Gotta start somewhere

OK, so I really only registered for this blog in order to be able to post comments on Internal Monologue but as long as I have this resource, I might as well use it occasionally. It's appropriate to start this blog today, on the day of the largest earthquake so far in 2006, a magnitude 7.9 quake off of Tonga. I give this about even odds of remaining the largest earthquake through the rest of the year. An expected tsunami was much smaller than anticipated (less than 2 feet tall). This probably indicates that the earthquake took place within the Pacific Plate as it moves below the Australian Plate, and the Australian Plate above didn't deform much. The quake was also remote enough not to cause much damage, but the power of one of these events is still staggering. The seismic energy released was over 3.4 megatons, the actual total energy released by the earthquake was almost 10,000 times larger. While this was about equivalent to the Great San Francisco Earthquake, the quake that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami was about 64 times larger.
Even though this earthquake was almost on the other side of the world from here, it still caused visible shaking for over an hour on seismographs here in Oregon.