AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT…

Beginning on Groundhog Day, February 2nd, the snow storms began. Here at Tangled Oaks we saw only a few inches from that one. Then again on the 6th, we had another 3 inches. At that point we were feeling as if the winter was going somewhere ELSE, and we were being spared. Then along came the 10th, and that storm dumped 18 inches on us. Other areas had gotten more, though, so again we felt that Old Man Winter was looking down on us with a smile. Even the 16th brought only about an inch. The temperatures were in the upper 30's, and everything was beginning to melt. Wonderful! But it was not to last, because on the 25th a really significant storm came rolling out of the Midwest and covered everything within its reach with snow measured in FEET! All along the East Coast life came to a virtual standstill. Washington lawmakers took days off from their duties. Delaware and Maryland were under layers of the white stuff, and after two days of relentless accumulation, Tangled Oaks put up the white flag and even my husband stayed home and worked from his own computers. Everything was covered. Nothing was running. No one was venturing out. Even the birds were not looking for food, nor were the squirrels. Everything was a silent white snow scape, almost surrealistic.

Then it began: The roaring of snow blowers trying to win back driveways. All up and down the street neighbors began the work of removing about a foot of snow. One neighbor had her driveway done for her by others with blowers. The "zip" of snowmobiles in the empty fields reminded everyone that snow could also be fun. Skittles and Patches came out for business but ended up putting their little faces into the drifts and struggling to make those little legs navigate around the yard (ground clearance for a Shih Tzu is about 4 inches). Kids began coming out to play. My husband had me move all the stuff away from the garage door so that he could bring out the blower and begin work on the driveway. Once begun, the blower made short work of the driveway, all 800 feet of it. He also blew out an arc on the lawn to give the dogs a place for "business" that was navigable for those with 4-inch-high legs. They quickly put it to use. By the 27th it had begun to melt, and today, the 28th, only the lawn shows the extent of the storm. Everything else is largely melted off.

Here at Tangled Oaks we are happy to begin to see the ground again, but at least it is holding still. Not so in other locations where major earthquakes rattled the land on which people stood. The first quake was in Haiti, in the Caribbean, which received a jolt of over 6 on the Richter scale. Many of the buildings there were hardly more than shacks, and the jolt quickly turned them into piles of sticks. Since the quake occurred at night, people were INSIDE their homes, and when the houses fell, then landed ON THE PEOPLE. This contributed to a hefty death toll of approximately 200,000. Expecting aftershocks, dazed people rushed into the streets calling for help rescuing their families. Rescue efforts were made difficult because the debris blocked the way of equipment and machines that could do it. Survivors were digging with their bare hands at places where they believed their loved ones were buried.

Religious groups that had gone to Haiti with relief efforts quickly became rescuers. An orphanage had been badly damaged, and the church people had quickly begun saving the children's lives. In what they saw as a humanitarian gesture, the parishioners began taking those children to a neighboring country, the Dominican Republic, which had avoided being damaged by the quake. But instead of being grateful for this action, the rescuers were themselves jailed for kidnapping! All was now chaos as Haitian nationals felt threatened by the Americans, the country lay in ruins, and the result was that no one was getting any help! Finally all but two of the religious rescuers were released from jail, and Americans were working to have them released as well.

Meanwhile, back at Planet Earth, ANOTHER EARTHQUAKE was wreaking havoc. This time it was on the country of Chile in South America. Again, during the night, an 8.8 quake began tearing apart the country with a force many times stronger than the one that hit Haiti. Roads were literally ripped apart, cars thrown around as if they were Matchbox toys, and another dazed population was running out into the streets to avoid being hit by falling structures and to assess their losses. Now this time the TV stations began explaining how and why this earthquake was bigger than the one that hit Haiti using algorithms (no, not Al Gore-he didn't do earthquakes). Anyway, this quake was many multiple times stronger, and since Chile is on the Pacific Ocean, fear of Tsunamis began to grow. Could this earthquake lead to the same kind of disastrous waves that developed in 2006 off Indonesia? What areas could be affected? Would the residents there even know?

The news stations were quick to tell their audience that since that major tsunami, buoys had been set up to measure the water at different points in the ocean. Variations in these would inform scientists of the risk of a tsunami. The news showed visitors at a local hotel being removed and all locals being told to seek higher ground as well. As it happened, California, Japan, and parts of Hawaii were affected. The death toll for this earthquake IN CHILE was recorded at 708.

