Earth's orbit around the sun isn't a perfect circle, it's an ellipse. One side is closer to the sun (147.5 million km) than the other (152.6 million km). This weekend (Jan. 2nd), we're at the closest point, known to astronomers as perihelion. When Earth is at perihelion, the sun looks a little bigger than usual, as shown in this composite image from Khosro Jafarizadeh of Karaj, Alborz, Iran:

Jafarizadeh took the two pictures from opposite ends of Earth's orbit: perihelion and aphelion. Sunlight falling on Earth at perihelion is 3.5% stronger than the year-long average. Northern snow doesn't melt, however, because seasons are shaped primarily by the tilt of Earth's spin axis, not the eccentricity of its orbit.
www.spaceweather.com

The Siberian Times - Tue, 24 Nov 2020

A tranquil video of white and silver bubbles of methane caught in newly-formed ice was filmed at Maloye More, a strait that separates the lake's largest island of Olkhon from the western shore of Lake Baikal.

'Ice covering the shallow straits and bays begins to form by the end of November, while the rest of Baikal freezes by the middle of January.  'This kind of ice, the purest, can only be seen in some areas of the lake in November and December', said Stanislav Tolstev, 46, photographer and tour guide from Irkutsk. 'The first time I paid attention to these bubbles was about four years ago, then I learned to distinguish methane from air bubbles."

'Methane bubbles freeze in layers one over the other, and the floors of them can grow 1.5 metres (5ft) deep.  Local anglers say that other, smaller and more chaotic, bubbles are 'the breathing of Baikal seals' and point to the areas where these animals rise to the surface to take some air'.

Baikal is located in a rift zone which is a deep - in fact the largest on the planet - crack in the Earth's crust which narrows at depths of several dozen kilometres.  It does not have a solid bottom: instead there is a cushion of bottom sediments that has been filling the most narrow lower part of the crack for millions of years. These bottom sediments are similar to bogs in that they contain a lot of gas, including methane.

In deep winter, there are roads over the ice, but the larger methane bubbles pose a threat.  'There are areas of the lake where bubbles grow so big that cars fall through the ice,' he said. 'The location may vary from year to year, and usually the large bubbles appear starting from February and can be seen through March and April.'

Scientists monitor methane rising from the floor of Baikal, and while it is said to be increasing, they have disputed this is due to global warming.

More on this at : https://www.sott.net/article/444866-Beauty-of-frozen-methane-bubbles-on-the-worlds-deepest-lake-shown-in-stunning-video

THRIVE Movement
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This is the most comprehensive production to date explaining what is wrong with the human condition, and better yet, what we can do as humans to correct the problem. Yes, this mess can be fixed! Take the time to watch the entire film. You will be amazed.

You will be even more amazed at who made the film.

Ascension Path with Sandra Walter
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With food prices steadily rising over the last several years, by as much as five percent, families are scaling back and going without many staples just to put a meal on the table. Or worse, resorting to ‘bargains’ like fast food specials, subsidized SNAP junk food or just plain instant noodles to fill a hungry belly.

We have reached the point where self-sufficiency is not a luxury any longer, it’s a real necessity. In response, many are carving out a small homestead niche, even in the middle of lively cities. An encouraging example is found with a micro-farm in the heart of Southern California.

The downward spiral of dwindling food supplies

It isn’t much of a stretch to see our food dollars are shrinking. A combination of droughts, erratic weather patterns and astronomical fuel costs have all contributed to an inflated food bill. The use of GMO seeds isn’t helping the matter either with horrible crop yields. Couple this with a nose dive of world economies and we have a recipe for wide spread shortages of quality, nutritious food. Individuals are waking up to these realities and taking matters into their own hands — not only growing their own food, but removing themselves from the grid as much as possible, even within the bounds of a bustling city. A shining model of exceptional self-sufficiency, survival and ecological action is the  Urban Homestead.

You can read the whole inspiring story here: https://wakeup-world.com/2013/03/13/inspiring-urban-farm-grows-an-astonishing-three-tons-of-produce-a-year-on-a-mere-110-of-an-acre/

Rebecca Parkes, Dee Taylor-Mason and Magenta Pixie
May 5, 2020

An uplifting video by three awakened and spiritually aware ladies explaining how to cope with these difficult times and with your awakening to the true reality of Ascension for Humanity and the Earth.  It is time to dream your biggest dream for yourself and for Humanity.

A new type of aurora is rippling across Arctic skies. Citizen scientists who discovered it nicknamed it "The Dunes" because of its resemblance to desert sand dunes. A paper published in the Jan. 28th issue of AGU Advances describes the new form and the unexpected physics that causes it.

Dune-shaped auroras form in a narrow altitude range 80 km to 120 km above Earth's surface. Turns out, this is an extremely hard-to-study layer of Earth's atmosphere. It's too high for weather balloons, and too low for rockets.

"Due to the difficulties in measuring atmospheric phenomena between 80 and 120 km, we sometimes call this region 'the ignorosphere'," says Minna Palmroth, Professor of Computational Space Physics at the University of Helsinki and the lead author of the study.

Sky watchers in the Arctic have been seeing Dunes for years without understanding what they were. A breakthrough came on Oct. 7, 2018, when multiple groups photographed the dunes from widely separated locations in Finland. Maxime Grandin, a postdoctoral researcher in Palmroth's team, analyzed the images, using triangulation techniques to decipher the Dune's geometry.

