Reply #45: If that's all it took to set it off

[NickB79]

Then this fault would have simply gone off a few days later than it did, maybe only a few hours later. Even assuming that the charges did set it off (and I in no way believe that), the massive amounts of energy in the fault had been building for millenia. Since the tectonic plates are always moving regardless of human activity, the earthquake would have occurred eventually, and with as much warning as we had with this one (none). In fact, if the plates were given more time to build up energy, the earthquake and resulting tsunami would have been even greater than what we saw on Sunday. Releasing the energy now would be far preferable to releasing even more energy 10 yrs from now. Given a few more years of buildup, there could have been twice as many dead from an even larger tsunami.