Breaking: 5.9 Earthquake hits Indonesia! What is going on...goodness! Makes me nervous that USA is

[Doityourself]

possibly next.

[dkf]

1. Looks like the earth is pissed.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

7. Yes, the earth has seen DU's GD-P, and is not amused!

But between Myanmar and China, it is starting to make Bush's response to Katrina look humane, by comparison.
:scared:

[jaksavage]

2. Geologically speaking

we are WAY overdue...

[DavidDvorkin]

3. Don't assume that anything is going on

The question is, "Is this level of activity unusual?" I suspect it's not but that we're hearing more about quakes right now because what happened in China has sensitized the media.

[hendo]

4. With the region that these disasters are staying in

I would be more worried about Japan, Indonesia, or Australia myself.

[Fovea]

5. ~6 is not bad

It will get your attention.

The New Madrid system is WAY overdue. It's last be jolts were in 1812.

3 earthquakes in the Missouri bootheel and Ark rang churchbells in Philly.

The Miss. river ran backwards.

When that happened, St. Louis was not a big city, Memphis (the closest big city) wasn't there, and it still was a devastating quake to the sparse residents.

It could quite easily be an 8.x quake when it goes.

It needs a lot more serious seismic disaster prep than it has.

[wtmusic]

10. Odd, funny story

An acquaintance who was a successful L.A. studio singer in 1994 was so rattled by the Northridge quake he had to get out of California. He gave up his career and took up farming.

The farm he bought in Missouri is 15 miles from the New Madrid fault.

[Fovea]

18. File that under

sick irony.

New Madrid's big blast in the 19th C was bad in a way that makes the word catastrophe seem too tame.

[JoDog]

11. So do you think

Last month's jolts on the New Madrid were warm up shocks?

[Fovea]

19. That, and I worry every flood down there

Traditionally, winter is the worst earthquake month for the NM fault. That suggests surface load and surface hydrodynamics are a trigger.

[Virginia Dare]

15. Last I heard that was #1 on the DHS's..

most feared domestic disaster. But yet, they put all their money into terrorism.

[noonwitch]

17. Yeah, we'd feel that one in Detroit

An 8 quake would produce ripples all over the continental US. When we do get a tremor in Michigan, it's usually from one of those faults in the Ohio/Mississipi valley.

[jaxx]

6. This shows where the quakes have been for a couple weeks.

Red circles are current. Mouse over to get info on the bottom.

http://www.iris.edu/seismon/

[Virginia Dare]

16. We had a small one here in Northern Virginia a couple of weeks ago..

makes you wonder...:hide:

[izzie]

8. They were always having them when I lived in Alaska.

I must say I did not like them.

[Xithras]

25. Funny story.

An old friend was hiking through a valley in the Saint Elias Mountains on the Alaska/Canada border about 25 years ago when they were hit by a massive earthquake. He said they could hear the crashing as the glaciers cracked under the shaking, and see the ground waves racing at them down the valley floor, and watched two massive landslides as small sections of the surrounding peaks tumbled down towards the valley below. The mules were thrown to the ground, none of them could keep their footing, and as he described it once: "it felt like the world was ending". They were sure that Alaska had just experienced another devastating quake and that they'd see nothing but ruin and destruction when they arrived in town.

You can imagine their surprise when they got back to Juneau a few days later and found that the 6.5 quake had merely gained a three sentence mention mention in the local news area of the paper. It had rattled some dishes in Skagway, and was felt in Juneau, but the Saint Elias mountains are so empty (or were 25 years ago) that nobody in the "civilized" world took much notice of it. He and his group were later told that they may have been the only people on the planet to give the quake any real thought at all...to the rest of the state, it was just another minor temblor. Outside of southern Alaska and northern Canada, it was ignored entirely.

[bdamomma]

9. after a 7.8 in China and now Indonesia, the plates are really shifting.

the earth is pissed (angry) is right.

[Fox Mulder]

12. EQ's are quite common in Indonesia.

It's nothing new.

http://www.iris.edu/seismon/

[helderheid]

13. I stocked up on emergency food and water. I'm going to get earthquake insurance on my house too.

I live along the Wasatch Front in Utah. We're due.

[Tesha]

14. They don't call it "The RIng of Fire" for nothing.

The entire Pacific basin has always been seismically
and volcanically active.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ring_of_Fire



Tesha

[Radio_Lady]

20. Problem is always: NOT IF BUT WHEN. Might be 5 days from now, or 500 years.

In the first year of our living here in Portland, Oregon (1998-99), I had the bejeesuz scared out of me by a cable channel program that played over and over. It predicts a 9.0 earthquake for this area. I had my husband get earthquake insurance for sure!

Also, we inhabit a home with 60 -- 80 ft. Douglas fir trees towering behind our property, not far from our upstairs master bedroom.

During one windstorm, our neighbor called us because her husband was on travel and she was frightened about one of the trees falling on her home. My husband was calm and talked her through it. The winds were howling at over 50 mph that night.

So, have a nice day!

RL

[Xithras]

23. Not just the Ring of Fire. ANY plate boundary is going to be seismically active.

The Ring of Fire just gets the good press because the U.S. and Japan straddle it. Seismically speaking, the Pacific plate boundaries are no more or less active than any other plate boundary region around the world.

[Tesha]

24. The plate boundaries also have to be near land to be of interest for earthquakes.

(Tsunamis are, of course, a different question.)

Tesha

[tuckessee]

21. The earth has a history of earthquakes.

They go back quite a ways.

The sky is NOT falling.

[kestrel91316]

22. Earthquakes that size happen every week in the area.

Check out the USGS map:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/

[JackCo]

26. Straight from fiction but..

I just finished reading a book in the People of the Earth series that dealt with a tribal destruction due in affect to global warming and the crashing of the tribes glacier home.

The afterword climatic research is interesting and mentions that when glaciers are melting from warmer water something called isostatic rebound occurs. This is when land that has been weighted down by ice begins to spring back. The author mentions that the Alps are losing 1.5 billion tons of ice a year and this is causing the entire are to gain altitude. As a result of these changes the earth is destabilized so more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions can occur.

Just thought that was interesting with the way so many earthquakes great and small have been occurring.

[Ishoutandscream2]

27. Hold on. I'm checking the Rapture Ready Report

We're not up to red yet, but it's getting close!