We are fast approaching December 21, 2012 when, according to the Maya long-count 26,000 year calendar cycle, the end of the world as we know it ends.

The Maya was a Mesoamerican civilization noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems.(1)

2012 Milky Way

The ancient Maya recognized that the sun, observed at each winter solstice, was slowly moving towards the center of the Milky Way.  At the time of the winter solstice in 2012, the sun will be in conjunction with the equator of the Milky Way.

It appeared to them to be of such deep meaningful significance that they selected it as the end of their calendar.  At this time an extremely rare astronomical constellation will occur. (2)

Many ancient peoples have also spoke of these last days of the Great Cycle, including the Maya, Hopi, Egyptians, Kabbalists, Essenes, Qero elders of Peru, Navajo, Cherokee, Apache, Iroquois confederacy, Dogon Tribe, and Aborigines.(3)

In recent years there has been an upsurge of movies, books, articles, and websites created about the prophecy date December 21, 2012 and what it all depicts, with many advocating an “apocalypse” or an “end of the world prophecy”.

However, according to the Mayan, this end also signifies a new beginning.  They believed this transition as the emergence of a new era:  ‘At the end of each age there is a rebirth’.

This is substantiated by the writings of Mayan prophet, Pacal Votan who, in the 7th century left a universal message for future generations of an evolving Earth and considerations that must be heeded in this rebirth.

It proclaimed; “If humanity wishes to save itself from biospheric destruction, it must return to living in natural time.”

He considered it the ending of time as we currently know it and the beginning of a new cycle of time within nature that will allow for the expansion of human awareness and consciousness. (4)

According to eminent American scholar José Argüelles, “The global mobilization of social forces to achieve demilitarization and deindustrialization will finally, despite delays due to the resistance of reactionary elements, achieve its goal towards the end of the cycle in 2012.

The end of the cycle is marked by a festive atmosphere, a synchronization of mythical proportions and a tenor of spiritual renewal, previously unknown in the historical phase. Our planet thus enters into its next evolutionary phase.”

Are Votan and Argüelles correct in their presumptions?

Are we about to witness human transformation as we enter a new evolutionary phase?

Is it going to be a painless transition or are we about to be part of a catastrophe of global proportions?

Is the world going to lose another civilization as in the case of Atlantis, as written about by Plato?

No one knows for sure what happened to that civilization (Atlantis) or if indeed it ever existed.

One theory is that it sank into the Atlantic Ocean or it may have been off the coast of England, or near Hawaii.  Recently it has been suggested, by authors Rand and Flem-Ath, that the island continent of Atlantis still exists today and is under the ice of Antarctica.(5) (NASA Ice Campaign Takes Flight in Antarctica)

So could, like Atlantis, a continent vanish today?

One possible scenario is an asteroid collision.

Are there any asteroids about to hit earth in the near future?

According to NASA’s Near Earth Object Program, the nearest impact date could be on Friday, April 13th, 2029 when they have calculated asteroid 2004 MN4  has a 1-in-60 chance of colliding with Earth. (6)( ..see footnote)

The asteroid is about 320 meters wide. “That’s big enough to punch through Earth’s atmosphere devastating a region the size of, say, Texas, if it hit land, or causing widespread tsunamis if it hit ocean,” says Paul Chodas of NASA.(7)

asteroid hitting earth

Another asteroid, named Apophis, has an arrival date of April 13, 2036. However, making contact with the Earth is very slim.  The chances are 1 in 45,000.

They have concluded there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of meteors and rocks that pose a thread to Earth, including a thousand yard-wide asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth in 2880.

They suggest these ‘numbers are too close for comfort’ and a group of engineers and scientists are urging the United Nations to step in and develop the blue print for a global response to deal with such an issue.(8)

Are there any other concerns that need a global response?

To address these issues, an insight into the Earth’s crust is helpful.

The science of the shaping of the Earth’s crust goes by the name “tectonics,” and the process described here is the essence of “plate tectonics” by which the Earth’s crust consists of distinct plates which are continually rearranged, sometimes carrying along continents or parts of continents. The entire motion is driven by the Earth’s internal heat.(9)

The Pacific plate bordering California, for instance, is slowly rotating, moving northwards.  The edge of California is attached to that plate and also moves northwards, but the bulk of the continent does not.  The juncture between the two, where one slips by the other, follows in part the famous San Andreas fault. (10)

However, different plates do not move in the same way.  India has moved from south of the equator to where it is now.  This is known as continental drift, a theory first proposed by Alfred Wegener, which states that parts of the Earth’s crust slowly drift atop a liquid core.(11)

Earths crust

Therefore land masses may shift. One half of San Francisco is sliding past the other half, for instance, with the San Andreas fault in between but the rate is only about one inch per year.

