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August 24, 2011

The Link Between Climate Change and Geological Disruption: Can Global Warming Be A Cause of Earthquakes?

By Paul from Potomac

Over the past few years there have been a growing number of mega-scale earthquake disasters, especially in Chile and Japan. Yesterday, the most powerful quake since 1897 struck in normally placid Virginia, shaking Washington, DC in the middle of a busy workday. The damage in the DC area was miniscule,only about $100 million, though sobering to many who witnessed it. There may be a scientific linkage to global warming.

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Over the past few years there have been a growing number of mega-scale earthquake disasters, especially in Chile and Japan. Yesterday, the most powerful quake since 1897 struck in normally placid Virginia, shaking Washington, DC in the middle of a busy workday. The damage in the DC area was miniscule,only about $100 million, though sobering to many who witnessed it. The quake in Japan was over 50,000 times as powerful, at 8.9 on the Richter scale, and has yet to be measured in terms of human suffering and death. The "China Syndrome" effects on three nuclear reactors at Fukushima, a complete core meltdown, may yet cause severe long-term effects on the resident population. Two nuclear reactors at North Anna, in Virginia, automatically shut down as designed yesterday in the 5.8 quake. It was revealed that both reactors suffered precisely the same defect of external power loss as a result of the quake. North Anna is a Westinghouse PWR. Fukushima is a GE BWR, which was known to designers to be dangerously underdesigned.

We now know that the nuclear reactors are very vulnerable, and are not idiot-proof, fool-proof, and earthquake-proof as advertised.

Chile's earthquake measured 8.8 on the Richter scale, just slightly less than Fukushima, but the sixth strongest ever recorded in history by a seismograph. It occurred on February 27, 2010, two months after the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. Japan's quake was just over a year later, on April 11, 2011. The severity of these events was extreme, in that these types of severe quakes should occur decades apart, even centuries. But they happened within months, which leads to speculation about causality.

The ice in the ocean around Antarctica is also melting at alarming rates, especially by late summer, as a result of global warming. Both quakes occurred just as the ice was reforming after summer in the south.


Now we have a century-class earthquake a few months later, on August 23, 2011, just as t by International Arctic Research Center (IARC) in corporation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)

Now we have a century-class earthquake a few months later, on August 23, 2011, just as the hottest year on global record has just passed and the entire Arctic Ocean has just melted away. Snowfalls in the Antarctic are at record levels again this year during its winter, which adds to the global imbalance of excess ice at the South Pole, and no ice within a thousand miles of the North Pole.  

Many scientists have postulated that there may be a link between the two seemingly unrelated natural disasters. Many are being laughed at by the global warming deniers, as well as their own people. However, the confluence of these extreme events does leave open the door for reasonable doubt.

Since the amount of melting at the poles is about 100 feet of ice each year over more than a 5 million square mile area, there is a considerable amount of mass defect when it melts. Similarly, the land mass in Antarctica has thousands of feet of ice covering the land and ice sheets breaking off into the ocean each summer during the melts. It is literally the same size as the Arctic Ocean, a little more than 5 million square miles. Doing the math, the imbalance created by the extreme melting at the poles is roughly 100,000 cubic miles of ice, plus 50k at the melting pole, and -50k at the freezing pole. This imbalance, coupled with the confluence of the earth's magnetic fields as they come together at the poles, places unusual forces upon the earth's tectonic plates.

This is not a scientific paper in that the work is not being funded for research, verified and reported by peer review, or carefully measured and compared to comparable situations that might have been measured and reported in the past.

I will state for the record, however, that this correlation of century-class geological events and extreme global warming as has never before been seen in human existence may indeed be linked to the interference of Man upon this earth.

What do you think?

--Paul from Potomac



Authors Website: http://www.paulallencurto.com

Authors Bio:

Designed first all-solar home for Ryland Homes in 1974. At MITRE, led a group of 35 of the best minds in the world (including Dr. Edward Teller, among others) who performed detailed engineering, scientific, socio-economic, and political analyses of all alternative energy choices for ERDA/DOE, NSF, and MITRE in 1975-80, and designed solar power plants at Gibbs & Hill in '80-'83. These included closed cycle gas turbines driven by a power tower, solar cogeneration 100MWe plant to power the Hidalgo, NM Phelps Dodge copper smelter using the Outokumpu Oy oxygen flash smelting process, the Ridgecrest Project with the Consortium of Alternate Energies, a seven-field power tower complex with 560 MWe peak power output with 100 hours of thermal storage for a 100 MWe base load system (China Lake/Ridgecrest, CA), and a 400 million gallon per year solar-powered ethanol plant. Known as world leader in alternative energy until the collapse of the field over the Reagan years.

Worked as a utility consultant for 8 years, and later at NASA for 16 years as a scientist and engineer, as Chief Technologist, reviewing all of NASA's R&D in every field of endeavor for the NASA Inventions and Contributions Board and the NASA Administrator.

20 invention disclosures, 5 patents, 87 scientific and technical peer-reviewed papers, 51 years in the profession, and successfully completed 15 projects on time, on budget, and meeting or exceeding specifications.

Listed in Who's Who In America and Who's Who In The World for the past several years and again in 2017.


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