The prevailing nutritional wisdom nowadays is that whole grains and foods made from whole grains are better for you than anything made with refined white flour. But really, this is only a half-truth.What this mainstream nutritional dogma fails to take into account is that unless grains (along with beans, nuts and seeds) are properly prepared, these “healthy” foods can actually wreak havoc on your health.
Grains, beans, nuts and seeds have long been staples in traditional diets throughout the world for a simple reason: They can be stored for relatively long periods of time without going bad. This is because they are essentially all seeds. Each individual seed contains all of the nutrients and enzymes needed to produce a living plant, but remains dormant until the conditions for germination are just right.
What prevents seeds from becoming plants is something called phytic acid, a compound that inhibits phytase, an enzyme involved in the germination process. Phytic acid not only keeps seeds from sprouting — it also helps to protect them from predators. Its enzyme-inhibiting activity blocks digestive enzymes so that seeds stay intact as they pass through the digestive system of animals that eat them.
Phytic acid is considered an anti-nutrient because it binds to minerals like magnesium, calcium, zinc, copper and iron in the intestines, blocking their absorption and carrying them out of the body. Ruminants (cattle, bison, sheep, deer, etc.) are the only animals that possess phytase, which allows them to digest the phytic acid found in the cereal grasses they eat. In humans, consuming high levels of phytic acid — which often happens as part of a “healthy high-fiber diet”— can lead to digestive distress, mineral deficiencies and a whole host of associated maladies. Research has linked phytic acid consumption to anemia, bone loss, tooth decay, depression, compromised immunity and inflammation.
So how can we safely consume phytic acid-containing foods? It’s pretty simple — start the germination process by soaking (or sprouting) them. Soaking grains, beans, nuts and seeds unlocks theirs “life force” and activates phytase, which starts to break down phytic acid, while also freeing up vitamins, minerals and amino acids, making these nutrients more bioavailable. Fermenting grains (think sourdough bread) is another way to reduce phytic acid by essentially “pre-digesting” it.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of commercially available “whole grain” products are made with improperly prepared grains, which is something of a tragedy, considering that most people equate “whole grain” with “healthy.” In the case of someone struggling with digestive problems, for example, a traditionally fermented sourdough bread made with refined white flour is probably a better choice than the whole wheat bread sitting on a store shelf with “high-fiber” and “heart-healthy” claims all over the label.
Cooking alone is not enough to adequately reduce phytic acid content, a fact that our ancestors were well aware of. According to Sally Fallon, co-founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of Nourishing Traditions, “our ancestors and virtually all pre-industrialized people only ate grains that were soaked or fermented.”
In general, the best way to significantly reduce the phytic acid content of grains and legumes is to soak them in a slightly acidic liquid for 12-24 hours and then to cook them. Nuts and seeds contain less phytic acid than grains and beans, and also contain delicate oils that can be damaged by heat, so simply soaking them for 2-12 hours is ideal. Your “slightly acidic liquid” could consist of buttermilk (soured milk) or spring or filtered water with 1 tablespoon of an acidic medium added for each cup. Ideally this acidic medium would be unpasteurized apple cider vinegar or lemon juice.
This beautiful chart (click to view full size) is a helpful quick guide to the ideal soaking and sprouting times for various grains, beans, nuts and seeds. To learn more about traditional methods of soaking, fermenting and cooking grains, I highly recommend reading Nourishing Traditions.
About the Author
Mina is a natural health enthusiast, avid yoga practitioner and health freedom advocate. She has a passion for discovering and sharing strategies for achieving optimal health and longevity, and has spent the last eight years working in the natural health industry. In addition to researching health and nutrition, writing about the latest happenings in the natural health world and practicing yoga, she enjoys spending time in nature, meditating and making superfood smoothies.
An alleged counterfeit condiment operation blew its cover, literally, when exploding bottles of repackaged Heinz ketchup became hard to ignore for the other tenants of a New Jersey warehouse.
