Tsunami Wave Approaching the Shore – Voice of Zion

 

The BibleSearchers Reflections

Reflections on the Time of the End

By Robert Mock MD

robertmock@biblesearchers.com

www.BibleSearchers.com

 

Gleanings on Global News at the

Time of the End

January 2005 Special Edition Issue

  

Signs at the Time of the End

 

Topics

The God of Israel and the Great Tsunami

The Great Indonesian Quake and Tsunami

The Geological Study of the 2004 Sumatra Quake

History of Preceding Large Quakes to the Indonesian Sumatra Quake

Detection of a Major Catastrophe

Jewish Rabbinic Response to the Earthquake

The Day the Earth Shrugged and Groaned

World Response to the Indonesian Tsunami

 

The God of Israel and the Great Tsunami

 

It all began on the weekend of December 26, 2004. In the early morning the coolness of the day produces the pleasure of being close to God’s nature.  People were walking along the beach, children playing along the lapping waves when the tides suddenly moved out.  The children followed the retreating tides lines eager to pick up shells that were left behind and unaware of the disaster that lay ahead of them.  The foundations of the earth went into spasms and all the seismographs around the world recorded the convulsions. 

 

Live International Seismographs of the Indonesian Earthquake – December 26 (21:40:57)

- By the United States Geological Survey (USGS)

 

A 9.0 magnitude earthquake, known to seismologists as a “megathrust”, shook the tectonic plates near the archipelago of 17,000 islands of Indonesia and 155 miles south of the city of Bandah Aceh on the northern tip of the western shoreline of Sumatra.  Five miles below the Indian Ocean the edges of three continental tectonic plates along with the Indian and Australian plates slowly grind along a subduction zone against the Burma plate. There they overlap and thrust above and below each other.  In a long 745 mile fault line running north and south west of Indonesia, the Indian plate dives below the Burma plate and the Sunda Trench marks where the Indian plate descends into the hot mantle of the earth’s molten interior inferno.  Here one of the biggest earthquakes in the Indian-Asia hemisphere in the past 200 years began to convulse the entire planet earth.  An 8.0 earthquake rocked this area in the year 2000, preceded by giant quakes in 1797, 1833 and 1861.  Yet this quake released 31 times more energy than the 2000 quake.

 

The mass of water displaced by the tectonic plates sent a mega tsunamis racing along the ocean floor of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean faster than an airliner streaks across the sky. Chaos, havoc and destruction soon wrecked its deadly toll along elite seacoast resorts where the beautiful people of the six continents were basking in the sun.  There with the local native communities from Indonesia to Somalia in Eastern Africa, their lives were obliterated.  A sixty five wall of water struck Indonesia while waves thirty feet high rolled over like a freight train unto the shorelines of Sri Lanka more than a 1000 miles from the earthquake.  The energy displacement caused the oceans to rise halfway around the world where in Manzanilla, Mexico, the waves rose up more than eight feet.  Yet here was the shocker. While hundreds of thousands of humans were killed, no animal bodies were recovered in the debris.  Along with the primitive natives whose eyes and ears are sensitive to the changes in nature, they all make a quick retreat to the inner highlands along the coast. 

 

Asian Tsunami Satellite Imagery

– By Global Security.org

 

Tsunamis occur frequently in the Pacific basin where the “Ring of Fire” drapes over the globe like a necklace on a beautiful figure. Here the most active tectonic spots on the globe are in constant motion.  Yet the quietness of the Indian Ocean was deceiving.  In a world used to the placid calmness of uniform changes in nature, the “mega-disaster” of a million atomic bombs made the fear of human terrorism appeared like child’s play.  Not since the region exploded with the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 has a tsunami been recorded in the Indian Ocean.  This rogue catastrophe created fear in every coastal inhabitant from New York, Amsterdam and Buenos Aires to Tokyo, San Francisco and Hong Kong where 80% of the populations of the earth live.  The monster of the deep may any second crush out their lives without warning.  

 

This planet earth wobbled on its axis, the pole migrated or tilted on its axis over an inch and the rotation of the earth sped up 3 microseconds.  Even a nuclear submarine of the United States hitting an undersea mountain highlighted that all the sea lanes in the regions, where the massive oil tankers ply the waters from one continent to another, were vulnerable to a potential mega-environmental disaster if a tanker hull plying one hundred feet into the ocean were to rip apart from the catastrophic changes in the shifting ocean floors. 

 

The islands surrounding Indonesia “were moved out of place” very similar to a future greater earthquake that will affect the whole earth as revealed in the 6^th Seal of Revelation. 

 

Revelation 6:12-17 - And I looked and He opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood; and the stars of heaven fell to the earth, as a fig tree drops its late figs, when it is shaken by a mighty wind.

 

And the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved out of its place.  And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, and every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb; For the great day of His wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

 

The realization that is casting a pall across the face of the earth is that something different is happening to our globe and no one seems to have an answer.  In an era in which all nature appears to be going awry, the confidence of weather forecasting is shattered by aberrant hurricanes wandering over one state in America, the highest temperature in 500 years in Europe, mega tornados in mid-America, the mighty ice shelves of the Antarctica collapsing, the glaciers in the Artic retreating, the unexplained phenomenon of the darkness of the Artic glowing like the breaking of a new day, the increased temperature of the central Pacific of 2-4 degrees causing 100 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains and mud slides and collapsing homes in San Bernardino County in California, we have to ask, “Is the Eternal One of Israel saying something to us?”  Are these aberrant and unusual catastrophic changes in a uniform world?  Is this planet flinging through the darkness of the solar system guided by the finger of the Divine or is it home alone as it careens through outer space?

 

Once more we hear the words of the ancient prophets of Israel ringing in our ears,

 

Haggai 2:6 – “For thus says the Lord of hosts, Once more in a little while, I am going to shake the heavens and the earth, the sea also and the dry land.”

 

It is easy for many to believe that the forces of nature reveal the nature of the God of Israel.  Yet where was the Eternal One of Israel when the convulsion of the deep sent a shock wave to the distant lands?  As a geologist patient of mine, who analyzes the deep earth sounding on the crust of the earth, said to me, “What happened in Indonesia has been part of the formation of this earth for millions of years. Is happened and it will happen again!  Oh, yes, this may not be the most catastrophic earthquake and tsunami to hit this earth but the question still begs an answer, “Did an absentee God let this earth hiccough on its own?  Was the Lord of hosts rather sending a message to this planet earth? 

 

Revelation 14:7 - “Fear God and give glory to Him for the hour of His judgment is come; and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water.”!” 

 

If the Lord of hosts wanted to communicate to the inhabitants on this planet, how would He do it?  He sent the Torah and we believe it not.  He sent the prophets of Judah and Israel and let the children of Israel be blessed or cursed depending on their responses to His word so we could see the consequences.  Yet today, we blame Israel rather than believing that the God of Israel will do what He states He will do whether or not we will believe in Him.  He sent down His only Son who affirmed the prophets of old and their apocalyptic vision and we still believe Him not.   

