It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Around the turn of the millennium, Earth’s spin started going off-kilter, and nobody could quite say why.
For decades, scientists had been watching the average position of our planet’s rotational axis, the imaginary rod around which it turns, gently wander south, away from the geographic North Pole and toward Canada. Suddenly, though, it made a sharp turn and started heading east.
Now, some of the same scientists have identified another factor that’s had the same kind of effect: colossal quantities of water pumped out of the ground for crops and households.
“Wow,” Ki-Weon Seo, who led the research behind the latest discovery, recalled thinking when his calculations showed a strong link between groundwater extraction and the drifting of Earth’s axis. It was a “big surprise,” said Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University.
One main cause is that Earth’s crust and mantle are springing back after being covered for millennia by gigantic ice sheets, rebounding like a mattress unburdened of a sleeper. This has been steadily changing the balance of mass around the planet.
More recently, the balance has also been altered by factors more closely linked to human activity and the global climate. These include the melting of mountain glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, changes in soil moisture, and our impounding of water behind dams.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday emphatically denied that he was involved or present when his son Hunter Biden is alleged to have texted a Chinese business partner in 2017, claiming that he was sitting with his father.
Asked whether he was involved in the business dealings or was sitting with Hunter when the message was sent, Biden told reporters Wednesday, “No. I wasn’t.”
Asked again, Biden replied more forcefully, “No.”
A Department of Justice (DoJ) report released today has confirmed that Jeffrey Epstein‘s death in 2019 was determined to be a suicide and not the result of any external involvement, putting an end to years of widespread conspiracy theories surrounding the
Epstein’s death was the result of his own actions, report says
Fears are brewing that an apocalypse is coming. But instead of burning buildings and utter chaos, there's a monthslong global internet blackout. The concern comes amid recent solar storm data that has emerged, but is the current activity on the sun really enough to cause what's been dubbed the "internet apocalypse?"
Videos have been making the rounds on social media claiming that this apocalypse is on its way. One video, which has amassed more than 4 million views on TikTok, claims that a solar storm could cause such an event to happen within the decade.
Despite the trending claims, such an event is thought to only occur once every half-millennium.
The sun has been in Solar Cycle 25 since December 2019, meaning its 25th 11-year cycle since record keeping began in 1755. At the beginning of the current cycle, the National Weather Service predicted that peak sunspot activity would happen in 2025, with the overall activity of the cycle being "fairly weak."
But earlier this month, researchers determined that the cycle has "ramped up much faster" than what was originally predicted, with "more sunspots and eruptions than experts had forecast."
"Tracking and predicting the Sun's solar cycles gives a rough idea of the frequency of space weather storms of all types – from radio blackouts to geomagnetic storms and solar radiation storms – and it's used by many industries to gauge the potential impact of space weather on Earth," NOAA explains.
If you have eclipse glasses, put them on and look at the sun. There's a naked-eye sunspot today (AR3354). South Korean astronomer Bum-Suk Yeom saw it this morning and created this infographic: (picture located at the site)
The sunspot is seven times wider than Earth itself, covering an area of the sun equal to ~25% of the historical Carrington sunspot. These dimensions mean it can be seen with the human eye (no magnification required) if the sun is properly filtered.
The amazing thing is, this sunspot didn't exist two days ago. It has grown with remarkable rapidity.