Preliminary investigations from Heinz officials show that the Dover, N.J., operation had a simple ploy in mind: Purchase bulk quantities of traditional Heinz ketchup, transfer the sauce via large bladders into individual containers labeled “Simply Heinz,” one of the company’s premium recipes, then shunt the result off to unwitting consumers at a cushy markup.
The backers of the ill-fated ketchup syndicate have not yet been identified, but there’s another mystery beneath the lurid headlines: Why did the bottles, which allegedly contained an ordinary, shelf-stable Heinz variety, begin to explode in the first place? What’s keeping an average person at a diner counter from becoming the next victim of a spontaneous ketchup detonation?
It’s not yet known whether the ketchup schemers adulterated the traditional Heinz recipe with contaminating additives or fillers, but even if they didn’t, the simple act of moving the condiment from one container to another would likely have been enough to lay the groundwork for explosions, according to Rutgers University food chemist Thomas Hartman. [Stuck Ketchup Problem Solved by MIT Engineers]
“When you get expansion and containers blowing up like that, a lot of the time it’s from gas buildup within the container, and that’s usually a red flag for microbial growth,” said Hartman. “By transferring the ketchup from one container to another, they could have breached the [containers’] sterility.”
The reason you’re unlikely to hear about unopened ketchup bottles blowing up on pantry or supermarket shelves, even if they’ve been there for years, is because the product has been heated in the factory to kill microbes before being packaged. When the seal is breached, carb-hungry microbes can move in and start building pressure inside a bottle as they convert their feast into gas.
Refrigerating ketchup stifles microbial growth after the bottle has been opened, but unrefrigerated bottles of ketchup are a common sight at restaurants and in the homes of people who don’t like cold ketchup on hot fries. So why don’t these bottles explode like the ones in New Jersey?
In the right conditions, especially unusually warm ones, they could. But Hartman says ketchup explosions are not normal occurrences in diners and homes partly because the bottles are opened frequently, so pressure doesn’t have a chance to build up.
It’s not clear how long the exploding ketchup bottles were left sealed in New Jersey, but Heinz investigators say the site of the operation appeared to have been abandoned before the project came to fruition. And if the thousands of phony bottles had been exposed to elevated temperatures while they sat in the warehouse unattended, microbes would have been given a boost in overcoming ketchup’s growth-retarding acidity.
A Heinz spokeswoman told ABC News that the company has no reason to believe any of the counterfeit ketchup reached market, but if New Jersey grocers start reporting ketchup eruptions, science will point back to a warehouse in Dover.
ALMOST-X FLARE: Today at 1814 UT, Earth-orbiting satellites detected an impulsive M9-class solar flare. The source was an active region just behind the sun’s southeastern limb. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash: image. Radio blackouts and ionization waves in the upper atmosphere are possible on the dayside of Earth as a result of this event. Stay tuned for updates.
A USGS map showing, in blue, where people reported feeling the Maine earthquake (on Oct. 16, 2012).
CREDIT: USGS
How unusual was the magnitude-4.0 earthquake that struck southern Maine yesterday (Oct. 16)?
U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist Julie Dutton said it was larger than most but not too out of the ordinary for New England, where one or two minor earthquakes can be felt somewhere every year.
It’s unclear what exactly caused the quake, Dutton told OurAmazingPlanet. “To pinpoint which fault it was — we don’t have that information and we may never have that information,” she said. The area lacks the extensive network of seismometers present in more tectonically active areas. There are many faults in the area, and the fault that was active yesterday was probably small and may never be active again, Dutton said.
The East Coast is riddled with old faults, buried miles deep in the ancient crust of the North American plate, the tectonic plate that underlies the United States and Canada. But most of these fissures haven’t been active in a long time, and very few of them are well-studied or understood.
Stress naturally builds up within tectonic plates and is periodically released in earthquakes like this one, Dutton said.