 

Yet many others believing in a God of Love are uncomfortable that a loving God would marshal the forces of tectonic destruction upon the people of this earth.  Yet what choice does a loving God have in a world where power, greed and control is reining its evil hand over the face of the earth.  Europe today is virtually God-less today. America is quickly erasing any images or written portrayals of the Divine from its institutions of justice. The apostate Christian church is completing its bid for global dominion. The “Protest”ant Church no longer are protesting.  They are flocking as fast as they can back to the fold of apostate Christianity.  Neither are they obeying the call of the Lord of hosts,

 

Maybe we want the Eternal One of Israel to proclaim in a loud thundering voice from heaven that will be heard in the 70 languages on this earth?  Maybe He should sent a host of angels to the geopolitical power center on this earth. Maybe He should sent His own archangels!  Maybe He will.

 

Revelation 18:4 - “And I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her my people, lest you receive of her plagues.  For her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.” 

 

Consider the fact that there is so much evil in the hearts of man today that we do not need a Satan.  Leave man to his own devices and this earth will surely be consumed and destroyed. The goodness of man seen on this earth does not come from the abundance of righteousness inherent in our own hearts but rather there are a few people who are still listening for the “still small voice” of God. The Lord of hosts desires that all men should be saved but it was Yahshua (Jesus) who stated, “Many are called but few are chosen. “ Why?  Because only a few hear the voice of the Lord and are willing like Isaiah who said, “Here am I, oh Lord, send me.” 

 

Maybe we should reconsider that the Eternal One of Israel is truly sovereign over the entire Universe.  The fact that the laws of nature appear stable and we feel protected only suggests that over the centuries the Lord of the Universe has been holding this planet in the palm of His hand.  Withdraw that Hand of divine protection and the evil acts of man will suffocate this planet and the natural laws of the universe will be thrown awry.  If the prophet of Revelation is to be believed, the Lord of hosts will withdraw His protective influence from this earth until His remnant will ‘cry upon His Name’ and the inhabitants who choose to harbor the forces of evil will harden their hearts till every spark of the divine touch will be extracted from their soul. Only when the polarity between the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’ appears as stark as ‘night and day’ will the Moschiach (Messiah) of Israel come to claim His own. (Click to Open “Signs at the Time of the End”)

 

Links to Aish.com

Israel, Tikkun Olam and the Tsunami

After Disaster

Reacting to the Tsunami

 

The Great Indonesian Quake and Tsunami

 

Isaiah 45:7 God says “I make peace and create calamity; I, the LORD, do all these things.”

 

Asian Tsunami Kills 12,300, Many More Homeless – December 26, 2004

COLOMBO (Reuters) - More than 12,300 people were killed and tens of thousands left homeless after a powerful undersea earthquake unleashed giant tsunami waves that crashed into the coasts of south and southeast Asia. The 8.9 magnitude earthquake that struck off the Indonesian island of Sumatra early on Sunday was the biggest in 40 years. It triggered waves that reared up into walls of water as high as 10 meters (30 feet) as they hit coastlines in Indonesia, Sri Lanka,

 

India and Thailand.

 

Aid agencies rushed staff, equipment and money to the region, warning that bodies rotting in the water were already beginning to threaten the water supply for survivors. Rescue workers also spoke of bodies still caught up on trees after being flung inland by the waves. "I just couldn't believe what was happening before my eyes," Boree Carlsson said from a hotel in the Thai resort of Phuket. "As I was standing there, a car actually floated into the lobby and overturned because the current was so strong," said the 45-year-old Swede.

 

"I heard an eerie sound that I have never heard before. It was a high pitched sound followed by a deafening roar," said a 55-year-old Indian fishermen who gave his name as Chellappa. "I told everyone to run for their life." In Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,000 islands, one official said nearly 4,500 people had died. The worst affected area was Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province, where 3,000 were killed. More than 200 prisoners escaped from a jail when the tsunami knocked down its walls. In Sri Lanka, the death toll also reached 4,500 and 1 million people, or 5 percent of its population, were affected. It was the worst natural disaster to hit Sri Lanka. Hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans sheltered in schools and temples overnight, and officials expected the death toll to rise further once rescuers resumed searches after daybreak. In southern India, where at least 3,000 were estimated to have died, beaches were littered with submerged cars and wrecked boats. Shanties on the coast were under water. Thai government officials said at least 392 bodies had been retrieved and they expected the final toll to approach 1,000.

 

NO WARNING SYSTEM

 

In Los Angeles, the head of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said U.S. officials who detected the undersea quake tried frantically to get a warning out about the tsunami. But there was no official alert system in the region, said Charles McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's center in Honolulu. "It took an hour and a half for the wave to get from the earthquake to Sri Lanka and an hour for it to get ... to the west coast of Thailand and Malaysia," he said. "You can walk inland for 15 minutes to get to a safe area." "We tried to do what we could," he said. "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world."

 

The earthquake, of magnitude 8.9 as measured by the U.S. Geological Survey (news - web sites), struck at 7:59 a.m. (1959 EST). It was the world's biggest since 1964, said Julie Martinez at the USGS (news - web sites). The tsunami was so powerful it smashed boats and flooded areas along the east African coast, 3,728 miles away. In the Maldives, where thousands of foreign visitors were holidaying in the beach paradise, damage appeared to be significantly more limited, according to initial reports. Twenty-eight people were estimated to have died in Malaysia and 10 in Myanmar.

 

SCALE OF DISASTER NOT YET KNOWN

 

Aid agencies said with communications cut to remote areas, it was impossible to assess the full scale of the disaster. The Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it was seeking 7.5 million Swiss francs ($6.5 million) for emergency aid funding. The United States said it would offer "all appropriate assistance," while the European Union (news - web sites) pledged an initial three million euros ($4 million). Experts said the top five areas to be addressed were water, sanitation, food, shelter and health. "We've had reports already from the south of India of bodies rotting where they have fallen and that will immediately affect the water supply especially for the most impoverished people," Christian Aid emergency officer Dominic Nutt said.  A tsunami, a Japanese word that translates as "harbor wave," is usually caused by a sudden rise or fall of part of the earth's crust under or near the ocean. It is not a single wave, but a series of waves that can travel across the ocean at speeds of more than 500 miles an hour. As the tsunami enters the shallows of coastlines in its path, its velocity slows but its height increases. A tsunami that is just a few centimeters or meters high from trough to crest can rear up to heights of 100 to 150 feet as it hits the shore, striking with devastating force. (Read Entire Article)

 

Indonesia Needs Help, Death Toll Expected To Exceed 400,000 – December 30, 2004

KUALA LUMPUR, (Bernama) -- The death toll in Acheh, the region worst hit by last Sunday's tsunami, may exceed 400,000 as many affected areas could still not be reached for search and rescue operations, Indonesia's Ambassador to Malaysia Drs H. Rusdihardjo said Thursday. He said the estimate was based on air surveillance by Indonesian authorities who found no signs of life in places like Meulaboh, Pulau Simeulue and Tapak Tuan while several islands off the west coast of Sumatra had "disappeared".

