Tag Archives: anomalies

This Weird Winter Weather

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Why Much of North America Skipped Winter

Wynne Parry, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 06 March 2012 Time: 05:14 PM ET
Cherry blossoms on March 4, a sign of early spring in Brooklyn.
Cherry blossoms on March 4, a sign of early spring in Brooklyn.
CREDIT: Wynne Parry

For parts of North America, this winter was the winter that nearly wasn’t.

January ranked as the fourth-warmest for the 48 U.S. states on record since 1895. December, too, was above average, although not as significantly. The final analysis for February is not yet in, but weather watchers expect last month to rank above average temperature-wise as well.

Of course, this year hasn’t brought early beach weather for everyone; just ask residents of Alaska and Europe, where a frigid cold snap is blamed for hundreds of deaths. And the warmth has been blamed for contributing to the slew of devastating tornadoes that hit the Midwest and southern U.S. on Friday (March 2).

While scientists have said that global warming willcause an uptick in extreme weather, they are hesitant to link any one event or even an unusual season to climate change. Even so, they say, global warming may play a role in the weird winter weather.

The jet stream

The key to understanding the unusually warm winter lies in the jet stream. It is made up of high-altitude, westerly winds. Its polar branch, the one important for determining winter weather, travels over the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in winter, according to Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the weather service and news site Weather Underground.

The polar jet stream divides cold Arctic air to the north from warmer air to the south. This year, meteorologists say, the jet stream has kept the cold air bottled up farther north than usual.

As a result, warmer-than-usual temperatures this year have graced much of the United States, particularly in New England, the Great Lakes and the Upper Plains, according to Mark Paquette, a meteorologist with AccuWeather.com. Southern Canada, too, has gotten its share of mild winter weather

The polar jet stream is influenced by natural patterns, the most prominent being fluctuations in the Northern Annular Mode, also called the Arctic Oscillation. When the mode is in its so-called positive phase, air pressure over the far north remains low, leading to a stronger jet stream. This keeps the cold Arctic air bottled up to the north. The negative phase, meanwhile, is associated with a weaker, meandering jet that allows cold air to spill south.

Reversals

Until late January, the mode was in its positive phase, resulting in warmer temperatures farther north.

But a reversal of phase allowed the jet stream to meander some, and let Arctic cold air move down into Eastern Europe. The result was a cold snap that is blamed for killing hundreds.

The mode has shifted again since then. In fact, a strong jet stream contributed to the tornados that hit the south and the Midwest last week, as did the arrival of warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, according to Masters, who discusses the tornados on his blog.

La Niña and the future

Another large-scale atmospheric pattern, one related to temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, is also at play. This winter La Niña, associated with cooler water temperatures in the Pacific, has been in effect. La Niña is typically associated with drier-than-normal conditions for the southern and eastern U.S. — largely consistent with precipitation this winter, according to Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Boulder, Colo.

“The dryness looks like what we would expect with La Niña, the warmth we saw is consistent with the positive Arctic Oscillation,” Arndt said. “The two of them tougher, all else being equal, would tend to produce a warmer and drier winter, especially east of the Rockies.”

Paquette predicts an end to this trend. “Mother Nature or weather patterns have a way of evening themselves out. I think it only matter of time before this mild dry pattern flips and we get into a much different weather pattern.”

from:    http://www.livescience.com/18877-mild-winter-weather.html

Phoenix Rising Star on Moving Beyond the Old Ways

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MESSAGE FROM THE MEDICINE WHEEL

By Phoenix Rising Star

Oh my. What a year 2012 is turning out to be! A lot of predictions are coming true.

Solar flares. More intense ones than before.

Interruption and breakage in computers, digitized formats and microchip devices.

Emotional turmoil.

Death.

But also, there seems to be an increased awareness and desire for truth.

Giving us greater opportunities to go into our hearts.

So far, and I know I’m not alone in this; I’ve had a wide variety of symptoms that have led me to believe I have the ‘Ascension Flu’.

