Divermarv

(Excerpt from an MSNBC article)

Is Earth shaking more?
The Ryukyu Islands of Japan were hit with a 7.0-magnitude quake on Friday night. News of that tremor, the Haiti quake and now Chile may make it seem as if Earth is becoming ever more active. But in the grand scheme of things, geologists say this is just Mother Nature as usual.

“From our human perspective with our relatively short and incomplete memories and better and better communications around the world, we hear about more earthquakes and it seems like they are more frequent,” Arrowsmith said. “But this is probably not any indication of a global change in earthquake rate of significance.”

Coupled with better communication, as the human population skyrockets and we move into more hazardous regions, we’re going to hear more about the events that do occur, Arrowsmith added.

However, “relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid 1990s, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years,” said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science and Technology. “We still do not know the reason for this yet. Could simply be the natural temporal variation of the stress field in the earth’s lithosphere.” (The lithosphere is the outer solid part of the Earth.)

Well, I think I side with the geologist from Arizona. In the tiny compressed scope of time that we humans can comprehend in our lifetimes, it is rather brash to make assumptions based on the gargantuan span of geological or Terran time. And it is true communications are so much more wide-spread with brilliant graphics and such it is easy to assume that “times” today are much worse. I contend that if you go back through history and read the fine print, each generation has successively stated that it’s “time” was worse, and things were bleaker than ever before.

Just my opinion. Your mileage may vary.

As you were.