Moderate earthquake near the Chilean capital Santiago de Chile
Last update: March 24, 2012 at 2:39 pm by By Ashish Khanal
USGS I Have Felt It values – Moderate to light shaking in average (MMI IV-V)
M 5.2 2012/03/24 07:28 Depth 68.8 km REGION METROPOLITANA, CHILE We have an unusual number Chile visitors in the site at this moment.
This means an earthquake has struck Chile
Universidad de Chile is not reachable
Other agencies have no values yet
The first “experience reports” we are receiving are mentioning a strong shaking in Santiago de Chile
USGS is mentioning a preliminary Magnitude of 5.1 @ a depth of 66.7 km
If these data are confirmed, the earthquake would not be damaging The epicenter has been (preliminary) located at 50 km from Santiago de Chile (capital)
The fact that the epicenter is located so close to the Chilean capital is the reason why millions of people have felt this earthquake as very dangerous. The depth of 60 km gives almost the same shaking values in Santiago than in the epicentral area. Update 08:00 UTC : Universidad de Santiago de Chile is reporting a M 5.3 at a depth of 68.9 km. These data are confirming our earlier stated expectations that this earthquake would not lead to serious damage or injuries Update 08:51 UTC : This earthquake is a typical “subduction earthquake“. The Oceanic Nazca plate is subducting (gliding below) the continental South American plate. This gliding effect is not always smooth, and the Nazca plate sometimes hangs (stops moving). The continuous moving of the Nazca plate increases the pressure and the resistance point breaks off : earthquake. The depth of 69 km gives an approx. impression of the thickness of the South American plate at the epicenter (of course theoretically, as the breaking point maybe also deeper or shallower) Update 09:07 UTC : Onemi Chile has had (as expected) NO reports of damages or injuries MMI values as recorded by ONEMI Chile Región: Coquimbo
MMI V : Canela, Los Vilos, Salamanca Región: Valparaíso
MMI V : Casablanca, Concón, El Quisco, La Ligua, Los Andes, Quillota, San Antonio, San Felipe, Valparaíso, Villa Alemana, Viña del Mar, Zapallar
MMI IV : Quintero Región: Metropolitana de Santiago
Puente Alto, San Bernardo, Santiago, Talagante, Tiltil Región: Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins
Rancagua: IV
by Roxane BUrnett
I recently spent some time with a woman I grew up around. I was in her town and offered to treat her to lunch. I told her to choose a restaurant that she hasn’t been to before and that feels ‘abundant’ and extravagant to her. She chose an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. She had a coupon.
As I was on my second salad, she began commenting on the physicality of our fellow eaters. ‘Why doesn’t she DO something about THAT.’ ‘I’m surprised these chairs can hold him.’ ‘How sad, even their kids are huge.’ ‘How could she let her self GO like that?’
Her words were hurtful and made my stomach turn. As we finished our meals, my friend stood up and as she did, she gripped her back and moaned. She has had back pain for years and every move she makes is painful. She has been sleeping on the same mattress for 30 years.
As I drove back to her home my friend chatted continuously about other drivers and how one ‘should’ always play by the rules so everyone on the road feels safe. When I dropped her off at home and began to say goodbye, her partner of many years greeted me with kindness. My friend’s partner has been depressed for a long time and doesn’t leave the house. Her pain shows as a permanent, downturned mouth and swollen eyes. Perhaps she cries often, I don’t know. We hugged and chatted a bit as I found a place to sit in their living room. It was packed with stuff.
Stuff. You know, important things we collect. On the top of one of the piles on the coffee table was a magazine. Reminace. My friend is 80+ and likes to focus upon her ‘good’ life in the 40s and 50s.
After chatting about the weather, the government, illegal aliens, and how immigrants ‘should’ learn English in order to stay here in the US, I graciously left and drove back to my hotel room. My 5D sanctuary.
Pain
We all hold pain. Every body holds pain in it’s own unique way. It can show up as complaining about others, as extra weight (I’ve been there), depression (that too) or physical aches (sometimes). Our individual art or mastery is how we deal with it. How do YOU deal with your pain? Do you even recognize it?
How to cope with pain
One way we cope with our pain is to deny it. ‘If I just ignore it, it will go away.’ But does it truly go away? Or does it simply demonstrate itself in quiet, passive/aggressive ways? As with my friend’s partner-sadness and depression.
