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Some estimates for sea level rise this century come in at about two meters. An exponential process might lead to five meters: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/2/2/024002/fulltext

For the maximum possible sea level rise (expected under BAU carbon dioxide emissions eventually) 80 meters is calculated here: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

Of course they will. However, there wasn't even a magnitude 6 earthquake on May 21st anywhere in the world, there were no reports of anyone being "raptured", and it was essentially a slow news day.

If it was Katla that erupted, the bigger one next door to Eyjafjallajokull, then it could be something impressive. It has been historically quite an explosive volcano and would likely produce ash plumes much worse than Eyjafjallajokull. Grimsvotn? Pah. It erupted a few years ago (1996) and no one but Icelanders and geologists took much interest. At best there might be some impressive jokulhlaups that will take out some bridges and roads, but Icelanders are already smart enough not to live downstream. Who knows? Maybe this eruption of Grimsvotn will turn out to differ from the historical pattern it has followed, but it's doubtful.

It won't stop the crazies from grasping at straws, but, seriously, there are volcanoes erupting somewhere in the world every day, and it wouldn't surprise me if there was an eruption somewhere else in the world that was actually worse by some measures.

I further give you the point that I might be biased - I come from a place that was a fallout hotspot after Chernobyl.

Well there you go. I'm very sorry for what happened. The fact of the matter is that we can't base political decisions upon emotion. We have to look at facts.

There have only been a small handful of deadly nuclear accidents in the world. All of them took place outside the United States. Two of them (Chernobyl and Mayak) were due to sheer incompetence and were completely avoidable. One of them was due to a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the tsunami that followed, and subsequent massive aftershocks that continue to this day . In all the years of nuclear energy production, there have been several thousand deaths. It's unfortunate for those people, but a pretty damned good safety record in the grand scope of things.

Not a single death to the public in the United States. Three Mile Island is the one incident that a lot of anti-nuclearites like to cite, but it wasn't a disaster by any means. Nothing really happened. A core meltdown occurred, but so what? People like to talk about the word meltdown like it's some evil thing that will destroy the world, but it's just what happens when a cooling system fails. The walls of the facility were built so that radioactive material wouldn't escape (and it didn't), and the staff were competent enough to stop the meltdown (and they did). There have been no deaths and the cancer rate in the area directly surrounding the plant has not changed as a result of the incident.

So yes, nuclear power has an incredible safety record. The Chernobyl disaster was extremely unfortunate, but it would not have happened if controlled by the United States. Mayak was extremely unfortunate, but it would not have happened if controlled by the United States. Fukushima was extremely unfortunate, but look at what the fuck kind of stress that place is under. It was built thirty years ago to withstand an 8.0 earthquake. It mostly contained the damage after a 9.0 earthquake but then the emergency generators were flooded by the tsunami. That is a result of poor design, and so the disaster could theoretically have been avoided. New reactors will not be designed as such because we saw what happened. We will learn from that mistake, and nuclear power will only continue to become safer.

Perhaps you could've slightly improved your piece of 'code' before slashing it here, but then anything get plastered around here these days...

Google maps DEM (Digital Elevation Model) is based on SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) data over most of the globe. You can download the original processed data from NASA and apply it to any GIS software of your choice.

Then with a single click of the elevation tool you can raise or lower the global sea level by x meters of your choice. Was playing around with this 7 years ago when the data came out. Now bored of it.

Like some have pointed out already, the flood fill algorithm is a bit pointless since tsunamis don't behave like flood filled algorithms. A more informative map would simply color areas more than a certain height green showing areas that are definitely out of reach of a tsunami of certain height. Then people could at least see where its relatively safe by inputting the maximum wave height. With large tsunamis we do not even have scientific data on how far inland they could actually travel. Some geologists for example speculate that a super tsunami might have swept across the whole of the Australian continent.

This was an unprecedented earthquake and subsequent tsunami. A once in a millennium occurrence?

The sea wall in fron of the damaged plant was designed for a tsunami of about 6 meters in height (see here)

It seems that the probability for a violent tsunami, of which the wave height exceeds 5 m, is highest along the Pacific coast in central Japan, reaching a value of 41 per cent.

