The Shaking Won’t Stop: There Have Been More Than 10,000 Earthquakes In California And Nevada In The Last 7 Days

Michael Snyder
End of The American Dream

The ground is constantly shaking in southern California right now, and this has many concerned that another large earthquake may be coming.  I have been keeping my eye on Cal Tech’s recent earthquake map, and as I write this article it says that there have been 10,053 earthquakes in California and Nevada over the past 7 days.  I have never seen that number so high, and southern California is being hit by yet another new earthquake every few moments.  Most of the earthquakes are happening out in the Ridgecrest area where we witnessed the magnitude 6.4 earthquake that hit on July 4th and the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that hit on July 5th.  But as you can see from Cal Tech’s map, there has been a tremendous amount of seismic activity along the San Andreas fault as well.  As I discussed the other day, the San Andreas fault is “locked and loaded” and it is way overdue for “the Big One”.  Could it be possible that all of this earthquake activity is leading up to something really big?

And it isn’t just earthquakes that we need to be concerned about.  According to Fox News, “geologists are nervously eyeing eight nearby volcanoes”…

California’s uncanny “earthquake pause” is over. It should have already had several “big ones” by now. All that pressure has to go somewhere. Now geologists are nervously eyeing eight nearby volcanoes. And why has Yellowstone supervolcano been acting so weird?
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has warned Southern California to expect more big earthquakes to come. Some, they say, may even be more powerful than those experienced in the past few days.
“(These quakes do) not make (the Big One) less likely,” local seismologist Lucy Jones told The Los Angeles Times. “There is about a one in 20 chance that this location will be having an even bigger earthquake in the next few days, that we have not yet seen the biggest earthquake of the sequence.”

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Adapt 2030 Ice Age Report: Europe setting a super freeze trend - 3rd year in a row

Adapt 2030

Third year in a row of extreme snowfall events for Europe. Grand Solar Minimum intensification forecast these amplifications, and these are the totals for 2019, but the real extremes will show around 2020-2021.

The Earth’s magnetic field is weakening ten times faster than expected

inhabitat.com

New satellite data from the European Space Agency has revealed some puzzling findings: the Earth’s magnetic field appears to be weakening much faster than previous research would suggest. These measurements show that on the whole, the planet’s geomagnetic field is weakening about ten times faster than expected, at a rate of about 5% every decade. However, it’s also important to note that in some regions it’s actually strengthened, particularly over Asia.

The data was collected by the ESA‘s three Swarm satellites, which track changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, making note of the strength, direction, and variations across the globe. Since their launch in 2013, they’ve measured magnetic signals from the Earth’s core, mantle, crust, oceans, ionosphere, and magnetosphere – creating a much more detailed map than scientists have ever been able to create before.

The localized fluctuations in the magnetic field are easily explained; researchers believe that they’re due to the movement of liquid metal flowing within the planet’s core. What they aren’t yet able to explain is exactly why the field as a whole is becoming weaker, or what the effects of that change will be.

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Life existed on Earth 300mn years earlier than previously thought - new findings

Comment: And that's probably a conservative estimate...

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RT

Scientists believe that life may have existed 300 million years earlier on Earth than previously thought. They analyzed data from tiny pieces of a mineral in Australia and managed to date them back to when the planet was just 400 million years old.

 

The researchers were looking at pieces of the mineral zircon, in Western Australia. After taking the samples back to the lab, they found a ‘chemo-fossil’ or a certain mix of carbon isotopes, a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences stated.

Think of it as "the gooey remains of biotic life or anything more complicated," said study co-author Mark Harrison, a UCLA geochemistry professor, as cited by AP.

They were able to determine this because carbon has different weights. The carbon residue in the pieces of zircon had a greater percentage of lighter carbon, which scientists usually manage to find in remnants of life, just as if your finger decayed, Harrison said.

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Nightmares of the Future: THE PLUTOCRATIC EXIT STRATEGY PART 1

Daily Grail

What's the end game of late-stage capitalism? What provisions are The Powers That Be making for the Coming Collapse; for Climate Chaos and other Catastrophes? This is the Plutocratic Exit Strategy. In this series we'll see how they plan on making their getaway, and how we can work to steal the future back.

