The Cover Story
Those in control of the cover-up have promised that panic was the most important reason for the keeping the common man in the dark. Now the most powerful earthquake in forty years set off a string of tsunamis across many countries and tens of thousands have died. Was this a fluke or is there more on the way? This is what you will have to live with as the death toll climbs into the millions with ever increasing disasters, and you and your knowledge will be held responsible in God's eyes. You shall be given many opportunities to come forward, but it is always easiest in the beginning. Events will only get worse and the web of lies, larger.
The unified group of governments controlling all knowledge is now putting forth the Earth is wobbling and its alleged cause, the 9.0 earthquake off of Sumatra. Has the quake in Alaska or Chile both higher 9's triggered a wobble? No, but you are made to believe this is an explanation for the series of events yet to unfold.
Quake's power = million atomic bombs?
Like a bulldozer in Sumatra
Monday, December 27, 2004 Posted: 7:43 PM EST (0043 GMT)
"(AP) -- Scientists describe Sunday's devastating earthquake off the island of Sumatra as a "megathrust" -- a grade reserved for the most powerful shifts in the Earth's crust.
The term doesn't entirely capture the awesome power of the fourth largest earthquake since 1900, or the tsunami catastrophes it spawned for coastal areas around the Indian Ocean.
Despite its awesome power, the quake itself was not much of a surprise, scientists said Monday.
Sumatra is one of the most earthquake-prone places in the world, sitting atop one of the handful of sites where several plates of the planet's crust overlap and grind. Colossal pressures build up over decades, only to release in a snap.
"These subduction zones are where all the world's biggest earthquakes are produced," said geologist Kerry Sieh of the California Institute of Technology. "Sunday was one of the biggest earthquakes in the region in the past 200 years."
How powerful? By some estimates, it was equal to detonating a million atomic bombs.
Sieh and other scientists said it probably jolted the planet's rotation. "It causes the planet to wobble a little bit, but it's not going to turn Earth upside down," Sieh said.
Epicenter: More than 5 miles below ocean
Researchers also speculated on the extent to which the jolt might have changed Sumatra's coastline. Extensive damage and flooding was preventing investigators from immediately reaching the scene.
Beneath the ocean, the flexible edges of the crustal plates might shifted vertically by as much as 60 feet relative to each other. But even that kind of displacement would lift or lower the Sumatran coast by only a few feet or less, they said, and sea levels would not change dramatically.
"Basically, the run up of high tide will be just a little further up or further back," said Paul Earle, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
But inland, ground levels in northern Sumatra might have changed noticeably in places, Sieh said.
"As the block of land on top of subduction zone lurches out west toward the Indian Ocean, you expect that area behind it to sink," he said.
Seismologists said the epicenter of Sunday's quake was more than 5.5 miles below the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Sumatra and about 150 miles south of the city of Bandah Aceh on the island's northern tip.
Beneath the ocean floor, the quake occurred along a long north-south fault where the edge of the Indian plate dives below the Burma plate. A sea floor feature known as the Sunda Trench marks where the Indian plate begins its grinding decent into the Earth's hot mantle.
It causes the planet to wobble a little bit, but it's not going to turn Earth upside down.
-- Kerry Sieh, California Institute of Technology geologist,
Complicating matters, the edges of three other tectonic plates also bump here, with the Indian and Australian plates slowly sliding northwest relative to the Burma plate.
A magnitude 8.0 earthquake on the island's southern tip was the most deadly tremor of 2000, causing at least 103 fatalities and more than 2,000 injuries. Giant quakes also rocked the area in 1797, 1833 and 1861.
But they were preludes to Sunday's event.
Atlantic ocean landslide speculation
Pressed from many directions, stress built up along the fault line off the Sumatra coast. A north-south fault ruptured along a 745-mile stretch, or about the length of California. It started offshore, then zigzagged inland beneath Sumatra's northern tip and up beneath the Andaman Islands almost to the coast of Myanmar.
Similar to quakes on the San Andreas fault in California, the tremor caused one side of the fault to slide past the other. The rupture released energy like shock waves, especially to the east and west.
While ground shaking damaged buildings and roads on Sumatra, the real havoc was caused by large ocean waves in the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean that were displaced by the quake. Known as tsunamis, the waves obliterated seacoast resorts and communities as far away as Somalia in East Africa.
By Monday, according to the International Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, some energy from Sunday's waves sifted into the Pacific Basin.
At Manzanillo, Mexico, waves rose more than 8 feet. Minor fluctuations were reported in New Zealand and Chile, where waves rose between one and two feet. In the United States, Hawaii reported almost no wave changes, while San Diego saw waves rise less than a foot.
Most tsunamis occur in the Pacific basin because it is encircled by the "Ring of Fire," the necklace of the world's most tectonically active spots. Sunday's tsunami in the Indian Ocean was the first in that region since 1883, when the Krakatoa volcano exploded.
But rogue waves can rise in any ocean, and Sunday's disaster renewed attention on the vulnerability of major coastal cities like
New York City(hint)
In 1999, scientists at University College London reported that if a volcano in the Canary Islands erupted with sufficient force, it could cause a massive landslide on the island of La Palma and trigger tsunami waves in the Atlantic Ocean.
They speculated such a landslide would generate a "mega-tsunami" that would inundate the east coast of the United States and the Caribbean with a wall of water more than 164 feet high.
But other researchers in Britain discounted the prediction as the product of a speculative computer model. They said that over the last 200,000 years there had been only two huge landslides on the flanks of the Canary Islands and that there was geologic evidence indicating the slides broke up and fell into the sea in bits instead of one big whoosh.
"If you drop a brick into a bath you get a big splash," Russell Wynn of the Southampton Oceanography Centre said in a statement. "But if you break that brick up into several pieces and drop them in one by one, you get several small splashes."
Wynn said a multistage landslide would affect the Canary Islands, but would not generate tsunamis capable of swamping New York."
The above story is a courtesy of
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/12/27/quake.seismic.ap/index.html