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Correlation is certainly not necessarily causation, and improved monitoring can certainly skew the data, but if you check the records on wiki or elsewhere, there have been about 150 earthquakes over 7 (the usual definition of 'major or great') since 2000 (the date where your graph stops, and only about 50 from 1970 to 2000. It is not my specialty, but I don't know of any major breakthrough in seismology technology that would have increased our ability to sense earthquakes by about ten times in 2000. So presumably there has been some significant level of increase in the last ten years over the long term average. I am inclined to assume that the fact that this coincides with the period when the effects of GW, especially of large ice bodies, really started to accelerate dramatically. But it does not strike me as on the face of it an utterly inane question whether ice cap melting and sea level rise has or could affect pressure points in plate tectonics, some of which are apparently on hair triggers, ready to go off explosively with the slightest forcing.

In particular, the Japanese earthquake was caused by iPad 2 which is being released exactly today while iPad 1 was released exactly one year ago, i.e. 2 weeks after the Chilean earthquake. At the time of the Indonesian tsunami, Apple changed its suppliers and opened its first store in Europe (London) and sold its 200-millionth song via iTunes.

Oh bullshit rockdoc. I've been around here for over 5 years and without a doubt there have been other things you've called people ill-informed for, like asserting that Saudi production has peaked. I believe you had some choice words in that vein for the late Matt Simmons. Meanwhile, the Saudis seem to be having trouble getting back to 9mb/d and seem to have an excess of crappy, thick, sulfur-laden shit that nobody wants. Maybe it slipped your mind, but peak oil is about the light, sweet stuff. Yow know, the high EROEI stuff.

At this point, it's pretty much like whatever you say, the smart money is on the opposite. And in 5 years, you've been proven wrong time and time again. When do you quit?

dolanbaker wrote:+1

The classic "hair trigger" in action, anything can set it off, but none of these things or forces armed the 'quake in the first place.

rockdoc123 wrote:It is noted the frequency/energy release of earthquakes since 2000 though increasing on average over the past 10 years pales in comparison to where it was from 1900 through to 1930 when it was much higher and for which you could not possibly draw a correlation with melting ice caps or rising sea level.

But I think that's the point here. The melting ice and rising seas are adding stress to already stressed plate boundaries in multiple locations, causing them to release in a bunch rather than over a longer time, which would have happened had things remained more or less static. It makes sense to me.

According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey there were 1,085 major earthquakes in the 1980s. This increased in the 1990s by about 50 per cent to 1,492 and to 1,611 from 2000 to 2009. Last year, and up to and including the Japanese quake, there were 247 major earthquakes.

There has been also a noticeable increase in the sort of extreme quakes that hit Japan. In the 1980s, there were four mega-quakes, six in the 1990s and 13 in the last decade. So far this decade we have had two. This increase, however, could be temporary.

Hynes said there is some evidence that one earthquake can snowball into another until the Earth's crust has adjusted to the new pressure transfers.

The coast of British Columbia sits on the Pacific fault line that curves around the southern coast of Alaska, travelling southwest to Japan.

Hynes said the upper plate of Vancouver Island is flexing like a bow. It's stuck and bending upward. Ultimately it will release itself and produce a major quake, he said.

Japan's big earthquake could change the tectonic stresses in the Pacific and possibly affect Vancouver.

"I'm afraid to say that Canada is by no means as careful about its building codes as Japan," Hynes said.

Montreal sits on a fault line that travels along the St. Lawrence River valley.

Hynes said the fault is smack in the middle of a tectonic plate, making it harder to understand the stresses.

dolanbaker wrote:+1

The classic "hair trigger" in action, anything can set it off, but none of these things or forces armed the 'quake in the first place.

However, "relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid 1990s, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years," said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science and Technology. "We still do not know the reason for this yet. Could simply be the natural temporal variation of the stress field in the earth's lithosphere." (The lithosphere is the outer solid part of the Earth.)

Even taking out the New Zealand events, there are still four major earthquakes at least as big as magnitude 8.6 in the last seven years – the two events in Sumatra in 2004 and 2005, the Chilean earthquake in 2010, and Japan. This is unusual, Rundle said.
"The question is, is it so unusual that these things are causal? We don't know that, but we used to believe that these things were independent and you would see random clustering, but this has become so pronounced that you have to think there might be some correlation to it," he told me today. "In fact most of our models that we use do show correlations of earthquake events."
Rundle added that he believes that earthquakes are correlated and these big events are correlated. The question is, are they correlated because there is a surge in plate motion or do these things just align in spurts when looked at over spans of thousands of years?

The growing number of monitoring stations isn't really an issue with tracking these huge quakes; I'd figure you'd be hard pressed to not know about those, even pre 19th century. I have my doubts about global warming causing major quakes, but perhaps major quakes cause major quakes.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011 NISA doubles early fallout estimate
Kyodo--NISA on Monday more than doubled its estimate of the radioactive material ejected into the air in the early days of the Fukushima nuclear crisis to 770,000 terabecquerels.

The nuclear safety agency also issued its own assessment of the cores in reactors 1, 2 and 3 at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, assuming that all of them melted, and said it was possible the meltdowns in units 1 and 2 happened faster than the time frame estimated by Tokyo Electric Power Co.

The assessment by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency is expected to be reflected in Japan's report on the accident at a ministerial meeting being hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency later this month.

Seismic activity linked to global warming
Finally, human civilization is starting to get global warming events that it can FEEL.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. Something real, something hard, fast, and impossible to ignore. Increasing evidence and statistical analysis links increased seismic activity to global warming.

This alarming notion was first discussed in 1998 and is now more widely mentioned in university studies and recent publications - from the Journal of Geodynamics to National Geographic, to blogs reporting opinions of scientists (below).

Some intuitive calculation may help understanding: A cubic yard of ice weighs nearly a ton. The Antarctic ice sheet is a few miles thick. Earth adjusted to that immense weight over the millennia - now, as ice caps melt, this weight is slowly lifting..