We start this series of posts by looking at the arrival of the Hyperloop; the latest piece of science fictional technology to be delivered to us - as if plucked from the future readymade - by that great prophet of the Myth of Progress: "the real world Tony Stark" himself, Elon Musk.

We'll hop aboard the "fifth mode of transport" to examine the California Ideology so prevalent in Silicon Valley today and visit Tim Leary & Co's idea of SMI2LE. Then we'll head into the shadow realms, to penetrate the secret world of Classified Technology, and the mythology that surrounds it.

Our ultimate destination is to come to an understanding of how these two different aspects of the world we live in are being actively merged to a create an almost unimaginable life for the privileged few that will be admitted to it, and the price the rest of us will bear to achieve it.

Between a near-future of vast private infrastructure - of fusion power and off-world colonies - and a world full of hyperconnected refugees fleeing war & climate chaos.

Our mission is to build up a vocabulary for discussing these extraordinary conditions, as we teeter ever more precariously on the knife edge between Dystopia and Utopia. To do this we'll have to undertake a wider than usual survey of pop culture; from the land of sci-fi and spy-fi into the murkier waters of conspiracy theory and ufology and back out again, into reality with our heads made bigger and eyes widened ready for the task ahead.

The opening parts of this series are framed largely through the fictional universes of two films: Tomorrowland and Kingsman: The Secret Service, with a little help from the comic books of Jonathan Hickman. SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ALL THREE.

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Drought Toll: California Now Missing 1 Year’s Worth of Rain

Live Science

The amount of rain that California has missed out on since the beginning of its record-setting drought in 2012 is about the same amount it would see, on average, in a single year, a new study has concluded.

The study’s researchers pin the reason for the lack of rains, as others have, on the absence of the intense rainstorms ushered in by so-called atmospheric rivers, the ribbons of very moist air that can funnel water vapor from the tropics to California during its winter rainy season.

Overall, the study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres, found that California experiences multi-year dry periods, like the current one, and then periods where rains can vary by 30 percent from year to year. Those wet and dry years typically cancel each other out. 

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What the night sky would look like if you could see every asteroid

Eliza Sankar-Gorton
The Huffington Post

If you think asteroids are rare, it's only because they're so small and dark and hard to see. An eye-opening new video (above) shows what the night sky would look like if we could see the near-Earth asteroids astronomers have discovered -- it's quite a swarm.

"We're essentially flying around the sun through this population of asteroids with our eyes closed," Scott Manley, the astronomer who created the animation and posted it to YouTube, says in the video.

The interactive video lets you pan around the night sky as if you were standing in the darkness with a powerful telescope. Manley created it to spotlight the all-too-real danger that asteroids pose to humanity.

Thinking about the threat isn't much fun, but we have to say that watching the video is. Enjoy! 

Another great flood: time to build an ark?

Andrei Kislyakov
Sputnik

The world geological community is warning that today's seismic activity on our planet is nothing compared with what's to come.

Over the past three years, Pakistan, for example, has been hit by dozens of earthquakes. In March 2005, 80,000 people died under the rubble there. On October 30, the last time nature went on the rampage, there were hundreds of victims. Tens of thousands of people drowned during an overwhelming Asian tsunami at the end of 2004. China and Afghanistan have been rocked by quakes again more recently.

These natural disasters, which have swept our planet in recent years, indicate that the world has entered an era not only of a political, but also of climatic instability. Most scientists - biologists and environmentalists - tend to blame the human race for the catastrophic climate change on the Earth. No doubt, the greenhouse effect due to industrial activity plays a considerable role in global warming, but there are other reasons worth considering. The Earth is rotating around its own axis slower. The International Earth Rotation Service has regularly added a second or two to the length of a 24-hour day in recent years.

This is the main reason, according to Igor Kopylov, professor at Moscow Energy Institute, why the planet - a gigantic electrical machine - has had its energy balance upset. He expressed this viewpoint in 2004. Kopylov is convinced that the Earth has entered the first phase of a global change. A weakening of the Earth's magnetic field was first registered early in the 20th century, and a consistent drop in the speed of rotation, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It has been established that when the Earth's rotation slows by one second a year, it releases a tremendous amount of heat, hundreds of times the volume of energy released by human industrial activity.