Is this rate likely to speed up?

Due to events that are occurring mainly through man-made activities such as global warming, climate change and ice melt, this is a possibiity.

How do these events affect proceedings?

“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,” states Professor Bill McGuire of University College, London.

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

Tony Song of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California warned of the vast power of recently discovered “glacial earthquakes” — in which glacial ice mass crashes downwards like an enormous landslide.

In the West Antarctic, ice piled more than one mile (1.5 km) above sea level is being undermined in places by water seeping in underneath.

“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.”

He said ice sheets appeared to be disintegrating much more rapidly than thought and said glacial earthquake tsunamis were “low-probability but high-risk”.

McGuire said the possible geological hazards were alarming enough, but just one small part of a scary picture if man-made CO2 emissions were not stabilized within around the next five years.(12)

What about non-glacial earthquakes?

Most earthquakes are caused by the sudden slip along geologic faults.  The faults slip because of movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates.  The rocky tectonic plates move very slowly, floating on top of a weaker rocky layer.  As the plates collide with each other or slide past each other, pressure builds up within the rocky crust.

Earthquakes occur when pressure within the crust increases slowly over hundreds of years and finally exceeds the strength of the rocks. Earthquakes also occur when human activities, such as the filling of reservoirs, increase stress in the Earth’s crust.(13)

Beginning in 1935, the first detailed evidence of reservoir-induced earthquakes came from the filling of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona state border.  Earthquakes were rare in the area prior to construction of the dam, but seismographs registered at least 600 shallow-focus earthquakes between 1936 and 1946.

It follows that the same activity could occur in ocean beds. There is a probability that if land ice melts increased water levels will apply extra pressure on the ocean seabeds.  Also if north and south ice caps melt this will release vertical pressures the volume of the ice applies to the earth allowing centrifugal forces to gather momentum.

Hampel and co at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, provide evidence to support this probability.  They found that the vertical stress placed on the Earth’s crust by a heavy ice sheet can suppress many types of fault from slipping and causing a quake.

Though the faults are pinned down for a time, stresses in the crust continue to build, so when the ice melts, earthquakes occur more strongly and more frequently.(14)

They wondered why Scandinavia experienced a surge in tectonic activity around 9,000 years ago, whereas few earthquakes occur there today.

They found that the earthquake activity coincided with the melting of the Fennoscandian ice sheet, which blanketed the area in the last ice age.

Is there evidence of melting ice today?

According to a report in  Nature, glaciers are getting thinner all around the perimeter of Greenland, and in western Antarctica as well.  Lead author Hamish Pritchard, of a British Antarctic Survey says;  “It’s not so much that they’re melting, it’s that their seaward motion is accelerating.  And, says Pritchard, “that’s a much more rapid way of losing ice than through melting alone.” (15)

He and his colleagues believe that it has to do with changes at the very mouth of the glaciers.  When they reach the sea, many glaciers just keep going, reaching out beyond the shoreline to sit on the seafloor.

But if warming temperatures or changes in ocean currents make these so-called ‘ice tongues’ melt, they eventually float off the bottom — and the friction between ice and seafloor disappears.  “It takes the brakes off,” says Pritchard, “and the glacier accelerates.”  In Antarctica, where many glaciers flow not directly into the sea but into giant, floating ice shelves, it’s the thinning or total collapse of the shelves, that takes the brakes off.  This is happening with increasing frequency, he states.(16)

Is there evidence of increased earthquake frequency to coincide with glacier dispersal?

Earthquakes vary in strength.   An earthquake registering between 6.0 and 6.9 could be considered fairly major.  Above 7.0, the earthquake is considered more serious, with a larger area of damage anticipated.(17)

The largest earthquake in recent history measured about 9.5 (Chile, 1960). This is closely followed by the recent Chilean earthquake when on 27 February, 2010, a powerful 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit central Chile. According to the National Emergency Office (ONEMI), the current number of confirmed fatalities is 799. More than 350 people died in the coastal town of Constitución (Maule region) due to waves from a tsunami. An estimated 500,000 houses were seriously damaged and some 1,5 million houses affected. A national state of emergency was declared for Maule and Bio-Bio regions. President Bachelet has affirmed that 80% of the Chilean population were affected in some way.(17/1)

In the future it is not beyond possibility that a massive earthquake of magnitude 10.0 or 10.1 on the Richter scale could occur on the earth in extreme circumstances. This level of quake would cause damage to the earth’s crust on a truly global scale, with the fault line likely to circle the entire planet, causing massive destruction on many continents and probably unbelievably high death tolls. (18)

The table below shows major earthquakes frequency across the planet from 1863 .