These symptoms include:

* unexplained nausea

* weight loss

* weight increase

* sometimes both weight loss and increase in the same day!

* nervousness

* super-sensitivity, physically and emotionally and every other way

* mood swings

* body temperature changes

* pain, sometimes phantom, never lasting long

* and a feeling of having one foot in quicksand and one in the elevator.

Oh, did I forget to mention short term memory loss????????

We’ve known that 2012, Ascension, or whatever you want to call this time period, was coming. We’ve known this for quite awhile. There’s no excuse not to recognize it, or the fact that like it or not, we’re in it. And that we chose to be here at this time. Right now.

Somehow I guess I figured that because I chose to be here now, I wouldn’t have to experience the symptoms, the challenging changes, or feel like I had to cope.

Wrong!

I’m here now, thick in the middle of Ascension Flu and feeling like I’m going crazy.

I realize this is the chance for going into my heart, but some days I can’t seem to let go of my haunting fear long enough to do that.

One day, when I was feeling really badly,I went to Mother Earth – to connect deeply, send my love, receive hers and to connect with all the directions through the teachings of the wheel – the Medicine Wheel. Named because traditionally it is a place of healing, of knowledge and awareness, and a place where we can more easily open ourselves to the messages from spirit.

I was feeling fear, negativity, self-judgment, pain, sorrow, you name it; all nameless and formless, but insistently there regardless. Welling up and overwhelming me.

I felt so desperate by the time I got to my place in nature that I forgot how to make a wheel.

Confused I looked around a flat area and wondered where to start.

All of a sudden one rock selected itself to be the center, all that is.

From here I could figure out the cardinal directions of east, west, south and north.

I found a stone for the west, the place of transition, and began to open the wheel.

I stopped aghast at what I was doing.

In the tradition I was taught, the medicine wheel should be opened from the east.

What was I doing?????

I recalled one of my teachers talking about her teacher. He told her, ‘Always open the wheel from the east, the place of new beginnings.” One day to her surprise, he opened the wheel from the west, the place of transition. And a week later, he passed away.

Oh my God!

Did this mean I was dying? Maybe that would explain so much pain and fear! Old cellular memory needing to be cleared before I crossed over!

I hurriedly corrected my opening to the wheel and opened from the east.

I moved immediately to the west.

What?????

What was I doing???????

I’d gone to the south, and in my mind called it the west.

Oh my God!!!! Is this more confirmation I’m dying?

Well, if so, I’m in it now.

No stopping here.

I corrected my direction of the south and managed to chuckle that this direction opens our intuition and feminine receptivity.

Ha!

I went again to the west, in a clock-wise fashion. And then to the north. Where I froze.

I couldn’t remember what the north represented. I knew the animals were white: white buffalo and polar bear. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember anything else.

I stood there and stood there.

Nothing came. No idea whatsoever.

Eventually I had to move on.

In the tradition in which I was taught, one walks counter clock-wise around the circle to release energy and clockwise to energize the new energy.

“Thinking” I was releasing, I found myself walking clockwise. It was only when I turned to go in the opposite direction that I realized what I was doing.

What was I doing?????

I couldn’t believe this! I’ve never felt so messed up before. Not just short term memory loss, but loss of conscious awareness.

This was positively weird.

I went to the center andasked for a message from spirit.

I received my message:

“You are not wrong, misguided, incorrect, or at fault here. You are truly acting on a deeper level of inner guidance. This guidance is what is essential to master the old lessons of the third dimension, such as fear, judgment, negativity, etc. In order to master these lessons, the old ways of learning from and releasing them must be changed. The old ways are not working anyway, so why keep trying them?

“Listen to your guidance and do things differently.

“Go into your heart. Feel love. Express love. Send love. Anytime you feel the old feelings of fear, judgment and negativity, keep sending love until that’s all you feel is love.

