Rumbling and Grumbling and All Fall Down

Anyone else feel like the planet has been a bit more active than usual lately? Like the Earth's insides are rumbling, or the planet is grumbling about something... and we're all falling down because of it! 

from Wikipedia's 2010 Earthquakes page

2010 was a doozie between the really serious earthquakes in Haiti (7.0), Chile (8.8) and Christchurch (7.1 in Sept then 4.9 on Boxing Day with a few "lighter" aftershocks in between), and according to Wikipedia (you can find anything there, lol!) over 220'000 people died in 2010 due to earthquakes.

Crazy as it may sound, 2011 is starting out even worse (at least from the viewpoint of quake strength, I hope we won't see another death toll like that in Haiti again any time soon)!

Waking up to the news today, seeing those images from Japan (8.9) coming at me from random TVs wherever I go, hearing on the radio about the Tsunami alert throughout the Pacific (even down in NZ!)... and this just a few weeks after Christchurch was hit by another biggie (6.3, considered an aftershock of the Sept quake, death toll of 166)! And googling for data on last year's quakes I just found out the same area of Chile was hit by another quake last month (6.8) but I don't remember hearing anything about it on the news (probably for similar reasons why last year's wasn't talked about as much as Haiti's, the country is prepared for quakes so there was less damage and fewer deaths).

I am so thankful not to have ever been through something like that (in 7 years in Mexico City I only lived through 3 quakes of magnitude above 6.0 and those were scary enough!) and I feel terrible for all the people who are (or have) suffering through this! I saw first hand the damage done in Christchurch by the Boxing Day quake when I was there in January. So many buildings were being shored up, sidewalks were blocked to pedestrians due to unstable buildings, most of the youth hostels in town were closed due to having been damaged... and from what I saw in the news (and heard from a friend who lived through it, building next to his hotel collapsed, he was evacuated to a safe place for the night 'till friends from out of town rescued him the next day. He was never allowed back into the hotel to get his stuff back before leaving the country) things were even worse after the February quake! Already damaged buildings just gave up and collapsed. When you see how they were in January:

not really surprising. :s

I hope all these rumblings stop before everything just falls down around us! And my thoughts and prayers go out to those suffering from the current even in Japan... and I hope that Tsunami dies down before it causes any further damage. As they say in Arabic: Inch'Allah!

Edit: 17h30
Seeing all these images of the massive waves of water as they rushed 10km inland is shocking and mesmerizing... and that huge tsunami rushing across the Pacific... WOW!
Apparently it's the 6th strongest earthquake since they've been measured (since around 1900), and probably the strongest in Japan for the past 1000 years. Bloody scary!!!