Editor’s Note: As is very often the case, Michael Snyder’s article below will be labeled by some as “fearmongering.” Snyder has a flair for the dramatic with his writing, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. And unlike Climate Change Cultist or doomsday fearmongers, he bases his observations on demonstrable facts, so take from Snyder’s speculation what you will. I, for one, will add this to the growing list of reasons to leave Commiefornia soon. Here’s Snyder…
Trillions of gallons of rain have already fallen on the state of California, and more rain continues to fall as I write this article. Billions of dollars in damage has already been done, but of even greater concern is what all of this water could mean for southern California’s fault lines. As you will see below, geophysicists have discovered that the additional weight that flooding puts on fault lines can help trigger earthquakes. Of course we have been warned for many years that “the Big One” is way overdue in southern California, and when it finally happens it will be a disaster unlike anything we have ever seen before.
Water is very heavy. If you doubt this, just try lugging a couple of gallons of water around with you for a while.
Now trillions of gallons of rain have poured down on California, and all of that added weight is going to put additional stress on the fault lines in the southern portion of the state.
A number of years ago, a team of geophysicists determined that flooding helped trigger major earthquakes in southern California “at least three times in the past 2,000 years”…
Geophysicists have linked historical earthquakes on the southern section of California’s famed San Andreas fault to ancient floods from the nearby Colorado River.
The work has broad implications for understanding how floods or reservoirs relate to quakes — a topic that gained new relevance in 2008, after a massive earthquake in China’s Sichuan province killed more than 80,000 people. Some geologists have proposed that impounding water behind a newly built dam there helped hasten the quake.
Now, new work in southern California suggests that at least three times in the past 2,000 years, the weight of river water spreading across floodplains seems to have helped trigger earthquakes in the region.
Geophysicist Daniel Brothers was one of the scientists that worked on this study, and he was very confident about what his team discovered…
“We found quakes happened about every 100 to 200 years and were correlated with floods,” says Brothers. “The Colorado River spills, loads the crust and then there is a rupture.” He says the team is “very confident” in its evidence for the existence of three flood-derived quakes, of roughly magnitude 6, which happened about 600 years ago, 1,100 years ago and 1,200–1,900 years ago. “Sediments don’t lie,” he says.
With all of that in mind, let’s talk about what has just happened in southern California.
Some of the rainfall totals that we have seen so far are just staggering…
The highest total came at the Cogswell Dam above Pasadena. NWS monitors at that site recorded 13.15 inches of rain in the past 72 hours.
A little farther south, Beverly Hills has seen 8.61 inches of rainfall, Culver City 7.71 inches and Downtown L.A. to the east has endured 8.13 inches.
That means that in just three days, downtown Los Angeles has received more than half of its 30-year average seasonal rainfall, which is 14.25 inches.
And it is being reported that UCLA’s weather station experienced “a 1-in-1,000 year rainfall event”…
The 11.87 inches that fell in 24 hours at UCLA’s weather station was a 1-in-1,000 year rainfall event. Technically known as a “1,000-year recurrence interval event,” according to meteorologist Jacob Feuerstein, a 1-in-1,000-year rain event is a statistical way of expressing the probability of such a huge rainfall occurring in any given year in a given location, according to NOAA.
That is certainly a lot of rain!
Overall, it has been estimated that approximately 5.6 trillion gallons of rain fell on California in a 48 hour period…
A rough calculation estimates that 5.6 trillion gallons of water has fallen across California the past two days, according to FOX Weather meteorologist Greg Diamond.
Of course that is not a final number.
More rain continued to fall after that estimate was made, and it is still raining in California as I write this article.
What we are witnessing is truly unprecedented, and all of this water is going to put immense pressure on southern California’s fault lines.
We’ll get back to that in a minute.
But first, let me talk a bit about the damage that all of this water has already caused.
In an article that I posted a few days ago, I speculated that this disaster would cause billions of dollars of damage in the state, and it appears that is precisely what has happened…
AccuWeather estimates the preliminary total damage and economic loss from the intense storms and record rainfall in California this week will be between $9 billion and $11 billion.
Right now, there are apocalyptic scenes all over southern California.
Flash floods, mudslides and fallen trees have caused immense amounts of destruction.
These massive Eucalyptus trees were blown down by Sunday's wind gusts of 60+ MPH smashing cars on this hillside above the Pacific. Fortunately the power here is buried. But 11% of Santa Cruz County is in the dark this morning.
We're live on @weatherchannel pic.twitter.com/0IThCYEB9E— Mike Seidel (@mikeseidel) February 5, 2024
Even if nothing else happens, this is going to be one of the costliest natural disasters that we have seen in a long time.
But what if the weight of all this water triggers “the Big One” at some point?
It has been reported that when “the Big One” strikes it could literally “plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly”…
The Big One may be overdue to hit California, but scientists near LA have found a new risk for the area during a major earthquake.
They claim that if a major tremor hits the area, it could plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly.
The discovery was made after studying the Newport-Inglewood fault, which has long been believed to be one of Southern California’s danger zones.
A lot of people seem to think that a part of the state could break off like a cracker and fall into the Pacific Ocean.
But that is not how it would work.
According to Cal State Fullerton professor Matt Kirby, land on the western side of a major fault line would suddenly drop by up to three feet and that would allow the Pacific Ocean to come rushing in…
The study showed that land within major Californian seismic faults could sink by 1.5 and three feet instantly.
The last known major quake occurred on the San Andreas fault in 1857.
Seismologists estimate the 800 mile-long San Andreas, which runs most of the length of the state, should see a large quake roughly every 150 years.
‘It´s something that would happen relatively instantaneously,’ Kirby said.
‘Probably today if it happened, you would see seawater rushing in.’
As I have discussed in multiple books, scientists have repeatedly warned us that this is going to happen someday.
It is just a matter of time.
Will a disaster of this magnitude happen in 2024?
Let’s hope not, but I will definitely be watching southern California very closely now that all of this rain has fallen.
When it finally arrives, “the Big One” could hit without warning, and those living right along the coast may only have moments before the Pacific Ocean starts rushing over them.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
It’s so displaced so no, but it could erode the fault lines a bit. Same amount of water on Earth since day 1, just in different places. It’s called – WEATHER!
magnitude 4.6 temblor in Southern California today 2/9/2024
https://www.foxweather.com/weather-news/earthquake-rocks-big-island-hawaii-feb-9.amp
Maybe that is why democrats don’t want to build any more reservoirs in Cali. They could be concerned that the added weight will help Cali fall into the sea. I say, “Build More Reservoirs!”