“Energize with love. This is the new way. This is the only way that will work to help you on your path to ascension, to the next dimension. If you choose to stay in the fear, or not to energize with love, you are choosing to stay in this dimension. And will have to come back to re-learn this another time. By choosing love, you are choosing to move beyond this dimension into the next. Which do you choose?”

Hearing this internal message actually melted my anxiety, self-recriminations, judgment, fear and everything else.

I was able to send love to myself, finally.

I sent love to all beings feeling fear, judgment, and everything not love.

I sent it without expectation of what would happen. I sent it because I could.

And I felt peace for the first time since December. Or maybe even before that.

Peace and harmony.

Now I know what to do to alleviate the Ascension Flu.

Go into my heart, into the center of all that is, and feel love.

Send love.

Be love.

Energize with love.

That’s all.

In Peace,
Phoenix Rising Star

 

PS—What is the teaching of the north?

Purification.

 

About Phoenix Rising Star

Phoenix Rising Star

 

Phoenix’s Credentials:

Flower of Life Facilitator

M.S. Counseling

Clinical Hypnotherapist

Integrated Energy Therapist, Top Master Instructor since 2006

Reiki/Seichem Master

Medicine for the Earth Facilitator

Angel Therapist

S.H.E.S. Minister (Spirit Helpers and Earth Stewards)

 

For more information on Your HeartWalk Center in Sedona, AZ, see their website:www.sedonaheartwalk.com

For more information on Integrated Energy Therapy, see their website: www.learniet.com

from:   http://www.spiritofmaat.com/mar12/message_from_the_medicine_wheel.html

 

Mayan Pyramid’s Light Beam

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Mayan Light Beam Photo: Message from Gods, or iPhone Glitch?

Natalie Wolchover, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 27 February 2012 Time: 05:31 PM ET

 

"El Castillo," a Mayan temple on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, with a mysterious "light beam" emerging from the top. Credit: Hector Siliezar
“El Castillo,” a Mayan temple on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, with a mysterious “light beam” emerging from the top.
CREDIT: Hector Siliezar

When Hector Siliezar visited the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza with his wife and kids in 2009, he snapped three iPhone photos of El Castillo, a pyramid that once served as a sacred temple to the Mayan god Kukulkan. A thunderstorm was brewing near the temple, and Siliezar was trying to capture lightning crackling dramatically over the ruins.

In the first two images, dark clouds loom above the pyramid, but nothing is amiss. However, in the third photo, a powerful beam of light appears to shoot up from the pyramid toward the heavens, and a thunderbolt flashes in the background.

Siliezar, who recently shared his photographs with occult investigators, told Earthfiles.com that he and his family didn’t see the light beam in person; it appeared only on camera. “It was amazing!” he said. He showed the iPhone photo to his fellow tourists. “No one, not even the tour guide, had ever seen anything like it before.” [See photo]

The photo has surfaced on several Mayan doomsday discussion forums. But was the light beam a sign from the gods — a warning about Dec. 21, 2012, the date that marks the end of the Mayan calendar cycle, and when some people fear the world will end? Or is it simply the result of an iPhone glitch

According to Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the cameras used during NASA’s Mars missions, it is almost definitely the latter. Hill works with images of the Martian surface taken by rovers and satellites, as well as data from Earth-orbiting NASA instruments, and is fully versed in the wide range of potential image artifacts and equipment errors.

He says the “light beam” in the Mayan temple photo is a classic case of such an artifact — a distortion in an image that arises from the way cameras bounce around incoming light.

It is no mere coincidence, Hill said, that “of the three images, the ‘light beam’ only occurs in the image with a lightning bolt in the background. The intensity of the lightning flash likely caused the camera’s CCD sensor to behave in an unusual way, either causing an entire column of pixels to offset their values or causing an internal reflection [off the] camera lens that was recorded by the sensor.” In either case, extra brightness would have been added to the pixels in that column in addition to the light hitting them directly from the scene.

