What's going on in the world?

So what are some of the most significant news stories of this year?  Earthquakes?  Particularly in Japan?  What about the mideast protests?  Most significantly Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.  Now what is up with all the recent tornadoes?  And what about the the wars being fought?  And what about all the economic troubles?

What is bringing about these changes?  Are any of them related?  Could these things be some sort of precursor to possible changes some have alleged will occur in 2012?  Or are they really changes at all?  None of these things is new.  Earthquakes have been occurring throughout history.  Some of them tragic...just ask the people who lived at Pompeii when Mt. Vesuvius erupted.  People have been protesting things throughout recorded history.  Government's have been overthrown before.  Wars have been fought...some of them lasting many years.  Economic troubles have come and gone before.  And although tornado activity has increased this year, it could just be a temporary increase.  It may be too soon to tell about that at this point.  

So with that in mind, could all of these things a precursor of things to come?  Could the world already be in the process of changing?  Or are these events mostly unrelated and not necessarily an indication of any major long term changes (economic troubles and the mideast protests may be related though)?  

The world has actually been changing in some ways for a long time anyways.  Just think of some of the changes in the world throughout history.  The world has come a long ways from simple stone tools, to cars, airplanes, and the Internet.  

So what will next year bring?  I guess time will tell.

Earthquakes and Weird Atmospheric Phenomena

A while back I wrote a post about earthquake lights and today I came across a blog posting about atmospheric phenomena that may be related to earthquakes.  Here is an excerpt from that posting:

Geologists have long puzzled over anecdotal reports of strange atmospheric phenomena in the days before big earthquakes. But good data to back up these stories has been hard to come by.

In recent years, however, various teams have set up atmospheric monitoring stations in earthquake zones and a number of satellites are capable of sending back data about the state of the upper atmosphere and the ionosphere during an earthquake.

Last year, we looked at some fascinating data from the DEMETER spacecraft showing a significant increase in ultra-low frequency radio signals before the magnitude 7 Haiti earthquake in January 2010

Today, Dimitar Ouzounov at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland and a few buddies present the data from the Great Tohoku earthquake which devastated Japan on 11 March. Their results, although preliminary, are eye-opening.

They say that before the M9 earthquake, the total electron content of the ionosphere increased dramatically over the epicentre, reaching a maximum three days before the quake struck.

At the same time, satellite observations showed a big increase in infrared emissions from above the epicentre, which peaked in the hours before the quake. In other words, the atmosphere was heating up.

The post also mentions alleged high tech warfare that could be causing the atmospheric conditions and earthquakes.  But it also points out that earthquake lights were seen long before any advanced technologies were invented to allegedly manipulate atmospheric conditions.  But then again, just because the conditions existed naturally in the past isn't alone necessarily proof that atmospheric conditions cannot be manipulated by man.  People have been conceiving babies naturally for a long time too...but that doesn't mean a baby can't also be conceived in a test tube today.

Nevertheless, conspiracy theories about weather manipulation aside, I thought the post was a good read about science behind atmospheric conditions noted around the time of earthquake occurrences.  Maybe one day we will even be able to predict earthquakes.

Read the whole post here.

Nada

I just realized I haven't posted anything new on here in over a month now.  Life is busier for me these days that it was when I first started this blog, so I don't have as much free time to write.  But at the same time, I haven't really had anything I felt like writing about either.  I still read about paranormal topics some on a few different blogs and on the paranormal.about.com website, but I haven't really seen anything I felt like writing about myself.  Nevertheless, life is good, so I'm not complaining.  :)