Globally, there are about 5 recorded tsunamis a year with one over 10 meters high every few years: see page 100

Development of Sea Level Rise Scenarios for Climate Change Assessments of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

... subsurface water and hydrocarbon extractionâ" are especially problematic in Asian delta regions where population densities and agricultural production are greatest and most critical for socioeconomic reasons. In most cases, the rates of subsidence in deltaic environments, human-induced or even naturally occurring, are many times greater than the rates of historical or projected eustatic sea level rise expected with climate change.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2010/1165/downloads/OF10-1165pages1-10.pdf

The real danger comes not from the seas rising but from the land sinking.

Look, burning coal spews some radioactive materials around. But so does burning anything, and there is radioactive material in ordinary rock and soil at varying concentrations. There's a good summary here of the radioactive content of raw coal and the residue from burning, coal ash, which has higher concentrations (because the less volatile radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium, and potassium tend to stay behind during burning). I don't see much basis for alarm.

Naturally radioactive materials exist in practically everything, including within our own bodies and our food in essential nutrients (e.g., potassium and carbon). Every time people talk about the effect of artificial radioactive materials generated from nuclear power getting into the environment and exposing people to more radioactivity than normal, this old yarn about the radioactive material released from coal is trotted out. Oh, coal is so much worse. How can it be relevant when, for example, coal doesn't contain radioactive iodine in any significant concentration, it doesn't contain radioactive cesium, and doesn't contain an especially high level of radioactivity compared to materials we deal with every day? Can you detect the radioactive fallout from innumerable coal-burning plants all around the Earth? No. There's nothing exceptional about it in either quantity or concentration. It's in the background. It's easier to detect the soot, SO2, mercury and other products -- those are the real risks, chemical risks, not radioactivity from coal. Yet if you go looking for radioactive cesium in, say, the sediments deposited over the last century in the bottom of a lake almost anywhere in the world, you'll see a great big spike in the 1940s-1960s from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, and then another big spike in the 1980s from Chernobyl. And while I don't think the event at Fukushima will have an effect anywhere near the widespread effects of Chernobyl (different mix of isotopes released -- e.g., not much strontium-90 from Fukushima, not a huge atmospheric plume), it's grossly misleading to imply that the effect of burning coal is on par or worse by any sane measure in terms of radioactivity. Burning coal doesn't make an area unsafe to occupy or eat certain types of food from for generations. There are places in Europe well away from Chernobyl where it still isn't safe to eat certain foods because of strontium-90 contamination.

Look, there's a big, coal-burning power plant ~45km to the north of Fukushima along the coast. It has big piles of dirty, black, dusty coal, and generates plenty of fumes from its smokestacks (although the photos suggest they aren't very obvious). It's right on the coast and I'd be surprised if it wasn't affected by the tsunami. Why haven't we heard anything about it in the news? Because it doesn't matter. You could burn it to the ground, blow it up, bulldoze it, crash a plane into it, bomb it, hit it with a meteorite, erupt a volcano under it, flatten it with an earthquake, swamp it with a tsunami, whatever, and it wouldn't make a speck of a difference except in the immediate area (say <1km radius). And within a few years of cleaning up the site you could probably build a playground and a school on top of it if you really wanted to, and it would be perfectly safe.

Which type of risk do you think the local people want to have near them? A nuclear power plant like Fukushima or a coal-fired power plant? Yes, worst-case scenarios are very rare, and yes the ordinary, day-to-day, undesirable chemical output from a coal-fired power plant is potentially worse than a nuclear plant in terms of health effects and effects on infrastructure (e.g., acid rain), but it can be mitigated substantially by simply having appropriate emissions controls on the smokestacks. However, if a worst-case scenario ever does un

Coal releases tons of radiation

Please provide links to some scientific study calculating the damages to human health caused by the radiation released by coal plants. You would require something like that, if some greenpeacer told you that living near a nuclear power plants is dangerous for your health.

and kills miners

As uranium does. Moreover, miners know the dangers they face, are trained and equipped to avoid them, and are indemnified for it. Families living around nuclear power plant aren't.