Conclusion: Dunes are located ~100 km high--smack-dab in the middle of the ignorosphere--and have a pure, monochromatic wavelength of about 45 km.

Above: An artists' concept of a mesospheric bore trapped in a high-altitude waveguide. [more]

The research team believes the Dunes are a "mesospheric bore"--a type of atmospheric gravity wave that springs up from the surface below and gets caught in a thermal waveguide ~100 km high. When solar wind particles rain down on the bore, they illuminate its rippling structure.

The discovery of Dunes may allow researchers to study the ignorosphere as never before. Monitoring Dunes can reveal previously hidden waves and waveguides at the boundary between Earth and space. Aurora photographers, have you seen a Dune? Submit your photos here.
www.spaceweather.com

Emily McPherson, 9news.com.au
Wed, 08 Jan 2020

Beautiful photographs of the bush regrowing on the NSW Central Coast a month after fires devastated the region have been picked up as a symbol of hope online.

Local photographer Murray Lowe snapped the shots in the Kulnara area on Monday and posted them on Facebook, where they have been shared more 37,000 times in less than 48 hours.

"Ventured out into the fire grounds today to capture some images of how the Aussie bush responds to fire, and the way it regenerates itself and comes back to life," Mr Lowe wrote in his post.

"Even without any rain, life bursts through the burnt bark from the heart of the trees and the life cycle begins again."

Mr Lowe urged as many people as possible to share the photos.

"It's so heartening to see the bush coming back to life again," he wrote.

Other Facebook users also shared their photos of the bush regenerating near their homes in the comments section of Mr Lowe's post.

In an update to the post, Mr Lowe said he had been blown away by the response to his photos.

"I did not, in my wildest dreams, anticipate the overwhelming response to my photos that I've seen. It's both humbling, and heart-warming," he wrote.

Port Macquarie Koala Hospital, which has been faced with the desperate task of saving our decimated koala population, also recently shared an image showing regrowth on the "trunks of koala food" in the Bril Bril state forest.

"To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books."

- Manly P. Hall, author of 'The Secret Teachings of All Ages'

Solar Minimum is having a calming effect on Earth's magnetic field. The deepening quiet is shown in these geomagnetic data, taken by Stuart Green of Preston, Lancashire, UK, during each of the past 3 summers:

"I've plotted the changing levels of geomagnetic activity for the months of May, June and July (between the equinoxes) for the years 2017, 2018 and 2019," explains Green, who operates a research-grade magnetometer buried in his backyard. "The trend is clearly downward, with less frequent and intense storms in 2019, as the sun continues deeper into Solar Minimum."
His data show why minor G1-class geomagnetic storms, which would rarely be mentioned during Solar Maximum, are suddenly noteworthy. Any magnetic storm is news at this point in the solar cycle.
The quiet won't last forever, though. A panel led by experts from NOAA and NASA predict that the solar cycle will bottom out in late 2019 with a bounce back to higher levels of activity beginning sometime in 2020. Meanwhile, G1 is a significant magnetic storm.
www.spaceweather.com

Denise Piper, Stuff.nz, 03 Jul 2019

A team of international scientists believe they have found the answers to the mysteries of Earth's last polar reversal in the tree rings of an ancient kauri. The 20 metre-long kauri log could map out what to expect during a geomagnetic reversal - a change in the planet's magnetic field - including its impact on climate change and solar radiation.

The kauri, measuring a massive 2.5m in diameter, is one of the oldest trees ever found. The ancient kauri tree was uncovered during excavations Northland's Ngāwhā about three months ago during excavations for a geothermal power plant expansion. The tree was buried in about 8m of soil and was preserved like swamp kauri, despite not actually being in a swamp. Now, carbon dating has confirmed the ancient kauri was alive 41,000 to 42,500 years ago, making it one of the oldest trees ever found.

"This Ngāwhā kauri is unique in the world," University of Waikato associate professor Alan Hogg, the director of the Waikato Radiocarbon Dating laboratory, said. During its 1500-year lifespan, the tree experienced one of the earth's geomagnetic excursions, meaning the north magnetic pole drifted down to the southern hemisphere and back up again. "There's nothing like this anywhere in the world."

While knowledge of the geomagnetic excursion was not new, a tree that spanned the entire excursion timeframe had never been found, Hogg said. "It's the time it takes for this movement to occur that is the critical thing ... We will map these changes much more accurately using the tree rings," he said. Study of the ancient tree has just begun but Hogg said it would give a picture of the solar radiation in the earth's atmosphere during the excursion.

As the magnetic poles moved, the strength of earth's geomagnetic field weakened, letting in more cosmic radiation, he said. And the tree would show what to expect during another polar excursion or reversal - which scientists said was not a matter of if, but when. "We will have increased cosmic radiation. It will take out satellites and it might take out other communication infrastructure," Hogg said.

Ngāwhā Generation - a subsidary of Northland power wholesaler Top Energy - gave the kauri tree back to iwi on the agreement scientists could take samples for study.

The research is being funded by the Australia Research Council and led by Professor Chris Turney from the University of New South Wales, a expert in paleoclimatology and climate change over the past 40,000 years.