Geophysicist Richard Aster from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology is concerned—very concerned.
Evidence he’s amassed leads him to the inescapable belief that the Earth has plunged into a terribly dangerous period of huge, devastating earthquakes.
The prominent scientist—the current president of the Seismological Society of America—sees more mega quakes: bigger, more widespread, and more deadly.
Cluster quakes
Some researchers believe that non-local earthquake cascades occur in clusters and point to graphs depicting energy release versus time. They argue that the charts don’t lie and the numbers prove that historically most of the energy released by major earthquakes results in several very large quakes globally—a chain of destructive dominoes collapsing one upon the other.
While it’s true the energy released by gigantic quakes creates life, they also mercilessly crush out life.
The Sumatra 9.3 magnitude earthquake and tsunami snuffed out the lives of some 300,000 people and the Japanese 9.1 quake and tsunami may have killed 25,000 or more before exposing the world to an ongoing nuclear catastrophe.
Currently, the theory of cascading is accepted by most seismologists, geophysicists, and geologists. The cascade theory of fault rupture argues a quake has a tendency to spread across one part of a fault to a neighboring fault rupturing the crust like a crack spreading on thin ice.
Ideally, all earthquake activity ceases when the energy that produced the rupture ceases.
Ideally.
Yet, that may not be the case. As Aster admits, earthquake researchers really have little hard science revealing how a mega quake initiates another in a completely different region of the globe.
It’s known that mega quakes can trigger far distant aftershocks. For instance, the Sumatra quake seems to have triggered another in Afghanistan and then Iran. And seismologists believe the March 2011 Japanese 9.1 quake created tremors in several distant regions including one recorded in Nebraska and another in Arkansas.
Random occurrences
Andrew Michael, a Menlo Park, California geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey dismisses the idea of cluster quakes.
He told Inside Science News Service during an interview, “Overall, the pattern is random.”
Michael explained he investigated the theory and researched the patterns of mega quake incidents. After eliminating all recorded aftershocks, he asserts, cluster quake incidents are simply “flukes” and cannot be relied on for future earthquake prediction. “Random doesn’t mean evenly spaced out,” Michael explained.
Giant quakes may signal doom for some cities
Although some geophysicists and seismologists doubt that mega quakes probably aren’t harbingers of more catastrophes to come, Aster pointed out the reality that “it’s undeniable that we’re becoming more and more vulnerable to the effects of earthquakes in general.”
The 21st Century world is much more susceptible to potential disasters that carried far less risk in the past. As urban sprawl spreads and technology, economies and distribution networks become more globally interconnected, the damage from large quakes and mega-quakes grows exponentially.
“We just have more people in precarious places,” Aster said. But he believes that researchers like Michael have it wrong.
And there are other scientists that believe Andrew Michael is wrong: they claim charts don’t lie and historically most of the energy released by major earthquakes can result in mega-quakes elsewhere.