As in other East Coast quakes, the vibrations Tuesday could be felt over a wide area – as far south as Long Island, N.Y., and as far north as southeastern Ontario, she said.
In North America, feeling shaking over such a larger area is unique to the East Coast. The crust of the eastern part of continent isn’t as fractured as elsewhere, which allows vibrations to travel long distances. That explains how last year’s 5.8-magnitude earthquake, centered in Virginia Aug. 23, was felt by nearly a third of the United States.
Last night’s temblor came from a rupture 4 miles (6 km) underground and struck at 7:12 p.m. local time (23:12 UTC), the USGS reported. The epicenter was about 21 miles west of Portland, Maine.
The earthquake shook houses in Boston and Connecticut, but it apparently did not cause any injuries or damage, according to news reports. “A magnitude-4 can knock stuff off shelves and that kind of thing, but isn’t likely to cause major structural damage,” Dutton said.
The last earthquake to cause moderate damage in New England was a magnitude-5.6 temblor in New Hampshire in 1940, she said. The largest earthquake in recorded history in New England struck New Hampshire in 1638 and had an estimated magnitude of 6.5, according to the USGS.
Russia hints plans to quit Kyoto Protocol October 18, 2012 Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev Enlarge Russia on Thursday hinted that it may refuse to sign up to a new round of targeted carbon cuts that could see the Kyoto environmental protection treaty extended beyond its end of 2012 expiry date. “One has to admit that we never got any real commercial gain from the Kyoto Protocol,” news agencies quoted Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, pictured on October 12, as telling a government meeting. Russia on Thursday hinted that it may refuse to sign up to a new round of targeted carbon cuts that could see the Kyoto environmental protection treaty extended beyond its end of 2012 expiry date.
“One has to admit that we never got any real commercial gain from the Kyoto Protocol,” news agencies quoted Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as telling a government meeting. “That does not mean that we have to try and drag it (the treaty) out any further,” Medvedev added. European diplomats at the May G8 summit in France said that Russia along with Japan and Canada had confirmed plans not to join the second round of carbon cuts. Russia ratified the treaty in 2004. It has since argued that its terms harm developing nations. Medvedev noted that he had said on repeated occasions in the past that “if the world community fails to agree on Kyoto, we would wave it goodbye.” He said he was thinking of extending the treaty’s terms with EU nations alone. “But considering our uneasy relations with the European Union, I am not sure how likely this scenario will be,” he said. A range of EU nations are probing Russian energy natural gas giant Gazprom for price-fixing and other unfair practices under its new Energy Charter Treaty. Medvedev did not explain his reasoning beyond the mention of Russia’s failure to tap into the profits it could have earned had it sold other nations unused carbon emission credits from its domestic producers. (c) 2012 AFP
The world of academia does not resonate too strongly with many who walk the path of conscious and spiritual growth. This is, perhaps, understandable when one considers that many entrenched academic concepts of institutional consensus, received wisdom and logical criteria for truth, can seem rather opposed to the trajectory of authentic conscious deepening. Not only that, but from a shadow perspective, it’s relatively straightforward to hijack the academic edifice. After all, if you can sequester the system, you can effectively steer all those who study under it.
In the West, the academic paradigm is still perceived as the ultimate hub for establishing scholarly credibility and continues to serve as the empirical arbitrator of accomplishment and consensus reality. Here in the US, I have noted that there’s still a great deal of fuss made about sticking Dr. in front of someone’s name. Billboards, TV and radio commercials, books and business cards are plastered with such academic titles. Dr Somebody is wheeled in as a talking head for some garish infotainment show, so as to offer an ‘expert’ view of politics, science, history or whatever. Many people buy it, hook, line and sinker. The alternative community is not immune to such occasional haughtiness either. Someone who got a PhD in Floral Management will leverage their title when publicizing their work in the Mysteries Of The Lost Aztec Kingdom. The irrelevance of their qualification does little to affect the credibility curve in the minds of many.
To put it bluntly, lots of people from many different walks of life believe that academic qualifications = authority. After all, who knows better?
