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You say that like anybody in Iceland is going to notice less than 4.0 earthquakes, Iceland is always shaking a little bit.

You know the other reactor built to withstand a Tsunami - Yeah, Fukushima, they said there would never be a Tsunami big enough to do it any harm. Was it true? No.

Karachi is exposed to tsunami's coming from the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. To say the geography bears no resemblance when the places mentioned are geographically nearby on the same coast is quite frankly absurd - India was hit by 11meter tsunami from the same earthquake that wiped away Pakistani towns and the whole area is seismically active.

Map of last 40 years earthquakes only:
http://ds.iris.edu/ieb/index.h...

See, for example, http://www.iris.edu/seismon/zo...

The scientific community is really coalescing around Python. I started working at UCSD-SIO in 2004 and sold my whole team on Python. In that time I've seen Python emerge as the accross the board standard in most research institutions. Although there's still heaps of legacy code written in Perl, C, Fortran, tcl, tcsh, insert language here, and there's always the holdout who will keep writing matlab code until you pry it out of his cold dead hands, so being a multilinguist helps.

You see some programming jobs related to seismics (which is a branch of geology) pop up here from time to time http://www.iris.edu/hq/employment

You'll find some oceaongraphy related programming jobs pop up here from time to time. Note some of them require going to sea. You'll find marine geophysicists do a lot of seismics and geology: http://unols.org/jobs/jobs/index.html

The life sciences are a completely different area than other sciences in the US. All of the life sciences are dealing with an explosion of new scientists--too many, in fact, to deal with--because of the surge in popularity of those fields. I've heard horror stories of postdocs working in bio labs for $40k/yr until they're 40 because there simply aren't enough positions for research scientists available for the huge amount of graduates that are out there. The life sciences seem to have become saturated with young minds.

Many other hard sciences, however, are not saturated. I am in the field of seismology. We are a relatively small community, and there is no lack of positions available. I see probably 5-10 recruiting e-mails a week for new grads and experienced scientists sent through the IRIS consortium's bulk mail system.

I had just been visiting the USArray site to watch the animations associated with the Japan Earthquake right before I read this article. It's a similar idea.

The thing is, they can't. As others have pointed out from actually reading TFA, the software is to help prioritize disaster relief efforts, not predict the unpredictable.

Let me know how your fortune telling pans out (even so-called weather prediction is actually just a forecast based on statistical models that generally do not hold up, hence why such "predictions" can only be made with a degree of certainty leading up to a probability of 0 (for a non-event) or 1 (for an event) at the time predicted.

Actually they are not predicting the event but are predicting the damage radius from the event. There is a damage zone where buildings look OK but really are dangerous to occupy, being able to predict how big this zone is would be very useful, you don't want to use a building that will fall down in the next after-shock as a shelter. The existing network has some serious latency, the last Earthquake I felt here in Michigan took an hour to get posted to IRIS.

IRIS maps them out for you.

Earthquakes look pretty typical to me, notoriety isn't the same thing as frequency or intensity. Also the glaciers have been melting for the entire Holocene, so that's really not unusual and to top it all off the polar ice caps have rebounded to normal levels. Some scientists have made a similar assertion to icecap melting leading to increased vulcanism;

They said there was no sign that the current eruption from below the Eyjafjallajokull glacier that has paralysed flights over northern Europe was linked to global warming. The glacier is too small and light to affect local geology. Ice cap thaw may awaken Icelandic volcanoes

that isn't the case here.

Please enlighten me. Where is seismic activity not a threat?

Ok let's not be paranoid here people, and apply a bit of the critical thinking class everyone took in college. Five Separate locations, with one reporting power problems. A bit of detective work using the following data will lead to the most simple and likely conclusion for geological activity.

Map of affected areas:
http://www.ilovebonnie.net/cablecuts.jpg

Map of undersea cables:
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/02/01/SeaCableHi.jpg

Seismic activity report for the past 30 days from the IRIS Consortium:
http://www.iris.edu/seismon/last30.html

Seismic activity report from the USGS NEIC (Shared with IRIS):
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/

Add a little third party analysis and study from when the first effects were seen:
https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Effects+of+Fibre+Outage+through+Mediterranean
"Bear in mind that the fact the outage did not start until around 6:00am, and re-routing traffic before the end of the day will both dilute the effect. Also the effects were not uniform on all hosts in a country."

Statement denying ship anchor involvements:
http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5hTi5wNwTD66nvWdTAQw20SaFI_GQ
"'A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time,' said the statement. The ministry added that the location, 5 miles from the port of Alexandria, was in a restricted area so ships would not have been allowed there to begin with."

Correlating the affected locations, dates and above analysis dates we can find the following.