If we accept that all processes on Earth run according to cosmic cycles, which, in turn, depend on the Solar System's position in our Galaxy, then humankind may be facing another Great Flood.

The Solar System, including the Earth, travels through the Galaxy in spiraling elliptic paths. The cycle time for the larger spiral is 200-210 million years, and for the smaller one, which determines minor galactic cycles, 26,000 years. Correspondingly, half a cycle lasts 130 centuries. This period almost exactly coincides with the date of the last Flood, the occurrence of which was real. The myths and legends of many peoples including that of the Bible recorded the event.

The Flood has been dated rather precisely: at 11,100 BC. If we accept that the civilized society on Earth has been developing for 400,000 years, then this period saw 30 great floods, and we are witnessing the beginnings of the thirty-first flood.

The cosmic cycles are so gigantically long by human standards that they have little impact on the life of people, but the active initial phase of the galactic cycle is of vital importance for the development of civilization. In the view of Russian scientists, the Earth currently finds itself at precisely this point in the cycle.

The transitional process in the electrical machine "planet Earth" can be divided into three phases. During the first - lasting 300 to 500 years - a relatively quick change in the direction of cross current (according to the law of electric machines) will alter the Earth's magnetic field, with the Northern magnetic pole shifting to the eastern part of the Arctic Ocean. 


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Volcanoes in Japan, Colombia and Chile spew ash – Colombian airport closed

The Extinction Protocol

July 2015 – JAPAN – Ōwaku Valley, a part of Mount Hakone with high volcanic activity, has been showing more signs of an impending eruption recently. The smoke which regularly issues from its vents was mingled with ash, turning noticeably gray, for about ten seconds around noon on July 21. On June 30 and July 1, it had also erupted on a very small scale, ejecting material to a distance of over 100 meters (328 feet), which technically meets the qualifications for an “eruption.” (The distance material from the recent eruption was ejected has not yet been measured.) However, tremors associated with volcanic eruptions have not been recorded. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, “it has the characteristics of an eruption, but that would have an effect on disaster prevention by inciting residents’ anxieties, so the term ‘eruption’ is not appropriate.” – Rocket News 24

Colombian Airport closed: Colombia’s Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted in an ash cloud on Sunday, prompting authorities to temporarily close two airports in the area. The civil aeronautics agency said it closed airports at Manizales and Pereira as a precaution after the 8:30 am (1330 GMT) eruption. This resulted in the cancellation of at least 16 flights on Sunday. A major eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz in 1985 melted the volcano’s snowcap, unleashing mudslides that wiped out the town of Armero, killing an estimated 23,000 people. The volcano, which has been active for an estimated 150,000 years, is 220 kilometers (137 miles) west of Bogota. - Yahoo News

Chile: The Cabulco volcano in southern Chile has erupted twice in the last 24 hours after being dormant for decades. And there may be more action on the way. CBSN’s Anne-Marie Green and David Begnaud discuss what geologists are monitoring. –Yahoo News

The Extinction Protocol

 

San Francisco could be hit by massive earthquake 'any day now', says USGS scientist

The Independent

The San Francisco Bay Area could be struck by a major earthquake "any day now", says a scientist with the US Geological Survey.

The Hayward fault historically causes a huge earthquake every 140 years and it has been 147 years since the last major quake on the fault.

Hayward caused a magnitude 4.0 earthquake on Tuesday that caused no major damage, but Tom Brocher of the USGS says it will not be long until the next massive quake, which would cause loss of life and economic damage on a large scale.

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Signs Of Change 2015

HawkkeyDavisChannel

Measuring the sixth mass extinction

Cosmos

The Earth teeters on the edge of a sixth mass extinction – or so a recent study published in Science Advances has claimed.

Gerardo Ceballos from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his colleagues calculated that by land clearing, hunting, introducing pests and burning fossil fuels humans have driven the extinction rate to 100 times the rate they believe it would be otherwise. And that’s a conservative estimate, they add.

But measuring extinction rates is not straightforward. The study only counted vertebrates – ignoring creatures such as the insects, spiders and crustaceans that make up 80% of the world’s animal species, not to mention plants, fungi and microbes.

