Happy Earth Day!

Save the Earth ~ It's the Only Planet with Chocolate! <3

Celebrating the Birthday of Naturalist John Muir

John Muir is often called a "Scottish-American" because he was born in Scotland. But he was really an all-American hero, striding across the landscape in search of natural treasures and using his skill as a writer to help preserve the wilderness. He was key to founding our National Park System, especially the great western parks of Yellowstone and Yosemite. He founded the Sierra Club which carries on his great work to this day.

Happy Birthday, John Muir!!! How fitting that his birth is one day before Earth Day.

"The Battle for Conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal warfare between right and wrong."
~ John Muir







From PBS

John Muir was one of the earliest advocates of the national park idea, and its most eloquent spokesman. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, he moved with his family to a Wisconsin farm in 1849. Muir's father, an itinerant Presbyterian minister, treated him harshly and insisted that he memorize the Bible. By age 11, he was able to recite three-quarters of the Old Testament by heart, and all of the New Testament.

Muir studied botany and geology at the University of Wisconsin and had a natural flair for inventions. In 1867, after recovering from a factory accident that left him temporarily blinded for several months, he cut short a promising career in industry to walk from Indiana to Florida, creating botanical sketches on his way. From there he sailed to California and then walked from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada – the "Range of Light" that would transform his life with his "unconditional surrender" to nature.

After working as a sheepherder in the high country for a season, Muir took a job in the Yosemite Valley in 1869, building a sawmill for James Mason Hutchings. In his free time, he roamed Yosemite, where he developed a scientific theory that the valley had been carved by glaciers. Muir felt a spiritual connection to nature; he believed that mankind is just one part of an interconnected natural world, not its master, and that God is revealed through nature.

. . . he traveled to Alaska's Glacier Bay and Washington's Mount Rainier. His writings brought national attention to two more places that would eventually become national parks.
Muir would also champion protection of the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. He was the public voice for setting aside the high country around Yosemite Valley as a national park in 1890, as well as for General Grant and Sequoia national parks.

. . . Muir was a founder and the first president of the Sierra Club; Muir Woods National Monument, a grove of redwoods north of San Francisco, is named in his honor.

Heartland Oil Spills are Wake-Up Call on XL Pipeline

source: Reuters

This Easter weekend, the town of Mayflower, Arkansas, a suburb of Little Rock, had thick crude oil flowing through the streets and into nearby Lake Conway. Most residents didn't realize an Exxon Pipeline ran through their neighborhood, but the evacuated residents won't soon forget it.

In Minnesota last Wednesday, a train derailed spilling 30,000 gallons of crude oil.

These ecological disasters are wake-up calls for people in the heartland to stop the XL Tar Sands Pipeline.

Sign These Petitions to Fight the Keystone Pipeline:

The Climate Reality Project - Just Say No

EcoWatch Pipeline Petition

Sign-On.Org Petition
Act350.Org ~ Sign and Leave Comments
National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Petition

Ozarks First News

It was not the holiday weekend Mayflower resident Ryan Senia envisioned.

"Basically if it doesn't fit in our car we don't have it right now," said Senia.

His once ideal home on South Starlite Road sits vacant as oil fumes permeate the air. His neighbor Joe Bradley said, "Well we could see oil running down the road like a river."

It's all because of a ruptured oil pipeline owned by Exxon Mobile.

"Supposed to be a 20 inch pipeline that runs from Illinois to Texas."

Bradley knew nothing of the pipeline.

"I had no idea and I'm the 4th or 5th house from it," Bradley says.

On Saturday, county, city and state officials, along with Exxon Mobile, met with residents.

"This could have been much worse," said Faulkner County Judge Allen Dodson. Dodson says close to 20 agencies responded within 90 minutes -- stopping the leak. He maintains they did so before any oil reached Lake Conway - a source of drinking water. Exxon and the EPA say they're monitoring air quality - but warn residents with asthma or other breathing disorders to see a doctor. And Resident Darren Hale says there are immediate concerns - like when can residents return home.

"The first one was two days and now I get here and find out two weeks, and finally after taking it to (a state representative), no one knows," said resident Darren Hale.

"We're just concerned about our property values and what Exxon is going to do for us,"

LiveScience

A train carrying crude oil from Canada into the United States derailed in Minnesota, spilling thousands of gallons of oil.

