The recent 7.0 Mw earthquake in Haiti on 12 January 2010 was followed by the 8.8 Mw event on 7 February 2010 in Chile (the seventh largest in recorded history). In turn, this was followed by a 5.9 Mw quake in Turkey on 8 March 2010. Should we worry about the San Andreas Fault?

The answer is a resounding "Yes!" We absolutely need to prepare ourselves for a worst-case scenario. Whenever there's a major earthquake, it sets the Earth ringing like a bell, and I personally would say that it's more than likely that one earthquake can trigger others.

The world is a lot more interlinked than we know, especially in geologic terms. For example, in addition to "Old Faithful," there's a whole bunch of periodic geysers in Yellowstone Park. Some time ago, a bunch of them changed their rates – prior to that they had been as regular as clockwork.

I cannot remember the exact details, but let’s say that one of them "gushed" once every 2 hours and 23 minutes ... and this suddenly changed to 1 hour 48 minutes. Similarly others in the group changed their frequency, but no one knew why... until someone realized that the geysers had changed their cycles within an hour of an earthquake occurring thousands of miles away in Alaska – and that earthquake had no known fault links to the Yellowstone area

Apparently the earthquake in Chile was so large that it moved the entire city of Concepcion 10 feet to the west. In fact, it was so large that it caused a change to the Earth's axis to and shortened the length of the day by a small amount (Click Here to see an article about this).

Do you realize how many earthquakes are occurring every day? I had no idea until I blundered into this United States Geological Survey (USGS) website. Good Grief – in fact there were a couple of reasonably "chunky" earthquakes in California just a few hours ago as I pen these words.

The reason I'm waffling on about this is that I just posted a review on the book A Crack in the Edge of the World – America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester (Click Here to see this review). As this book explains, scientists and geologists agree that there's going to be another monster seismic event on the San Andreas Fault – it's not a case of "if" – it's a question of "when".

Although we (in America) tend to think of the great quake of 1906 as being an isolated incident, it seems that there were a number of large earthquakes around the world in the preceding year. We can only hope and pray that the San Andreas does not let loose in our lifetimes ... but in 1990, the USGS reported that there is a 67% chance that one or more quakes of magnitude 7 or larger will occur in the San Francisco Bay area before the year 2020...

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