Since I wanted to know more about these two earthquakes so close together in time and hemisphere, I went to Google, which responded with the following:

Editor's note: Colin Stark, Doherty Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, is a geophysicist and geomorphologist whose research is focused on the effects of typhoons and earthquakes on the triggering of landslides and the erosion of mountain rivers.

Palisades, New York (CNN) -- About six weeks ago, a large earthquake devastated Haiti and killed over 200,000 people. Saturday, a huge earthquake releasing 500 times more energy, devastated Chile and killed hundreds. So why did the smaller earthquake kill so many more people? And why the sudden spate of disastrous earthquakes in the Americas?

No, the apocalypse is not coming. No, the two earthquakes are not linked in any way. And no, Pat Robertson, you can't blame the Devil or the French. The real answers, for those comfortable with science and the Enlightenment, are tectonics and poverty.

Of the many revolutions of the 1960s, the one that really mattered to geologists was the revolution of plate tectonics. Tectonics is the word geologists use to describe the process by which mountains move and rocks squeeze and crunch. In the sixties, new data from the research cruises and from earthquake seismometers led to the realization that tectonics makes mountains slide sideways. Earth scientists discovered that the Earth has a patchy skin of mobile plates a hundred miles thick and thousands of miles across, and that they move horizontally at a slow but irresistible pace. It's where they collide that our problems begin.

South America is a prime example of this process, one that geologists call "subduction." It's why we have the long chain of mountains called the Andes and it's why countries like Chile and Peru suffer giant, destructive earthquakes every few decades.

Off the coast of Chile is a tectonic plate called the Nazca Plate. Unseen by most, it has been inching its way towards the South American continent, and sliding underneath it, for well over a hundred million years. Since the day that Magellan first rounded Tierra del Fuego it has encroached by 130 feet in a roughly east-north-east direction. The Nazca plate doesn't slide under the South American plate in an orderly fashion though. It moves in fits and starts, sometimes sticking and sometimes slipping, sometimes here and sometimes there. Along the coast of Chile, patches can get stuck for over a hundred years. When they do finally slip, they go with a bang. All that squeezing energy is released in seconds and an earthquake happens.

On Saturday a patch roughly the size of Maryland came unstuck, unleashing one of the most powerful tremors ever recorded. Fifty years ago, a patch four times bigger and with an area of about 50,000 square miles, the size of Louisiana, slipped and triggered the Valdivia earthquake. Its magnitude has been estimated as at least 9.5, making it the largest earthquake of modern times.

Over millions of years, this tectonic squeezing has formed the Andes and raised the high desert known as the Altiplano. Elsewhere it has created the Alps, the Rockies, the Himalayas, and Tibet. It has also created and distorted some of the islands of the Caribbean, including Haiti.

So that's why some parts of the world suffer from big earthquakes that strike with irregular frequency, while other regions are seismically quiet: it all depends on where the plates meet and how fast they are running into each other. Knowing this helps us assess seismic risk and mitigate it. It helps us know where the strongest earthquake shaking will hit and roughly how often. Predicting when the shaking will hit is a much greater challenge, and geophysicists are working hard to reach that goal. In any case, prediction is not the real problem: poverty is.

Poverty is what ultimately kills most people during an earthquake. Poverty means that little or no evaluation is made of seismic risk in constructing buildings and no zoning takes place. It means that building codes are not written, and even if they do exist they are difficult, or impossible, to enforce. It means the choice between building robustly or building cheaply is not a choice at all.

Haiti is a tragic illustration of this. Weak building materials and poor construction standards share much of the blame for the grotesque numbers of fatalities, injured and internally displaced people.

Of course it's complicated. Earthquake shaking is a complex process and the chain of causation from earthquake source magnitude through infrastructural damage to human harm involves factors like the type of earthquake fault, its orientation, the hardness of bedrock or presence of wet soil, and so on. A lot also depends on the time of day the earthquake strikes in terms of how many people are inside buildings that could collapse. Population density, distance from the epicenter, and the depth of the rupture are the most important factors of all.

Nevertheless, those countries most at risk of seismic tragedy are not simply those on tectonic plate boundaries, but also those with the least money to spend on protecting themselves. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Colin Stark.

There you have it-the scientific explanation of why the two earthquakes had such different results. In the midst of these disasters, I had Email from an old friend in New Jersey who told me that a small quake had shaken his home recently. From this experience he had gained some perspective on what an earthquake on a larger scale might feel like. When I told my husband about it, we both remembered a similar incident back in New Jersey years ago when we felt a big "thud" and things fell off of shelves.