• Media via Ricardo Neves, Sebastian Kaulitzki/Shutterstock

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

16-01-2020 om 22:41 geschreven door peter  

Magnetic north just changed. Here's what that means.

BY MAYA WEI-HAAS

“Things are acting very strangely at high latitude."

“The Siberian patch looks like it's winning the battle,” he says. “It's sort of pulling the magnetic field all the way across to its side of the geographic pole.”

THE ARCTIC: AN OCEAN ON TOP OF THE WORLD

Ice, wildlife, and adventure—that is what draws us to the icy waters sweeping down from the Arctic Ocean. Join the crew of the National Geographic Fleet to explore the northernmost part of the Earth.

{ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ }

16-01-2020 om 20:52 geschreven door peter  

Pole Shift Major Earth Changes, Influx of Magnetic Waves, North Pole Shifting Fast, EMF Damage & Protection

Major Earth Changes, Influx of Magnetic Waves, North Pole Shifting Fast, EMF Damage & Protection

Unknown Burst of Gravitational Waves Just Lit Up Earths Detectors Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo detectors recorded an unknown or unanticipated “burst” of gravitational waves on Jan. 14. Gravitational waves we’ve detected so far usually relate to extreme cosmic events, like two black holes colliding or neutron stars finally merging after being caught in a death spiral.

Burst gravitational waves have not been detected before and scientists hypothesize they may be linked to phenomena such as supernova or gamma ray bursts, producing a tiny “pop” when detected by the observatories.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

16-01-2020 om 20:01 geschreven door peter  

Everyone knows that Superman is indestructible … except when exposed to green kryptonite from his home planet of Krypton. Everyone knows that tardigrades – those eight-legged micro-animals found living in the most hostile locations, including outer space – are indestructible too. Well, now these little super-beings have their own kryptonite … and, like Superman’s, this deadly and destructive force comes from their own home planet. What … or who … wants to kill these cute little water bears?

“A research group from Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen has just shown that tardigrades are very vulnerable to long-term high temperature exposures.”

Wait a minute, you tardigrade experts shout. Tardigrades have been found living in hot springs and near hot vents on the ocean floor. That’s true, and Ricardo Neves and Nadja Møbjerg, researchers at the University of Copenhagen and authors of a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, point out that desiccated tardigrades (which have their water removed but can still be revived) can survive temperatures up to 151°C (300°F) for up to half an hour. Not surprisingly, active tardigrades require lower temperatures, but how low?

“Rather surprisingly the researchers estimated that for non-acclimated active tardigrades the median lethal temperature is 37.1°C (98.78 F), though a short acclimation periods leads to a small but significant increase of the median lethal temperature to 37.6°C (99.68 F).”

That’s not much higher that the human normal temperature of 98.6 F. According to the university press release on the study, it’s also not much higher than the currently measured maximum temperature in Denmark of 36.4°C (97.52 F). Why are tardigrade researchers in Copenhagen so interested in the maximum temperature of Denmark? You can see where this is heading.

“Global warming, a major aspect of climate change, is already causing a wide range of negative impacts on many habitats of our planet. It is thus of the utmost importance to understand how rising temperatures may affect animal health and welfare.”

What better animal to subject to rising temperatures than the most indestructible creature on the planet, the tardigrade? The research was done on tardigrades found in roof gutters in Nivå, Denmark – in other words, living right alongside humans, not in some hot spring. NASA reports that the average surface temperature for the year 2017 was 58.62 F (14.9 C) and, unless you live in a nice, cool cave where you don’t get any news reports, it’s been rising steadily for years.

Wait a minute, you desperately shout one more time. Didn’t the study find that tardigrades can acclimate themselves to tolerating higher temperatures for longer periods? That’s true, says Neves, but “exposure-time is clearly a limiting factor that constrains their tolerance to high temperatures.” That’s why the study concludes that climate change, and global warming in particular, is the tardigrade’s kryptonite.

It bother me too.

“Indeed, although tardigrades are able to tolerate a diverse set of severe environmental conditions, their endurance to high temperatures is noticeably limited and this might actually be the Achilles heel of these otherwise super-resistant animals.”

Are we doomed? If the tardigrades are, you already know the answer. If only they could fly like Superman and reverse the spin of the Earth to take us back to a time when climate change was not a problem … or at least to a time where we could make better decisions on how humans affect their planet.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

16-01-2020 om 01:13 geschreven door peter  

New Studies: Antarctica Stable, Temps Falling, Ice Mass Growing!

By Kalte Sonne (German text translated/edited by P. Gosselin)

The ice in Antarctica, how is it doing? Is it melting, is it growing? In the following, we present the latest literature on the subject. There is a lot to report.

Let’s start with the temperature development because along with snowfall, this is the most important control factor for Antarctic inland ice.

At NoTricksZone, Kirye shows ten coastal stations of Antarctica. None have been warming over the past 10 years. An example follows:

And here’s the temperature development of the entire Antarctic according to UAH and RSS satellite measurements (from Climate4You, via NoTricksZone):

According to Clem et al. 2018, East Antarctica has cooled over the last 60 years, while West Antarctica has warmed.

The authors establish a connection with the SAM ocean cycle, the Southern Annular Mode. Euan Mearns also deals with the temperature development of Antarctica during the last decades.

Increased ice

Based on height and gravity field measurements by satellite and GPS measurements on the ground, Martin-Español et al. 2017 determined an increase in ice mass in the East Antarctic and a reduction in ice mass in the (much smaller) West Antarctic for the interval 2003-2013.

NASA researcher Jay Zwally also interprets an increase in the East Antarctic ice mass. However, a paper announced in mid-2018 still seems to be stuck in review…

Will the ice of East Antarctica be dragged along by the melting West Antarctic at some point in the melting vortex? No, this will not happen, Indiana University said in a press release of 2017:

New study validates East Antarctic ice sheet should remain stable even if western ice sheet melts

A new study from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis validates that the central core of the East Antarctic ice sheet should remain stable even if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts. The study’s findings are significant, given that some predict the West Antarctic ice sheet could melt quickly due to global warming.

If the East Antarctic ice sheet, which is 10 times larger than the western ice sheet, melted completely, it would cause sea levels worldwide to rise almost 200 feet, according to Kathy Licht, an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences in the School of Science at IUPUI. Licht led a research team into the Transarctic Mountains in search of physical evidence that would verify whether a long-standing idea was still true: The East Antarctic ice sheet is stable.

The East Antarctic ice sheet has long been considered relatively stable because most of the ice sheet was thought to rest on bedrock above sea level, making it less susceptible to changes in climate. However, recent studies show widespread water beneath it and higher melt potential from impinging ocean water. The West Antarctic ice sheet is a marine-based ice sheet that is mostly grounded below sea level, which makes it much more susceptible to changes in sea level and variations in ocean temperature. „Some people have recently found that the East Antarctic ice sheet isn’t as stable as once thought, particularly near some parts of the coast,“ Licht said.

Recent studies have determined that the perimeter of the East Antarctic ice sheet is potentially more sensitive and that the ice may have retreated and advanced much more dynamically than was thought, Licht said. „We believed this was a good time to look to the interior of the ice sheet. We didn’t really know what had happened there,“ Licht said. The research team found the evidence confirming the stability of the East Antarctic ice sheet at an altitude of 6,200 feet, about 400 miles from the South Pole at the edge of what’s called the polar plateau, a flat, high surface of the ice sheet covering much of East Antarctica.

