I received a link today for a blog that reprinted the recent Willcox Range News story of giant cracks along Van Ness Road in Cochise County (The blog also reprinted the AZGS photo of the fissure at right, without any attribution or credit). Apparently, this is viewed as another piece of evidence of the impending doom facing the Earth. There is an active online community proposing that the Earth's magnetic poles are about to catastrophically shift, causing the crust of the Earth to move 90 degrees. There's also a connection somehow with Planet Zeta about to zoom through the solar system and further throw everything into turmoil.
For months, advocates of these ideas have been pointing to reports of cracks in the ground, along with other events, as evidence of the rapidly impending catastrophes. But they also track reports of 'earth cracks' that look in some cases to be similar to the earth fissures we have in Arizona. Cracks in Mexico and Chile could be caused by a variety of factors, but we know of extensive earth fissures in central Mexico that occur in similar geologic and hydrologic conditions as in Arizona. So, it's of value to see what we can learn from these other 'cracks'.
We are not endorsing the pole shift and other catastrophe theories (after all, as a state agency, AZGS must be in on the worldwide government conspiracy to hide this info from the public) but there are some folks out there dedicated to tracking down all the reports of earth cracks. That might be a useful resource.
