FEMA Is Preparing For A Solar Storm That Would Take Out The Grid

Noting that the rare, yet “high-consequence” scenario has “the potential for catastrophic impact on our nation and FEMA’s ability to respond.”

by Tyler Durden

FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Administration) is planning for a massive solar storm that would be so strong, it would take down the power grid.

Authored by Maco Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

According to unpublished FEMA documents obtained by Government Attic, a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) database and non-profit organization, the Department of Homeland Security agency once mapped out a disaster plan for the occurrence of another geomagnetic “super storm” like the one the occurred in 1859.

Back then, the sun flung a giant plume of magnetized plasma out into space. The coronal mass ejection (CME), the sibling of a massive solar flare, traveled the 93 million miles between the Sun and Earth in only 17.6 hours. Today, it’s known as the Carrington Event and is remembered by the largest geomagnetic storm in the history of recorded space weather.

No other storm has matched it in speed or magnitude. When the shock wave of accelerated particles arrived on September 1, 1859, the disturbances to Earth’s magnetosphere were so great that telegraph communications across Europe and North America went on the fritz. Sparks leaped from the telegraph infrastructure, and machinery was so inundated with electric currents that operators were able to transmit messages while disconnected from battery power. Compasses even wiggled, and brilliant auroras were reportedly seen as far south as the Caribbean.

But that doesn’t mean the ill-equipped government isn’t preparing for the inevitability, in fact, they are. Despite our superior ability to predict these events, the stakes are exponentially higher in a modern, hyper-connected world.  FEMA predicts that a geomagnetic storm of this intensity would be “a catastrophe in slow motion.” Space weather events happen all the time, and many are harmless. For example, an event causing radio blackouts, solar radiation storms, and geomagnetic storms would be abnormal, yet the ripple effects on the power grid and communications would severely limit FEMA’s ability to respond to a nationwide crisis.

Within 20 minutes of the CME’s occurrence, FEMA estimates that 15 percent of the satellite fleet would be lost due to solar panel damage.

Solar radiation from the incoming storm would add “3-5 years worth of exposure” to the panels, degrading older satellites to the point of inoperability.

Low orbiting satellites, such as Iridium and Globalstar, may be less affected. Cellular service would be disrupted, and a loss of GPS capabilities could complicate FEMA operations.

–Motherboard

Should a storm of this magnitude hit, there wouldn’t be much the government can do. And of course, this would be the perfect opportunity to round up the masses for a trip to a FEMA camp. Individuals would need to band together to help get things back online, but it would all take time.  Those in heavily populated regions would be hit the hardest and evacuation of over 100 million people would be impossible, and even if it was, there would be no unaffected region to send the evacuees – other than the FEMA camps.

Prepare yourself, because the mere fact that this government document exists could mean that there is something we don’t know.

 

 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-22/fema-preparing-solar-storm-would-take-out-grid

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Why Trees Are The Ultimate Meditation Teachers

Photo by Eric Parks | https://tricy.cl/2s3whKb

In Buddhism, trees have long been recognized as living things worthy of recognition and protection.

By Lauren Krauze

Last April, my morning meditation was interrupted by the sounds of whirring chainsaws and clamoring trucks. When I stepped to the window, I noticed three men from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation standing around a large oak tree on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. At first, I thought they were trimming the branches. As I watched them saw off larger and larger sections, I realized they were cutting down the entire tree.

My heart started racing. How could I stop this? I thought of the environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill, who climbed a California redwood tree in 1997 and lived there for nearly two years to save it from being cut down. From my third floor window, I quickly scanned the oak’s upper canopy. It was nearly gone.

I hurried down to the sidewalk and approached the hard-hatted men. “Why are you cutting it down?” I yelled over the chainsaws. A bearded man with icy blue eyes cupped his hand around his ear and leaned toward me. I repeated my question.

He raised his arm and gestured toward the tree, yelling: “It’s dead!” His tone suggested that I had missed something obvious. Dead? The day before I had watched house sparrows and black squirrels scamper along the branches and hide among the tree’s full, healthy leaves. We watched as a thick limb tumbled down through the remaining branches and landed on the street with a thud.

