MSNBC is reporting two earthquakes have just occurred in southeastern Spain.
For anybody who cares, the town of Lorca is in the province of Murcia, not the municipality :smack:
Just two weeks ago I had someone arguing with me that “we never get any earthquakes here, you know” “actually we get earthquakes all the time” “but they’re never serious” “tell that to Lisbon and Santander, dude”… repeat after me: Thee Shall Not Go Neener-neener At Mother Nature.
Well, this is a little uncanny.
Specially considering that predicting earthquakes in Italy is like predicting water in the Aegean. There’s thousands every day, most of them are too small to notice but still, if all Bendandi said was “there will be an earthquake on January 2nd of next year”, that doesn’t require aid from the Holy Ghost.
I have seen reports of 7-10 people are dead as a result of the quakes. These quakes have been relatively minor (4.5, 5.4 on Richter Scale).
Speculation, Some really old buildings?
Specially considering that there weren’t any earthquakes in the region with casualties that made the international news yesterday. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. … I trust you get the point.
And he didn’t say, “There will be an earthquake on January 2nd of next year.” He allegedly said, more than 30 years ago, that there would be an earthquake that would destroy Rome on May 11, 2011. I’ll admit that the Roman part was a miss though.
That’s, among other things, because previous earthquakes of similar intensity (some of which did cause buildings to fall down, some of which did have people die because of the walls that fell down) simply did not make the international news. Such as the one which caused a wall to fall down onto my parent’s terrace (thankfully at night), or the one which caused the wall surrounding the building next to my SiL’s inherited-from-her-grandfather’s house to, guess what, fall down. But again at night, again it didn’t make the news beyond the regional level.
Even the MSNBC report says that earthquakes of that intensity are not uncommon in Murcia; what’s uncommon is that this time people got hurt and that apparently it was a slow news day in the US.
My family (my mother and my sister, along with her husband and kids) live in Albacete, where the earthquakes were felt rather strongly. Nothing happened there, fortunately.
But, indeed, earthquakes are NOT rare in Southern and Southeastern Spain.
The supposed “prediction” of this Bendandi guy… First of all, there is no record of him actually making that kind of prediction. And if he was a minimally serious sismologist, he would NEVER have made that kind of prediction – earthquakes cannot be predicted with any level of accuracy, much less so many years in advance.
Second, predicting earthquakes anywhere in the Mediterranean basin is like shooting fish in a barrel. The Mediterranean basin is seismically unstable. An earthquake might have happened anywhere in the Mediterranean basin today, and it might have been taken as “reasonably close” to Rome.
Third, let’s be real here – According to the US Geological Service, every year, on average, there are more than 1300 earthquakes between the magnitudes of 5 and 5.9. That translates to roughly between 3 and 4 earthquakes of that magnitude each and every day, somewhere in the world (source).
Is it so surprising that an earthquake of 5.2 magnitude happened to strike on May 11 roughly 2000 km away from Rome?
As Nava said, predicting that some earthquake will happen in the Mediterranean area is like predicting that there is water in the sea. The “prediction” was, simply, lucky in that a middling earthquake struck in the “general area” on that day.
Well, which is it? You can either say “earthquakes cannot be predicted with any level of accuracy years in advance” (and yet, here it is, May 11, 2011, and there was a big old earthquake in Mediterrean basin, as was kind of predicted). Or it’s a cakewalk, they happen everyday, saying there will be an earthquake in the Mediterrean basin is like saying the sun will rise in the east. But you can’t say both!
By the way, if it is the latter, would you mind taking a stab at naming the next day an earthquake with minimal casualities or Rome-destroying power (same diff) in the Mediterrean basin will occur?
You didn’t read my third point, right? With 1300+ earthquakes between the magnitudes of 5 and 5.9 happening every year (and they tend to be concentrated in the seismically active areas of the world, of course) --that is, with between 3 and 4 earthquakes of that magnitude happening every single day somewhere in the world (again, concentrating in the seismically active areas)… It is NOT a great stretch of the imagination to imagine that, just by chance, a 5.2 earthquake happened in the seismically active Mediterranean basin today, May 11, 2011.
By saying “predicting earthquakes in the Mediterranean basin is like shooting fish in a barrel” I mean that it is not a big deal to say that there will be earthquakes in the area. Giving a precise date is a gamble… But that’s all it is. Earthquakes WILL happen in the Mediterranean. You cannot say when and where with any degree of certainty, unless you are lucky with your gamble.
The prediction got lucky by having a 5.2 earthquake in the general area on the day that supposedly was announced. Confirmation bias and all that.
So, to sum up: This was a coincidence, and not a particularly outlandish one.
Glad to know your people’s all right, I remembered you were from that area and therefore likely to have familyand friends there but it wasn’t any decent hour to be sending emails…