No rule defines what constitutes a mass extinction. “The Earth’s history is punctuated with these extinction events, and we’ve known about them since the 1800s,” says Jessica Whiteside, a palaeobiologist at the University of Southampton in the UK. “But a ‘mass extinction’ is a loose term.

It’s generally defined as a loss of more than one major group of species, across marine and terrestrial environments, tied to a trigger like climate change.” All scientists do agree, though, that a mass extinction is an event where the extinction rate is much higher than the rate at which species die out naturally. 

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Here's More Proof Earth Is in Its 6th Mass Extinction

Comment: Nothing like being prepared...

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Live Science

Diverse animals across the globe are slipping away and dying as Earth enters its sixth mass extinction, a new study finds.

Over the last century, species of vertebrates are dying out up to 114 times faster than they would have without human activity, said the researchers, who used the most conservative estimates to assess extinction rates. That means the number of species that went extinct in the past 100 years would have taken 11,400 years to go extinct under natural extinction rates, the researchers said.

Much of the extinction is due to human activities that lead to pollution, habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species and increased carbon emissions that drive climate change and ocean acidification, the researchers said. [7 Iconic Animals Humans Are Driving to Extinction] 

"Our activities are causing a massive loss of species that has no precedent in the history of humanity and few precedents in the history of life on Earth," said lead researcher Gerardo Ceballos, a professor of conservation ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting professor at Stanford University.


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See also: Reality Change I: 16 Ignition Points

Why has NASA announced that a meteor is NOT going to hit the Earth in September?

Michael Snyder
End of the American Dream

 Internet buzz about a giant meteor that is going to strike our planet in September has become so intense that NASA has been forced to issue a statement publicly denying that it is going to happen. NASA insists that the agency knows of "no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth", and that "no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years". To be honest, NASA should perhaps hold off on making such bold statements concerning what will happen in the future considering the fact that the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia in 2013 took them totally by surprise. In any event, what we do know is that our region of space is absolutely packed with meteors and asteroids. At this point, approximately 10,000 major near earth objects have been discovered by scientists, and about 10 percent of them are one kilometer or larger in size. If any of those big ones were to hit us, we would be looking at another Tunguska event or worse. Very large meteors have struck our planet before, and they will hit us again. It is only a matter of time.

But of most immediate concern to lots of people out there are the various theories that are floating around about September. The following is an excerpt from an article that appeared in a British news source just this week... 

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Our world is descending into chaos, have you noticed?

Joe Quinn
Sott.net


The Germanwings crash "trial by media" continues unabated. The most recent evidence produced to back up the official story is the alleged discovery of a cell phone video of the last moments of the plane and its passengers. Reporters from both French magazine Paris Match and German daily Bild claim to have viewed the video that portrayed a scene "so chaotic that it was hard to identify people" where "the sounds of the screaming passengers made it perfectly clear that they were aware of what was about to happen to them."


"It is a video that several of us saw together", said Frédéric Helbert of Paris Match, "that we watched dozens of times. You must understand that this video does not allow us to identify any people, it is not a sensationalist video. It is from a passenger who filmed from the back of the plane. The sound is atrocious. It shows the human dimension of panic, distress, screaming people on board. That is what is terrible. It is a very powerful human element, but it doesn't provide any information that might be useful for the investigation."

Indeed, such a video doesn't provide any information useful to the investigation, unless the investigation is being carried on by the mainstream media, with 'evidence', such as this video, being provided by persons unknown.

According to Helbert the video was obtained from "a source close to the investigation" that "required several levels of intermediaries connected to people working on the terrain." Whoever provided the alleged video to Paris Match and Bild did not, however, give them a copy. It seems the reporters were only shown the video, presumably on some media device like a laptop which was then taken away. Helbert said: "I don't have the video. We had the opportunity to see the video."

The immediate response from French 'authorities' came from Lieutenant-Colonel in the French gendarmerie, Jean-Marc Menichini, who said that the report was "completely wrong" and "unwarranted". This was echoed by the French prosecutor Brice Robin who said that no memory cards had been analyzed as part of the probe. Paris Match countered by saying that if police had not yet accessed data from salvaged mobile phone parts "there is a problem in the investigation". That's the understatement of the decade, and the media is a major part of the problem. Yesterday, Robin backtracked and conceded that it was possible that the video was real and demanded that any such videos be handed over to investigators.

