Volcanoes and earthquakes and stuff

[Sput]

So long as you've stopped reading wattsupwiththat I'm happy.

[marksi]

So long as you've stopped reading wattsupwiththat I'm happy.

Mostly!

There's only a small amount of actual content anyway. Around 97% of it is people thinking of new ways (that they think are hilarious) of saying how they are 100% right and everyone else is 100% wrong.

[Inspector Sands]

Should we be concerned about all this seismic and volcanic activity and is it unusual or do we just know more about everything going on in the world?

There's a volcano erupting today in Eritrea that hasn't been active in recorded history. Plus the one in Chile that continues to erupt. The one in Iceland a couple of weeks ago. Then there's the recent earthquakes in the Pacific.

My understanding is that it's nothing unusual; it's all about randomness, clustering and the human habit of noticing patterns.

There are earthquakes/tremors of varying sizes all day every day, of course most of them no-one notices either because they happen in remote locations or they're weak. At least from a human perspective they happen fairly randomly and unpredictably. The USGS has some interesting graphs of earthquake activity since 1980 and there's not really any pattern, nor is 2011 shaping up to be that bad: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/ ... graphs.php In fact the worst year for earthquakes seems to be 2007, although the worst recent year for deaths are 2004 (Tsunami) and 2010 (presumably that's Haiti)

With any random sequence there will be clusters of results. Say you tossed a coin a thousand times and noted the results, you would see runs of heads or runs of tails here and there. It's a natural tendency for the human mind to perceive patterns where there are none. Runs of good luck and bad luck being a classic example

That's almost certainly what's happening at the moment - just a cluster of high profile seismic activity which is perceived as being something out of the ordinary.


This is very earthquake related, I suspect it's the same with volcanoes, but I'm not aware of a USGS equivalent for them