Swarm of quakes hits Hawaii

About 70 shallow earthquakes in 2 hours occurred beneath the upper east rift zone of Kīlauea early this morning. The swarm began at 2:15 a.m. on Sunday, June 17 and is ongoing. Some quakes are in the mid 3's magnitudes. The earthquakes are centered 1 km (1 mile) southwest of Mauna Ulu and are concentrated between 1.5 and 3 kilometers (1-2 miles) deep. As of 4:30 a.m., ten of the quakes had magnitudes greater than 3 and were felt by nearby residents.
All data so far is consistent with the event being a shallow intrusion of magma. The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory is watching the situation closely and has deployed field crews to the scene.
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park has taken the following precautionary measures: Chain of Craters road is closed. Crater Rim Drive is closed between Jaggar museum and the Thurston lava tube parking lot. NPS personnel are sweeping both roads to evacuate visitors.
USGS Quake List: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.php

Quake in Victoria

An earthquake measuring 3.2 on the Richter scale has shaken the town of Myrtleford in Victoria's north-east.The tremor was detected about 6am (AEST) on Monday, and lasted only a couple of seconds, Geoscience Australia said.
Seismologist Phil Cummins said the earthquake occurred 45km south-east of the town and did not cause any damage."We estimate a magnitude of 3.5, and was not large enough to cause damage," Mr Cummins said."It appears to have been shallow, but the depth is uncertain (at this time)."Mr Cummins said that shock waves could be felt in the area, but he did not expect any further earthquakes in the coming days.He said small quakes like this were common in Australia, even though the country was not on the edge of a plate boundary.
The Indian-Australian plate was being pushed north and was colliding with the Eurasian, Philippine and Pacific platesvb, he said."That sort of creates a compression of the plate, and it squeezes it," Mr Cummins said."In this area (Myrtleford), it is pretty much squeezed in an east-west direction, so due to that squeezing the stress in the Earth's crust gradually builds up until it is eventually released."According to Geoscience Australia, there was a small earthquake, which measured 2.5 on the Richter scale recorded on June 6, near Foster, 140km south-east of Melbourne.On May 28, a quake measuring 2.5 occurred near Grantville, in Victoria's south-east.

Evacuation

Sunday June 10, 03:12 PM
About 4,000 residents in the NSW Hunter Valley are being forced to evacuate their homes amid predictions the Hunter River will breach its levee.
The State Emergency Service (SES) on Sunday afternoon issued an evacuation order for residents of central Maitland, South Maitland and Lorne following revised predictions that floodwaters would peak at five centimetres above the levee by 9pm (AEST).
Residents were being advised to be out of their homes by 8pm, SES spokesman Philip Campbell said."The revised flood peak of 11.4 metres is expected by 9pm and that will cause the levee to over-top," Mr Campbell said.About 5,000 people in the Maitland and Singleton areas have been told to evacuate since Saturday.
But after three days of severe storms battering parts of the state, emergency services are bracing themselves for the worst of the flooding still to come.
Upstream of Maitland, the swollen Hunter River has already closed the New England Highway at Branxton.Further south at Tuggerah Lakes on the NSW Central Coast, high flood waters have forced 400 residents out of their homes on the western shore.
Earlier, Mr Campbell said waters were waist deep in some of the already flooded properties in the Hunter and Tuggerah Lakes regions, with those in the lowest-lying areas inundated up to roof level.
"Those people in those areas have been evacuated well and truly ahead of time and given sufficient notice to remove all their valuables," Mr Campbell said.

Hot stuff

Question:
what is the hottest planet in our solar system?
The answer will astonish you.
No, it is not Mercury.
Answer:
Venus because
At over 800°, it is hotter than Mercury because the clouds and abundant carbon dioxide hold in most of the heat received from the sun

Gulf Stream

Recently, some scientists have been claiming that the Gulf Stream is more stable than thought, but there is now additional evidence that it is weakening. The Gulf Stream's flow turned south in early May, and continued moving southward through May 15. By May 22, it was beginning to show signs of recovery, however what had been one of the hottest springs on record in the British Isles has been transformed into a cold and wet beginning of June. Is this simply normal for the area, or did the change in the stream's flow cause it? The present failure has almost certainly led to severe weather not only in Europe, but across the entire northern hemisphere. The present anomaly was too short lived to provide a clear relationship, but it is also true that these dramatic southerly turns of the stream are not commonplace. In the years that Unknowncountry has been watching the Gulf Stream, the December 2006 and May 2007 anomalies are the only two we have observed.
My two cents worth:
not only has this happened in the Northern Hemisphere but here in the Southern Hemisphere in particular in the Canberra region the same weather has manifested. We have had furious north westerly gusting winds that have wreaked havoc on homes and brought ice weather along with a furious dump of rain. This all has happened at the same time in the Southern aswell as Northern Hemispheres.
Guess there's truth to the saying that we are all one.

Sudden Climate Change is Happening Now

Australia is suffering from a crippling drought, and now it appears that California is also in serious trouble. Meanwhile horrendous tornadoes sweep the US midwest, followed by gigantic floods, and China and Europe experience scorching spring weather. To top it all off, the first named storm of the season has appeared off the coast of the Carolinas weeks before hurricane season even begins.

And now scientists are telling us that the poles are melting far faster than models predicted--in fact, that the north pole is at least thirty years ahead of schedule and Greenland is melting at a rate that even two years ago was completely unanticipated.

So, why are the models so far off?

The reason is that something besides pollution is at work, and it was not anticipated. Other planets in the solar system, are also showing signs of warming. The system-wide warming effect is being added to the warming that we are creating, with the result that it's all happening with blinding speed, and not only that, there's no way to tell if system-wide warming will increase, stop or even reverse, so there's no way to tell what is actually going to happen.

It is important to keep a careful watch on conditions that might result in extreme climate disruptions, and right now the continuing weakness of the Gulf Stream and the generally unsettled weather are causing us to watch even more carefully.

The biggest bang of all

KABOOM indeed! In a cascade of superlatives, astronomers reported that they have seen the brightest and most powerful stellar explosion ever recorded.
The cataclysm - a monster more than 100 times as energetic as the typical supernova in which the more massive stars end their lives - may be an example, they said, of a completely new type of explosion.

Such a blast, proposed but never seen, would explain how the earliest and most massive stars in the universe ended their lives and strewed new elements across space to fertilise future stars and planets.

"It is quite possibly the most massive star that has ever been seen to explode," said Nathan Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, who estimated it as "freakishly massive", about 150 times the mass of the sun.

The star was discovered in a galaxy 240 million light years away in the constellation Perseus.

In a normal supernova, the core of a star collapses and forms either a neutron star or a black hole, with some heavy elements blown into space. But this supernova appears to be the result of the core not collapsing but being obliterated in an explosion blasting all its material into space.

The New York Times, Reuters

Lets try this wayout hypothesis on for size.
Leave your doubts and aspersions under the mat and enter the home of my mind...

What if...
we are right now no longer on the Earth that has been our home for millenia
we have left our 3D world and are already on the 5D planet that we are evolving to
but in reality are here already, just consciously not aware of this
and what the scientists observed was in reality our own planet evolving into a supernova in the future that we are observing now, as time is NON LINEAR and we
are at the beginning of the 'oreborus' of time just in a slightly different space
lets call it a "parallel universe", so because we are at the point that is closest to the
end of the old and the beginning of the new we are priviledged to witness the end
of the old