Earth Effect – Europe Starting to Dive Under Africa

On 11^th March’11, Japan was hit by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake officially named the Great East Japan Earthquake. The earthquake triggered extremely destructive tsunami waves of up to 38 meters which are reported to enter 10kms inland in some cases.

In addition to loss of life and destruction of infrastructure, the tsunami caused a number of nuclear accidents, of which by far the most serious was an on-going level 7 event and 20 km evacuation zone around the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. The overall cost could exceed $300 billion, making it the most expensive natural disaster on record. In one of my previous articles, I asked this question – Is World coming to an end???(End of the World 2012). Well maybe Scientists have found the reason for Japan Earthquake and the Tsunami which hit their coast in March.

To get into a bit Technicality, lets see what our Mother Earth is made of and What are Tectonic Plates???

The mechanically rigid outer layer of the Earth, the lithosphere, is broken into pieces called tectonic plates. These plates are rigid segments that move in relation to one another at one of three types of plate boundaries: Convergent boundaries, at which two plates come together, Divergent boundaries, at which two plates are pulled apart, and Transform boundaries, in which two plates slide past one another laterally. Earthquakes, volcanic activity, mountain-building, and oceanic trench formation can occur along these plate boundaries.

And thus we had Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. But where did these plates moved or came together. Here is a overlook into this:

Experts says Europe may be starting to dive under Africa, creating a new subduction zone and potentially increasing the earthquake risk in the western Mediterranean Sea.

Subduction zones form where tectonic plates collide, with one plate diving beneath the other and into Earth’s mantle. Sometimes these collisions are gradual, but often they occur in big lurches that can trigger quakes.

Because subduction zones are generally on seabeds, earthquakes in these zones can set off tsunamis, like the killer wave that devastated Japan last month.

For millions of years the African plate, which contains part of the Mediterranean seabed, has been moving northward toward the Eurasian Plate at a rate of about an inch every 2.5 years.

Now studies of recent earthquakes in the region indicate that a new subduction zone may be forming where the plates are colliding along the coasts of Algeria and northern Sicily.

For more details on this topic click here for more insight.

Earthquake risks are increasing in the Mediterranean and we don’t know how destructive they will be. Again this fails to answer my question – Is World coming to an end??? Is Mother Nature finally reacting to the cruelty and brutality done by our human race????? Well time will tell, 2012 is not far away now.

Source: http://www.wikipedia.org/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com