DATES FROM & TO PERIOD NO. EARTHQUAKES (Mag. > 6.99)
————————— ———– ——————————
1863 to 1900 -  incl 38 yrs – 12
1901 to 1938 -  incl 38 yrs – 53
1939 to 1976 – incl 38 yrs – 71
1977 to 2014 – incl * 38 yrs  – 144 (to Sept. 2009) predict >180 in total.

Although periods are shown up to 2014,  a predicted total is shown.
The earthquake (SW off coast of American Samoa) on 29th September 2009 is the last included in these numbers.

It shows there are more major earthquakes occurring now, and on an ever more frequent basis.(19)

What about earthquakes in the United States?

In the winter of 1811-12, the central Mississippi Valley was struck by three of the most powerful earthquakes in U.S. history. (20)

Four hundred terrified residents in the town of New Madrid (Missouri) were abruptly awakened by violent shaking.  It was December 16 and a powerful earthquake had just struck.  This was the first of three magnitude-8 earthquakes and thousands of aftershocks to shake the region that winter.

Earthquakes of moderate magnitude occur much more frequently than powerful earthquakes of magnitude 8 to 9; the probability of a moderate earthquake occurring in the New Madrid seismic zone in the near future is high.  Scientists estimate that the probability of a magnitude 6 to 7 earthquake occurring in this seismic zone within the next 50 years is higher than 90%.  Such an earthquake could hit the Mississippi Valley any day.(21)

St Louis

In 1811, the central Mississippi Valley was sparsely populated. Today, the region is home to millions of people, including those in the cities of St. Louis, Missouri, and Memphis, Tennessee.

Adding to the danger, most structures in the region were not built to withstand earthquake shaking as they have been in California and Japan.  Moreover, earthquake preparations also have lagged far behind.

What other reactions can earthquakes produce?

New evidence showing that very large earthquakes can trigger an increase in activity at nearby volcanoes has been uncovered by Oxford University scientists.

Sebastian Watt, a Dphil student in Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences,  conducted the analysis that suggests seismic waves, radiating from the earthquake rupture, may trigger an eruption by stirring or shaking the molten rock beneath volcanoes.  The disturbances that result from this lead to eruption but, because of the time it takes for pressure to build up inside a volcano and for magma to move towards the surface, an eruption may not occur until some months after the earthquake.(22)

An analysis of records in southern Chile has shown that up to four times as many volcanic eruptions occur during the year following very large earthquakes than in other years.  This ‘volcanic surge’ can affect volcanoes up to at least 500 km away from an earthquake’s epicenter.

How would this effect the United States?

The United States is home to 50 active volcanoes (defined as having erupted sometime in the last 200 years). (23)

In the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest, the home of Mount St. Helens, geophysicists are continuously monitoring a number of other volcanoes that have erupted within the past two centuries, including Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, Lassen Peak, and Mount Rainier. “There is a lot of concern about Mount Rainier because it is so close to Seattle ” says geologist Mary Reid of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Reid and others have focused their scientific vision on the Long Valley Caldera in northeastern California.  The giant depression was formed 760,000 years ago in a massive volcanic explosion that covered the entire western United States in ash and volcanic rock.  The volcano has been relatively inactive ever since, except for eruptions from some smaller volcanoes inside the caldera (crater).

Back in 1980, a string of three large quakes, around magnitude 6,  rocked the caldera.  Since then, swarms of small, imperceptible quakes have regularly lit up seismographs.  Those quakes, some researchers suspect, mark the reemergence of volcanic activity in the caldera.

There have been other indications too. “The center part of the volcano has been coming up, doming, at rates that vary from less than an inch to six inches a year,” says Reid. “Different people have different interpretations, but I think that most people would agree that means there is magma moving beneath the surface.”

Back in 1990, another dramatic sign of resurgent volcanic activity — vast tree kills from huge amounts of carbon dioxide gas seeping out of the soil — was first noted at Mammoth Mountain, near the ski resort town of Mammoth Lakes, on the southwestern edge of the caldera.(24)

If there was a volcanic eruption, would this affect the climate?

In the last century, two significant climate modifying eruptions have occurred.  El Chichon in Mexico erupted in April of 1982, and Mount Pinatubo went off in the Philippines during June, 1991.  Of these two volcanic events, Mount Pinatubo had a greater effect on the Earth’s climate and ejected about 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.