Investigators have also said that they found co-pilot Lubitz's ipad and that he had recently searched online for "how to commit suicide and the security measures for cockpit doors". I was expecting they might also have found that he searched for "how to convince someone they need to go to the toilet" but there's no word on that yet. So we're now one step further along, perhaps the final step, in the process of the disingenuous and deliberate character assassination of Andreas Lubitz: his act of mass murder was no spur-of-the-moment thing, it was premeditated.

So a couple of quick rhetorical questions:

• How difficult is it to put together a few-seconds-long video of what appears to be the cabin of an aircraft, where no faces are discernible, and throw in some scream sound effects?
• Are we meant to believe that Lubitz's pilot training did not include an explanation of how to lock the cockpit door, and that he was forced to search online to find out how to do it?
• Are we meant to believe that when Lubitz searched online for how to commit suicide, one of the results was "crash your plane full of passengers into a mountain"? Lubitz was a keen glider pilot. Are we to assume he specifically chose to kill 149 other people along with himself because he couldn't wait a few days until he was alone? The NY Times, the corporation responsible for initiating the highly-suspect and unprofessional trial by media, has helped to bring me back to my senses and focus on the essential:

"The fact that Mr. Lubitz was researching the security measures for the cockpit door seems to indicate that his actions were not only intentional but probably premeditated, as well."

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California Water Wars: Another Form of Asset Stripping?

Ellen Brown
Web of Debt 

In California’s epic drought, wars over water rights continue, while innovative alternatives for increasing the available water supply go untapped.

Wars over California’s limited water supply have been going on for at least a century. Water wars have been the subject of some vintage movies, including the 1958 hit The Big Country starring Gregory Peck, Clint Eastwood’s 1985 Pale Rider, 1995’s Waterworld with Kevin Costner, and the 2005 film Batman Begins. Most acclaimed was the 1975 Academy Award winner Chinatown with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, involving a plot between a corrupt Los Angeles politician and land speculators to fabricate the 1937 drought in order to force farmers to sell their land at low prices. The plot was rooted in historical fact, reflecting battles between Owens Valley farmers and Los Angeles urbanites over water rights.

Today the water wars continue on a larger scale with new players. It’s no longer just the farmers against the ranchers or the urbanites. It’s the people against the new “water barons”  – Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Monsanto, the Bush family, and their ilk – who are buying up water all over the world at an unprecedented pace. 

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Are we ready for the next volcanic catastrophe?

Watts Up With That?

Eric Worrall writes: The Guardian has published an unusually interesting article about the danger to our civilisation, of a new Tambora scale volcanic eruption.

According to Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL;

“In April 1815, the biggest known eruption of the historical period blew apart the Tambora volcano, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, 12,000km from the UK. What happened next testifies to the enormous reach of the biggest volcanic blasts.
The Tambora volcano had shown no signs of life for 1,000 years; a single eruption in the previous five millennia provided the only indication that magma was still churning far beneath. It is very likely that the residents of the island considered the volcano extinct, and possible even that they did not know the impressive 4,300m (14,107ft) mountain – at the time, probably the highest in the East Indies – was a volcano at all. This all changed, however, with the rumblings and earthquakes of 1812, a full three years before the climactic blast. Over time, the seismic shocks were superseded by steam blasts and small ash explosions, engendering increasing trepidation on the island and signalling that something bigger might be imminent. It was. On 5 April 1815, a titanic explosion hurled a cloud of ash to a height of more than 30km.”
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The consequences for the developed societies of the northern hemisphere were dire. A dry, sulphurous, fog draped itself across the landscape of eastern North America, causing temperatures to plunge and bringing unprecedented summer cold. In New York State, snow fell in June, while the bitter cold and killing frosts wiped out crops and halved the length of the growing season across much of the region. On the other side of the Atlantic, Europe saw summer temperatures down by 2C compared to the average for the decade; the unseasonal cold accompanied by incessant rains and – into the following winter – by unusually powerful storms. Analysis of climate records reveals that 1816, the so-called “year without a summer”, was the second coldest in the northern hemisphere of the past six centuries.”
Read more http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/28/are-we-ready-for-the-next-big-volcanic-eruption-tambora-bill-mcguire

