At the AGU meeting in San Francisco, journalist Simon Winchester apologized to attendees for his March 2011 article that claimed the Tohoku Earthquake in Japan could trigger a daisy chain of temblors in North America.
Yet if you, Science 2.0 scientist, were to try and attend the AGU meeting as a journalist, you would be dismissed as 'just a blogger' - Winchester is, however, completely qualified to get a press pass despite knowing basically nothing and proving it in Newsweek.
"The Scariest Earthquake is Yet to Come," he wrote, and pointed to the Japan quake, an 8.8-magnitude February 2010 quake in Chile, and a 6.1-magnitude February 2011 quake in New Zealand as evidence there was one corner of the Pacific Ocean in British Columbia left unscathed (but whose time was coming), to the delight of hysterical conspiracy theorists everywhere.
But, really, who else reads Newsweek? If you did, you must have chuckled when he wrote that giant quakes ring the Earth like "a great brass bell, "triggering other mega-quakes in far-off regions".
Science Journalist Apologizes for Newsweek Quake Article by Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience
