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Earthquake synchrony

18 June 2010
Geology

At www.physorg.com/print196090397.html we are informed that in nature random signals often fall mysteriously in step, one after the other. Fireflies flashing sporadically in the early evening have a tendency to flash in unison, or very closely after each other – flashing in bunches, and a similar harmonic behaviour can be conjectured while listening to crickets (grasshoppers) or even swinging clock pendulums. The tendencey of nature to create order out of random events is now thought to explain the fact earthquakes tend to occur in clusters. Earthquakes trigger earthquakes as stress is transferred to nearby parts of the crust and some really strong earthquakes seem to trigger others virtually on any fault line. The Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America has a paper that looks at earthquake patterns over the last 1500 years – strings of related earthquakes. It explains the physics of how faults might align themselves to rupture simultaneously over a large region – when all of a sudden a series of faults release stress all at roughly the same time. Observation of recent earthquakes lies at the root of this paper’s findings but it is very signficant as far as the Bronze Age catastrophes are concerned – as they almost certainly involved earthquakes, strings of them along fault lines from the Aegean, across Anatolia and into SW Asia. Amos Nur described them as ‘earthquake storms’ – clusters of earthquakes over a relatively short period of time. It now seems they are a reality – please tell the archaeologists somebody.

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