For the January 30th time frame cuts, the following seismic activity was in the region on the following dates:
DATE LAT LON MAG DEPTH REGION
31-JAN-2008 00:01:23 39.97 33.27 4.8 10.0 TURKEY
29-JAN-2008 15:16:55 37.63 23.39 4.3 42.0 SOUTHERN GREECE
04-FEB-2008 22:15:41 38.13 21.95 4.9 30.8 GREECE

For the February 1st and (1st) 5th cut, the following seismic activity was in the region on the following dates:
DATE LAT LON MAG DEPTH REGION
02-FEB-2008 05:33:21 26.42 52.96 4.8 10.0 PERSIAN GULF

For the (2nd) February 5th cut, the following seismic activity was in the region on the following dates:
DATE LAT LON MAG DEPTH REGION
04-FEB-2008 08:26:54 -8.83 107.99 4.9 35.0 JAWA, INDONESIA
30-JAN-2008 11:03:20 -9.80 108.06 4.8 10.0 SOUTH OF JAWA, INDONESIA
30-JAN-2008 10:31:59 4.27 96.60 4.5 39.3 NORTHERN SUMATERA, INDONESIA
27-JAN-2008 12:48:00 -8.65 110.69 4.6 35.0 JAWA, INDONESIA
26-JAN-2008 06:08:02 1.08 97.23 4.5 35.0 NORTHERN SUMATERA, INDONESIA
24-JAN-2008 12:03:39 -3.95 101.63 5.3 35.0 SOUTHERN SUMATERA, INDONESIA
23-JAN-2008 19:23:34 -2.89 101.12 5.1 50.0 SOUTHERN SUMATERA, INDONESIA
23-JAN-2008 13:03:21 1.37 97.22 4.8 29.0 NORTHERN SUMATERA, INDONESIA

We can look at this data and conclude the simplest explanations is likely to be undersea damage associated with seismic activity. Rock slides and underwater stresses aren't limited to the specific time frame for an earth quake either. There are afters

..my ass

Well, according to this source http://www.iris.iris.edu/HQ/Bluebook/chapter5.magn itude.html, a 4.8 on the richter scale means an explosion in the 10 kiloton range. The number that I ahve see so far for the N. Korea explosion is 4.2. So, this was one big boom and almost certainly nuclear in nature (I had heard speculation that it was a just a lot of conventional explosives).

From here: a one killoton explosion is equivalent to about 4.0. Maybe it was just a butt load of dynamite and not nuclear at all.

I don't think all earthquakes cause tsunamis
A quick look at IRIS will confirm that, out of 334 earthquakes in the last 30 days, 6 had tsunami potential and there were no reported tsunami. I was quite interested in tsunami after the boxing day quake, and was preparing to help an open source project that fizzeled. The reality is there are enough siesmometers to analyse all ready, what's need is several fold,
one problem is geopolitical, many countries ignored the established warning systems because they were run by american or seen as run by americans.
Another problem is in many areas, there is either noway or it's difficult to get a warning from the emergency management center to the people fast enough or even at all in many parts of the world. If the Cascadia fault ruptured, there would be no way the people on our own west coast could be warned in time; imagine the problem in Indonesia's jungles islands.
and lastly there is what I call the "jaws syndrome" the locals just don't want to scare the tourists.

What I think is needed is a mesh network type of system where the warnings could be routed through multiple means even down to a radio system like the weather warning radios we can get. Remote villages near the coast could get one of these radios with solar cell recharged bateries, then use their own system localy.

Major earthquake exercise under way in Russian Far East

According to research conducted by the International Institute of Earthquake Prediction Theory and Mathematical Geophysics, there is at least a 30% probability of an earthquake with a 7.2-magnitude or higher in the area of Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands before mid-December.
The ministry's regional forces have been on alert since early August.

In looking at the map on the IRIS Seismic Monitor web site, it appears that the Kamchatka peninsula and the volcanic activity in Oregon may have something in common: both regions lie along the same fault line. The Indonesian tsunami, quakes near Taiwan and Japan, and recent earthquakes in Alaska and California all seem to lie along the same fault line.

http://www.iris.edu/seismon/

There was a huge earthquake (8.1 on Richter) south of Tasmania 3 days before. It made headlines http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000081&si d=aUIanL7wC_m8&refer=australia/ but fortunately no victims. However if you look at a map of tectonic plates http://geology.about.com/library/bl/maps/blplatesw topoehem.htm/ and compare it with the location of the earthquake http://www.iris.edu/seismon/ you can see it happened at the southern tip of the Indian plate. Now 3 days later on the middle of the eastern edge of the same plate another huge earthquake...looks like plate movement to me.