back in Tranna
drove through another lovely winter storm
clicking
You and your 282 friends have supported 1,682,202.1 square feet!
Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 55,291.1 square feet.
You have supported: (33,947.8)
Your 282 friends have supported: (21,343.3)
American Prairie habitat supported: 32,300.0 square feet.
You have supported: (9,199.8)
Your 282 friends have supported: (23,100.2)
Rainforest habitat supported: 1,594,611.0 square feet.
You have supported: (158,311.6)
Your 282 friends have supported: (1,436,29
Happy to hear you arrived home safely, ehBeth!
Sending hot chocolate and warm footies!
Sounds just right, stradee. Thanks!
And we will be at 70 F on Friday! Read it and weep.
Clicked.
sumac, wish the weather was a little less freezing here.
Leaving my warm house for running errands today. <brrr>
Chilly here at 39F with a typical Washington gray drip-fog.
Click.
It's right around 39F here in Boston, too, Piff; but by us that's not chilly. That's downright warm for this time of year.
Our temps are supposed to go to the mid-50's on Friday.
Interesting times we live in, indeed.
Here is another interesting idea, and one that I have always thought probably exists: from today's Op Ed page of the NYT.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 29, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Year the Earth Fought Back
By SIMON WINCHESTER
ondon ?- LIKE two bookends of calamity, earthquakes at Bam in Iran and off Sumatra in Indonesia have delineated a year of unusual seismic ferocity - a year, one might say, of living dangerously. Twelve months, almost to the very hour, before Sunday's extraordinary release of stress at the India-Burma tectonic plate boundary, a similar jolt at the boundary of the Arabian and the Eurasian Plates devastated one of the most celebrated of Persian caravan cities. The televised images of Bam's collapsed citadel and the sight of thousands of bodies being carried from the desert ruins haunted the world then just as the images of the drowned around the shores of the Bay of Bengal do today.
But that has not been the half of it. True, these two disasters were, in terms of their numbers of casualties, by far the most lethal. But in the 12 months that separated them, there have been many other ruinous and seismically ominous events, occurring in places that seem at first blush to be entirely disconnected.
This year just ending - which the all-too-seismically-aware Chinese will remind us has been that of the Monkey, and so generally much prone to terrestrial mischief - has seen killer earthquakes in Morocco in February and Japan's main island of Honshu in October. The Japan temblor left us with one widely published image - of a bullet-train, derailed and lying on its side - that was, in its own way, an augury of a very considerable power: no such locomotive had ever been brought low before, and the Japanese were properly vexed by its melancholy symbolism.
In America, too, this year there have been some peculiar signs. Not only has Mount St. Helens been acting up in the most serious fashion since its devastating eruption of May 1980, but on one bright mid-autumn day in California this year the great San Andreas Fault, where the North American and Pacific Plates rub alongside one another, ruptured. It was on Sept. 28, early in the morning, near the town of Parkfield - where, by chance, a deep hole was being drilled directly down into the fault by geologists to try to discern the fault's inner mysteries.
The rupture produced a quake of magnitude 6.0 - and though it did not kill anyone, it frightened millions, not least the government scientists who have the fault in their care. They had expected this particular quake to have occurred years beforehand - and had thought a seismic event so unlikely at the time that most were at a conference in Chicago when it happened. They rushed home, fascinated to examine their instruments, but eager also to allay fears that their drilling had anything to do with the tremors.
As every American schoolchild knows, the most notorious rupture of this same fault occurred nearly a century ago, at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906 - an occurrence now known around the world as the great San Francisco Earthquake. An entire city, a monument to the hopes and dreams of America's westward expansion, was destroyed by a mere 40 seconds of shaking. It was an occurrence possessed of a historical significance that may well be matched by the tragedy now unfolding on the far side of the world.
But, curiously, it turns out that there were many other equally momentous seismic events taking place elsewhere in the world in 1906 as well. Ten weeks before the San Francisco quake there was one of magnitude 8.2 on the frontier between Colombia and Ecuador; then on Feb. 16 there was a violent rupture under the Caribbean island of St. Lucia;then on March 1, 200 people were killed by an earthquake on Formosa; and then, to pile Pelion upon Ossa, Mt. Vesuvius in Italy erupted, killing hundreds.
But even then it wasn't over. The grand finale of the year's seismic upheaval took place in Chile in August, a quake that all but destroyed the port of Valparaiso. Twenty thousand people were killed. Small wonder that the Chinese, who invented the seismograph and who tend to take the long view of all historical happenings, note in their writings that 1906 was a highly unusual Year of the Fire Horse, when devastating consequences are wont to abound, worldwide.
