Marc G. Fournier wrote:
Is there a higher then normal amount of earthquakes happening recently? haiti, japan just had one for 6.9, there was apparently one in illinos a few weeks back, one on the Russia/China/N.Korean border and now Chile?
Random events come in bunches - something I always stop to remind myself of whenever there is a sudden bunch of quakes, celebrity deaths, plane crashes, etc. Especially with relatively unusual events like great-quakes and plane crashes, it can be tough to see if there is any signal in the noise - a job I have to leave to experienced statisticians.
The world averages one "great" (8+) earthquake/year which, of course, means some years like 2008 have none but 2007 had four. 7-7.9 like Haiti or our own Loma Prieta quake are far more common averaging ~17/year.
Haiti is a catastrophe not because the quake was of unusual size (it barely made it into the 7-7.9 category and released less that 1/15 the energy of the Chile quake) but because the hypocenter was both shallow and fairly close to Port-au-Prince combined with terrible construction standards and virtually non-existent emergency-response capabilities in Haiti.
Some general quake stats/facts are here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/year/eqstats.php Cheers, Steve -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
