The Yuma Sun reports no damage in the Yuma area from Friday night's 5.4 magnitude earthquake that occurred 19 miles southeast of Mexicali, on a southern extension of the San Andreas fault. The Sun also noted:
Significant earthquakes, at least 7.0 in magnitude, shook Yuma in 1915, 1934 and 1940. The 1940 quake was centered near El Centro.
The Sun on May 20, 1940, reported that the quake "rocked buildings, crumpled bridges, ripped huge crevices in pavements and on valley farms, caused large sections of land to rise and other sections to drop a foot or two below the surface of surrounding land."
[Maps are from the US Geological
Survey]
Lightning and Thunder From Above During an Earthquake
ReplyDeleteThe missing link between sunspots, solar eruptions and other extreme solar activity and earthquakes
is the fact that the former cause electric discharges on the Sun which also ends up affecting the Earth's
ionosphere. To understand this missing link, the ionosphere, the earth's crust and the atmospheric air
between them, has to be viewed as a giant planet sized capacitor. Please take note that no analogy is
perfect and this one is no exception.
The ionosphere forms one "plate" of a capacitor, while the surface of the Earth forms the other. Changes
of voltage on one plate will induce movement of charge on the other plate. This movement of massive charge
may very well be one cause of instability in the Earth's upper crust and actually end up contributing to built up
stress in known earthquake prone areas following extreme solar activity by causing instability in the underlying
rock. Due to stress, the subsurface rock has become semi-conducting which leads to electrical breakdown.
There are literally millions upon millions of volts of opposite charge building up on these plates forming
an enormous gradient. Naturally, the dielectric material which, in this case is mostly air sandwiched
between the ionosphere plate and the stressed rock plate on the opposite side, breaks down and allows
charge to flow between them. Nature searches for equilibrium by relasing millions of volts in the form of
lightning discharges that travel from one plate to the other during the earthquake which, could also helps to
release stress in the rocks. This is stress that could have been built up for hundreds or thousands of years.
Hence the weird ground lighting artifacts and strange luminescence reported on occasions prior to an
earthquake event as well as the lightning discharges that can happen during an actual earthquake.
All of these predictive factors and others such as earthquke clouds can and should be scientifically measured
and compared, even if it's not pure tectonic plate theory.
Armchair Geophysicist