To understand how an ice sheet changes through time, a continuous historical record of those changes is needed, according to Licht. The team found layers of sediment and rocks that built up over time, recording the flow of the ice sheet and reflecting climate change. Finding that record was a challenge because glaciers moving on land tend to wipe out and cover up previous movements of the glacier, Licht said.

The big question the team wanted to answer was how sensitive the East Antarctic sheet might be to climate change. „There are models that predict that the interior of the East Antarctic ice sheet wouldn’t change very much, even if the West Antarctic ice sheet was taken away,“ Licht said. According to these models, even if the ice sheet’s perimeter retreats, its core remains stable. „It turns out that our data supports those models,“ she said. „It’s nice to have that validation.“

The team’s research findings are presented in a paper, “Middle to Late Pleistocene stability of the central East Antarctic Ice Sheet at the head of Law Glacier,” that was published today online in the journal Geology.  The research presented is in collaboration with Mike Kaplan, Gisela Winckler, Joerg Schaefer and Roseanne Schwartz at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.”

A Nature Editorial also dealt with the current growth of the East Antarctic ice in January 2018. Of course, the ice in this region has also been worse at times, so it continues to heat up.

However, one would have to go back to the warm Pliocene (5.3-2.6 million years before today):

A history of instability

The East Antarctic ice sheet may be gaining mass in the current, warming climate. The palaeoclimate record shows, however, that it has retreated during previous episodes of prolonged warmth.

The phrase “at a glacial pace” once invoked a sense of slow and unchangeable movement, an almost imperceptible motion. But decades of remote sensing and seafloor observations have shown that glaciers and ice sheets can respond to disturbances much more dynamically than once thought. But as satellites captured the surges and retreat of Greenland’s maritime glaciers in the past decades the Antarctic ice sheets — east and west of the Trans-Antarctic mountains — were at least assumed to be stable. But this, too, turned out to be wrong. First came sediment¹ and model² evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsed during previous interglacial periods and under Pliocene warmth. Then came erosional data showing that several regions of the East Antarctic ice sheet also retreated and advanced throughout the Pliocene³. An extended record⁴ of ice-sheet extent from elsewhere on the East Antarctic coast now paints a more complicated picture of the sensitivity of this ice sheet to warming.”

Curiously enough, half a year later, the tide turned when a paper by Shakun et al. 2018, also in Nature, saw no major problems for the Antarctic ice in the Pliocene:

Minimal East Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat onto land during the past eight million years

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is the largest potential contributor to sea-level rise. However, efforts to predict the future evolution of the EAIS are hindered by uncertainty in how it responded to past warm periods, for example, during the Pliocene epoch (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago), when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were last higher than 400 parts per million.

Geological evidence indicates that some marine-based portions of the EAIS and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated during parts of the Pliocene^1,2, but it remains unclear whether ice grounded above sea level also experienced retreat. This uncertainty persists because global sea-level estimates for the Pliocene have large uncertainties and cannot be used to rule out substantial terrestrial ice loss³, and also because direct geological evidence bearing on past ice retreat on land is lacking.

Here we show that land-based sectors of the EAIS that drain into the Ross Sea have been stable throughout the past eight million years. We base this conclusion on the extremely low concentrations of cosmogenic Be and Al isotopes found in quartz sand extracted from a land-proximal marine sediment core.

This sediment had been eroded from the continent, and its low levels of cosmogenic nuclides indicate that it experienced only minimal exposure to cosmic radiation, suggesting that the sediment source regions were covered in ice. These findings indicate that atmospheric warming during the past eight million years was insufficient to cause widespread or long-lasting meltback of the EAIS margin onto land. We suggest that variations in Antarctic ice volume in response to the range of global temperatures experienced over this period—up to 2–3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures⁴, corresponding to future scenarios involving carbon dioxide concentrations of between 400 and 500 parts per million—were instead driven mostly by the retreat of marine ice margins, in agreement with the latest models^5,6.”

Also, read more at cato.org.

Antarctica stable

Eight million years ago, the earth’s atmosphere had similar CO2 content as today. Investigations now show that the Antarctic ice sheet had hardly retreated at that time.

The ice is apparently more stable than expected. Click here for the press release from the National Science Foundation. You can also read an article in Popular Mechanics.

University of Edinburgh press release from 2017::

Central parts of Antarctica’s ice sheet have been stable for millions of years, from a time when conditions were considerably warmer than now, research suggests.

The study of mountains in West Antarctica will help scientists improve their predictions of how the region might respond to continuing climate change. Its findings could also show how ice loss might contribute to sea level rise.

Although the discovery demonstrates the long-term stability of some parts of Antarctica’s ice sheet, scientists remain concerned that ice at its coastline is vulnerable to rising temperatures. Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Northumbria studied rocks on slopes of the Ellsworth Mountains, whose peaks protrude through the ice sheet. By mapping and analysing surface rocks — including measuring their exposure to cosmic rays — researchers calculated that the mountains have been shaped by an ice sheet over a million-year period, beginning in a climate some 20C warmer than at present.

The last time such climates existed in the mountains of Antarctica was 14 million years ago when vegetation grew in the mountains and beetles thrived. Antarctica’s climate at the time would be similar to that of modern day Patagonia or Greenland. This time marked the start of a period of cooling and the growth of a large ice sheet that extended offshore around the Antarctic continent. Glaciers have subsequently cut deep into the landscape, leaving a high-tide mark — known as a trimline — in the exposed peaks of the Ellsworth range.

The extended ice sheet cooled the oceans and atmosphere, helping form the world of today, researchers say. Their study is among the first to find evidence for this period in West Antarctica. The research, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, was done in collaboration with the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre. It was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council and supported by British Antarctic Survey.

Professor David Sugden, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, said: „These findings help us understand how the Antarctic Ice Sheet has evolved, and to fine-tune our models and predict its future. The preservation of old rock surfaces is testimony to the stability of at least the central parts of the Antarctic Ice Sheet — but we are still very concerned over other parts of Antarctica amid climate change.“

As the ice in West Antarctica melts, it rises isostatically, which in turn stabilizes the overlying ice, found a research team from Denmark and Colorado.

Again and again, there are the climate stories about the Totten Glacier in the East-Arctic Wilkesland. Gwyther et al. 2018 were able to show that the basal melting of the glacier is subject to strong natural fluctuations (press release of the NSIDC here). There is no long-term melting trend.

Melting from volcanoes

Glaciers in the western Ross Sea are also stable (Fountain et al. 2017, press release here). The rapidly melting Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica has a hot secret that has now been revealed: Beneath the glacier lies a previously unknown volcanic heat source. University of Rhode Island press release from June 2018 (via EurekAlert!):

Researchers discover volcanic heat source under glacier plays critical role in movement, melting

A researcher from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography and five other scientists have discovered an active volcanic heat source beneath the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica. The discovery and other findings, which are critical to understanding the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, of which the Pine Island Glacier is a part, are published in the paper, „Evidence of an active volcanic heat source beneath the Pine Island Glacier,“ in the latest edition of Nature Communications.

