From yesterday’s journal entry:

According to the records, it occurred at 7.58pm our time last night, which was a little after midnight local time. They keep saying it????s the largest earthquake in the world in 40 years – Susan Mernit’s blog quotes somebody saying that it even disrupted the earth????s rotation. I am typing this on Michelle????s laptop in the kitchen, with the tv on Newsworld, which is broadcasting BBC World, which is reporting on the earthquake…scenes of devastation, mud, ruin, ect. More than 11,000 people dead.Earlier this week, I was reading Goethe????s autobiography, and he talked about the Lisbon Quake of 1755, and how it made him question the reality of God. Whenever you read about the development of deism and atheism in the 18th Century Enlightenment, they speak of that earthquake. Here, in 2004 is our version. The difference is though, that without our communications tech, we would only hear about this disaster months from now, and by then with inaccuracy and embellishment.

This Earthquake follows exactly a year after the one that levelled Bam in Iran. From Wikipedia:

In December 26, 2003 at 1:56 AM UTC (5:26 AM local time) Bam Citadel — ‘the biggest adobe structure of the world’ — and most of the city of Bam proper were devastated by an earthquake. The USGS estimated its magnitude as 6.6 on the Richter scale. The BBC reported that ‘70% of the modern city of Bam’ was destroyed. The total death toll was given as 41,000 on January 17 but the latest estimate from Teheran has halved previous estimates to 26,271 deaths. An additional 10,000 – 50,000 were reported injured (this number is very uncertain, the morst appairing number is 30,000, which may have originated from an early Reuters report. The Iranian authorities does not seem to have given any injured quote). According to the Iranian news agency IRNA, the old Bam Citadel was ‘leveled to the ground’.”

For a while I subscribed to the USGS’ earthquake alerts, which taught me that earthquakes occur everyday somewhere in the world. So far today, there have been 139 earthquakes. Many of these are aftershocks from yesterday’s mega.