Hurricane Dean Causes Earthquake

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Again, a hurricane comes and an earthquake happens! This isn't mere happenstance. Hurricane Dean, when it strengthened to a catagory 3 storm, swept over the smaller windward islands of the Caribbean and a 4.8 earthquake hit the very same Leeward Islands! Hurricane Dean is the first to trouble our shores this season. It is now causing inflation due to oil futures rising. If it isn't one storm, it is another, eh?

From Yahoo:

Hurricane Dean roared into the eastern Caribbean on Friday, tearing away roofs, flooding streets and causing at least three deaths on small islands as the powerful storm headed on a collision course with Jamaica and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

The Atlantic season's first hurricane grew into a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 125 mph after crossing over the warm waters of the Caribbean and forecasters warned it could grow into a monster tempest with 150 mph winds before steering next week into the Gulf of Mexico, with its 4,000 oil and gas platforms.

It is now actually a catagory 4 hurricane. I kept the older story to illustrate this business of hurricanes and typhoons causing the thinner crust of the ocean floor to flex or deform just enough to trigger an earthquake. The one in Japan as usual, came with a big storm with rotation and this also helped trigger a global banking crash just like the Kobe quake did 15 years earlier. The financial mess is still unwinding there due to the main energy source for many factories in northern Japan were damaged badly and it is a very costly repair since this nuclear power plant must be dismantled, it sits square smack dab on an earthquake fault.

Here is the list of earthquakes on the day the hurricane passed over these islands, from IRIS:

This map is from IRIS and if you compare it to the hurricane's path, it matches:

Here is a satellite photo of the the mega-typhoon hitting China right now:

From ABS-CBN news:

The weather bureau on Friday night said that typhoon Egay (international codename Sepat) continues to weaken but will still continue to bring occasional rains over Luzon and Visayas.

Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), in its 10:30 p.m. weather bulletin Friday, said Egay continues to move northwest toward the island nation of Taiwan at 17 kilometers per hour (kph).

PAGASA said Egay was spotted 180 kilometers north-northeast of Basco, Batanes or in the vicinity of Southern Taiwan. It was packing maximum sustained winds of 185 kph near the center, down from 205 kph as of 5 p.m., and gustiness of up to 220 kph.

Taiwan took the brunt. Over a hundred miners in China are trapped by flood waters...mining is by far, the most dangerous profession....all these Asian countries will have to recover form these storms and this will turn China even more inwards. The US, when we were hit by big storms, cried for help and the whole world, as usual, responded. I can only hope we return the favor, the whole planet seems to be convulsing again right now on the meteorologial as well as the geological level. And this is no coincidence: our planet's systems are interlocked in amazing ways.

From Xinhua:

China on Friday continued to order vessels to return to harbor and maritime workers to land, send warning messages and relocating people to safety as super typhoon Sepat approaches.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs issued a circular on Friday, ordering Fujian, Guangdong and Zhejiang Provinces to prepare for the typhoon and disaster relief work. A working group of the ministry has gone to Fujian to guide and help local governments.

Will this pull China and Taiwan closer? The US must help more simply because if we don't, others will. And we just gave $30 billion to Israel's Jews (NOT the Muslims or Christians in Israel!) without strings. Hell, we just gave Countrywide, a probable criminal banking scam, $11 billion! The diplomatic possibilities of helping other natioins is obvious and we seem to be oblivious to this. Equador just got hammered by an epic earthquake this week and desperately needs help.

From Yahoo:

Hungry earthquake survivors ransacked a public market Friday, while other mobs looted a refrigerated trailer and blocked aid trucks, prompting Peru's president to appeal for calm. Aid finally arrived to the disaster zone after about 36 hours without much help.

With hopes diminishing of finding more survivors from Wednesday's devastating magnitude-8 quake, the death toll had reached at least 510. Another 1,500 people were injured, overwhelming the few hospitals in Peru's southern desert region.

Severe damage to the only highway to the hardest hit zone slowed trucks from Lima. But food, water, tents and blankets were finally arriving, and with Peruvian soldiers distributing aluminum caskets, the first mass funerals were being held.

How heartbreaking it all is. A helicopter bringing aid crashed and where is the US navy? Where are they? When we lost New Orleans they were all in the Gulf of Persia! And Asia! Patrolling the planet's richest regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Israel and Japan! We used to concentrate on North and South America but these places are now abandoned as our dying empire seeks to dominate Asia and Europe. This costly plan has many hidden costs one being, China is now preempting us in the rescue operations business in South America, for example. But they are being hammered too, by Mother Nature.

