Washington Monument Under Wraps!

Or at least, under repairs.  And I thought rather stylishly so, too.

This a result of the August 23, 2011 Earthquake.

Earthquake Watch: Puerto Rico

Little quakes (3.0 - 3.9) are very common along this fault like and in an average week you would see between 8 and 12 of them on this section of the map. They are rarely felt by anyone on the surface, those under the sea are never felt. In the past week, there have been over 50! What's going on?

Costa Rican Quake - 7.6 - 4 SEPT 12

Earthquake Watch

Earthquake Patrol: For a 7 day period, the earth is unusually calm...

Earthquakes: Central Asia

It's been a busy week for earthquakes in Central Asia from the Russian-Mongolian boarder to the Straights of Hormuz.

Earthquake: Mexico

How many hours ago did I post the observation that seismic activity was at a very love ebb collectively for the past week? It isn't so good when the earth slows down. It only allows for the building up of pressure in the tectonic plates.

Oraciones para los gente de Mexico...

World Watch: Earthquakes

Here's a map of the world that I lifted from the USGS site. It shows all the earthquake activity around the world for the past 7 days in yellow, past 24 hours in blue and past 60 minutes in red. The larger the quake, the larger the square.

Here's the thing. I check in on this site nearly daily and have been doing so for the past 15 or so years, and this is as calm a week as the earth has experienced in well over a year. Cool? or calm before the storm? Hmmmm....

Japan Continues To Shake, Too

Moma's Got An Itch

That would be Mother Earth. It's been an interesting month regarding Earthquakes. Besides the one we experienced here in the DC region, there have been two others in unusual places that were large enough to produce aftershocks and have continued to do so. One is on the Colorado/New Mexico boarder and the other is in west central Texas. Besides those a decent little quake occurred in central Washington state, and a series of odd temblers has occurred in places like Alabama, Illinois, New York and West Virginia. Over a year's time and it would not be unusual to see such events, but over the past 25 days? It's at the very least unusual.

Land-"Shakes!" Alive

Oh my, another earthquake in the land of ... well, no earthquakes. The first one occurred in the wee hours of the morning back on July 16, 2010. It was a paltry 3.6 by comparison, but the epicenter was much closer. And still it's relative lack of energy only rattled my in my bed.

Then today there was this considerably more enthusiastic shaker. 5.8 centered some 85 miles to the south of where I live.

At the time, I was leading part of a training with about 40 teachers when I started to feel the floor vibrate, as the vibration continued to slowing intensify I said, to the people in my discussion group, "What is this? An earthquake?" and then the floor bounced a little and bucked good jolt sending everyone swaying and then it rumbled to a halt. Yep, it was an earthquake.

To be honest, I was a little embarrassed for how many people around me overreacted. It's given me a mite of concern over experiencing a REAL disaster around them. But then, everyone wants their lives to be the most amazing, exciting things. Which isn't to say that being in a second floor cinderblock classroom while it shifts a couple inches one way and then abruptly back to roughly it's original GPS locale isn't extraordinary. It's just not the same as the end of civilization as we know it.

Tsumani Graphic

When I saw this annotated map in a recent online article (I forget where....), I wondered how it translates to actual water depth.

So.....

I took the image of a typical house, chose six of the cities on the map and over-layed the house on the depth of water that inundated those places. Made it more real to me.

Earthquake Hot Spot

After another significant quake in Japan just moments ago (6.4) on the north east coast, the earth is a shakin' still. In Japan, it hasn't stopped since the major quake of 11 March 2011. And it's shaking in major ways in new places, too. There have been a huge increase in notable small quakes around the island of Puerto Rico, and in the Western U.S. all around Yellowstone N.P. in Wyoming. A recent rash of larger activity has shaken the ocean floors along the Pacific coast of Central America.

And a much more noticeable set of quakes has begun to occur along a fault line near the remote island of Raoul in the southwestern Pacific between Fiji and New Zealand. The image only shows the activity for the last week, altogether there have been dozens of quakes the strongest registering 7.6 on July 7, 2001.

