On the 8th of October a devastating earthquake rating 7.6 on the Richter scale struck northern Pakistan. Whole cities in some of Pakistan's remoted and poorest regions were leveled, with a death toll expected to exceed 50,000 individuals...
It’s easy to count bodies. The subtle morbidity so profound in a simple one line statistic masks the human expense of natures fury. Each individual alive has interpretation of the world. With each death, a world dies.
That said, its a shame that wherever you see, someone has to step forward with his own 'negative' interpretation of the events in addition to the myriad of interpretations already sprouting up. However I must say, the most ridiculous and abysmally ignorant one of them all is the general interpretation of the event as "Qahar-e-Illahi" or "The (Punishment) Destruction by God".
Kashmiri's are some of the more honest and straightforward individuals on earth. They are more concerned with living a simple and easy life rather than raving over a certain sword in some multiplayer game or getting worked up over a couple of scratches on their new Ipod Nano. They are deeply religious; however their faith is more inclined towards general piety and committed trust in God rather than the fanaticism exhibited by politicized Islam.
Kashmir is not Sodom or Gomorrah. These people are innocent. I might accept the religious viewpoint of God testing these individuals, but I really can’t believe this to be a 'warning' to the Ummah for their 'crimes'. What crimes?
I recently came across this blog, stressing the fact that ‘Islamabad is not in an earthquake prone zone’ and this is a ‘wake up call' for the Muslim world....lol. (Wake up call?)
It could be a 'wake up call' for the Pakistani government to invest in some tangible disaster management...but apart from that I am really at loss to find any fault in these innocent individuals who perished in the quake.
Millions of years ago the world was one gigantic land mass called Pangea, which later split and one of these was called Gondwanaland. Then, the Indian plate separated from Gondwanaland and struck the Eurasian plate. This is how the Himalaya’s were formed. Ever wonder why the ride gets bumpier on the way to Islamabad? The Indian plate is moving northwards in to the Eurasian plate at a rate of roughly 2-4cm per year. The point of contact between separate tectonic plates is called a ‘fault'. (Smaller faults also exist, any point of movement with the Earths crust can be called a ‘fault’).
Tectonic plate movement along faults causes earthquakes. The world is constantly moving beneath our feet. At the point of plate collision, this movement may create pressure. When this pressure isn’t ‘released’ by lesser quakes, it sometimes builds up over time and a large section of one plate may crumble or move at a catastrophic pace, causing a major earthquake. This movement may ‘only’ be a few feet, but the results can be devastating. The December 2004 Indian Ocean quake, which taught the word ‘tsunami’ to the mainstream Star Plus soap watching community, was attributed to a plate movement of roughly 50 feet.
Unfortunately, for us, Pakistan is on the western edge of the Indian plate and lies flatly on two faults. This is one of the most earthquake prone areas in the world. The larger the span of time between two earthquakes, the more intense the subsequent one is presumed to be. Time is relative here, a large quake in the Kashmir area was ‘due’ for nearly a century, but one 100 years really isn’t a significant span of time in the Earth’s 4.6 billion year history. (One billion = 1000 million = 1,000,000 x 1,000)
So much for earthquakes not being ‘common’ near Islamabad.
Cataclysmic events are relative. How do you measure one’s size? Scientific reading? Death toll? Financial loss?
About 65-64 million years ago some meteors struck the earth, one of these landed near the Yucatan Peninsula, one in the middle of what is present day Ukraine, one in the North Sea and one in the Indian Ocean west of India. These impact events are unanimously believed to have suddenly killed off the dinosaurs before evolution could. Just one of these meteors is enough to wipe out all civilized life on Earth. The scary bit is, these meteors were roughly 5-10km in diameter. What would happen if something bigger happened our way?
Life goes on…?
It’s easy to count bodies. The subtle morbidity so profound in a simple one line statistic masks the human expense of natures fury. Each individual alive has interpretation of the world. With each death, a world dies.