Another way is to be macho (got testosterone?) ‘I’m as strong as a bull. I can bulldoze my way through anything.’ Yes you can’ until that body or mind gets exhausted and quits in some way-an injury or breakdown.
Another way we respond to pain is to project our inner pain onto those around us. ‘Why doesn’t she DO something about that fat/back pain/cough/acne/depression?’ This is a common solution most engage in. If I find others who I can pick on or criticize, I don’t have look at my own pain or where I am off-balance. They are much worse off than I am. I have mine under control.
Moan. You can moan and grunt and make big sighs, and perhaps others around you will become sympathetic and pity you. Or perhaps they will ask you what your problem is. This will open the door for you to talk about all your doctors and surgeries and medications. Better yet, find someone you can commiserate with and compare pains. You can make it a game and compete to see who has the sorest back.
Self-medicate. Lots of options here.
No matter what, it begins in your head.
The more masterful (and perhaps more difficult) way to cope with pain is to focus on releasing or lessening it. Use the tools you’ve learned to de-charge and release that pain, whether it manifests as physical, emotional or mental off-balance. Of course, before we do that we must decide that we are really finished with it. Many are not finished carrying that pain around. It has become so familiar they can’t imagine life without it. ‘Who will I be if I am not depressed and overwhelmed?’
Start with imagining what is possible. Pretend. What would today be if I were not eating a bag of cookies right now? If I were happy? If imagining is too difficult find a living example of the ideal you. What words is that person demonstrating? Certain, Successful, Active, Vibrant? Simply watch how s/he demonstrates that energy.
First, decide that the pain and the pickle you are in is no longer fun, nor does it give you the attention/sympathy/comfort it did originally. Then you must decide it is too expensive to carry that rock around in your backpack any longer; it’s too expensive physically, emotionally, and mentally. Then step up to your tool bench and use the tools you have to de-charge that old habit. The Rose, the Grounding Cord, the Living Words and others. (There are many others.) Take baby steps to avoid discouragement or self-pressure. This isn’t a race to wellness.
Buying a new mattress and seeing a chiropractor could also be a great first step to relieving that painful back. But if you did that, you might not have much to talk about anymore. You might lose all your complaining friends. You might get happy!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An author and teacher, Roxane has been offering tools for developing intuition and Personal Power to individuals, businesses and women’s groups since 1994. Following a successful career as an art director for two large corporations and as manager of her own design firm, she trained as a Life Coach and Mastering Alchemy teacher.
Roxane’s seminars include: Spiritual Abilities and Tools for Intuition, Personal Energy Management and Female Alchemy. She also has been featured on television, radio and in national publications both in the US and Australia. She is the co-founder of Mastering Alchemy and presents this work with Jim.
Vikings who conquered new lands unwittingly brought with them another sort of invader, a new DNA study says—mice.
Scientists studying the evolution of house mice already knew about a DNA pattern found only in mice in what’s now Norway, a Viking homeland, and northern Britain, which Vikings colonized, said study leader Eleanor Jones, a population biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
The finding suggested to Jones and her team that the two populations, despite being separated by the sea, were related and that Vikings had possibly brought the mice to northern Britain.
The new study tested modern and ancient mouse remains from the sites of known Viking colonies and found the same telltale pattern, adding weight to the idea that the mice were brought by Viking colonizers.
Intimately Connected
Between the eighth and the mid-tenth centuries A.D., Vikings settled new colonies in several regions, including Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Newfoundland, and Greenland.
House mice likely stowed away in grain and hay stores on the big, deep-bellied boats that Vikings used to conquer these new areas, Jones said.
In general, as their name implies, house mice tend to prefer human company and may have even co-evolved to live among people. The first records of house mice living with people come from the Mideast’s so-called Fertile Crescent and date to around 8,000 to 6,000 B.C.
With the new research, we can “we can follow [their] genetic story, which is tied very intimately to our own genetic history,” she said.
For the study, Jones and colleagues first took DNA samples from wild house mice in nine sites in Iceland, one in Greenland, and four near the Viking archaeological site of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. The team compared this DNA with ancient samples from mouse bones found at four archaeological sites in Iceland and a few in Greenland.
Researchers then zeroed in on a small fragment of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed down by mothers to their offspring. By comparing this fragment to mouse mtDNA from all those different sites, the scientists figured out which mice were related and which weren’t. (Get a genetics overview.)
