The Big One

Another earth quake has hit Indonesia. This, of course, is being reported by many news sources, but I need to link to something so I will choose at random Al Jazeera:

Dale Grant, of the US Geological Survey, told Al Jazeera that "the recent spate of earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and now Indonesia, were not connected in any way", adding that there are about 18 major quakes 7-7.9 in magnitude recorded every year.

So if you think the world is coming to an end, you're mistaken. That's not happening until December of 2012. The real reason for all of these quakes was identified by the ultra-genius Uncle Buck in the comments on the CBC web site:

I think the reason why we are seeing more and more large earthquakes is probably because the earth has become stressed and under a lot of pressure due to the fact that too much oil and natural gas has been taken out of the ground. A void or vacuum has formed and now the earth is reacting. Remember your physics, for every action there is a reaction. The time has come with bigger earthquakes. And bigger ones yet. Don't you think so ?

There you have it. The earth is imploding because we are pumping too many dead dinosaurs out of the ground. Makes sense to me.


But are earth quakes really getting bigger? I am far too lazy to dig up historical data on the magnitude of earth quakes and running a time series statistical model to test that hypothesis (factoring in fuel consumption as an independent variable of course.) Perhaps View From Seven has some spare time? I think I know the answer though.

They are not getting bigger. However ... I have often wondered: will there be a "big one" in our life time? We have all seen diagrams in text books of how the earth looked hundreds of millions of years ago -- all the continents smushed together into one big blobby super-continent. Surely all of this continental drift that has happened since didn't happen 2 inches at a time. There must occasionally be a big-ass mother-fucker of a quake that raises the mountains by 10 meters, creates massive gaping fissures in the earth, spewing lava for hundreds of miles, and shifts continental plates a noticeable amount. As far as I know, such a thing has not been recorded in the history of us communicating human beings. Will there ever be such a quake? Perhaps in 2012?

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coming up next: why is bipole III really being built in the wrong place?