He said the latest death toll of more than 40,000 in Acheh and northern Sumatra did not take into account the figures from the other areas, especially in the west of the region. "Aerial surveillance found the town of Meulaboh completely destroyed with only one building standing. The building, which belonged to the military, happens to be on a hill," he told reporters after receiving RM1 million in aid for Indonesia's Tsunami Disaster Relief Fund here Thursday. Rusdihardjo said there were about 150,000 residents in Meulaboh, which was located 150km from the epicentre of the earthquake while Pulau Simeuleu had a population of 76,000.
(Read Article in Full)

 

Politics and 'acts of God' – January 13, 2005

Washington Times - George W. Bush and the Asian tsunami have put religion back on the front page. Exit polls revealed that a majority of religious folk voted to re-elect the president; after tens of thousands died under the waves, millions turned to religion for answers to the question that men and women have asked wise men for millennia.

A headline in the New York Observer puts it bluntly: "Disaster Ignites Debate: 'Was God in the Tsunami?'  If so, how can such things happen? If not, how can such things happen?  Some of the answers seek to exploit tragedy. Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin reports that one Palestinian imam told his congregation that the tsunami was the result of "Jewish American corruption and destruction." Other imams blamed Christians.

Every Sunday-school scholar is familiar with the teaching that God rewards righteousness, as seen in the flood that spared Noah, the endless suffering of Job, the New Testament presentation of the Gospel. But skeptics have forever mocked religious exhortations in politics and religious explanations of natural disasters. After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Voltaire's Candide ridiculed the idea that "this is the best of all possible worlds." Marx jeered that religion was "the opium of the people," and Freud suggested that neurotics sought a "Heavenly father" as protector to replace the biological father.

But religious faith thrives. "Almost everywhere you look around the world, with the glaring exception of Western Europe, religion is now a rising force," reports the New York Times. "The tsunami in Asia could spur religious revival as well, as victims and onlookers turn to mosques, temples and churches both to help them fathom the catastrophe and to provide humanitarian assistance."

In Washington, humanitarian assistance is discussed in pragmatic terms, suggesting (probably a triumph of hope over actual expectation) that our generosity will show Muslims, whose radical extremists seek to persuade with terrorism, that Christians and Jews are not so bad, after all. But generosity needs no political analysis. You don't have to be religious to be charitable to the victims of "acts of God," but it's the religious impulse that has guided American idealism and benevolence through our finest hours. G.K. Chesterton, the English writer, called America "the nation with the soul of a church."  David Gelernter, writing in Commentary magazine, demonstrates how American democracy was built on a Biblical foundation. "The Bible is not merely the fertile soil that brought Americanism birth. It is the energy source that makes it live and thrive; that makes believing Americans willing to prescribe freedom, equality, and democracy even for a place like Afghanistan, once regarded as perhaps the remotest region on the face of the globe."

American history is rich in allusions to America as the New Eden, as if we are a chosen people fulfilling biblical destiny in the New World. Presidential inaugural speeches abound with biblical phrases and references that are not meant solely for inspiration, though they are that, but to embody the driving force for spreading American values of democracy. Abraham Lincoln called us God's "almost chosen people." In his inaugural address, John F. Kennedy said our revolutionary beliefs "come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God."  Abraham Lincoln never joined a church, but said he would if he could find one with a creed fulfilling "what our Lord said were the two great commandments, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength, and my neighbor as myself."  Woodrow Wilson, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, sounded in his inaugural like a Biblical prophet, albeit with more optimism than most: "The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings, like some air out of God's own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one."

Americans are firm in their belief in the separation of church and state, so that men and women of different faiths and of no faith are equal before the law. Anyone who talks to President Bush, a born-again Methodist, hears this echoed today. "The president's job is not to pick a religion," he told me this week in an interview in the Oval Office. "The president's job is not to say you've got to be religious. The president's job is to say you're free to choose. It's very important for that to be even clearer today, given the world in which we live. If you're a Sikh or a Muslim you're equally an American as if you're a Methodist -- or anyone else."   Harry Truman, a plain-spoken Baptist, captured in his memoirs the firm belief of most of us: "What came about in 1776 really had its beginning in Hebrew times." (Article)

 

The world of uniformitarianism is about over. The future era of catastrophic changes as predicted in Revelation is unfolding before our eyes.  The tectonic plates beneath the outer mantle of our planet are being stressed by the increased magma flowed erupting from the molten iron core of the earth.  The gyroscopic core of the earth is rotating on a fixed axis, but the shifting volcanic-like upheavals of the magma that circulates around this core, called the magma convection system is causing the weight of the earth to shift and create a wobble.  It is also causing the magma to hit the underside of the outer mantle of this earth creating stresses that this earth has not experienced in the recent historical history.  

 

What are the implications?  The balance of the earth’s rotation is changing.  As the earth begins to wobble more, the imbalance will increase and eventually the mantle of this earth will break loose and slide several degrees around the core.  Strange tremors are now being recorded along fault lines on the earth.  Listening on the deepest levels of the mantle, the rumblings are being recorded.  Even though it has not been documented in recent historical past or even in the distance geological past, when the magma flows shift to a new location, an unstable volcanic hot spot will occur. If it is over an existing fault line, it will be recorded even better.  In the future, we can expect to hear of more deep tremors.  The animals will perceive it before we will and strange phenomenon in the animal kingdom will occur even with our own pets and domesticated livestock. There will be increased earthquake activity along all the major tectonic plate systems on this planet.  Massive earthquakes will strike seismic unstable areas such as California, Japan and Alaska. Is it no wonder that the Indonesian plate shift was preceded by severe seismic activity in Japan?  Will Alaska soon become more vulnerable including the volcanic zones in the Pacific North-west and Yellowstone National Park?

 

Somewhere in the future we will more than likely experience a geophysical pole-shift.  It this unusual? Yes!  Yet our geological history has proven that it has occurred and ancient Jewish literature has confirmed that on at least one instance, Noah saw a pole shift prior to the arrival of the Noachian Flood.

 

Jasher -

In the sixth seal, the Book of Revelation predicts that there will be a mighty earthquake that will move “all mountains and all islands”.  Yes this will be a global earthquake such as the Indonesian quake off of Sumatra but will such great intensity that it is said “never before occurred on this earth”

 

Revelation

 

Quake rattled Earth orbit, changed map of Asia: US geophysicist – December 28, 2004

Yahoo - An earthquake that unleashed deadly tidal waves on Asia were so powerful it made the Earth wobble on its axis and permanently altered the regional map, US geophysicists said.  The 9.0-magnitude temblor that struck 250 kilometers (155 miles) southeast of Sumatra island Sunday may have moved small islands as much as 20 meters (66 feet), according to one expert.