McGuire adds a minor obligatory genuflection towards climate change, this is after all The Guardian – but unusually for a Guardian story about the environment, the focus of the article is not on the alleged dangers of our industrial output of CO2. And what McGuire says is entirely pertinent – a Tambora style eruption could kill millions of people from starvation, as massive crop failures caused food prices to skyrocket. And Tambora is not the worst which could happen – The Toba eruption, which occurred 74,000 years ago, blackened the sky, causing massive die backs across the world – and may even have almost ended the human race. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#Genetic_bottleneck_theory

McGuire then goes on to list a few of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes – though interestingly the Indonesian volcano Merapi, an unstable giant slumbering adjacent to a city of 3 million people, doesn’t make his list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Merapi

These colossal global catastrophes of the past, and the certainty that similar catastrophes will occur again in the future, maybe even in our lifetime, really puts the feeble temperature wobbles which are ascribed to humans into perspective.

New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection

Gabriela Segura, M.D.
The Dot Connector Magazine

This article was first published in issue 13, volume 1 / 2011 of The Dot Connector Magazine, official publication of Sott.net.

"Comets are vile stars. Every time they appear in the south, they wipe out the old and establish the new. Fish grow sick, crops fail, Emperors and common people die, and men go to war. The people hate life and don't even want to speak of it." -Li Ch'un Feng, Director, Chinese Imperial Astronomical Bureau, 648, A.D.

In 2007, a meteorite fell in Puno, Southeastern Perú. José Macharé - scientist of the Geologic, Mining and Metallurgic Institute in Perú - said that the space rock fell near a muddy area by Lake Titicaca, making the water boil for around ten minutes, and mixing with the soil and emanating a gray cloud, the components of which remain unknown. Having discarded radioactive poisons, this toxic cloud is said to have caused headaches and respiratory problems in at least 200 persons from a population of 1500 inhabitants. Other than this event, how often do we hear about people getting sick due to a rock coming from space? How about birds, fish or other animals? Ancient astrologers cite comets as ill omens of death and famine, but are there any other causes other than the ones due to physical/mechanical consequences of comet impact devastation in our fragile environment of which we should be aware?

As a physician, I usually concentrate strictly on medical and health-related issues, not history or catastrophism. However, like so many other people, I see signs of atmospheric changes on our planet which, according to many experts, may well be due to increasing comet dust loading. When I read about increasing reports of fireballs all around the world, and I know that these factors must have an effect on the health of individuals and societies, it motivates me to do the research to find the connections so that I am better prepared for what may lie in our future. If our planet is entering a new cometary bombardment cycle, and if these comets harbor new species of microbes unknown to mankind's collective immunological systems (as may well be the case), then being forewarned is being forearmed. 

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Video shows enormous crack in the ground in northern Mexico

The Independent

Incredible footage has emerged showing a 26ft (8m) deep crack in the in the farmland of northwest Mexico, which stretches for over a kilometre. 

The crevice which appeared last week, has disconnected Highway 26 between Hermosillo and the coast, Sky News reported. 

Drivers, including farm workers, have been forced to navigate around the colossal trench.
 
The video showcasing the crack that in some parts is 16ft (5m) wide, was shot using a camera attached to a drone device.

 It shows vehicles stopped beside the crack, while a green tractor drives away from the scene. People below the drone appear to be discussing the situation.

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Earth May Be in Early Days of 6th Mass Extinction

Live Science

Earth may be in the early stages of a sixth mass extinction, an international team of scientists says.

Animals and plants are threatened. More than 320 land vertebrates have gone extinct since 1500, the researchers said. The world's remaining animals with backbones are 25 percent less abundant than in 1500— a trend also seen in invertebrate animals, such as crustaceans, worms and butterflies, the scientists reported.

The previous mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs, happened about 65 million years ago, likely from a catastrophic asteroid that collided with Earth. In contrast, the looming sixth mass extinction is linked to human activity, Rodolfo Dirzo, a professor of biology at Stanford University in California, said in a statement. Dirzo is the lead author of the new review of past research on the topic, which suggests Earth is in the early days of this sixth mass extinction. 

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