Assistant Professor Brice Loose of Newport, a chemical oceanographer at GSO and the lead author, said the paper is based on research conducted during a major expedition in 2014 to Antarctica led by scientists from the United Kingdom. They worked aboard an icebreaker, the RRS James Clark Ross, from January to March, Antarctica’s summer. „We were looking to better understand the role of the ocean in melting the ice shelf,“ Loose said. „I was sampling the water for five different noble gases, including helium and xenon. I use these noble gases to trace ice melt as well as heat transport. Helium-3, the gas that indicates volcanism, is one of the suite of gases that we obtain from this tracing method. „We weren’t looking for volcanism, we were using these gases to trace other actions,“ he said. „When we first started seeing high concentrations of helium-3, we thought we had a cluster of bad or suspicious data.“

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet lies atop a major volcanic rift system, but there had been no evidence of current magmatic activity, the URI scientist said. The last such activity was 2,200 years ago, Loose said. And while volcanic heat can be traced to dormant volcanoes, what the scientists found at Pine Island was new. In the paper, Loose said that the volcanic rift system makes it difficult to measure heat flow to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. „You can’t directly measure normal indicators of volcanism — heat and smoke — because the volcanic rift is below many kilometers of ice,“ Loose said

But as the team conducted its research, it found high quantities of an isotope of helium, which comes almost exclusively from mantle, Loose said. „When you find helium-3, it’s like a fingerprint for volcanism. We found that it is relatively abundant in the seawater at the Pine Island shelf. „The volcanic heat sources were found beneath the fastest moving and the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica, the Pine Island Glacier,“ Loose said. „It is losing mass the fastest.“ He said the amount of ice sliding into the ocean is measured in gigatons. A gigaton equals 1 billion metric tons.

However, Loose cautions, this does not imply that volcanism is the major source of mass loss from Pine Island. On the contrary, „there are several decades of research documenting the heat from ocean currents is destabilizing Pine Island Glacier, which in turn appears to be related to a change in the climatological winds around Antarctica,“ Loose said. Instead, this evidence of volcanism is a new factor to consider when monitoring the stability of the ice sheet.

The scientists report in the paper that „helium isotope and noble gas measurements provide geochemical evidence of sub-glacial meltwater production that is subsequently transported to the cavity of the Pine Island Ice Shelf.“ They say that heat energy released by the volcanoes and hydrothermal vents suggests that the heat source beneath Pine Island is about 25 times greater than the bulk of heat flux from an individual dormant volcano.

Professor Karen Heywood, from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, the United Kingdom, and chief scientist for the expedition, said: ‘The discovery of volcanoes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet means that there is an additional source of heat to melt the ice, lubricate its passage toward the sea, and add to the melting from warm ocean waters. It will be important to include this in our efforts to estimate whether the Antarctic ice sheet might become unstable and further increase sea level rise.’

Does that mean that global climate change is not a factor in the stability of the Pine Island Glacier? No, said Loose. ‘Climate change is causing the bulk of glacial melt that we observe, and this newly discovered source of heat is having an as-yet undetermined effect, because we do not know how this heat is distributed beneath the ice sheet.’

He said other studies have shown that melting caused by climate change is reducing the size and weight of the glacier, which reduces the pressure on the mantle, allowing greater heat from the volcanic source to escape and then warm the ocean water. ‘Predicting the rate of sea level rise is going to be a key role for science over the next 100 years, and we are doing that. We are monitoring and modeling these glaciers,’ Loose said.

The scientists conclude by writing: ‘The magnitude and the variations in the rate of the volcanic heat supplied to the Pine Island Glacier, either by internal magma migration, or by an increase in volcanism as a consequence of ice sheet thinning, may impact the future dynamics of the Pine Island Glacier, during the contemporary period of climate-driven glacial retreat.’

In addition to Heywood, Loose worked with Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, of the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom; Peter Schlosser of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University; William Jenkins of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts; and David Vaughn of the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, United Kingdom.”

The University of California in Santa Cruz 2015:

Study finds surprisingly high geothermal heating beneath West Antarctic Ice Sheet

UC Santa Cruz team reports first direct measurement of heat flow from deep within the Earth to the bottom of the West Antarctic ice sheet

Read more here.

Article at Spiegel.de 2017:

Researchers discover 91 volcanoes under the ice 

Surprise in Antarctica: hidden under kilometres of ice, researchers have found dozens of previously unknown volcanoes. Eruptions threaten a strong melt – sea levels could rise.”

Read more at Spiegel.de (press release from the University of Edinburgh here).

The West Antarctic Kamb Ice Stream has always puzzled the researchers because here the ice thickened, in contrast to the general melting trend in West Antarctica.

What could be the cause? Another volcano, as reported by the University of Washington in 2018: University of Washington 2018:

Volcano under ice sheet suggests thickening of West Antarctic ice is short-term

A region of West Antarctica is behaving differently from most of the continent’s ice: A large patch of ice there is thickening, unlike other parts of West Antarctica that are losing ice. Whether this thickening trend will continue affects the overall amount that melting or collapsing glaciers could raise the level of the world’s oceans.

A study led by the University of Washington has discovered a new clue to this region’s behavior: A volcano under the ice sheet has left an almost 6,000-year record of the glacier’s motion. The track hidden in the middle of the ice sheet suggests that the current thickening is just a short-term feature that may not affect the glacier over the long term. It also suggests that similar clues to the past may be hiding deep inside the ice sheet itself. ‘What’s exciting about this study is that we show how the structure of the ice sheet acts as a powerful record of what has happened in the past,’ said Nicholas Holschuh, a UW postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences. He is first author of the paper published Sept. 4 in The Cryosphere.

The data come from the ice above Mount Resnik, a 1.6-kilometer (mile-high) inactive volcano that currently sits under 300 meters (0.19 miles) of ice. The volcano lies just upstream of the thickening Kamb Ice Stream, part of a dynamic coastal region of ice that drains into Antarctica’s Ross Sea. Studies show Kamb Ice Stream has flowed quickly in the past but stalled more than a century ago, leaving the region’s ice to drain via the four other major ice streams, a switch that glaciologists think happens every few hundred years. Meanwhile the ice inland of Kamb Ice Stream is beginning to bulge, and it is unclear what will happen next. ‘The shutdown of Kamb Ice Stream started long before the satellite era,’ Holschuh said. ‘We need some longer-term indicators for its behavior to understand how important this shutdown is for the future of the region’s ice.’

The paper analyzes two radar surveys of the area’s ice. One was collected in 2002 by co-authors Robert Jacobel and Brian Welch, using the ice-penetrating radar system at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and the other in 2004 by co-author Howard Conway, a UW research professor of Earth and space sciences. Conway noticed the missing layers and asked his colleagues to investigate. “It wasn’t until we had spent probably six months with this data set that we started to piece together the fact that this thing that we could see within the ice sheet was forming in response to the subglacial volcano,” Holschuh said.

The study shows that the mysterious feature originates at the ice covering Mount Resnik. The authors believe that the volcano’s height pushes the relatively thin ice sheet up so much that it changes the local wind fields, and affects depositing of snow. So as the ice sheet passes over the volcano a section missed out on a few annual layers of snow. “These missing layers are common in East Antarctica, where there is less precipitation and strong winds can strip away the surface snow,” Holschuh said. “But this is really one of the first times we’ve seen these missing layers in West Antarctica. It’s also the first time an unconformity has been used to reconstruct ice sheet motion of the past.”

