(The Economic Collapse Blog)—It is getting very difficult to ignore all of the shaking that is going on. Over the past few months, there have been very unusual earthquakes all over the United States. As you will see below, there have been noteworthy quakes on the west coast, on the east coast, near our northern border, and near our southern border.
Of course all of this comes at a time when the entire planet is being shaken by unusual seismic activity. Is all of this unusual seismic activity building up to something? If so, what does that mean for all of us?
On Tuesday night, a magnitude 5.2 earthquake that shook southern California made headlines all over the nation…
An earthquake northwest of Los Angeles shook a large swath of Southern California on Tuesday night, but there were no immediate reports of damage.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the 5.2 magnitude temblor struck at 9:09 p.m. and was centered near Mettler, an unincorporated area in Kern County about 85 miles (137 kilometers) from downtown Los Angeles.
Following the quake, Dr. Lucy Jones went on television and revealed that her initial assessment was that the quake was not associated with any known fault. I thought that was quite strange.
Another earthquake expert named Ole Kaven agreed with that assessment, but he did note that this particular area is known for earthquakes…
There isn’t a known fault in the area where the earthquake struck on Tuesday night, but it’s still an area known for earthquakes, said Ole Kaven, U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist.
The shaking was felt over a very large area.
In fact, it was being reported that this earthquake was felt by those living “in Ventura, Simi Valley, Camarillo, Santa Clarita, Encino, Hollywood, Santa Monica, North Hollywood and Woodland Hills”.
Subsequently, there have been more than 200 aftershocks in that same region…
There have been more than 277 aftershocks to Tuesday’s magnitude 5.2 earthquake in Southern California, two with a magnitude 4.0 or greater – but the likelihood of another, larger shock is still low, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
“Seeing a lot of these smaller events that slow over time is very normal,” said Ole Kaven, a research geophysicist with USGS.
Hopefully things will settle down soon. But it is just a matter of time before the earthquakes return.
For more than a decade, I have been specifically warning about what will happen to the state of California when “the Big One” finally strikes.
Scientists assure us that “the Big One” is overdue, and the damage that it will cause will be off the charts.
California is known for earthquakes, but we are also seeing significant shaking in areas of the country that are not known for earthquakes. For example, the state of New Jersey has been shaken by more than 200 earthquakes over the past three months…
It’s not known for being a hotspot for earthquakes.
But New Jersey has been rattled by more than 200 tremors in the past three months.
In the middle of the country, a magnitude 2.9 earthquake was just recorded directly under Lake Michigan…
As an earthquake nut, I thought I had seen it all. An earthquake Friday proves that I still haven’t. The USGS has confirmed there was an earthquake under Lake Michigan Friday which was felt by many in Wisconsin.
The USGS confirms that an earthquake large enough to be felt by dozens in Wisconsin happened at 9:18am and was centered under Lake Michigan.
This bizarre earthquake registered 2.9 on the Richter Scale and was reportedly felt by many near Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
We will want to keep a very close eye on any seismic activity around the Great Lakes, because it could have very serious implications for the city of Chicago at some point in the future.
Meanwhile, so many earthquakes have been happening in one county in Texas that a state of emergency was formally declared…
So many earthquakes have struck the west Texas county of Scurry in the past week – more than 100 at last count – local officials have declared a state of emergency.
Scurry County Judge Dan Hicks wrote in his Friday declaration of disaster that since the first earthquake, registering magnitude 4.9, was felt the night of July 22, “damage has been found throughout Scurry County in businesses and residences.”
In my previous article entitled “5 Reasons Why You Should Be Prepping Like Crazy Right Now”, I warned that natural disasters would be a major theme during the second half of this year and beyond.
Of course there are a lot of other reasons why so many people are feverishly preparing for “the perfect storm” that is now upon us.
Global events are starting to spin out of control, and there is a tremendous amount of concern about what is coming next.
Earlier today, I came across a CNN article that discussed the fact that many among the elite are now constructing “21st century fortresses” in anticipation of what is ahead…
Few things appear to soothe the existential anxieties of the super-rich like a bunker designed to withstand anything short of total nuclear Armageddon. Yet it’s no longer enough for the security-conscious billionaire to stick an impenetrable safe room in the basement where it might sit empty forever. In today’s uber-prime properties, bunkers have gone seriously upmarket and hi-tech, in some cases growing to the extent that whole homes are becoming 21st century fortresses.
“We’ve seen a lot more of a focus on entertainment,” said Al Corbi, who has been at the forefront of secure luxury for 50 years as the president and founder of SAFE (Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments), based in Virginia, in the US. “If you’re going to be able to survive underground, we want you to be having fun.”
Do you think that those elitists are going too far?
I don’t.
We have entered a time of tremendous political chaos, global war, worldwide food shortages, deadly pestilences and historic natural disasters.
If you are wise, you will be working extremely hard to get prepared for what is coming too.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.
