I feel the ocean move
This morning, a M 7.1 earthquake rumbled the ocean floor off the coast of Japan, spreading fear and panic among normally-placid sea anemone and vent-dwelling tubeworm populations and raising troubling concerns about the ability of local ecosystems to cope with such disturbances without comprehensive planning at the seabed-wide level.
Okay, maybe it didn’t. Being a child of the media age has kind of conditioned me to think of everything as a crisis. Well, I’ve also had people asking me whether I’m okay.
The quake was 300 miles offshore–and the focus was buried unusually deep. I didn’t feel it at all, and the reports on the websites of the major dailies are buried by this point–the Princess’s wedding and the Koizumi cabinet’s budget capers, you know. There was a tsunami warning, but it was downplayed even as it was being made.