Faith in the academic edifice is beginning to crack in some European countries, most notably England. The grandeur of someone’s bachelors or masters degree, or even doctorate, is not quite what it used to be. This is largely due to the fact that people have realized that the whole process of going to university and getting certain qualifications is getting easier and easier. In addition, the connection between one’s degree and the actual career path undertaken, is becoming increasingly divergent. For the last 40 years, successive UK Governments (Conservative and Labour) have resolutely pursued a campaign of getting more and more people into university and making sure they graduate. The annual charade of ever-escalating school and university pass rates is roundly derided by all with eyes to see. The result? Everyone and their dog has a degree now.
Speaking of declining standards in the US educational system, comedian George Carlin said: “They lower the passing grades so more kids can pass. More kids pass, the school looks good, everybody’s happy, the IQ of the country slips another two or three points and pretty soon all you’ll need to get into college is a fucking pencil.”
Perhaps academia has never quite been the glorious testament to human achievement that it presents itself to be. Even the most serious, free-thinking and well-intended scholars will often find themselves pulled into a vortex of insularity, prejudice and separatist specialization. It is the way of things in academia, particularly if you need approved funding for your work. You have to play the game, or else risk getting sidelined or even booted out. Collectivism is rewarded over independence; compliance over distinctiveness. Of course, this naturally balances out and improves over time, especially as the old guard fade away and the new crowd emerges, amongst which there’s always a healthy sliver of maverick and pioneering attitudes. But it takes a good long while to filter through. In the meantime, in such a rapidly changing and disinformation-saturated world, we cannot rely on academia to assist with our knowing. We have to do it for ourselves.
Dawn Of The Autodidact
An autodidact is someone who is largely self-taught. The autodidactic impulse is often characterized by a commitment in the individual to be a self-directed and life-long learner. There is an inherent appreciation that real knowledge is best transmitted direct to the discerning student, without any requirement for official mediation. Famous autodidacts include: William Blake, HP Lovecraft, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Faraday, Joseph Campbell, Nikola Tesla, George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemmingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, Edgar Alan Poe, Doris Lessing, Benjamin Franklin, Jakob Bohme, Abraham Lincoln, the Wright Brothers, Walt Whitman, Stanley Kubrick, Frank Zappa, John Cage, Arthur C Clarke, Joseph Conrad and Thomas Edison.
Being an autodidact does not mean having no formal education at all. It simply means that it is not the chief source of one’s learning. In the above examples, as it happens, many actually never did see the inside of a classroom. But even for those who did, they either dropped out, or relegated their formal education to mere background noise, from which their own autonomous learning sprang forth, far beyond the intellectual or temporal reach of any institution.
In my own life, I have routinely acknowledged that the most insightful people I have met have all been autodidacts. In some instances, the breadth and penetration of their knowing totally eclipses any apparently corresponding academic mindset. The opposite side of this equation has also proven true; the professors and Cambridge graduates that I have conversed with, at length, have been some of the least discerning and most blinkered folk imaginable. They particularly mark themselves out in this negative aspect by way of their own claims of achievement and authority. Very disagreeable. Of course, this is purely anecdotal and constitutes little more than a broad generalization. However, it does draw one’s attention to certain facets of the autodidactic method that warrant a closer look.
The great privilege of the autodidact is that they have a totally free hand to do whatever they want. Nobody can censor, prejudice or divert them from their own chosen areas of study. They can go where they want, when they want. No concept is too far out, no subject is taboo, no creative tangents are considered a waste of time and belief systems are often gratifyingly upgraded or even totally jettisoned. With correct alignment, all this information processing acts as a jumpgate for transmutation into the felt-experience of real wisdom.
