New maps

We don't often hear from the California Department of Mines & Geology (probably because of their low funding). However, today the CDMG came out with two new maps, both new-fangled Google Maps mashups. Check them out:

http://www.quake.ca.gov/gmaps/GMC/stategeologicmap.html

http://www.quake.ca.gov/gmaps/FAM/faultactivitymap.html

These are pretty generalized, low-resolution maps, but sometimes that's what you want to see the big picture.

The recent quake off Taiwan, together with the quakes in Haiti and Chile, and the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, have some people wondering--Is this the beginning of the end of the world? Is this the start of the coming 2012 apocalypse?

In a word, no.

Most people feel only a few quakes in their lifetimes, and most never directly see a volcano erupting. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, residents might feel one or two earthquakes in a year. Yet numerous small quakes are occurring in the Bay Area every day. This site, quake.usgs.gov, shows Bay Area earthquakes in near-real time. As of this moment, 261 quakes have occurred in the Bay Area within the last week--almost 40 per day. Yet most of these would be difficult to feel unless they occurred right underneath you.

Likewise, if we look at an earthquake map of California, we see 1357 quakes within the last week. That's almost 200 quakes per day. This week is more active than usual, but even in an average year, California receives 25-30,000 quakes.

There are fewer volcanoes erupting around the world, but many are in a constant state of eruption. On the Big Island of Hawaii, for example, an eruption near the Kilauea area started in 1983--and hasn't stopped since. If you go to Hawaii today, you can see lava flowing right into the Pacific.

The bottom line is this: Eyjafjallajökull, Chile, Haiti are the normal state of the Earth. The world is not undergoing some End Times cataclysm. And 21 December 2012 will end just like every other day, with busy Christmas shoppers scrambling for last-minute deals.

SkeptiCal 2010 at Berkeley

Today, Bay Area skeptics were treated to the annual meeting of SkeptiCal at Berkeley, where we heard talks from Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, David Morrison of NASA, and Kiki Sanford, among others. Chris Hoofnagle of ScienceBlog's Denialism talked about his denialist deck of cards, and John Conway talked about misconceptions of the Large Hadron Collider.

Altogether, some good talks and discussions about science and skepticism.