Mount Tongariro Erupts

Disaster Calendar – 7 August 2012

SYMBOLIC COUNTDOWN: 1,317 Days Left

[August 7, 2012] Mass die-offs resulting from human impact and the planetary response to the anthropogenic assault could occur by early 2016.  SYMBOLIC COUNTDOWN: 1,317 Days Left to the ‘Worst Day’ in Human History…

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Selected Global Disasters/ Significant Events

New Zealand

Mega eruptions could follow in and around New Zealand Islands, as forecast

Mount Tongariro, located in the center of NZ’s North Island, spewed ash and debris more than 6,000 meters into the air at 23:50 on Monday local time.

The force of eruption sent a cloud of ash about 110 km southeast of the volcano, and catapulted volcanic rocks at least a kilometer away, reports said.

• NZ’s Civil Defense said the volcanic activity could pose a threat to  Waikato, Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne, Manawatu, Wanganui, Bay of Plenty and Taranaki.
• Mount Tongariro last erupted in 1897.

see also:

• Worst Case Condition for New Zealand Islands

Large boulders landed on the Tongariro Alpine Crossing track. Photo: NZ Police.

Volcanic rocks ejected from Mount Tongariro damage Ketetahi Hut in Tongariro National Park. Photo: NZ police

USA

• Montana. Gov Schweitzer declared a state of emergency across half the state as strong winds fanned wildfires that have already scorched about 300,000 acres since last week.
  • “The spate of new fires in recent days has pushed Montana above 900 square miles burned so far in 2012. That’s well over the state’s 10-year average and more than three times the amount of land that burned last year,” said a report.

• Florida.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has designated 23 counties in Florida as agricultural disaster areas due to the combined effects of Tropical Storm Debby, excessive rain and flooding that occurred June 1-29, 2012.
  • Georgia. Five counties in Georgia were also declared as disaster areas because they’re contiguous.

• California.  USDA has designated 13 counties in California as agricultural disaster areas due to damages and losses caused by losses caused by hail, rain and cold temperatures that occurred April 11-13, 2012.
  • Primary disaster areas: Kings and Merced counties.
  • Contiguous disaster areas: Fresno, Kern, Madera, Mariposa, Monterey, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Santa Clara, Stanislaus, Tulare and Tuolumne counties.

• South Carolina.  USDA has designated six counties in South Carolina as agricultural disaster areas due to damages and losses caused by frost, freezes, and a hailstorm that occurred April 5-13, 2012.
  • North Carolina.  Three counties in NC were also declared as disaster areas because they’re contiguous.

Philippines

• Manila.  Extreme rain events have submerged more than half of the Philippine capital, triggering a deadly landslide that killed at least a dozen people.
  • Most parts of the country were already saturated following Typhoon Saola, which left up to 60 people dead and forced more than quarter of a million people to flee their homes last week.
  • The authorities have reportedly evacuated hundreds of thousands of residents along the Marikina River banks, after excess water La Mesa dam spilled into the rivers flowing into Manila’s suburban Quezon City and several other areas.
  • Many others have climbed to rooftops waiting to be rescued.
  • “It’s like a water world,” the chief of  disaster response agency was reported as saying.
  • At least ten provincial areas and cities around Manila have declared states of calamity.
  • Price of basic commodities in areas under states of calamity have skyrocketed by up to 300 percent since last week, reports said.

Flooding in Marikina City, Metro Manila (Photo: Dave Llavanes)

Related Links

• Survivors of the NEXT NZ DISASTER won’t have a chance!
• Powerful Quake Strikes Christchurch, NZ

• New Round of Geo-Assualt at Kermadec Trench
• Strong Quake Strikes Off Coast of NI, NZ
• Mt Ruapehu Eruption Alert
• Mag 5.3 Earthquake Rattles North Island, NZ
• Magnitude 7 Earthquake Hits Kermadec Islands

• Magnitude 6.8 Quake strikes Kermadec Isls Region
• Powerful 7.8 M Quake Strikes New Zealand Region
• http://newzeelend.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/a-warning-to-new-zealand-visitors/

• FEWW Earthquake Links

Climate Change: For what you’re about to receive…

It’s what you wished for!

Scientists Echo More Hazards of Global Warming You Probably Didn’t Know Existed, or Cared Much

More of the human enhanced geological hazard are being spelled out as scientists scratch hard, going beyond textbooks.

