Volcanic Surprise: Take your Toys and Go Home

Eyjafjallajökull erupts during the strongest geomagnetic storm to hit Earth in 3 years; photo Albert Jakobsson

Tomorrow morning, April 19th, 2010, at around 5a.m. PST the Space Shuttle Discovery is due to reenter Earth’s atmosphere on a trajectory that takes her over the Pacific Northwest, and then on a southeasterly heading towards Cape Canaveral, Florida. She undocked from the International Space Station at the weekend in preparation for reentry.

Early birds in the states of Montana, South Dakota, Missouri and Mississippi and those driving to work in the cities of St. Louis, MO, Memphis, TN and Columbus, GA may catch a glimpse of the descending craft as it prepares for landing at the Kennedy Space Center, ETA 8:48a.m.

Trajectory of space shuttle Discovery on her way home tomorrow

Viewers in continental U.S. will be able to see Discovery as a blazing fireball in the dawn sky on first reentry over Northern California, Oregon, Washington and BC, and then, when daylight progresses, as a bright high-altitude object, as the craft heads east. Those who may not be sure of what they are seeing will hear a double sonic boom about a minute after the shuttle passes overhead.

Discovery’s appearance in the skies over continental USA is unusual, to say the least.

NASA is normally super-cautious, not only to schedule reentry on a trajectory over ocean (south Pacific or Atlantic) – to avoid potential conflict with commercial air traffic or the complication of an accident over such an important landmass – but also does not issue a specific schedule beforehand – for ‘security reasons’.

In the case of tomorrow’s landing, another issue has complicated NASA’s plans: the volcanic cloud emanating from Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. Because the eastern hemisphere is affected by dust and volcanic ash in the atmosphere resulting in the grounding of all European airlines, the shuttle’s choices were drastically reduced.

It is perhaps our present crazy world’s greatest irony that tomorrow, when the whole continent of Europe has not a single aircraft in the skies, except for patrolling military Tornadoes or light prop craft which can fly below radar, United States air traffic controllers will be overworked as they reroute planes so as not to provoke a chance encounter with the spacegoing shuttle on her way home.

Air travel all over northern Europe has been disrupted, with flights grounded or diverted due to the risk of engine damage from sucking in particles of ash from the volcanic cloud.  Even the usually noisy skies of helicopter traffic to and from North Sea Oil fields are silent.

Eyjafjallajökull sub-glacial eruption

And what of Eyjafjallajökull?

What series of convoluted circumstances caused her to erupt just when airlines the world over were pulling in their horns in response to global recession, cutting frills and flying fripperies to an absolute minimum?

Eyjafjallajökull is merely responding to a ripple in the mid-Atlantic ridge.

Iceland can’t help it: her island kingdom sits astride a large tectonic anomaly, where two plates meet, and – rather like Hawaii – has confounded scientists for centuries in their ability to ride the volcanic storms and still maintain buoyancy as islands. Icelanders have benefited in cleverly channeling underground heat from natural hot springs to provide comfort – even luxury – to every home, but, like Hawaiians, their tiny population (300,000, about the same as a medium-size British city) is not unaware of the fragility of their situation.

Eyjafjallajökull has erupted five times since human settlement in the ninth century and its most recent eruption has been going since March 20th this year, but it is only in the last week that ash from this eruption has reached the stratosphere of its continental neighbour.

And Europe is freaking out.

In terms of aviation, when almost all transport is presently airborne – people, freight, goods and services – it is understandable that Eyjafjallajökull’s blasting through its surface glacier and spewing dust and ash into the airlanes should cause concern. Health and safety have become buzzwords in industry: the natural reaction for air traffic regulators was to close everything down. So soon after Easter, when many were starting to enjoy the prospect of spring following a very hard winter, holiday travel numbers were high and planes fully booked.

Those airplanes are now dead in the water.

And, with no change in the foreseeable future, Europeans are stranded in remote locations worldwide, unable to get back home; British-based airlines may not take off and US-based airline traffic may not land in Europe.

