The New Madrid Fault. Booms. Earthquake. Methane Gas Releasing. Sinkhole.

THE FOLLOWING WILL BE IMPORTANT REGARDING THE NEW MADRID FAULT...
The following video...

Published on Jan 15, 2013

Plug in all the data and see for yourself, here's the links:

BOOMS:
Guthrie, Oklahoma: http://kfor.com/2013/01/04/mysterious-boom-heard-in-guthrie/
Cater County, Oklahoma:http://www.kten.com/story/20271784/loud-booms-heard-across-texoma-has-confirm...
QUAKES:
Spencer, Oklahoma:http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/usc000eli9#summary
Healdton, Oklahoma:http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/usc000ei5q#summary

BOOMS:
Evensville, Indiana http://www.14news.com/story/20537321/did-you-hear-the-booms
http://tristatehomepage.com/fulltext-news?nxd_id=575392
QUAKE:
Marion, Illinoishttp://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nm011113a#summary

BIRDS FALLING DEAD:
Seymour, Tennesee http://www.newschannel9.com/news/top-stories/stories/dead-birds-fall-sky-3646...
QUAKE:
Madisonville, Tennesseehttp://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/se010813a#summary

BOOMS:
Lexington County, South Carolinahttp://www.wistv.com/story/20525068/searching-for-the-cause-of-booms-reported...
Columbia County, Georgiahttp://www2.wjbf.com/news/2012/dec/06/3/several-loud-booms-reported-columbia-...

Explosion Sounds:
Trumbull County, Ohiohttp://www.wkbn.com/content/news/local/story/Explosion-Sounds-Reported-in-Tru...

BOOMS:
Jamestown, New York http://www.wivb.com/dpp/news/local/loud-boom-jolts-southern-tier

BOOMS:
Salem, Massachusetts http://salem.patch.com/articles/did-you-hear-a-loud-bang-eary-saturday-morning
Barrington, Rhode Islandhttp://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/local_news/east_bay/explosion-heard-on-bay-nothi...

QUAKE:
Hawkesbury, Canadahttp://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ld60023403#summary
Boothbay Harbor, Mainehttp://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/usb000enwr#summary

Canada Seismic Hazard map:
http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/environment/naturalhazards/earthqu...

USGS Earthern US Seismic Hazard Map:
http://www.usgs.gov/blogs/features/files/2012/08/Screen-Shot-2012-08-28-at-1....

BOOM/QUAKE Map of everything pinned:
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=200270150651160417375.0004d3458c51989c71...

Areas prone to collapse sinkholes

The map below shows areas of the United States where certain rock types that are susceptible to dissolution in water occur. In these areas the formation of underground cavities can form and catastrophic sinkholes can happen. These rock types are evaporites (salt, gypsum, and anhydrite) and carbonates (limestone and dolomite). Evaporite rocks underlie about 35 to 40 percent of the United States, though in many areas they are buried at great depths.

source: USGS

Monster Sinkholes An Indication That Major Earth Changes Are Coming Along The New Madrid Fault?

 By Michael, on December 2nd, 2012

The most powerful earthquakes in the history of the United States happened along the New Madrid Fault in 1811 and 1812.  Those earthquakes were reportedly felt more than 1,000 miles away.  Scientists assure us that one day we will once again see very powerful earthquakes along the New Madrid fault.  It is only a question of when it will happen. Today, the New Madrid fault zone covers portions of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi.  However, a major earthquake of magnitude-8.0 or greater would likely have a dramatic effect all the way from the Great Lakes all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.  When most Americans speak of the “big one”, they think of what may happen along the coast of California someday, but the truth is that a New Madrid earthquake could potentially do far more damage.  So is there evidence that the New Madrid fault zone is waking up?  Yes, there is.  According to Bloomberg, there has been “a sixfold increase in the number of earthquakes that have shaken the central part of the U.S. from 2000 to 2011″.  Much of that increase is being blamed on human activity such as mining, drilling and fracking.  So could human activity aggravate the fault zone so much that it could set off a truly history-making earthquake at some point?  Well, the potential is certainly there.  That is why so many people are so concerned about the monster sinkholes that have appeared in the region in recent months.  For example, a massive sinkhole down in Louisiana is now over 8 acres in size and it has forced hundreds of people to flee from their homes.  You can see video of the Louisiana sinkhole right here.  Over in Ohio, a giant sinkhole has suddenly formed that is more than 30 feet deep and that is the size of four football fields.  That sinkhole caused part of State Route 516 to collapse and authorities say that it will likely be closed for many months.  You can see video of the gigantic sinkhole in Ohio right here.  Are these monster sinkholes an indication that major earth changes are coming along the New Madrid fault?  Has reckless human activity awoken a sleeping giant that we should never have messed with?