Researchers believe that the Pinatubo eruption was primarily responsible for the 0.8 degree Celsius drop in global average air temperature in 1992.  The global climatic affects of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo are believed to have peaked in late 1993.

Satellite data confirmed the connection between the Mount Pinatubo eruption and the global temperature decrease in 1992 and 1993.  The satellite data indicated that the sulfur dioxide plume from the eruption caused a several percent increase in the amount of sunlight reflected by the Earth’s atmosphere back to space causing the surface of the planet to cool.(25)

What about climate change?

Does this have an affect on volcanic activity?

With increased ocean weight at continental margins as sea levels rise, the crust could bend, reducing compressional conditions, says Professor McGuire.  Magma may then find it easier to reach the surface at adjacent volcanoes.(26)

The crucial point is that any change in sea level may alter regional stresses at continental margins enough to trigger eruptions in a volcano already primed to erupt, he says.

Small changes in rainfall can also trigger volcanic eruptions.  In 2001, a major eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat was set in motion by particularly heavy rainfall.  This destabilized the volcano’s dome enough for it to collapse and unleash magma within.  Now it seems even typical tropical rain showers could trigger an eruption and climate models suggest that many regions, including parts of the tropics, are likely to get wetter with climate change.(27)

With evidence increasing of the dangers to the planet, are there concerns at Governmental level?

Professor Bill McGuire states:

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

Is there evidence to give credence to his words?

Recently, The White House has said for the first time that it does not expect to see a climate change bill this year, removing one of the key elements for reaching an international agreement to avoid catastrophic global warming.

Carol Browner

In a seminar in Washington on Friday, Barack Obama’s main energy adviser, Carol Browner, gave the clearest indication to date that the administration did not expect the Senate to vote on a climate change bill before an international meeting in Copenhagen in December.(28)

“Obviously, we’d like to be through the process, but that’s not going to happen,” Browner told a conference hosted by the Atlantic magazine on Friday. “I think we would all agree the likelihood that you’d have a bill signed by the president on comprehensive energy by the time we go in December is not likely.”

The aim of the meeting in the Danish capital is to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emission levels, which expires in 2012.

At the moment, the United States, although a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, has neither ratified nor withdrawn from the Protocol.  The signature alone is merely symbolic, as the Kyoto Protocol is non-binding on the United States unless ratified.  The United States was, as of at least 2005, the largest per capita emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.(29)

As of August 27, 2008, China surpassed the United States as the biggest emitter in the world of CO2 from power generation, according to the Center for Global Development.  On a per capita basis, however, the emission by the power sector in the U.S. is still nearly four times that of China.  The top ten power sector emitters in the world in absolute terms are China, the United States, India, Russia, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, and South Korea.(30)

The UN has cast the Copenhagen meeting in December as a last chance for countries to reach an agreement to avoid the most disastrous effects of global warming.  Negotiators, including the state department’s climate change envoy, admit it will be far harder to reach such a deal unless America, historically the world’s biggest polluter, shows it is willing to cut its own greenhouse gas emissions.

There you have it.

Is the industrialized United States cutting its own throat?

Is it coincidence that the end of the Kyoto Protocol is 2012 – the same year as the Mayan end of cycle?

Is the refusal to limit greenhouse emissions likely to trigger a chain reaction of global devastation caused by volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis?

If present scientific evidence is to be believed, then this scenario is not beyond the realms of the imagination.

With accelerating ice melt and glacier dispersal on the continent of Antartica, are we about to rediscover Atlantis?

Is the continent of Antarctica about to drift towards the equator?

Is North America in danger of splitting apart, drifting Northwards?

Are volcanic eruptions triggered by a chain reaction?

Maybe.

This is a big gamble they (U.S.) are taking because if catastrophe occurs, there is no turning time back.

On the other hand, this may be the catalyst needed for evolutionary change spoken of by Pacal Votan and José Argüelles.

If the industrialized world continues to pollute and destroy the planet, we will be looking at the disappearance of another civilization.  This time the United States.

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Ann Margrain

Founder, ‘Heroin and Cornflakes’ blog.

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More info on Continental drift.. ..www.enchantedlearning.com

Latest asteroid update

US space agency Nasa has sharply downgraded the threat that a massive asteroid could slam into Earth in 2036.

Apophis was discovered in 2004 and is two-and-a-half times the size of an American football field.

It captured widespread attention after calculations suggested it might pose a threat to the planet.

There is now a one-in-250,000 chance of a collision with Earth in 2036, according to new calculations by Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

more info

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Latest news story….