Europe – the northern portion of it, certainly – is like a plague zone.

They’ve always said character comes to the rescue when crisis descends or hard times rule. And the other thing they say: Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

During the hard snows and frosts of winter – that in northern Scotland and pockets of Europe lasted until spring equinox – Britain went through a series of threats from companies in conflict with employment unions – with aviation and transportation strikes imminent – until intervention by a well-meaning Icelandic volcano moved the goalposts.

Suddenly, within the last week, other means of transportation – bus, taxi, train, ferry, tube, metro, hot air balloon, microlite, bicycle – have reared their heads again and a dumbed-down population re-creates, starts to think outside the box, begins to invent.

In early ‘seventies ‘3-day-week’ Great Britain, share-a-ride became an everyday occurrence, nobody drove a car without at least two other passengers, public transport was in full use and the struggling population again became aware of their parents’ post-war attitude of ‘conserving’ energy. It is possible that the present crisis may bring about a similar respect for alternative means to get from A to B, and consequently even more respect for the entity which caused the hiccup in the first place: Mother Earth.

Many of us have blogged over last winter about impending changes the Earth may put us through: for most of us those earth-changes were remote: reports from Haiti, Chile, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Turkey. But changes are starting to happen closer to home (Home being the First World).

large swathes of Amazon rainforest under threat

The First World has not traditionally reacted well to being threatened by Nature. It has acted (particularly over the last two generations – fifty years) as if nature were subservient to Man. It has turned a blind eye to decimated rain forests, depleted habitat for endangered species, global poverty, substandard housing and polluted drinking water in those ‘other’ worlds. It’s not accustomed to having its toys taken away and told to go home.

With the grounding of aircraft run by some of the world’s most elite flying operations, those ‘toys’ are getting a shakedown. And Big Business doesn’t like it.

Already on shaky ground over fears of recession, many airlines are already in debt or about to seek bail from world governments. Now governments themselves are questioning whether there are funds in the coffers to cover planetary transportation meldown. Big Business has traditionally used London, Paris, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Amsterdam as staging posts in its hops between hemispheres. Suddenly their wind-up toys aren’t working. No immediate replacement in sight, they’re having to think of ways around the situation.

Pressure/precipitation 4-day forecast, courtesy Unisys

Fortunately, continental Europe has remarkably efficient waterways, rail links, passenger liners, trains and autobahns. Every one of them has suddenly become remarkably important as an artery of communication in an atmospherically-deprived world. But if Icelandic ash continues to spew forth it will take some really revolutionary thinking for Big Business to survive. Seven million passenger-journeys have been cancelled in a few days. There’s talk right now of losses in the millions – Emirates Airlines calculating 25 million dollars per day in lost revenue, British Airways losing one million pounds every hour. Pretty soon those losses will be billions and thereafter . . . if Eyjafjallajökull doesn’t let up – or worse, if her neighboring volcanoes on the Ridge join in – figures will be incalculable. ‘Business’ as a concept will have no meaning.

None of us wants the approach to ‘End Times‘ to come suddenly. But there have been warnings; we have had clues; our history is littered with references to ‘preparing’ for when those ‘decline and fall’ times will come. So should we be surprised when the Earth herself is the instigator?

It is a well-known phenomenon that spacecraft engineers, pilots and scientists, on their return to Earth after a space mission, express feeling ‘transformed, changed, uplifted’ and ‘born-again’ by their experience outside Earth’s atmosphere. From liftoff as hardened scientists, electrical engineers, they return as philosophers, enlightened spirits.

It might be seen by some that Discovery’s reentry to Earth coinciding with the Earth’s growling northern latitudes indicate a sign of impending doom; for others it may signal the onset of liberation from earthly institutions which were beginning to cripple creativity; a top-heavy bureaucratic mechanism that smothers the budding creative spark.

Heaven knows, now is the time for creativity to surface and be recognized: time for the toys to come alive and play for real: our future and our future home – the planet Earth – depend on it.

