Is the increasly frequent number of earthquakes/volcanoes that we are having normal? Are they somehow tied in together? Woo's woo's must be attributing to Planet X...

Is the number really increasing? Or is it just perception? I mean, when Mt St Helens makes a little burp it's more news as it would be when it would be just one of the many more unpopular volcanoes.

__________________
"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

well I think it is more a case of perception as you say...I more curious as to whether these things are tied in with each other...

I'm sure they are more than a little bit of coincidence, but to explain my reasoning: both the recent earthquake fault line and mt St. Helens are in the same techtonic system on the Pacific Rim and the Ring of Fire.

__________________
...what's so wrong with a little overkill?

Here are some stats from the US Geological Survey on US and global earthquake frequency. Just eye-balling it, there are higher years and lower, but I don't see any trend or that 2004 is particularly high (2003 seemed to be a higher count).

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

OK, I did it last year, guess I’ll do it again.

Here’s the USGS info on magnitude 5+ quakes:
Here I calculated the average per month so that a quasi trend could be shown (and yes, I took the right number of months, and days, for 2004 into account ):
So, as of September 21, 2004, there is no increase in earthquakes this year, quite the opposite in fact.

Just to clarify, the quakes per month was just to get apples to apples comparisons to get a trend and not intended to reflect actual monthly quakes, there’s data on that out there already.

As has been stated, it's all about perception. St. Helens is/is about to erupt and suddenly it's in the forefront of people's minds.

<conspiracy mode>But of course the USGS is cooking the numbers to hide the clear evidence of Planet X's approach!</conspiracy mode>

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Oh my gosh, the number of quakes is DECREASING! The core has stopped! We're doomed! #-o 8-[ :wink:

Sorry. ops:
Nice job Captain Kidd.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

I don't think there is anything about the celebrity status of Mount St. Helens. Any active volcano in the continental US would get the same attention. I remember in 1990 when the Redoubt Volcano exploded in Alaska (that day was labeled Ash Wednesday by the folks in Anchorage), it was given a lot of press coverage. I also suspect that an explosion or ash cloud in Hawaii would also be well covered.

Not true. Volcanoes errupt all the time, nearly every year in the aleutian island chain of alaska. These erruptions are basically ignored.

Yes but given the relative populations of the Mainland US, Hawaii, and even central Alaska, compared to the Aleutians, I think the idea is still valid.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

That's funny!!!

I check NEIC for world quakes and recent quakes NW and CA daily and have been for years.

Intellectually I know it is only coincidence, (or I really was feeling minor quakes, which isn't supposed to be true either), but I started checking when I had this odd premonition about quakes. I felt the ground shake, or did I? The house creaked. So, I started checking.

Within a short time, weeks, maybe a month, we had the Nisqually Quake.

The number of daily minor quakes in the NW was higher before Nisqually. Then the numbers went down and stayed down until recently. The number of daily minor quakes in the NW increased a few weeks ago and the volcano activity followed.

But, let me give some background observations here, to give you a more accurate picture. The number of quakes on the NW map is usually between ~10 and ~30, (ignore the 300 number up there now which is volcano activity). It can go up on many occasions without really trending up, so you cannot go by any single day or even days.

A few weeks ago, the number of daily quakes went up and pretty much stayed in the 20-30+ range. In retrospect, it might even have represented the slow quake (see link in my previous post) that I now see had happened. And now we have volcanic activity. The number of NW quakes remains high when you subtract the volcanic activity.

The CA quakes range from ~100 to ~350 daily. They have gone up to the 500s and whether they were up or down, they offered no predictive value for bigger quakes. In fact, they weren't especially high before the Parkridge quake.

Today's NEIC world quakes has more South American quakes than usual and less Japan earthquakes. I don't recall seeing such a pattern before. But chances are it is absolutely meaningless.

The average quakes worldwide is very consistent, as you can see from the above links. An increase in small quakes should indicate slow slippage and is a good thing, it releases pressure. The number of quakes before and after Nisqually, (and my premonition :wink: ), has not borne out to be predictive in earthquake research, so it probably is coincidence. We don't have enough big quakes here to get a decent sample to test, (also a good thing, until the big Cascadia rupture makes up for it anyway).

On the other hand, I'd be very interested in knowing if plate movements have faster and slower movement and over what time frame. I'll be doing more reading about these slow quakes now that my curiosity is peaked again. Since they have occurred every 14 months or so, they can't be predictive of volcanic activity. But on occasion, the slow quake might be the underlying cause of a single magma increase or movement.

Of course, I could do this as real science and actually plot the data. But that's too much work. I'd much rather contribute to TEOTWAWKI rumors on GLP by selective data memory. :P

Oh ya, and before the ~5 earthquake we had here a few years before Nisqually, I had spent the previous day going around my neighborhood formalizing the assigned tasks for our earthquake response team, true story.

__________________
The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/

I was careful to say continental US, but I should have said contiguous US, which is what I meant.

Yes, if Mt. Rainier were to start grumbling, no one would care.

From CNN.com, as of 13:17 EDT

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Parkfield is on the San Andreas fault, which is where the North American and Pacific Plates are sliding past each other.

Mt. St. Helens is in the Cascades. The mechanism is subduction from the small remnant of the Juan De Fuca plate. As it subducts under the North American Plate, as the material is subducted deep into the Earth, some of it eventually works back up into the Cascade volcanoes.

Why do volcanoes occur?

They are really two different mechanisms, about the only real thing they have in common is that both the Parkfield quake and Mt St Helens explosion occurred in North America.

Friday, January 7, 2005
"One of the largest and most active volcanoes on the Alaska Peninsula has grown increasingly restless since the start of the new year...Alaska Volcano Observatory on Tuesday upgraded Mount Veniaminof Volcano's level of concern to yellow..."

Number of Earthquakes Worldwide for 2000 - 2004

2004 seems to be pretty much in line with recent years.

__________________
- Learn a lot teaching others.

I've been running the numbers for some of the "believers" on the tt-watch forum. No matter how many times I do an analysis, one particular doomsayer comes back with more claims of increasing seismological activity.

Of course, they claim that the USGS is cooking the numbers about earthquake numbers and magnitude. They look at the initial reports from SED then claim that the USGS is reducing the magnitude in the official report. They can't get it through their heads that the preliminary data in SED is PRELIMINARY.

Oh bother.

__________________
I feel a hot wind on my shoulder
And the touch of a world that is older

When I went to Anchorage some years ago, my friend there said they had an earthquake every hour. He said you just couldn't feel them. I never researched it, so I'm not sure if his statement was accurate.