Free Republic

Finally! After our demanding for the last two weeks that the plotter of the Hudson terror plane, Louis Caldera, be fired, he's gone. In a classic (classic!) Friday afternoon news dump, The White House confirms that Louis Caldera is out. Technically, the President "accepted his resignation". We assume that means he was canned. If you don't recall, it was Caldera's bright idea fo fly Air Force One around lower Manhattan and New Jersey, prompting several buildings to be evacuated out of fear that we were witnessing a repeat of 9/11. That Caldera's term on the job would end like this...

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has repeatedly refused to rule out Caldera's dismissal for authorizing Monday's Air Force One photo op fiasco that sent panicked New Yorkers running through the streets of lower Manhattan. But the drumbeat for his dismissal seems to be growing louder. The national television media was all over it again this morning, and Gibbs called the photo-op "stupid" during a press briefing on Air Force One. Gibbs was asked this morning if President Obama "regrets" anything during his first 100 days. Gibbs cited the flyover, and only the flyover. Not a good sign for Caldera....

WASHINGTON -- It didn't take long for former University of New Mexico President Louis Caldera to make headlines in his new job, taking responsibility Monday for terrifying New Yorkers with a government photo op gone wrong. Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, apologized for a federal flyover fiasco in lower Manhattan that sent New Yorkers into the streets in fear of another 9/11-style attack. Caldera served as U.S. Army secretary under President Clinton and became UNM president in 2003. As director of the White House Military Office, he coordinates all military support for the White House. He oversees...

NY Post: The planes flew over the Verrazano Bridge, buzzed the left ear Lady Liberty and then continued up the Hudson past Jersey City and then circling back toward Staten Island, federal sources told the Post. Thousands flooded the streets downtown as buildings called evacuations.

The gradual uplift of Yellowstone National Park's caldera is pushing the earth's crust southwest along the Snake River Plain, affecting much of the Great Basin. "It adds energy to the whole system that we see," said Bob Smith, a University of Utah geophysicist who works with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. "It adds to the whole deformation and expands the Great Basin to the west."

So Yellowstone, the super volcano, is again rumbling? Mercury has been detected throughout the national park (not a good sign) for quite sometime and along with it the ground under Yellowstone Lake is rising. More than 250 earthquakes reported during a 24-hour period ... Scientists monitoring Yellowstone have stated that it has entered into what they have described as a "red zone." Remember Mount St. Helens? The feds warned folks in the region around the mountain to vacate, and most did. Some (a few) didn't. It's been reported that the feds will issue a vacate order to the inhabitants of...

With the increased seismic activity in the Yellowstone Caldera, it is likely that there is some increased interest in in the geology of the area. Here are some resources that should be of interest. First, we have a fairly recent peer reviewed publication on the "Super Volcano" known as Yellowstone, including some discussion of just what a "Super Volcano" is. The largest scale of volcanic eruptions, the so-called super-eruptions, can destroy all living beings and infrastructure over tens of thousands of square kilometres, can disrupt agriculture over millions of square kilometres and can alter global climate for years or decades....

A Yellowstone earthquake update: 1) The rumbling continues, including 3.5, 3.0 and 3.2 quakes just today 2) Here is some more Jake Lowenstern (the Yellowstone volcano scientist) analysis (via TIME): Jake Lowenstern, Ph.D.,YVO's chief scientist, who also is part of the USGS Volcano Hazards Team, told TIME that it doesn't appear a supervolcano event is imminent. "We don't think the amount of magma exists that would create one of these large eruptions of the past," he said. "It is still possible to have a volcanic eruption comparable to other volcanoes. But we would expect to see more and larger quakes,...

More on the Yellowstone earthquake swarm at the supervolcano caldera. First, this piece of database analysis from an IT guy at Splunk puts the swarm into scary perspective: I'm sending you this email with some information I've gleaned from the USGS archives. I'm analyzing the ANSS data (http://www.ncedc.org/cnss/) in an install of Splunk, which is a timeline based search and reporting engine. I have 30 years of data in the system, with about 2M quakes total. It makes doing graphs and adhoc investigations faster than dealing with the USGS limited search forms. Disclaimer: I work for Splunk as their evangelist,...

