I have cousin who is in Malaysia right now. He said his island was not hit very hard by the tusnami because the island of Sumatra protected it. Still, he said 59 people were killed because of the waves and that one of them was the father of one of his friends.

I just sent him an email. I can't guarantee that he will be able to respond in a timely manner, but if he does, I'll let you know what he has to say.

[edit on 05/1/6 by GradyPhilpott]

I've been monitoring that site since the main Earthquake occurred & I have to say that some of those aftershocks & minor quakes have been quite large. They have been occurring since 26th December & I'm guessing they're not done yet.

I'm throwing this out to anyone with some geology knowledge (because mine is pretty limited), but is this a normal amount of activity after a quake of that magnitude? Looking at the USGS website it appears that quakes of 5.0+ have been happening almost every few hours almost continuously since the 9.0. Having grown up in southern California and been through many quakes myself, I'm familiar with aftershocks, but nothing like that. I'm not one of these nutters who thinks this is the end of the world, or the poles are shifting or whatever, but I'm curious as to whether it is possible to have periods of dramatically increased seismic activity (e.g. having major quakes constantly for months). From what I've read of the Alaska 9+ quake I never recall reading anything about continuous major aftershocks for weeks afterwards. If anyone can enlighten me on the normality or abnormality of this particular series of events that would be great.

Originally posted by rg73
I'm throwing this out to anyone with some geology knowledge (because mine is pretty limited), but is this a normal amount of activity after a quake of that magnitude? Looking at the USGS website it appears that quakes of 5.0+ have been happening almost every few hours almost continuously since the 9.0.

There are thousands of 5.0 quakes every year.

Having grown up in southern California and been through many quakes myself, I'm familiar with aftershocks, but nothing like that.

The san andreas is one fault, actually its a series of microfaults in some parts, and what you have is the last bits of i think the juan de fuco plate being subducted underneath north america. In the rest of the ring of fire, there are not just double, not just triple, but quadruple plate boundaries. Its a whole different world from california.



I'm not one of these nutters who thinks this is the end of the world, or the poles are shifting or whatever, but I'm curious as to whether it is possible to have periods of dramatically increased seismic activity (e.g. having major quakes constantly for months)
I don't know, you'd think so, but apparently it doesn't happen. I think this is a 'full moon babies' case.

Lemme 'splain. For a long time people thought that more babies were born on a full moon, for whatever the reason. Nurses actually confirmed it. But when the records were checked, it was completely untrue. Everyone had an expectation that it should be true, so they took more note of stuff on those occasions. Full Moon out, check, crap look at all these babies. No full moon, well, there's lots of babies, but no full moon, so forget about it.

Here its, wow, what a huge earth quake. Then everytime there is an earthquake in that part of the world, its going to get noticed, even get reported on the news and multiple newssites. So it seems like there is a ton of stuff going down.

From what I've read of the Alaska 9+ quake I never recall reading anything about continuous major aftershocks for weeks afterwards.

I don't think that these are necessarily aftershocks. Thats a region where there are constant unrelated (well, sort of) earthquakes.

That's right...it's called "The Fallacy of Positive Instances". I see a lot of this type of thinking applied in many posts on ATS.

This, apparently, falls into the category of an "aftershock" -- and seemed to be fairly close to the surface of the earth, meaning it was felt by people in the immediate area.

For those asking, yes, there are lots of aftershocks following a big quake, and they will go on for up to 6-8 months AFTER the initial quake. This was true of the big one in Bam (another recent massive catastophe.) We can expect to see others.

Remember that the monitoring system there in the Indian Ocean was bad to begin with, and hasn't improved in the destruction following the tsunami. The most effective way of reaching many areas right now seems to be ham radio (cell phones aren't as reliable because they need to have towers to work... many were damaged by the force of the water.)

If you haven't checked it out, look at Jazzgurl's link to the USGS site. Very interesting and infomative.