Shaking Comes with the Territory

This week the earth is shaking/shifting in the heartland of the United States.


On June 5th a 3.0 quake rattled Northeastern Ohio.


On June 7th it was Southeast-Central Missouri's turn with a significantly larger temblor registering 3.9 on the Richter Scale.

Who's next?

Japan Shakes Still

Which is not a surprise. Both Chile and Haiti experienced similar post quake tremors, but this one is a 6.2 well west of the original quake region, which leads one to wonder if it is an aftershock or a harbinger....

And Japan Shakes More

newer quakes moving south and west with some epicenters on the mainland coast. The tragedy is immense. The ocean floor is shifting over an area the size of Indiana.

Japan Shakes

The series began with a 7.2 quake off of the north east coast on Wednesday and hit its apex with today's 8.9. From this quake a series of quakes in the 6.8 to 5.1 range have ricocheted southward along the fault plate toward Tokyo. Two (6.2 & 5.8) have even occurred on the western side of Honshu Island just this afternoon.

This burst of seismic activity is very much like what happened after the 9.1 quake in Chile and it took months for the earth's crust to settle down.

Earthquake Up-date! Indiana? Really?

In a somewhat strange year for earthquakes in the continental United States, yesterday it was Indiana's turn to rumble.

You may recall the July quake of a very similar magnitude that rocked central Maryland. I do. It jarred me out of my early morning hazy sleep. And once I realized that an overloaded monster dump truck was not, in fact, about to descend upon my cozy little second story bedroom; the more lucid realization that it was only an earthquake was quite comforting.

In October, a sister quake gave the inhabitants of central Virginia a similar thrill.

And In November a rather larger quake occurred off of the coast of New Jersey/New York to little fanfare because of it's depth and distance in the Atlantic--but no where near to the mid-Atlantic rift.

Combine these with an ongoing and unusual series of quakes (dozens and dozens of them) in the mid-Oklahoma area over the past several months, and one has a reason to be at the very least curious about the present state of movement in the North American Continental Plate.

2010 has seen catastrophic shifts in the both the Pacific and Caribbean plates as testified to by the quakes in Haiti, Chile, Mexico and New Zealand. And the continental United States, though not know for seismic activity of any regular sort, has been visited on occasion in its history by some of the most amazing earthquakes.

Everyone knows about the infamous New Madrid Earthquake; but what most people don't know is that the New Madrid event was actually a series of quakes, a couple of which were nearly beyond imagining for the range of effected landmass. The event began in the wee hours of the middle of the night on December 16, 1811 when a quake which historians put at a 7.7 by modern calculations rattled the middle of the continent at New Madrid (Missouri). Within 24 hours there were reports of at least 3 more major aftershocks. And earth continued to rumble locally until January 23, 1812 when it let loose again. This time the quake is believed to have hit 7.5 on the modern Richter Scale. And on February 7, 1812 the final member of the triad occurred with an epicenter just south of the original quake at Reelfoot on the Missouri Tennessee border and was as powerful as the first quake at 7.7.

Culling historical records indicates that in the 90 days between December 16, 1811 and March 15, 1812 there were no less than 3 quakes in excess of 7.0; seven aftershocks in the 6.0-6.9 range, some of which were centered in Arkansas making them separate quake events of their own, and about one hundred in the range of 5.0-5.9. The ground was in nearly constant motion as another 90 or so quakes occurred in the 4.0-4.9 range and 1,800 tremors in the 3.0-3.9 range. I'm sure it gave a some people in the area "religion"!

During the major quakes framing this seismic event, ancient faults slipped and large areas of land shifted up and down as much as 10 meters (the height of a 3 story building). The pressure was reported to have opened fissures in the ground from which were ejected awesome amounts of sand and coal. The sunken land adjacent to the Mississippi River cause the water of the river to flow into the sunken land contributing to claims that the waters of the Mississippi south of the event flowed backward from the Gulf of Mexico for days. And modern evidence supports the enlargement of Lake St. Francis in eastern Arkansas where the ground sank.

