Quakes and Typhoons: What's Up with Mother Nature?

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Environment
posted: 11 August 2009 12:44 pm ET
from LiveScienceQuakes and Typhoons: What's Up with Mother Nature?

It may seem like Mother Nature is pulling out all the weapons in her
arsenal,
after a spate of earthquakes and cyclones struck Asia in recent days,
but the
fact that these events coincided is just that — a coincidence.

Typhoon Morakot was the first to strike, slamming into Taiwan Sunday
and causing
disastrous mudslides with its torrential rains. Scores are feared to
have died
in the maelstrom.

While the Taiwanese were lashed by the storm's wind and rain, a 7.1-
magnitude
earthquake rumbled off the Japan coast, also on Sunday. On Tuesday,
Japan was
struck again by a magnitude 6.5 earthquake that triggered a small
tsunami and
caused buildings to sway in Tokyo, some 90 miles away, according to
news
reports. While the Earth trembled, the country was also seeing rain
from Typhoon
Etau.

Minutes before, another earthquake had ruptured in the Indian Ocean on
Tuesday,
north of India's Andaman Islands. The United States Geological Survey
(USGS) put
the magnitude of that temblor at 7.6.

The events have little to nothing to do with each other, except that
they are
happening in an earthquake-prone region of the world that is in the
middle of
its tropical cyclone season.

Stormy links

The western Pacific typhoon season lasts from about mid-May to
November, about
the same time as the Atlantic hurricane season (June 1 to Nov. 30).
(Hurricanes
and typhoons are the same phenomenon, collectively known as tropical
cyclones.
They just carry different names, because they occur over different
ocean
basins.)

While the Pacific typhoon season has been busy, no tropical storms or
hurricanes
have yet sprouted in the Atlantic. This is because of events a world
away —the
El Nino that has developed in the eastern Pacific. El Nino puts energy
high into
the atmosphere that tends to promote cyclone activity in the Pacific.
That
energy moves across the Americas, over the Atlantic, and tends to
stifle
hurricane formation in the Atlantic.

"That has worldwide effects," said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the
National
Hurricane Center in Miami, referring to El Nino.

The Atlantic hurricane activity does seem to be picking up though,
with the
development of the second tropical depression of the season (tropical
depressions have less intense winds than tropical storms, which in
turn are less
intense than hurricanes). Tropical Depression 2 seems to be on track
to develop
into Tropical Storm Ana, which will be the first named Atlantic storm
of the
season.

"We're seeing more activity now than we've seen all season," Feltgen
told
LiveScience.

The busiest months of the Atlantic season are typically August and
September.

Shaky links

While the cyclone and earthquake activity in Asia aren't linked, there
was
initially some thought that the earthquake activity might have been.

The earthquake in Japan on Tuesday happened a mere 11 minutes and 29
seconds
after the Andaman Islands quake in the India Ocean.

"They were very close in time," said Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with
the USGS.

Scientists looked to see if the seismic waves from the Andaman quake
might have
triggered the Japan quake, but saw that the waves from the first quake
arrived
too early to have caused the second one, about 8 minutes and 40
seconds after
the Andaman quake.

"We don't think they're linked at all," Caruso told LiveScience.

Neither of the Japanese quakes was linked either, with the Sunday
temblor
happening very deep in the ground, and the Tuesday earthquake
occurring farther
north and at a more shallow depth, Caruso said.

While aftershocks have shaken the regions hit by earthquakes, whether
or not
more strong quakes will occur can't be predicted.

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