Dave Schumaker from his blog life, technology, outdoors, photography; has posted a very informative piece on the amount of earthquakes that have been happening lately. He brings in a touch of logic in this day and age where the media seems to get a distorted view of what is really news or really worth getting the public worked up about.
Dave writes "After the massive earthquake this past weekend in Chile, MSNBC published a sensationalistic piece entitled, “Is nature out of control?” The Wall Street Journal asked if three massive earthquakes around the world in two months are related and a cause for alarm. The mainstream media, always searching for sensationalistic or fear mongering news, has latched onto the question; are we seeing more earthquakes than normal?
Well, not really.
To better understand why, let’s take a look at how many earthquakes occur each year on average. The USGS has a fascinating page of earthquake facts and statistics, with the following table:
| Magnitude | Average Annually |
|---|---|
| 8 and higher | 1 ¹ |
| 7 – 7.9 | 17 ² |
| 6 – 6.9 | 134 ² |
| 5 – 5.9 | 1319 ² |
| 4 – 4.9 | 13,000 (estimated) |
| 3 – 3.9 | 130,000 (estimated) |
| 2 – 2.9 | 1,300,000 (estimated) |
² Based on observations since 1990"
I would like to personally thank Dave for bringing this data out in the open as I have been wondering the same thing and was really starting to get worked up on the matter (THANK YOU FOXNEWS).
If at any point you where wondering about knowing if there was an earthquake or wondering how many we have had in a day visit this page from the USGS. They list all by date time and magnitude.
Oh and by the way there was just a 3.8 quake about an hour ago off-shore northern,CA. Oh well they keep coming, we just hope that the loss of life and devastation is minimal.
Dave Schumaker - "have there really been more earthquakes than average"
2 comments:
I found this during a google search. thank you so much for posting this. it calms my worries a little bit although i know california is in for a big one.
Just so you know.. they do predict the New Madrid Fault (The one you and I live on) has the potential to quake anytime
(appx 200 years after the one in 1812) and they predict it to have enough seismic strength to topple the St. Louis arch. So... While I'm not exactly losing sleep (the paranoia part of my brain does shake me up sometimes though lol) I don't think it would be unreasonable to prepare for such as disaster. Much in the same way we prepared for terrorists after 9/11, Nuclear bombs during the cold war, or getting stranded in the middle of winter. All not likely but always a possiblity.
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