Long Earthquakes; Short Wilma

by Dr Deep Gupta

After a heady Katrina-a-Rita induced rise, hurricanes have plateaued and can only go down from their hyper-inflated levels; expect Wilma to further underwhelm its hype. Earthquakes are the steady unsexy FCF generating natural disaster, the kind that the Berkshire Hathaway of Disasters would look to acquire opportunistically. They kill more people. They do more damage. They release more energy (“A Richter 12 [earthquake) would be the equivalent of a fault half way to the center of the earth or about the same amount of energy as the Earth receives from the sun in a day”). They can cause derivative disasters such as mudslides, rockfalls, tsunamis (last winter a 9.0 earthquake iniated the tsunami) and super volcanoes.

Super Volcanoes? (from here)

Immediately before the eruption, there would be large earthquakes in the Yellowstone region. The ground would swell further with most of Yellowstone being uplifted. One earthquake would finally break the layer of rock that holds the magma in – and all the pressure the Earth can build up in 640,000 years would be unleashed in a cataclysmic event.

Magma would be flung 50 kilometres into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometres virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. Volcanic ash would coat places as far away as Iowa and the Gulf of Mexico. One thousand cubic kilometres of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches thick. The explosion would have a force 2,500 times that of Mount St. Helens. It would be the loudest noise heard by man for 75,000 years, the time of the last super volcano eruption. Within minutes of the eruption tens of thousands would be dead.

Let’s see the “wind” try and do that.

Recommendation: Long earthquakes; Donate money to the forgotten natural disaster in Pakistan.


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