Spate of Quakes Is Not Unusual, Scientists Say

(March 16) -- I remember last year watching the trailer for the movie "2012" and thinking I had never seen anything so absurd in cinema: With Los Angeles both crumbling and combusting at the same time -- as part of worldwide devastation some believe was predicted by the Maya -- John Cusack's character shepherds his family out of harm's way, first by limo then by plane. Director Roland Emmerich had taken the disaster film to even a more preposterous level -- which is saying something.

But after the seismological activity of the past few months, I wouldn't be surprised if people are rechecking their Mayan calendars. Most devastatingly, there was the earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12. And that was followed by others in Japan, Chile, Taiwan, Indonesia and Turkey. And today another one -- a relatively minor 4.4 -- struck Los Angeles. It's as though earthquakes, heretofore sporadic events, had decided that, like hurricanes, they wanted their own season.

They must be connected, right? Well, no, actually. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, while powerful earthquakes can stimulate other seismic activity in the area -- witness the aftershocks that are still plaguing Chile -- they're unlikely to spread across the globe because, as CNN reports, the "Earth's surface is not rigid enough to transfer the stress over long distances."

In fact, the USGS estimates there are millions of earthquakes each year -- with monitors catching at least 50 in the United States each day -- and nearly all of them go unnoticed by the general public. "Had the quakes in Haiti and Chile not occurred recently, we might not have even been interested in the other quakes," says Dr. Kurt Frankel of the Georgia Institute of Technology, according to CNN.

The recent seismic activity is not a historical anomaly. "According to long-term records (since about 1900), we expect about 18 major earthquakes (7.0 - 7.9) and one great earthquake (8.0 or above) in any given year," says the USGS. The quake that struck Chile -- an 8.8 on the moment magnitude scale -- would qualify as this year's big one, even though the 7.0 that struck Haiti caused more devastation.

But don't count on an unveiling of facts to dispel the rampant earthquake speculation. Some Christians, for instance, are looking forward to a day of Armageddon and predicting a tremendous earthquake in the Holy Land in the next few years. Others believe the recent seismic activity is just a prequel to the 2012 apocalypse they believe was predicted by the Maya -- though in fact scholars say that the end of the Maya's long-calendar cycle was meant to be a cause of celebration, a sort of New Year's on steroids, and not the end of the world.

The 2012 phenomenon is fanned by the "media and from other people making use of the Maya past to fulfill agendas that are really their own," says Susan Gillespie, a University of Florida anthropologist. And the same can be said of those who read much more into the recent flurry of earthquakes than they should.