As much as I wanted to intervene, there was nothing I could do. I trudged back upstairs. I closed my apartment windows, but I couldn’t escape the screaming chainsaws. Later, after the trucks pulled away, all that remained was a clean stump and a few small piles of sawdust.

For days, I reflected on my urge to protect the tree every time I walked past the stump. I realized I was trying to repay a kind of guardianship offered to me a long time ago. When I was a kid, three tall and sturdy oak trees grew in my family’s backyard. When I reached my hand out of my open bedroom window, I could graze the tips of their leaves with my fingertips. At night, I remember lying in bed and watching their dark branches sway in and out of the window frame. I liked to think they were waving hello, like witnesses or guards watching over me in the night.

In Buddhism, trees have long been recognized as living things worthy of recognition and protection. Shakyamuni Buddha was born in the lush Lumbini grove and later became enlightened under a bodhi tree. At the end of his life, he also physically passed (parinibbana) while nestled in a grove of sal trees. In Thailand, forest monks perform tree ordination ceremonies as a way to declare trees sacred and conserve the forests. Monks wrap robes around ordained trees and hang signs on their vast trunks that remind others that “to harm the forest is to harm life.”

A meditation teacher once advised me to look to the example trees set as steady, observant beings. “They are excellent meditators,” she said. “They sit in one spot for decades, watching all that goes by.” In his book The Island Within, anthropologist Richard Nelson described trees in a similar manner. “The dark boughs reach out above me and encircle me like arms. I feel the assurance of being recognized, as if something powerful and protective is aware of my presence . . .  I am never alone in this forest of elders, this forest of eyes.”

I sometimes wonder if the stories we impose on trees—and the anthropomorphic qualities we assign them—illuminate our efforts to bring forth the parts of ourselves that are most curious and aware. Not too long ago, I was strolling through a museum with a friend. Her husband had passed away several weeks earlier, and she was grieving and in deep shock. After we stopped to rest on one of the couches in the museum, we gazed out the windows at several small trees growing on a patio…

more…

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/trees-ultimate-meditation-teachers/

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The Stars: A Mythopoetic Masterpiece Serenading the Night Sky Through Myths and Stories from Around the World

“Light gives light because it is its nature.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly… I think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive,” Vera Rubin, who confirmed the existence of dark matter, pondered in her most extensive interview. More than a century earlier, trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell — Rubin’s formative role model — contemplated the same question after attending a lecture on beauty by Emerson: Mitchell, too, found the splendor of the cosmos inseparable from its allure as an object of scientific investigation, each enhancing rather than distracting or detracting from the other. The great physicist Richard Feynman extolled this interplay in his memorable Ode to a Flower, in which he insisted that “the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower,” and Marina Abramović touched on it in her manifesto for art and life, which asserts that “an artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the stars in the night sky.”

Indeed, for as long as we humans have gazed up into the night sky, our imagination has been captivated equally by aesthetic awe and scientific curiosity — something reflected in our earliest sky myths, the Medieval wonder-sighting of comets, and our 4,000-year history of visualizing the universe.

That dual enchantment is what artist Vija Celmins and writer Eliot Weinbergerbring to life in the limited-edition MoMA book The Stars (public library) — an uncommonly poetic ode to the resplendence of the night sky.

Reminiscent of the poet Mark Strand’s 89 meditations on the clouds, Weinberger’s text is a sort of florilegium composed of lyrical descriptions of the stars drawing on various myths, folk tales, or anthropological sources from different eras and cultures. What emerges is a quintilingual mythopoetic masterpiece, written in English and translated in Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Maori, accompanied by three stunning celestial etchings by Celmins, each months in the making.

Etching by Vija Celmins for The Stars – a negative image of the night sky

The whimsical text begins:

The stars: what are they?

They are chunks of ice reflecting the sun;
they are lights afloat on the waters beyond the transparent dome;
they are nails nailed to the sky;
they are holes in the great curtain between us and the sea of light;
they are holes in the hard shell that protects us from the inferno beyond
they are the daughters of the sun;
they are the messengers of the gods;
they are shaped like wheels and are condensations of air with flames
roaring through the spaces between the spokes;
they sit in little chairs;
they are strewn across the sky;
they run errands for lovers…

Double gatefold of Vija Celmins’s negative image of the night sky

all stars move and shine in order to be
most fully what they are — light
gives light because it is its nature…

Complement The Stars with Adrienne Rich’s sublime poem “Planetarium,” Henry Beston on how the beauty of the night sky nourishes the human spirit, and the forgotten woman who pioneered the art of astropoetics in the nineteenth century.

https://www.brainpickings.org/

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How Does Earth Move Through Space? Now We Know, On Every Scale

by Ethan Siegel, Contributor

NASA, ESA; Acknowledgements: Ming Sun (UAH), and Serge Meunier

On the largest scales, it isn’t just the Earth and the Sun that move, but the entire galaxy and local group, as the invisible forces from gravitation in intergalactic space must all be added up together.

Ask a scientist for our cosmic address, and you’ll get quite a mouthful. Here we are, on planet Earth, which spins on its axis and revolves around the Sun, which orbits in an ellipse around the center of the Milky Way, which is being pulled towards Andromeda within our local group, which is being pushed around inside our cosmic supercluster, Laniakea, by galactic groups, clusters, and cosmic voids, which itself lies in the KBC void amidst the large-scale structure of the Universe. After decades of research, science has finally put together the complete picture, and can quantify exactly how fast we’re moving through space, on every scale.

Steele Hill / NASA

Within the Solar System, Earth’s rotation plays an important role in causing the equator to bulge, in creating night-and-day, and in helping power our magnetic field that protects us from cosmic rays and the solar wind.

Most likely, as you’re reading this right now, you’re sitting down, perceiving yourself as stationary. Yet we know — at a cosmic level — we’re not so stationary after all. For one, the Earth rotates on its axis, hurtling us through space at nearly 1700 km/hr for someone on the equator. That might sound like a big number, but relative to the other contributions to our motion through the Universe, it’s barely a blip on the cosmic radar. That’s not really all that fast, if we switch to thinking about it in terms of kilometers per second instead. The Earth spinning on its axis gives us a speed of just 0.5 km/s, or less than 0.001% the speed of light. But there are other motions that matter more.

NASA / JPL

The speed at which planets revolve around the Sun far exceeds the rotation speeds of any of them, even for the fastest ones like Jupiter and Saturn.

Much like all the planets in our Solar System, Earth orbits the Sun at a much speedier clip than its rotational speed. In order to keep us in our stable orbit where we are, we need to move at right around 30 km/s. The inner planets — Mercury and Venus — move faster, while the outer worlds like Mars (and beyond) move slower than this. As the planets orbit in the plane of the solar system, they change their direction-of-motion continuously, with Earth returning to its starting point after 365 days. Well, almost to its same exact starting point.

Because even the Sun itself isn’t stationary. Our Milky Way galaxy is huge, massive, and most importantly, is in motion. All the stars, planets, gas clouds, dust grains, black holes, dark matter and more move around inside of it, contributing to and affected by its net gravity. From our vantage point, some 25,000 light years from the galactic center, the Sun speeds around in an ellipse, making a complete revolution once every 220–250 million years or so. It’s estimated that our Sun’s speed is around 200–220 km/s along this journey, which is quite a large number compared both Earth’s rotation speed and its speed-of-revolution around the Sun, which are both inclined at an angle to the Sun’s plane-of-motion around the galaxy.

But the galaxy itself isn’t stationary, but rather moves due to the gravitational attraction of all the overdense matter clumps and, equally, due to the lack of gravitational attraction from all of the underdense regions. Within our local group, we can measure our speed towards the largest, massive galaxy in our cosmic backyard: Andromeda. It appears to be moving towards our Sun at a speed of 301 km/s, which means —when we factor in the motion of the Sun through the Milky Way — that the local group’s two most massive galaxies, Andromeda and the Milky Way, are headed towards each other at a speed of around 109 km/s…

more…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/16/how-does-earth-move-through-space-now-we-know-on-every-scale/#2cf72ac7861f

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Sands of time

Photo by Chris Jordan from the series Midway: Message from the Gyre

The North Sea is rich in signs of what made the modern world. It’s also a monument to what awaits us in the Anthropocene

by David Farrier is a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Edinburgh, where his research interests include eco-criticism, postcolonial studies, and asylum and refugee contexts. He is currently working on a book about deep time in contemporary poetry. 