 

AFP Photo

 

"That earthquake has changed the map," US Geological Survey expert Ken Hudnut told AFP. "Based on seismic modeling, some of the smaller islands off the southwest coast of Sumatra may have moved to the southwest by about 20 meters. That is a lot of slip. "The northwestern tip of the Indonesian territory of Sumatra may also have shifted to the southwest by around 36 meters (120 feet), Hudnut said.

 

In addition, the energy released as the two sides of the undersea fault slipped against each other made the Earth wobble on its axis, Hudnut said. "We can detect very slight motions of the Earth and I would expect that the Earth wobbled in its orbit when the earthquake occurred due the massive amount of energy exerted and the sudden shift in mass," Hudnut said.

 

Another USGS research geophysicist agreed that the Earth would have got a "little jog," and that the islands off Sumatra would have been moved by the quake. However, Stuart Sipkin, of the USGS National Earthquake Information Center in Golden Colorado, said it was more likely that the islands off Sumatra had risen higher out of the sea than they had moved laterally. "In this case, the Indian plate dived below the Burma plate, causing uplift, so most of the motion to the islands would have been vertical, not horizontal." The tsunamis unleashed by the fourth-biggest earthquake in a century have left at least 23,675 people dead in eight countries across Asia and as far as Somalia in East Africa.  The tsunamis wiped out entire coastal villages and pulled beach-goers out to sea.  The International Red Cross estimated that up to one million people have been displaced by the natural calamity. (Article)

 

Quake's power = million atomic bombs? - Like a bulldozer in Sumatra – December 29, 2004

CNN - Scientists describe Sunday's devastating earthquake off the island of Sumatra as a "megathrust" -- a grade reserved for the most powerful shifts in the Earth's crust. The term doesn't entirely capture the awesome power of the fourth largest earthquake since 1900, or the tsunami catastrophes it spawned for coastal areas around the Indian Ocean. Despite its awesome power, the quake itself was not much of a surprise, scientists said Monday.

 

Sumatra is one of the most earthquake-prone places in the world, sitting atop one of the handful of sites where several plates of the planet's crust overlap and grind. Colossal pressures build up over decades, only to release in a snap. "These subduction zones are where all the world's biggest earthquakes are produced," said geologist Kerry Sieh of the California Institute of Technology. "Sunday was one of the biggest earthquakes in the region in the past 200 years."

 

How powerful? By some estimates, it was equal to detonating a million atomic bombs.  Sieh and other scientists said it probably jolted the planet's rotation. "It causes the planet to wobble a little bit, but it's not going to turn Earth upside down," Sieh said.

 

Epicenter: More than 5 miles below ocean

 

Researchers also speculated on the extent to which the jolt might have changed Sumatra's coastline. Extensive damage and flooding was preventing investigators from immediately reaching the scene.  Beneath the ocean, the flexible edges of the crustal plates might have shifted vertically by as much as 60 feet relative to each other. But even that kind of displacement would lift or lower the Sumatran coast by only a few feet or less, they said, and sea levels would not change dramatically. "Basically, the run up of high tide will be just a little further up or further back," said Paul Earle, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

 

But inland, ground levels in northern Sumatra might have changed noticeably in places, Sieh said. "As the block of land on top of subduction zone lurches out west toward the Indian Ocean, you expect that area behind it to sink," he said. Seismologists said the epicenter of Sunday's quake was more than 5.5 miles below the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Sumatra and about 150 miles south of the city of Bandah Aceh on the island's northern tip.  Beneath the ocean floor, the quake occurred along a long north-south fault where the edge of the Indian plate dives below the Burma plate. A sea floor feature known as the Sunda Trench marks where the Indian plate begins its grinding decent into the Earth's hot mantle.

 

Complicating matters, the edges of three other tectonic plates also bump here, with the Indian and Australian plates slowly sliding northwest relative to the Burma plate.

A magnitude 8.0 earthquake on the island's southern tip was the most deadly tremor of 2000, causing at least 103 fatalities and more than 2,000 injuries. Giant quakes also rocked the area in 1797, 1833 and 1861. But they were preludes to Sunday's event.

 

Atlantic Ocean landslide speculation

 

Pressed from many directions, stress built up along the fault line off the Sumatra coast. A north-south fault ruptured along a 745-mile stretch, or about the length of California. It started offshore, then zigzagged inland beneath Sumatra's northern tip and up beneath the Andaman Islands almost to the coast of Myanmar. Similar to quakes on the San Andreas fault in California, the tremor caused one side of the fault to slide past the other. The rupture released energy like shock waves, especially to the east and west.

 

While ground shaking damaged buildings and roads on Sumatra, the real havoc was caused by large ocean waves in the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean that were displaced by the quake. Known as tsunamis, the waves obliterated seacoast resorts and communities as far away as Somalia in East Africa. By Monday, according to the International Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, some energy from Sunday's waves sifted into the Pacific Basin. At Manzanillo, Mexico, waves rose more than eight feet. Minor fluctuations were reported in New Zealand and Chile, where waves rose between one and two feet. In the United States, Hawaii reported almost no wave changes, while San Diego saw waves rise less than a foot.

 

Most tsunamis occur in the Pacific basin because it is encircled by the "Ring of Fire," the necklace of the world's most tectonically active spots. Sunday's tsunami in the Indian Ocean was the first in that region since 1883, when the Krakatoa volcano exploded. But rogue waves can rise in any ocean, and Sunday's disaster renewed attention on the vulnerability of major coastal cities like New York City.

 

In 1999, scientists at University College London reported that if a volcano in the Canary Islands erupted with sufficient force, it could cause a massive landslide on the island of La Palma and trigger tsunami waves in the Atlantic Ocean. They speculated such a landslide would generate a "mega-tsunami" that would inundate the east coast of the United States and the Caribbean with a wall of water more than 164 feet high.

 

But other researchers in Britain discounted the prediction as the product of a speculative computer model. They said that over the past 200,000 years there had been only two huge landslides on the flanks of the Canary Islands and that there was geologic evidence indicating the slides broke up and fell into the sea in bits instead of one big whoosh.  "If you drop a brick into a bath you get a big splash," Russell Wynn of the Southampton Oceanography Centre said in a statement. "But if you break that brick up into several pieces and drop them in one by one, you get several small splashes." Wynn said a multistage landslide would affect the Canary Islands, but would not generate tsunamis capable of swamping New York. (Article)

 

Massive Quakes Difficult to Measure – December 27, 2004

NewsDay - Sunday's earthquake in Sumatra had a preliminary magnitude of 9.0, classifying it as a great quake and making it the strongest in 40 years. Earthquakes near the very top of the magnitude scale are difficult for scientists to measure. For one thing, they occur rarely -- once a year or less -- so researchers don't have many chances to analyze them. And, the tools that scientists use to measure movements in the planet's crust are becoming more sophisticated. So the way in which they assign a number to signal an earthquake's fury is evolving.