Fourteen tanker cars of a 94-car Canadian Pacific Railroad train went off the tracks near Parkers Prairie yesterday (March 27), according to the Associated Press. Three tanker cars were leaking, and one reportedly spilled most or all of its 26,000-gallon (98,000 liter) load of oil.

Cold weather may have helped minimize the damage from the oil spill, according to Dan Olson, a spokesman for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Reuters

A mile-long train hauling oil from Canada derailed, spilling 30,000 gallons of crude in western Minnesota on Wednesday, as debate rages over the environmental risks of transporting tar sands across the border.

The major spill, the first since the start of a boom in North American crude-by-rail transport three years ago, came when 14 cars on a 94-car Canadian Pacific train left the tracks about 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis near the town of Parkers Prairie, the Otter Tail Sheriff's Department said.

Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd, the country's second-largest railroad, said only one 26,000-gallon tank car had ruptured, adding it was a mixed freight train.

CP spokesman Ed Greenberg said he did not know if the crude was from Canada's tar sands or from conventional oil fields.

Thousands March to Protest Tar Sands Pipeline and Fracking

For the first time in 120 years the The Sierra Club is urging citizens of the U.S. and Canada to practice Civil Disobedience against the XL Pipeline, planned to carry toxic tar sands from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. This weekend, many protests took place across the country, and celebrities chained themselves to the gates of the White House leading to the arrest of Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club, Julian Bond, Darryl Hannah, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr..


Protests Across the Country

Thousands of people rallied in downtown San Francisco on Sunday to urge President Obama to reject construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, an action they said would prove he is committed to fighting global warming.
The demonstration across from the Ferry Building was held at the same time as similar events in cities including Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles. The main event in Washington, D.C., drew tens of thousands of supporters in what was billed as the largest climate change rally in U.S. history.

Activists Arrested in White House Protest Over XL Pipeline

Celebrities and environmental activists, including lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and civil rights leader Julian Bond, were arrested Wednesday after tying themselves to the White House gate to protest the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada.
Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune also was arrested – the first time in the group's 120-year history that a club leader was arrested in an act of civil disobedience. The club's board of directors approved the action as a sign of its opposition to the $7 billion pipeline, which would carry oil derived from tar sands in western Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.



Activist Bill McKibben, actress Daryl Hannah and NASA climate scientist James Hansen also were arrested, along with more than 40 others. They were charged with failure to disperse and obey lawful orders, and released on $100 bond each.

. . . Kennedy, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a New York-based environmental group, said he was being arrested "with regret," noting that he would prefer to contest the pipeline in court – and may eventually do so.
Kennedy, whose father was an attorney general and U.S. senator, called the pipeline "a boondoggle of monumental proportions" that will "ruin the lives of millions of people," through increased carbon pollution and likely spills.

Raging Bush Fires in Australia

Horrible wildfires are raging in Australia right now, endangering thousands and destroying homes and property. We can only imagine what is happening to the creatures who live in the Australian Bush as well. I hope their weather breaks soon and they get some cooling rain.

Time Magazine Slideshow

From Discover News:

The record-breaking temperatures have fueled brushfires across Australia. The L.A. Times has reported that swaths of the country face “some of the most dangerous conditions for fires on record.” As of today, 140 brushfires were reported in the state of New South Wales alone. And a NASA map of active fires detected by satellite sensors showed many more across the entire country.
 On Monday, the average high temperature across all of Australia was 104.6 degrees—a record, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. This continues a persistent trend. For the September through December period, the average Australian maximum temperature was the highest on record.

"Tornadoes of Fire" ~ A Grandfather Saves his Family

More Pics Here at Daily Kos

Powerful Message About Mountain Coal Removal from Kids of Appalachia

Powerful video of Appalachian children explaining the dangers of mountaintop coal removal to President Obama. Seriously - this is a must-see. It brought tears to my eyes. I was once a child just like them and felt just as strongly about pollution and mining. My wish would be that no more generations would ever have to watch mountains being destroyed for coal.

You can help:

Give a Donation Today to ILoveMountains.Org

Sign The Petition to tell President Obama "No More Excuses" ~ Stop Mountaintop Removal in the Appalachian Mountains

2012 ~ Apocalypse Postponed ...Again

One of the first posts I wrote on this blog back in March 2012 was about the National Geographic TV show "Doomsday Preppers." I had watched a couple of episodes and was amazed at the level of fear and paranoia in these hoarders of spam, rice and guns.

