This palmtree used to be 12-foot high.
Now, it sunk to ground-level
-
-
- In light of recent underground fires reported in Calama,
Chile, another nearby town is witnessing strange geological changes. In
the town of Baquedano, numerous ground fault splits are occurring. The
ground is sinking in other areas, creating craters, and cracking walls
and floors of entire buildings. But perhaps what has Mayor Matilda Asante
most worried is how rapidly this is happening. According to estimates,
the affected area appears to be as big as 400 meters in diameter.
-
- The strange geological phenomenon has now literally reached
the local Chilean Customs Office, where the barracks rooms of the officers
display notable cracks on the floors and walls. Furthermore, according
to police information, as many as twenty houses in the proximity have been
displaying similar characteristics since last September.
-
- Antofagasta Governor Christian Pizarro has called for
an emergency meeting that will involve representatives from the National
Geology and Mining Institute, local public utilities department, the regional
emergency and disaster coordinator, as well as public liaisons of local
mining companies.
-
-
 The local authorities have come up with diverse hypotheses regarding
how the ground is collapsing in Baquedano. Perhaps the most probable is
the possible existence of underground water filtrations due of the salinity
of the ground in the area. This would provoke a notable geologic fault
in addition to the passage of heavy equipment and trucks in that particular
area. In addition, it has been speculated that in that part of the town,
there used to be an old fuel depot that could have been negligent when
handling and disposing fuel. Nevertheless, what ever the cause may be,
the entire town hall building will have to be relocated some place else
because it is in the middle of it all. 30 city workers have already been
relocated.
- The local governor's emergency committee tried to explain
the origin of the existing ground splits, which have injured two municipal
workers, as well as the drastic structural deterioration of the town hall
building. Mayor Matilde Assented believes that the affected area is even
greater than the previously estimation of 400 meters, given that the town
hall is located outside of that area. She also stated that professional
geologists will investigate why the ground is sinking and splitting apart
throughout the declared affected area. Finally, she added that if the phenomenon
continues, the town hall building transfer will be inevitable.
-
- Regional Emergency and Disaster Management Director Hernan
Flores stated that the authorities have to take into consideration all
the different hypotheses until a conclusion can be reached from the investigation
that will be carried out by geologists. Flores also indicated that repairs
to the town hall building will have to be postponed until a solution for
the problem is established. In the meantime, the transportation department
will have to create an alternative traffic route for heavy-duty vehicles
in order to avoid circulating through roads that are considered to be risky.
- MYSTERY LIGHTS IN THE SKY
-
-
- A reporter for a major news network was driving back
to the city of Arica after providing coverage of an annual off-road rally.
At around 9:30 PM, on the 9th of February of 2002, he witnessed how a bright
white light illuminated the entire valley near the highway. He was traveling
with some local city workers, who corroborated with his testimony.
-
- At first, they thought it could have been lightning and
did think it was out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, when the journalist
finally arrived home, he mentioned what happened to his neighbor. Surprisingly,
the neighbor told him that he also saw it. He was able to see it from the
city, which is several kilometers from where the alleged sighting took
place.
-
- "I thought it was lightning. Although the sky was
clear, I knew that it was raining in the town nearby. But now I am sure
that that was not the case because the light was just too strong, and the
area that it covered was too vast. I also spoke with two more neighbors
who saw it", said the journalist's neighbor, who preferred not to
reveal his name.
-
- According to the major news media journalist, the light
appeared like a flash, lasting only moments. In the area where the light
appeared, throughout the sky, he claimed that there were smaller and less
bright colorful lights, as well as a red light in the center of them. He
also claimed that not only the ground was lit, but the sky as well.
-
- Among the off-road rally participants, there were a few
more eyewitnesses. As they were driving back from the event, passengers
of up to thirteen vehicles that were traveling together saw the big flash.
Among them, Maria Saldias, who participated in the 600-kilometer race with
her husband, and corroborated with the reporters testimony. She also thought
initially that it was lightning; however, she later realized that the light
was just too strong, and that she never had seen lightning that illuminates
the entire sky in such a widespread area.
-
- Similar cases took place last year in September. Others
date back to 1993. Several eyewitnesses have described similar phenomena
between the cities of Iquique and Arica. They all concur when they mention
that the entire sky was completely lit.