We're running out of oil

That's true, but then uranium is a scarce resource too, and alternatives exist.

as well as being horribly dirty (there is no such thing as clean coal).

There is no such thing as clean spent nuclear fuel.

Wind isn't always blowing or in the right place, sun isn't always shining or in the right place, water isn't always available for dams or in the right place and kills huge aquatic populations, not all of the population lives where tidal generators are a possibility...

1) That's why we have power distribution grids. They're needed for nuclear power plants too, because they constantly produce power even during the night, when nobody wants it.
2) For the birthday paradox, there will always be some renewable energy source readily available for any spot on the Earth.

we're running out of options if we want electricity.

No, we aren't. Many countries run perfectly fine without nuclear power at all. The US only get 20% of their power from nuclear.

Nuclear is great for providing a base generating capability, and there's not a whole lot else right now that's feasible or economical, especially considering the amount of nuclear waste we're planning on storing under a rock in Nevada.

If nuclear power is so "economical", then why does it depend on state subsidies to be set up?
The DOE says that nuclear power is the second most expensive power source, after solar power. It ranks below biomasses and wind.

Hell, the Fukushima reactor mostly survived the 4th largest earthquake since 1900

1) "Mostly surviving"? You can't "mostly don't get" cancer. Also, the events are still running - you'd better wait until it's over before drawing a final balance, otherwise you'll end up doing like the AIEA: a few hours after the accident, they stated that nothing had happened, attached a comfortably low "number" to the accident, and kept inviting people to build more nuclear power plants, which is their job. Then, day after day, they had to revise their position to accommodate their propaganda to the ever-worsening reality, thus giving sledgehammer blows to their credibility.
2) The perceived magnitude at Fukushima was lower than the one at the epicenter.
3) Nuclear apologist told us, until yesterday, that nuclear power plants were able to withstand any eartquake. It turned out (in case there was need to...) that such affirmation was false, and fruit of either arrogance or bad faith.

And that's a 40 year old design. We're talking the same year that the Intel 4004 was released. That's a hell of a testament to the design of modern nuclear power plants that are more efficient and even safer.

Then you have to ask yourself, why is a 40 year old power plant still operating? That's exactly because nuclear power is so expensive that once you managed (with the government's money) to build a power plant, you still have to milk every single watt of power out of it if you want to profit.
Also, every single time a nuclar accident happens, we're told that it was because that particular nuclear power plant was outdated, belonged to the previous generation, its maintaine

We all use electricity. And we're using more and more of it as time goes on. Coal releases tons of radiation and kills miners as well as being horribly dirty (there is no such thing as clean coal). We're running out of oil and it pollutes. Wind isn't always blowing or in the right place, sun isn't always shining or in the right place, water isn't always available for dams or in the right place and kills huge aquatic populations, not all of the population lives where tidal generators are a possibility... we're running out of options if we want electricity. Nuclear is great for providing a base generating capability, and there's not a whole lot else right now that's feasible or economical, especially considering the amount of nuclear waste we're planning on storing under a rock in Nevada.

Hell, the Fukushima reactor mostly survived the 4th largest earthquake since 1900. And that's a 40 year old design. We're talking the same year that the Intel 4004 was released. That's a hell of a testament to the design of modern nuclear power plants that are more efficient and even safer.

Yes, shit happens. Fukushima failing is horrible. But it's like being afraid of flying when you're perfectly ok with riding your bike, even though you're much more likely to die.

It's not "nuclear apologists". It's realists who want to maintain our standard of life, and understand what acceptable risks are. Life is all about risk management, and flipping out about the word "nuclear" is very poor risk management.

What? The USGS states that the depth was 49.0 km, and that's not even all that particularly deep. Some of the quakes listed for the past few days were much deeper.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.php

[Shrug] If it wasn't for subduction-related tectonics and the resulting earthquakes the islands of Japan wouldn't exist in the first place.

If there's one lesson worth learning on this planet we call home, it is that you have to be prepared to deal with what nature dishes out, because sometimes she's pretty brutal. As it is, Japan does a VERY good job of this when it comes to earthquakes, probably the best job of preparing for earthquakes of any country in the world. It's hard to see what a difference this makes, but it does. An enormous difference. It is pretty grim to say that "only" a couple tens of thousands of people may have been killed in the recent earthquake, but the reality is, had the same event happened in most other countries of the world we would probably be talking about over 100 thousand killed. Skeptical? Compare to the 2004 tsunami and earthquake in Indonesia. Compare to other historical earthquakes. It isn't much of a consolation for the people who have lost so much, and of course there is room for improvement, but a lot of people that are struggling with the situation in Japan would probably be dead if it wasn't for the substantial investment Japan has made in earthquake and tsunami preparedness over the years. I think they understand Gaia pretty well, even if she is in a crabby mood at the moment.

Here. Happy now?

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0002ksa.php

The USGS is like a million times better.
    Here's the link: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0002ksa.php
and here's the Tsunami info:
    http://ptwc.weather.gov/ptwc/text.php?id=pacific.2011.04.07.143955

14:32:41 & 14:32:00

about 100km apart (caveat not so good at spherical trig in head calculations)

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/region/Asia_eqs.php

What looks 'better' varies by person, but in general anything goes when making an image beautiful to the eye. The Russians are using more infrared bands than most NASA images do, and their images have a lower sun angle. Both of these bring out details in the imagery.

If you want to see more images taken in infrared bands, take a look at the Earth as Art exhibit hosted by the USGS. (NASA is credited on some of them because it was involved with the satellites. And for full disclosure, I should mention that I personally created many of the images in the EaA exhibits.) We chose and created these pictures for aesthetic quality -- we wanted them to look good rather than be useful for science. But there are no photoshop tricks. Some of them are just using wavelengths of light that you cannot see with human eyes.

I think the point of this entire press release by the Russians is that they are savvy about public relations, and had enough foresight to distribute images that looked good instead of images with immediate scientific value. Not every government agency adopts that strategy -- we often try to wow the scientists first and the public later.

"In general this is not true. "

actually it is.
and it has nothing to do with pollution, uranium occurs naturally in the earths crust, in coal it tends to be a little more concentrated, it's even in seawater though at very low concentrations. it has absolutely nothing to do with pollution, if humans had never existed there would still be uranium and thorium in coal.

"We are talking about power plants that go rogue, explode or melt. "

averaging out or are you assuming that every plant will explode sooner or later?

"But the reason might be that our coal plants filter everything out of the smoke)."

ho ho ho
someone's been spinning you a merry tale.
Only about 80% of the ash is captured, the rest goes into the air, particularly volatile materials are going to escape completely and even the ash that's captured just gets buried in landfills or similar where it's heavy metals can leech into the groundwater.

"I can not find a singel other source supporting that."

you didn't try very hard then
a google for "coal ppm uranium" yielded these on the first 2 pages.

"Some coal deposits contain uranium concentration levels as high as 1000 ppm. "
http://www.magnumuranium.com/s/Uranium.asp

"Some trace elements in coal are naturally radioactive. These radioactive elements include uranium (U), thorium (Th), and their numerous decay products, including radium (Ra) and radon (Rn). Although these elements are less chemically toxic than other coal constituents such as arsenic, selenium, or mercury, questions have been raised concerning possible risk from radiation."
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html

Historical analytical data from the period 1992 to 1995 indicate that the fly ash in these deposits contains between 92 and 154 ppm U3O8. The bottom ash contains similar values. These are similar to those in a number of in situ leach type uranium deposits under evaluation in various parts of the world.â
http://enochthered.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/uranium-extraction-from-coal-waste/

Worse Than Chernobyl: When the Fukushima Meltdown Hits Groundwater

by Tom Burnett

Fukushima is going to dwarf Chenobyl.The Japanese government has had a level 7 nuclear disaster going for almost a week but won’t admit it.

The disaster is occurring the opposite way than Chernobyl, which exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactions are getting worse. I suspect three nuclear piles are in meltdown and we will probably get some of it.

