Hurricanes help to build momentum for the next set of disasters. While earthquakes have a non-certain relationship, based on what we know of the past the relationship between major hurricane seasons and earthquakes we are setting up the field to chaos.
With the ring of fire always a threat and vicious hurricanes hitting up the coast, one having swamped Houston creating massive flooding and another ripping through Florida after taking a trip up the Caribbean. We are bound to see great catastrophe and have already witnessed it through Mexico and other places even before the current hurricanes have made landfall.
On the other coast we see wildfires bursting out all over after a season of scorching hot temperatures and years of dryness, causing fires through California and British Colombia with smoke lasting for days drifting into the prairies.
And late Thursday night, off the coast of Mexico, we saw a monster of an earthquake, followed by a one two whammy punch right off the coast by Hurricane Katia.
You could easily be forgiven for thinking apocalyptic thoughts, like the science fiction writer John Scalzi who, surveying the charred and flooded and shaken landscape, declared that this “sure as hell feels like the End Times are getting in a few dress rehearsals right about now.”
Earth scientist Shimon Wdowinski and his colleagues at the University of Miami presented an idea at the American Geophysical Union meeting in February 2011 linking the devastating Haiti earthquake in January 2010 to strong tropical storm systems that struck the region in 2008.
The hypothesis put forth by Wdowinski and colleagues is that the mass of sediment removed from Haiti's uplands (and deposited in adjacent lowlands) influenced the stresses on the Léogâne Fault zone enough to cause it to rupture, resulting in the devastating Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. The cause of such rapid erosion, according to the abstract, was the combined effects of two hurricanes and two tropical storms in 2008 on a severely deforested landscape.
With two major hurricanes covering the same area, we are now in a petry dish where data will soon be a indicator of the future to confirm or deny this hypothesis. With a solar eclipse across the United States and Canada and Kim Jong Un in North Korea we sure do live in interesting times.