The red-veined rocks of Bohuslän in western Sweden have one of the highest concentrations of Bronze Age art in Europe. I was lucky enough to see the carvings during a recent October visit. The site was set back from a road, which marked where the shoreline of the North Sea would have been when the figures were first inscribed, between 2,500 and 4,000 years ago. The petroglyphs had since been painted pillar-box red so that they’d stand out for tourists, and the bright colours and wobbly lines looked like an enormous child’s drawing. But what the scene lacked in elegance it made up for in energy. Bowmen stalked antlered stags among a fleet of longships, flowing into a procession of bulls and thick-bodied giants teetering precariously atop spindly legs. Land and sea, human and animal, swam in and out of view.

Bronze Age rock art in Bohuslän, Sweden, assumed to depict the performance of a ritual. Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

I found myself trying to create a narrative, some sort of lost epic, as if I were deciphering a Bronze Age cartoon. We don’t know why these inscriptions were made, or what they were meant to say. The blunt-limbed figures give no clue about where such a story might begin, or where it might end. But perhaps that tangled quality is the petroglyphs’ real message. The longships speak of a culture closely aligned with the sea; the many animals point to a strong affinity with nature. Similar sites on the Cornish and Iberian peninsulas indicate that cultural influences travelled along what the Beowulf poet would later call the ‘whale roads’, the open waters that connected Bronze Age Scandinavia to the rest of Europe for the purposes of war and trade.

We live in a similarly entangled age, in which our consumption of fossil fuels, nitrogen fertilisers, the cobalt in our smartphones, antibiotics, and plastic all bind us to faraway times and places. The world of the Anthropocene is made from this dense web of relationships, each of which leaves its imprint on the world of the future. Two hundred generations of humans have lived and died since the Bohuslän petroglyphs were chipped out of the granite, but they remain urgent and vivid, the evidence of a living presence. In their silence, they pose certain questions. How and why do we navigate the currents of time and of matter to communicate with the deep future? Is it our intentional signs and symbols that leave the most lasting marks, or our unintentional traces?

Ilive and work in Edinburgh, on the lip of the North Sea. I’ve come to see these waters as a kind of Anthropocene laboratory, somewhere that lets us peer at the long-term impacts of the way we’re living now. Its past can tell us something of our future. As the Pangea supercontinent was breaking up 200 million years ago, ancient bacteria and microscopic plants were trapped in what would become the sea floor. Sediments gradually covered them over, and the immense pressure and heat from moving tectonic plates slowly converted this organic matter into the fossil fuels for which the region is now famous.

Until the end of the last Ice Age a vast plain linked Britain to continental Europe; evidence of human presence has been discovered in the form of stone hand axes, dredged up from the sea floor in the south. Then, around 11,700 years ago, the glaciers that once smothered the British Isles in sheets of ice up to 2km thick began to melt, and the North Sea slowly emerged in its present shape – a shallow basin, edged by a deep trench where the sea meets the crenellated coast of Norway…

more…

https://aeon.co/essays/the-north-sea-is-a-sign-of-what-awaits-in-the-anthropocene

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Signs of Consciousness, Sentience and Intelligence in Nature Demand Our Respect

by Sofia Adamson, Staff Writer, Waking Times

Part of our lot as human beings on planet earth is dominion over the plant and animal kingdoms, and as a by-product of our economic and cultural heritage, we have largely become indifferent to the suffering of animals. An indicator of the cruelest aspects of our nature.

This systemic disrespect for nature and her creatures is part of, or symptomatic of, a larger problem with modern society, the institutionalized perception that we are separate and independent of our environment. This dualism is part of the division of consciousness that is often noted in ancient texts as well as contemporary discussions of the characteristics of human consciousness.

Perhaps the most appalling sign of human kind’s dualistic trap is how we treat our friends in the animal kingdom. Yet this destructive idea is a tragic falsehood, as animals and plants alike are conscious, sentient and intelligent. The examples of this are everywhere today, and in this video, we see humpback whales clearly showing their appreciation to the humans who freed them from fishing nets.

