GAMARA!
Posted on 03/11/2011 6:49:41 PM PST by decimon
The 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rumbled through Japan today (March 11), triggering a devastating tsunami, was the strongest felt in that country since seismic monitoring was invented. It's also comparable in scale to a few other recent temblors, including last year's 8.8-magnitude quake in Chile and 2004's 9.1-magnitude undersea rupture off Indonesia that caused a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people.
But researchers say these catastrophes shouldn't be taken as evidence of a larger trend. According to the United States Geological Survey, the number of earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 7 has remained constant in the last century. And the occurrence of a few big quakes in a few years is most likely a statistical anomaly. (The upcoming "supermoon," by the way, also did not cause the Japanese earthquake.)
"Statistics are way too small to say that this just couldn't happen randomly," Henry Pollack, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Michigan, told LiveScience.
However, increasing populations in earthquake-prone areas mean that smaller quakes can put more people at risk than in the past, researchers say.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
If you're older than 50, then, when you were young, there were only 3 networks , and they only had news broadcasts in the evening. There was little coverage of international events that didn't affect us.
Nowadays, there are those same 3 networks, but several others that accommodate "Breaking News" on a 24/7 basis. They'll flog a story for hours, even if there is no real NEW information to be had.
There have always been tsunamis, we just never heard about them until recently.
GAMARA!
But life was simpler then.
I don’t know about you, but frankly, I just didn’t pay attention to the news when I was younger than 15, with the exception of the assassination of JFK, when I was 10. It wasn’t until the murders of RFK, and MLK, the year I turned 15, that I actually paid attention to the news.
I agree. When I was in high school back in the mid 1960s, I had a teacher of Japanese descent who grew up in Hawaii. He told us about a tsunami that wiped out his town as a child and killed most of his family. He used the words "tsunami" and "tidal wave" interchangeably as we students had never heard the word "tsunami" before.
At the time, I pictured a tidal wave 300 feet high.
I'm not sure who is BS'in who. Below is a chart I put together from the USGS data. It's based on the automated seismic recording system and is the most accurate data available to my limited knowledge.
I put this together in December of last year and the mag 5 and higher where running 33% higher than normal the. I'm positive the average is MUCH higher now. For the first 30 years of available USGS data, we've averaged roughly 4 daily magnitude 5+ earthquakes worldwide. Below is a link to the mag 5 and higher earthquakes for the past week:
Latest Earthquakes M5.0+ in the World - Past 7 days
Certainly the aftershocks from the earthquake in Japan have distorted the recent data. However, if you go further back, you will see that the average number of 5+ quakes for the past couple of months is almost twice the average above.
One doesn't have to be an expert to recognize an increase in the number of earthquakes we've been experiencing!
They were called “tidal waves”. I didn’t hear the word “tsunamis” until I saw it on the transom of a yacht and was told it was named after a tidal wave.
but how often did a quarter million people die? In my childhood, the big historical disasters were the SF earthquake and the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
In my childhood, the big event was the 1900 Galveston Storm, which killed approx. 10,000 people and is still the largest lost of life to a natural disaster in our countries history. Not saying I was a child in 1900 but my grandfather survived the storm and told his children and grandchildren about it many times. It registered in my young mind as something I did experience because my grandfather was a good story teller.
One possible analysis....
The supermoon is optimum, i.e. max gravity.
The earthquakes now show that as the gravitational pull grows failure occurs at a point of lesser stress than when the force is at a maximum, supermoon
It was to be expected as an unpredictable possibility. It was not predictable because the failure stress is unknown and can’t be calculated.
Next time, a prediction can be made on the basis of time before supermoon
When I was in Jr High, the population of the Earth hit 3 billion (or perhaps that happened just a hair earlier), and the US population crossed the 200 million mark.
World population is now something like 7 billion, and US population is somewhere north of 300 million.
Because of arable land, commerce, and water supply, a great many people live fairly near sealevel, in the way of stuff like this. What once would have killed a number of people now kills a greater number, because more people are around.
News coverage is ubiquitous, so we see and hear more.
And these events are still rare.
The Japanese population is crowded (one might say herded) into low-lying development, living in antfarms, and the interior of the country is mountainous.
Life is leveraged up in every possible way and so the stakes are higher.
The quake didn’t cause whole chunks of the landfill to slide down the continental shelf, I think the Japanese have planned better in that regard.
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