Prepping for the Doomsday Olympics

I wrote:

. . . these people longing for Armageddon don't laugh very much.They are deadly serious about everything and just want to show off their mad survival skills in the end-of-the-world Olympics. They've given up on life, music, and fun in favor of fear mongering.
. . . I couldn't help but feel a little disturbed that one family has enough food for the next 20 years while other people are eating out of dumpsters. But this philosophy isn't about helping the "other people" - the belief is that the weak ones are going to be destroyed by the next disaster while the self-sufficient strong survive. Doomsday Prepping begins at home and ends at home. Like their brethren in the Republican Party who don't believe in "sharing the wealth" or "that dang socialism," Doomsday Preppers live in the Narcissistic States of America.

At the time I was thinking about Paul Ryan's budget and the whole Ayn Rand philosophy as something that drives these clannish survivalists. But now that both the election and the Doomsdays - Dec. 12 or Dec. 21 - have come and gone with nothing unusual happening, these folks now seem like regular old Tea Party members to me.

Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, they fit right in with Todd Akin and the other anti-science people, the unskewed polls people who reject the math in front of their eyes and believe what they want to believe. Their love of ammunition hoarding is second only to that of Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, and if they aren't vapor-locked in their underground bunkers right now, they are cheering on the Congressman who refuse to do anything while a great country takes a dive over a man-made fiscal cliff.

Many now say it's a "New Age" instead of the end of the world. Where will the Doomsday Preppers fit into that scenario? They don't consider "peace and quiet" a plausible future, so I imagine that they really are doomed to be marginalized just like the anarchy-based Tea Party and the Gun-Loving GOP. The New Age will sail on without them, and good riddance.

Death of a Yellowstone Wolf

A wolf with a radio collar wandered out of Yellowstone National Park and sadly was immediately shot by a hunter. It wasn't just any wolf, but the Alpha Female of a famous wolf pack which had been studied by scientists for many years. This is just devastating for the ecosystem.

Who was the hunter? No one knows, but clearly he was just aching to kill a wolf. More's the pity. It amazes me that the same people who would sue for a million dollars if someone shot their domesticated horse or dog don't give a crap about an irreplaceable wolf who is a treasure to our country and really belongs to us all.

So many wolves have been murdered this year - yes, wantonly murdered - that Montana just this morning cancelled their wolf season in certain areas, from the Laramie News:

Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission chairman Bob Ream said commissioners were addressing only "the particular and unique situation" of collared wolves being shot.

"It seems to be kind of a compromise," Ream said. "Is it political? Yeah, wolves are political."

. . . Park officials say at least seven Yellowstone wolves _ including five wearing tracking collars _ were shot in recent weeks by hunters in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

Also shot were four collared wolves originally from the park but now living outside it. Three more shot in the vicinity of the park had unknown origins and were not wearing collars, park officials said.

Saturday marks the opening day of Montana's first wolf trapping season since the animals lost federal protections last year.

From the New York Times:

The wolf, known as 832F to researchers, was the alpha female of the park’s highly visible Lamar Canyon pack and had become so well known that some wildlife watchers referred to her as a “rock star.” The animal had been a tourist favorite for most of the past six years.

The wolf was fitted with a $4,000 collar with GPS tracking technology, which is being returned, said Daniel Stahler, a project director for Yellowstone’s wolf program. Based on data from the wolf’s collar, researchers knew that her pack rarely ventured outside the park, and then only for brief periods, Dr. Stahler said.

This year’s hunting season in the northern Rockies has been especially controversial because of the high numbers of popular wolves and wolves fitted with research collars that have been killed just outside Yellowstone in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

. . . “She is the most famous wolf in the world,” said Jimmy Jones, a wildlife photographer who lives in Los Angeles and whose portrait of 832F appears in the current issue of the magazine American Scientist.

Documenting the End of Arctic Ice on our Planet

It's imperative to pay attention to the disappearance of ancient ice all over the world. It's not an academic question of "when" this will happen anymore. Global Warming is real. It is happening right now and the effects on our planet will be devastating as temperatures and oceans rise.

I saw parts of the movie "Chasing Ice" on PBS a few months ago, and it is amazing. What they are documenting is historic, awe-inspiring and undeniable. And real.

