Crust Shift? Earthquakes Start in Southern Africa August 5, Johannesburg, 5.5, Yesterday South of Jo'burg, 4.6. Connected to the Hapgood-Einstein Papers?

 Another earthquake has struck South Africa in less than three weeks, this one measuring 4.6 on the Richter Scale, as reported by the US Geological Survey (USGS).

The quake struck around 12km (7.5 miles) west of Orange Farm (south of Johannesburg) in Gauteng, around 01:14 CAT early Friday morning.

The epicentre of this morning’s quake was closer to Johannesburg than that of the 5.5 magnitude Orkney quake 17 days ago. Orkney lies in the North West province, approximately 170km (106 miles) south west of Johannesburg, whereas Orange Farm lies approximately 45 km (28 miles) south of the city.

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The August 5 quake — the country’s most powerful in more than 40 years – killed a 31-year-old homeless man who died after a brick wall collapsed on him. Around 34 miners were injured by that earthquake, and more than 400 houses were destroyed. 

South Africa  is not “earthquake prone” like the Pacific Rim or the California Fault. It is on a large tectonic plate that extends  fromt the Arabian plate through the East African Rift System (EARS) to halfway between the South American and African continents.

This is one of the geologic wonders of the world, a place where the earth’s tectonic forces are presently trying to create new plates by splitting apart old ones.

The thin line coming out of the Arabian Plate into the  middle of Africa is part of the Rift Valley.

In simple terms, a rift can be thought of as a fracture in the earth’s surface that widens over time, or more technically, as an elongate basin bounded by opposed steeply dipping normal faults.

Geologists are still debating exactly how rifting comes about, but the process is so well displayed in East Africa (Ethiopia-Kenya-Uganda-Tanzania) that geologists have attached a name to the new plate-to-be; the Nubian Plate makes up most of Africa, while the smaller plate that is pulling away has been named the Somalian Plate. These two plates are moving away form each other and also away from the Arabian plate to the north. The point where these three plates meet in the far region of Ethiopia forms what is called a triple-junction. However, all the rifting in East Africa is not confined to the Horn of Africa; there is a lot of rifting activity further south as well, extending into Kenya and Tanzania and Great Lakes region of Africa.

During the course of his life, the great physicist Albert Einstein received many unsolicited papers with accompanying requests for Einstein’s opinion. As Einstein himself wrote most of these theories contained little scientific worth. However, in the mid 1950’s (Einstein-Hapgood Papers) Einstein received an original idea which he said “electrified me”.

 The theory was by Charles H. Hapgood and James H. Campbell, and it later appeared in the YALE SCIENTIFIC MAGAZINE. The title of the paper was the “Effect of Polar Ice on the Crust of the Earth”. Einstein later wrote the preface to the first edition of Hapgood’s book entitled the EARTH’S SHIFTING CRUST… (Earth Crust Displacement) Hapgood proposed that the accumulated centrifugal force generated by the unsymmetrical ice packs of the poles caused enough momentum to displace the earth’s crust. …This paper is not primarily concerned with the ’cause’ of the displacement, but rather with the results upon human populations following the event.

[[Hapgood locates the Hudson Bay 60 degrees North and 83 degrees West as the site of crust formerly over the North Pole. (continue here…)

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