Earthquakes - the toll is seismically ominous. Almost 12 months ago to the day of the horrific Sumatran earthquake and subsequent devastating tsunami, another earthquake claimed tens of thousands of lives in Bam, Iran. The Sumatran quake was caused by the slip of the Indian plate under the Burma plate, generating the tsunami that has claimed at least 150,000 lives; the true number will never be known. The Bam quake was caused by the a similar slippage or jolt betweeh the Arabian and Eurasian plate.

In between these two significant events, significant because of the huge concentrations of lives lost and livelihoods wiped out, this has been a year of extraordinary seismic activity. Quakes claimed lived in Morocco, Japan, Mt.St.Helens in Washington began to smoulder once again, and there were other non-lethal quakes along the San Andreas fault. Off Tasmania, shortly before Christmas there was a quake measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale.

One has to go back to 1906 to find a similar period of seismic activity, when not only the San Franciscan disaster occurred, but also a quake measurning 8.2 between Columbia and Ecuador, St.Lucia in the Carribean, Formosa, the eruption of Vesuvius in Italy killing thousands and finally a quake in Chile in which 20,000 people perished.

Could these quakes across the planet somehow be connected? Scientists used to pour scorn on such ideas, but now there is a gathering of circumstancial evidence that is making them think again. Recently they noticed a correlation between a huge earthquake in Alaska in 2002, and an increase in geyser activity in Yellowstone park - thought before to entirely unconnected.

To understand what is going on we need to go right back to the beginning some 225 million years ago, when there was only one land mass, a supercontinent called Pangea, from the Greek meaning 'all lands'. Something happened, some collossal geological event that forced the supercontinent to break apart:

The earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, did Gondwanaland exist for all this time only to break up suddenly 225 million years ago? What violent event could have caused such a break-up that we are still feeling the consequence of today as the continents collide and slip under and over one another with such devastating consequences? Some argue that perhaps there have many many Gondwanalands, with the landmass breaking up and periodically colliding into one big land mass again before going on their seperate parts. Nobody knows.

What is known is the violence of the earths history. Some argue that the extinction of the dinosaurs was triggered by two events, the meteorite that slammed into Yucatan, Mexico and a surge in volcanic activity, possibly the result of the meteorite impact that exacerbated the already perilous situation, as Vulcan stirred his fiery forges in the bowels of the earth. In Yellowstone park, three colossal explosions have occured in the last 2.1 million years, with a frequency of 600,000 - 800,000 years.

Why this periodicity? Nobody really knows, but it should remembered that plate tectonics, the science of continental drift as a theory, has only been around for forty odd years. We still do not understand the true nature of what happens beneath the earth. Could there be a connection between seemingly seperate events on the other side of the world, relationships between the continents that lie beyond our current knowledge? A seismic butterfly effect? With the surge in geological activity that we have seen this last twelve months, it cannot be ruled out. Activity that has seen such devastating loss of life over the last twelve months.

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