6.3-magnitude quake hits off the east coast of Honshu, Japan

[Viva_La_Revolution]

Source: Xinhua

An earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale jolted off the east coast of Honshu, Japan at 09:05: 03 a.m. local time (00:05:03 GMT) on Friday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The epicenter, with a depth of 31.00 km, was initially determined to be at 37.2935 degrees north latitude and 143.9118 degrees east longitude.

Read more: http://english.sina.com/world/2011/0602/376134.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=DTN+Fashion:

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same latitude as Fukushima

[closeupready]

1. God forbid it's an omen/pre-quake of some kind

nt

[hlthe2b]

2. Gawd.. is there no end?

Will Japan ever recover? Have a chance to recover?

[aquart]

5. THIS is climate change.

The melting polar ice and Greenland ice has redistributed the weight on the tectonic plates. Volcanoes are becoming active all over the place. Mt. ETNA's been burping.

Scientists said, after the big one in Japan that there was still intense pressure, that it had not been relieved, and that the likelihood was further catastrophic quakes.

Next thousand years gonna be dicey.

[caseymoz]

7. Now, that's one hypothesis on Global Warming I'm skeptical about.

Unlike the weather for the past hundred years, they really don't have a lot of data on that. And they definitely can't trace more earthquakes to lack of ice in Greenland, or Siberia, Antarctica and Canada for that matter. For CO2 and methane, etc, they at least knew what their effects were in the lab. They definitely haven't done enough field studies to link these earthquakes all the way back to greenhouse gases yet.

Though it has been an explosive couple of years for earthquakes, but unfortunately, that's also an aspect of randomness. You'll get clusters. And one has to ask, why is it happening by and large to Japan and Indonesia if it's related to ice melt?

What makes "Global Weirding" (as I call it), so compelling now is that it's not just much more rainfall or hotter temperatures or more tornadoes, it's all of that and much more.

Whereas the earthquakes could likely be just bad luck.

[Art_from_Ark]

8. Japan has had many catastrophic earthquakes in its recorded history

Both Japan and Indonesia are located on or near 4 different tectonic plates that are constantly grinding against and under/over one another. So there are going to be earthquakes, regardless of what happens on the surface.

[blank space]

11. Skeptical or not

It was forecast as being part of the consequences of global warming decades ago - the gravitational effects of ice sheets moving has always been well and truly understood and is definitely part of the scientific lexicon.

One of my favorite anecdotes of mans accomplishments is one of NASA's satellite measuring devices set up to measure exactly this - gravitational fluctuations through compression of the earth.

The area around north central america, yellowstone ironically, was under massive pressure from 5 mile thick ice sheets - this caused huge gravitational fluctuations which needed to be measured. This was done through putting up two satellites at a specific distance apart, they rotate around the planet at exactly the same speed bouncing a signal between themselves and the earth mapping gravitational variations to the size of a red blood cell.

Further the melting of ice sheets and the subsequent weight redistribution also causes gravitational fluctuations in the oceans - the water does not simply disperse around the world as it does int he bath, but rather creates gravity sinks of higher density and mass (specifically near the antartica), further this is massively influenced by temperature and current flow.

So there is huge, vast amounts of science and research which has been going on in this area for decades - but like no single event can ever be blamed on global warming, we can certainly state with absolutely confidence what some of those things will be - so althouhg we can not blame Japans recent activity on global warming - we know with absolute certainty that global warming will cause earth quakes and volcanic erruptions through gravitational variations and weight redistributions -


Cheers.

[caseymoz]

13. Okay, so what are the odds then?

Unless you're talking about objects the size of Jupiter, "huge gravitational fluctuations" is a contradiction in terms.

Do you know how weak a force gravity is? If you were in space within fifty feet of a hunk of ice the same mass as the sheet you describe, you likely would not even notice the pull of it. You would need major instrumentation to even detect that you were falling toward it and would hit it in a few months or a year. Look, if it were a large effect, and I mean "large" in the way people who don't do experimental work with gravity use the word, they wouldn't need an elaborate system of two satellites bouncing signals to detect it.

So, they predicted more earthquakes in 30 years. Therefore, there can be two outcomes: More or less. The first would agree with the prediction, the second wouldn't.

And the odds if you flip a coin randomly are, what? The same thing. Therefore there's no way to tell if it's random or from any effect of ice melting. So, what are the odds that an utterly random system without the ice-melt can see an increase in earthquakes? About the same.

Now, if they had data predicting where we could expect the quakes and even approximately when from 30 years ago, and it was proving right a statistically significant amount of time, I would take notice. Have they made these predictions? Do they have any correlation from them? I'm thinking no, they haven't, despite how much data they've gathered.

As it is, they really do not have enough results yet to say if there's any correlation, much less causation? No. It takes a longer time than that, and unlike actual global warming, they really only have geological data to go on, not data from several fields all pointing in one direction as Global Weirding has.

And I'm not saying it's impossible. I simply don't expect any correlation can be shown yet. Right now, it's a legitimate worry, but keep in mind, it's neither supported nor disproved scientifically.

[Cleita]

3. Oh no! Not again! n/t

[Cleita]

4. Burp.

[Art_from_Ark]

6. That earthquake was 100 miles off the coast of Fukushima

The seismic intensity on the mainland was relatively low (the areas with greatest intensity only registered a 3 on the 9-level Japanese scale).

It's also interesting that the Japanese estimate of this quake's magnitude is only 5.9

http://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/2011-06-03-09-05.html?c=2

[AndyTiedye]

9. The Japanese Scale Only Goes Up to 7

[Art_from_Ark]

10. But there are two levels of 5 and 6

So I count it as having 9 levels

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_seismic_intensity_scale

You could even say it has 10 levels if you count 0 (although that value never appears in earthquake reports)

[Art_from_Ark]

12. Several hours later, there was another earthquake

much closer to the Fukushima coast, and the Japanese seismic intensity was much higher-- 5-minus in Iwaki City, and it looks like a 4 in the reactor area.

http://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/2011-06-04-01-00.html?c=2