Planet Waves for March 31, 2005

My old friend Lane is a geologist (professional, actually) and she offered to do a write up on what happened in Indonesia earlier this week. I will have a short astrological summary up on my Q and A column on Jonathan's late late tonight. Also -- we've posted the spring extended forecasts for everyone to read. Thanks so much for visiting.

Here's Lane!

There's been plenty of discussion about the recent earthquake in Indonesia.  Some are saying this is a rare and unusual event for there to be another quake in the same place so soon, a harbinger of the ‘end times’. Quite the contrary, it is quite common. This is not to demean the grace and power of our lovely Mother Earth, but rather the religious zealots and fear mongers.  
 
So what causes an earthquake?  Well, our beautiful planet Earth is quite alive, she is all warm inside with different layers (mantle and core) and the continents literally float around on the surface (the crust) as lightweight plates.  What causes them to move is hot magma coming up from near the core (like a lava lamp) and erupting along fissures in the sea floors.  This forms new sea floors, heavy dense plates, which get pushed away from the new stuff coming up, like sliding a piece of paper across a desk.  When the sea floor plate, which is heavy, bumps into a continental plate, which is much lighter, it gets slowly forced UNDER the continental plate, this is known as subduction.  As you can imagine this is a very slow and difficult process.  Near plate boundaries are what geologists called faults (the San Andreas fault in California is a very well known fault). Faults accommodate the pressures of such interactions by relieving the built up stress.   A fault starts releasing stress along a line, "unzipping" like a zipper (quakes are an expression of this release of stress- like cracking your back) stress released in one place (like the big one that caused the Tsunami in December) will result in stress likely being released along the fault, or in this case the subduction zone (in Indonesia one sea floor plate is being forced under another plate-that’s a LOT of stress).

If you look at a map of each successive quake in Indonesia lately, you can see that each one happens a bit southward of the previous one.  Click on Indonesia to zoom in to see this: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Maps/region/Australia.html <http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Maps/region/Australia.html>   
 
What causes a tsunami?  When there is a release of tension in the sea floor which results in a change in the bottom of the sea floor (suddenly becoming deeper or shallower along a fault that has popped up or down on one side) it causes really big waves, like dropping an ice cube into an glass of water, things slosh around until it all settles.  The quake on Monday caused some smaller tsunamis, but why was there no really big tsunami this time?  There is lots of speculation, but really, there is a lot we don’t know about how things work.  Earth scientists are still trying to figure it out to put more efficient tsunami warning systems in place.  These events will give folks more pieces of the puzzle to work with.
 
Three days later Indonesia is still experiencing aftershocks  http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/bulletin/  and the earth is ringing inside like a great gong with the seismic waves bouncing around the inside of the globe.  I imagine that it feels good.   I like to think that the Earth is waking up and becoming a conscious being, stretching and yawning.  
 
Take a look at this really cool map:  http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/qed/    This shows the locations of every earthquake on earth for the last 8 to 30 days.  Notice how the earthquakes all happen along very defined lines, these are the plate boundaries. Also notice how many there are in 3 weeks!  This wonderful being, the planet we call Earth, is quite alive and doing her yoga daily to relieve stress.  Perhaps I should follow her example…
 
Namaste,
Lane