Earth Vision Trust on Facebook
James Balog on Twitter

We are so thrilled to announce that Chasing Ice will be showing at the United Nations later this month.... fb.me/NT8XELeq

— James Balog,EVT (@earthvisiontrst) December 2, 2012

"A lot of people have told me it's time to stop but I find myself with a profound committment to continuing to tell this story. I feel like I'm in the middle of the biggest story I could possibly ever be in the middle of as an environmental photographer. This is a monumental historic change in the natural landscape, happening in our time."
~ James Balog, "Chasing Ice" Photographer, on PBS News







From the Extreme Ice Survey Website

In 2005, internationally acclaimed nature photojournalist James Balog traveled to Iceland to photograph glaciers for The New Yorker. This led to a 2006 National Geographic assignment to document changing glaciers in various parts of the world. In the course of shooting that story (which became the June 2007 cover story, “The Big Thaw”), Balog, who in addition to being a photographer is a mountaineer with a graduate degree in geomorphology, recognized that extraordinary amounts of ice were vanishing with shocking speed. Features that took centuries to develop were being destroyed in just a few years or even just a few weeks. These changes are the most visually dramatic and immediate manifestations of climate change on our planet today.

Founded in 2007 by James Balog, the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) is an innovative, long-term photography project that merges art and science to give a “visual voice” to the planet’s changing ecosystems. One aspect of EIS is an extensive portfolio of single-frame photos celebrating the beauty–the art and architecture–of ice. The other aspect of EIS is time-lapse photography; currently, 34 cameras are deployed at 16 glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, the Nepalese Himalaya, Alaska and the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. These cameras record changes in the glaciers every half hour, year-round during daylight, yielding approximately 8,000 frames per camera per year. We edit the time-lapse images into stunning videos that reveal how fast climate change is transforming large regions of the planet. Finally, EIS supplements the time-lapse record with episodic repeat photography in the French and Swiss Alps, Canada, Iceland, and Bolivia.

California Earthquake Swarm

There was a swarm of over 100 earthquakes in the past 24 hours in Southern California, some of them as high as magnitude 5.4, which is pretty strong. Tonight there was also a strong earthquake off the coast of El Salvador with a tsunami warning, but it's probably unrelated.

This is one of the largest swarms in the state since the 1970s. And overnight they are still rocking in the town of Brawley, California east of San Diego.

USGS Real Time Earthquake Map
USGS Recent Earthquake List for the World



Story from KTLA.com

The earthquakes began about 10 a.m. with a 3.8 magnitude temblor three miles northwest of Brawley, according to the USGS.

In the next 40 minutes, 11 additional quakes struck with a magnitude from 2.0 to 2.9.

The quakes picked up in intensity after noon, when a series of earthquakes were registered ranging from a magnitude of 2.0 to 5.4.

Residents in the desert communities near the California border to Mexico and Arizona reported feeling the quake, as well as residents as far as Monterey Park, Fullerton, Costa Mesa and San Diego.

A handful of buildings in downtown Brawley had minor damage after an earthquake swarm rattled the area Sunday, officials said. No injuries were reported.

Brawley is located about 16 miles from El Centro and 92 miles from Tijuana. In the last 10 days, there have been six earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby.

These folks sure are strangely calm - I would have been out the door and down the road after the first one! *eep*



From the San Jose Mercury News

The city of Brawley activated an Emergency Operations Center and many of its 25,000 residents were on edge into early evening, City Councilman Sam Couchman said.

"Residents were a little jumpy all day,"Couchman said."It's over 100 degrees, but many left their residences and stayed outside seeking any shade they could."

. . . Sunday's series of more than 200 earthquakes, which scientists refer to as a swarm, all emanated from a small stretch of fault line about three to four kilometers long near Brawley, about 16 miles north of El Centro, according to Lucy Jones a United States Geological Survey seismologist.

"It's characteristic of the seismology of the Imperial Valley," she said.

Climate Crisis

Lots of news about extreme weather conditions that are eventually going to affect all of us.

Governor Quinn of Illinois: We are All Tom Joad

Who can forget the profound desperation in Tom Joad’s heart as he and his family leave Oklahoma’s drought-stricken farms in John Steinbeck’s classic "The Grapes of Wrath?"


That dusty image — of flattened fields and beaten-down farmers — can be seen today in most counties in my state and others due to the persistent, unprecedented drought now suffocating America’s breadbasket.
The facts are stark.
In Illinois, we’ve experienced the sixth-driest growing season on record. Of 102 counties, 100 are disaster areas. The latest corn conditions show 74 percent of this year’s crop is “poor” or “very poor”, so the cost of corn products ranging from ethanol to tortillas will soar. Barren grazing pastures are forcing livestock farmers to purchase hay at inflated prices. The drought also affects fisheries, wildlife, water levels in navigable waterways and the entire food chain.