That said, its a shame that wherever you see, someone has to step forward with his own 'negative' interpretation of the events in addition to the myriad of interpretations already sprouting up. However I must say, the most ridiculous and abysmally ignorant one of them all is the general interpretation of the event as "Qahar-e-Illahi" or "The (Punishment) Destruction by God".
Kashmiri's are some of the more honest and straightforward individuals on earth. They are more concerned with living a simple and easy life rather than raving over a certain sword in some multiplayer game or getting worked up over a couple of scratches on their new Ipod Nano. They are deeply religious; however their faith is more inclined towards general piety and committed trust in God rather than the fanaticism exhibited by politicized Islam.
Kashmir is not Sodom or Gomorrah. These people are innocent. I might accept the religious viewpoint of God testing these individuals, but I really can’t believe this to be a 'warning' to the Ummah for their 'crimes'. What crimes?
I recently came across this blog, stressing the fact that ‘Islamabad is not in an earthquake prone zone’ and this is a ‘wake up call' for the Muslim world....lol. (Wake up call?)
It could be a 'wake up call' for the Pakistani government to invest in some tangible disaster management...but apart from that I am really at loss to find any fault in these innocent individuals who perished in the quake.
Millions of years ago the world was one gigantic land mass called Pangea, which later split and one of these was called Gondwanaland. Then, the Indian plate separated from Gondwanaland and struck the Eurasian plate. This is how the Himalaya’s were formed. Ever wonder why the ride gets bumpier on the way to Islamabad? The Indian plate is moving northwards in to the Eurasian plate at a rate of roughly 2-4cm per year. The point of contact between separate tectonic plates is called a ‘fault'. (Smaller faults also exist, any point of movement with the Earths crust can be called a ‘fault’).
Tectonic plate movement along faults causes earthquakes. The world is constantly moving beneath our feet. At the point of plate collision, this movement may create pressure. When this pressure isn’t ‘released’ by lesser quakes, it sometimes builds up over time and a large section of one plate may crumble or move at a catastrophic pace, causing a major earthquake. This movement may ‘only’ be a few feet, but the results can be devastating. The December 2004 Indian Ocean quake, which taught the word ‘tsunami’ to the mainstream Star Plus soap watching community, was attributed to a plate movement of roughly 50 feet.
Unfortunately, for us, Pakistan is on the western edge of the Indian plate and lies flatly on two faults. This is one of the most earthquake prone areas in the world. The larger the span of time between two earthquakes, the more intense the subsequent one is presumed to be. Time is relative here, a large quake in the Kashmir area was ‘due’ for nearly a century, but one 100 years really isn’t a significant span of time in the Earth’s 4.6 billion year history. (One billion = 1000 million = 1,000,000 x 1,000)
So much for earthquakes not being ‘common’ near Islamabad.
Cataclysmic events are relative. How do you measure one’s size? Scientific reading? Death toll? Financial loss?
About 65-64 million years ago some meteors struck the earth, one of these landed near the Yucatan Peninsula, one in the middle of what is present day Ukraine, one in the North Sea and one in the Indian Ocean west of India. These impact events are unanimously believed to have suddenly killed off the dinosaurs before evolution could. Just one of these meteors is enough to wipe out all civilized life on Earth. The scary bit is, these meteors were roughly 5-10km in diameter. What would happen if something bigger happened our way?
Life goes on…?
posted by Nihilist at 7:16 PM
4 Comments:
Spam is annoying.
What would u say abt the constant quakes happening in isloo now?
and yes spam sucks
Those smaller quakes are more of seismic 'reverbrations' aka 'aftershocks' which can be analogized to sonic echos. The Richter scale is algorithmic, each step represents 32x the energy of the previous step. An r7 quake releases 32x the energy of r6 and 32x32x the energy of r5. You could say that the ~r5.6 aftershocks were roughly 1000 times weaker than the original r7.6 temblor.
Normal seismic convention would assume that another big +7 one wont happen for a long time along the same fault line, but you never know. I just hope to God I dont see another one like that, at least in my lifetime.
oO
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