There have always been earthquakes like this, but as population and infrastructure increase they do more damage. 7+ earthquakes in the open areas will be hardly noticed, however many countries (especially china and south america) are building more into these areas as their populations grow and industry expands so these once harmless earthquakes begin to seem more aggressive. Also the number of seismic stations has increased from 350 in 1931 to several thousand today so every earthquake anywhere gets recorded and various stats taken given the views of more earthquakes, lesser developed countries in the past like in asia, africa and south america would not even have had the equipment to measure any earthquakes and when they happened there is little chance that anyone outside of the country would have heard about it. Some of the biggest earthquakes (8-9) occured 50-100 years ago and the modern ones only seem more destructive as we see a lot of damage from poorly contructed infrastructure (cost cutting in most non westen countries) and ultimately large number of casualties.
We all know (or should know) that earthquakes are not new occurrences, they've happened in world history before and in some cases on a higher magnitude scale.
The media isn't over-reporting this. It IS news when scores or hundreds or thousands of people die as a result of earthquake (or other disaster).
To that point, most recently mother Earth has been kicking our asses.
You pin it on population and infrastructure creep...:dunno: Isn't the score still the same though?
You may say she's kicked our asses before blah, blah, blah....but that doesn't diminish my simple point of us getting our asses kicked now.