Study finds quake risk at Los Alamos

Seismic activity at the nuclear lab could result in deadly amounts of airborne plutonium, federal experts say.

A big earthquake and resultant fire could trigger potentially deadly releases of radioactive materials from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico due to “major deficiencies” in the nuclear weapons lab’s safety planning, federal safety experts warned Tuesday.

The warning from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was sent to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, urging him to “execute both immediate and long-term actions.”

A spokeswoman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department, said, “We are currently evaluating the board’s recommendation and preparing a formal response.”

The statement also said a number of new safety measures have been added in recent years.

The lab, atop a mesa west of Santa Fe, is the nation’s primary plutonium fabrication facility for nuclear weapons and is believed to house thousands of pounds of plutonium at a complex known as TA-55.

In the course of designing a new building near the plutonium facility, engineers discovered that a previously known fault has the potential for causing far greater ground movement than they had calculated.

The board, an independent federal agency that oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons plants, described the lab’s “safety strategy” as “flawed.”

The issue has bounced around for at least one year and possibly two years, a period when federal safety regulators grew increasingly impatient with the Energy Department’s slow response, according to Peter Stockton, an investigator for the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

Energy officials were pressuring the safety board as recently as this week to delay their recommendation, arguing that the situation was not dire enough to issue a public warning, so that they could prepare a news release, Stockton said.

But within the laboratory, it appears that senior nuclear weapons managers are weighing the potential to move some plutonium out of TA-55 — a costly and technically difficult remedy, he added.

The safety board’s analysis found that in the worst-case scenario, a fire could release so much airborne plutonium that a person on the boundary of the lab would get a dose of radiation — potentially many thousands of times greater than a chest X-ray — that could be fatal in weeks, according to individuals knowledgeable about the study.

The danger involves the lab’s hundreds of glove boxes, which are enclosed structures used to safely work on radioactive materials. The projected ground movement in a quake could be enough to topple the boxes.

Some of the glove boxes are quite large, containing furnaces to cast plutonium and machining equipment to form it.

If a glove box were to topple over while a furnace inside was melting plutonium, it could create an uncontrollable fire, according to the safety analysis.

Exactly how much plutonium is stored in the vaults at Los Alamos is classified, but the analysis assumes all of it would be vaporized in a massive fire and then drift off site.

Some of the lab’s closest neighbors are a trailer park and an Indian reservation.

In its statement, the National Nuclear Security Administration said it had approved a new safety analysis that identified the need for additional upgrades.

Though that analysis concluded that the lab is currently safe, it also found that a more sophisticated examination was required of “all the relevant hazards in a seismic event.”

Meanwhile, the lab, which is operated by a consortium that includes the University of California, said it has completed a number of actions this year to improve fire safety at the facility, including installing higher-temperature ventilation filters, adding manual fire extinguishers in many areas and putting plutonium into containers that can survive an accident.

“Protecting the health and safety of our employees, the public and the environment while conducting operations all across the laboratory, particularly at the plutonium facility, TA-55, is our primary concern,” the lab said.

ralph.vartabedian @latimes.com

Big Quake in Central US Would Displace Millions

1/19/2010 4:55 PM EST

Theresa Jefferson and John Harrald, research faculty members at the Virginia Tech Center for Technology, Security, and Policy in the National Capital Region recently completed a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funded research project to model the social impacts and disaster response requirements of a 7.7 magnitude catastrophic earthquake on the three segments of the New Madrid Seismic Zone.

The researchers, whose focus is response requirements and social impacts, found that such a disaster would result in 80,000 injuries and 3,500 fatalities. Their analysis also concluded that, due to the extensive damage to critical infrastructure and buildings, two million people would seek shelter.

Using damage and loss estimates produced by Amr S. Elnashai, director of the Mid America Earthquake Center, University of Illinois, the study principal investigator, and Lisa J. Cleveland, technical project manager with the earthquake center, the study focused on the impacts to vulnerable populations and the requirements necessary to support the 7.2 million people who would be directly impacted by such an event. Jefferson and Harrald have both academic and practical experience in crisis, disaster, and emergency management. They traveled extensively through the New Madrid Seismic Zone in connection with their research.

The New Madrid Seismic Zone is a 150-mile-long fault system spanning four states in the Central United States. Historic earthquakes in the region, such as the 1811–1812 earthquakes, are believed to have had magnitudes of approximately 8.0 if measured on the Richter scale. The geology in the Central United States based on soil liquefaction makes earthquake damage in that area much more widespread. There are approximately 12 million people in the high risk area; there are 44 million people in the entire New Madrid Seismic Zone region.

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