Earthquakes

There have been some highly publicized earthquakes recently. The 7.9 earthquake that hit Sichuan Province is especially troubling. The death toll is around 20,000 and they think it could reach as much as 50,000. I'm thinking it will probably be over 100,000 when all is said and done. The tsunami that was huge a few years ago started off with small figures and then it seemed to spiral upward as the weeks wore on.

I talked to some co-workers about this and how we just think that it is horrible (over here in the U.S.), feel bad for a few minutes and then go on with our day. However, if that many people died over here it would be absolute tragedy. On September 11th there weren't even close to that many people that lost their lives. Granted, that event also had other implications in our minds associated with freedom and government, but still. Someone in the conversation had worked for a major newspaper in the past and he said that these types of news just made one of the bullets on the news homepage until the numbers reached into the 100,000 range. Interesting what is then "newsworthy."

One of my other co-workers uses iGoogle, like me, and he had a little widget on his page that showed all the earthquakes taking place at any given time in the world. It was absolutely shocking to me what is going on. The middle east is quaking all over the place all the time.

I've made a screen shot to show my page with the widget. I don't know if this is a normal amount of earth quaking or if there is something we should be watching. Most you can see are on known fault lines or plates, but others seem to randomly crop up unrelated to others.