Padres/Blue Jays Affair Interrupted by Earthquake

One thing that I have learned from living in California is the awesome power of earthquakes.

During last night's Toronto Blue Jays/San Diego Padres affair, a 5.8 magnitude earthquake happened about 85 miles east of San Diego which was enough to have the ground rumblings at Petco Park.



The game was delayed for the safety of fans and players but was eventually completed with a 6-3 win for the Toronto Blue Jays and for the Padres it's just something to shake off.

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Remembering the 1989 World Series Earthquake

There has only been a few things that ever stopped a World Series game and the 1989 World Series was stopped by an earthquake.

The Oakland Athletics faced off against the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park in the "Battle of the Bay" and were set to play game three as the Athletics held a 2-0 series lead. The Loma Preita earthquake had another idea.

The game was scheduled for 5:15 pm pst and the ABC crew of Al Michaels, Tim McCarver and Jim Palmer were going through a highlight package of Game 2. The quake stuck at 5:04pm as a 7.0 on the Richter scale.

Most of the power was lost in the stadium, players/fans/coaches/and media members were running for cover as some of them had never experienced an earthquake while most of the fans started to chant "Play Ball." The only ongoing coverage on the ground was done by ESPN's Bob Ley who left his position in the press box at the top of the stadium and lucked out on the fact that the ESPN control room was being run on a diesel generator.

Ironically, the World Series helped save many lives since many people in the San Francisco Bay Area were either at the stadium or at viewing parties for the game. The Bay Bridge which connects Oakland to San Francisco had a section of it collapse but due to light traffic, the loss of life was less than what it would have been on a normal day.

In another lucky break, people within Candlestick Park were saved by another coincidence as the upper deck was reinforced by a seismic-strengthing project which was completed earlier in the year. Ironically for once, construction was ahead of schedule.

The Athletics went onto sweep the World Series from the Giants for their only title during their run to three straight World Series. However, the Athletics celebration was short-lived due to the earthquake and put a damper on a team that could be celebrated as one of the best ever. The 1989 World Series earthquake was one of the most memorable moments in World Series history and in the end, the World Series helped prevent many lives from being lost.

(Sources used for this story includes Wikipedia and ESPN)

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Gotta Love a Gimmick - John Tenta = Not a Fish

John Tenta had a lot of silly gimmicks associated with him while in the WCW. Whether it was "The Shark" or "Avalanche," they all just kind of ended up showcasing Tenta in a blue top, just like his WWF days as Earthquake (check out all the videos, the costumes barely change).

In this staged interview, Tenta goes off at WCW for all the gimmicks he's had to play. Things start to get good at around 1:39, but the best part is definitely at 2:22 where Tenta claims:
"I'm not the Shark. I'm not a Fish, I'm not an Avalanche, I'm a man, JOHN TENTA! A five hundred pound MAN!"

Good stuff indeed. Also I found a bonus video, the "birth" of Earthquake. It's really weird and involves Dino Bravo doing push ups with "random wrestling fan" Tenta on his back.

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The Oblate Spheroid, An Earthworm's View - Fossil Forest Find

Trees Stuck In Time - Image Credit: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The Oblate Spheroid, An Earthworm's View - Fossil Forest Find

Last week, geologists surveying a coalmine 250 feet below the current surface of the Earth's crust, came upon a preserved 300 million year old forest. Measuring over four-square miles in size, the discovery is the largest fossil forest ever to date (as mining continues, the size of the exposed fossil forest grows by the day).

The discovery of the fossil remains were in the ceiling of the coalmine and are unusual, in that the fossilized trees of a forest are still standing and preserved standing straight up, as if frozen in time.

This left lead study author Bill DiMichele, a pale botanist at the Smithsonian Institution, to observe, "We get to walk under it and look up at it," he said. "It's the earthworm's view."

Sunken Forest and Peat Cuttings - Submerged for thousands of years, and now very much visible, the Historic Sunken Forest and the Peat Cuttings on Tywyn Beach [Wales]. Not a lot is known why it is there but due to beach erosion more is showing than ever before. Image Credit: ria3 via Flickr Fossils

Excerpts from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch -

Geologists discover world's largest fossil forest in the ceiling of an Illinois coal mine
By Eric Hand - ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH - 04/24/2007

Illinois geologists have discovered the remains of one of the world's oldest tropical rainforests, preserved in the ceiling of a coal mine 250 feet below the surface.

The four-square-mile fossil forest — the largest find ever — is just south of Danville in Vermilion County, Ill., in the 300-million-year-old Herrin coal bed, a 6-foot-thick strip mined by a subsidiary of St. Louis-based Peabody Coal.

Plant fossils are common in coal beds. Coal, after all, is the compacted result of peaty plant material. But scientists are surprised by the size of this fossil bed, which they suspect came about because of a freak, fortuitous event: an earthquake that flooded and buried the forest. The vast extent of the fossil forest, which existed in a swampy time of giant dragonflies and tree ferns, has allowed the scientists to infer subtle ecological changes across the ancient landscape.

"This is almost as good as insects in amber," said Scott Elrick of the Illinois State Geological Survey and one of the authors of the study, which was published in the May issue of the journal Geology.
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These are the remnants of extinct plants from a geological period 300 million years ago, called the Carboniferous, when the world was covered in a riot of green. Illinois was near the equator and much warmer and wetter.

It was also a time before flowering plants had evolved, and so the plants would seem bizarre to modern eyes, said study co-author Howard Falcon-Lang, a geologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

"These are some of the earliest known rainforests to evolve on our planet," he said. "It was like something out of Jules Verne."

Giant tree ferns would have formed a lower canopy 30 feet high. Poking up through the ferns would have been 100-foot-tall clubmosses — asparagus-like poles that sprouted crowns full of spores. It was the age of insects, with 6-foot-long millipedes and dragonflies with yard-long wingspans.

The photo "Fosilillos" was taken next to the Bay of Biscay on the North coast near Bilbao, Spain – Image Credit: Mr. Theklan via Flickr Fossils
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An earthquake preserved all this for posterity. Elrick says it was akin to the 1811-12 earthquakes near New Madrid, Mo., which dropped a block of earth containing the Mississippi River, creating a natural dam that made Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee.

When the ancient earthquake hit, a sudden flooding in the submerged block killed the rainforest. Mud and silt rushed into the depression, preserving the stumps and logs in a layer that eventually became shale.

And that was the state of things until, 300 million years later, miners noticed shiny, funnel-shaped concretions that occasionally fell from the shale layer above them. They called them "kettlebottoms." But they were really fossilized stumps, whose roots fingered the peaty layer that ultimately became the coal seam the miners were working in.
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Lead study author Bill DiMichele, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian Institution, said the lateral extent of the fossils allowed him to notice subtle changes in species diversity as he did surveys.
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DiMichele is now doing inventories of ancient plants in two other actively mined Illinois coal seams, the Danville and the Springfield, which sit above and below the Herrin, respectively, and are separated by about a half-million years of geological time. Where most botanists do their work by walking through a forest, DiMichele takes elevators down mine shafts — to get beneath the forest.
Reference Here>>

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