Apr 25 2008
Nature doing weird things
We’ve been having a peculiar spasm of bizarre natural events lately, and I thought it would be interesting to recount just a few of them.
– We have the ongoing problem of the Mississippi River swelling to uncomfortable levels due to the rain and snowfall earlier this month.
– There was an unprecedented swarm of earthquakes off the coast of Oregon. The strange location of the earthquakes prompted one geologist, Robert Dziak, to note:
“In the 17 years we’ve been monitoring the ocean through hydrophone recordings, we’ve never seen a swarm of earthquakes in an area such as this,” Dziak said. “We’re not certain what it means. But we hope to have a ship divert to the site and take some water samples that may help us learn more.”
– Last week, Illinois was treated to a wake up call. A 5.2 earthquake rocked St. Louis and southern Illinois.
– Wild fires are raging in New Mexico around Mountainaire earlier this week. It’s still going on last I checked.
– Today, a 4.4 earthquake struck Reno.
With the exception of the ongoing flood and potential flood situation along the Mississippi, all these other events have happened around 10 days of each other. This is pretty astonishing when you stop and think about it. The sheer density of events is incredible.
In very short order, I wonder if the human psyche can cope with the pace of events. I’m willing to venture a guess that a sizable portion of the people in the United States and the world have already gone mad from the rate of change in our world.
And if you have doubts on this, imagine yourself as a Chinese peasant around thirty-five years old. Roughly twenty-five years ago, when you were ten, your nation was a predominately agrarian society. Now, it’s become a high-tech industrial society. Everything you’ve known in your whole life keeps changing every few years.
To bring the point on home, there are certain towns out in Arizona that only just five or six years ago only housed five hundred to one thousand people. Now, many of those small towns are suddenly called cities as the thousands poured in from outside the state from California and the Northeast. I know of one such town that was strangely dubbed the fastest growing city in America. From 500 to the expected 350,000 by 2025.
Even my hometown, Houston, Texas, has changed radically in the five years since I left. Roughly 800,000 people have poured into the city from California and New Orleans and the Northeast (Ain’t it funny how people are doing a mass exodus from California? The problem is, the newcomers usually maintain their adherence to the same mentality that created the dysfunctions of California.) On my visits home, I almost feel alien there.
I know this was a total segue from my initial topic of natural phenomenon but it felt relevant at the time.