©2010 Marian Youngblood
Marian Youngblood is the author of a prescient novel (in the light of this week’s events) ‘SHASTA: Critical Mass‘ which relates volcanic earth changes to Man’s ability to rise above his own beginnings and become superconscious human. Her book is entered in James Twyman’s contest to find the ‘next spiritual author’. Press this LINK if you would like to read an excerpt and vote for her entry. Round One (voting round) of the competition ends on May 3rd.

Crop Circle Season: an early bird?

Weeks before swallows return, we may see an early start to crop circle season

I believe the 2010 Crop Circle Season is imminent. I don’t mean this July. Much sooner. Possibly even next week.

I made a few notes on dates previous seasons began – even after atrocious winters – thinking I had at least another week before I needed to post this, another week of research and doublechecking the facts. But, in going over it again, I realize Crop Circle Consciousness is upping the ante.

H2O molecule or octohedron, West Overton June 1999

A decade ago the first crop designs in Wiltshire and Hampshire appeared when barley and wheat were beginning to show signs of ripening at the end of May and the first week of June. Similarly, in the early years of the 1990s’ decade, seasons began May-June. But as the decade got older, consciousness quickened and seasonal appearances started happening earlier. By the last year of the ‘nineties, 1999, the first crop circle appeared in Over Wallop Hampshire on April 3rd! In the early ‘noughties, up to and including 2006, the season didn’t begin until well into May or even June (2003-2004) in ripening barley and wheat. Then, bang, as if the last years of the decade again brought anticipation and focused interest on the phenomenon, the season started earlier: 2007: April 15th at Oliver’s Castle, Wiltshire; 2008: April 20th Waden Hill, Avebury. Last year, the first crop circle appeared in oil seed rape – not yet in flower – on April 14th at the Ridgeway.

April 14th is less than a week away. And there are already a number of fields planted in oil seed rape (canola) in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire.

Picked Hill, Wiltshire August 2000 'flower of life' crop circle

This year April 14th is also Vedic New Year: Vikridhi; the name itself occurs only once in 60 years. A week later, it’s Earth Day (Arbor Day), a northern hemisphere date chosen to celebrate the birth of naturalist John Muir, but more recently absorbed into the Earth-First culture of organic growers, tree-lovers and tree-huggers everywhere and, naturally by analogy, those who celebrate the earth’s crowning glory in crop form: the Croppies.

We all know the crop circle phenomenon has been getting more notice of late: worldwide attention, in fact. On the internet alone, it features in websites as diverse as ρѕу¢нє∂єℓι¢ α∂νєитυяє run by supreme techwiz ‘CO’, to the photographic marvels of Karen and Steve Alexander to the ultimate in documentary archives, the Dutch-run multi-lingual Crop Circle Archive which seems to have catalogued every crop pattern in every country since the beginning of Creation!

Then there are the more philosophical and ‘mystery school’ sites like Freddy Silva’s Crop Circle Secrets, Krsanna Duran’s Timestar and Paul Vigay’s leading-edge research site, Crop Circle Research.

Given that in all self-realized culture, ‘consciousness equals reality’, we’re speaking about a large slice of humanity who follow such blogs and website updates; a large group of people whose consciousness is willing the new season to begin.

CO runs an international blog, unfunded by donations, a labor of love. He’s very good at what he does, his blog-traffic is astounding (one hit every five seconds) and he has a distinctly Vedic following. The Alexanders, Cropcircleconnector and Lucy Pringle, on the other hand, are a little more conservative, receive handouts with solid Brit, or WASP, backing (Americanese for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), and have a slightly more ‘English’ approach to the subject. You are encouraged to buy a T-shirt or log on and read a plea for financial support before you can be routed to the goodies. The Dutch archive site offers a diagram catalogue of every crop circle, is volunteer-funded, but its attitude is open and its following represents perhaps half the First World. I like to think of CO’s following in the Indian Subcontinent as the Second World. The Third World is, so far, unrepresented.