-
- Could these lights be UFOs? All of the eyewitnesses agreed
that in this case, it was not lightning. Perhaps the only scientific answer
for these phenomena is in an interesting piece written by Alberto Enriquez
from the Anchorage Daily News, in Alaska. According to Enriquez, these
lights could be a manifestation of some sort of earthquake prediction revealed
by the atmosphere. He eloquently cites scientific data, as well as numerous
cases throughout the world. He also mentions that these phenomena date
back to ancient times.
-
-
-
- Quaking Lights
-
- Scientists drawn to legends of luminous displays
that precede temblors
-
-
- By Alberto Enriquez Anchorage Daily News
- (Published: January 21, 2002)
When it comes to earthquakes, the earth doesn't just move. It often roars.
It broadcasts at radio frequencies. And if the conditions are right, it
even produces a visible glow.
So-called "earthquake lights" are nothing new. The Greek historian
Thucydides wrote that "immense columns of flame" foretold the
destruction of two ancient cities, Helice and Burls, by earthquake. Far
across the ancient world, the author of a traditional Japanese haiku recorded:
The earth speaks softly to the mountain, which trembles and lights the
sky.
What's new is the possibility that scientists may be able to reliably duplicate
these extraordinary effects, including earthquake lights or "coronal
discharges," under artificial conditions in the lab. Because some
earthquake-related effects occur hours and even weeks before the quakes
themselves, further research into the nature of the earthquake precursors
holds the promise of one day -- no one says this will be soon -- predicting
quakes.
In a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, physicist Friedemann
Freund theorizes that positive charges can be generated when huge stresses
are generated along faults in the Earth's crust. The rocks in the crust
normally act as insulators that conduct electrical charges only poorly.
But under the severe stress generated before an earthquake, these rocks
may behave briefly like "p-type semiconductors" found in computer
chips, capable of releasing large numbers of positive charges referred
to as "holes." These charges speed upward toward the surface
of the Earth at between 220 and 660 mph.
Freund, a professor at San Jose State University in California, thinks
they ionize the atmosphere upon reaching the air, accounting for the bizarre
effects -- radio interference and colored streamers, flashes and glows
reported by thousands of observers. Among them: Radio interference reported
in the days before the worst quake recorded (magnitude 9.5), in Chile in
1961, as well as Alaska's magnitude 9.2 Good Friday quake in 1964.
Thirty-eight luminous displays seen by Quebec residents before, during
and after the earthquakes of November 1988. The first photographs of earthquake
lights during the Matsushiro "earthquake swarm" in Japan between
1965 and 1967, collected and published by Japanese researcher Yutaka Yasui
during a period when thousands of seismic events were being recorded each
day.Lights during a Chinese quake in 1976 that reportedly turned night
into day near the epicenter and awakened people nearly 200 miles away.
Freund's most recent publications detail how he has moved beyond theory
and developed an experimental means to generate stresses in rocks, which
"can account for earthquake-related electrical signals causing electric
discharges and earthquake lights." Duplicating earthquake lights in
the lab is important because science deals with reproducible events.
Experiments that can't be repeated -- like the "cold fusion"
craze a few years back -- soon drop into the dustbin of scientific history.
As Freund says, it's tough to do basic research while waiting for the Earth
"to repeat the experiment."
Earthquake-light research remained beyond the pale of Western science throughout
the 1970s, classed by some as largely anecdotal even after the publication
of Yasui's extraordinary photo collection. U.S. research continued largely
along conventional seismological lines. By 1986, however, seismologist
John Derr described in the scientific journal Nature experiments by Brian
Brady and Glen Rowell of the U.S. Bureau of Mines in which they broke rocks
in darkness. As the rocks broke, the men detected light that did not have
the characteristic spectrum of the minerals in the rock, but of the air.
The observations suggested that something given off by the breaking of
the rocks ionized the air.
Derr, who has put forward an alternative theory of earthquake lights based
on hydrological effects, also mentioned Freund's then-purely theoretical
work based on semiconducting effects. Though science was slow to recognize
earthquake lights for what they are, Derr thinks accounts of them are more
common in history and prehistory than generally appreciated but often were
interpreted as spiritual experiences, ghosts or unidentified flying objects.