Given these cascades of disasters past and present, one can only wonder: might there be some kind of butterfly effect, latent and deadly, lying out in the seismic world? There is of course no hard scientific truth - no firm certainty that a rupture on a tectonic boundary in the western Pacific (in Honshu, say) can lead directly to a break in a boundary in the eastern Pacific (in Parkfield), or another in the eastern Indian ocean (off Sumatra, say). But anecdotally, as this year has so tragically shown, there is evidence aplenty.
Plate tectonics as a science is less than 40 years old. It is possible that common sense suggests what science has yet to confirm: that the movement among the world's tectonic plates may be one part of enormous dynamic system, with effects of one plate's shifting more likely than not to spread far, far away, quite possibly clear across the surface of the globe..
In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system - the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.
Mr. Lovelock's notion, which he named after the earth goddess of the Ancient Greeks, makes much of the delicacy of the balance that mankind's environmental carelessness increasingly threatens. But his theory also acknowledges the somber necessity of natural happenings, many of which seem in human terms so tragically unjust, as part of a vast system of checks and balances. The events that this week destroyed the shores of the Indian Ocean, and which leveled the city of Bam a year ago, were of unmitigated horror: but they may also serve some deeper planetary purpose, one quite hidden to our own beliefs.
It is worth noting that scientists have discovered that the geysers in Yellowstone National Park started to erupt much more frequently in the days immediately following a huge earthquake in central Alaska in 2002. There turned out to be a connection, one hitherto quite unrealized, that intimately linked places thousands of miles apart. Geologists are now looking for other possible links - sure in the knowledge that if real geological connections can be determined, then we may in due course be able to divine from events on one side of the planet indications that will allow us to warn people on the other - and so perhaps allow them to prepare, as those in today's Indian Ocean communities never were able, for the next time.
For one thing is certain, and comfortless: on earth, eternally restless and alive, there will, and without a scintilla of doubt, be a next time.
Simon Winchester is the author of "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
from the Inspirational Thought of the Day
Quote:"When you see a new trail, or a footprint that you do not know, follow it to the point of knowing."
-Grandmother of Charles Eastman
SANTEE SIOUX
Quote:We never gain new knowledge or new experience unless we are willing to take risks. It's good to be curious. Also, it pays to be cautious.
Walk in balance.
The path of the Warior is filled with opportunities to seek new knowledge.
As we travel down the Red Road,we will run into trails of opportunity.
Down each of these trails are experiences from which we will learn.
Experience plus action is the beginning of knowledge.
Great Spirit, Help me to make good choices in choosing only the trails you would have me take.
Thanks to Hohawk for this.
aktbird57 -
You and your 282 friends have supported 1,683,747.4 square feet!
Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 55,408.2 square feet.
You have supported: (33,947.8)
Your 282 friends have supported: (21,460.4)
American Prairie habitat supported: 32,323.4 square feet.
You have supported: (9,199.8)
Your 282 friends have supported: (23,123.6)
Rainforest habitat supported: 1,596,015.9 square feet.
You have supported: (158,358.5)
Your 282 friends have supported: (1,437,657.4)
Wonderful thoughts from our tribal elders, ehBeth. Many thanks for those postings.
sumac, good article ~ thanks!
ehBeth, lovely quotes. Words to live by...
Well hello everyone,
The guys cut the telephone line again!!!!!!
They are also not from the phone company installing good cables like I had hoped. They are installing water lines!!!
Anyway, good reading catching up with you all.
Clicked.
Danon, well that's what happened to ya!
And those guys are collecting a paycheck for connecting the telephone cable to the water system.
Don't be surprised when Pattie yells from the kitchen - "The faucets ringing"!!!
aktbird57 -
You and your 282 friends have supported 1,685,175.7 square feet!
Marine Wetlands habitat supported: 55,525.3 square feet.
You have supported: (33,947.8)
Your 282 friends have supported: (21,577.4)
American Prairie habitat supported: 32,346.8 square feet.
You have supported: (9,199.8)
Your 282 friends have supported: (23,147.0)
Rainforest habitat supported: 1,597,303.6 square feet.
You have supported: (158,381.9)
Your 282 friends have supported: (1,438,921.7)
Stradee,
What an inventive sense of humor you have. I like that.
I would tell Patti to answer the bibcock - and if it's an advertising call to tell the people to dry up and then stop the cock. (All the foregoing is above board stuff - grin) (I'm getting a sinking feeling.)
Ka licked!
Danon, LOL
Sending a smile and wishing you, your Pattie, and all Wildclickers ~
A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR!
