Having NO idea whether this is Potential Science or Actual Buncombe (or Both simultaneously, that QWF being unPopped as yet), I submit the following for consideration by the IrishtrojanSphere, if not by the EarthMother. :)

Perhaps Brendan “Earthquake Magoon” Loy, former USC student of Tremblorology, will give out with an analytical Tremor or two about this Grand Unification theory of Geology. :} (For the benefit of the ridiculously young around here, Earthquake Magoon is a character from Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip. :) Hat Tip: CT New Age Republican Bob Lutts. :)

By SIMON WINCHESTER

December 29, 2004

…Given these cascades of disasters past and present, one can only wonder: might there be some kind of butterfly effect, latent and deadly, lying out in the seismic world? There is of course no hard scientific truth - no firm certainty that a rupture on a tectonic boundary in the western Pacific (in Honshu, say) can lead directly to a break in a boundary in the eastern Pacific (in Parkfield), or another in the eastern Indian ocean (off Sumatra, say). But anecdotally, as this year has so tragically shown, there is evidence aplenty.

Plate tectonics as a science is less than 40 years old. It is possible that common sense suggests what science has yet to confirm: that the movement among the world’s tectonic plates may be one part of enormous dynamic system, with effects of one plate’s shifting more likely than not to spread far, far away, quite possibly clear across the surface of the globe.

In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system - the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.

Mr. Lovelock’s notion, which he named after the earth goddess of the Ancient Greeks, makes much of the delicacy of the balance that mankind’s environmental carelessness increasingly threatens. But his theory also acknowledges the somber necessity of natural happenings, many of which seem in human terms so tragically unjust, as part of a vast system of checks and balances. The events that this week destroyed the shores of the Indian Ocean, and which leveled the city of Bam a year ago, were of unmitigated horror: but they may also serve some deeper planetary purpose, one quite hidden to our own beliefs…

Simon Winchester is the author of “Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883.”

Read the whole holistic thing, the first portion of which recounts (apparent) “cascades of disasters past and present”.