EarthMonitor

Earth Changes Bulletin Update As Of July 31, 2002

POLAR MOTION: The Anomaly Deepens, this cycle of Chandler’s Wobble is definitely wobblier than normal. Is it the Sun?

The "flattening" of the Wobble is clearly continuing and the Wobble is behaving as if the "X" dimension has peaked on this spiral leg substantially short of where it should be. Is the Wobble as a whole rapidly being displaced into new territory, or is the wobble cycle being fairly well beat up and even dented by the ionic energies in the peak of Sunspot Cycle 23, or are both things happening? Good question Dr. Watson, I believe we need to examine the evidence further, possibly for another 14 months. At the moment the distortion in the track of the constantly moving spin axis appears appears be most easily explainable as the effect of the increased pounding and stress on the Earth by the solar wind, storm bursts, and magnetic lines of force which have been exceptionally strong since 1999.

SUNSPOTS: Daily Count Sizzling At ~300 and Solar Flux is at 230, now dipping slightly down.

From 89 to 320 and now at about 300, the Sun continues to keep everyone guessing. There do not seem to be any particularly useful correlations to explain this wide performance during July. Two new coronal holes are coming into alignment with the Earth and NASA predicts a lot of new energy and even auroras by August 2 from a fairly stormy solar wind which will flow from these new holes. Not that the seas are not already pretty choppy, the U of Alaska Fluxgate showed a major fluctuation today, like a good 50 foot deep ocean swell to rock all boats.

DROUGHT WATCH: Conditions worsen with the increase in solar sunspot activity

As predicted, the monsoon action brought a little relief in early July but not much so far. Now the monsoon has virtually dried up even as the Caribbean continues to spoil the Midwest with moisture for thunderstorms. A huge high pressure ridge has built up over western North America. I cannot prove it but I suspect that it is essentially electromagnetic in nature as a by-product of the peak activity which is underway in Sunspot Cycle 23. Ranging from Saskatchewan down to Mexico, the Rocky Mountain spine on the East holds the Caribbean and Canadian air at bay. On the West, very little marine air is moving in from the Pacific Ocean. The air masses are stacked up and frozen in place, just like they were during May when the sunspots were high. As then, the current result is deadlock and drought in western North America. If this pattern persists through August, I believe that large numbers of Pinon Pines will succumb and some strands of Ponderosa will die as well.

ECONOMY WATCH: Watch the bueaucrats, politicians, and media all scurry for cover this weak as they revise all the numbers and admit that the recovery is WEAK, much weaker than hyped. What these urban people don’t know, because they are too disconnected from the Earth, just like the shamans say, is that there is a major contraction under way in the ag industry worldwide and a major recessionary wave will swamp all boats by the end of the year.

EL POPO WATCH - El Popo falling back to sleep

From Mexican geologists: In the last 24 hours, the Popocatepetl volcano activity remained in a steady level. There were 22 small exhalations accompanied by steam and gas. Two volcanotectonic microearthquakes were detected, with magnitudes 2.5 and 2.4, both with depths between 4 and 5 km, located 7 km southeast of the crater.

EL NINO: None. Pacific water temperature along the equator is still cooling relative to the time of year. Assuming a normal spiral in Chandler’s Wobble, the earliest possible year for an El Nino will be 2004.

VOLCANIC ACTIVITY: Falling off slightly even as Kilauea wows the tourists.

Southwest Volcano Laboratory Watch: 20 in active list, 14 with continuing daily updates, 4 in restless category, and 31 in alert status. (The alert status is the sum total of all volcanoes which are restless enough to command the attention of geologists or are active with some sort of eruptive and emissive activity which can be described and recorded).

EARTHQUAKE ACTIVITY: Since the 26^th of July we have had ten good-sized quakes, with seven of these in the last 36 hours or so, along the Southwestern edge of the world’s most dynamic tectonic plate, the Caribbean Plate, ranging in size between 4.4 and 6.5 in magnitude. These, plus two quakes in the Mid Atlantic Rift, and another off the coast of Newfoundland out to sea from the St. Lawrence, suggest that North America will see increased tectonic activity during the next lunar syzygy window, more so than during the last boring New Moon.

The USGS charts for California/Nevada confirms this suspicion. There were several 3.0 size quakes today in California and several more during the past seven days. The seven day running total of all quakes of all sizes for the area was 284 but you can probably expect this to increase rapidly during the next few days. A large number of small quakes have swarmed during the past 36 hours. There was also a quake above 4.0 along the Baja Plate Edge south of California. So far there has not been much response in the Pacific Northwest. USGS charts show only 34 quakes for the past two weeks, all of them below 3.0, most of them in the range of 1.0

Many quakes scattered around the Pacific Rim of Fire in all the usual places. Japan activity is up and of course the Fiji-Papua Arc is highly active as usual.

OTHER NEWS & LINKS

Here is the future for watching volcanoes: InSAR satellite surveys. This is a great science article, easy for laymen to read yet conveying real information.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/07/22/MN141637.DTL

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