Evidence in favor of this explanation is the fact that the beam, when isolated in Photoshop or other image analysis software, runs perfectly vertical in the image. “That’s a little suspicious since it’s very unlikely that the gentleman who took this picture would have his handheld iPhone camera positioned exactly parallel to the ‘light beam’ down to the pixel level,” Hill told Life’s Little Mysteries.

It’s more likely that the “light beam” corresponds to a set of columns of pixels in the camera sensor that are electronically connected to each other, but not to other columns in the sensor, and that this set of connected pixels became oversaturated in the manner described above.

“That being said,” Hill said, “it really is an awesome image!”

from:    http://www.livescience.com/18692-mayan-light-beam-photo.html

February Fireballs

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The Fireballs of February

Feb. 22, 2012:  In the middle of the night on February 13th, something disturbed the animal population of rural Portal, Georgia. Cows started mooing anxiously and local dogs howled at the sky. The cause of the commotion was a rock from space.

“At 1:43 AM Eastern, I witnessed an amazing fireball,” reports Portal resident Henry Strickland. “It was very large and lit up half the sky as it fragmented. The event set dogs barking and upset cattle, which began to make excited sounds. I regret I didn’t have a camera; it lasted nearly 6 seconds.”

Strickland witnessed one of the unusual “Fireballs of February.”

February Fireballs (splash, 558 px)

A fireball over north Georgia recorded on Feb. 13th by a NASA all-sky camera in Walker Co., GA. [video]

“This month, some big space rocks have been hitting Earth’s atmosphere,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “There have been five or six notable fireballs that might have dropped meteorites around the United States.”

It’s not the number of fireballs that has researchers puzzled. So far, fireball counts in February 2012 are about normal. Instead, it’s the appearance and trajectory of the fireballs that sets them apart.

“These fireballs are particularly slow and penetrating,” explains meteor expert Peter Brown, a physics professor at the University of Western Ontario. “They hit the top of the atmosphere moving slower than 15 km/s, decelerate rapidly, and make it to within 50 km of Earth’s surface.”

The action began on the evening of February 1st when a fireball over central Texas wowed thousands of onlookers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

“It was brighter and long-lasting than anything I’ve seen before,” reports eye-witness Daryn Morran. “The fireball took about 8 seconds to cross the sky. I could see the fireball start to slow down; then it exploded like a firecracker artillery shell into several pieces, flickered a few more times and then slowly burned out.” Another observer in Coppell, Texas, reported a loud double boom as “the object broke into two major chunks with many smaller pieces.”

The fireball was bright enough to be seen on NASA cameras located in New Mexico more than 500 miles away. “It was about as bright as the full Moon,” says Cooke. Based on the NASA imagery and other observations, Cooke estimates that the object was 1 to 2 meters in diameter.

So far in February, NASA’s All-Sky Fireball Network has photographed about a half a dozen bright meteors that belong to this oddball category. They range in size from basketballs to buses, and all share the same slow entry speed and deep atmospheric penetration. Cooke has analyzed their orbits and come to a surprising conclusion:

February Fireballs (meteorcam, 200px)

This camera is part of NASA’s All-Sky Fireball Network. [more]

“They all hail from the asteroid belt—but not from a single location in the asteroid belt,” he says. “There is no common source for these fireballs, which is puzzling.”

This isn’t the first time sky watchers have noticed odd fireballs in February. In fact, the “Fireballs of February” are a bit of a legend in meteor circles.

Brown explains: “Back in the 1960s and 70s, amateur astronomers noticed an increase in the number of bright, sound-producing deep-penetrating fireballs during the month of February. The numbers seemed significant, especially when you consider that there are few people outside at night in winter. Follow-up studies in the late 1980s suggested no big increase in the rate of February fireballs. Nevertheless, we’ve always wondered if something was going on.”