From this data, the team pieced together a family tree, which showed how house mice spread across Europe over the past few thousand years. That lineage matched with the path of the Vikings’ expansion, she said.
House mice, Jones said, “carry the genetic signature of human history.”
It’s unknown whether the Vikings were aware of their hitchhikers, although there are records that the settlers brought cats on the ship, noted Jones, whose study was published March 19 in the journalBMC Evolutionary Biology.
“Once you get to Iceland and Greenland, there are no other small animal pests—they must be taking cats with them to deal with this mouse pest,” she said.
Once on land, the hardy species would’ve had no problem establishing themselves in the new Viking communities, Jones added.
Viking-Mouse Study “Convincing”
The new study offers a “very convincing application of ancient DNA analysis” of mice to trace how people settle new territories, Fabienne Pigière, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, said by email.
The research also “opens new perspectives of research for the study of human-settlement history,” said Pigière, who was not involved in the research.
For instance, the team found no evidence of house mice in Newfoundland during the Viking period, which suggests Vikings may have lived in the area for only a short time, she said.
Elizabeth Reitz, an zooarchaeologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, noted that smaller animals such as house mice are often found in archaelogical collections, but “many people ignore them in favor of emphasizing larger, domestic, animals—those used for food, traction, and raw materials.”
“Yet small, incidental animals, such as house mice, can tell us a great deal about the human-built environment,” Reitz said via email. “As this article shows, they can also provide us additional insights into the process of human colonization and trade.”
The study is also a reminder of how people can alter new environments, study leader Jones added.
“As we move around, we unintentionally move animals with us. Once we get to a place, we’re creating a new type of habitat—we’re creating new environments for them to live in.”
Posted by: JeffMasters, 4:54 PM GMT on March 23, 2012
+21
The most incredible spring heat wave in U.S. and Canadian recorded history is finally drawing to a close today, after a ten-day stretch of unprecedented record-smashing intensity. Since record keeping began in the late 1800s, there have never been so many spring temperature records broken, and by such a large margin. Airports in fifteen different states have set all-time records for March warmth, which is truly extraordinary considering that the records were set in the middle of the month, instead of the end of the month. The 29.2°C (85°F) measured at Western Head, Nova Scotia yesterday was the third warmest temperature ever recorded in Canada in March, according to Environement Canada and weather records researcher Maximiliano Herrera (top two records: 31.1°C at Alberini Beaver Creek BC on March 29th 1926, and 29.4°C in 1921 at Wallaceburg.) Michigan’s all-time record for March warmth was toppled on Wednesday, when the mercury hit 90°F at Lapeer. The previous record, 89° at Lapeer in 1910, was matched at three stations yesterday–Ypsilanti, Dearborn, and Lapeer. The duration, areal size, and intensity of the Summer in March, 2012 heat wave are simply off-scale, and the event ranks as one of North America’s most extraordinary weather events in recorded history. Such a historic event is difficult to summarize, and in today’s post I will offer just a few of the most notable highlights.
Figure 1. Clear skies over the Eastern U.S. caused by a blocking ridge of high pressure on March 21, 2012, are apparent in this visible satellite image. The comma-shaped cloud pattern over the Central U.S. is associated with a “cut-off” low pressure system. This low is moving over the Eastern U.S. today through Saturday, and will bring an end to “Summer in March” over the U.S. and Canada. Image credit: NOAA’s Environmental Visualization Lab, and modified by Andrew Freedman of Climate Central.
Low temperatures beating previous high temperature records for the date
I’ve never seen a case where the low temperature for the date beat the previous record high. This happened on at least four occasions during “Summer in March, 2012”:
The low temperature at Marquette, Michigan hit 52° on March 21, which was 3° warmer than the previous record high for the date.
The low temperature for International Falls, Minnesota on March 20 bottomed out at 60°F, tying the previous record high for the date.
The low temperature in Rochester, Minnesota on March 18 was 62°F, which beat the previous record high for the date of 60°.
Breaking all-time April records for warmth in March
Not only did many locations in Canada set records for their all-time warmest March day during “Summer in March, 2012”, a number also broke their record for warmest April day:
St. John, New Brunswick hit 27.2°C (81°F) on March 21. Previous March record: 17.5°C on March 21, 1994. April record: 22.8°C.
Halifax, Nova Scotia hit 27.2°C (81°F) yesterday. Previous March record: 25.8° set the previous day. April record: 26.3°C, set on April 30, 2004.