Reuters: UN Warns Extreme Weather Affects Food Supply

"It has not been properly recognised yet that we are dealing with a food system here. There is a whole chain that is also going to be affected by climate change," Professor Dr John Porter of the University of Copenhagen said.

"It is more than just the fact that there are droughts in the United States that will reduce yields," he said. Like the other experts, he said was giving personal opinions, not those of the U.N. panel.

After harvest, floods could wash away roads or bridges, for instance, between fields and factories processing the crop. Or warehouses storing food could be damaged by more powerful storms. Such factors were likely to hit poor nations hardest.

"There are reasons to expect more frequent (price) spikes, given that it will be more common to see conditions that are considered extreme," said David Lobell, an assistant professor at Stanford University in California.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Western Wildfires Threaten Homes

Not only are more wildfires flaring up in the West this year than last, but the nation's fires have gotten bigger, said Jennifer Smith, of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. As of Thursday, more than 43,000 wildfires had been reported in the U.S. this season, burning a total of nearly 6.4 million acres, or 10,000 square miles, the center said. The 10-year average for the period is 52,535 fires, but covering only 5 million acres, Smith said.

    Guardian UK: Arctic Sea Ice Disappearing

Using instruments on earlier satellites, scientists could see that the area covered by summer sea ice in the Arctic has been dwindling rapidly. But the new measurements indicate that this ice has been thinning dramatically at the same time. For example, in regions north of Canada and Greenland, where ice thickness regularly stayed at around five to six metres in summer a decade ago, levels have dropped to one to three metres. "Preliminary analysis of our data indicates that the rate of loss of sea ice volume in summer in the Arctic may be far larger than we had previously suspected," said Dr Seymour Laxon, of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London (UCL), where CryoSat-2 data is being analysed.

"Very soon we may experience the iconic moment when, one day in the summer, we look at satellite images and see no sea ice coverage in the Arctic, just open water." The consequences of losing the Arctic's ice coverage, even for only part of the year, could be profound. Without the cap's white brilliance to reflect sunlight back into space, the region will heat up even more than at present. As a result, ocean temperatures will rise and methane deposits on the ocean floor could melt, evaporate and bubble into the atmosphere. Scientists have recently reported evidence that methane plumes are now appearing in many areas. Methane is a particularly powerful greenhouse gas and rising levels of it in the atmosphere are only likely to accelerate global warming.

Earthquakes and Fracking

Rachel Maddow did an excellent spot about the connections between natural gas "fracking"  - forcing wastewater from drilling into deep underground wells - and earthquakes in Texas where historically few have occurred.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Oops - Someone Stole Our 800-Year-Old Tree

The Lorax would be infuriated! I know I am! How the heck did someone manage to "steal" a giant red cedar tree from a Canadian Provincial Park on Vancouver Island? It was easy, say both environmental groups as well as park rangers - someone just drove into a parking lot, chopped it down partially, let the rangers finish it, then came back and dragged the rest of it away. The B.C. government should look into these lame excuses, which just don't "cut it" for me. According to the video below, the old-growth forest in Carmanah-Walbran Provincial Park has been protected since 1988. So someone is obviously looking the other way while loggers ravage these giant trees, and there's absolutely no excuse that can justify this .


Story from Huff Post

Torrance Coste of the Wilderness Committee said consistent budget cuts over the last decade mean park rangers rarely monitor remote sites such as the Carmanah-Walbran Provincial Park, from where the cedar was chopped.

"Whoever's doing this knows that no one's going to have eyes on this park for months at a time so it's exceptionally easy to do what they've done," Coste said Thursday.

Don Closson, who supervises the Cowichan area for B.C. Parks, said Parks officials at the site a year ago noticed that about 80 per cent of the tree had been cut through and that a professional faller was hired to bring it down because it posed a safety hazard.

"On our return this year we noticed that somebody had gone in and cut up a large portion of the butt and dragged portions of it into the parking lot," he said.

Blocks of red cedar are valuable as a roofing product, Closson said, adding officials have little information in the case. "We have no eyewitnesses or licence plates at this time."

Happy Place Diversion ~ Fiery Gizzard Trail

Inspiring look at Middle Tennessee's South Cumberland Plateau and Fiery Gizzard Trail. This is a true ecological success story.

