By Joe Espiritu In the past weeks an earthquake of great magnitude hit Haiti a Caribbean country. Then later, another tremor just as devastating hit Chile, a South American country facing the Pacific. Recently some shocks had been felt in Taiwan and the Philippines. Somehow, those quakes are not related to one another as some religious adherents want to depict. They are just a part of geological activities that is continuously occurring since the formation of the earth. The earth began as a mass of stellar matter blown away from the sun. For several billion years it cooled and solidified into a planet 8,000 miles in diameter. Today, the very center of the earth a core of iron and nickel 4,400 miles in diameter has a temperature of 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit, slightly cooler than the sun. It is surrounded by a mantle of molten rock nearly 1,800 miles thick. The crust, which floats around the mantle, is proportionately thinner than an eggshell. Under the ocean, it is some five miles ...
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