Monumental olive trees of the Iberian Peninsula younger than expected

Due to the large size of the olive trees in the Mediterranean region, many experts have claimed that they are millennia old but “there had never been a scientific study to verify this,” as explained to SINC by the ecologist Bernat Claramunt from the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF). A team from this centre has now analysed the ages of the famous olive trees and the oldest found is 627 years of age. Claramunt states that “this is one of the oldest specimens recorded in the Mediterranean ecosystem and on the European Continent.”

Lead by Jordi Martínez-Vilalta, the CREAF researchers employed classic dendrochronology methods based on the analysis of growth rings in the tree trunks. The study has been published in the Dendrochronologia journal.

The scientists analysed 14 olive trees (Olea europea) from the coastal region of Montsià in Catalonia. As Claramunt explains, “we use a technique that allows for the extraction of a small cylindrical piece of the trunk which goes from the bark to the core of the tree. This sample contains the life history of the tree.” They also studied entire sections of the trunk that had been previously carved out.

Obtaining results from trunks is not easy. Claramunt warns that “there are times when the rings are hardly visible or they do not follow a known time pattern. The olive tree could also be too twisted.”

The data from this study can also be useful when reconstructing the climatic conditions of the last few centuries. “As well as dating these olive trees, we have shown that this type of tree can be used for dendrochronological analysis,” outlines the expert. The olive trees that captivated the famous Spanish poet Antonio Machado come from a variety that was cultivated in Palestine 6,000 years ago. This species spread West throughout the Mediterranean thanks to the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, the Greeks and the Romans. It is believed that they started to be cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula some 4,000 years ago.

There are at least 17 tree species in the world that can live longer than one thousand years and nearly all of them are conifers. The oldest known are the pine trees (Pinus longaeva) in the Rocky Mountains of North America that are nearly 5,000 years old.

“In Europe there are many trees that are considered to be one thousand years old but nobody has calculated their age,” explains Claramunt. The Regional Government of Catalonia has recently changed the name of the ‘millennium-old’ olive trees to ‘monumental trees’. …

via The Archaeology News Network: Monumental olive trees of the Iberian Peninsula younger than expected.

Time Lapse of Earth, What’s that Spotlight?

A timelapse of Planet Earth from Electro-L, a geostationary satellite orbiting 40000km above the Earth. The satellite creates a 121 megapixel image every 30 minutes with four visible and infrared light wavelengths. The infrared light appears green in these images, and shows vegetation. The images are the largest whole disk images of our planet, the resolution is 1 kilometer per pixel. The images are “masked” by a circular barrier that blocks out the light of the Sun and other stars. This is to prevent damage to the camera by exposure to direct sunlight. City lights are not visible because they are thousands of times less bright than the reflection of sunlight off the Earth. The images have been interpolated (blended) to create a smooth animation.

In other words, this is not what you would see from space. The green would not be so green, etc.  I believe this is a more accurate view:

“The Blue Marble” is a famous photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972 by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft en route to the Moon at a distance of about 29,000 kilometers (18,000 statute miles). It shows Africa, Antarctica, and the Arabian Peninsula.

Forty million Japanese in ‘extreme danger’ of life-threatening radiation poisoning, mass evacuations likely

… Japanese officials are currently engaging in talks with Russian diplomats about where tens of millions of Japanese refugees might relocate in the very-likely event that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility’s Reactor 4 completely collapses. According to a recent report by EUTimes.net, Japanese authorities have indicated that as many as 40 million Japanese people are in “extreme danger” of radiation poisoning, and many eastern cities, including Tokyo, may have to be evacuated in the next few weeks or months to avoid extreme radiation poisoning.

As we continue to report, the situation at Fukushima is dire, to say the least. Reactor 4 is on the verge of complete collapse (http://www.naturalnews.com/035789_Fukushima_Cesium-137_Plume-Gate.html), which would send radioactive nuclear fuel from thousands of fuel rods directly into the atmosphere. These fuel rods, after all, are already exposed to the open air, but the full release of their fuel would cause not only a regional catastrophe, but also a global nuclear holocaust.

“A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant’s No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be ‘the weakest link’ in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster,” reported the Mainichi Daily News recently.

“The worst-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant’s other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate.”

So in an effort to establish contingency for the Japanese people in closest proximity to the fray, authorities are considering potentially relocating tens of millions of Japanese people to the Kuril Islands, which are located in Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast region, or potentially even to China, where hundreds of uninhabited “ghost town” cities with no apparent use could house at least 64 million refugees. If this relocation were to occur, Japan would largely become a barren wasteland.

‘Wave’ of highly-radioactive waste reportedly headed for West Coast of U.S.

For the Japanese people, the Fukushima disaster represents the complete demise of their nation, as literally nothing is being done to contain the thousands of exposed fuel rods that will eventually explode when Reactor 4 fails. But the consequences of all this are not limited to just Japan, as the rest of the world, including the U.S., will bear the brunt of this ticking nuclear time-bomb as well. We are, in fact, already suffering the consequences of this “nuclear war without a war” (http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28870).

Late last year, for example, it was reported that U.S. officials ordered the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to release three million gallons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean. Now, according to The Intel Hub, this waste will soon arrive on the shores of the U.S. West Coast, unbeknownst to the millions of Americans living in that region that will be exposed to it.

This new ‘wave’ of radiation is, of course, in addition to previous waves that have already killed thousands of people, many of whom were children, and sparked a considerable uptick in cancer cases. And as time goes on, more and more people living in America will begin to develop chronic conditions as a result of perpetual radiation poisoning from Fukushima, and many will die, all while the mainstream media remains willfully silent on the issue.