Among the candidates:
On the Alaska Peninsula, a brilliant glow often seen in the mountains south
of Lake Iliamna and visible up to 45 miles away, described by Native peoples
as the work of ghosts. Floating lights seen on the sacred mountain of Wu
T'ai Shan in China, interpreted by Buddhists as a manifestation of a saint.
Around A.D. 33, a report of luminous figures, at the time of an earthquake,
in the crucifixion passage of the Gospel of Matthew, 28:51-53: "The
earth shook, and the rocks were split and the bodies of the saints who
had fallen asleep were raised and seen coming out of tombs." Reports
of an egg-cup- shaped thing chasing a car and of a UFO buzzing a fishing
boat, both in Australia, two days before a series of earthquakes.
Despite mounting documentation of luminous and electromagnetic phenomena
associated with quakes, resistance to scientific study of these events
as signs of impending earthquakes remained strong.
As recently as 1998, prominent American seismologist Wallace Campbell editorialized
against a United Nations grant to Chinese researchers who published a guide
to forecasting earthquakes based on geomagnetics.
Thrashing numerous misunderstandings and errors in the Chinese researchers'
work, Campbell concluded that the manual was "pseudoscientific nonsense"
that raised false hopes in the public.
In the gloves-off world of scientific debate, Freund fired back his own
public riposte in the EOS Forum newsletter. While acknowledging the limitations
of the Chinese researchers, Freund blasted Campbell for using "innuendoes
to discredit the interdisciplinary search for the subtle signals by which
the Earth may divulge an impending disaster."
The entire blistering exchange can be found at www.globalwatch.org/ungp/
EOS_98.htm and www.globalwatch.org/ungp/friedemann98.htm
Such candor hasn't always brought Freund friends, but two years after the
debate he says he remains more confident than ever. As he puts it, "I
have told people that they have overlooked something fundamental, and people
don't like to be told this!"
Publication in the prestigious and rigorously peer-reviewed Journal of
Geophysical Research may signal a pending scientific groundswell in Freund's
favor. The Japanese and Taiwan-ese long ago committed millions to research,
including the installation of sensor networks.
Have Freund's ideas gone mainstream? "I wouldn't go that far, just
looking at my success rate getting funding," he says. "In four
years, I've had one small grant of $10,000 out of NASA." Journal of
Geophysical Research reviewer Malcom Heggie of the University of Sussex
in England writes of Freund: "His work is adventurous and may or may
not be correct, but the ideas he has, the concepts he explores and the
careful work he puts into them deserve attention."
Derr, chief of the Global Seismograph Network, at the U.S. Geological Survey
laboratory in Albuquerque, said Freund's proposed semiconducting theory
"looks like an important paper." And among the converts to the
newly emerging field of "seismoelectromagnetics" is professor
Masashi Hayakawa, who heads one of two large research projects funded by
the Japanese government.
"I was also a newcomer in this field -- I am here 10 years,"
Hayakawa writes. "Because I thought this field was not a science the
scientists who published papers on (seismoelectromagnetics) were not so
qualified."
Since that time, he says, Japanese researchers have confirmed seismic effects
not only in the Earth's crust, but to the atmosphere's highest reaches,
the ionosphere. Hayakawa thinks those "seismic effects" may be
propagated by very low-frequency radio emissions from the Earth, consistent
with Freund's theory of the emission of positive charges. He plans to invite
Freund to Japan to address the International Union on Radio Science in
August.
Earthquake light effects are less pronounced at transverse faults like
the San Andreas in California, where plates mainly rub alongside each other.
Nevertheless, before the 1906 San Francisco quake, a "flickering haze"
appeared over the ground. Earthquake lights are much more pronounced near
the far more dangerous thrust faults, such as those that occur in Alaska
-- where 51 percent of all U.S. quakes occur -- and in Japan.
In May 1978, residents of Homer awoke to a "false sunrise" over
the western side the Cook Inlet -- several hours before the real sunrise.
About that time, Anchorage bush pilot Sumner Putnam reported to the Division
of Geological and Geophysical Surveys that he saw greenish-white flashes
in Nondalton that coincided with bursts of static on his plane's radio.
State seismologists report no current research in Alaska on earthquake
lights or the prediction of quakes.
|