Over time, the glacial record shows that this feature followed a straight path toward the sea. During the 5,700-year record, the five major coastal ice streams are thought to have sped up and slowed down several times, as water on the base lubricates the glacier’s flow and then periodically gets diverted, stalling one of the ice streams. “Despite the fact that there are all these dramatic changes at the coast, the ice flowing in the interior was not really affected,” Holschuh said.

What the feature does show is that a change occurred a few thousand years ago. Previous UW research shows rapid retreat at the edge of the ice sheet until about 3,400 years ago, part of the recovery from the most recent ice age. The volcano track also shows a thinning of the ice at about this time. “It means that the interior of the ice sheet is responding to the large-scale climate forcing from the last glacial maximum to today,” Holschuh said. “So the long-timescale climatic forcing is very consistent between the interior and the coast, but the shorter-timescale processes are really apparent in the coastal record but aren’t visible in the interior.”

Holschuh cautions that this is only a single data point and needs confirmation from other observations. He is part of an international team of Antarctic scientists looking at combining the hundreds of radar scans of Antarctic and Greenland glaciers that were originally done to measure ice thickness. Those data may also contain unique details of the glacier’s internal structure that can be used to recreate the history of the ice sheet’s motion.

“These persistent tracers of historic ice flow are probably all over the place,” Holschuh said. “The more we can tease apart the stories of past motion told by the structure of the ice sheet, the more realistic we can be in our predictions of how it will respond to future climate change.” The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. The other co-author is Knut Christianson, a UW assistant professor of Earth and space sciences.

Blown soot apparently has no influence on the Antarctic glaciers in the McMurdo dry valleys, Khan et al. 2018 (press release).

Medley & Thomas 2019 documented an increase in snowfall in the Antarctic, which benefited the ice sheet (NASA press release here). The authors establish a connection with the SAM ocean cycle, the Southern Annular Mode.

The University of Colorado in Boulder, however, blames the increase in snowfall on the ozone hole (press release, paper by Lenaerts et al. 2018).

Jenkins et al. 2018 pointed to decadal cycles in the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet at the edge of the Amundsen Sea. The relationship between melting and ocean temperature is nonlinear:

West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat in the Amundsen Sea driven by decadal oceanic variability

Mass loss from the Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has increased in recent decades, suggestive of sustained ocean forcing or an ongoing, possibly unstable, response to a past climate anomaly. Lengthening satellite records appear to be incompatible with either process, however, revealing both periodic hiatuses in acceleration and intermittent episodes of thinning. Here we use ocean temperature, salinity, dissolved-oxygen and current measurements taken from 2000 to 2016 near the Dotson Ice Shelf to determine temporal changes in net basal melting. A decadal cycle dominates the ocean record, with melt changing by a factor of about four between cool and warm extremes via a nonlinear relationship with ocean temperature. A warm phase that peaked around 2009 coincided with ice-shelf thinning and retreat of the grounding line, which re-advanced during a post-2011 cool phase. These observations demonstrate how discontinuous ice retreat is linked with ocean variability, and that the strength and timing of decadal extremes is more influential than changes in the longer-term mean state. The nonlinear response of melting to temperature change heightens the sensitivity of Amundsen Sea ice shelves to such variability, possibly explaining the vulnerability of the ice sheet in that sector, where subsurface ocean temperatures are relatively high.

And here are even more temporally variable relationships. Wang et al. 2019: reported on temporally variable relationships of the surface ice mass balance in West Antarctica with the SAM cycle and ENSO:

A New 200‐Year Spatial Reconstruction of West Antarctic Surface Mass Balance

High‐spatial resolution surface mass balance (SMB) over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) spanning 1800–2010 is reconstructed by means of ice core records combined with the outputs of the European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts “Interim” reanalysis (ERA‐Interim) and the latest polar version of the Regional Atmospheric Climate Model (RACMO2.3p2). The reconstruction reveals a significant negative trend (−1.9 ± 2.2 Gt/year·per decade) in the SMB over the entire WAIS during the nineteenth century, but a statistically significant positive trend of 5.4 ± 2.9 Gt/year·per decade between 1900 and 2010, in contrast to insignificant WAIS SMB changes during the twentieth century reported earlier. At regional scales, the Antarctic Peninsula and western WAIS show opposite SMB trends, with different signs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The annual resolution reconstruction allows us to examine the relationships between SMB and large‐scale atmospheric oscillations. Although SMB over the Antarctic Peninsula and western WAIS correlates significantly with the Southern Annular Mode due to the influence of the Amundsen Sea Low, and El Niño/Southern Oscillation during 1800–2010, the significant correlations are temporally unstable, associated with the phase of Southern Annular Mode, El Niño/Southern Oscillation and the Pacific decadal oscillation. In addition, the two climate modes seem to contribute little to variability in SMB over the whole WAIS on decadal‐centennial time scales. This new reconstruction also serves to identify unreliable precipitation trends in ERA‐Interim and thus has potential for assessing the skill of other reanalyses or climate models to capture precipitation trends and variability.”

Read more at No Tricks Zone

Source: https://climatechangedispatch.com/studies-antarctica-stable-ice-growing/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

15-01-2020 om 22:26 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.theguardian.com/international }

14-01-2020 om 22:36 geschreven door peter  

Now and again, I will dig into a weird story that most people may be completely unaware of. And, that is very much the case today. It’s time to head back to 1959 and a strange radar-based affair that went down in England. It was revealed by the media on July 27, 1959 that  for almost a year an unusual phenomenon had been perplexing radar specialists at the Marconi Research Center at Great Baddow, near Chelmsford, Essex, England. The mystery all began early one morning in mid-1958. That was when a number of scientists at the center noticed the appearance of a strange point of light on their radar screens. It appeared to spread out into a ring, then faded and finally completely vanished. This was repeated several times, and the effect was very much likened to the spreading ripples of water on a pond. The rings lasted for two and a half to six minutes. An identical event occurred several days later, but on this particular occasion, the phenomenon had moved from its original position to a different location.

The puzzled scientists began to investigate the strange “ring angels,” as they soon dubbed them, and over the following twelve months or thereabouts recorded ‘ring angel” activity at no less than seventy sites throughout the south-east of England. Despite this, there were no corresponding visual sightings – not a single one. The rings began to appear all over the south and east of the country: reports surfaced from Ipswich, Reading, Canterbury and Tunbridge Wells. Nor were the “ring angels” hindered by changing weather patterns, as evidenced by the fact that a number of positive radar tracking were made in areas that, at the time, were engulfed in thick fog.

Was it possible that the culprits were nothing more mysterious than flocks of birds? This particular theory was carefully scrutinized by a Dr. E. Eastwood, who, at the time, was the Director of Research at the center. Eastwood found that several of the rings had been reported in areas which were regular roosting for starlings. This speculation was weakened, however, when it was noticed that some of the speeds of movement displayed by the “ring angels” were greater than those normally expected of birds. Dr. Eastwood elaborated on this particular theory and said the following: “Another problem is that if these are bird roosts, the birds don’t use them every night. Our once a week observations don’t show the same centers each time by any means.”