 

Today, when seismologists describe an earthquake's magnitude, it is a composite of several types of instruments and equations that calculate several aspects of an earthquake's behavior. The methods started in a more simple way nearly 70 years ago when seismologist Charles Richter of the California Institute of Technology developed his now-familiar Richter scale of earthquake magnitude.

 

Today, researchers still use its familiar scale. Each whole number represents a tenfold increase in seismic movement and severity. Moderate earthquakes begin at 5.0. Strong earthquakes begin at 6.0 and cause damage even to modern structures. Major earthquakes are rated at 7.0 and higher, causing damage over hundreds of miles. Sunday's quake was the strongest since the 1964 tremor that struck Alaska and measured 9.2. The most powerful earthquake on record was a 9.5 in Chile in 1960. While researchers still use the familiar Richter scale numbers, the equations that go into the original scale are too limited, especially for larger earthquakes and those that extend down faults for hundreds of miles. As a result, researchers have turned to more precise measurements, such as "seismic moment," which quantifies how much energy is released by an earthquake. Because of these uncertainties, scientists may initially estimate an earthquake's magnitude, only to tweak it as more data are available. The U.S. Geological Survey initially said Sunday's quake had a magnitude of 8.1, then revised that to 8.5 and then 8.9 before calling it a 9.0. (Article)

 

Scientists: Quake may have made Earth wobble – December 29, 2004

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- The deadly Asian earthquake may have permanently accelerated the Earth's rotation, shortening days by a fraction of a second and caused the planet to wobble on its axis, U.S. scientists said Tuesday.  Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth's center during the quake Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

 

Scientists believe that a shift of mass toward the Earth's center during the quake caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.  When one huge tectonic plate beneath the Indian Ocean was forced below the edge of another "it had the effect of making the Earth more compact and spinning faster," Gross said.  Gross said changes predicted by his model probably are too minuscule to be detected by a global positioning satellite network that routinely measures changes in Earth's spin, but said the data may reveal a slight wobble. The Earth's poles travel a circular path that normally varies by about 33 feet , so an added wobble of an inch is unlikely to cause long-term effects, he said.  "That continual motion is just used to changing," Gross said. "The rotation is not actually that precise. The Earth does slow down and change its rate of rotation."  When those tiny variations accumulate, planetary scientists must add a "leap second" to the end of a year, something that has not been done in many years, Gross said.

Scientists have long theorized that changes on the Earth's surface such as tide and groundwater shifts and weather could affect its spin but they have not had precise measurements to prove it, Caltech seismologist Hiroo Kanamori said.  "Even for a very large event, the effect is very small," Kanamori said. "It's very difficult to change the rotation rate substantially." (Article)

 

New York might Face Watery End – December 28, 2004

New York Post Online - It hardly raised a ripple when it was reported over the summer, but news that a tsunami could one day hit New York is suddenly getting a second look.  Several months ago, geologists raised concerns that an unstable flank of a volcano in the Canary Islands off the coast of Western Africa could slide into the sea and send giant waves across the Atlantic at the speed of a jumbo jet. Within three hours, the wave could swamp the west coast of Africa. Within five hours, it could hit southern England, and within 12 hours, it could build up enough force to wipe out the U.S. East Coast, including New York, Washington, Boston and Miami, according to a British researcher. "Eventually, the whole rock will collapse into the water, and the collapse will devastate the Atlantic margin," said Bill McGuire, of the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Center. "We need to be out there now looking at when an eruption is likely to happen . . . other wise there will be no time to evacuate major cities." McGuire said close monitoring of the site might give two weeks warning of the disaster. But that was before funding of the seismology project in the region dried up several years ago. Scientists at the time of McGuire's August study paid little attention to the warning, largely because the volcano in question has been dormant since 1971, even though it erupts every 20 to 200 years. (Article)

 

Mysterious tremors deep beneath the San Andreas Fault – January 6, 2005

The Houston Chronicle - Tremors rock earth deep beneath San Andreas Fault - Puzzling vibrations baffle researchers - Mysterious tremors deep beneath the San Andreas Fault near the quake-prone town of Parkfield are shaking the earth's brittle crust, far below the region where earthquakes normally strike -- and scientists say they can't understand what's happening or what the motions mean.

 

Seismic researchers are monitoring the strange vibrations closely. But whether the faint underground tremors -- termed "chatter" by some seismologists -- portend an increased likelihood of a major quake in the area is an unsolved puzzle. Robert Nadeau, a geophysicist at the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, has charted more than 110 of the faint vibrations since they were first detected by the lab's High Resolution Seismic Network in Parkfield three years ago. What concerns Nadeau and his colleagues is that the epicenter of the great 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, whose magnitude has been estimated at 7.8 to 8, was located almost exactly where the deep tremors are now occurring -- beneath the San Luis Obispo County village of Cholame, some 17 miles south of Parkfield.

 

The episodes of chatter last from four to 20 minutes and are being recorded from as deep as 40 miles beneath the surface -- up to four times the depth of normal earthquakes, which originate in what scientists call the "seismogenic zone." That zone reaches no deeper than 9 or 10 miles below the Earth's surface. What's most striking is that deep tremors like the Cholame series have never been recorded before on a strike-slip fault such as the San Andreas, Nadeau said. "We see this kind of tremor activity inside volcanoes like Mount St. Helens," Nadeau said, "but that's due to the movement of rising magma, and in the tremors we've recorded there's no evidence of volcanism and no seismic waves typical of ordinary earthquakes."

 

Nadeau and David Dolenc, a graduate student in his lab, are publishing the first report on the mysterious sequence of deep tremors today in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science. They conclude that "future increases in San Andreas Fault tremor activity may signal periods of increased probability for the next large earthquake on the Cholame segment."  The Fort Tejon event rocked the ground violently and ruptured the fault for 225 miles, from northwest of Parkfield to San Bernardino. It was at least as large as the 1906 San Francisco quake. But because the Cholame region was virtually unpopulated at the time, it killed only two people and destroyed only the Tejon Army post, midway along the affected section of the fault. The area is still sparsely populated; Cholame itself boasts only 2,125 inhabitants. But Paso Robles, with a population of more than 25,000, is only 25 miles west of the village -- and it was badly damaged by a magnitude 6.5 quake only a year ago. Scientists have estimated that the Cholame segment of the fault has ruptured in a large quake roughly every 140 years. It is now 148 years since the Fort Tejon event, so the possibility of another one may be steadily increasing, they say.

 

Similar deep tremors have been detected recently along the coast of the Pacific Northwest, known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone, as well as in Japan -- and there, too, scientists are struggling to understand what their import is. In those areas, giant slabs of the earth's crust are dipping downward and sliding ponderously beneath other great crustal slabs, and scientists believe that fluids -- most likely seabed water saturating the slabs -- are causing the tremors, according to Herbert Dragert of Canada's Geological Survey in British Columbia and Kazushige Obara of Japan's National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention. In an interview, Dragert said the tremors appear to add stress to a major thrust fault in the Puget Sound region, and that scientists in Canada and Washington are trying to determine whether the tremors might "play a significant role in triggering great earthquakes."

