The full map and the legend can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/4o3re8

It is the best I have found on the Net showing the tectonic plates.

It is a simplified version of the map at http://peterbird.name/publications/2003_PB2002/PB2002_wall_map.gif

Dr Tom Chalko claims that global warming increases the strength of Earthquakes.

Here is a shorter web link

His link leads direct to a promotion of his book. Apparently whatever warming is happening is causing the earth's core to heat up.

No comment on either point.

Clicked on a couple of the links in his website and leads you to a page full of "scientific texts" such as Understanding your Aura, Alien abductions, Understanding the entire universe by meditation, cure basically any illnes by diet, meditation practices etc.

No comment required by me to explain what he is.

Earthquake been reported very recently 70ks out to sea SE of Cairns of 4.0

http://www.cairns.com.au/article/2011/03/15/154335_local-news.html
i hope the link works, lol

It's an absolute nutter's picnic out there in blogland commentary at the moment.
Rational thinking and common sense has gone seriously missing.

I'm with Keith and Sir BT.

That's interesting how common are they there?

Not an area I would suspect.

What is a worry is smaller disturbances can lead to larger ones.

Do you think the massive displacement of mass[silt] from both the Cyclones [Andrew/Yasi] and recent floods have disturbed the equilibrium of the fault?

Obviously quakes of that magnitude occur HUNDREDS of thousand times a year...but its still unusually coincidental.

maybe i answered my own question...

Innisfail apparently had mag 4 earthquakes in 1974, 1989 and 1990.

The Geoscience Australia site seems to be overloaded at present so I don't know if they were on the same fault system

There's also another risk..are we all going to keep reacting more out of fear and alarm instead of arguing from solid evidence, such things as CO2 heating up the earth's core, and a thousand and one other things that we 'THINK' (ie we don't know) might cause calamities?

I think this mentality stems from chaos theory (butterflies can cause hurricanes) and this absurd Gaia rubbish. Then the far left seizes upon it and imposes its own interpretations. Worst of all, in all the blogs and forums, people keep restating the fear until we all end up believing it into existence. The 'loonies' know this and use it effectively.

We are losing our grip on things if we keep letting this happen.

Continental drift has been occuring for billions of years.

Northern Japan moved 6 feet eastward in this earthquake. Continental Drift in action.

The Chilean earthquake last year actually moved the east coast of Argentina 6 inches to the west. The entire southern half of South America actually moved west.

Anything that is moving trillions of tons of continental plate is not being affected by us.

Smaller scale activity like post-glacial rebound earthquakes or the surprising earthquakes caused by large geothermal projects are more in line with the type of impact humans can have. These are millions of times smaller than a 9.0 continent-moving earthquakes.

I find it interesting that people are attempting to argue whose psuedo-scientific internet blogs are better than others.

MONTREAL — Severe earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and now Japan have experts around the world asking whether the world's tectonic plates are becoming more active — and what could be causing it.


Some scientists theorize that the sudden melting of glaciers due to man-made climate change is lightening the load on the Earth's surface, allowing its mantle to rebound upwards and causing plates to become unstuck.


These scientists point to the historical increase in volcanic and earthquake activity that occurred about 12,000 years ago when the glaciers that covered most of Canada in an ice sheet several kilometres thick suddenly melted.


The result was that most of Canada's crust lifted — and is still rising.


Scientists have discovered that the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet over the last 10 years already is lifting the southeastern part of that island several millimetres every year.


The surface of the Earth is elastic. A heavy load such as a glacier will cause it to sink, pushing aside the liquid rock underneath.


The Greenland glacier is about three kilometres at its thickest and it is believed that its weight has depressed sections of the land under the glacier about one kilometre. In fact, the weight of the glacier is so great that significant portions of Greenland have been pushed well below sea level.


"There is certainly some literature that talks about the increased occurrence of volcanic eruptions and the removing of load from the crust by deglaciation," said Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta. "It changes the stress load in the crust and maybe it opens up routes for lava to come to the surface.


"It is conceivable that there would be some increase in earthquake activity during periods of rapid changes on the Earth's crust."


Other scientists, however, believe that tectonic movements similar to the one that caused the Japanese quake are too deep in the Earth to be affected by the pressure releases caused by glacier melt.


These scientists theorize, however, that glacier melts could cause shallower quakes.



Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/technolog...l#ixzz1GkrU33EN

This is quite laughable really. Something bad happens, must be human induced global warming.

My cat died. I blame global warming.
My friend has cancer. I blame global warming.
Julia Gillard's getting fat. I blame global warming.

They theorise because of their academic career..which has turned into Academics' Chorea.

The chaos theory, that originated in 1890 by Henri Poincaré, if taken out of concept it is easily misunderstood.

the Butterfly effect,

That is referring to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. While the butterfly does not cause the tornado, the flap of its wings is an essential part of the initial conditions resulting in a tornado.Recurrence, the approximate return of a system towards its initial conditions, together with sensitive dependence on initial conditions are the two main ingredients for chaotic motion. They have the practical consequence of making complex systems, such as the weather, difficult to predict past a certain time range (approximately a week in the case of weather)

This phenomenon, common to chaos theory, is also known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system. Or another words, what does the outcome of a specific event have on the rest of the world.


My way of looking at the Chaos theory is " for every action there is a reaction."[i][/i]

So it's more in the realm of philosophy. My point was that the mentality of ascribing increased earthquakes to global warming stems from that very concept, which, in my view, is drawing a very long bow. Using that approach, anyone could conclude anything. Looks to me like it's closer to New Age hippy stuff than science.

Newton's (I think it was him) theory of reactions was that 'to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction'. That's a huge difference to chaos theory. At least Newton's was based on observational evidence.

Seeing Plate Tectonics are a rather prominent feature of the news at the moment, this research article from" Science Daily" is a short but interesting read.

Viscous Cycle: Quartz Is Key to Plate Tectonics

Edit and add; An animated video showing the sequence of the Japanese quakes;

http://www.gfz-potsdam.de/portal/gfz/Neu...animation_gross

And further info;

http://www.gfz-potsdam.de/portal/gfz/Public+Relations/M40-Bildarchiv/001_+Japan

Old. old news! Glacial isostatic rebound following the melting of the continental ice caps was first theorized in 1865, and has been well described and measured since that time. It has been ging on for 10,000 years and is expected to take a further 10,000 years before Scandinavia reaches an equilibrium state. Wikipedia has an excellent article on the subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isostatic_rebound

Removing that volume of ice and the resulting mass, does cause stresses in the crust around the area that is rising, and is well known to cause minor earthquakes in those areas. It won't have noticeable effects away from the zone of uplift, apart from a compensating sinking of surrounding areas. For instance as Scotland has risen due to the removal of ice sheets, southern England has been sinking as mantle flows from beneath southern England towards Scotland.

The only way I could imagine melting ice sheets to cause some plate activity would be if a plate boundary had a melting ice sheet sitting on top of it, and then if a sufficient loss of mass occured I might imagine it making a difference. Since no ice sheets sit on top of plate boundaries, I can't see the loss of a few metres of ice fro the present ice sheets having any effect at all. Even if the whole of the Greenland ice sheet melted it would have no more effect than the melting of the Scandinavian and North American ice sheets had 10 or 15,000 years ago - local effects only.