Back then the quakes toppled simple structures as far away as Cincinnati, Ohio. Extrapolating an event of similar magnitude by today's population, the devastation would dwarf anything that has come before it. Imagine rings of destruction extending outward in 100 mile radii.

Ring #1 - clips Memphis, Tennessee

Ring #2 - Evansville, Indiana, Saint Louis, Missouri, Nashville, Tennessee; and clips Jefferson City & Springfield, Missouri, and Little Rock Arkansas.

Ring #3 - Springfield, Illinois, Indianapolis, Indiana, Louisville, Kentucky, Chattanooga Tennesse, Huntsville & Birmingham, Alabama; clips Kansas City, Missouri, Peoria, Illinois, Frankfort & Lexington, Kentucky, Knoxville, Tennessee, Montgomery, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi.

Ring #4 - Cincinnati & Dayton, Ohio, Atlanta & Columbus, Georgia, Shreveport, Louisiana, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Topeka & Kansas City, Kansas, Chicago, Illinois, and Gary Indiana; clips Fort Wayne, Indiana, Columbus, Ohio, Macon, Georgia, Mobile, Alabama, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Wichita, Kansas Des Moines & Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

But the potential devastation doesn't stop there. The 1811/1812 event was felt in major ways in Detroit Michigan, Charleston, South Carolina, and church bells were caused to ring as far away as Boston, Massachusetts... If such an event were equa-distantly as powerful today, bells would ring out in Denver, Santa Fe, El Paso and Tampa.

Lest you doubt this degree of intense and lessor activity, we witnessed something very similar in the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake with multiple and nearly daily aftershocks in the 5.0-6.9 range for months after the original quake and a far greater elevation of quake activity in the same range as far north the boarder with Peru (hundreds of miles). It's only been in the last month that activity around this event has calmed down.

And there have been other major quakes along the same fault line. The next one occurred in 1843. One in 1895 that was felt over a similar area with some major damage, as well. These subsequent 1843 & 1895 events are largely lost to history.

So what's happening?

We live on a planet that moves. Sometimes it moves with horrific violence, and most of the time, it doesn't. All we know for sure is that it will move again. It will likely move again in this region, but when exactly, no one has yet figured out a way of predicting. Are the recent quakes in Indiana, Maryland, Virginia, and Oklahoma omens of a larger event or harbingers of tectonic pressures relieved and forestalled? No one has the answer to that one, either.

This is the burden of such finite beings living upon a planet who's life cycles shame glaciers by its pace. Yet change it will. And cope with the changes we will, too.

Earthquake Up-date! What's Up with Papua-New Guinea...

Today the little island of New Britian was rocked by a 7.0 quake. and this region of the pacific plate has been racking like crazy lately. When you look at the squares the large one to the left is a 6.4 quake. The quakes around the principle one registered as 5.1, 5.1, 5.2, and 5.6.

This on top of so many recent quakes, check out my post of 22 JUL 10.

It's really an amazing set of quakes on a specific place short of a new volcano erupting....

Earthquakes

There have been an unusual cluster of 5.0+ quakes around the plates north of Australia in the past 24 hours. What does it mean? The world continues to shake and split and move in ways that haven't been seen in our life times. That's all.

Earthquake Up-date! Pity Papua-New Guinea...

Given the recent unprecedented and historic little Earthquake in Maryland, I've been thinking about Earthquakes even more than usual lately.

Below the radar of most of us in the United States has been a series of serious and curious quakes centered around the Island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea. This map shows the quakes over the past week. They start with a magnitude 7.3 quake and then include, aftershocks of 6.3, 5.6, 5.3, 5.3, 5.1, 5.0, 5.0, 4.8, 4.7, 4.3. Add to this day old map today's quakes of 5.1 and 4.3. It's a lot of seismic activity in one acute region over the course of 8 days....

But it is also a very isolated place on the planet, so it goes below our radar. Yet, it is not without its greater meaning to the whole. Even if we still don't understand it all.