Shake, rattle, and roll, a band called The Comets once crooned in the 1950s — and the ground, it is a’shaking and a ‘rattling and sometimes even rolling.
You have those quakes in Japan. You had that quake in Ecuador. You have seismic activity in California — of course. And also in the Northwest. There was a small quake not far from the Mississippi River and also not far from the epicenter for the famous 1811-1812 quakes that roared underground not so far from St. Louis and Memphis, the most powerful quakes thus far recorded in the forty-eight contiguous states (yes, more powerful than the famous San Francisco disaster in 1906).
The small quake set off worries, in some circles, that the New Madrid fault — which caused great Mississippi quakes a century ago — may be coming to life once more.
There is quite a bit of rumbling in New Zealand. There was a small quake north of San Francisco early Monday.
Just last week it was reported, as Live Science summarized, that “an odd phenomenon may explain why the Southeastern United States has experienced recent earthquakes, even though the region sits snugly in the middle of a tectonic plate and not at the edges, where all the ground-shaking action usually happens. This seismicity — or relatively frequent earthquakes — may be the result of areas along the bottom of the North American tectonic plate peeling off, the researchers said. And this peeling motion is likely to continue, leading to more earthquakes in the future, like the 2011 magnitude-5.8 temblor that shook the nation’s capital.”
The earth’s mantle, said another publication, “is way less stable than we thought.”
We’re not talking about the thin layer known as the crust; we’re speaking about its thousands-of-miles-thick underpinning.
Couple that with the strange long uncanny rolling and echoing (and rattling) sounds that so many report in their vicinities — along with unexplained booms — and you begin to wonder if the interlocking plates that support the surface of the planet are set to shift in a major fashion.
Think of the earth’s mantle as like an egg with many cracks, with pieces of the shell that could sink lower than the rest (as a shell would into the egg white of a hard-boiled egg). Entire areas leveled? Large lakes formed? Imagine the results. To be frank, a sudden drop in a large section of the mantle could devastate a continent, could in theory drain an ocean, unlikely though it may be to occur.
But something is astir underneath. Volcanoes seem to be slowly waking up; also last week, geologists reported rumblings at Mount St. Helens, indicating that its lava chambers may be refilling.
On Sunday, the United States Geological Service noticed a swarm of quakes at Oregon’s Mount Hood.
Also last week, about California, an expert said, “The springs on the San Andreas system have been wound very, very tight. And the southern San Andreas fault, in particular, looks like it’s locked, loaded and ready to go.”
The San Andreas has not relived major stress caused by the movement of tectonic plates for a hundred years. The last quake to relieve such stress was — ironically (and for all we know, not simply coincidentally) in 1812.
We may be ready to find out that quakes around the globe are far more connected — and trigger one another — than seismologist know or could know (you simply can’t see down there). They do believe that both the earth’s surface and interior are in constant motion. There are “plates” down there that hold entire regions of the world.
Meanwhile, late last week, as United Press International put it, “There’s a nine percent chance a magnitude 9 or larger earthquake will strike the Aleutian Islands in the next 50 years. That is the prediction offered by scientists from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa made with the help of a newly designed computer model. Researchers say an earthquake of that size could send a mega-tsunami in the direction of the Hawaiian Islands.”
It is starting to seem more and more that in coming years and at the most decades dramatic occurrences will alter the landscape in major areas of the nation, perhaps in some areas that will be totally surprised to have such shaking in their vicinity — and under their homes. Stay tuned.
The prediction here is that several major quakes will strike before the mid-point of the century, each one more intense than either New Madrid in 1811 or the famous California quakes.
[resources: Sent To Earth; Said Mother Angelica of this books, by Michael H. Brown, ” “If you didn’t buy his book, you’re missing it. It’s not a scary book; it’s a very good book. If you haven’t bought it I would buy it. I think it’s a great book, just terrific. I think it’s important for my future and your future. I want you to read Sent To Earth. Why? It’s logical, it’s truthful, it’s sensible, and it’s God’s way of saying, ‘Let’s be ready.'”]
[Retreat (Michael Brown) for Moodus, Ct.; Retreat: Philly-New Jersey]