Good News for American Chestnut Trees

The American Chestnut Tree once provided abundant food for humans and wildlife, as well as strong and long-lasting lumber. But then a blight nearly wiped out the species by the 1920s. Occasionally botanists would find a sprout in the forest old enough to bear fruit, which would inevitably succomb and die. Yet the resiliancy of the species gave hope to scientists that somehow this majestic tree would not go extinct.

And in 2006, a miracle happened. A stand of resistant trees was discovered in Albany, Georgia. Then in 2009, a 74 foot giant was found in Talledaga National Forest in Alabama. These are like the ivory-billed woodpeckers of the tree world, existing where they were supposedly wiped out long ago.

Scientists have been trying to cross the American Chestnut with the resistant Chinese Chestnut with limited success. But yesterday it was announced that genetic engineering may be the answer:

This month, researchers from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, N.Y., are planning to plant 10 chestnut trees with a tweaked gene that they believe will help the trees stave off the pathogen that brought their ruin.
William Powell, a plant biotechnology expert at ESF, and his colleague Charles Maynard, have incorporated a gene into the test trees that they derived from a breed of wheat. The gene has been shown to increase resistance in hybrid poplar trees to fungal pathogens.
. . . The hybrid chestnut trees are slated to be planted at a test site in the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx on April 18. The location is significant. "That's a stone's throw — literally across the street — from where the blight was discovered in 1904," Maynard said in a statement.

Awesome news, and we hope these trees will be around for the next 100 years!

You can help the effort to save this amazing tree with a donation to the American Chestnut Foundation.

Science Nerd ~ Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

I'm an nerdish earthquake watcher and I probably check the USGS List several times a day. I think it helps in these days of  "Apocalypse Doomsday" prophecies to learn what is normal geological activity for the earth and what is not.
 USGS Earthquakes in the World ~ Past Seven Days
 USGS Nifty New Real-Time Shake Map
USGS General Information and Lists State by State

This week there have been at least four big earthquakes in two days, as well as myriad large aftershocks, which caused  LiveScience to wonder if these are somehow connected:

It's possible, geophysicists say, that quakes off the coast of Oregon, Michoacan, Mexico, and in the Gulf of California ranging from magnitudes 5.9 to 6.9 on the Richter Scale had something to do with the large earthquake that struck near Indonesia. But the west coast quakes were fairly standard for their location. "The Earth is in constant motion," said Aaron Velasco, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, El Paso. "I wouldn't necessarily say it's unusual, but we will definitely be looking at these earthquakes to see if there's any link between them."

But why didn't the big 8.6 quake in Indonesia this week cause a huge Tsunami like the one back in 2004 that killed so many people and destroyed villages all around the Indian Ocean? Here we go, via The Conversation:

It was a “strike-slip earthquake”, which results in the ground moving with a more side-to-side motion, rather than an up-and-down motion. The side-to-side motion means there isn’t much up-and-down movement of the sea floor, so the water isn’t disturbed much. As a result, large tsunamis usually don’t form from slip-strike earthquakes.

Most people don't realize how many strong earthquakes there are in the world on any given day. The Pacific "Ring of Fire" is the main area, and nearly every day you'll see new quakes 5.0 and above : Honshu, Japan, where three major geological plates are still sliding under the ocean after the Tsunami disaster last year; Vanuatu and the Mollucca Sea north of Australia; Offshore Chile, which has been rumbling since 2010; Mexico, which has live volcanoes and where there's a "swarm" happening around Oaxaca as well as the Gulf of California right now; and Alaska, which shakes all the time but has limited effect on humans due to the small population of the state. California is the opposite with people packed into cities large and small, but  residents laugh off the danger and try to ignore fears about "The Big One." Then there are occasional bursts of activity around the Greek Isles, Italy, Africa, Greenland, Puerto Rico, and even the Virgin Islands due to Volcanoes.

And this is the fun part of watching the earthquake list ~ once you are familiar with the "normal" quake areas, you can easily spot the oddities. The Virginia quake last year that shifted the Washington Monument was fascinating and historical, being felt as far away as New Jersey. The strange quakes in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Ohio that are possibly caused by gas-pipe "fracking" are unprecedented, and now those areas are hot-spots where there didn't used to be any quakes. But really earthquakes can happen in any state, so keep an eye on your shake map and be sure to report one if you feel it via the USGS interactive website!
Earthquake Map For the U.S. Heartland