We are now also discovering the deeper lives of plants, and in a research study spanning some 30 plus years, biologists have discovered the songs of plants.

 

Forest ecologist Dr. Suzanne Simard of the University of British Colombia has uncovered the subterranean network of organisms that allow trees to communicate with one another.

It appears that animal consciousness is rising at present here on planet earth, in spite of wholesale neglect. Elephants can understand and correctly interpret human gestures, and chimpanzees are developing new behaviors and skills. Here, Kanzi the bonobo chimpanzee starts a campfire to roast marshmallows.

Chimps have now been observed using tools to fish for food, a sign of their continuing cognitive development.

 

Their learning process is now being compared to that of human children, and in the following video, an experiment demonstrates the similarities between the two.

Many of the world’s most majestic animals are under direct threat of extinction today, and while most humans fail to appreciate this for what it really means, others continue to learn from animals, admiring their tenacity in the face of overwhelming pressure from humans. In the following case a pack of Andean bears works together to dismantle remote wildlife cameras.

Animals display a broad range of emotion as well, as is sometimes revealed in front of cameras, for example here, when a leopard exhibits compassion for the child of monkey it has just killed.

And animals also like to have fun, as is seen in this clip of dolphins getting high off puffer fish and having a good time in the wide open ocean.

You don’t have to look to hard to find signs of mankind’s disrespect, disregard, and distrust of nature. Raising awareness of our connection and dependence on the natural world in these materialistic times is the only way to counter the devastation. Fukushima, the Deepwater Horizon, mountain-top removal, deforestation, tar sands, fracking, plastic pollution, depleted uranium, animal cruelty, so on and on… there really is no end to our ignorance and disrespect.

Whatever your relationship to the natural world is, and no matter what kind of dystopian illusions you may have for our future, there is no escaping the truth that we are all products of nature, and as such dependent on the natural world for survival and happiness.

About the Author

Sofia Adamson is a contributing writer for Waking Times with a keen appreciation for matters of science and the spirit.

This article (Signs of Consciousness, Sentience and Intelligence in Nature Demand Our Respect) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Sofia Adamson and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution and author bio. 

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2017/05/10/10-signs-nature-intelligent-sentient/

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Dead Whale Shows Highest Pollutant Level Ever Seen by Scientists in an Animal

© AP Photo/ NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center

A dead orca whale that washed up on the shore of a Scottish isle has been revealed to have the highest concentration of dangerous pollutants ever recorded.

Following the dead whale’s discovery in January on a small island, researchers with the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS), a group that according to their website, “collates all data from stranded marine animals around Scotland,” conducted an autopsy that revealed astonishingly high levels of dangerous pollutants, including highly toxic manmade polychlorinated biphenyls (PBCs).

Scientists conducting the autopsy said the PCB levels are the highest ever recorded in an animal, according to Ibtimes.

The 20-year-old orca, nicknamed Lulu by the team of scientists, was revealed to have PCB levels at concentrations 100 times above the toxicity threshold for sea-going mammals. A study of Lulu’s ovaries revealed that the cetacean had never reproduced, likely a result of the pollutants riddling her tissues, according to the SMASS report.

According to SMASS head Andrew Brownlow, “Previous studies have shown that killer whale populations can have very high PCB burdens, but the levels in this case are some of the highest we’ve ever seen.”

“We know Lulu died from becoming entangled,” Brownlow added, “but given what is known about the toxic effects of PCBs, we have to consider that such a high pollutant burden could have been affecting her health and reproductive fitness.”

Between 1920 and 1977, when their use was eliminated, PCBs were ubiquitous in electrical distribution and power-generation equipment. According to data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), some 1.5 billion pounds of the deadly compound was manufactured for use in a wide spectrum of applications in the industrialized world.

Banned in 1979 by the US after it was revealed that PCBs were harmful to the environment and caused cancer in humans, the compounds continue to leach into the oceans and many other habitats. PCBs have been identified in almost every biome of the planet, including 36,000 feet below the surface of the sea, according to a February NOAA study.

“Once PCBs get into the marine environment, they are difficult if not impossible to remove,” said Brownlow.

https://sputniknews.com/environment/201705071053350251-dead-orca-most-polluted-animal/

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