 

In California, the most mystifying feature of the unexplained tremors is that they are occurring right on the deepest part of the San Andreas -- a fault that does not involve subduction or volcanic activity. Instead, two sides of the earth's crust are sliding horizontally past each other in a motion seismologists call "right-lateral strike slip." In an earthquake, that slip can be an abrupt jolt, and in big quakes, a violent one. The tremors are occurring at such great depth, Nadeau said, that they must be at the very bottom of the brittle crust -- where the earth's hot, viscous upper mantle begins -- which has been under stress for millions of years. It's possible that the mantle there resembles something like Silly Putty, Nadeau said, with great chunks of embedded rock grinding against each other. "No one really knows what the tremors mean," said David Schwartz, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park. "As to what they imply for the possibility of some future quake, we can't tell, and right now we can only wait and see." A long-awaited magnitude 6 quake struck Parkfield in September at a depth of about 5 miles. That quake was seen as the latest in a series of quakes that have hit around Parkfield on an average of every 22 years between 1857 and 1966. The Parkfield section of the San Andreas, in southern Monterey County, is the most intensively instrumented seismic danger region in the United States. A borehole 2 miles deep, carrying an array of instruments and called the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, is to be completed next summer. Whether its instruments solve the mystery of the tremors and determine whether they portend a future Cholame earthquake remains to be seen. (Article)

 

The markers of a god-less society is that they become lovers of themselves. The implications are also in the ego-centric society we become less perceptive of the natural world around us.  The world tourist vacationers were oblivious to the danger that was looming before their eyes as they walked and bathes in the beaches of the famous resorts.  At the same time, the primitive people, the aboringinal natives in the unexplored regions of remote islands and the animals who are more sensitive to nature were spared.

 

Endangered tribes in path of tsunami  - Fate of isolated, primitive groups in the balance – December 29, 2004

Manish Swarup / APMSNBC – Rescuers have yet to reach all of the islands in India’s southeastern Andaman and Nicobar Island chain, the home of some of the world’s most isolated and primitive civilizations

 

In the wake of the tsunami, there was abundant amateur video of the disaster coming from tourist hotspots, like Phuket, Thailand. But some of the villages and islands in the path of the devastating wave are home to primitive tribes and indigenous groups so isolated that contact was only being made on Wednesday, days after the disaster. Anthropologists worry that the tsunami could be the final blow to some cultures that were already thought to be endangered. “My suspicion is that we may be seeing … perhaps as many as three or four different nations (specific indigenous populations) that would be completely wiped out,” says Dr. Rudolph Ryser, chairman of the U.S.-based Center for World Indigenous Studies. He notes that tiny islands that dot the west coast of Sumatra and the east coast of India are so close to the epicenter of the earthquake that they would have been hit within minutes. Many have no high ground to provide refuge. “One question that I’m asking is whether those islands are even there now,” says Ryser.

 

“The entire geography of some parts of these islands has changed,” said territory police chief S.B. Deol. “Where there was one island before, we now see two. In one place, a tree stands alone in the middle of the ocean.”  Among the places where the toll was especially high was the Andaman and Nicobar island chains. All of the islands in the chain have yet to be visited by rescuers. The territory, stretching north from the earthquake epicenter, is ruled by India, but populated by a variety of distinct tribes. Among them are the Sentinelese, a hunter-gatherer society that has lived in almost complete isolation from modern society on the tiny North Sentinel Island due west of Port Blair, the chain’s capital. Even before the disaster, the population of this Stone-Age tribe, which some anthropologists have called the last undiscovered people, was estimated at only 100-200. They have remained hostile to outside interference, so very little is known about their culture. The Sentinelese are one of the Andaman’s lingering Negrito tribes — peoples who appear more African than Indian and have already dwindled to the edge of extinction. Other shrinking tribes such as the Nicobarese and the Shompens derive from Mongoloid stock, and live primarily in the Nicobar chain.

 

Surviving on coconuts

On the island of Car Nicobar, dazed Nicobarese tribespeople emerged from the trees as the army pushed into the interior. Andaman and Nicobar administration relief chief Puneel Goel said 6,000 of the 30,000 people living on the island of Car Nicobar, also the site of the air force base, were Staring blankly, drawn, exhausted and barely speaking, they show little emotion or relief at the arrival of the first help after three days of living mainly on coconuts and camping on the tiny island’s only high ground.“Everything is gone. We have nothing left, not even a slipper,” said Nathan, a 56-year-old father of eight. “One in every five inhabitants in the entire Nicobar group of islands is either dead, injured or missing,” said territory police chief S.B. Deol. At least 50,000 people live in the Nicobars, at the southern end of the chain. “The situation in some of the islands we managed to establish contact with is indeed very, very grim. People have been living on coconuts ... and the coconuts are not going to last forever. We need to reach food urgently to these people.”

 

On the Andaman and Nicobar island of Chowra on Tuesday, rescuers found 500 survivors out of 1,500 residents, the territory’s deputy police chief, C. Vasudeva Rao, told Reuters. “We thought the entire island was washed away. But we found 500 survivors,” he said. No contact has yet been made with two neighboring isles, home to a combined population of 7,000.  “We are fearing the worst in these islands. We have heard nothing from them,” Rao said. “We have no information.”

 

Little high ground

Most of the Andaman and Nicobar islands are uninhabited, but many of the roughly three dozen have no high ground to escape a tsunami. They are also several days’ sailing from help. The tsunami, triggered by a massive undersea earthquake off nearby Indonesia, has killed tens of thousands of people.  “I would not be at all surprised that we will be on 100,000 (deaths) when we know what has happened on the Andaman and Nicobar islands,” Peter Rees of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in Geneva. Dozens of aftershocks continue to hit the islands. Residents terrified the tremors could trigger more giant waves are living on high ground or sleeping on mattresses in the streets of the capital, Port Blair. (Article)

 

Arrow-wielding survivors emerge from forest – All 250 members of ancient Jarawa tribe survived tsunami – January 6, 2005

JIRKATANG, India (AP) – Members of the ancient Jarawa tribe emerged Thursday from their forest habitat for the first time since the Dec. 26 tsunami rocked the isolated Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and in rare interaction with outsiders, said all 250 tribe members survived.

 

A Sentinel tribal man aims with his bow and arrow at an Indian Coast Guard helicopter as it flies over the island for a survey of the damage caused by the tsunami in India’s remote Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, on Dec. 28. “We are all safe after the earthquake. We are in the forest in Balughat,” Ashu, an arrow-wielding Jarawa, said in broken Hindi and through an interpreter in a restricted forest area in the northern reaches of South Andaman island.

 

According to varying estimates, there are only about 400 to 1,000 members alive today from the Jarawas, Great Andamanese, Onges, Sentinelese and Shompens. Some anthropological DNA studies indicate the generations may have spanned back 70,000 years. They originated in Africa and migrated to India through Indonesia, anthropologists say. Seven Jarawa men — wearing only underwear and amulets on their arms — emerged from the forest to meet with government and police officials to say they had all fled to the forest and survived.

