Articles in Floods
Chinaman Builds Ark Orb
Chinaman is such an antiquated term, but I’m not sure if it is un-PC… oh well….
This bloke from China has taken the bull by the horns and built a survival pod:
According to the Daily Mail:
Liu Qiyuan (a farmer from China) created the fibreglass shells – dubbed Noah’s Ark – after being inspired by the apocalyptic Hollywood movie 2012.
….Building them around a steel frame in a yard at his home in the village of Qiantun, Hebei province, south of Beijing, he says the pods can offer life-saving shelter during natural disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes.
The pods are able to float on water and some of have their own propulsion.
The airtight spheres with varying interiors contain oxygen tanks and seatbelts with space for around 14 people, and are designed to remain upright when in water.
It’s not a perfect solution, unfortunately… As we have seen from recent tsunamis, it is often not death by drowning, but …
Cities At Risk of Super Cyclones
There are two parts to this story from Cosmos Magazine:
“A black swan is a surprise with huge impact,” she said yesterday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California. “For this study, we defined [it] as an event which cannot reasonably be anticipated based on historical records alone.”
1. A “black swan” cyclone has the intensity of Superstorm Sandy, but would occur somewhere such an event has not previously been recorded. According to the news item a similar storm hit New York in the 19th century. Computer simulations have enabled scientists to make a short list of places where a super cyclone could occur, even though none have previously.
2. Darwin, Tampa and Dubai made that short list. Darwin (see below) and Tampa have some degree of cyclone expectation, so presumably they are reasonably prepared. But Dubai is the big stand out. I have no idea how that …
Hurricane Sandy: Not Good Enough
Preppers throughout the USA played close attention to Hurricane Sandy, and how well people in New York coped with the situation. These minor disasters are a good indicator for how a country can survive when a massive disaster occurs. Apologies to New Yorkers and New Jersey folk for calling it minor, but this level of disaster disrupts life somewhere in the world several times every year. They might be rare at a specific location, but globally it is just nature and humans intersecting as they always have.
Being the richest country in the world, with plenty of natural disasters in it short history, the USA should be able to cope with a supercell storm. They even knew it was coming, and where it would hit. And yet we have sites like SHTFPlan.com detailing how poorly FEMA responded:
Portable toilets and tents aren’t great when more storms are coming and it is almost …
A Floating Safe for Your Valuables
I’m not really sure what to make of this new product. It is common sense to keep your important documents in a water-proof, damage-proof safe, and there are plenty of options already available. But this one floats!
The description doesn’t translate terribly well from Czech:
Very important thing is that the safe-ball with it’s protection shell is floating in the water, so it’s size is ride on weight and size of protected valuables. But in case of making decisions between life and death, we don’t need much. The most important thing is to have life-saving stuff and all other things come itself. And if we have on top of that a few loving keepsakes and memories, we can survive! [Source: safe-ball.eu]
A newspaper article from 1918 shows that the concept is not new – Menotti Nanni invented it.
It doesn’t look like the Czech product is available for purchase at this stage, but what interests me is …
NASA: Catastrophic Floods Happen
When NASA say catastrophic floods they are not talking about Hurricane Katrina. Check this out:
Geologists would learn that the waters could have drowned a 40-story skyscraper, making them 20 times deeper than the Hurricane-Katrina-triggered flooding that destroyed swaths of New Orleans and the Gulf coast in 2005. Computer modeling would reveal that in the upper Grand Coulee, water charged over the cliff now called Dry Falls at the highway speed of 65 miles per hour. Dry Falls would be recognized as the largest waterfall to have existed on Earth, carrying 10 times as much water as all modern rivers combined.
The article is discussing the Washington state canyon known as Grand Coulee, and the history of discovering what caused its creation. Modern opinion is that the flooding was due to glacial melting at the end of the last Ice Age. I found the final paragraph interesting, considering NASA is very much …
Updates: Flood, Tsunami & CME
Thailand is now 1/3 under water due to the worsening floods. This map shows the affected area (might take a little while to load).
Up to 20 million tons of debris from the Japanese tsunami in March will eventually be washed ashore on the west coast of the USA, and will start arriving in three years. The debris includes TVs, fridges and shipping boats. Expect beachcombing to become a boom hobby!
Half of the USA got to see the northern lights last Monday, thanks to a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun. The pic below is from Norway, more recent pics are at SpaceWeather.com
New California Risk: Superstorm
As if supervolcanoes and earthquakes weren’t enough to worry about, add floods to the list of natural events that could be catastrophic for Californians.
A group of more than 100 scientists and experts say in a new report that California faces the risk of a massive “superstorm” that could flood a quarter of the state’s homes and cause $300 billion to $400 billion in damage. Researchers point out that the potential scale of destruction in this storm scenario is four or five times the amount of damage that could be wrought by a major earthquake.
Such a storm could dump 10 feet of water onto the state in the space of 40 days. Geological evidence shows that storms of this magnitude have occurred in California in the years 212, 440, 603, 1029, 1418, 1605 and 1861. The most recent was so severe the state capital was temporarily …
Russian Professor: Prepare for Great Flood
Igor Kopylov, professor at Moscow Energy Institute, believes that our planet has had its energy balance upset.
A weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field was first registered early in the 20th century, and a consistent drop in the speed of rotation, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It has been established that when the Earth’s rotation slows by one second a year, it releases a tremendous amount of heat, hundreds of times the volume of energy released by human industrial activity.
…The Solar System, including the Earth, travels through the Galaxy in spiraling elliptic paths. The cycle time for the larger spiral is 200-210 million years, and for the smaller one, which determines minor galactic cycles, 26,000 years. Correspondingly, half a cycle lasts 130 centuries. This period almost exactly coincides with the date of the last Flood, the occurrence of which was real. The myths and legends of many peoples including …
