Thanks for the info you posted...
Here is some more information on this scientist, who is a Christian, who disputes the idea that earthquakes are increasing.
Dr. Steven A. Austin is a field research geologist with a Ph.D. from Penn State University in sedimentary geology. He is “Senior Research Scientist” with Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, Texas. He has performed geologic research on six of the seven continents of the world. His research adventures have taken him by helicopter into the crater of Mount St. Helens volcano, by bush plane onto glaciers in the high mountains of Alaska, by raft through the entire Grand Canyon, on horseback into the high Sierra, by elevator into the world’s deepest coal mines, by SCUBA onto the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, by rail into the backcountry of Korea, by foot onto barren plateaus of southern Argentina, and by four-wheel drive into remote desert areas of Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. He is the author of three books, three videos, one computer software package, and more than thirty technical geology papers.
Dr. Austin’s field research within Grand Canyon includes over 400 nights camped out below the Canyon’s rim. He has launched 22 raft trips within Grand Canyon. He has explored very remote areas of Grand Canyon by mule, helicopter and ATV. His book “Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe” and his DVD “Grand Canyon: Monument to the Flood” summarize his investigations. He has over ten technical papers on Grand Canyon. Subjects of his technical publications on Grand Canyon include lava dams, breached dams, fossils, limestones, sandstones, basalts, diabase sills and radioisotope dating. He is widely known for his discovery of the regionally extensive mass-kill and burial bed within the Redwall Limestone about 2000 feet below the Canyon’s rim.
See the original article for more links and further information... [click on the link above the picture].
Thanks, I saw the article earlier and was looking for where he came up with his stats.
Hard to find it at USGS.
It really depends upon the definitions being used in their numbers. For example, does one include aftershocks?
Would a 0.5 qualify in an area which daily has several 1.1 to 2.5 quakes, if a remote area never experiencing any seismic activity has a 1.0 and is counted?
If only major quakes are recorded, where is the threshold? 5? 6? 7?; If 5.0, then are the 6.0 and 7.0 aftershocks ongoing yesterday in Chile considered separate events from the 8.8?
Lastly, if all quakes are being considered, then what indicators are there of them in the past 2 millennia, especially in areas where little to no recording of such events is known today?
Even with these questions, perhaps we are going about it the wrong way. We know we should address the issue through faith in Christ, so perhaps we can ask the dual of the argument through faith in Him, are earthquakes lessening in frequency? For example, if many years ago we had an established rate of 30 per decade, did they reduce to 3 per decade the following century, then 3 per century, and now to 3 per millennia?
This we can agree is not the case.
The opposite question if they have risen from 3 per century to 30 per century over a millennia, to 30 per decade over another millennia, to now 30 per year in the last decade? This appears to be a reasonable possibility.
The article by Steve Austin, IMHO, asked and assumed some improper positions, if sincerely seeking honest answers to the above questions, using statistical analysis of the available data. I would discern it is better presented than many other articles on the topic, but IMHO has a swayed bias towards asserting no frequency change exists or if anything the frequency is lessening.
When I run the numbers, I tend to find the opposite is occurring, but its hard to tell.
Even the USGS site addressing the question, buffers the query by simply noting they have increased their information gathering network by more than a factor of 20 in the last decade, which could easily sway such calculations unstably.