Were The Tsunamis Just A Minor “Correction?”

Whenever such horrific events occur, such as the great number of tsunamis that hit India and Southeast Asia a few weeks ago, people wonder if there was a reason for it all. Or was it just a random act of nature.

All any of us can focus on is the great number of dead people, innocents, struck down suddenly when a supposedly mild and balmy climate suddenly turned deadly.

As of this writing, the toll currently is climbing past 144,000, and that horrible number could soon double when sickness, famine and disease start to take their toll in the aftermath. This is why so many of the rest of the world’s nations are scrambling to counteract these things, so that more people do not need to die from such aftereffects.

Added to this is all the human suffering and mourning. Almost all of us knows of someone who has lost a friend or family member due to this enormous tragedy. It affects us all.

BTW, if you want to help, here is a link. Disaster Relief Info

Later, I am sure there will be efforts to put into place some kind of early warning system, but with communications being so primitive in many of these countries, and with the convoluted and volatile politics there, you have to wonder if an early warning system will make any difference at all, concerning future tsunamis.

But even now, after all the political posturing and finger pointing, other people, mostly scientists, are beginning to try to understand why this earthquake happened, for it was not just a tiny shift in the earth’s crust, but it was a major event – a great shift in the earth’s interior structure.

The part of the Earth’s crust that broke last week is called the Java Subduction Zone (mantle plates in collision), where the continental shelf of India is diving under all the islands of the Burmese Plate. This line is 600 miles long, under the ocean, and the recent major shift there measured 9.4 on the Richter Scale.

Is it possible that the Earth’s ecological system is trying to regulate itself, and that this major shift in its internal core had some kind of purpose?

Who asks such a question?

“Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth’s center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.” (source: JPL)

Think of it as a fast spinning top, whose pliable core can be shifted, ever so slightly, to prevent it from becoming off balance. Our earth has essentially a liquid core of molten rock and metal, mostly Nickel, with an iron center. Last weeks planetary shift was just a tiny tweak in it’s internal structure.

The early implication is that it was a self-correcting tweak, of a lifeless planetary system, causing a shift to the planet itself, in response to man’s recent changes to its ecology.

“The deadly Asian earthquake may have permanently accelerated the Earth’s rotation — shortening days by a fraction of a second — and caused the planet to wobble on its axis. When one huge tectonic plate beneath the Indian Ocean was forced below the edge of another ‘it had the effect of making the Earth more compact and spinning faster,’ Gross said.”

This will result in a climate change that is a tiny bit colder. In other words, there will be a minute reduction in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth each day, and the direction of its rays will be a scant bit lower in the sky. You know, THAT could be good news for the whole world.

The question is, could this possibly be enough offset all the heat and carbon dioxide we have been pouring into our world’s environment for the last century or more?

These are changes we have made to the climate from the industrialized countries in the last several centuries, and they are measured in billions of tons per year. In other words, we have slightly increased the volume and weight of the earth’s atmosphere, at the same time, allowing the sun to heat it up, thus causing global warming, beginning with the evident melting of the earth’s polar caps, or so it is assumed from evident data collected on the Earth’s environment.

How could such a small difference in our earth’s rotation and inclination change anything in the worldwide climate? Such a shift is exceedingly small, but we are talking about the loss of billions of calories of heat every day, which could perhaps help put the breaks on Global Warming and forestall the melting of Earth’s polar caps.

Measurements will need to be taken, over a long period of time, to see if this recent earthquake is enough to mitigate some of the environmental damage we have been doing to the planet.

But there is also evidence that there are other major upheavals deep under the Earth’s crust, waiting to occur.

These places of potential upheaval are called Subduction Zones.

One is called the Cascadia in North America, which runs on a line between Northern California and Vancouver Island. It is believed to be primed for a major upheaval, and has had increasing clusters of tremblers over the past several months. Seismologists just don’t know when that ‘Big One’ will occur, whether sometime this year, or a hundred years from now.

Another Zone is in Alaska, where the last major upheaval there occurred in 1964. That one was almost as violent a shift in the Earth’s crust as the one two weeks ago.

Both of these Zones in North America are also 600 miles long, as is the one that just broke in Southeast Asia.

One other one which is primed to occur soon, that we know of, is between Pakistan and the Himalayas.

There are a lot more of these deep faults, totaling over 50,000 miles in length, but of course, not all of them are known to be active. Link Here

Therefore, this past event, as horrific as it was, begs the question: Are there possibly other, similar cataclysms to come, in which this supposed newly discovered self regulating system of the earth will try to compensate for the profound changes that Man has done the environment?

This question is one of many that arise from the implications of Mr. Gross’ scientific observations, if you think about it.

People generally tend to think of their world as rather small. Fact is, the Earth is enormous, and, as someone said, we a ‘just a stain’ on its surface.

Others think we have no right to be here, or to adversely affect the world as we do. I am not one of them.

I think we do have a place in this world, and an important one. We just need to learn more about our world, and we must also learn how to protect it without laying it to waste. It is not Mother Nature that is our enemy in all this. We may just be our own worst enemy on this earth. This is perhaps something we are only beginning to realize in these modern, technological times.

Sometimes, as wise and as bright as we think we are, it is hard to know when to get out of the way of the planet’s many systems, which it seems to employ for regulating itself. That is as much of an answer to the ‘why’ of these recent events, as I know of.

Stay tuned – and stay alert.