The sinkhole down in Louisiana is of particular concern because it has been venting natural gas.  A few days ago it reportedly “burped” which sounds kind of ominous.  Could we see some kind of an “explosion” at some point?

Many of those living in the area may not be able to return to their homes for quite a long time.  The following is from a recent Huffington Post article…

At the eight-acre, Bayou Corne sinkhole in Assumption Parish, owners of slab houses are waiting for methane-gas monitors to be installed in December. The sinkhole deepened in November and coughed up debris and hydrcarbons late in the month. Cypress trees fell into the gap. Residents are watching natural gas being flared from the site and are ventilating homes while bayous around them bubble.

But if human activity is capable of producing sinkholes that are 8 acres in size and capable of causing a “sixfold increase” in the number of earthquakes in the middle part of the country, is human activity also capable of setting off the New Madrid fault?

Sadly, even most Americans that are living in that part of the country don’t really understand how incredibly massive and how potentially destructive this fault zone actually is.  The following is from a recent report from WREG in Memphis, Tennessee…

Many people don’t realize that north Alabama lies in the impact zone of the New Madrid fault line, a sleeping giant that is approximately twenty times larger than California’s famed San Andreas fault. 

The biggest earthquake in U.S. history happened in the New Madrid seismic zone in 1812, and in just the last few weeks, activity along the fault line is starting to heat up. 

If the earthquakes that happened along the New Madrid fault zone in 1811 and 1812 happened today, the devastation would be unimaginable.  Back then, there were not that many people living in the area.  But even so, the destruction was incredible…

Accounts of the 1812 quake vary since there were no measuring instruments at the time, but most geologists say evidence shows it was at least a magnitude 8 earthquake, and possibly a 9 or higher.

The shaking was so intense that church bells started ringing as far away as Boston and New York.

Chimneys toppled from the Deep South to Canada, and President James Madison was awoken by the violent shaking as he slept in the White House.

Eyewitnesses said it even caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards for a time.

Unfortunately, there are now indications that the fault zone is becoming more active as a recent Examiner article explained…

Tuesday evening, two shallow earthquakes, although small, were felt in Mt. Carmel, Ill. as well as five miles outside Edmond, Okla. Illinois had the largest at 3.6 magnitude, leaving Oklahoma with a smaller 2.9 magnitude quake as reported by the USGS.

The fact that both of these quakes were shallow and follow on the heels of Kentucky’s 4.3 just 10 days ago makes the questions begin to fly. Is the New Madrid waking up? Is it gearing up for ‘the big one’? When Ky. Experienced a 4.3two weeks ago, it was felt across 10-12 states. Although it didn’t knock runners off their feet, it did alarm many. Knoxville was among the cities that felt the quake. The shaking was not minor in many areas, and it scared people as walls shook and many began to pray.

This is something that I have written about previously, and we all need to keep our eyes open for more reports about earthquakes in the middle part of the country.  When the “big one” does finally hit the New Madrid fault zone, it will be one of the biggest news stories ever.

We are talking about a catastrophe that would be so immense that it would be hard to imagine.  According to ABC News, a study by the Mid-America Earthquake Center found that in the event of a major earthquake along the New Madrid fault, “nearly 750,000 buildings would be damaged, 3,000 bridges would potentially collapse, 400,000 breaks and leaks to local pipelines and $300 billion in direct damage and $600 billion in indirect losses would occur.”

You can ready much more about the New Madrid fault right here.

All of this is even more frightening when you consider that there are 15 nuclear reactors along the New Madrid fault zone.

In the event that the “big one” strikes, we could be looking at Fukushima times 15.

We have been blessed to have avoided a major earthquake like that for so long in the middle part of the country, but there is no guarantee that the New Madrid fault zone will always be stable – especially considering how much it is being aggravated by man-made activity.

There are even some that believe that eventually we will see an earthquake of magnitude-9.0 or higher along the New Madrid fault.  Such an earthquake could literally change the face of the entire continent.  We are talking about an event that could potentially change the course of the Mississippi River and create bodies of water where none existed previously.

We seem to be moving into a time of increased seismic activity on the earth, and many scientists are convinced that the New Madrid Fault zone is definitely overdue for a major earthquake.

Massive sinkhole swallows Florida home

By Andrew Mach, Staff Writer, NBC News

A home in Hudson, Fla., along Florida's west coast, was ripped apart Wednesday after a massive sinkhole opened beneath it.

No one was inside the house, belonging to 79-year-old Susan Minutillo, when it quietly crumbled to the ground, neighbors said.

