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- What on earth - or more accurately, what under the earth is causing a strange banging sound in west Seattle? The thumping noise is loud enough and has the ground vibrating enough to have people concerned and saying, what is that? None would go on camera to offer any kind of an explanation. Residents said the thumping stopped at about 1 AM Sunday.
- Seattle, Oct 12
This is a precursor to what we have described will be going on during that week of rotation stoppage, the moaning. Why a rhythmic thumping? Because you are hearing rock snap. Plates are not a solid cohesive piece. It's more like a pie crust, flaked, overlapping. This is why you can have rifts occur, like the St. Lawrence Seaway separating, or the Red Sea or the African Rift, or down along the Baja Peninsula between that and the land mass of Mexico. It pulls apart, likewise it folds under. This is why Hawaii is rising as the Pacific compresses, registering in one island a 2 foot rise suddenly. The pie flakes are folding under and creating more bulk. So when you have, like the West Coast, a great deal of resistance because the subduction is a broad stretch, you don’t have an earthquake that suddenly moves all those Pacific plates under the West Coast. You have places that snap and break that have the greatest tension. This has been recorded in human history as a precursor to earthquakes, this kind of whomping regularity. You hear a whomp when there’s a break and the ground literally vibrates. You feel it, and it’s vibrating the air which is why you hear it, and it is over a broad area. Why the lull and then a repeat every few minutes? Because the pressure is built up and then there is another snap. This is not a continuous affair. It’s like wave lengths of pressure and release, pressure building up and then another snap.