Japan earthquake and tsunami..

Been watching this all unfold in Japan. Are things of this nature becoming much more commonplace around the world or are we just able to get the news delivered to us easier?

I searched and found this after seeing something on the news which prompted me to look for further information. Much like what they cause it looks like they tend to come in waves.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquak...s.php#table_us

Originally Posted by DAND

I searched and found this after seeing something on the news which prompted me to look for further information. Much like what they cause it looks like they tend to come in waves.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquak...s.php#table_us

Interesting..... The table showing the data for the United States seems to indicate a noticeable upwards trend in the number of earthquakes. Wonder where exactly the increase is taking place?

Here's an interesting page off of the above link for keeping track of such things, btw....

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/

Well, if you look at the Earth's tectonic plates as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,all interlocked and touching, you can't mess with one without effecting the rest.

That's why there are often other quakes and volcanic eruptions soon after a quake (like within 3 to 6 months).

You wiggle one plate and it sets off a chain reaction to all those touching it, and others for thousands of miles around.

All those plates float around on a layer of magma, when you move one plate, the magma fills the void around the edges. If the plate borders are located in the ocean, you just don't see the magma rise to the crust, because it's underwater.

If there's a "vent" or volcano near the edge of the plate, it's gonna be active. Like popping a zit.

Kilauea, in Hawaii, has been erupting more forcefully lately.

Maybe that volcano set this earth quake off, and not the other way around.

The Ring of Fire is gonna be raising Hell for the next several months.

As old as the Earth is, why do we still have moving tectonic plates at all?

Without any dramatic external forces acting upon it, one would think this big ball of dirt would be completely stable by now.

Originally Posted by WebSlave

As old as the Earth is, why do we still have moving tectonic plates at all?

Without any dramatic external forces acting upon it, one would think this big ball of dirt would be completely stable by now.

With all the destruction man does to this ball of dirt. How many holes have been drilled into it with the hope of finding oil. Something is bound to give, move or shift given enough of a nudge.

Originally Posted by SamanthaJane13

Kilauea, in Hawaii, has been erupting more forcefully lately.

Maybe that volcano set this earth quake off, and not the other way around.

The Ring of Fire is gonna be raising Hell for the next several months.

Hate to say I told you so, but...

Kilauea is STILL raising Hell, and getting WORSE...and now the lava flow is endangering the rain forests there.

Also-3 more quakes last night.

2 7.0's in Myanmar and 1 6.9 in Thailand.

I think I would be getting the heck OUT of there!

Source: http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=770624

Radiation from Japan spreading around the world
Monday 18th April, 2011

(Op-ed) Victor Kotsev - Asia Times Online Monday 18th April, 2011

Radiation is spreading around the world as a small nuclear wasteland grows near the heart of Japan.

The desperate struggle to restart the crippled reactors' own cooling systems in order to bring them under control is producing little to no results, and is shrouded in uncertainties.

Powerful aftershocks of the level nine earthquake that triggered the crisis threaten to obliterate what little progress has been achieved. Economic and political shock waves are similarly difficult to predict, but will likely also be felt strongly around the globe.

These are some of the main updates on the Fukushima crisis from the past week or so. On Tuesday, the Japanese government raised its assessment of the severity of the crisis by two notches simultaneously, from level five to level seven, the highest on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), on par with the worst nuclear disaster in the history of the world, that in Chernobyl in 1986.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a level seven accident indicates a "major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures".

The move came as a surprise, since the Japanese authorities had sought to downplay the crisis all along, and, as I reported last week, most analysts had assessed the accident to merit a level six classification. The government claimed that it was sparked by revised estimates of the total amount of radiation released in the meltdowns, which is currently thought to be about 10% of that released in the Chernobyl accident.

No major new setbacks were reported, even though several new tremors led to temporary evacuations in the plant and added concerns about the safety of another reactor nearby. In a report released by The New York Times last week, American nuclear engineers returning from Japan cautioned that the reactors, damaged by explosions and full of sea water, had become more vulnerable to seismic aftershocks.

Efforts to stabilize further the crippled reactors have recently focused on repairing the internal cooling systems, but have run into serious difficulties. Currently, engineers continue to pump water into the melted cores to prevent overheating, while simultaneously pumping out highly radioactive water from the basements of the reactors in order to conduct repairs.

The reactor containers appear to have sustained damage, however, and some of the water that is pumped in trickles down to the basements, reversing the progress achieved. In a few days of efforts, the water levels dropped mere centimeters. While 660 tons of contaminated water were pumped out, an estimated 60,000 tons remain.

There continues to be a lot of uncertainty surrounding the status of the reactors. Radiation measurements at the plant are inaccurate, because the instruments were damaged by the high levels of radioactivity, Japanese media reported. Fears remain that the situation could get much worse. "The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that the amount of leakage could eventually reach that of Chernobyl or exceed it," an official from the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), told Japan Today on Tuesday.

TEPCO claims that "Once it repairs the internal cooling system it would take only a coupleof days to bring the reactors to a cold shutdown," Reuters reported, but how quickly those systems can be accessed is only one of the major questions surrounding this claim. There is a lot of debate over the technical aspects of the cooling process.