Okay, I'll start: 1) Blagojevich walks scott free 2) My salary continues to remain stagnate 3) The bailout results in a massive debt to taxpayers with zero benefit to them 4) Iran aquires nuclear weapons and we (including Bush) failed to do anything about it 5) Jamie Gertz continue's to become even more attractive as she ages

A swarm of small earthquakes in Yellowstone National Park is the most intense measured there in years, leaving scientists puzzled.

<p>YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (AP) - The University of Utah Seismograph Stations report a swarm of small earthquakes in Yellowstone National Park.</p> <p>The university says the quakes of magnitude 3.5 and lower have been occurring beneath Yellowstone Lake, five to nine miles south-southeast of Fishing Bridge, a park landmark. The earthquakes that began on Friday and continued on Saturday intensified during the weekend, and there were reports that people in the Yellowstone Lake area felt the quakes.</p>

-SNIP-Obama today announced that former UNM President Louis Caldera will serve as Director of the White House Military Office. In his new post, Caldera will coordinate all military support for Presidential operations. -SNIP- Also, according to the news release, Caldera has had a "30-year career as a soldier, lawyer, legislator, high ranking government official, university president and professor of law." Caldera, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a former member of the California Assembly and a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He earned his law and business degrees at Harvard University in 1987,...

The U.S. government eagerly reached out to Venezuelan presidential candidate Hugo Chavez in 1998 and moved quickly to denounce a rumored coup plot against the man who's become one of the Bush administration's archenemies, newly declassified State Department documents obtained by McClatchy Newspapers reveal. State Department officials initially appeared dazzled by Chavez's oversized persona and his promise for sweeping reforms, and seemed sincere in their efforts to help him, the documents show. Some of those overtures drew positive responses from Chavez, who said he wanted U.S. help in fighting corruption and drug trafficking.... ...A Jan. 20, 1999, cable setting the...

Magma surge causes record rise at Yellowstone 19:00 08 November 2007 NewScientist.com news service Catherine Brahic The remains of the Yellowstone supervolcano in the US is huffing and puffing and rising by up to 7 centimetres a year, say researchers. They speculate this rise is caused by a mass of molten rock the size of Los Angeles being forced from the Earth’s mantle into the magma chamber beneath the ancient volcano. But the researchers, led by Wu-Lung Chang of the University of Utah in the US, caution that the movement does not mean an explosion is imminent. Calderas – the...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Norman Caldera has asked Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to butt out of his country's political affairs after Chavez signed a favorable oil pact with dozens of leftist Nicaraguan mayors. Peru and a Mexican presidential candidate also have recently accused Chavez of interfering in internal affairs. Chavez agreed last month to ship 10 million barrels of fuel a year at preferential prices to 51 Nicaraguan communities, many of them allied with the party of Sandinista presidential candidate Daniel Ortega. He also made a donation of 10,000 tons of urea to Sandinista farming organizations, Caldera said....

NASA Earth Observatory has this neat graph of the lawn area in the United States. It's a very close match to the "night light" image made a couple of years ago. I linked the little picture below to the bigger one (which is only 380 K). Click on the link for the accompanying article. Yann-Arthus Bertrand took this impressive photograph of the "crater lake" inside the caldera from the Pinatubo eruption of 1991:

Just had a good size quake here in Southwestern Montana. I live very close to Yellowstone National Park. Was wondering if any other freepers felt it in MT. or WY.?

Link post: to see the images (and discuss them), go to the thread in the General/Chat section: Geology Picture of the Week, July 17-23, 2005: Crater Lake After I posted the original thread, I realized that one reason I thought of this (other than my trip) was the News/Current Events item, the release of the Oregon State Quarter: