Shake it up, brotha, shake it up

As humans, we have bestowed upon ourselves the power to engineer great catastrophe - fire and flood, of course. But would you have thought earthquakes? Yo, man, we have the power to shake it up. Among the top 5 ways to cause a man-made earthquake, as Wired blogged in June, are dams, tall buildings and coal mines. And if that's not news enough and if you will excuse the pun, it seems the continent of Africa is splitting at the seams. Obviously not with laughter (as you would be at a joke like this). In fact, Momma Earth is constructing a new ocean for herself along the East African Rift - all the way from the tip of the Red Sea down to Mozambique. Of course, the fact that it will take ten million years to get the job done makes the whole thing less frightening. What's more worrying is if we will give this planet the next ten years (drat, my home loan tenure runs way beyond that).