Kejimkujik Park, Nova Scotia hit 27.9°C on March 21. Previous March record: 22.5°C on March 30, 1986. April record: 25°C on April 27, 1990.
Breaking daily temperature records by more than 30°F
It is exceptionally rare for a weather station with a 50+ year period of record to break a daily temperature record by more than 10°F. During “Summer in March, 2012”, beating daily records by 10° – 20°F was commonplace, and many records were smashed by over 20°. Two stations broke records by more than 30°F, which is truly surreal. Western Head, Nova Scotia hit 29.2°C (85°F), yesterday, breaking their previous record for the date (10.6°C in 1969) by 18.6°C (33°F.) Yesterday’s high temperature was 24°C (44°F) above average. Pellston, Michigan in the Northern Lower Peninsula–dubbed “Michigan’s Icebox”, since it frequently records the coldest temperatures in the state–hit 85° on March 21. This broke the previous record for the date (53° in 2007) by 32°, and was an absurd 48°F above average.
Breaking daily temperature records nine consecutive days or more
It is extremely rare for stations with a 50+ year period of record to break a daily high temperature record for seven or more days in a row. The longest such streak of consecutive high temperature records at International Falls, Minnesota, was a 5-day period March 3 – 7, 2000. The city has tied or broken their high temperature for the date ten consecutive days, as of yesterday. This streak will likely end today, as the high is predicted to be 60 – 65, and the record high for the date is 66. Chicago, Illinois has tied or broken their daily high temperature record the past nine days in a row. This ties the nine-day streak of record highs set on August 26 – September 3, 1953. Other cites that have set daily high temperature records the past nine days in a row include Fort Wayne and South Bend, Indiana. Numerous cities have broken high temperature records on seven consecutive days during “Summer in March, 2012”, including Gaylord, Pellston, and Traverse City in Michigan.
Figure 2. All-time high temperature records set in March 2012 for the U.S. The grey icons show locations where the March record was broken on multiple days. Image taken from wunderground’s new record extremes page, using data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.
The big picture: the impacts of “Summer in March, 2012”
I’ve always said living in Michigan would be much more bearable if we could just get rid of March. March weather here is always horrible, with brutal cold, high winds, damaging ice storms, heavy snow, interminable cloudy stretches with no sun, all interspersed with a few teasing warm spells. Well, this year, I got my wish. This March, we started with twelve days of April weather, followed by ten days of June and July weather, with nine days of May weather predicted to round out the month. This has been a huge benefit to the economy–vastly reduced heating costs, no snow removal bills, and far fewer traffic accidents due to icy roads. However, there is major downside to the “Summer in March, 2012” heat wave. The growing season is now in full swing, five weeks early. A damaging freeze that will severely impact the fruit industry and other sensitive plants is very likely. Indeed, the forecast calls for lows in the upper 20s in the cherry-growing region of Michigan near Traverse City on Monday night. The exceptional March warmth has also melted all the snow in the northern U.S. and southern Canada, drying out the soils and setting the stage for a much warmer than average summer, and an increased chance of damaging drought conditions. The early loss of snowpack will also likely cause very low flow rates in the major rivers in late summer and early fall, reducing the amount of water needed for irrigation of crops. Low flows may also cause problems for navigation, limiting commercial barge traffic on Midwest rivers.
Wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt will be posting a more comprehensive summary of the “Summer in March, 2012” heat wave this weekend.
Have a great weekend, everyone, and I’ll be back Monday with a new post. I expect I’ll be hard at work this weekend, mowing my lawn for the first time ever in March!
March 22, 2012: A recent flurry of eruptions on the sun did more than spark pretty auroras around the poles. NASA-funded researchers say the solar storms of March 8th through 10th dumped enough energy in Earth’s upper atmosphere to power every residence in New York City for two years.
“This was the biggest dose of heat we’ve received from a solar storm since 2005,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA Langley Research Center. “It was a big event, and shows how solar activity can directly affect our planet.”
Earth’s atmosphere lights up at infrared wavelengths during the solar storms of March 8-10, 2010. A ScienceCast video explains the physics of this phenomenon. Play it!
Mlynczak is the associate principal investigator for the SABER instrument onboard NASA’s TIMED satellite. SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earth’s upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a key role in the energy balance of air hundreds of km above our planet’s surface.
“Carbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats,” explains James Russell of Hampton University, SABER’s principal investigator. “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.”
That’s what happened on March 8th when a coronal mass ejection (CME) propelled in our direction by an X5-class solar flare hit Earth’s magnetic field. (On the “Richter Scale of Solar Flares,” X-class flares are the most powerful kind.) Energetic particles rained down on the upper atmosphere, depositing their energy where they hit. The action produced spectacular auroras around the poles and significant1 upper atmospheric heating all around the globe.
“The thermosphere lit up like a Christmas tree,” says Russell. “It began to glow intensely at infrared wavelengths as the thermostat effect kicked in.”
For the three day period, March 8th through 10th, the thermosphere absorbed 26 billion kWh of energy. Infrared radiation from CO2 and NO, the two most efficient coolants in the thermosphere, re-radiated 95% of that total back into space.
A surge of infrared radiation from nitric oxide molecules on March 8-10, 2012, signals the biggest upper-atmospheric heating event in seven years. Credit: SABER/TIMED. See also the CO2 data.
In human terms, this is a lot of energy. According to the New York City mayor’s office, an average NY household consumes just under 4700 kWh annually. This means the geomagnetic storm dumped enough energy into the atmosphere to power every home in the Big Apple for two years.
“Unfortunately, there’s no practical way to harness this kind of energy,” says Mlynczak. “It’s so diffuse and out of reach high above Earth’s surface. Plus, the majority of it has been sent back into space by the action of CO2 and NO.”
During the heating impulse, the thermosphere puffed up like a marshmallow held over a campfire, temporarily increasing the drag on low-orbiting satellites. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, extra drag helps clear space junk out of Earth orbit. On the other hand, it decreases the lifetime of useful satellites by bringing them closer to the day of re-entry.
The storm is over now, but Russell and Mlynczak expect more to come.
“We’re just emerging from a deep solar minimum,” says Russell. “The solar cycle is gaining strength with a maximum expected in 2013.”
More sunspots flinging more CMEs toward Earth adds up to more opportunities for SABER to study the heating effect of solar storms.
“This is a new frontier in the sun-Earth connection,” says Mlynczak, and the data we’re collecting are unprecedented.”
Most important Earthquake Data:
Magnitude : 5.6 (USGS) – Ml 6.1 (Geoscience Australia)
UTC Time : Friday, March 23, 2012 at 09:25:16 UTC
Local time at epicenter : Friday, March 23, 2012 at 07:55:16 PM at epicenter
Depth (Hypocenter) : 10.7 km (6.6 miles)
Geo-location(s) :
Very close to Ngarutjara (risk area)
317 km (197 miles) SSW (213°) from Alice Springs, Australia
available
Red circle area can be damaging – image courtesy Geoscience Australia
– The earthquake’s epicentre was recorded at a shallow depth near Ernabella, 415km north west of Coober Pedy and about 320km south west of Alice Springs, just before 8pm. It is about 130km SE of Uluru.
– A magnitude of Ml6.12 has been given by Geoscience Australia. Given the remoteness it is difficult to constrain the magnitude.
-It has been given a M5.6 by other agencies.
Ernabella has an airstrip, and 2 houses.
Geoscience Australia reported the quake could have been felt by people up to 500km away and damage experienced within a 40km radius of the epicentre.
“There are a number of Aboriginal communities near the epicentre and they would have felt the earthquake strongly,” he said.
“It is possible there could be some minor damage up there.”
An SA Police spokesman said there had been no reports of damage or
injuries as yet, but being nightfall probably more information will be
found tomorrow.
Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz
The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.
Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.
But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.
Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.
The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
UTAH DATA CENTER
When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility in Bluffdale will encompass 1 million square feet.
1 Visitor control center
A $9.7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access.
2 Administration
Designated space for technical support and administrative personnel.
3 Data halls
Four 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers.
4 Backup generators and fuel tanks
Can power the center for at least three days.
5 Water storage and pumping
Able to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day.
6 Chiller plant
About 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep servers from overheating.
7 Power substation
An electrical substation to meet the center’s estimated 65-megawatt demand.
8 Security
Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.
Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Conceptual Site plan
A swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of January 6, 2011, mixing with a weeklong coating of heavy gray smog. Red air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the bone-chilling twenties. “What I smell and taste is like coal smoke,” complained one local blogger that day. At the city’s international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency’s highest-ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.
