Tag: disaster

Strong 5.7 earthquake rattles southern Mexico sending people fleeing into the streets in panic

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

As H5N1 Bird Flu Spreads To More States, Many Are Wondering What Will Happen If People Start Getting Infected…

ETH – February 23, 2022

(OPINION) I have been watching the H5N1 bird flu for a very long time. Many of my readers don’t even know this, but many years ago I actually had an entire website that was dedicated to tracking the latest news regarding bird flu.

Fortunately, H5N1 hasn’t been a significant threat for ages, but now it is back. It is spreading very rapidly in birds in North America right now, and some experts are concerned that it could mutate into a version that could begin spreading easily in humans. If that happens, it would make the COVID pandemic look like a bad joke in comparison, because the death rate for H5N1 in humans is extremely high.

Over the past several days, we have received some really troubling news about the spread of bird flu inside the United States. For example, bird flu has now been detected in a “non-commercial backyard flock” in Suffolk County, New York. The following comes from the official USDA website…

The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has confirmed the presence of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in a non-commercial backyard flock (non-poultry) in Suffolk County, New York.

Samples from the flock were tested at the Cornell University Animal Health Diagnostic Center, part of the National Animal Health Laboratory Network, and confirmed at the APHIS National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL) in Ames, Iowa.

APHIS is working closely with state animal health officials in New York on a joint incident response. State officials quarantined the affected premises, and birds on the properties will be depopulated to prevent the spread of the disease. Birds from the flock will not enter the food system.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

The US Southwest is hitting megadrought status

– 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

UK Issues Rare ‘Danger-To-Life’ Red Alert As It Faces Worst Storm In Decades

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

A Highly Virulent Form Of The Bird Flu Is Starting To Spread Like Wildfire Across Several Eastern States

– February 15. 2022

I know that this isn’t exactly going to be welcome news to a lot of people, but bird flu appears to be spreading rapidly in several U.S. states.  Long before COVID ever came along, bird flu was one of the main threats that global health authorities were concerned about.  The good news is that human cases of the bird flu have been fairly rare in recent years, but just like COVID, bird flu has the ability to mutate rapidly.  And when humans do catch bird flu, the death rate can be over 50 percent.  For now, the outbreak in the United States is limited to birds.  It is hitting turkeys, it is hitting chickens, and authorities have informed us that “dozens of wild birds have tested positive along the East Coast in recent weeks”…

Avian flu has now been detected in flocks of birds in Virginia and Kentucky, just days after Indiana officials had to euthanize 29,000 turkeys due to the spread of the virus, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Monday.

Dozens of wild birds have tested positive along the East Coast in recent weeks, including three in the Carolinas last month. Avian flu usually does not cause any symptoms in wild birds, but it can be deadly in domestic poultry.

What this tells us is that the outbreak is not contained.

It is already in multiple states, and authorities have no idea where it originally started.

On Monday, bird flu was detected “in a flock of commercial broiler chickens” in Kentucky…

The Kentucky Department of Agriculture announced Monday a confirmed case of high pathogenic avian influenza — deadly bird flu — in a flock of commercial broiler chickens in Fulton County, with a second suspected case in Webster County.

The fact that it is now affecting our food supply should definitely get our attention.

In neighboring Tennessee, there is a tremendous amount of anxiety about what is happening in Kentucky, because a widespread outbreak of the bird flu in Tennessee could have enormous implications for the entire globe.

http://endoftheamericandream.com

Ebola persists in survivors’ brains for years, re-emerging to spread & kill – study

RT – February 11, 2022

One of the deadliest infectious diseases on the planet, which is caused by Ebola virus (EBOV), may relapse, researchers have warned. A study, published on Wednesday and dubbed “groundbreaking” by the scientific community, has found that Ebola may be hiding in the brain of those thought to have recovered years ago following an antibody treatment.

Such persistent infections in survivors make them spread the virus again, “potentially causing a new outbreak,” according to researchers.

The study was conducted by a team at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Having linked some recent Ebola outbreaks in Africa to persistent infection in patients who had previously survived the disease, researchers aimed to discover where exactly the virus could be sitting in the body, avoiding antibodies. To locate the hiding virus, they used a nonhuman primate model, which most closely recapitulates Ebola virus disease in humans.

They discovered “severe inflammation and massive Ebola virus infection” in the brains of about one in five macaque monkeys that had received monoclonal antibody (mAb) treatment. The virus persisted specifically in the brain ventricular system, in which cerebrospinal fluid is produced, circulated, and contained. Despite being cleared from all other organs with effective therapeutics, the virus was able to re-emerge to cause lethal disease, while also severely damaging brain tissues.

“These findings have implications for long-term follow-up efforts to reduce the individual (disease relapse/recrudescence) and public health (reignition of outbreaks) consequences of viral persistence in survivors of EBOV infection,” the authors warned.

https://www.rt.com

Hidden M8.2 earthquake triggers mysterious 2021 global tsunami

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

DC Asks Shoppers to Start Rationing Food: Is This Just the Beginning?

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

Super-mutant HIV strain discovered in Europe

RT – February 4, 2022

A new highly transmissible and dangerous HIV variant has been discovered in the Netherlands, confirming scientists’ worst expectations.

An international collaborative study, led by researchers from the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute, identified 109 cases of the new ‘virulent subtype B’ (VB) variant after analyzing more than 6,700 positive samples.

The research revealed significant genome differences between the VB strain and other HIV variants.

“Individuals with the VB variant had a viral load (the level of the virus in the blood) between 3.5 and 5.5 times higher,” the scientists said. The results of their research have been published in the journal Science.

The rate of CD4 cell decline, which is the hallmark of immune system damage by HIV, “occurred twice as fast in individuals with the VB variant, placing them at risk of developing AIDS much more rapidly.”

Patients with the VB strain also demonstrated an increased risk of transmitting the virus to other people.

These conclusions confirm long-standing concerns that new mutations could make the HIV-1 virus even more infectious and more dangerous. According to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, it already affects 38 million people worldwide, and 36 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic in the early 1980s.

https://www.rt.com

Preparedness: A monstrous earthquake in the Pacific Northwest is a certainty; we just don’t know when

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