but the elephant protecting child pic seems (while cool) out of place…

As the caption on Flickr explains (our blog platform makes it tough to add captions handily in-line):

This is a statue outside of a civil defense and citizen earthquake preparedness training center in Tokyo, Japan. The statue symbolizes protection and preparedness for natural disasters, the most common and historically destructive of which for Japan is earthquakes. The image is not out of place in this blog post.

Those lil shakes were like licking an ice cream cone then throwing the rest in the trash: I don’t like the effects per se of a big ol’ nasty one, but damn it I don’t like to be teased either.

There’s a tiny piece bit of coverage here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj3DZnzlUzc#t=4m24s
but there was a lot more on the NHK program.

Literally the ENTIRE BAY for 3 miles was on fire!

My own thought, as well as that of a geophysicist that I know, is that even if there was some sort of reliable magic precursor signal produced from the point miles below ground shortly before an earthquake starts, that would be absolutely useless unless you could also tell how big the quake was going to be.  Hundreds of tiny quakes happen every day in California, and since a big quake is really just a “cascade” effect of many smaller quakes triggering each other and joining together, a precursor for a big quake probably wouldn’t look any different than that for a small one.  

Let’s just build stronger buildings.  Not like those death-trap townhouses in the San Francisco Sunset district that will just sink into the soil through liquefaction…

This quake makes 3 correct AGW earthquake predictions out of 23 in the following blogs with the standard 2-week model and shows the “T” in the T-Party (t-GOP) stands again for exporting a tsunami.

“A 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck 180 kilometers (112 miles) east of Raoul Island in the Kermadec Islands  … sea level readings indicated a tsunami was generated, which may have been destructive along the coasts near the earthquake epicenter … the quake was felt along the east coast of New Zealand” (“Earthquake strikes near Raoul Island in the Kermadec Islands”; eturbonews.com, 10/21/11).

The predictions are found in:

http://wireupdate.com/news/strong-earthquake-hits-off-the-coast-of-oregon-no-damage.html

http://www.koinlocal6.com/news/local/story/5-9-magnitude-earthquake-strikes-off-Ore-coast/o_B9eYkfUUiv3ngPKh-c3Q.cspx?p=Comments