Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Ring of Fire quakes: An ominous warning?

Earlier today, Taiwan was rocked by a 6.4 earthquake. This followed the massive 8.8 earthquake in Chile on February 27th, which was preceded by a 7.0 earthquake off of Okinawa, Japan a day earlier.

On January 12th, Haiti was devastated by a 7.0 quake, and prior to that on September 29, 2009 American Samoa suffered the wrath of an 8.1 earthquake. And that's not to mention the March 23, 2009 eruption of Alaska's Mt. Redoubt.

What this geologic activity has in common (with the exception of Haiti, but perhaps there's a geological commonality that I'm unaware of since that's not my field of expertise) is that it all occurred in countries that border or sit on the Pacific Ocean, in what is known as the Ring of Fire. The Left Coast is included in the region.

While it's not uncommon for these areas of the world to have seismic and volcanic activity, five major events in such a short time seems to be more than just coincidence. And one year is a small fraction of time, geologically speaking.

Scientists have determined that fifty miles off of our coast lies a fault, which is capable of unleashing a 9.0 or higher earthquake.
Recent computer simulations of a hypothetical magnitude-9 quake found that shaking could last 2 to 5 minutes — strong enough to potentially cause poorly constructed buildings from British Columbia to Northern California to collapse and severely damage highways and bridges.

Such a quake would also send powerful tsunami waves rushing to shore in minutes. While big cities such as Portland and Seattle would be protected from severe flooding, low-lying seaside communities may not be as lucky.
While this appears to be a scene out of a disaster movie or an ancient prophecy come-to-life, it's more likely a period of heightened seismic activity for the Pacific Rim. Though we haven't yet heard from the scientists with a comparison of the collective events, it seems that they are somehow connected.

Comments:

Blogger Tom Dennen said...

"The earth's rotation acts on these (polar) unsymmetrically deposited (ice and snow) masses and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum produced this way will, when it reaches a certain point, produce a movement of the earth's crust over the earth's body, and this will displace the polar regions towars the equator ... Their ponderous weight pushes against the crust and this immense pressure, combined with the greater incline in the earth's tilt [another changing factor of the orbital geometry] forces the (entire) crust to shift ..." Albert Einstein, 1953.
Because the planet earth is a closed ecosystem, the amount of ice that accumulates on the poles reaches its maxmum weight every thirteen thousand years at which point severe geological disturbances occur, starting with earthquake swarms and tectonic plate shifts and ending with the entire crust's displacement.

Earthquakes today are caused mostly by rupture or geological faults, volcanic activity, landslides, mine blasts but also by nuclear experiments.

We should be melting the poles.

March 4, 2010 6:40 AM  

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