“You just look over there and the whole back end of the house just flipped right down into the hole,” neighbor Mike Richards told First Coast News in Jacksonville, Fla.

Ironically, Minutillo was having her home evaluated for the risk of sinkholes when the ground opened up. As crews were surveying her property, she stepped out to run an errand, and by the time she got home, about half of her house was already in the ground, according to Pasco County Fire Rescue crews.

...As many as 150 sinkholes are reported in Florida each year. 

read more at NBC

LOUISIANA SINKHOLE...DANGEROUS GASES BEING RELEASED

12 May 2011 A large sinkhole has developed at the corner of Downing and S. Edsel in Detroit.

Stratfor: The Geopolitics of Shale

The Geopolitics of Shale

December 19, 2012

By Robert D. Kaplan
Chief Geopolitical Analyst

According to the elite newspapers and journals of opinion, the future of foreign affairs mainly rests on ideas: the moral impetus for humanitarian intervention, the various theories governing exchange rates and debt rebalancing necessary to fix Europe, the rise of cosmopolitanism alongside the stubborn vibrancy of nationalism in East Asia and so on. In other words, the world of the future can be engineered and defined based on doctoral theses. And to a certain extent this may be true. As the 20th century showed us, ideologies -- whether communism, fascism or humanism -- matter and matter greatly.

But there is another truth: The reality of large, impersonal forces like geography and the environment that also help to determine the future of human events. Africa has historically been poor largely because of few good natural harbors and few navigable rivers from the interior to the coast. Russia is paranoid because its land mass is exposed to invasion with few natural barriers. The Persian Gulf sheikhdoms are fabulously wealthy not because of ideas but because of large energy deposits underground. You get the point. Intellectuals concentrate on what they can change, but we are helpless to change much of what happens.

Enter shale, a sedimentary rock within which natural gas can be trapped. Shale gas constitutes a new source of extractable energy for the post-industrial world. Countries that have considerable shale deposits will be better placed in the 21st century competition between states, and those without such deposits will be worse off. Ideas will matter little in this regard.

Stratfor, as it happens, has studied the issue in depth. Herein is my own analysis, influenced in part by Stratfor's research.

So let's look at who has shale and how that may change geopolitics. For the future will be heavily influenced by what lies underground.

The United States, it turns out, has vast deposits of shale gas: in Texas, Louisiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and elsewhere. America, regardless of many of the political choices it makes, is poised to be an energy giant of the 21st century. In particular, the Gulf Coast, centered on Texas and Louisiana, has embarked upon a shale gas and tight oil boom. That development will make the Caribbean an economic focal point of the Western Hemisphere, encouraged further by the 2014 widening of the Panama Canal. At the same time, cooperation between Texas and adjacent Mexico will intensify, as Mexico increasingly becomes a market for shale gas, with its own exploited shale basins near its northern border.

This is, in part, troubling news for Russia. Russia is currently the energy giant of Europe, exporting natural gas westward in great quantities, providing Moscow with political leverage all over Central and particularly Eastern Europe. However, Russia's reserves are often in parts of Siberia that are hard and expensive to exploit -- though Russia's extraction technology, once old, has been considerably modernized. And Russia for the moment may face relatively little competition in Europe. But what if in the future the United States were able to export shale gas to Europe at a competitive price?

The United States still has few capabilities to export shale gas to Europe. It would have to build new liquefaction facilities to do that; in other words, it would have to erect plants on the Gulf of Mexico that convert the gas into liquid so that it could be transported by ship across the Atlantic, where regasification facilities there would reconvert it back into gas. This is doable with capital investment, expertise and favorable legislation. Countries that build such facilities will have more energy options, to export or import, whatever the case may be. So imagine a future in which the United States exports liquefied shale gas to Europe, reducing the dependence that European countries have on Russian energy. The geopolitics of Europe could shift somewhat. Natural gas might become less of a political tool for Russia and more of a purely economic one (though even such a not-so-subtle shift would require significant exports of shale gas from North America to Europe).

Less dependence on Russia would allow the vision of a truly independent, culturally vibrant Central and Eastern Europe to fully prosper -- an ideal of the region's intellectuals for centuries, even as ideas in this case would have little to do with it.

This might especially be relevant to Poland. For Poland may have significant deposits of shale gas. Were Polish shale deposits to prove the largest in Europe (a very big "if"), Poland could become more of an energy producer in its own right, turning this flat country with no natural defenses to the east and west -- annihilated by both Germany and the Soviet Union in the 20th century -- into a pivot state or midlevel power in the 21st. The United States, in turn, somewhat liberated from Middle East oil because of its own energy sources (including natural gas finds), could focus on building up Poland as a friendly power, even as it loses substantial interest in Saudi Arabia. To be sure, the immense deposits of oil and natural gas in the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Iran will keep the Middle East a major energy exporter for decades. But the shale gas revolution will complicate the world's hydrocarbon supply and allocation, so that the Middle East may lose some of its primacy.

