Shake, Rattle and Role!

The earth continues to groan and shake at a rarely enthusiastic pace. I've been watching this sort of thing for about 20 years now, and I honestly can't remember a more seismically active 34 days. For whatever reason the fragile shell upon which all life depends is shifting much more than in the recent past.

On this map I've recorded with a green dot all of the 5.0 and larger earthquakes since Valentine's Day (a coincidental starting date). The MOST active region is clearly in central Chile. I don't even think there's a way to describe just how amazing the seismic activity here has been. At 6:34 AM on February 27th, the plate offshore of Maule, Chile shifted to the degree of an 8.8 earthquake. It was well over 200 times as severe as the quake that hit Haiti. TWO HUNDRED TIMES! It sparked a nearly simultaneous quake on the Pacific Arctic ridge of the Pacific plate of 5.6--the largest of the tectonic plates. Since then the activity along the Peru-Chile trench has been off the scale. (One can only imagine a similar lost scenario around the San Francisco, California region of the Pacific plate in 1906.)

In raw data, there have been 207 follow up quakes between 5.0 and 5.9, and 22 quakes between 6.0-6.9 since the 8.8 quake of February 27th. On March 11th there were 3 quakes in the 6.0 range: beginning at 2:39 PM a 6.9 quake hit. 16 minutes later, a quake of 6.7 magnitude rocked the same place on the plate. Finally, 11 minutes later a 6.0 quake punctuated the trinity. All of this occurred during the ceremonies to transfer the Presidency of Chile--(thank the stars above we live in an age of enlightenment!)

But the story is not one of chile alone. It's a story of shifting plates. Just prior to the amazing movement in the Nazca Plate off of the Pacific coast of Chile, the Caribbean Plate demonstrated it's power to shift, and from whatever direction the pressure has been stored, it continues to shake with quakes increasing in places like Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, and Jamaica. On the other side of the Pacific, there are several hot spots of seismic activity.

The most recent is along a ridge of Pacific plate around the island nation of Tonga that leads southward to include New Zealand. The tearing of plates along the eastern coast of the Philippines and around it's southern islands is another hot spot. The Ryukyu Islands south of Japan are in the epicenter of a region of activity that includes Taiwan to the south and the central coast off of Honshu to the north. And the western edge of Sumatra in Indonesia is another area of concern. But not of these locals defines the current activity. It's the Western edge of the Pacific Plate, it's the Philippines Plate, It's the Caroline Plate, it's the Java Trench, it's even the minimal Sandwich Plate in the extreme South Atlantic!

More people have felt the earth move under their feet in the last 3 months, than in the last 3 years. Who will be next?