Another theory put forward was that they originated as a result of changing patterns in the air itself. “This makes it a very attractive theory,” said Dr. Eastwood, “except that no-one has satisfactorily explained why the air should produce a radar echo.” Despite a lack of a conclusive answer, the rings presented no long-term interference to the practical use of the radar sets, nor to the mystified operators. Finally, however, an answer was found. As the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) reveal: “A copse of trees covered with starlings revealed the cause of the strange rings of Angels: successions of waves of birds, separated by three minute intervals, took off from the roost moving in expanding circles to feeding grounds.”

On this particular subject, Dr. David Clarke says, in an article titled “Radar Angels”: “Throughout its early history, radar was dogged with technical problems that often led to spectacular misinterpretations of ‘angels’ as enemy aircraft and flying saucers. It is a popular misconception that radar – like the camera – cannot lie and that UFOs ‘confirmed’ by radar must by definition be solid, mechanical objects possibly from outer space.” Sometimes a mystery proves to be not so mysterious, after all. But, we are still left with a fascinating tale!

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-01-2020 om 20:47 geschreven door peter  

Alien Face Seen In Australian Bush Fires Jan 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Jan 2020

Location of sighting: Australia wild fires

 

Now this is something that just blows my mind. A person was taking photos of the horrendous wildfires in Australia and caught a face poking up from the ground. It looks like a devil. But I believe its an alien that is in an underground base about 6km below the surface who is really seen here. His thoughts...and concerns are visible in his face. You see, aliens can use the power of the mind to see whats going on at the surface. His thoughts accidentally caused the smoke to take form of his face while he was in his meditative state. Smoke is the lightest and easiest form of matter for a telepathic to manipulate. The alien didn't mean to create it. Its just that his thoughts are so powerful that the clouds molded around his telepathic projection unintentionally. Absolutely amazing find by Youtuber UFOvni2012. 

Scott C. Waring 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

13-01-2020 om 19:26 geschreven door peter  

The CIA recently declassified an intelligence report which reveals new information regarding a nearly 50-year-old UFO sighting. The sighting happened during the summer of 1973 at an experimental missile range located in Kazakhstan (Soviet Union’s Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range).

The heavily redacted report contains only one paragraph explaining the mysterious UFO encounter that happened at a spot called “Site 7”. It explains that the witness was watching a Canada vs. USSR sports game on television when the person “stepped outside for some air”. At that point, the witness reported seeing “an unidentified sharp (bright) green circular object or mass in the sky.” Even though the object was hovering in the sky, the witness was unable to give an approximate size.

According to the report, “Within 10 to 15 seconds of observation, the green circle widened and within a brief period of time several green concentric circles formed around the mass. Within minutes the coloring disappeared. There was no sound, such as an explosion, associated with the phenomenon.”

After researcher John Greenewald asked for a Mandatory Declassification Review and received the intelligence report, he made an interesting connection between numerous unexplained sightings during the Cold War and other similar UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) sightings reported by the U.S. Department of Defense. In fact, a military official told The Washington Post that UAPs can sometimes be seen in military airspace multiple times per month.

In a telephone interview, Greenewald told Newsweek, “This is very much similar to the context we see today, with threats on military facilities,” adding, “The U.S. Navy has gone on the record saying whatever this is, it’s a concern. They’re being encroached upon by this unidentified phenomena.”

The report also added that several weapons were being tested at the range, such as experimental missiles and warheads that contained cartridges that were loaded with hundreds of metal balls. “According to hearsay, experiments involving laser weapons were conducted at an unknown location at the range. Supposedly the tests involved powerful antennas,” the report read. The UFO sighting happened at Site 7 which was used as the headquarters for the “warhead checkout unit” with a number of Soviet Air Force personnel stationed there. The full report can be read here.

It’s quite interesting that the UFO encounter took place at an experimental missile range in 1973 because just a short time before that there were over 12,000 UFO sightings reported to Project Blue Book between the years 1947 and 1969 during the Cold War.

T̷h̷e̷ ̷B̷l̷a̷c̷k̷ ̷V̷a̷u̷l̷t̷@blackvaultcom

The CIA just shed light on a #UFO encounter that has remained a mystery for more than 40 years.

https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cia-ufo-document-

declassified-further-solidifies-threat-potential-from-unknown-objects/ 

…#blackvault #FOIA #UAP

CIA UFO Document Declassified Further Solidifies Threat Potential from Unknown Objects - The Black...

By John Greenewald, Jr. – The Black Vault – Originally Published January 6, 2020 The year 2019 was undoubtedly exciting for UFO enthusiasts. It brought news that the U.S. government and military...

theblackvault.com

• 105

3:14 PM - Jan 6, 2020

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{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

12-01-2020 om 00:43 geschreven door peter  

The UFO Answer(s)

http://ufocon.blogspot.com – The UFO Iconoclast(s)

Source: 

• https://ufocon.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-ufo-answers.html

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

11-01-2020 om 18:14 geschreven door peter  

Ear-pleasing new report confirms volcanic source of mysterious global hum

The idea is that “Every time the rock sags into the chamber, it creates a resonance and this produces this strange signal that you see far away.” Is this really ‘The Hum’?

Can you hear it? That elemental thrumming emerging just beneath the engulfing din of everyday city and suburban life? Well, chances are you're not losing your mind or developing some extrahuman ability akin to comic book superheroes. Better odds are that it's Mother Earth's growing pains in the form of loud volcanic stirrings, as revealed in a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

First reported back in the '70s, these unexplained low-frequency rumbles were heard around the world, and though myriad theories were presented, there was no specific cause ever found, other than possible sound sources like area cooling towers, transformer substations, industrial air compressors, and even secret submarine tracking stations (as portrayed in a 1998 The X-Files episode titled Drive).

Credit: Getty Images

Now a German scientific team has apparently solved the mystery of a strange seismic humming experienced around the globe since it was first detected in late 2018.  And despite many believing it was some alien doomsday device warming up to unleash its planet-killing spores, it appears to be caused by a massive underwater volcano forming just off the coast of Madagascar.

Beginning in the spring of 2018, a wave of intense earthquakes was recorded off the coast of the minuscule island of Mayotte, a French territory midway between Madagascar and Mozambique. 

This anomaly led study co-author Simone Cesca, a German seismologist of the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, to conclude with his colleagues that they were caused by an enormous pocket of molten magma slowly draining up to meet the sea floor of the Indian Ocean. According to their latest research paper, it’s the largest magma chamber ever discovered, and measures in at a whopping 16 to 19 miles deep.

Credit: Getty Images

While surrounding rock filtered and sagged down over the draining magma lake, the ocean floor responded by emitting an epic hum starting in June 2018, and first heard five months later. This gradual draining process also gave birth to a ginormous undersea volcano that spanned three miles in diameter and rose to a height of nearly 2,500 feet.

The primal machinations creating the underwater volcano began voicing a faint seismic humming that wasn't heard until Nov. 11, 2018, when sonic waves traversed the Earth from Kenya to Chile and Canada to the Hawaiian Islands, growing louder and lasting up to 30 minutes at a time. This thunderous downsag of the host rock overlying the reservoir is what triggered the worldwide resonance by emitting 407 very-long-period seismic signals.