 

‘Sixth sense’ may have saved tribes

Government officials and anthropologists believe that ancient knowledge of the movement of wind, sea and birds may have saved the five indigenous tribes from the tsunami. “They can smell the wind. They can gauge the depth of the sea with the sound of their oars. They have a sixth sense which we don’t possess,” said Ashish Roy, a local environmentalist and lawyer who has called on the courts to protect the tribes by preventing their contact with the outside world. The tribes live the most ancient, nomadic lifestyle known to man, frozen in their Paleolithic past. Many produce fire by rubbing stones, fish and hunt with bow and arrow and live in leaf and straw community huts. And they don’t take kindly to intrusions.

 

Anil Thapliyal, a commander in the Indian coast guard, said he spotted the lone tribesman on the island of Sentinel, a 23-square-mile key, on Dec. 28. “There was a naked Sentinelese man,” Thapliyal told The Associated Press. “He came out and shot an arrow at the helicopter.” It appears that many tribesman fled the shores well before the waves hit the coast, where they would typically be fishing at this time of year.

 

After the tsunami, local officials spotted 41 Great Andamanese — out of 43 in a 2001 Indian census — who had fled the submerged portion of their Strait Island. They also reported seeing 73 Onges — out of 98 in the census — who fled to highland forests in Dugong Creek on the Little Andaman island, or Hut Bay, a government anthropologist said. However, the fate of the other tribes won’t be known until officials complete a survey of the remote islands this week, he said. The government reconnaissance mission will also assess how the ecosystem — most crucially, the water sources — has been damaged.

 

‘Land of the head hunters’

Taking surveys of these people is dangerous work.  The more than 500 islands across a 3,200-square mile chain in the southern reaches of the Bay of Bengal appear at first glance to be a tropical paradise. But even one of the earliest visitors, Marco Polo, called the asuar “the land of the head hunters.” Roman geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus called the Andamans the “islands of the cannibals.”  The Sentinelese are fiercely protective of their coral reef-ringed terrain. They used to shoot arrows at government officials who came ashore and offered gifts of coconuts, fruit and machetes on the beach.

 

The Jarawas had armed clashes with authorities until the 1990s, killing several police officers. Samir Acharya, head of the independent Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, said the Jarawas were peaceful until the British, and later the Indians, began encroaching on their territory. British bullets killed thousands of bow-wielding Jarawas in 1859.  Over the past few years, however, relations have improved. The government has banned interaction with the tribes, and even taking their pictures is an offense. Many tribe members have visited Port Blair, capital of the Indian-administered territory, and a few Great Andamanese and Onges work in government offices.

 

Outsiders are forbidden from interacting with the tribesmen because such contact has led in the past to alcoholism and disease among the islanders, and sexual abuse of local women. “They have often been sexually exploited by influential people — they give the tribal women ... sugar, a gift wrapped in a colored cloth that makes them happy, and that’s it,” said Roy. One of the most celebrated stories of a tribal man straddling both worlds is that of En-Mai, a Jarawa teenager brought to Port Blair in 1996 after he broke his leg. Six months later, he looked like any urban kid, in a T-shirt, denim jeans and a reversed baseball cap. But he is back on his island now, having shunned Western ways. (Article)

 

Disaster mystery: No dead animals - Sri Lankan wildlife officials stunned by lack of carcasses – December 29, 2004
WorldNetDaily - As the human death toll from Sunday's earthquake and subsequent tsunami continues to skyrocket in Asia, a mystery is unfolding in Sri Lanka. Somehow, the animals survived the disaster. According to reports out of Colombo, Sri Lankan wildlife officials are said to be stunned. "The strange thing is we haven't recorded any dead animals," H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of the national Wildlife Department, told Reuters. "No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit." "I think animals can sense disaster," he added. "They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening."

 

The sentiment was echoed by Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne, whose Jetwing Eco Holidays runs a hotel in the Yala National Park, the country's largest wildlife reserve where hundreds of wild elephants dwell along with some 130 other species. "This is very interesting. I am finding bodies of humans, but I have yet to see a dead animal,'' he told the Associated Press.

 

Floodwaters reportedly rushed up to two miles inland at the park, where 41 human bodies have been recovered so far, including 13 foreigners, according to Lanka Business Online. Wildlife officers reportedly found a 13-year-old boy yesterday morning, the only survivor of the tsunami at the park. Wildlife Conservation Director General Dayananda Kariyawasam told the paper except for dead fish, no carcasses of animals have been found. The human death toll in Sri Lanka exceeds 21,000. (Article)

 

Do they know something we don't? - Animals' senses may have helped them survive - January 11, 2005

Boston Globe - Before the devastating wall of water hit a beachfront in Thailand last month, elephants carrying tourists ran for a nearby hill, saving their passengers, according to news reports. At Yala National Park in Sri Lanka, dozens of men, women and children were killed as the lodge was literally flattened, but virtually all the elephants, buffalo and deer survived. In a wildlife sanctuary in Tamil Nadu, India, antelope reportedly were seen racing from the coast to the forests 10 minutes before the tsunami hit.

 

It's too early to know whether these incidents are isolated anecdotes or whether animals were better able to survive the disaster than people. But many animals can hear ultra low frequencies and have a keener awareness of the Earth's vibrations. This probably didn't give animals a "sixth sense" to know that the tsunami was coming. Instead, they may been able to better detect the earthquake that preceded it, said Jan Randall, an animal behaviorist at San Francisco State University. Most people didn't feel the earthquake or suspect the tsunami was coming until they saw the giant waves. For humans, "vision is the first line of communication, then probably sound," Randall said.

 

Whether animals' sensory abilities helped them to survive may become clearer after the completion of several ongoing assessments. A team from Humane Society International this week has seen animals, like dogs, cats and cattle returning to coastal areas of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after being noticeably absent since the tsunami."The team has no idea where they have been. It's a mystery," said Kelly O'Meara, program manager for the Humane Society. "The animals are in bad shape because they haven't eaten or drunk properly for a few weeks. . . . The situation is very chaotic. No one knows how many animals perished and how many survived."

 

Jan Vertefeuille, a spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Fund, said that two of the elephants in the Yala park have satellite GPS collars; as soon as it can, her organization plans to retrieve the satellite data and confirm whether the elephants fled to higher ground, and when.  Intensely powerful events, like earthquakes, avalanches, volcanic eruptions -- and maybe tsunamis -- produce so-called infrasound or infrasonic sound waves that humans can't hear, but elephants, giraffes, rhinos, hippos, and even pigeons can. It's thought that pigeons use infrasonic sound for navigation, finding their way over water by locking onto beacons of infrasound. Some predators, according to Alfred J. Bedard Jr. of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, may have evolved infrasound detectors to hear the panicked thump of their prey's heart.  The sound of distant thunder is about as close to infrasound as people can hear, said Bedard. Below this lies a threshold where sound passes from hearing to feeling in humans. Mammals sense ground vibrations through special detectors in their joints and feet called pacinian corpuscles.

