States, and it has already resulted in the deaths of almost 2.8 million birds.  Most of the birds that have died have been chickens or turkeys.  And since this was just in the very first month of the pandemic, there is no telling how bad it could eventually become.  What will the eventual death toll look like?  Will it be in the tens of millions?  That is definitely a possibility.  And what would happen if the bird flu mutates into a version that spreads easily among humans?  We might want to start thinking about that, because that is possible too.

I knew that the bird flu outbreak was bad, but I didn’t know that it had gotten this bad.  The following comes from a prominent farming website…

With new outbreaks in Iowa and Missouri, nearly 2.8 million birds — almost entirely chickens and turkeys — have died in one month due to highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), the Agriculture Department said on Monday. The viral disease has been identified in 23 poultry farms and backyard flocks in a dozen states since February 8, when the first report of “high path” bird flu in a domestic flock was reported.

2.8 million dead birds in just one month.

Will next month be even worse?

And the number of states that have detected bird flu has actually gone up since that article came out.  Nebraska just became the 13th state to detect a positive case of HPAI.

To me, one of the most alarming things is that this flu just keeps hitting more commercial flocks.  On Monday, officials announced that a commercial flock of turkeys in northwest Iowa had been affected…

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com

Ricky Scaparo – March 3, 2022

An earthquake struck southeast Mexico on Thursday, sending people fleeing into the streets. The U.S. Geological Survey gave a preliminary magnitude of 5.7 and said the epicenter was about 7 miles (12 kilometers) west-northwest of the town of Nopalapan at a depth of 69 miles (111 kilometers).

The quake triggered seismic alarms 235 miles (380 kilometers) away in Mexico City, but it was not felt in the capital. There were no immediate reports of damage.

The motion of these crustal plates causes frequent earthquakes and occasional volcanic eruptions. Mexico has a long history of destructive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In September 1985, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake killed more than 9,500 people in Mexico City.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

Scott K. Johnson – February 14, 2022

About half of the contiguous US is currently experiencing moderate to extreme drought—including almost all of the West. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, as widely pervasive drought has been present for quite a while now in this region, where major reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead are hovering around all-time low-water levels. But how does this ongoing drought compare to the past? After all, the region is no stranger to dry stretches.

A 2020 paper examined the 2000-2018 data in the context of a tree ring reconstruction going back to the year 800 and stretching from Southern California to Wyoming. That team found that this was likely the second-driest period in the record, beat out only by a megadrought in the late 1500s.

At the time, the paper’s authors guessed that good precipitation in 2019 would be enough to end the extended drought. But instead, a particularly wicked 2021 kept the drought alive. As a result, three of those researchers—UCLA’s Park Williams and NASA’s Benjamin Cook and Jason Smerdon—decided to update the numbers through 2021.

The most mega

The term “megadrought” isn’t some sensationalist moniker from bad television; it’s a term for the handful of two- to three-decade Southwestern droughts in the past millennium or so—some with history-defining impacts on the civilizations who lived there at the time.

With the analysis updated, 2000-2021 ranks as the driest such 22-year period in the data going back to the year 800. The megadrought years of 1571-1592 slip into second place. (Though the error bars on the two periods overlap.)

Between 2000 and 2021, 18 of those years saw soil moisture below the long-term average. Only two past megadroughts meet that level of consistent dryness. The years 2002 and 2021 rank as the 11th and 12th driest years in the whole record—and it has been three centuries since a drier year occurred. And although some megadroughts were focused in a particular region, the drought of the last two decades has been widespread across the West. That’s what you would expect to see from a drought driven more by global warming than by precipitation patterns.

To estimate the contribution of climate change, the researchers repeated their analysis of climate models run with and without warming temperatures. Their previous work had estimated that 46 percent of the severity of the 2000-2018 drought was due to human-caused warming. For 2000-2021, they get a similar answer of 42 percent despite using a new generation of climate model simulations.

https://arstechnica.com

Melanie Wilcox – February 18, 2022

As storm Eunice picked up speed with winds as high as 122 miles per hour, the United Kingdom’s Met Office expanded its “danger-to-life” weather alert Friday to include the south of England and some areas of Wales, CNN reported.

In the southwestern London area of Surbiton, a CNN reporter saw a rooftop fly off a home and crush a parked car.

Apart from crushing cars and toppling fences, Storm Eunice has also sent planes skidding on airport runways, according to CNN.

More than 200,000 people watched a live stream on YouTube of planes trying to land at London’s Heathrow Airport, battling wind gusts and skidding from side-to-side on the runway, according to CNN.

