Tsunami Dog Comes Home

I was going to write a long, detailed piece about how March 2011 was one of the most event-packed, news stuffed, tumultuous, strange, heart-breaking months to have unfolded in my lifetime, but I was only a few paragraphs in when I came across the below cartoon by acclaimed Australian artist @FirstDogOnMoon, which wraps up March better than I could ever dream of doing.

(Click image to enlarge)



You can also see the Tsunami Dog At Sea cartoon, with comments, here at Crikey.

If you're wondering what happened to Tsunami Dog, here's the owner & dog reunion. Tear factor 9 :



The human death toll of the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami is beyond 20,000. Unlike Tsunami Dog, most of those swept out to sea were not rescued & did not survive, including hundreds of school children.

Gloating Over Mass Deaths

I'd heard that Americans on Facebook were claiming within hours of the event that the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami were, somehow, "revenge for Pearl Harbour", but it took the compilation below to ram home just how truly strange and downright insane this mass FU-ing of the tens of thousands who died, the millions who've had their lives ruined, actually was :



(click image to enlarge or go here)

Scientists Don't Know Why Earthquakes Come In Clusters



They don't know how yet, but imagine if scientists could look at a pattern of earthquakes and predict an expected size and location for a devastating quake, allowing for necessary evacuations a day or two in advance, then we will have cracked one of the greatest, most devastating, mysteries of Mother Nature.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

The director of the Australian Seismological Centre in Canberra, Kevin McCue, said yesterday's quake in Japan, the largest recorded there, would not have been linked to the one that struck Christchurch last month.

''This earthquake is a rupture of the plate boundary,'' Professor McCue said. ''The Christchurch earthquake was not. It was an earthquake on the conjugate fault, a fault that's at an angle to the main fault and 100 kilometres away from the plate boundary.

...Professor McCue said earthquakes on plate boundaries often came in quick succession. ''We had a sequence of earthquakes in 1906 where there were at least six 'grade earthquakes' around the Pacific. And now we've had Chile last year and this one,'' he said.

''It's something we observe in all extreme events - they are clustered in time. That's what we observe they do but we don't have an answer for it.''

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