An earthquake measuring 7.5 rocked China's Sichuan province on Monday, less than 100 kilometres from the provincial capital of Chengdu, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its website. It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties or damage from the tremor, which the USGS earlier put at 7.8. The tremor, centred 92 kilometres northwest of Chengdu, was felt as far away as Beijing and Shanghai and the Thai capital Bangkok, where office buildings swayed with the impact.
An earthquake measuring 7.5 rocked China's Sichuan province on Monday, less than 100 kilometres from the provincial capital of Chengdu, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its website.
It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties or damage from the tremor, which the USGS earlier put at 7.8.
The tremor, centred 92 kilometres northwest of Chengdu, was felt as far away as Beijing and Shanghai and the Thai capital Bangkok, where office buildings swayed with the impact.
Google news search gives quite a list of recent earthquakes: Tokyo (with aftershocks), Taiwan, Iran, Kazachstan, Mississippi, Missouri, Guam, Alaska, California, Nevada, Mexico... all in the last 2-3 weeks, some in series. Besides, we have the volcano in Chile, tornadoes in US, and of course, Myanmar. Is mother nature awakening and learning how to kick us?
There was an idea floated a few years ago that big earthquakes could trigger other earthquakes at the other side of a tectonic plate, with a 1-1.5 year delay as slow speed vibrations resonated through the affected tectonic plates to the other end. Not being a seismologist, I've no idea where that idea presently stands.
What if the Earth system is more complex than a reptile brain? Couldn't it be then comparably functional as well?
First I would start to talk about functionality arising in the Form of a simple "reaction" to special circumstances. On the most primitive level, you have direct physical causation satisfying this Form. Then you have rigid "self-enforcing" chains of physical events forming that "automatically react" following the From; those chains that better enforce their own existence (say, because their interesting effects fit better into diverse longer such chains) would tend to persist and occur more frequently. Gradually, the Form becomes identifiable as "perception/reaction" cycle. Brain neurons are of the same Form! Event patterns would network themselves, with ever more meaningful functionality, etc.
At the moment, I would not explain teleonomy particularly better than the Wikipedia link above and its references.
No. Because the structures are completely different. And there's been no evidence to date at all that the Earth is anything other than a physical system, which has been frozen, attacked by space by debris, left to cook on a high heat and is currently in a semi-stable transition state.
An intentional Earth would look everso slightly different, I think.
Suggesting that the Earth is having earthquakes because we've been bad says a lot more about how narrative logic works than it does about the Earth.
It is simply a matter of scale. Earth's processes do not respond to surface changes linked to global warming because these changes are irrelevant to the scales whereupon earth's processes operate. Surface changes are way, way behind the comma of the physical laws and the material properties that govern tectonic processes involved in generating earthquakes/volcanic activity; they do not matter, period. And hence earth processes do not physically or chemically respond to them, let alone reorganise as result to them.
It's the earth's more sensitive host on the surface, the biosphere, that does respond. Because humans, in our eye-blink of time, are not used to a sudden increase in rates of earth activity, it doesn't make us special, nor does it allow us to assign anthropomorphological features to the earth.
What if the tectonic system (which is probably more ancient than biological life, and is just as unique to Earth for what we know), being more slow and clumsy by orders of magnitude, is set on a critical level within own parameters, and hereby teleonomically ready to receive a signal from the atmosphere or whatever, a signal to let an overhauling hell loose? It would be just another instance of consequential reaction to a special condition...
Earthquakes are one of the most interesting phenomena whose every aspect displays fractal statistics and whose dynamics is possibly chaotic... ... While multifractality of the earthquake process is confirmed in every way...
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While multifractality of the earthquake process is confirmed in every way...
One fracture is just a fracture; a single fault is derived from a network of micro/meso fractures.