Presenter Jerry Dyer gave encouraging, entertaining words on the Big Jet’s TV channel, saying to the pilot, “Come on mate, you can do it!”

British Airways said that although “significant disruption” was to be expected, most flights would continue as scheduled. The airline said it would use larger aircraft to combat the weather.

https://dailycaller.com

Strange Sounds – February 9, 2022

Scientists have uncovered the source of a mysterious 2021 tsunami that sent waves around the globe. A magnitude 8.2 earthquake was “hidden” within a magnitude 7.5 earthquake in 2021, sending a mysterious tsunami around the world.

In August 2021, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake hit near the South Sandwich Islands, creating a tsunami that rippled around the globe. The epicenter was 47 kilometers below the Earth’s surface — too deep to initiate a tsunami — and the rupture was nearly 400 kilometers long, which should have generated a much larger earthquake.

Seismologists were puzzled and sought to understand what really happened that day in the remote South Atlantic.

A new study revealed the quake wasn’t a single event, but five, a series of sub-quakes spread out over several minutes. The third sub-quake was a shallower, slower magnitude 8.2 quake that hit just 15 kilometers below the surface. That unusual, “hidden” earthquake was likely the trigger of the worldwide tsunami.

The study was published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes short-format, high-impact papers with implications that span the Earth and space sciences.

Because the South Sandwich Islands earthquake was complex, with multiple sub-quakes, its seismic signal was difficult to interpret, according to lead study author Zhe Jia, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology. The magnitude 8.2 quake was hidden within the tangle of seismic waves, which interfered with each other over the course of the event. The hidden quake’s signal wasn’t clear until Jia filtered the waves using a much longer period, up to 500 seconds. Only then did the 200-second-long quake, which Jia said accounted for over 70% of the energy released during the earthquake, become clear.

“The third event is special because it was huge, and it was silent,” Jia said. “In the data we normally look at [for earthquake monitoring], it was almost invisible.”

Predicting hazards for complex earthquakes can be difficult, as the South Sandwich Islands quake demonstrates. The USGS initially reported the magnitude 7.5 quake and only added the 8.2 event the following day, as the surprise tsunami lapped on shores up to 10,000 kilometers away from its point of origin.

“We need to rethink our way to mitigate earthquake-tsunami hazards. To do that, we need to rapidly and accurately characterize the true size of big earthquakes, as well as their physical processes,” Jia said.

https://strangesounds.org

Jeff Thompson –  January 25, 2022

It’s begun.

We’ve kept our fingers on the pulse of supply chain issues for years now here at The Organic Prepper. Just last week we wrote about all of the impending supply chain issues which were plaguing America. Shortly after that piece was published we saw further edicts be given which banned particular Canadian truckers from coming across the border.

Say goodbye to your maple syrup.

And lo and behold, after massive inflation games, after tampering with the free market, after the deliberate creation of supply chain issues, now we have Washington DC running short on food. What’s the solution to these food shortages?

Why, telling people to not buy as much, of course.

That’s exactly what DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management is now asking residents to do, as they face a problem with keeping their grocery store shelves stocked. Self-imposed rationing is the solution.

You have to love the notion that “there is no need to buy more than you normally would.” There’s just a nationwide supply chain issue, right? It surely won’t make it so that you won’t be able to buy what you need? And is there not a taint of “the government will take care of you here” as well? Aren’t these the same people who are deliberately causing these problems?

Bare grocery stores are becoming more and more common throughout America at the moment. Keep tabs on your own supermarket. What have you seen over the past few months? What have you found is difficult to find at the moment? There are very few who could likely say their grocery store shelves remain the same as always.

There’s a reason that Americans throughout the country are posting pictures online of barren stores, food items spaced out to give the illusion of stocked shelves, and posters of food being where soup should be.

Farmers are being paid to not produce, are being ordered to dump their product to rot on the side of the road, meat is being regulated out of existence, people are being banned from trucking food into the country, and food processing plants are coercing people out of their jobs (and then facing inexplicable labor shortages).

America seems to now be facing a food shortage.

https://www.theorganicprepper.com

Strange Sounds – January 27, 2022

A monstrous earthquake in the Pacific Northwest is a certainty. We just don’t know when.

For many people, natural disasters inspire both fascination and fear. They’re a sign of nature’s power to not only create, but also destroy. At the same time, they’re a reminder of the human potential for ingenuity when it comes to protecting ourselves from the forces we cannot control.

In this case, there are two opposing forces: the North American Plate, an enormous tectonic plate that carries the entire continental United States on its back, versus the 90,000-square-mile Juan de Fuca Plate, located in the ocean off Washington, Oregon, and Northern California.