The typhoon lashing China is a classic killer storm and maybe it will trigger earthquakes. Not all storms do this but they do it often enough to require warnings of possible earthquakes associated with these mega-storms. And these storm/earthquake events cause economic mayhem. The US lost a major city due to a hurricane and our natural gas production was hard hit and the economic smash-up is ongoing, the US was in the middle of this goofy building boom due to cheap Federal Reserve interest rates and since that hurricane, rates have climbed along with inflation and now Hurricane Dean is going to rip through the Gulf of Mexico, one of the world's biggest bathtubs filled to the brim with hot water.

Fom CNN:

Hurricane Dean intensified Saturday as it muscled across the Caribbean and headed toward a dangerous rendezvous Sunday with Jamaica.

Forecasters fear Dean will be a destructive Category 5 monster packing 155 mph winds by then.

Even worse could be yet to come. By Monday, as Dean nears Cancun and other tourist areas along Mexico's eastern Yucatan coast, its sustained winds could be 160 mph, with gusts as high as 195 mph -- wreaking new havoc on an area heavily damaged just two years ago by Hurricane Wilma.

Up here in the Northeast, we have had a surprizingly cool late July into August. It feels like fall. Tonight, my mountain will drop to 45 degrees and some of the trees think it is fall and are turning their leaves red and gold! My little hummingbird friends who entertain me out on the deck all summer have all left, the last stragglers said goodbye last week. For some reason, strong Canadian winds have been sweeping south across us. I can't say why. I wonder if this will change now that the hurricanes are beginning. Usually, they sweep northwards after hitting the Gulf states.

This one will strike either the Yucatan or it could wobble north and hit the US. Wherever it goes, it will destroy oil rigs if it is a catagory 5+ monster and this will have many repercussions for a long time. With world oil prices at their highest, they will climb. No longer can Saudi Arabia make up the difference without oil prices climbing. Indeed, the whole point of our illegal invasion of Iraq was to seize the oil and contol OPEC by controlling one of the biggest Arab oil fields. The failure of this invasion to drop oil prices is obvious and the Hurricane Katrina/Hurricane Wilma mess deepened the economic crisis.

About the Yucatan: when they decided to built all those hotels there, I thought they were nuts. And they are nuts. Every two or three years, thousands of frightened tourists try to flee that death trap and quite a few are forced to huddle in the dark with the wind screaming and everything being torn up. Eventually, people will understand that Paradise can flip into Hell in an instant. For example, the very same resorts annihilated in an eyeblink along with thousands of tourists and hundreds of thousands of citizens, had less than 5 minutes warning!

It amuses me, how swiftly people forget catastrophes. This is why Galveston is still sitting there, waiting to be destroyed again and Miami Beach continues to flirt with complete annihilation and New Orleans can't be rebuilt the way it was. Global warming isn't about warm temperatures but rather, about melting ice and amount of sunlight. Recently, there has been this fight over whether it was warmer in 1933 during the Dust Bowl years or today. The CO2 production of the entire twentieth century has meant that any change in solar output means warming has a stronger effect. Every time a major volcano has a major erupton like Pitumbo in the Philippines, we get temporary cooling and these change the overall statistics but the warming is proven by the glacial melt going on with all the world's glaciers in all hemispheres and in Antarctica and the loss of sea ice in the Arctic.

Refuting this is impossible. And the mega-storm effect is very, very real. This huge hurricane forming in the Gulf will suck up a lot of energy because there have been no storms at all this season so as the earth shifts from the Solstice to the Equinox, violent storms will bloom. My parents have flown in planes all over the planet for nearly 70 years. They noticed by the early 1960's that if they flew in the spring or the fall, the nearer to the equinoxes they flew, the nastier their trips so they tried to schedule them to not coincide if they were flying cross country or overseas. I remember some very scary flights in violent storms in DC3s!

Are we ready for hurricanes? Is the super-secretive Lord Voldemort clone, Chertoff, running around in public, talking about how we must protect ourselves? And where is the National Guard, the bitter remants of that organization? Are they in the middle of a surge in Iraq or will they save people from the surge in a hurricane here at home? And why didn't the Democratic Party leaders impeach Bush by now?

Instead, more Americans will die. And our economy won't be saved by helicopters flown by Bernanke, either. We can't paper over all this with dollar bills printed up in secret. The Chinese are no longer holding our dollars as they pour in.

Instead, Mother Nature does what she has to do: she follows her own laws and they are unassailable and can't be papered over with magic money.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Comments

[Blunt Force Trauma]

Weather related....In case you missed it, U.S. drought is growing in the southeast. 'Exceptional' drought has almost engulfed an entire state and one half of another.

http://drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html

[blues]

A whole lot of smoke is issuing from vast fires in Idaho and Montana:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/natural_hazards_v2.php3?img_id=14451

And the Dakotas:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/natural_hazards_v2.php3?img_id=14448

I saw the smoke high up at sunset last evening here in Western Massachusetts.