Global Climate Change will trigger violent geological activity, but little is known about the effects. Larger, deadlier quakes? “Orchestral” volcanic eruptions? Giant glacial slides/ landslides? More frequent Jumbo tsunamis? Methane Burps?

Those are just a few of the items on the menu, which you have already ordered, and will have to pay for.

Sit tight and see how you fare on the deadly white-knuckle ride as global warming changes the earth’s crust. No need to fasten your seat belt because it won’t help.

“WHOI glaciologist Sarah Das stands in front of a block of ice that was raised up 6 meters by the sudden drainage of a meltwater lake in Greenland. (Photo by Ian Joughin, UW Polar Science Center)” Image may be subject to copyright.

Global warming may cause more deadly quakes and tsunamis

“Climate change doesn’t just affect the atmosphere and the oceans but the earth’s crust as well. The whole earth is an interactive system,” Professor Bill McGuire of University College London was reported as saying, at the first major conference on the changing climate’s effects on geological hazards.

“In the political community people are almost completely unaware of any geological aspects to climate change.”

“When the ice is lost, the earth’s crust bounces back up again and that triggers earthquakes, which trigger submarine landslides, which cause tsunamis,” said McGuire.

According to the Toba catastrophe theory a supervolcanic event at Lake Toba ( Sumatra, Indonesia) plunged the Earth into a mini-ice-age lasting several thousand years (70,000 to 75,000 years ago). The explosion, classified as “mega-colossal,” ejected about 2,800 km³ of volcanic matter into the atmosphere, the impact of which reduced the world’s human population to about 10,000, possibly a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution. [The theory was proposed in 1998 by Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.]

In more recent times, about 3,600 years ago, the Minoan eruption of Thera (Santorini), a major catastrophic volcanic eruption (VEI = 7, DRE = 60 km3), which was the second largest volcanic events on Earth in recorded history, destroyed most of the island of Thera, and contributed to the collapse of the Minoan culture. It also caused significant climatic changes in much of the Northern Hemisphere, for example, failure of crops in China.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher Tony Song has warned about the enormous power of  “glacial earthquakes.” Millions of tons of  glacial ice, cracked by hydrofractures caused by the lubricating effect of the meltwater from supraglacial lakes, slide downward from great heights (in West Antarctic the ice sheet is about a mile high) like  massive landslides.

“Our experiments show that glacial earthquakes can generate far more powerful tsunamis than undersea earthquakes with similar magnitude,” said Song.

“Several high-latitude regions, such as Chile, New Zealand and Canadian Newfoundland are particularly at risk.” [Having discovered an additional dozen or so nasty surprises, FEWW issued a travel warning to would be visitors to New Zealand months ago!]

Although ice sheets are disintegrating much more rapidly than previously thought, he noted, glacial earthquake tsunamis were “low-probability but high-risk.” [For now, anyway, but the odds are rapidly changing for the worst.]

Volcanoes can spew vast amounts of ash, sulphur, carbon dioxide and water into the upper atmosphere, reflecting sunlight and sometimes cooling the earth for a couple of years. But too many eruptions, too close together, may have the opposite effect and quicken global warming, said U.S. vulcanologist Peter Ward.

“Prior to man, the most abrupt climate change was initiated by volcanoes, but now man has taken over. Understanding why and how volcanoes did it will help man figure out what to do,” said Ward.

Speakers were careful to point out that many findings still amounted only to hypotheses, but said evidence appeared to be mounting that the world could be in for shocks on a vast scale.

McGuire says man-made CO2 emissions must be stabilized within about the next five years, to avoid a nightmare of which geological hazards are only a small part. What he didn’t say is where he got his 5-year “grace period” from because the tipping point was reached about 3 years ago, according to FEWW “EarthModel.”

“Added to all the rest of the mayhem and chaos, these things would just be the icing on the cake,” he said. “Things would be so bad that the odd tsunami or eruption won’t make much difference.”

Related Links:

• Vanishing Lakes
• Climate Change, Earthquakes, Volcanic Eruptions
• Doctors Talk Climate, Finally

• Volcanoes Killed Off Dinosaurs
• Volcanoes, Santorini Eruption and Crops Failure in China
• Toba the Sleeping Colossus
• Supervolcanoes may awaken
• The Largest Earthquake in the World
• Tambora Volcano produced the largest eruption in recorded history