For the past 200 million years, these two have been squaring off in an epic wrestling match in an area known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone, or CSZ. Trust us, nobody wants to see the end of this round. Yet only a few people seem truly bothered: seismologists, emergency management professionals, and those who have experienced earthquakes before.

It’s certain that the Northwest will experience a devastating earthquake again, says Chris Goldfinger, an oceanographer at Oregon State University and one of the world’s leading experts on subduction zone earthquakes. “We have no idea of the timing and how urgent it is,” Goldfinger tells Pop Mech. “People tend to ignore it in that case.”

The majority of the public, as well as most governments in the Northwest, aren’t yet pushing to implement the extensive infrastructure changes and early-warning communications systems needed to save tens of thousands of lives.

The Juan de Fuca Plate has been steadily pushing against the Pacific Coast as it slides beneath the North American Plate. But the roughly 47-million-square-mile North American Plate isn’t budging. Instead, it’s locked tightly against the Juan de Fuca’s surface.

Here’s the chilling prediction from the Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup (CREW) in its 2013 report on CSZ earthquakes: “Cascadia has now been building up strain for over 300 years, so the next great earthquake could happen at any time.

https://strangesounds.org

Michael Snyder – January 16, 2022

Why does our planet keep getting hit by “historic disaster” after “historic disaster”?  Over the past couple of years, an extremely unusual series of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions has rocked the globe.  Authorities keep telling us that “everything is normal”, but the truth is that there is absolutely nothing about any of this that is “normal”.  Major changes appear to be happening to our planet, and that has enormous implications for our future.

Unfortunately, the corporate media gives very little attention to the major disasters that take place outside of the United States, and so most Americans don’t even understand the seriousness of what we are facing.

Over the weekend, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in Tonga experienced a “once in a thousand years explosion”.  This eruption sent a 3 mile wide mushroom cloud of red hot ash, steam and gas 12 miles into the air.

To put that in perspective, the entire island of Manhattan is only 2.3 miles wide.

This eruption was so massive that it actually created an entirely new island, and the sonic boom from the blast could be heard 6000 miles away in Alaska.

One of the most remarkable things about this disaster is the incredible amount of volcanic lightning that it produced.

It is being reported that there were approximately “200,000 lightning events” during the first hour of the eruption alone.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com

Michael Snyder – January 12, 2022

It is happening again. In December, Joe Biden stood in front of the American people and boldly declared that he had defeated the supply chain crisis but of course that wasn’t true. There have been persistent shortages for months on end, and now fear of Omicron is taking things to an entirely new level once again.

On Monday, the hashtag #BareShelvesBiden was trending on Twitter, and that is because shelves are alarmingly bare in supermarkets from coast to coast. We are being told that these shortages are only “temporary” but of course that was what we were told when nationwide shortages first began to pop up all the way back in early 2020.

Unfortunately, food industry experts are warning us that supplies are going to get even tighter in the weeks to come. For example, the following is what billionaire John Catsimatidis just told Fox News.

“Omicron is taking its toll at different levels of the supply chain, whether it’s the warehouses, whether it’s the selectors, the drivers, the loaders – and as they call in sick there are interruptions in the system,” Catsimatidis told Todd Piro during an appearance on “Fox & Friends First.”

Catsimatidis went on to say that many of these interruptions will continue over the next 6 weeks as the COVID-19 variant impacts the labor market. The United Refining Company owner added that the Northeast in particular is seeing the price of various products, including eggs, poultry, and beef, go up because of low supply and high demand.”

https://www.charismanews.com

Strange Sounds – January 5, 2022

Yet more earthquakes have struck near South Carolina’s capital city, the ninth and tenth in a series of rumblings that have caused geologists to wonder how long the convulsions might last, or if they could possibly portend future, more serious seismic activity.

Early Wednesday, a 2.6-magnitude earthquake struck near Elgin, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Columbia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was measured at a depth of 0.5 kilometers, officials said. About 7 hours later, another earthquake hit the area, this one with a magnitude of 1.5, according to officials.

That area, a community of fewer than 2,000 residents near the border of Richland and Kershaw counties, has become the epicenter of a spate of recent seismic activity, starting with a 3.3-magnitude earthquake on Dec. 27. That quake clattered glass windows and doors in their frames, sounding like a heavy piece of construction equipment or concrete truck rumbling down the road.

Since then, a total of nine more earthquakes have been recorded nearby, ranging from 1.5 to Wednesday morning’s 2.6 quake. No injuries or damage have been reported.

https://strangesounds.org