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 not a fan of catastrophist notions:

“Our whole understanding of catastrophic processes has changed as a result of that work,” says Baker. “Now we know that many geologically interesting places, including the English Channel, were formed by floods. And it doesn’t only happen on Earth. Mars has outflow channels that are seen as evidence of catastrophic floods.”

Remember, if it has happened before, it will happen again!

NASA: Catastrophic Floods Happen is a post from: 2012 Blog

©2012 2012 Blog. All Rights Reserved.

• 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

Updates: Flood, Tsunami & CME is a post from: 2012 Blog

©2012 2012 Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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 moved to San Francisco, and Governor Leland Stanford had to take a rowboat to his own inauguration.

Report at Yahoo, a copy is at Scribd.

BTW, even if you don’t live in California, such a catastrophe would have world-wide repercussions, with California being the world’s eight largest economy.

New California Risk: Superstorm is a post from: 2012 Blog

©2012 2012 Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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 that of the Bible recorded the event.

The Flood has been dated rather precisely: at 11,100 BC. If we accept that the civilized society on Earth has been developing for 400,000 years, then this period saw 30 great floods, and we are witnessing the beginnings of the thirty-first flood.

Read the complete article at RIA Novosti.

In case you were wondering, leap seconds are currently being added at a rate of 0.6 seconds per year.

Russian Professor: Prepare for Great Flood is a post from: 2012 Blog

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