Earthquake effects are far-reaching

El Defensor Chieftain: Earthquake effects are far-reaching: Socorro is not exactly standing on the same spot where it was on Christmas Day after the 9.0 Sumatra earthquake Sunday. Rick Aster, professor of Geophysics at New Mexico Tech, said the massive quake, of the likes the Earth has not seen for more than 40 years, caused Socorro to be displaced by about one centimeter.

A town 10 thousand miles from the earthquake has moved a centimeter...

The displacement was recorded at the PASSCAL Instrument Center at Tech by a seismic station that is part of the EarthScope program. Aster said Socorro is 10,000 miles away from where the quake occurred. He said the motions from the distant quake were too slow here to be felt by a person. The movement, though, can be detected by sensitive instruments used to monitor quakes globally. Aster said the quake caused the whole Earth to shudder, or ring like a bell.

The whole earth shuddered.

The frequency at which the Earth rings is lower than an ordinary bell, but when struck with the force of Sunday's earthquake, the ringing can last for several days. 'This is something globally people will be looking at for many years,' he said. 'This really was a remarkable event.'

Can somebody explain how this could effect the whole planet and yet experts say there is no relation between this seismic event and others occurring throughout the world? Haven't we learned enough by now to know that there must be some effect. If a town 10 thousand miles from the quake can move a centimeter, than would not every fault in between also move? It doesn't make sense to me that the entire crust of the planet could ring like a bell and have no effect on all of the cracks in it's surface. If a butterfly flapping it's wings in Brazil can trigger a hurricane in Florida (Chaos Theory) than shouldn't an earthquake in Indonesia have some effect on fault lines elsewhere?