Indeed, a 1990 study by astronomer Ian Holliday suggests that the ‘February Fireballs’ are real. He analyzed photographic records of about a thousand fireballs from the 1970s and 80s and found evidence for a fireball stream intersecting Earth’s orbit in February. He also found signs of fireball streams in late summer and fall. The results are controversial, however. Even Halliday recognized some big statistical uncertainties in his results.

NASA’s growing All-Sky Fireball Network could end up solving the mystery. Cooke and colleagues are adding cameras all the time, spreading the network’s coverage across North America for a dense, uninterrupted sampling of the night sky.

“The beauty of our smart multi-camera system,” notes Cooke, “is that it measures orbits almost instantly. We know right away when a fireball flurry is underway—and we can tell where the meteoroids came from.” This kind of instant data is almost unprecedented in meteor science, and promises new insights into the origin of February’s fireballs.

Meanwhile, the month isn’t over yet. “If the cows and dogs start raising a ruckus tonight,” advises Cooke, “go out and take a look.”

from:    http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/22feb_februaryfireballs/

New Zealand Earthquake and MORE

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1/28/2012 — 6.2 magnitude earthquake in New Zealand — MASSIVE amount of 5.0M quakes this past week

Posted on January 28, 2012

watch the video update here:

 

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January 28, 2012 — North of New Zealand a magnitude 6.2 earthquake occurred:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0007swv.php

Magnitude 6.2 – KERMADEC ISLANDS, NEW ZEALAND

 

from:    http://sincedutch.wordpress.com/

Norway — Tons of Dead Fish Appear & Disappear

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Tons of dead fish appear on, then disappear from Norwegian beach

Tons of dead fish appear on, then disappear from Norwegian beach

A dog walks among tons of dead herring that washed up on a beach at Kvaenes in northern Norway on New Year’s Eve.
January 4th, 2012
11:02 AM ET

Tons of dead herring that washed up on a Norwegian beach on New Year’s Eve are now gone, and no one is sure how they got there or where they went.

Local resident Jan-Petter Jorgensen told Norway’s TV2 he went to look at the thousands and thousands of fish after seeing a Facebook posting about them, according to a report on The Foreigner.

Joregensen said it was fortunate the icy cold prevented the mass of dead fish from raising a stink.

“It is 15 degrees below zero today, so the cold means they don’t smell. Nevertheless, the smell will be pretty intense in the long run,” he said, according to The Foreigner report.

Turns out that wasn’t a problem. Views and News from Norway reports that as of Tuesday, most of the dead fish were gone, perhaps pushed out to sea by tides and winds. The local mayor said they’ll likely sink in the ocean, according to the report.

Why they came to be on the shore remains a mystery.

Jens Christian Holst of the Institute of Marine Research in Norway told Norwegian Broadcasting the herring may have been chased ashore by predators, the Views and News report said.

“In this area, we know there is a lot of (pollock) that graze on (herring),” he said.

Seems like a reasonable explanation.

Of course, on the Web there are always more troubling theories around, including that the deaths could be the first sign the end of the world is coming in 2012, as some believe ancient Mayan prophecy predicts.

from:    http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/04/tons-of-dead-fish-appear-on-then-disappear-from-norwegian-beach/

Tsunami Clouds in Alabama

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Giant Tsunami-Shape Clouds Roll Across Alabama Sky

Natalie Wolchover, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 19 December 2011 Time: 02:12 PM ET
Clouds along the horizon in Birmingham, Ala., on Friday (Dec. 16). Credit: ABC 33/40 in Birmingham
Clouds along the horizon in Birmingham, Ala., on Friday (Dec. 16).
CREDIT: ABC 33/40 in Birmingham

For a morning, the sky looked like a surfer’s dream: A series of huge breaking waves lined the horizon in Birmingham, Ala., on Friday (Dec. 16), their crests surging forward in slow motion. Amazed Alabamans took photos of the clouds and sent them to their local weather station, wondering, “What are these tsunamis in the sky?”

Experts say the clouds were pristine examples of “Kelvin-Helmholtz waves.” Whether seen in the sky or in the ocean, this type of turbulence always forms when a fast-moving layer of fluid slides on top of a slower, thicker layer, dragging its surface.

