TREMORS!

I remember an incident years back , we used to sleep on terrace in summer. It was a cool and starry night . Soon I was asleep. At midnight I was awakened by a rumbling noise, the vibrations penetrated my bones. I gasped for breath and wondered what it was. I felt the tremors on the floor and knew for sure that it was an earthquake. I woke everybody up. The vibrations had lasted for seconds only.. my family did not notice anything and they all went to sleep. It took quite sometime for me to get back to sleep. Next morning there were headlines in the newspapers that our city had experienced an earthquake. Many people experienced the tremors in different parts of the city.. No damage or loss of life was reported. I thanked the almighty!

There were n number of questions in my mind. What caused the Earth to Tremor. The encyclopedia was referred. It said that sudden release of energy in the earths crust creates seismic waves.. Earthquakes are caused mostly by rupture of geological faults, huge amount of gas migration mainly methane deep within the earth, also by volcanic activity landslides mine blasts and Nuclear experiments. Remember the earthquake in Gujrat (26January 2001).The Tsunami (26December 2004).. The recent earthquake in China on 12 of May left thousands of homes and families devastated! I felt the pangs of sorrow . I pondered we can know the impending disaster of climate etc. by the help of satellite .Isn’t there any way to know the impending earthquakes so that we could save the lives of people.

The BBC News “Plan for Quake warning System” by Paul Rincon caught my attention . I gave a sigh of hope and read it eargely. In the news they reported that NASA has achieved a breakthrough in forcasting earthquake. They have found a link between the electrical disturbances occurring at the edge of our atmosphere and the impending quakes on the ground below. Signals were spotted during recent devastation in China . Minoru Freund a physicist and director for advanced aerospace material and devices at NASA Ames Research Centre in California told BBC “I do believe that we will be able to establish a correlation between certain earthquakes and certain pre-earthquakes signals in the unbiased way”.

A Space based early warning System is being investigated by UK team.Kudos!