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| A still from a video taken during the giant earthquake in Turkey earlier this week. That blue in the sky is a large power flash, as either a transformer or transmission line failed during the quake. |
A 7.8 earthquake, and a series of powerful aftershocks has left widespread devastation and thousands of people dead. It's one of the world's worst earthquake disasters in memory. At last count, 11,000 people were thought to have perished.
An earthquake isn't a meteorological or climate issue, so it's not a topic I usually cover in this blog thingy. But there are weather-related issues that further endanger victims. And there's questions about some odd phenomenon people saw in the sky.
Plus, this calamity is bringing out the nut jobs, as disasters tend to do. We'll get into that in a bit.
BAD WEATHER WORSENS THINGS
The biggest worry I have is how cold it is in the earthquake zone. Since the earthquake hit, daytime temperatures have generally been just above freezing, while nighttime lows have been close to 20 degrees.
People awaiting rescue beneath the rubble are already under extreme physical stress, as you might imagine. The cold makes it worse. Remember, the earthquake hit before dawn. People were in bed, certainly not dressed for winter.
These survivors can easily die of hypothermia, or freeze to death under these conditions.
Hope is obviously fading for finding more survivors.
The cold can slow down rescue efforts, too. Even worse, as Fox Weather reports, patches of freezing rain and sleet are roaming the heart of the earthquake zone. The northern part of the disaster area is experiencing moderate snow.
The ice that's accumulating can only make the rescue effort more difficult. It could also slow down the aid flowing in from foreign nations, including the United States.
In the second half of this week, precipitation should end in the disaster zone, but overnight lows will continue to drop to near 20 degrees, while daytime highs only get up to the 35-40 degree range.
Thousands of survivors are also outdoors in the frigid weather, since emergency shelters are lacking and so many buildings are destroyed. There could be additional deaths because of inadequate shelter in the aftermath of the quake.
This is as bad as a situation can get.
ODD LIGHTS
Video taken during the first and strongest earthquake, at 4:17 a.m. local time, show frequent flashes of light in the sky as the earth shook violently.
I'm quite sure all, or almost all of those flashing lights were power lines snapping, transformers collapsing and power substations suffering damage during the shaking.
Those power flashes look like lightning, but it was the power grid collapsing. You can see in some of the videos neighborhoods losing power at the time of nearby flashes.
You see the same sort of thing in the United States and elsewhere during nighttime tornadoes or extreme winds.
Still, it's possible some of the flashes could have come from other sources.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey:
"Phenomena such as sheet lightning, balls of light, streamers and steady glows reported in association with earthquakes are called earthquake lights (EQL). Geophysicists differ on the extent to which they think individual reports of unusual lighting near the time and epicenter of an earthquake actually represent EQL; some doubt that any of the reports constitute solid evidence for EQL, whereas others think that at least some reports plausibly correspond to EQL"
Whatever might or might not be going on with lights during earthquakes remains a mystery.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
The earthquake was really dumb, awful luck.
Like almost all earthquakes, this one occurred along a fault. Plates of the earth crusts beneath the surface are ever so slowly grinding past each other. Sometimes, parts of the fault get stuck. Pressure builds and builds, and finally the sticking point breaks. And you get an earthquake. Some of them are huge, like this one.
It's all basic geology and physics, tragic as it is.
This one hit in an area that doesn't have a recent history of enormous quakes. Building codes weren't up to date. So a lot of structures collapsed. This just made everything worse.
Lots of people have intense anxiety about the state of the world. Institutions they should trust have let them down. So, as Scientific American states:
"In such situations, a conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem more straightforward and controllable,"
There's apparently no limit to how outlandish these conspiracy theories can get. People will believe anything.
Against that backdrop, grifters gotta grift.
These scammers get on social media to promote the most outlandish conspiracies, knowing that will generate tons of clicks. Which means revenue. And they're convincing emotionally vulnerable people to believe the conspiracies, alienating them further from friends and families.
Plus, the conspiracy theories are endangering innocent people by making them targets of people who believe these whacked out stories.
I don't know how to combat this, other than mock these scumbags.
So, apparently, the "globalists" are mad that Turkey wasn't thrilled with the idea of Sweden and Finland joining NATO.
Which inspired the "globalists" including the United States to trigger the earthquake, through HARRP, whatever that is, or a nuclear detonator deep within the ground to trigger the quake.
The wacko grifters don't explain how the U.S. or somebody else would insert a giant nuclear device beneath the ground in Turkey and Syria without somebody in either nation noticing.
The HARRP crowd seems to be let on Twitter by some moron who goes by the name of Snezhina Boahen.
Here's their genius post:
As even the now loose-goosy Twitter alerts us after that post, those lightning flashes are, as noted above, the power grid failing in the earthquake.
I'm also comforted by the fact that this post was met with tons of derision in the comments.
The conspiracy theories get tragic-comic. The most outlandish one is that God killed all those people in Turkey and Syria because he was mad at Sam Smith for performing a song with a satanic theme during the Grammys. I wish I was making this up.
The God I believe in doesn't do mass murders because he gives two thumbs down for a brief awards show performance. But maybe that's just me.
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