Water waves, for example, form when the layer of fluid above them (i.e., the air) is moving faster than the layer of fluid below (i.e., the water). When the difference between the wind and water speed increases to a certain point, the waves “break” — their crests lurch forward — and they take on the telltale Kelvin-Helmholtz shape. [Astonishing Video Shows a Face in the Clouds]

According to Chris Walcek, a meteorologist at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at the State University of New York, Albany, fast-moving air high in the sky can drag the top of slow-moving, thick clouds underneath it in much the same way.

“In the pictures [of the Birmingham sky] there is probably a cold layer of air near the ground where the wind speed is probably low. That is why there is a cloud or fog in that layer,” Walcek told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. “Over this cloudy, cold, slow-moving layer is probably a warmer and faster-moving layer of air.”

Most of the time, the difference in wind speed and temperature between two layers of the atmosphere is small, and so the fast-moving air on top “simply slides smoothly over the slower-moving air like a hockey puck sliding along an ice surface,” Walcek said. At the other extreme, if the wind-speed difference is too large, the interface between the two layers breaks down into random turbulence.

Kelvin-Helmholtz waves form when the difference in the temperature and wind speed of the two layers hits a sweet spot. “What [these pictures] show is air between these two atmospheric layers that is just very close to that threshold for turbulence, and mixing to mix the two layers together,” he said.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/17545-giant-tsunami-shape-clouds-roll-alabama-sky.html

Triangular Skull Found in Peru

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Mysterious, triangle-shaped ‘alien skull’ found in Peru

By Eric Pfeiffer | 

Scientists aren’t clear on the origin story for this ancient Peruvian skull (Photo courtesy of RPP)

Peruvian anthropologist Renato Davila Riquelme has discovered the remains of an unidentified creature with a “triangle shaped” skull nearly as large as its 20-inch-tall body.

Has the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull –the setting for the underwhelming 2008 Indiana Jones vehicle–finally been discovered? Well, don’t be expecting a victory lap from Steven Spielberg or George Lucas anytime soon.

The remains are most likely those of a child, though one with an unusually shaped head and frame. But that hasn’t stopped local site RPP from interviewing several anonymous Spanish and Russian “scientists” claiming that the remains are actually those of an alien:

It has a non-human appearance because the head is triangular and big, almost the same size as the body. At first we believed it to be a child’s body until Spanish and Russian doctors came and confirmed that, yes, it’s an extraterrestrial being.

Of course, five anonymous scientific authorities citing proof of extraterrestrial life would probably be generating a little more attention if their research had passed some basic scrutiny. Even if the remains are almost certainly those of a person, they are certainly unusual. You can take a look at the gallery of photos here.

from:    http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/mysterious-triangle-shaped-alien-skull-found-peru-161615656.html

Unusual Solar Activity

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REMARKABLE SOLAR ACTIVITY: There haven’t been any strong solar flares in days. Nevertheless, some impressive activity is underway on the sun. For one thing, an enormous wall of plasma is towering over the sun’s southeastern horizon. Stephen Ramsden of Atlanta, Georgia, took this picture on Nov. 11th:

“Solar forums all over the world are buzzing with Sun-stronomers proclaiming this to be the biggest prominence that many of them had ever witnessed,” he says.

Remarkably, though, this is not the biggest thing. A dark filament of magnetism is snaking more than halfway around the entire sun: SDO image. From end to end, it stretches more than a million km or about three times the distance between Earth and the Moon. If the filament becomes unstable, as solar filaments are prone to do, it could collapse and hit the stellar surface below, triggering a Hyder flare. No one can say if the eruption of such a sprawling structure would be Earth directed.

“I cant help but wonder what could possibly come next since we are still over a year away from the forecasted Solar Maximum,” adds Ramsden. “There’s never been a better time to own a solar telescope than now!”

from: spaceweather.com