Has anyone noticed these influx of earthquakes, etc? Media ploy or an actual sign of more trouble to come?

Devastating earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and tsunamis are constant. Look into any period and you will find them.

I think these things just get more media coverage than in the past.

H.A.A.R.P reading Nostradamus ?

Where they occur influences the news. It’s like the jokes “Plane crash in <some remote place>, 300 people dead. Englishman has flight delayed at local airport.”, or, “Fog reported in the English Channel, Europe isolated.”

@jaytkay is right, plus we have faster and more thorough reporting of major events like these. But, they can and do come in waves or groups. When one of the earths tectonic plates gets moving, it can set of series of earthquakes in apparently unrelated areas.

We are apparently heading for some major ‘Solar flare’ activity within the next couple of years. These happen every century or so, when the last big one hit, the worst that happened was the newly installed Telegraph systems failed for a few hours. It seems there are enough bits of predictive and protective technology in place to prevent major electrical failure during the next lot. But we shall see.

It’s arguable whether there are more natural and man-made disasters than in the past, but it’s for sure the Internet, TV and other media have made us more aware of them than ever before.

You’re just noticing them more.

@markferg “Europe is isolated…” ROFL!! Exactly!

Well, have you noticed that it’s always the “Second or third worst earthquake since [what ever year.]”

It’s just being reported more. We are in the Information Age. It is becoming even more easy for us to have access to the world’s news, events, and anything you can imagine.

As the Grand Situati of the fourth level of the 5th ground swell, Knee High to the Grand Elevator, and positron of too many other titles and monikers to be able to write them here before the sun goes around the moon another trilorevolution, I can tell you for sure, and also for certain, not to mention being absolutely positive—that the inverted days of Zerrigor are upon us. Watch for democracy to start setting in. Watch for a Presidential election. Watch for a Microsoft/Google merger and the nanobot erection.

By the powers invested within me, and the obverse as well, I now pronounce said volcanos, earthquakes, hurricanes, revolutions and the marvelous Sargasso Sea plastic mines to be signs. Yes. I said it!

Signs!

Increased earthquake activity was something predicted 30 years ago as a result of climate change. It’s not the end of the world or anything, just some bad shit happening.

There was an earthquake in China in 1976 that killed upwards of 250,000 people. But hardly anyone has heard of it. Today you could not miss hearing about it. Communications have shrunk the globe, and the constant appetite for 24 hour news has distorted our perception of the frequency and magnitude of disasters.

Define ‘trouble to come’.

I think the ‘magnitude’ of any ‘disaster’ is relative @zenvelo. Our perceptions, from the safe haven of those parts of the world where earthquakes are rare, or volcanoes are ancient, are cushioned and narrow. Better to be shown these events – perhaps more often than necessary – than not at all, otherwise aid and much humanitarian relief would simply not be deployed where needed. New Zealand has just had the worst earthquake for years, and I, as a Brit, was disappointed not to see more news about it on TV. Libya was everywhere. Politics outweighs natural disaster, it seems.

Trouble to come as in a major catastrophic event similar to the 5 or so ones that have occurred in the earth’s history resulting in mass wipeouts of populations, etc.

The Earth is sick of us. It wants us off.

Oh sure, lots pf people have noticed after the His-Story channel primed them to expect to see that. When we go out expecting to observe something that happens routinely, it doesn’t take too long to be rewarded. That’s the mechanism of human thinking that conspiracy theorists and junk scientists rely on to sell their theories.

But the real scientists at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey haven’t noticed it, because they rely on reports from seismographs all over the world and not the His-Story channel’s sensationalism. They note that there are an average of about 1615 earthquakes of magnitude 5 or greater around the world each year. An earthquake has to be that big to ensure that there will be a seismograph somewhere close enough to its location to record it. The table for Worldwide earthquakes on the link above shows that the average is holding pretty steady. Some years have lass. Some have more. But there has been no massive, sudden change.

That is not to say it can’t happen. The tectonic plate motion that triggers earthquake activity is a vastly complex dynamical system with lost of strange attractors diving it. Perturbations are more than possible, the are predictable. What unfortunately isn’t predictable yet is when the perturbations will occur..

@mcbolden One more thought on that. I just stumbled on this news item this morning. If you happen to live somewhere that’s currently in the middle of a spike in seismic activity, you might conclude that the whole world is experiencing the same thing, when it fact it is a local phenomenon. Note that this earthquake, the largest in a string of hundreds that have rattled this area of Arkansas in the last year, was 4.7 on the Richter scale. So even though it was the biggest yet to hit that town, and woke people out of a sounc sleep, it didn’t make it up to the 5.0 or above threshold to even get on the chart of quakes the USCGS tracks for worldwide earthquake activity.

@ETpro Back in 1989 there was an earthquake swarm in the Mammoth Lakes area of the east central Sierra Nevada in California. There were enough that the USGS became concerned about a possible eruption of a dormant volcano. But on a global scale, it was nothing, and only interesting to scientists because it was easily observable.

@zenvelo Exactly. Same as what’s happening in Arkansas now. 800 earthquakes in a year. But most were so small hardly anyone felt them. Scientists are wondering if it is due to large scale natural gas wells allowing the surface to sag down into the emptied space the gas had occupied.