Credit: Getty Images

“The whole episode is really, really rare,” Cesca told The Washington Post. “Seeing the deep magma chamber, seeing the magma’s propagation to the surface, seeing the volcano being born — I think this is unique, absolutely. Every time the rock sags into the chamber, it creates a resonance and this produces this strange signal that you see far away.”

So next time your ears pick up some odd reverberations you can't quite identify, it just might be the birthings of some baby volcano arriving into the world.

{ https://www.syfy.com/ }

11-01-2020 om 17:38 geschreven door peter  

Today’s article demonstrates  – in a strange way – how the mind can provoke false memories of the UFO type. Before we get to that specific issue, however, we must first take a look at a series of books that are among my favorites. From 1990 to 1991, the late author David Bischoff penned a trilogy of novels: Abduction: The UFO Conspiracy; Deception: The UFO Conspiracy; and Revelation: The UFO Conspiracy. If you are into UFOs, cosmic cover-ups and the world of fiction (and all rolled into one), then if you have not read this great series, you really should. They are, in my opinion, the definitive UFO novels. While I won’t reveal the complete plot-line that links all three of the books – in case you plan on purchasing copies after reading this! – I will explain my enthusiasm for them. Imagine a combination of The X-Files meets The Fugitive meets Robert Ludlum meets The Invaders and you’ll have some idea of what this series is all about. Except that Bischoff’s books predate Mulder and Scully by a couple of years.

The overall theme of these highly entertaining, fictional tales is an intriguing one: a shadowy, powerful group in the U.S. government – a group that is pretty much answerable to no-one at all – has, for years, been secretly fabricating UFO incidents, and particularly so “alien abduction”-based encounters. So, does that mean there are no real aliens visiting us, after all? Well, no it does not mean that. Or maybe it does. Then again, perhaps it’s a bit of both. And that’s what makes the UFO Conspiracy series so entertaining: it keeps you on your toes and guessing from the very first page to the absolute last. As for the characters, they are a fine and equally entertaining bunch. We have maverick journalist Jake Camden (think of Mickey Rourke’s character of private-detective Harry Angel in Alan Parker’s 1987 movie, Angel Heart and that’s the closest thing you’ll get to Jake Camden). We also have Dr. Everett Scarborough, a UFO skeptic, and a best-selling author on books that the Flying Saucer faithful absolutely loathe. And there’s Marsha Manning, a gutsy character who provides the romance factor for Scarborough, while Camden prefers booze-filled, coke-fueled hook-ups in motel-rooms with UFO groupies.

Now, it’s time to return to the opening sentence of this article. Namely, the matter of false memories and the UFO phenomenon. A week or so before Christmas I received an email from a guy who said that he had read one of my two books on Roswell (The Roswell UFO Conspiracy) and wanted to make a few points. He said he knew that aliens came down not too far from Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947. He also said that in terms of the bodies allegedly found on the Foster Ranch, they were not the large-headed, small creatures that most people associate with when it comes to the famous case. Rather, he said that the aliens at Roswell actually looked just like us, for the most part. He also said that the aliens were genetically designed so that when they died on the ranch, their bodies  decomposed extremely quickly – and, as a result, the U.S. government never had the chance to study their rapidly decaying remains. On top of that, he said that he had read all of this in one of the controversial Majestic 12 documents that surfaced from the 1980s to the 1990s; but which, oddly, he could no longer find.

The guy assured me that this was the correct scenario for Roswell. I said he was wrong. Rather, I explained, this is the exact scenario  presented in the second novel in David Bischoff’s The UFO Conspiracy series. No, I was wrong, he told me. He said he only ever read UFO non-fiction, rather than saucer-themed fiction. Well, he got back to me two days later, and lo and behold, he said that he did have these very three books – after all – on one of his many bookshelves, which he had read when they were published. While he was searching his shelves, I spent a couple of hours going through my own copies of the trilogy looking for the relevant page on the decomposing aliens. I finally found it, on page 233 of Deception. When we chatted again I told him to turn to page 233 and read it. He did. Three decades after reading Deception, and after we chatted again, he realized his error. In the early 1990s he had read Deception (and not Majestic 12-themed documents at all); but around thirty years later his mind and memories had turned the Bischoff scenario for Roswell into a real event, rather than what it really is: a fine piece of entertaining UFO conspiracy-fiction.

Of course, there was no attempt on the part of the guy to deceive me. Rather, his memories had deceived himself. It’s a cautionary, UFO-themed story of how the passage of time can turn one thing into something very different.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

08-01-2020 om 17:09 geschreven door peter  

Retired USAF General Claims Advanced Technology Exists That Could Transport a Human Anywhere on Earth in 1 Hour

Recently retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Steven L. Kwast gave a lecture last month that seems to further signal that the next major battlefield will be outer space.

Kwast’s lecture included comments that heavily hint at the possibility that the United States military and its industry partners may have already developed next-generation technologies that have the potential to drastically change the aerospace field, and human civilization, forever, reports The Drive in their extensive article on advanced space technology.

Around the 12:00 mark in the video, Kwast makes the somewhat bizarre claim that the U.S. currently possesses revolutionary technologies that could render current aerospace capabilities obsolete:

“The technology is on the engineering benches today. But most Americans and most members of Congress have not had time to really look deeply at what is going on here. But I’ve had the benefit of 33 years of studying and becoming friends with these scientists.”

“This technology can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour.”

• https://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

07-01-2020 om 15:48 geschreven door peter  

If you’re running for president and you won’t want to answer tough questions about UFOs, extraterrestrials, X-files disclosure and the Space Force, you may want to avoid New Hampshire where Daymond Steer, a reporter for The Conway Daily Sun, has been hitting candidates hard about UFOs as they campaign in the Granite State. Last week it was Democrat Amy Klobuchar. He has also interrogated Republican William Weld (yes, there’s still another Republican running for president) and longshot Democrats Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, California congressman Eric Swalwell, former Massachusetts governor Devan Patrick and self-help author Marianne Williamson. What did they have to say?

“Let me say it this way, I have to be extremely careful because I am on the Intelligence Committee. So nothing that I’m saying is anything to do with anything I’ve learned on the Intelligence Committee. (But) our guys are seeing unidentified stuff. They don’t know what it is. And I don’t know what it is. I don’t think they’re saying that it’s necessarily things from outer space, but it’s unexplained stuff. That’s. That’s off the Southeast coast of the United States and off the California coast. We’re trying to learn more about it. The Air Force is trying to learn more about it.”

Michael Bennet

(Wikipedia)

Michael Bennet has a front row seat to the X-files as an Intelligence Committee member, but he wasn’t saying much and didn’t make any promises, although he did confirm that the military is seeing “unidentified” and “unexplained” stuff.

“I’m focused on things like getting rid of a lawless president — that’s first and foremost. Then I will work on out-of-worldly creatures.”

Eric Swalwell

(Wikipedia)

When asked about UFOs by reporter Steer, Eric Swalwell avoided it by punting with a comment on the current president, two moves that won’t win him many votes from UFO and conspiracy believers and open-minded Republicans.

“I will say, though, I have met other pilots, commercial pilots, who have said that there are things that they’ve seen in the night sky, mostly the night sky. I used to be on the board of an airline, I talked to pilots who told me about that sort of thing.”