Close on the heels of this freedom comes a distinct responsibility: self-discipline. It is incumbent on the independent scholar to hone a range of skills to endow their studies with the integrity, balance and penetration required to formulate empowering knowledge. Specifically – the ability to employ critical reason and discernment; to correlate and corroborate; to weigh any given idea against the consensus reality tunnel and one’s own personal reality tunnel; to use intuition; to watch how a notion moves through our belief systems and intellectual apparatus. What remains? What changes?
Another key difference between autodidacticism and academia is the value placed on direct felt experience. Who can walk the talk? If you physically meet a person, you can tell if they’re the real deal in the space of a few minutes. Even remotely, from just the spoken or written word, you can figure it out with a little heightened sensitivity. Anyone can read books, hunch over a laptop, visit a few temples, libraries and museums. But none of this constitutes real, juiced-up, direct encounter. The autodidact naturally places a far greater emphasis on the practical application of their knowledge than the academic. After all, they’re playing very different games. Self acceptance, rather than group acceptance, brings about a very different arc of learning. It must be said that there are, of course, some fine ground-breaking academics and there are some bloody awful independent scholars. There’s also no reason why one could not be both autodidactic and academic. Rare, but possible. There are many paths.
Creative Epistemology
Ascertaining the truth of a thing is always a strange and slippery business. Terence McKenna used to say that Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would deal with such problems by saying that something could be “true enough”. One interpretation of this being that if everything is relative, there’s little point in declaring something to be totally 100% true for everyone, in every situation, all the time. I am inclined to agree with this, albeit from an objective standpoint. Subjectively speaking however, we can feasibly say that something is true for ourselves. We can overlay a thing against our inner knowing and feel the essential veracity of it; judge its usefulness as a positive tool for perceiving and articulating our own reality tunnel. To call something ‘true’ in this way, is simply a piece of functional shorthand.
So what happens when the trueness of a thing diminishes? When it became clear that many of Carlos Castaneda’s accounts of his sorcerer’s apprenticeship with Don Juan Matus were factually inaccurate and even total fabrications – it changed the nature of his work for many people. Believers were disheartened. Skeptics were delighted. When I first read his works, it was very pre-Internet, and I had no idea of any of this. I read the classic six books and thoroughly enjoyed them. They spoke deeply to me. I have re-read them many times over the years. To this day, what is remarkable about them is how full of real gnosis they are. Despite the lo-fi anthropological value, I nevertheless find them to be truer than most other texts I’ve ever read. Just how the hell Castaneda came across such fabulous wisdom is still a mystery. Perhaps it was all an intentional double-bluff from the beginning, orchestrated to protect the real source of his teaching? Who knows. I’m just glad he put pen to paper, and decided to share it.
Since the late 1980’s, when I first came across Castaneda, I have had hundreds of experiences that have compelled me to explore the powerful overlay of the imaginal; positioned as it is so provocatively over both the real and the unreal. The further I walk down my own path, the wider I have to set the boundaries for what is real. It works both ways. What was fantasy, becomes actual; what was solid reality, becomes incongruous fakery. 911 being a textbook example. Most people don’t want to seriously study the events of 911, because in the back of their minds, they can feel the latent domino effect of collapsing belief systems. The real story of 911 is so off the map, that even the solemn ramifications of prior-knowledge and high-level treachery, pale compared to the issues of wider reality manipulation. Too weird.
Certainly, as we become more conscious, we become less susceptible to illusion; garbage constructs begin to fade and eventually dissolve altogether, with very little ‘mechanical’ effort from us. Even more significantly, with heightened awareness and a cleaner mental platform, we are able to channel greater resolutions of energy. We can go deeper with our knowing. Deeper into ourselves. Deeper into the universe.
It’s intriguing to watch how a thing can move from one reality filter to another with such fluidity; contravening the human boundaries of truth, belief and existence as if they didn’t exist at all. As I stated in an essay from May 2009, diverting all ones energies into the question of whether a given phenomenon is authentic or fake, may be missing the point. Many of the dozens of phenomenological koans that are routinely investigated in the alternative/esoteric field, go right to the heart of our complicity in the simulated reality construct we labor under. They exist to teach us not to judge whether something is real or not – but rather how it interacts with our own consciousness. As in quantum physics, consciousness itself changes the nature of the thing perceived. We really do have to take a long hard look at the operational value of consensus, received wisdom, peer acceptance and criteria for truth. This plays to the strengths of the autodidact, unshackled as they are from the chains of academic accord or the dreary guidelines of normality.