If reactor 3 is in meltdown, the concrete under the containment looks like lava. But Fukushima is not far off the water table. When that molten mass of self-sustaining nuclear material gets to the water table it won’t simply cool down. It will explode – not a nuclear explosion, but probably enough to involve the rest of the reactors and fuel rods at the facility.

Pouring concrete on a critical reactor makes no sense – it will simply explode and release more radioactive particulate matter. The concrete will melt and the problem will get worse. Chernobyl was different – a critical reactor exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactor cores are still melting down. The ONLY way to stop that is to detonate a ~10 kiloton fission device inside each reactor containment vessel and hope to vaporize the cores. That’s probably a bad solution.

A nuclear meltdown is a self-sustaining reaction. Nothing can stop it except stopping the reaction. And that would require a nuclear weapon. In fact, it would require one in each containment vessel to merely stop what is going on now. But it will be messy.

Fukushima was waiting to happen because of the placement of the emergency generators. If they had not all failed at once by being inundated by a tsunami, Fukushima would not have happened as it did – although it WOULD still have been a nuclear disaster.Every containment in the world is built to withstand a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake; the Japanese chose to ignore the fact thata similar earthquake had hit that same general area in 1896.

Anyway, here is the information that the US doesn’t seem to want released. And here is a chart that might help with perspective.

Making matters worse is the MOX in reactor 3. MOX is the street name for ‘mixed oxide fuel‘ which uses ~9% plutonium along with a uranium compound to fuel reactors. This is why it can be used.

The problem is that you don’t want to play with this stuff. A nuclear reactor means bring fissile material to a point at which it is hot enough to boil water (in a light-water reactor) and not enough to melt and go supercritical (China syndrome or aChernobyl incident). You simply cannot let it get away from you because if it does, you can’t stop it.

The Japanese are still talking about days or weeks to clean this up. That’s not true. They cannot clean it up. And no one will live in that area again for dozens or maybe hundreds of years.

© 2011 Hawaii News Daily

Dr. Tom Burnett is a frequent contributor to the Hawaii News Daily.

From interest I looked up a list of big earthquakes when the Japan one hit: USGS list - it was the fourth largest in the world since 1900. At a rough guess the chance of such a large quake hitting the area of the reactors would be lower than 1/1000, although the pacific rim is a very active area anyway. Right ballpark though.

Just chipping in because I happen to have looked this up already.

Keep in mind that the the Russian design (Wikipedia says there still are 11 of them going in Russia as of 2010) is far more dangerous than anything in the developed world and that the operators were taking extraordinary risks with the reactor at the time of the accident. Finally, dosages were higher because civilians weren't warned and evacuated for a significant time after the start of the accident. So yes, I can brush off however many deaths Chernobyl ends up causing precisely because it was an insane situation that has never held at commercial nuclear power sites anywhere in the developed world.

Ah, because they lied or underestimated the severity of the situation, you can blow it off. Brilliant deductive reasoning there. First of all, the number of peoples in proximity to a nuclear accident has absolutely effect on the amount of radiation released. Secondly, they lied about TMI too: at first, they assured the public there were no radiation releases (lie), then they said the radiation was released purposely to control pressure (2 more lies). Ah, so right there I have proved you wrong. You're are terrifically naive to think that no one lies in the developed world. The only thing that prevented TMI from being a Chernobyl was that there was a concrete encasement protecting the reactor, and that structure was not breached. But there was no natural disaster that caused it... it was a faulty valve and human error. What if there was an earthquake right underneath one of our safely designed domestic nuclear plants?. I don't think its so far a stretch of the imagination that an earthquake might cause breaches in concrete.

Had the Yucca Mountain facility been built, it would have been already filled more than twice by the toxic nuclear waste we now have in the US.

We can reduce the volume of waste. We can recycle nuclear fuel rods. And we can increase the size of Yucca Mountain's volume.