Deval Patrick

(Wikipedia)

Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick was on the board of United Airlines (UAL) and knows that pilots generally don’t report UFOs out of fear of losing their jobs. If he’s really had those conversations, he had to win them over by showing he shared in or at least respected their beliefs.

“I don’t know why the United States is so secretive about that issue compared to other countries. I love that stuff.”

Marianne Williamson

(Wikipedia)

Anyone who knows about Michelle Williamson’s New Age beliefs will not be surprised with her answer to Steer’s question about the USS Nimitz pilot who saw UFOs, although “I love that stuff” is not quite the same as “I’ll throw open the X-files and tear down the fence around Area 51.”

William Weld

(Wikipedia)

Perhaps the best comments came from Republican William Weld. He was much more open and expansive in his answers (watch the interview here), possibly because he’s run for president before. In an interview this week, he said, “I do think there’s extraterrestrial life out there” and he believes it’s probably “more intelligent” than us. While he seemed to scoff at the idea of “flying saucers” visiting Earth, he said “never say never.” In revealing his belief in the idea that memories are somehow passed down through generations and our minds passively receive them from grandparents and ancestors before them, he makes an interesting reference to the Bridey Murphy case, where a U.S. woman (Virginia Tighe) in 1952 was hypnotized and claimed to be the reincarnation of a a 19th-century Irishwoman named Bridey Murphy, possibly giving credence to stories of UFO abductions told by people under hypnotic regression. While Tighe’s claims were eventually debunked, Weld still remembers the story, as do many others. In answering a follow-up question about the files from the 2004 Nimitz sighting, Weld promised to “check it out” because “I’m a curious individual.” Curiosity is not the same as disclosure, but it’s a start and not a flippant punt to a remark about his potential opponent.

There are more presidential candidates visiting New Hampshire soon because of its February 11th primary. Will they be as open as William Weld to the UFO questions sure to come from The Conrad Daily Sun and intrepid UFO questionerer Daymond Steel? We’ll soon find out.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

03-01-2020 om 20:30 geschreven door peter  

Klobuchar Suggests She Would Disclose UFO Information As President

JAZZ SHAW

Here’s an obscure tidbit from the campaign trail involving Democratic Senator (and POTUS hopeful) Amy Klobuchar. This week she sat down for a lengthy interview with the editorial board of the Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire, which is something of a required stop for all presidential candidates. The interview was livestreamed on the newspaper’s Facebook page and printed up for a recent edition.

It was a wide-ranging interview covering most of the usual topics of the day, including a claim from Klobuchar that she feels she’s “well-positioned” to win the nomination and defeat Donald Trump next November. But toward the end of the Q&A she was hit with a somewhat more obscure question that she had declined to answer a few months ago. Has she looked into the reports of US Navy encounters with alleged UFOs and what does she make of all this? It turns out she has and she suggested that, as president, she would investigate whether or not some of that information could be disclosed to the public. (Hat tip to Paul Seaburn at Mysterious Universe.)

Back in October, the Sun asked Klobuchar if she was familiar with New Hampshire man David Fravor, who was made famous in 2017 for his account of chasing a UFO off the West Coast as a U.S. Navy fighter pilot in 2004.

During that exchange in front of The Met Coffee House in North Conway, Klobuchar said she would look into it and on Monday she confirmed that she did.

“I think we don’t know enough … I don’t know what’s happened, not just with that sighting, but with others,” she said. “And I think one of the things a president could do is to look into what’s there in terms of what does the science say; what does our military say.

“Here’s the interesting part of that answer is that some of this stuff is really old … So, why can’t you see if you can let some of that out for the public so earnest journalists like you who are trying to get the bottom of the truth would be able to see it?” she asked rhetorically.

That answer wasn’t really all that long, but those four sentences definitely caught the attention of people in the UFO community. We’re dealing with a politician running for office here, so everything has to be taken with a grain of salt. But what was she really saying?

First of all, she seemed to be familiar enough with the David Fravor encounter to believe that this has come up on her radar. The reporter who asked the question was Draymond Steer and he asks pretty much every presidential candidate about UFOs. In fact, he was the one who asked her back in October and didn’t get an answer.

So Klobuchar doesn’t believe that we know enough yet, but she also apparently hasn’t been privy to any secrets on this topic either. She wasn’t one of the Senators briefed on the subject in secret earlier this year, so that makes sense. Her ideas about what a president can do (ask what the science says and what the military has to say) are fairly generic as well.

Of course, other presidents have asked before, as we’ve discussed here previously. It’s confirmed that both Clinton and Obama asked and they were apparently told nothing. (Or so they claim.) Does Klobuchar believe she’d fare better in getting the intelligence agencies to open the bag? Good luck with that, Senator.

Her last comment was at least a bit more interesting, however. She made reference to “some of this stuff” being “really old.” Presumably, she’s not talking about the Nimitz and Roosevelt encounters in 2004 and 2015 because those are still on everyone’s minds. So what did she mean? Was that a reference to the 1947 Roswell incident? If so, she could certainly generate a lot of headlines if she somehow drove a wedge into that oyster. But so many before her have tried that I somehow doubt any new information would be forthcoming.

Of course, this could all be nothing more than an effort to appeal to a particular voter demographic. According to the most recent polling, while a majority of Americans still aren’t convinced that UFOs are definitely extraterrestrial spacecraft, a solid 68% said that they believe the government knows more than they’re telling the public. And we generally don’t like being kept in the dark. People are fascinated by these questions and it’s possible that Klobuchar is teasing some possible disclosure to round up a few more undecided voters.

So is the truth out there? Amy Klobuchar still has a ton of ground to make up in the primary polling if she really wants a chance to find out.

{ https://hotair.com/ }

03-01-2020 om 18:33 geschreven door peter  

by Corbin Black

You never know what you could find in the depths of the ocean. Never-before-seen alien-like organisms are discovered all the time. This time, a diver exploring the depths of a fjord in Orstafjord Norway came across a huge alien blob. The video has captivated the internet with over 491K views to date.

Diver Ronald Raasch with the research vessel REV Ocean was exploring the site of a WWII shipwreck in early October. As a group of divers returned to the boat, Raasch and captain Nils Baadnes came across the blob about 55 feet beneath the surface. Inside, the transparent egg contains thousands of squirming babies.

See the mesmerizing video below:

Later on Twitter, the REV Ocean team posted a Tweet:

#Mystery solved! #REVOcean captain @Nils Baadnes & Ronald Raasch discovered this giant gel ball while diving in Orstafjord #Norway, which is actually an eggmass of 10-armed #squid 🦑👀

REV Ocean@rev_ocean

#Mystery solved! #REVOcean captain @Nils Baadnes & Ronald Raasch discovered this giant gel ballwhile diving in Orstafjord #Norway, which is actually an eggmass of 10-armed #squid

More info from @Halldis Ringvold/Sea Snack Norway/Geleballprosjektet https://youtu.be/wJMHsi0HBUo 

• 209

1:28 PM - Oct 7, 2019

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Although the researchers identified the blob as an egg sac produced by a 10-armed squid, that doesn’t identify which species it might be. All squid have ten arms.

These alien squid sacs are rarely seen since they are thought to be laid deep down in the ocean, sinking ever-lower to 500 feet. At these depths, the babies hatch and start their lives in the cover of darkness.

