Some researchers suggest that there may be a link between large earthquakes world-wide.
Other point out that there is no connection and the earthquakes do not trigger each other.
The cluster could just as well be the result of random chance, scientist say.
The past decade has been plagued with what seems to be a cluster of large earthquakes, with massive quakes striking Sumatra, Chile, Haiti and Japan since 2004.
Each of the devastating quakes in the 2000s drew huge media coverage and required extensive rebuilding and economic restoration.
The intense interest in the earthquakes has led some to wonder if we are living in the middle of an "age of great quakes," similar to a global cluster of quakes
in the 1960s.
It's important to know whether these clusters occur because big earthquakes trigger others across the world, Parsons and Geist of the US Geological Survey say,
in order to predict whether more severely destructive quakes might be on the way.
To determine if the quake clusters in the 1960s and 2000s could be attributed to random chance, the researchers looked at the timing between the world's
largest earthquakes--magnitude 8.3 and above--at one-year intervals during the past 100 years.
They compared simulated lists of large quakes and the list of real quakes during this time with the between-quake intervals expected from a random process.
The intervals between the real-life large quakes are similar to what would be expected from a random process, they found. In other words, the global hazard of
large earthquakes is constant in time. Except in the case of local aftershocks, the probability of a new large quake occurring isn't related to past global quakes.
Aerial photo of the San Andreas Fault in the Carrizo Plain, northwest of Los Angeles
Image credit: Leohotens
This could be disappointing news for researchers who thought global communication between quakes might offer a way to predict the most severe seismic activity.
But there also may be some good news after a decade of destruction.
If global great earthquakes are occurring at random, the authors say, then a specific number of quakes that cluster together within a short
time is unlikely to be repeated in a similar way over a 100-year span.
In addition, if quakes were communicating at global distances, after a big quake, the entire planet would essentially be an aftershock zone.
MessageToEagle.com based on information provided by Seismological Society of America
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A while back scientists expressed that
Does a supernatural seismic activity threaten our planet?
Apparently, something unknown has triggered a "terrible and global domino", according to scientists who observe recent earthquake reports.
Seismologists recognize that what happens to the seismic activity goes beyond the level generally considered as normal.
Nothing can strike fear in the hearts of people quite like natural disasters. Among them are earthquakes, happening much more often recently.
Acccording to recent survey, a huge active fault was found under Mount Fuji, standing at 3,776 meters (12,385 feet) above sea level.
The fault, about 30 kilometers long, extends from just beneath the surface to a depth of about 5 km.
Mount Fuji, the highest and the nearly perfectly shaped peak in Japan, has been worshipped as a sacred mountain.
One day in the fall of 2011, Neil Sheeley, a solar scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., did what he always does –
look through the daily images of the sun from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
But on this day he saw something he'd never noticed before: a pattern of cells with bright centers and dark boundaries occurring in the sun's atmosphere, the corona...
The only places where mid-ocean ridges appear above sea level are Ethiopia and Iceland.
Two new studies into the so-called “plumbing systems” that lie under volcanoes could bring scientists closer to predicting large
eruptions and reveal new information about where magma is stored and how it moves through the geological plumbing network.
Enormous volcanic eruptions with potential to end civilizations may have surprisingly short fuses, researchers have discovered.
These eruptions are known as super-eruptions because they are more than 100 times the size of ordinary volcanic eruptions like Mount St. Helens.
Volcanoes are unpredictable, deadly and fascinating.
Scientists are still unable to determine what is causing the "warming hole" over United States.
Some have suggested natural variations in sea surface temperatures could be responsible, but recent studies indicate the hole has been created due to air pollution.
Temperatures are increasing on global scale, but in the central and eastern United States warming has not kept pace
with other parts of the world over much of the last century.