 

Humans have these receptors. But, although we can theoretically detect these signals, we are not conscious of them.  "Humans standing on two feet have much less contact with the ground than an animal with four feet," Randall said. "There are stories about native Americans placing their heads on the ground or tracks to listen for approaching horses or trains, and the use of drums to communicate in native cultures, so low-frequency sounds have been used at times as a secondary means of communication." Could humans be trained to tune in to these signals more? "I am sure it would be possible," said Peggy Hill, a biologist at the University of Tulsa. "I guess that people who operate without vision, or possibly hearing, do have a heightened awareness of vibration signals."  Hill said it's possible that the indigenous people living on the small, low-lying Andaman and Nicobar islands off India were able to read the Earth's signals -- in a way that the more modern people missed -- and save themselves from the waves.

 

According to the Associated Press, members of the ancient Jarawa tribe emerged from the forest Thursday and announced that all 250 of their tribespeople had survived. "We are all safe after the earthquake," a man named Ashu said in broken Hindi through an interpreter. Their survival, Hill stated in an e-mail, "just reinforces my view that we have the capacity to detect these things, but we 'override' the alarm signal as less important than ones coming in from other channels . . . and we depend more on television and the Internet for 'alerts' than we do on our own sensory abilities. "Loss of this sort of information may be one of the costs we are willing to pay for living in modern times." Animals could potentially be used as a low-technology warning system to alert humans when they perceive something we don't. The Chinese have developed a nationwide network to observe animal behavior in the event of a natural disaster, Bedard said. In northeastern China in 1975, unusual animal behavior convinced people to stay outside and therefore survive an earthquake that flattened their homes. But it remains unclear whether it would be practical or useful to set up similar networks elsewhere. "These events are so infrequent that it would be difficult to make reliable predictions about animal behavior that might warn us of such a disaster," Randall said. "Besides, do you really think humans would pay attention?" (Article)

 

Psalms 93:4-5 - Above the thunder of the mighty waters,

More majestic than the breakers of the sea is Hashem, majestic on high.

Your decrees are indeed enduring; holiness befits Your house, O L-rd, for all times.

 

The Geological Study of the 2004 Sumatra Quake

 

Magnitude 9.0 Off the West Coast of Northern Sumatra - Sunday, December 26, 2004 at 00:58:53 UTC

Preliminary Earthquake Report  - U.S. Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center  - World Data Center for Seismology, Denver

The devastating megathrust earthquake of December 26, 2004, occurred on the interface of the India and Burma plates and was caused by the release of stresses that develop as the India plate subducts beneath the overriding Burma plate. The India plate begins its descent into the mantle at the Sunda trench, which lies to the west of the earthquake's epicenter. The trench is the surface expression of the plate interface between the Australia and India plates, situated to the southwest of the trench, and the Burma and Sunda plates, situated to the northeast.

 

In the region of the earthquake, the India plate moves toward the northeast at a rate of about 6 cm/year relative to the Burma plate. This results in oblique convergence at the Sunda trench. The oblique motion is partitioned into thrust-faulting, which occurs on the plate-interface and which involves slip directed perpendicular to the trench, and strike-slip faulting, which occurs several hundred kilometers to the east of the trench and involves slip directed parallel to the trench. The December 26 earthquake occurred as the result of thrust-faulting.

 

Preliminary locations of larger aftershocks following the megathrust earthquake show that approximately 1200 km of the plate boundary slipped as a result of the earthquake. By comparison with other large megathrust earthquakes, the width of the causative fault-rupture was likely over one-hundred km. From the size of the earthquake, it is likely that the average displacement on the fault plane was about fifteen meters. The sea floor overlying the thrust fault would have been uplifted by several meters as a result of the earthquake. The above estimates of fault-dimensions and displacement will be refined in the near future as the result of detailed analyses of the earthquake waves. The world's largest recorded earthquakes have all been megathrust events, occurring where one tectonic plate subducts beneath another. These include: the magnitude 9.5 1960 Chile earthquake, the magnitude 9.2 1964 Prince William Sound, Alaska, earthquake, the magnitude 9.1 1957 Andreanof Islands, Alaska, earthquake, and the magnitude 9.0 1952 Kamchatka earthquake. As with the recent event, megathrust earthquakes often generate large tsunamis that cause damage over a much wider area than is directly affected by ground shaking near the earthquake's rupture. (Entire Article) 

 

Massive quake hits off Tasmania – December 24, 2004
A MASSIVE earthquake that struck the largely uninhabited area around Macquarie Island in Antarctica early today was felt in Tasmania. The quake hit at 2.58pm GMT Thursday (1.58am AEDT), measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale, the Earth Sciences Observatory in Strasbourg, France said.  The Hong Kong Observatory separately estimated the earthquake's magnitude at 7.8 on the Richter scale, measured at 3.12pm GMT (2.12am AEDT). The observatory determined the epicentre to be over the seas north of Macquarie Island.

Geoscience Australia said the quake had a magnitude of 7.8 and was felt in Hobart and on the Tasmanian Peninsula. “This was an inter-plate earthquake between Indo-Australian and Pacific plates,” seismologist Cvetan Sinadinovski said. “The last earthquake of similar magnitude in the Macquarie Rise region was in 1924.

“Earthquakes of this magnitude can produce localised tsunamis. Although we have no confirmation (of this) at this stage.” The Macquarie archipelago, an Australian territory some 1500km southeast of Tasmania, is the only island group in the world composed entirely of oceanic crust and rocks from the mantle - deep below the earth's surface - according to an Australian Government website. The island group, with mountains rising to 400m above sea level, became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997 due in part to its unique natural beauty and in part to its diversity in fauna. Its colony of king penguins, numbering around 850,000, is one of the largest in the world. (Article)

 

Powerful Tremor Jolts Bangladesh – Sunday, December 26, 2004

DHAKA, Bangladesh (FoxNews) -  A powerful earthquake (search) jolted a wide area of Bangladesh on Sunday, but there were no immediate reports of casualties or damage, news reports and weather officials said.

 

The magnitude 7.36 tremor struck the southern port city of Chittagong, according to a statement by the Bangladesh Meteorological Department said. Bangladesh lacks equipment to determine the epicenter of the quake. Media reports said the quake was felt in the central, southern and western parts of the country, including the capital Dhaka. Big quakes are rare in Bangladesh, a delta nation of 140 million people in South Asia. (Article)

 

Magnitude 8.1 - NORTH OF MACQUARIE ISLAND – December 23, 2004 - UTC Preliminary Earthquake Report
U.S. Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center - World Data Center for Seismology, Denver

A great earthquake occurred at 14:59:03 (UTC) on Thursday, December 23, 2004. The magnitude 8.1 event has been located NORTH OF MACQUARIE ISLAND. (This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.)