A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed “the spy center.” Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? “Absolutely not,” he said with a self-conscious half laugh. “Nor do I want them spying on me.”
For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly classified.”
And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country’s human and electronic spies.
Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. “We’ve been asked not to talk about the project,” Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.
Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)
It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”
The NSA’S SPY NETWORK
Once it’s operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA’s cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA’s code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world. Here’s how the data center appears to fit into the NSA’s global puzzle.—J.B.
1 Geostationary satellites
Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. Onboard software acts as the first filter in the collection process, targeting only key regions, countries, cities, and phone numbers or email.
2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado
Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.
3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia
Focuses on intercepts from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Codenamed Sweet Tea, the facility has been massively expanded and now consists of a 604,000-square-foot operations building for up to 4,000 intercept operators, analysts, and other specialists.
4 NSA Texas, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio
Focuses on intercepts from Latin America and, since 9/11, the Middle East and Europe. Some 2,000 workers staff the operation. The NSA recently completed a $100 million renovation on a mega-data center here—a backup storage facility for the Utah Data Center.
5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu
Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700 employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.
6 Domestic listening posts
The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom “switches,” gaining access to domestic traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20 such installations.
7 Overseas listening posts
According to a knowledgeable intelligence source, the NSA has installed taps on at least a dozen of the major overseas communications links, each capable of eavesdropping on information passing by at a high data rate.
8 Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, Utah
At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA’s cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents.
9 Multiprogram Research Facility, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects.
10 NSA headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
Analysts here will access material stored at Bluffdale to prepare reports and recommendations that are sent to policymakers. To handle the increased data load, the NSA is also building an $896 million supercomputer center here.
Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.
For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.
The Navy is pulling an M. Night Shyamalan. In a tough fight, rely on a “sixth sense,” say its mad scientists, not just your reasoning skills. That’s the way to win wars.
Promising “new insights into intuitive decisionmaking,” the futuristic Office of Naval Research is putting together a new program to turn what it actually calls a “sixth sense” into a military advantage. “Evidence is accumulating that this capability, known as intuition or intuitive decision making,” the scientists say in a new proposal, “enables the rapid detection of patterns in ambiguous, uncertain and time restricted information contexts.” Mastering with intuition, the Navy says, should help troops with “Cyberwarfare, Unmanned System Operators, Information Analysts, Small Unit Leaders and other domains.”
Recent neurological research, the Navy says, undermines two key assumptions about intuition. You don’t need to be be an expert at something for your intuition about it to pay off. And as far as your brainwaves are concerned, your intuition isn’t so structurally different than your considered, logical reasoning.”
“Intuitive decision making processes share some of the same underlying neural structures and cognitive processes as a type of learning known as implicit learning,” the Office of Naval Research states. “Consequently, by acquiring domain knowledge through implicit learning, one may be able to automatically strengthen, at the neural, cognitive and behavioral levels, the same capabilities that are needed for effective intuitive decision making.”
“We still don’t know very much about how intuition works,” Ivy Estabrook, an official with the Office of Naval Research at work on the intuition project, explains to Danger Room. “If research scientists could characterize and distinguish intuitive decisions from the better understood analytic decision making processes, methods might be developed to improve this aspect of human performance.”
The Navy doesn’t want to reserve the power of intuition for seasoned sailors. By commissioning greater study into how it works, the Office of Naval Research wants to “train non-experts to be more effective decision makers.” First, it has to create a “computational model” of how intuition works, followed by “training techniques & technologies that enhance intuitive decision making performance.”
The Navy isn’t the only one intrigued by neurology’s prospects for warfare. Years ago, Darpa sponsored a program called Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts, which sought to break down the cognitive silos between textual data, imagery, audio and other sensory information. And last year, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency sought to get the entire body involved in analyzing satellite data.
How does this benefit the military? Ever since Air Force Col. John Boyd introduced the concept decades ago, there’s a school of thought in military circles contending that tactical advantage in warfare depends on making decisions faster than an adversary. “Analytical decisions are sequential, methodical, and time consuming,” says Cmdr. Joseph Cohn, another Office of Naval Research official. “Intuitive decisions rely on a more holistic approach and take place very quickly — on the order of 100s milliseconds.” In other words, if you master intuition, it’ll be hard for an enemy to act faster than you.
Or you might make boneheaded, self-destructive errors.
