Portents Of Things To Come?

I love science. I really do. It brings to bare the essential logic of the universe and challenges our human tendency to be superstitious. And I'm not bad mouthing superstition. It is a time honored way for people to keep their sanity in the midst of things that we don't understand. The key is to just keep drilling down until we reach a level of understanding.

Perhaps the mythical "apple" set us upon this course, but I for one praise Eve for the courage and insight to express our essentially curious nature without regard to the mind-numbing threats of a weak and incurious, overly paternalist Deity. (pause for the lightning).....

Still here!

So here are my next set of thoughts. Regarding the map, I can't remember a time when the earth was more active and more violent in one area (and in all modesty, I've only been following this for about 20 years). This is coupled with a continued and now more generalized series of quakes about the Caribbean Plate that began with the Great Haitian quake. Add to this a set of much lesser but extremely unusual quakes in the mid North American plate (specifically Oklahoma and most recently southern Missouri), and we would be foolish not to begin a dialogue around how we as a nation would, should, could respond to the next BIG ONE on our soil.

The movement of the pacific plate has triggered additional seismic activity all along its planetary rift. This twitching of land forces every crack and fissure to either find relief or encounter more suppressed energy, and in the Caribbean, the response has been a most recent and measured series of earthquakes all along the rim of that plate.

There is a history here, too. We know that our planet is not above sending we mere humans a catastrophe now and then. It blew an island away in the Indian Ocean (Krakatoa) and plunged the earth into a winter in the summer. It shook North America so violently in the period from Dec 1811 to February 1812 that quakes centered in southern Missouri rang church bells in Charleston, South Carolina and collapsed a British fort where Detroit, Michigan stands today.

Perhaps the events in Haiti and Chile are best seen as a reminder that we have to understand that our heartland will shake. That one day it will shake with a violence that will be practically unimaginable. How do we prepare for the inevitable? Or do we just react and hope for the best? We saw how well that worked in Haiti.