SCIENCE REACTION:HAITI, CHILE, New Zealand, and now Japan. Powerful killer earthquakes have rocked one corner of the globe to another in just over a year but scientists warn against looking for a Doomsday scenario in this recurring ripple of big earthshaking natural disasters.
“There’s nothing going on out of the ordinary,” Dr Daniel McNamara, a research seismologist with the US Geological Survey said.
He said earthquakes, caused by shiftings and grindings of colliding tectonic plates beneath the planet’s surface, were a natural phenomenon happening “all the time”, with small tremors occurring in the tens of thousands each year.
Friday’s 8.9 magnitude quake in Japan was the biggest on record in that earthquake-prone country.
The survey said a magnitude 9 earthquake was equivalent to 25,000 nuclear bombs.
The Japan quake capped 14 months that saw a January 2010 7.0 magnitude jolt that devastated Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed more than 300,000 people, followed by an 8.8 magnitude quake the next month in Chile that killed more than 500 people and caused $30 billion in damage.
This year, a February 22nd quake measuring 6.3 magnitude ravaged Christchurch, New Zealand, followed an earlier nearby 7.1 quake in that country in September.
“We’ve just had bad luck, they’ve occurred in places near to centres of population and then it becomes news.
“If they occur in the middle of nowhere, they are not news,” said Grenville Draper, professor of geosciences at the Earth and Environment Department of Florida International University.
Experts were still searching for some kind of phenomena that could provide a warning for earthquakes. – (Reuters)