For instance: the solicitation cites examples of soldiers “detecting IED emplacements while in a moving vehicle or detecting anomalous civilian behaviors indicative of impending danger.” Their spidey sense just seemed to tingle with an alert. That no doubt happens. But sometimes, intuition fails, especially when mixed with adrenaline, and civilians end up getting shot for driving too close to military or contractor vehicles.
For now, the Office of Naval Research is seeking solicitations about how to structure its Sixth Sense work. Maybe Shyamalan will contribute a pitch.
The plume from a lateral blast at Pinatubo in the Philippines seen on June 15, 1991. The eruption may have helped stifle hurricane activity in the Atlantic for three years afterwards.
We have had many discussions over the years here on Eruptions about the relationship betweenvolcanic eruptions and weather/climate (remember, they are different things). Most of the time, the concern is how weather will become worse (i.e., much colder or much hotter) due to volcanic aerosols or ash that are kicked high into the atmosphere during large eruptions. Remember, ash plumes from manyplinian eruptions can tower over 35-50 km up, so material can be injected into the upper atmosphere and spread around the world in a matter of weeks. It would be very surprising if these sorts of eruptions – which are relatively rare, only occurring maybe once or twice a decade – didn’t effect weather and climate for years until the aerosols can all settle out.
So, I was quite interested when I saw a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research titled “Atlantic hurricane activity following two major volcanic eruptions” by Amato Evan. My instant thought was I actually wasn’t sure what to expect – I mean, how would a large eruption effect the activity of such major, hemisphere-spanning events like hurricanes? Would it make hurricanes worse? As it turns out, this study suggests that major eruptions in the tropics (or close) might actually subdue Atlantic hurricane activity for years after the eruption.
Figure 2B from Evan (2012) showing the drops in sea surface temperature (SST) in the Atlantic after the eruptions of El Chichón (1982) and Pinatubo (1991)
Evan (2012) looks at two eruptions in particular – the1982 eruption of El Chichónin Mexico and the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo* in the Philippines. Both were large eruptions, ranking as VEI 5-6. Both eruptions injected large volumes of aerosols and ash into the upper atmosphere in the tropics, reducing theoptical depth of the atmosphere to 0.1-0.2 (normally it should be closer to 0.01). To give you an idea, that is almost as bad as other large eruptions such as Krakatau in 1883, famous for the vibrant skies it produced worldwide. All these aerosols in the atmosphere increase the albedo of the planet – that is, the planet will reflect more sunlight back into space. This means less sunlight hitting the surface of the Earth, and in particular, less on the oceans in the tropics. This produces colder surface and near-surface waters in what is called the Atlantic Main Development Region (MDR) for hurricanes – between 8-20°N/20-65°W (see right). This decrease in sea surface temperature, in turn, lead to an increase in vertical wind shear in the MDR.
What Evan (2012) found was that the total number of hurricanes in the three years before each eruption and three years after the eruption were markedly different – ~12 per season prior to the eruption and 6-8 per season after the eruption. Not only that, but the storms in the three years after the eruption were weaker and didn’t last as long as prior to the eruption. Even beyond this, the location that hurricanes formed changed as well, where before the eruptions most hurricanes were found in the MDR, after the eruptions there were dominantly found along the eastern United States. So, the long and short becomes large volcanic eruption leads to lower sea surface temperatures and higher vertical wind shear in the locations where hurricanes form, thus fewer hurricanes occur and those that do are weaker.
Now, bear in mind, this study only looked at two major eruptions in the last 35 years – and unfortunately both coincided with an El Niño, so one can’t conclusively link the eruptions and the change in hurricane activity. Evan (2012) mentions that there are at least three other major eruptions that could effect hurricane activity – Agung in 1963**, Santa Maria in 1902 and Krakatau in 1883. However, no pattern emerges from these eruptions as hurricane activity did decrease after Krakatau, it wasn’t effected by Santa Maria and appeared to increase after Agung. Evan (2012) suggests that the Agung eruption might have cooled the South Atlantic preferentially, causing the increase in North Atlantic hurricane activity.
Hurricane Irene off of Cuba and Florida, seen on August 24, 2011. Can volcanic eruptions help or hinder hurricane activity? It is still unclear.