The real discipline of the independent thinker and the spiritual warrior, lies not in their scholarly capabilities and education, nor even in the anchoring of their knowledge into felt experience – it is in their willingness to transform their own consciousness. To change. This means letting go of things that we think we need, things we have become attached to, things we suspect might even be essential parts of us. More than anything else, it is this clinging to self that prevents us from moving forward. We sometimes forget that we are not the avatar.
The higher aspect of our being, our spirit if you will, never leaves the higher dimensional space. It is not plunged into the 3D as ‘we’ are. It remains effortlessly bulletproof and untainted in its purity, knowing, power and divinity. It is only the avatar that suffers the battle scars of earthly trauma and triumph. Yet this avatar is so lucid, so hi-resolution, so persuasive in its day-to-day consistency, that we forget it’s not actually us. A dream it may be, but one of no more or less reality than a dream from which we awaken in tears of rapture, or sadness, or longing. Undeniably, it moves us deeply.
Establishing a relationship between the avatar and the higher spirit – who we really are – is what certain occultists call the conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Hindu spiritual philosophers consider it as making contact with Atman (cognate with the Greek ‘asthma’, curiously enough, meaning to breathe). It is the Daemon of the ancient Greeks, with which Socrates himself documented his own intimate communion. It is in cultivating this relationship between self and spirit, that we transmute our inner knowing from merely acquiring navigational tools for the avatar, to the extraordinary ascendant journey of spiritualization. It is a natural path; elegant, innate, fulfilling and as real as you can imagine.
BAY AREA FIREBALL: Last night, Oct. 17th, many people near San Francisco saw a slow-moving fireball exploding in the sky around 07:45 pm PDT. Witnesses report bright flashes of light and sonic booms that shook houses. Using a wide-field camera, Wes Jones caught the meteor disappearing behind the trees in the city of Belmont:
“We don’t know yet if the end point [of the meteor’s flight] was over land or water,” says meteor expert Peter Jenniskens of the NASA Ames Research Center. Jenniskens operates a network of Cameras for All-sky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) near the Bay Area. “Data from the CAMS system should give us an answer [about landfall]. We’re analyzing the data now.” Stay tuned.
Note: Although Earth is nearing a stream of debris from Halley’s Comet, source of the Orionid meteor shower, this fireball was probably not an Orionid. The timing and direction of the meteor do not seem to match the Orionids.
Although we have a constitutionally protected right to free speech, legal trickery can still bypass this ostensibly impenetrable right. With the right lawyer, anyone can slap a bogus lawsuit on you for things you had every right to say publicly.
Matthew Inman, creator of humor website The Oatmeal, was a victim of what is called Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP). Targeted by a rival website, he was demanded to pay $20,000 for articles he had written that criticized them. He could either pay settlement fees, or face a lengthy court battle.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) helped Matthew fight off the legal threat. However, independent bloggers that find themselves in a similar predicament may not be able to afford the legal counsel necessary to defend their right to online free speech. They could be forced to pay settlement fees, remove articles, or even shut down their blog entirely.
The EFF and the Public Participation Project are calling on congress to support federal anti-SLAPP legislation called the PETITION act. A blogger that is threatened with a SLAPP lawsuit for legitimate online content can file a motion to get the case dismissed quickly, without having to pay legal fees.
Laws like this exist in twenty-eight states, but it’s important to have a federal law passed so that this becomes a non-issue for not only bloggers, but every person, every where.
Help stop anti-speech bullies. Tell Congress to protect free expression both online and off through the PETITION act – click here Image by ElectronicFrontierFoundation, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.