And the federal government has known all along that the Fukushima disaster is shaping up to be the most severe global catastrophe in recorded history, as was evidenced in a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Not only were federal authorities aware of the extreme dangers posed by Fukushima from the early days of the disaster, but they also orchestrated misinformation campaigns to keep the American people, and the rest of the world, in the dark about the truth (http://www.naturalnews.com/035847_plume-gate_Fukushima_radiation.html).

Since neither the U.S. nor the Japanese governments appear willing to actually deal with Fukushima, and particularly the Reactor 4 situation, NaturalNews is calling on the United Nations (U.N.) to take swift action. A new petition urges the U.N. to organize a Nuclear Security Summit to address the problem of Reactor 4, and also establish an independent assessment team to somehow stabilize it and prevent its fuel from potentially destroying all life on earth.

via Forty million Japanese in ‘extreme danger’ of life-threatening radiation poisoning, mass evacuations likely.

Remote Viewer Solves Murder

Last year, a California court convicted a swindler of murder in a case that was solved partly, the lead police investigator said, with the help of remote viewing NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show.In the May 5th edition of the Las Vegas Sun, Joe Schoenmann quotes Charlie Rose, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as saying that “it seems to me a hell of a cheap radar system. And if the Russians have it and we don’t, we’re in serious trouble.” He said this in 1979, when we were more concerned with the Cold War that al-Qaeda.

Six years ago, Las Vegas-based photographer Robert Knight was worried that he hadn’t heard from his friend Stephen B. Williams for awhile, so he asked remote viewer Angela Thompson Smith for help in finding him.She gave herself and six remote viewers she had trained a coordinate–a random series of letters and numbers–on which to concentrate. Schoenmann writes:

“The viewers each did from one to three remote viewing sessions of about an hour each. They were seeking information unknown at the time, working blind with only the random numbers and letters provided by Smith to focus on. Smith began the work with an initial viewing of the missing man, a follow-up viewing of the suspect’s location, then a profile of the suspect. The other viewers helped seek possible accomplices and the location of the suspect after he fled.

“They all came up with the same thing: an image of body in water, perhaps caught in a net, near Catalina Island off the Southern California coast. Coincidentally, Knight was in the area at the time and as soon as he heard a newscast about an unidentified body found off Catalina Island, he knew it must be his friend. The next morning he called the county morgue and said, “I know the identity of that body.”

He explained that the body would be missing 3 fingers from its left hand, as the result of an accident in shop class almost 50 years before. He was put on hold while they checked and, sure enough, the body was missing those fingers.So how did Smith die–could the remote viewers help Knight with that? Knight told police that a man named Harvey Morrow, who was supposed to be an investment adviser, had befriended Williams and was investing millions of dollars of his money for him. When the police investigated, they found out that Morrow had been stealing Williams’ money, but they couldn’t find Morrow.

The remote viewers helped out: They said he had fled to the British Virgin Islands. He was arrested and convicted and is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. Schoenmann quotes physicist Hal Puthoff, one of the founders of the government’s Stargate remote viewing program, as saying, “People seem to fall into two categories: those who have been intimately involved with the phenomenon and know it works, and those who haven’t and know it can’t.” …

via News from the Edge | Remote Viewer Solves Murder | unknowncountry.

Then there are the people in the third category who know it works, but also know that the actual protocol used by the successful remote viewers has not been revealed.

Woman shorts ignite after picking up rocks at beach

Officials with Orange County Public Health have sent two rocks found at Trestles State Beach to a state lab for review.

A 43-year-old woman is undergoing surgery after two rocks that she collected at a South County beach ignited in the pocket of her shorts, officials from Orange County Fire Authority said.

The incident happened about 3:30 p.m. Saturday when the woman was standing in her kitchen after returning from an outing to Trestles Beach. She had been home for about an hour when the pocket of her cargo shorts caught fire, OCFA Capt. Marc Stone said.

The woman tried to stop, drop and roll but was unsuccessful in getting the flames out, Stone said.

Her husband also tried to help and got second-degree burns when he tried to pull the shorts off, Stone said. The rocks, described as small, the size of a hamburger patty, smooth and orange and green in color, fell from the shorts onto the floor and continued to burn the wood floor and fill the house with smoke.

Firefighters responded immediately to the home on Avenida Estrella. When they arrived, the husband had successfully gotten the shorts off his wife and was hosing her down on the front deck with a garden hose, Stone said.

Paramedics treated the woman for severe second- and third-degree burns on her right leg from her thigh to her knee and on her right arm, Stone said. The husband also was treated for second-degree burns on his arm.

Both were taken to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana. Firefighters took the rocks with them to show to doctors, Stone said.

“I talked to the paramedic who treated her, and in his 27 years in responding to calls near the beach, he’s never seen this,” Stone said. “The rocks were still smoking when firefighters took them to the hospital.”

OCFA hazardous materials unit was consulted. The rocks have been taken to Orange County Public Heath and are undergoing testing to see what happened, Stone said. “Tests are expected to take a few weeks because they are dealing with an unknown.

“There is phosphorous that naturally occurs on the sand at the beach, but no one has ever heard of pants catching fire,” Stone said.

via Woman shorts ignite after picking up rocks at beach | stone, shorts, rocks – News – The Orange County Register.

Comment on ATS post by wutz4tom:

That beach is right up against Camp Pendleton where they do military exercises on the beach, so it could be left over parts from illumination flares for nigh drills.