Today, we are having very strong wind gusts up here, which we always seem to get when when hurricanes are in the Gulf of Mexico. They will send the smoke northward today, I would guess.

It makes sense that hurricanes can instigate earthquakes. In the ocean, they cause tidal surges, and it is established that even water pent up in new dams can cause them. I think they could do the same on land. For one thing, it is now known that hurricanes spawn many tornadoes, and tornadoes do far more than just rip things up. They produce powerful "ground thumping" that is easily detected on seismographs. I was in one once, in '89, I think. I was in a car, and it seemed to "jump around" from the repetitive blasts. All the trees around me were down, I noticed, when the water and mist vanished. (I wasn't under a bridge, but come to think of it, I will be more careful about hiding under bridges in tornadoes now!)

I would guess that even powerful thunderbolts could cause earthquakes. The crystal structure of rocks is presumably very uniform, and many such stones are subject to piezoelectric effects; so they expand or contract when hit with strong electrical discharges. From what I hear, though, most earthquakes are caused by the gravitational distortion ("tidal effect" of three feet or more across the globe) produced when the moon is near the earth and in conjunction with the sun (a solar eclipse is the worst case).

[Daliwood]

"...the whole planet seems to be convulsing again right now on the meteorologial as well as the geological level. And this is no coincidence: our planet's systems are interlocked in amazing ways."

Yes, and the interlocks are also going to show up in earthquakes caused by not only hurricanes but also melting glaciers. Only a few writers and scientists that I'm aware of have begun to postulate that global warming will--through the interconnectedness of Earth's environment--cause more and larger earthquakes through glacial thawing. The melting of glaciers and ice-packs significantly alters the pressure on the Earth's crust, lessening it where a glacier melts. Ice is comparatively heavy (about 1 ton per cubic meter if I recall correctly). With some glaciers having flow rates in the 1000s of cubic meters per second as they melt, there is a sudden and significant loss of pressure on the crust. The pressure itself isn't lost, of course, but it's transferred elsewhere, changing the dynamics and likelihood of earthquakes. Moreover, the seismic changes resulting from the altered pressure distribution may also manifest themselves in increased volcanism as well as earthquakes.

Get ready, Canada. Your comparatively timid seismic environment may be getting grumpy pretty soon.

[blues]

It's the Frigging Crack of DOOOOOOM!!!

(Pob'ly is, but I know it's none of my business. I'm sure someone else will handle it.)

[Daliwood]

P.S. Here's a delicious irony for you: TVA has had to shut down one of its nuke plants temporarily because of global warming. The "cooling water" is too hot. The neocons love nukes, but the global warming they denied for years is now going to let them know who's boss on this planet.

http://www.wate.com/Global/story.asp?S=6944837

[blues]

Yeah. I saw that Daliwood. You know, Daliwood, your style is just way too, way too. I hereby nominate you for the next Gore Vidal!

[Daliwood]

Thanks, blues. I appreciate the compliment.

Do you remember Truman Capote's review of a Gore Vidal novel? -- "That's not writing; that's typing."

[blues]

I haven't read a Vidal novel for 40 years, but they were great. I started reading Capote, but, if memory serves, I couldn't stand the egomania of it. I have seen a lot of artists with overwhelming ego issues, and they are the worst!

[JSmith]

As my old stats prof never tired of telling us, "Correlation is not causation."

And, "Coincidence is not correlation."

And another one, revised and updated for the 21st century: "The plural of anecdote is not 'data'".

In Other Words... your earthquake/hurricane link will need to be much stronger for me to believe there's any 'there' there.

"A helicopter bringing aid crashed and where is the US navy? Where are they? When we lost New Orleans they were all in the Gulf of Persia! And Asia!"

Disaster relief and Search&Rescue isn't the Navy's job. For that you want the Coast Guard.

"This huge hurricane forming in the Gulf will suck up a lot of energy because there have been no storms at all this season so as the earth shifts from the Solstice to the Equinox, violent storms will bloom."

An recent Sci-Am article suggested that stronger storms will mean fewer storms, precisely because big storms suck up a lot of energy.

[JSmith]

Gore Vidal is a vacuous old poofter.

[blues]

That's Poofter to you, partner.

[JSmith]

"I would guess that even powerful thunderbolts could cause earthquakes."

How about if everyone in North America jumped off their dining room tables at precisely the same instant? Would you expect earthquakes and tidal waves in Indonesia?

[L Luther]

When we were pounded by twin hurricanes in 2003, the second one, Jeanne, caused an earthquake that I felt here in Vero Beach Florida as it came ashore. It wasn't enough to rattle dishes (the wind could have done that!) but was a steady, heavy vibration with a rumble I could hear over the storm winds which were really wailing at that time. Other felt it but not one person I talked to had ever heard of such a thing. I researched it and discover that we really did have an earthquake and a Cat 3 storm at the same time.