It turns out that Australia also has large new natural gas deposits that, with liquefaction facilities, could turn it into a principal energy exporter to East Asia, assuming Australia significantly lowers its cost of production (which may prove very hard to do). Because Australia is already starting to emerge as the most dependable military ally of the United States in the Anglosphere, the alliance of these two great energy producers of the future could further cement Western influence in Asia. The United States and Australia would divide up the world: after a fashion, of course. Indeed, if unconventional natural gas exploitation has anything to do with it, the so-called post-American world would be anything but.

The geopolitical emergence of Canada -- again, the result of natural gas and oil -- could amplify this trend. Canada has immense natural gas deposits in Alberta, which could possibly be transported by future pipelines to British Columbia, where, with liquefaction facilities, it could then be exported to East Asia. Meanwhile, eastern Canada could be the beneficiary of new shale gas deposits that reach across the border into the northeastern United States. Thus, new energy discoveries would bind the two North American countries closer, even as North America and Australia become more powerful on the world scene.

China also has significant deposits of shale gas in its interior provinces. Because Beijing is burdened by relatively few regulations, the regime could acquire the land and build the infrastructure necessary for its exploitation. This would ease somewhat China's energy crunch and aid Beijing's strategy to compensate for the decline of its coastal-oriented economic model by spurring development inland.

The countries that might conceivably suffer on account of a shale gas revolution would be landlocked, politically unstable oil producers such as Chad, Sudan and South Sudan, whose hydrocarbons could become relatively less valuable as these other energy sources come online. China, especially, might in the future lose interest in the energy deposits in such low-end, high-risk countries if shale gas became plentiful in its own interior.

In general, the coming of shale gas will magnify the importance of geography. Which countries have shale underground and which don't will help determine power relationships. And because shale gas can be transported across oceans in liquid form, states with coastlines will have the advantage. The world will be smaller because of unconventional gas extraction technology, but that only increases the preciousness of geography, rather than decreases it.

Editor's Note: Stratfor offers a combination of geopolitical insight, source-driven intelligence and objective analysis to produce customized reliable information and forecasting for businesses, organizations and government agencies. For more information about Stratfor's client solutions offerings, click here: http://info.stratfor.com/solutions/

Read more: The Geopolitics of Shale | Stratfor 

Dinosaurs Farted Themselves Into eXTINCTion? Seriously a New Theory!

Can you believe this?   I laughed so hard about this one!!!  I'm going to tell you the "story" in my own words, with the facts involved, but the story that I refer to is found on Fox News.com.

Dinosaurs 'gassed' themselves into extinction, British scientists say

Published May 07, 2012

NewsCore

Okay, so British scientists have a new theory on how the dinosaurs became extinct.  


"What's that!", you say?


They say that dinosaurs literally FARTED themselves to their extinction, LOL!!!  


My husband and I were reading this in bed last night and were laughing so hard that we were almost crying.


We all know that scientists create "theories".  But, aren't there measurements and calculations?  Yep.  There were actual researchers that calculated the methane gases that might have been "oopsed" out of dinosaurs.  They calculated just how much gas was "let out" per year and say that it was enough to warm the planet and kill off the dinosaurs.


Just how did they compare the farts of the dinosaurs to the farts of today?  I sure wouldn't want to be part of that research team!

What happened to the asteroid theory?  What happened to the pole shift theory?  What happened to the volcano theory? What happened to Al Gore's theory on Global Warming?...and for that matter, is Al Gore behind this new theory?

Seriously!  How did scientists mathematically calculate the amount of methane excreted...no relieved of ...no farted by dinosaurs?

Did the scientists measure the methane excreted by cows and then divided that by the ton of the animal and multiplied that by the guessed tonage of each dinosaur, migrating the math, and farting the numbers out for a new scientific theory?  What a mammoth task!  

Have the scientists farted out a number for the gasious global warming caused by the farts of humans?  After all, didn't Al Gore say that it was the human population's consumption that was the problem?

How much longer do we have?  Will our farts end us all?  What can save us?  

Pretty soon, we'll be gassing into recycled plastic vacuum seal bags and the new NASA project will be to take those up to space and release the gasses into space, only to add to the already abundant space junk with the recycled plastic bags.

What do you think about this new gas bomb theory?

Really.  We want to know!

This is seriously a story that is seriously out there in the science community...  Seriously.  Just "Google" it.  I didn't believe it at first either.

Have a fantastic day!