Earthquakes: A Dangerous Butterfly Effect?

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Plate tectonics as a science is less than 40 years old. It is possible that common sense suggests what science has yet to confirm: that the movement among the world's tectonic plates may be one part of enormous dynamic system, with effects of one plate's shifting more likely than not to spread far, far away, quite possibly clear across the surface of the globe..

In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system - the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.

-- "The Year the Earth Fought Back" by Simon Winchester for The NY Times

In the face of this macabre natural disaster in Asia, where the death tolls now exceeds sixty thousand, Mr. Winchester brings out how this year has been particularly bad for natural disasters, and how these episodes seem to come in clusters as an historical matter, bringing out the example of 1906, for instance, the year of the Great San Francisco Earthquake which had its counter-parts elsewhwere in America and the world.

He raises the question: "might there be some kind of butterfly effect, latent and deadly, lying out in the seismic world?"

( Winchester article )

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Earthquakes: A Dangerous Butterfly Effect?

~

~~~

Plate tectonics as a science is less than 40 years old. It is possible that common sense suggests what science has yet to confirm: that the movement among the world's tectonic plates may be one part of enormous dynamic system, with effects of one plate's shifting more likely than not to spread far, far away, quite possibly clear across the surface of the globe..

In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system - the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.

-- "The Year the Earth Fought Back" by Simon Winchester for The NY Times

In the face of this macabre natural disaster in Asia, where the death tolls now exceeds sixty thousand, Mr. Winchester brings out how this year has been particularly bad for natural disasters, and how these episodes seem to come in clusters as an historical matter, bringing out the example of 1906, for instance, the year of the Great San Francisco Earthquake which had its counter-parts elsewhwere in America and the world.

He raises the question: "might there be some kind of butterfly effect, latent and deadly, lying out in the seismic world?"

( Winchester article )

.