Saturday, February 27, 2010

Earth is shaking

First it was Haiti and lot of destruction there. Now 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile. Although Chile is better prepared. Nonetheless over 100 people reported killed there. There is a Tsunami warning for Hawaii. What is happening?

Update: CNN is reporting that New Zeeland is experiencing Tsunami and Japan is very jittery. This earthquake is having a huge impact.

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14 comments:

  1. God is angry! If you do not send me all of your money he will smite us all! ;-)

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  2. Typical lawyer. That is how you get rich. :)

    But seriouly some scietists are saying it is a bit unusual.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35618526/

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  3. Can't blame a guy for trying!

    Seriously though, between Katrina, the boxing day Tsunami, Haiti and now this, it is a little alarming.

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  4. End Times. Repent.

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  5. There are scientists who make the claim (one that I see as reasonable) that as ice melts from Greenland/Iceland and antarctic glaciers you will see the weight distribution of water move towards the equator, you will see the crust previously under ice bounce back causing more earthquakes. In some zones faults frozen by billions of tons of ice for millions of years will become active.

    I can't say that this is the case now but CC/GW probably will increase earth quakes in the future.

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  6. Dr. Dawg, I am ‘pious sinner’ and need not repent. ;)
    Canadian Silver, global warming is for real. It is causing and will cause a lot of problems but I am not sure earthquakes is one of them. It has more to do with earth plates and their movement. Whether weight change on the surface makes difference I don’t know –may be a very substantial change will do it. Chilli had similar earthquake or worse in 1960

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  7. The earth is a living mass. Nothing is happening except the earth happens to be on the move.

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  8. Anyong, earth is indeed moving but there are also moving parts within it, continental plates, which are causing these problems.

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  9. Hawaii was thankfully spared..just lttle waves

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  10. Wherever you have a subduction zone, as in the case of today's Chile quake, you're periodically going to get very violent earthquakes. The most violent quake in recorded history - a 9.5 back in 1960 - occurred north of this location while another one almost as violent occurred to the south of Maule - today's epicenter - in 1922. Despite numerous smaller quakes over the intervening years they were not enough to release the stress on the fault that failed so dramatically this morning. As for crustal rebounding it's an exceedingly slow process and while it might reactivate some local thrust and transform faults in Greenland and the Antarctic it wouldn't trigger the kind of subduction zone quakes we saw today; it's a very different process.

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  11. I think Atlas shrugged.

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  12. Annie, tsunami was not that bad in the Pacific which is a good news for many counteries.

    ThinkingManNeil, keep thinking. Good stuff and good information and I think you’re right.

    The Rational Number, if you mean by that that whole globe shook or impacted the globe then you’re right. However, if you’re playing with the Atlas and throwing it around causing these problems then that is not nice. :)

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  13. Is there a particular reason why you spelled Chile "Chilli"?

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  14. Penlan, sorry. Damn word processor. I was not paying attention.

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