That Chilean earthquake ...

... really made a mess of things!

“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross told Bloomberg in an email. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 3 inches.”

Natural Disaster Juxtaposition - Haiti and Chile

Good read here. How does the world ensure that such things cannot happen again? Do we pick up Haiti by its bootstraps and ensure that everything meets acceptable codes as the country rebuilds? Where does Haiti find the money and appropriate manpower to enact such rebuilding efforts?

I cannot see Haiti being anything but a mess going forward for a long time. It's also possible, IMO, that Haiti may wind up falling into total chaos and governmental collapse. Who steps in then? The United Nations? The United States? I think we simply cannot afford to "take over Haiti" though I would hazard a guess that a majority of Haitians are hoping that we do that very thing.

Haiti as the 51st state anyone?

And before people start claiming "The end times are here!", I came across this page at the USGS yesterday. The earth is rocked by at least one quake of the magnitude that Chile experienced a year. Over a dozen rock the earth at the magnitude of what happened in Haiti ... so the sky isn't falling.