Some months ago, I wrote about some activity on the Ring of Fire.
http://boomer-musings.blogspot.com/2009/06/i-think-i-felt-earth-move.html
Well, there has been more activity of late. A lot. And very powerful activity. Something is going on. All in the region just north of Australia and west toward (and into) Indonesia.
I am not talking about little shakers. I am talking about things in the 7.0 and higher magnitude. And these often produce a side effect called tsunamis. You may have read about one recently in American Samoa.
Now, in that article I wrote back in June I mentioned that I subscribed to a service by the USGS (United States Geological Survey) where they email me about seismic activity. I woke up this morning to find 6 emails about events in the region I described above with magnitudes ranging from 6.9 to 7.8 between about 4:20 PM and 9:15 PM.
That's quite a cluster. And that area had been pretty quiet for awhile. The activity actually started with a couple of quakes (one big, one aftershock of reportable size) near American Somoa on the 29th of September.
We worry about the environmental impact of our own activities; the smog we produced, the levels of CO2, how much trash we are trying to bury, deforesting rainforests, water usage (and pollution), over-fishing, and the like. All of it would mean nothing if something like the Ring of Fire got as active as it once was millions of years ago.
We are a resilient species but our civilizations are very fragile. I don't think they could handle a period where the Ring became very active.
A Night Unremembered
13 years ago
5 comments:
maybe we should stop bombing the crap out it with our weapons of war. Let's face it, that has to have an impact
Paul, the only people bombing anything in that area are Jihadists and the occasional DPRK nuke test. We haven't bombed anyone in that area in decades.
...or perhaps we could redirect the Moon bomb back to Earth. If not at least the resources invested in that ridiculous experiment.
Hektik, I am all in favor of scientific endeavors. I especially am enamored of space travel and the possibility of remote outposts on the moon (and, eventually, Mars) but the moon bomb thing just seems so low tech...
We only get the occasional small tremor in the UK, so it's ahrd to imagine what a full scale rumble is like. I expect, like you say Douglas, human things would suddenly seem rather frail.
Rockets aren't really high tech, at least in theory. Big explosion, directed out the back of a tube, hope for the best.
I think the high tech bit after the bombing will be the observations and analysis of the results.
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