Comment and Question – February 9, 2013

Comment

In quite a few of my notes posted here I have stated that I feel that geology professionals around the world are being frighteningly nearsighted when it comes to the subject of earthquake forecasting. But I have also repeatedly stated that this is not a problem that is confined to just the geology world. It is everywhere in some form or another including in just about every area of science and medicine.

As stated in other notes, one of the places where this nearsightedness is having the most devastating impact on our world is in the energy area. Our world is in desperate need of new sources of affordable, environmentally safe energy. Yet governments including the U.S. don’t seem to be at all interested in solving this problem. Prior to the recent Presidential Election I sent Democrats, Republicans, and the U.S. Department of Energy an outline for the development of a new energy resource that would involve collecting enormous amounts of energy out in the ocean and far away from where people live. During their campaign speeches both of the Presidential Candidates repeatedly called for the development of new energy sources. But the outline I sent them was completely ignored. I truly can’t even imagine why the Obama administration can say so often and so loudly that we need new sources of energy and yet in their first four years in office not lift a finger to develop any new energy sources.

Something that I have been attempting to do for a while now is get various groups and individuals interested in the creation of a special nonprofit foundation that would identify all of the problems that threaten people’s lives and health and our global economy including that global energy shortage, and then propose how those problems could be solved or at least managed. Right now, government officials around the world literally don’t even know about the existence of many of those problems. They can’t solve problems that they have never even heard about. And the general public can’t pressure them to solve problems that are not clearly defined.

Wikipedia.org has been one of the most valuable resources in history for identifying problems and providing at least some help for solving them. But it has a major problem with the fact that Web pages at that site usually need to be “politically correct.” If someone were to propose there that earthquakes can in fact be predicted, there would undoubtedly be a deafening uproar from the international geology community. And Wikipedia.org would be forced to remove the Web page.

Question

Would anyone like to propose why there are so many aftershocks for those Solomon Islands earthquakes?

One would expect that a 9 + magnitude earthquake would have a lot of aftershocks. But the main one in the Solomon Islands was only an 8 magnitude quake. Yet those 5 and higher magnitude aftershocks seem to be going on without end.

Was there something unusual about that fault zone that is resulting in so many powerful aftershocks?

These are personal opinions.