Upon hearing of this morning’s devastation in Chile, I began to wonder whether all of this recent continental plate shifting in the news is connected. Is this, perhaps, the beginning of the Tectonapocalypse?
In a word: No. Haiti’s earthquake and Chile’s occurred on completely different plates, along completely independent fault lines. In fact, according to geophysics professor, Tim Dixon, the Earth gets a 7 magnitude earthquake approximately once a month, and an 8.8 range approximately once a year. Since humans, for the most part, don’t dwell in deep submarine caverns, or underneath the ocean floors, we experience few of these massive earthquakes firsthand. If your only source of information was cable news networks, however, you might begin connecting the dots and assuming that we’re in for some kind of “Pangea’s Revenge” disaster scenario.
One more thing about the Richter scale… I’d always known it was an exponential scale, but I didn’t know that each level actually represents a 1000% increase from the previous level. In other words, Chile’s 8.8 (were we to round off at 9) would be about 100 times more powerful than the 7.0 earthquake that rocked Haiti.
Given that information, one cringes at the potential devastation that is just starting to be reported in Chile. This could get very, very ugly.