So, give or take a few million, let’s say half the world is anticipating the new crop circle season. Not consciously, perhaps, but after a hard winter with only images in one’s mind or on one’s computer to feed off, it is hungry for a new influx. The future is wide open: will it show more mathematical code, more Mandelbrot sets, develop wild sacred geometry, or will it take the form of a Fibonacci spiral’s striking beauty? Or, or. . . will we of human culture stretch our superhuman electromagnetic circuitry and present ourselves with something we’ve never conceived before?

‘You mean, crop circles are rock ‘n’ roll?’ Julian Cope

Before he died, Paul Vigay wrote of his amazing work in crop circles. It ranged from simple on-the-ground measuring data and observation of cell-structure change in wheat, through correspondence with Gerald Hawkins on sacred geometric design, through illuminating discoveries in ultrasound. His work with Hawkins led to a previously obscure relationship between sacred geometry and intervals on the music scale noticed by the ancient Egyptians: something they likened to ‘frozen music’. It seemed to him a natural progression that he should later make recordings of pixel images of crop circles played through a computer program which converted pixels to sound, and discovered that the resulting music had a quality conducive to meditation, relaxation and deep contentment: essentially sounds in the ‘alpha wave’ band. He said:

Inspired by the work of Gerald Hawkins and our conversations on musical theory, I felt there was an important link between music and crop circles. Combining the two, I developed some computer software that could convert crop circle images into musical notes to see what ‘tunes’ were composed by them.

He recorded several soundtracks from different crop formations which can be downloaded from his website – maintained lovingly since his death. It did not surprise him that others ‘heard’ music while walking or kneeling or sitting inside crop circles which had been recently formed.

There are also a number of ‘coded’ messages which have been received and transliterated over the years. The Chilbolton radio telescope message is only one of many. I would recommend for code-lovers the lengthy study made by Robert Boerman in 2001 after an attempt to communicate with the circle-makers elicited a ‘reply’. This early documentary evidence was one of Hawkins’ favorites and its interpretations are fully discussed on the Dutch Crop Circle Archive.

Mandelbrot set visual in fractal geometry

I mentioned the chaos theory aspect of mathematics represented by the Mandelbrot set. It’s a complicated concept, even for a mathematician, discovered by French-American ‘father of fractal geometry’ Benoît Mandelbrot, aged 85, and still theorizing! Joseph Mason, a student of human consciousness (dream-sequences, results of concentrated intentional motivation), chose to experience learning its potential by his own method of study: concentrating by day, dreaming by night – and noting down his own responses, intuitive actions, human motivation.

Mandelbrot crop circle formation appeared after his dreams

As a non-mathematician, he familiarized himself with its complex form in chaos theory which, when projected visually, creates a satisfyingly circular heart-like geometric pattern with frilly edges, called a Mandelbrot Set. He made copious notes as he went along and was not surprised when, nine months after he started the experiment, a Mandelbrot Set design appeared as a crop circle. It convinced him even more firmly that our own consciousness is creating the formations.

The last few seasons of crop designs have made an unprecedented advance in complexity and beauty; our Group Consciousness is indeed making us sit up and observe the Earth with new eyes.

This dear planet we call home is where we are nurtured – particularly in the warm summer months when the Earth showers us with blessings. If only we might allow ourselves a break from thinking ‘poverty consciousness’ (‘running out of oil’) and instead dream up new ways to operate (‘an electric motor run on magnetic particles rather than coils’), within the bounds of her precious resources.

We are the caretakers. If we start taking better care of her, she will provide us with everything. All our needs will be met. We have only to think of miracles for miracles to occur.

We’re already wired for the upgrade. Our DNA has been receiving increasing light boosts since our rendezvous with Galactic Center at midwinter. Consciousness equals reality. We are capable of creating wonders beyond our wildest dreams.

And, what’s more, the new season of crop circles may show us the way…