Reached for a comment, Professor Calvin Howell, a senior nuclear physicist at Duke University, explained that definitions of a "cold shutdown" may vary somewhat, and that he could only offer an educated guess. He suggested that a major difference between flooding a reactor and using the in-built system is in the pressure of the water (both use water), and elaborated:
It is my understanding that the reactor is currently in shutdown status, meaning that the core is subcritical, ie, the fission chain reaction is not sustained. However, there was a tremendous amount of latent heat in the core when the damaging event occurred and heat continues to be generated by the fuel through normal radioactive decay processes, mostly beta decay. There is still enough stored and generated heat to boil flushing water which is at atmospheric pressure.

It is my understanding that the condition of "cold shutdown" is reached when unpressurized water in contact with the core does not boil. This occurs when unpressurized cooling water can maintain the core temperature below about 95 degrees Celsius. My "guess" is that flushing the reactor core with unpressurized sea water does not remove heat as efficiently as the pressured cooling loops that are used in normal operation. Therefore, it takes much longer to cool the core to temperatures below the boiling point of unpressurized water and is more difficult to maintain than with the normal high pressure cooling loops.

The likely damage to the reactor containers not only obstructs access to vital components of the in-built cooling systems, but also raises doubts whether high pressure can be applied safely. Thus, the best-case scenario remains in the realm of wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government is considering expanding by a few kilometers the 20-kilometer evacuation zone near the plant, a move that falls short of the recommendations of international experts (the US has recommended an 80-kilometer no-go zone to its citizens), but which has generated considerable controversy inside the country.

There are concerns that the site will become a "no-man's land", and an elder in a village nearby, aged 102, committed suicide on Tuesday fearing that he would have to leave his birthplace. Haunting images of "ghost towns" near the plant can be seen in this photo-essay.

Experts speculate that eventually, "there will be no other option but to encase the reactors in concrete", but according to a Reuters report, this would be much more difficult than at Chernobyl. Even a move like this is unlikely to prevent the formation of a long-term nuclear wasteland near the plant, as thousands of tons of highly radioactive by-products will remain on the site, and contamination has spread throughout the exclusion zone. "Experts say the clean-up will take decades," another Reuters report claims.

In another update, radiation levels are rising around the world - or at least, so far, around the northern hemisphere. A French non-governmental organization monitoring radioactive contamination, CRIIRAD, cautioned in a report dated April 7 that radiation pollution from Fukushima in Europe was "no longer negligible". It advised pregnant women and children to avoid consuming products such as milk and vegetables with large leaves, and to be careful when drinking water from reservoirs that collect rain water.

Natural News warned that in the United States, where the fallout spread first, milk samples taken a few weeks ago had tested for contamination with radioactive iodine over 300% higher than the maximum allowed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The independent network also cautioned that the EPA may be scrambling to increase its maximum allowable limits in order to cover up the crisis, and there is at least circumstantial evidence in support of these claims. Last year, the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) alliance blew the whistle on a plan by the EPA to "dramatically increase permissible radioactive releases in drinking water, food and soil after 'radiological incidents'."

In general, while the authorities in most countries continue to insist that there is no risk from the radioactive fallout, reports to the contrary are coming in from an increasing number of sources. It is important to avoid panic, the more respected whistle-blowers emphasize, but it is also important to take precautions such as avoiding certain products and switching to a diet that emphasizes more heavily the lower end of the food chain. Toxins, including radioactive chemicals, tend to concentrate in higher levels in animal products.

Other dimensions of the crisis are the related political and economic ones. As I reported previously, estimates of the costs top US$300 billion, and some of the worst consequences for the Japanese economy may come during the summer, when electricity consumption normally soars. "There's very high uncertainty on Japan's outlook ... the risk is firmly to the downside," a high-ranking International Monetary Fund (IMF) official told Reuters.

In terms of internal politics, the Japanese government currently looks stable, but its future is uncertain at best. The opposition has already rejected appeals a broad coalition and urged the prime minister to resign.

So far, there are no reports of major economic repercussions outside Japan, but it is hard to imagine that the crisis will be inconsequential. In a worst-case scenario, if the situation spins completely out of control, clean-up costs could run high all over the world, and a collapse of the Japanese economy could threaten global financial stability.

The nuclear industry will certainly be hit hard, while even a small decline in Japanese economic growth - which is practically unavoidable - will lead to reshuffles. Already a couple of months ago, the country lost its status as the second-largest world economy to China, and it now faces a further downgrade.

Politically, we can also expect reshuffles. Analysts expect that Japan will become even more introverted than before, and this will have repercussions for politics in Asia and beyond. A major turn to the worse, some analysts have speculated, could test the world's preparedness to overcome political and cultural differences in order to form coalitions for the sake of humanity's well-being. Though this is unlikely at this stage, the very foundations of the international system could potentially be shaken and transformed.

To return to the more probable outcomes of the crisis, the weight of Europe, and of Germany inside Europe, will increase. "What is clear is that after the United States and China, with Japan sidelined with its own multiple crises, Germany has become the world's third most important power," David Rothkopf writes in Foreign Policy.

This will impact the balance inside Europe, where the rivalry between the major European powers, and specifically between France and Germany, is well known. What the future of that rivalry will be, is more difficult to predict.

In sum, while there many unknowns in the Fukushima crisis, and great dangers remain, one thing will most likely become clearer in its wake - how interconnected the world is, and how far the consequences of an unpredictable crisis can spread. To paraphrase John Donne, no island is an island, certainly not in the nuclear age.

Victor Kotsev is a journalist and political analyst based in Tel Aviv.