LIGHTBULB ERUPTION: Sunspot AR1593, now emerging over the sun’s northeastern limb, doesn’t look very impressive. Yet two days ago it unleashed a very impressive eruption. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded a glowing bulb of plasma more than 100,000 miles across on Oct. 14th:
The eruption occurred while AR1593 was still on the farside of the sun, so Earth was not in the line of fire. Next time could be different. AR1593 will spend the next ~12 days facing our planet, setting the stage for geoeffective blasts if the sunspot erupts again.
At least four faults within the Indo-Australian plate ruptured simultaneously in April 2012, resulting in two magnitude-8 earthquakes within two hours. (Red stars indicate the epicentres.)
Keith Koper, University of Utah Seismograph Stations
Geological stresses rending the Indo-Australian plate apart are likely to have caused the magnitude-8.6 and magnitude-8.2 quakes, which broke along numerous faults and unleashed aftershocks for 6 days afterwards, according to three papers published online today in Nature1–3.
Seismologists have suspected since the 1980s4 that the Indo-Australian plate may be breaking up. But the 11 April earthquakes represent “the most spectacular example” of that process in action, says Matthias Delescluse, a geophysicist at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and lead author of the first paper1. Worldwide, “it’s the clearest example of newly formed plate boundaries,” he says.
According to prevailing theories of plate tectonics, the Indo-Australian plate began to deform internally about 10 million years ago. As the plate moved northwards, the region near India crunched against the Eurasian plate, thrusting the Himalayas up and slowing India down. Most scientists think that the Australian portion forged ahead, creating twisting tensions that are splitting the plate apart in the Indian Ocean.
Delescluse and his team inferred the presence of these seismic stresses by modelling stress changes from shortly before the 2012 earthquakes. They found that two earlier earthquakes along the eastern plate boundary — the magnitude-9.1 tremor in 2004 that unleashed a massive tsunami across the Indian Ocean, and another quake in 2005 — probably triggered the 2012 event by adding to pent-up stresses in the plate’s middle region.
Gregory Beroza, a seismologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, says that the model is a likely explanation. “The 2004 and 2005 earthquakes by themselves would not have caused this other earthquake. There had to be other stresses,” he says.
Slip-sliding away
Most large earthquakes occur when two plates collide at their boundaries, and one plate slides beneath the other. By contrast, when plates or portions of plates slip horizontally along a fault line, this usually results in smaller, ‘strike-slip’ earthquakes.
However, the first 11 April event defied expectations as the largest strike-slip earthquake on record, and one of the strongest to occur away from any conventional plate boundaries.
In the second study2, researchers found that the accumulated stresses spread over the plate’s interior broke free in the first 11 April event, resulting in one of the most complex fault patterns ever observed. Unlike most earthquakes that shake along a single fault, this one ruptured along four faults, one of which slipped as much as 20–30 metres.
“This earthquake, it was a ‘gee whiz’,” says study author Thorne Lay, a seismologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Previous work had already identified multiple strike-slip faults for the magnitude-8.6 earthquake5, but no other study had analysed the slip amounts in such detail. Beroza says that Lay and his team “do a splendid job of picking apart this very important earthquake” in their paper.
Lasting impressions
Although much attention has focused on how the earthquakes played out, some researchers are also studying the after-effects of the giant tremor. In a third study3, scientists found that for six days following the event, earthquakes of magnitude 5.5 and greater occurred at almost five times their normal rate all around the world.
“Aftershocks are usually restricted to the immediate vicinity of a main shock,” says lead author Fred Pollitz, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. He says that the 11 April example should challenge conventional definitions of how soon and how close aftershocks can occur to large earthquakes.
“Every earthquake is important to study, but this earthquake is rather unique,” says Hiroo Kanamori, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. With so many unusual characteristics to examine, the 11 April earthquake sequence may continue for some time to expand researchers’ ideas of how earthquakes can occur.
18th October 2012
