Why All the Recent Earthquakes? An Iranian Cleric's Answer

It appears as if earthquakes have recently become more common. Perusing through the press it appears that every week welcomes a new earthquake.

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First, Haiti had stunned the world by the devastation its earthquake had wrought. Haiti's earthquake was not the most powerful of all the recent ones, but because the infrastructure is so poor in that improvised nation it did not take much shaking to bring so many homes and buildings falling down and costing the lives of over 100,000 people.

An earthquake over 500x more powerful shortly thereafter hit Chile. But Chile, with its being Latin America's most developed nation and homes to its highest GDP per capita, maintains strict building codes which are duly enforced. Thus despite the most destructive shaking, Chile escaped any massive damage and the death toll was much lower at around 600 people.

The earthquakes in Chile and Haiti have been followed by ones in: Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia and Baja California (which was felt in the Los Angeles area). And another earthquake in China just recently which has killed thousands of lives. All this in recent past.

I have jokingly written that all this force all the world is an omen that the Mayans were right after all and this is a sign of the coming doom they predicted in 2012. Foreshadowing of worse horror to be unleashed.

But, in reality, earthquakes have not become more frequent. We only hear about them more people more of us are exposed to them as the planet grows in population and more people live along/around fault lines:

It’s true that more earthquakes are recorded than used to be the case, but that’s simply because there are more monitoring stations that are able to pick up minor earthquakes that once went undetected. If we compare the average global rates of large earthquakes, we find that these are stable as far back as we can trace them. On average, we record an earthquake with a magnitude over 6 every three days or so, and over 7 at least once a month.

Why then, does it sometimes seem they are more common occurrences? There are two reasons for this. First, people notice it when earthquakes happen in populated places. A big earthquake in California is news; a big earthquake in the Southern Ocean is noticed only by seismologists. So a run of earthquakes that by chance hit populated places makes it look as though the rate has increased, even if it hasn’t.

The classic case of this was in 1976. That year, there were a number of high-casualty earthquakes — including a 7.5 magnitude quake in Tangshan, China, that killed more than a quarter of a million people — prompting a lot of news media questions about the increasing frequency of earthquakes. But, in the end, 1976 turned out to have a relatively low number of quakes. It was just that an abnormal number hit populated areas.

The second reason is that in any semi-random process, you get clustering. Throw enough dice, and sometimes you’ll get several sixes in a row. People notice the clusters; they don’t notice the gaps in between. No one ever asks me during the quiet periods if earthquakes are becoming less frequent. Also, people tend to have short memories; they notice the current cluster, but don’t remember the previous one.

Earthquakes are so common that they are simply a fact in the earth's life, and there is even a website the documents the literally hours in between of earthquakes in California and Nevada; states along one of the world's most volatile fault lines. Aptly titled: Recent Earthquakes in California and Nevada.

But these facts are often ignored for a more dramatic narrative.

And people are always there to offer their silly reasons as to why there are ostensibly more earthquakes, and often to promote their own agenda. Few are as obnoxious as this cleric in Iran:

A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

But his logic, Las Vegas - Sin City - should be hit by one after another. You know, it that would make Vegas less grotesque that would not be such a bad idea.