Thanks to feather helping me out yesterday, I was a bit 'dumb' when it came to the 'recent' button/tab.
I realise there is a lot going on in the world today, but there is something else going on too that I am not sure how many of you here are aware of....the geo-physics of our planet.
I am posting this thread in the hope that some of you here will at least keep an eye on the Earth Matters section. I am not expecting any responses to this thread, as I am just posting it as a gentle reminder to us all that there are greater forces at work that even TPTB et all have no control over...except for the fact they might very well know what is coming (there is evidence for that) and are putting 'plans' in place.

Anyways, I am no cathar/spellbound...but given recent events in Indonesia and culminating in todays report, and those of you here who know me and what I have said about this region being the catalyst, I hope some more of you will keep an eye on the EQ and volcano threads over in Earth Matters.

Suma­tran earth­quakes in April were part of tec­tonic plate breakup

Sep­tem­ber 27, 2012 – INDONE­SIA — Planet Earth may be 4.5 bil­lion years old, but that doesn’t mean it can’t serve up a shat­ter­ing sur­prise now and again. Such was the case on April 11 when two mas­sive earth­quakes erupted beneath the Indian Ocean off the coast of the Indone­sian island of Suma­tra, far from the usual dan­ger zones. Now sci­en­tists say the seafloor rup­tures are part of a long sus­pected, yet never before observed, event: the slow-​motion split­ting of a vast tec­tonic plate. The first of the quakes, a mag­ni­tude 8.7, was 20 times more pow­er­ful than California’s long antic­i­pated “big one” and tore a com­plex net­work of faults deep in the ocean floor. The vio­lence also trig­gered unusu­ally large after­shocks thou­sands of miles away, includ­ing four off North America’s west­ern coast. “It was jaw-​dropping,” said Thorne Lay, a pro­fes­sor of Earth and plan­e­tary sci­ences at UC Santa Cruz. “It was like noth­ing we’d ever seen.” At first, Lay won­dered whether the com­puter code he used to ana­lyze earth­quakes was wrong. Even­tu­ally, he and other sci­en­tists real­ized that they had doc­u­mented the breakup of the Indo-​Australian plate into two pieces, an epic process that began roughly 50 mil­lion years ago and will con­tinue for tens of mil­lions more. Lay and other sci­en­tists reported their find­ings online Wednes­day in the jour­nal Nature. Most great earth­quakes occur along plate bor­ders, where one plate dives beneath the adjoin­ing plate and sinks deep into Earth’s man­tle, a process called sub­duc­tion. The April 11 quakes, how­ever, occurred in the mid­dle of the plate and involved a num­ber of strike-​slip faults, mean­ing the ground on one side of the fault moves hor­i­zon­tally past ground on the other side. Sci­en­tists say the 8.7 main shock broke four faults. The quake lasted 2 min­utes and 40 sec­onds — most last just sec­onds — and was fol­lowed by a sec­ond main shock, of mag­ni­tude 8.2, two hours later. Unlike the mag­ni­tude 9.1 tem­blor that struck in the same region on Dec. 26, 2004, and cre­ated a deadly tsunami, the April 11 quakes did not cause sim­i­lar destruc­tion. That’s because hor­i­zon­tally mov­ing strike-​slip faults do not induce the mas­sive, ver­ti­cal dis­place­ment of water that thrust faults do on the bor­ders of plates. The type of inter­plate faults involved in the Suma­tran quakes are the result of mon­u­men­tal forces, some of which drove the land mass of India into Asia mil­lions of years ago and lifted the Himalayan Moun­tains. As the Indo-​Australian plate con­tin­ues to slide north­west, the west­ern por­tion of the plate, where India is, has been grind­ing against and under­neath Asia. But the east­ern por­tion of the plate, which con­tains Aus­tralia, keeps on mov­ing with­out the same obstruc­tion. That dif­fer­ence cre­ates squeez­ing pres­sure in the area where the quakes occurred. The study authors say that over time, as more quakes occur and new rup­tures appear, the cracks will even­tu­ally coa­lesce into a sin­gle fis­sure. “This is part of the messy busi­ness of break­ing up a plate,” said Uni­ver­sity of Utah seis­mol­o­gist Keith Koper, senior author of one of the stud­ies. “Most likely it will take thou­sands of sim­i­lar large quakes for that to hap­pen.” The quakes were also notable for trig­ger­ing pow­er­ful after­shocks thou­sands of miles away. Though major quakes have been known to trig­ger after­shocks at great dis­tance, they are usu­ally less than 5.5 in mag­ni­tude. The April earth­quakes trig­gered 11 after­shocks that mea­sured 5.5 or greater in the six days that fol­lowed, includ­ing a mag­ni­tude 7. Remote shocks were felt 6,000 to 12,000 miles from the main quakes. Fred Pol­litz, a geo­physi­cist with the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey in Menlo Park, Calif., and lead author of one of the stud­ies, said the quakes were extremely effec­tive in trans­mit­ting seis­mic wave radi­a­tion around the world. Though Pol­litz said the mag­ni­tude of the larger Suma­tran quake is No. 10 on the list of quakes since 1900, no other tem­blor has trig­gered so many strong after­shocks so far away. “It’s the most pow­er­ful earth­quake ever in terms of capa­bil­ity of putting stress on other fault zones around the world,” he said. –LA Times


This is very worrying.….may not hap­pen in our lifetime…but mother nature has a habit of serv­ing a curve ball which results in us going back to the draw­ing board! Add to that my per­sonal ‘opin­ion’ of where we are head­ing and the rapid rise in vol­cano activ­ity in Indone­sia recently.…..

Thank you


Jane

The topics have been merged for some reason?

Good reminder, Jane.

It is human hubris to take the Earth for granted: Japanese earthqakes taught me a lesson in humility

mikey mikey wrote:
Its a shame we don't get earthquakes in very small areas, such as near mobile phone masts! Many people would like that!