While attention was on Hawaii, wondering about the tsunami’s effects there, Oklahoma got hit with an earthquake of magnitude 4.1, a big one for such a flat, geologically inactive state (link goes to USGS site).
Epicenter of Oklahoma earthquake, February 27, 2010
Most likely there is no connection between the Oklahoma quake and any other shaking on Earth in the past week or so.
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[…] is big. Plus, it appears to lay observers that earthquake intensity and frequency both have been building for over a year. Recent earthquakes in Arkansas and Texas concern some local residents who fear the quakes are […]
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Nance writes:
I keep hearing that there’s no connection, but it defies understanding. Our brains are built to recognize connections
yeah and it sometimes f***s up. Like when George W Bush sat there and looked at Al Qaeda and had this thought process: “They are evil. They are Muslim. Saddam Hussein is evil. Saddam Hussein is evil. Therefor Saddam Hussein must be linked to Al Qaeda and since Al Qaeda was behind the 9-11 attacks then Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks.”
Or when you look into a mirror and see a ghost face there. It’s called matrixing.
Or to put this another way, Nace, there is the logical fallacy of Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. Which means “After this, therefor because of this.” People like to think that if Event B happens after Event A then Event B happened because of Event A. Except it doesn’t always work like that.It’s a logical fallacy.
Yes the human mind likes to make connections between things. That doesn’t mean that those connections are always there.
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Some plates move more than one direction. Plates are oddly shaped. Oklahoma is 8,000 miles from Chile. Where is there any connection?
Oklahoma’s earthquake was tiny, as quakes go. Most of the time such a quake wouldn’t make any news at all. This time, quakes were in the news, and so it made the wire.
Go here, for example, and look at all the quakes in the last month around the world — most of which made no news at all:
http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/qed/
If you go here, in the next hour or so, you’ll see there have been three quakes in Oklahoma in the last week. How much did you hear about any of them?
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Maps/US10/32.42.-100.-90.php
Check out this map, you’ll see Oklahoma is #19 among active earthquake states. There are a lot of quakes of higher magnitude in more quake prone states that just don’t make the news — a 3.5 isn’t news in much of the Rocky Mountain area, nor in California.
Get more on that image here:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/top_states.php
If it’s not news, it doesn’t take a conspiracy to keep it out of the paper. It’s hard to cover up an earthquake. The government does not have a monopoly on seismometers. Many government seismometers are on the web, in real-time. The government couldn’t know in advance which quakes to cover up.
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How can earthquakes really be unrelated? Earthquakes are movements in the earth’s crust. Isnt there a law of physics “for every action there is a reaction”? In this instance, you have 1 plate or a series of plates that move along 1 edge, so if its moving 1 way, doesnt stand to reason that its eventually going to move along the other edge as well? And if that plates moves, doesnt allow other plates to move as well??
I firmly believe the our gov’t doesnt share all of the knowledge it has from any department or agency. Oh and by the way wasnt there as much coverage in the news (and it was local coverage from MI that did the brief news story) about this quake? 1 little blurp on the news the day of the event and then nothing???
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Okay, Nance, tell us what the connection is, can you? Hop over to the USGS site listed above, And look at how many earthquakes there are around the world every day.
Are they connected? Not physically.
Are you arguing for a spiritual connection between earthquakes?
At USGS, click on the “Real time, World” link.
Quakes along the same fault lines, or in the same caldera, or close by on the same plate, may be connected. Oklahoma and Chile are too far apart, too many plates apart, too unconnected.
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I keep hearing that there’s no connection, but it defies understanding. Our brains are built to recognize connections. Besides, we’ve all heard that one before: no connection between the maladies of vets and that Agent Orange thing, for example. It’s enough to make one imagine that government geologists are conspiring to keep us in the dark so we won’t notice that a giant pothole is forming under the Senate Building at this very moment.
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What are you talking about, blueollie?
[Fixed.]
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My goodness: my last post looks like it came from an illiterate! “Senator Coburn and Inhofe”. :)
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I’d say it is a warning from God for Senators Coburn and Inhofe not being sufficiently wingnutty.
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I’d tend to be agnostic on the connection issue.
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