Clearly, there is still a lot of noise in these correlations of hurricane activity and volcanic eruptions. The eruptions that Evan (2012) examined are the big ones – so, what if any effect would smaller eruptions in the tropics have (such as Merapi in 2010 or Nabro in 2011). Taking a look at the hurricane counts for the past century, you can see a number of periods of lower hurricane activity – can these all be correlated with eruptions like Katmai in 1912 (well out of the tropics) and what is causing the low hurricane counts in 2005-08? There are many unanswered questions here – but clearly, a closer examination looks to be in order – or, as the author of the paper suggests, maybe we need a large eruption in the tropics to test this theory out.
* Lockwood and Hazlett (2010) note that a typhoon/hurricane might have helped cause the cataclysmic eruption of Pinatubo in 1991. The lowest atmosphere pressure from the Typhoon Yunya passed over Pinatubo just 3 hours before the largest eruption. It likely didn’t cause the eruption (that was an injection of magma into the system over the prior few weeks), but it could have played a role in pushing the volcano pass the “tipping point” for an eruption.
** This eruption is listed in the paper as 1964, but the activity lasted from February 1963 to January 1964.
{Hat tip to Alex Witze for pointing out this article to me.}
Image 1: Pinatubo erupting in 1991. Image by Richard Hoblitt/USGS
Image 2: Figure 2B from Evan (2012), Journal of Geophysical Research
Image 3: Hurricane Irene in 2011. Image from the NASA Earth Observatory.
This executive order states that the President alone has the authority to take over all resources in the nation (labor, food, industry, etc.) as long as it is done “to promote the national defense” — a phrase so vague that it could mean practically anything.
The power to seize control and take over these resources is delegated to the following government authorities:
(1) the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to food resources, food resource facilities, livestock resources, veterinary resources, plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment and commercial fertilizer;
(2) the Secretary of Energy with respect to all forms of energy;
(3) the Secretary of Health and Human Services with respect to health resources;
(4) the Secretary of Transportation with respect to all forms of civil transportation;
(5) the Secretary of Defense with respect to water resources; and
(6) the Secretary of Commerce with respect to all other materials, services, and facilities, including construction materials.
This takeover is designed, in part, to “stockpile supplies” for the U.S. military. Authority for this total takeover of all national resources is granted with nothing more than the writing of a single statement that claims these actions are necessary to “promote the national defense.” As stated in the order:
the authority delegated by section 201 of this order may be used only to support programs that have been determined in writing as necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense:
(a) by the Secretary of Defense with respect to military production and construction, military assistance to foreign nations, military use of civil transportation, stockpiles managed by the Department of Defense, space, and directly related activities;
What all this means is that the U.S. government now claims the power to simplymarch onto your farm with guns drawn and demand all your crops, seeds, livestock and farm equipment.
Think I’m exaggerating? Read it yourself!
And for those living in denial who refuse to accept the reality of what’s happening in America, remember the following:
• When NaturalNews reported on the existence of the NDAA, we were told our reporting was misleading because Obama opposed it and wouldn’t sign it.
• When Obama betrayed America and signed the bill, we were told our reporting was misleading because “it didn’t apply to Americans.”
• When Obama admitted it did apply to Americans, he announced that he would choose “not to use it on Americans” but only by the grace of his restraint. Nobody who previously accused us of misleading the public had the integrity to offer us an apology and say, “Gee, you were right, it DOES apply to Americans!”
• Now Obama has seized control overall food, farms, livestock, water and transportationacross America. How many brain-dead Americans will continue to live in denial and try to convince themselves this is not happening? Sticking your head in the sand does not make this go away…
What California did to Rawesome Foods, the Obama administration can do to everyone
Remember the armed raids on Rawesome Foods? With guns drawn, California authorities assaulted the food distribution center, arrested the farmers, then proceeded todestroy $50,000 worth of foodincluding milk, eggs, cheese and watermelons. (http://www.naturalnews.com/033220_Rawesome_Foods_armed_raids.html)
As outrageous as that raid was, it’s only the beginning. Now, thanks to Obama’s executive order, the federal government can conduct Rawesome-style raids onall farms, all grocery stores, all food co-ops and even individual home gardens.
It’s written in plain English. This is no longer debatable and it’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s Obama administration policy. For what other purpose would this be issued in an executive order if it was not seen asactionableby the government? This piece of paper, you see, gives them the (false) authority to do whatever they want and then have the front-line soldiers who carry it out claim “we’re only following orders.”
Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz
Tuesday, March 20, 2012