Science Alert noted different squid species have different egg sacs. Scientists suspect the female squids lay a small mass that expands to a larger size.

One species has been seen inflating the egg with water.

“Squids that live in the Norwegian Sea that the fjord connects to include the European flying squid (T. sagittatus) and the much smaller Boreoatlantic armhook squid (Gonatus fabricii). However, another Gonatus species, G. onyx, has been observed actually brooding its eggs, so it may be a less likely candidate.

Interestingly, G. onyx has also been observed pumping seawater into her egg mass to inflate it, so that may be another clue about how the masses get so big.”

Another even bigger squid sac was discovered in 2015. National Geographic shared a video of a 13-foot-wide egg sac from a neon flying squid.

(pictured above)

The jellylike substance helps protect the eggs from predators as well as infection and bacteria.

See the National Geographic video below:

Featured image: Screenshot via YouTube, Ronald Raasch

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

31-12-2019 om 18:16 geschreven door peter  

One of the top stories of the 2010’s has been the rise – although not the perfection — of the somewhat controversial gene-editing technique known as CRISPR, which is the convenient and deceivingly innocent-sounding abbreviation for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. One of the top stories of 2019 has been the revelation that CRISPR was used to edit human embryos in China, resulting in the birth of twin girls, under the noble cause of trying to prevent them from developing HIV later in life — a goal that may not have been achieved. The researcher who did the editing faced heavy criticism and disappeared for a time, generating conspiracy theories as to his whereabouts. As the year and the decade end, CRISPR and He Jiankui are back in the news one more time.

“Chinese researcher He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison and fined 3 million yuan (about 430,000 U.S. dollars) for illegally carrying out human embryo gene-editing intended for reproduction, in which three genetically edited babies were born, a court in south China’s Shenzhen city said Monday.”

Xinhua News reports that the Nanshan District People’s Court of Shenzhen convicted He, who formerly worked as an associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology, of illegal medical practice and simultaneously announced that He had edited a third embryo which was brought to term. Two of his non-doctor associates and co-conspirators – Zhang Renli and Qin Jinzhou – were also found guilty and sentenced to two and one and a half years in prison respectively, with Jinzhou’s shorter sentence being suspended.

“(The defendants), in the pursuit of fame and profit, deliberately violated the relevant national regulations on scientific and medical research and crossed the bottom line on scientific and medical ethics.”

Interestingly (and possibly suspiciously), He offered no proof that he actually used CRISPR to create three genetically-modified babies. It seems he was convicted on the fact that he bragged about it at scientific conferences and on the testimony by colleagues that he was certainly capable of doing it and probably did. The trial was held in secrecy to ‘protect the innocent’ and there are no statements from He. Whether one agrees with the ethical fight against human CRISPR editing or not, does this sound like a fair trial? Could it perhaps be a show to keep the rest of the world scientific community from investigating what’s really going on in the gene-editing labs of China?

The New York Times points out that American scientist Stephen Quake, a bioengineer and He’s former academic adviser at Stanford, is under investigation, as is Michael Deem, who was He’s Ph.D. adviser at Rice University and was allegedly involved in the project – something his lawyers deny.

What does this mean for CRISPR in the 2020s? If the human embryo gene-editing cat isn’t already out of the ethics bag, its head, body and half of its tail are and the only thing keeping it in is not ethics but … you guessed it … money. You don’t need to be Baba Vanga or Nostradamus to make this prediction

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

30-12-2019 om 20:35 geschreven door peter  

Snowmageddon Warnings in North America Come from Tropics More Than Arctic Stratosphere

Winter weather patterns in North America are dictated by changes to the polar vortex winds high in the atmosphere, but the most significant cold snaps are more likely influenced by the tropics, scientists have found.

A team led by the University of Reading conducted the first ever study to identify how the four main winter weather patterns in North America behave depending on the strength of the stratospheric polar vortex. This is a ribbon of wind and low pressure that circles the Arctic at heights of 10-50km, trapping cold air inside.
The four US weather regimes (clockwise from top left): Pacific Trough, Arctic High, Alaskan Ridge, Arctic Low. Red indicates warmer conditions and blue colder conditions

Source: 

• http://www.ineffableisland.com/2019/12/snowmageddon-warnings-in-north-america.html

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

30-12-2019 om 18:29 geschreven door peter  

Researchers found a brand new mineral tucked in a tiny meteorite. It's never been seen in nature before

29-12-2019 om 22:49 geschreven door peter  

Christmas Eve has come and gone and NORAD has stopped tracking a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer. However, no one in a position of authority can explain why the North American Aerospace Defense Command, with headquarters in Colorado Springs, isn’t tracking those mysterious giant drones which continue to fly nightly over a remote area of northeastern Colorado. Well, perhaps there’s someone in Nebraska who’s concerned enough to investigate because new reports say the drones have crossed the border into the Cornhusker State. What is more mysterious (or nefarious) – the giant drones or the seeming lack of government and military concern?

“I had reports of anywhere from 6 to 12. One person believed it to more than 12, close to 30. It seemed like several of them were flying together, in 3 or 4 pairs.”

Sheriff Jon Stivers of Washington Country in the northeast corner of Colorado told Fox News Denver of the reports he’s been getting about the giant (6-foot wingspan) drones flying in formation in his area of jurisdiction. The 30-drone sighting appears to be the largest formation yet – the previous reports from Phillips County topped out at 17. So, the size of the nighttime (7 pm to 10 pm regularly) drone formations is growing … and now they’ve spread across the northeastern border into Nebraska.

“Britton said he has spoken with a sheriff’s deputy in neighboring Deuel County, Neb., who has been chasing drones in his state the past few days. The Deuel County sheriff could not be reached Friday to comment.”

The Denver Post says Sedgwick County Sheriff Carlton Britton (Sedgwick is the most northeastern county of Colorado) heard that his counterpart across the way in Deuel County is also getting drone reports. However, there seems to be no media coverage of them in Nebraska and no indication that any government, military or other officials of authority are looking into them.

These strange drones have been flying their suspicious nighttime missions for over a week now. Why the silence? The FAA, Air Force, DEA, U.S. Army Forces Command and other authorities maintain they’re not involved. Meanwhile, legal experts continue to maintain that the nighttime drone flights are perfectly legal. No one seems to have followed them – giving the excuse that it’s dark and they’re flying with lights off. No one has taken any photos, even at dusk, for the same reason. While the sheriffs continue to warn that shooting one down is illegal and dangerous, conspiracy theorists are calling for some kind of action – legal or not.

Everyone seems to feel the same way as Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Nestor, who told The Denver Post:

“I would love for someone to break it wide open. I don’t know what it is, but I would like it not to be in my county.”

Not in my backyard. Let someone else do it. When it comes to the mysterious drones of Colorado and now Nebraska, the prevailing mood of the 2010’s is crossing the border into the 2020’s.

We’ll continue to keep watch on this developing story.

VFRMAP.COM

This is basically the area where the sightings are occurring. It's largely uncontrolled airspace with a very sparse population.

VFRMAP.COM

Here you can see the relationship of the area of activity in relation to Denver and nearby Nebraska.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

29-12-2019 om 22:35 geschreven door peter