You don't read very well. That ship sailed. Its too late for Yucca, as bad an idea as it was to begin with. As I said, even if we had built it, and even if we had reduced the volume of waste, it would still be full. But we never even got there... the vast majority of our nuclear waste is distributed accross the eastern seaboard where most of our nuclear power plants are.... just sitting there in containment pools. Forget the reactors for a moment, I wonder how much of an earthquake one of those pools can withstand before they breach and radiated water seeps into aquifers and water supplies, emptying the pools, and opening the real possibility of nuclear catastrophe with absolutely no containment whatsoever. I know what you're gonna say "ooo... scary earthquake fear mongering!"

Seismicity of the United States
Location of reactors in the United States

At some point someone is going to have to actually pay attention to the very real possibilities of something going very wrong somewhere right in our backyard. I'd rather they did it sooner than later, and I'd rather they not be you, so you can just keep on being a cold bastard and not caring about the ridiculous amount of suffering that just a few nuclear incidents have caused just so you can avoid worrying about your electric bill.

I am not fully against nuclear power, but I am fully against this attitude that we've done nuclear power right and we continue to do it right, and the possibility of nuclear incident is small. There is just an immense amount of myopia involved with being pro-nuclear energy. I applaud these Americans favoring a moratorium, and I am releaved so many actually care. Bravo for caution.

Oh, sorry, after looking at this, I think you may just be mixing up the USGS Instrumental Intensity scale with Shindo? http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/shakemap/global/shake/c0001xgp/ Even so, it's clear from this that the worst shaking wasn't in Chiba.

Geologists also believed a 9.0 earthquake virtually impossible from the location where the Japanese earthquake happened: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/japan-earthquake-surpise/

I don't really buy that. It was a subduction zone. All subduction zones are capable of huge quakes. The article seems to imply that because there had been no quake bigger than 7.5-8.0 from the area in recorded history, scientists didn't believe anything bigger was possible. The problem with that is these huge 9+ quakes typically have intervals of centuries or millenia. So unless you have several thousand years of good records, you're on shaky ground (no pun intended) predicting a huge earthquake cannot happen at a portion of a subduction zone.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the moment magnitude scale used to classify earthquakes is a measure of the energy released by the quake. The energy released is roughly the amplitude of movement of the two chunks of land along the fault multiplied by the surface area (m^2, not area at the surface) of the fault which slipped. Slip-strike faults like the San Andreas have two chunks of land moving past each other sideways. They extend only a few tens of km down into the ground because that's how thick the Earth's crust is. Essentially they're long and skinny. So they only way they can generate huge magnitudes is if a very long segment of the fault (several hundred km, probably several thousand for a 9.0) were to slip. This is (1) unlikely to happen - one segment of the fault is likely to slip before the other thus making several smaller quakes instead of one huge one, and (2) would distribute the energy of the earthquake over a much larger land surface area, blunting its impact on any one area.

A subduction zone quake OTOH involves one plate moving underneath the other. This results in a broader contact area, sometimes a hundred km in breadth or more. A shorter length of the fault slipping involves a larger area because the area which slips is shaped more like a square or broad rectangle, rather than a long, thin rectangle. As a result, a shorter segment of the fault slipping has more energy released, that energy is directed at a smaller land surface area, and because of the broader contact area it's easier for a longer segment of the fault to slip. The segment of earth which slipped in the 1960 Chilean quake (9.5) is estimated to be 800 km long. That'd be like a California earthquake stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which is just inconceivable due to the relatively small depth of the San Andreas fault.

People have been predicting a big California earthquake for many years. Yes, it'll happen at some point but if you're really worried about it then don't live in California (or the Pacific Northwest).

The most dangerous area for an earthquake in the continguous U.S. is in the south-central Midwest. That area has produced the largest earthquake in recorded U.S. history (8.0), and because of the infrequency of earthquakes there the building construction codes and preparedness are woefully inadequate. I live in Southern California which has a reputation as a hotspot for earthquakes, but you could not pay me enough to live around St. Louis. Well, maybe if I got to design and build my own house, and it came with its own drinking water well and power generation facilitie

Geologists also believed a 9.0 earthquake virtually impossible from the location where the Japanese earthquake happened: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/japan-earthquake-surpise/

I don't really buy that. It was a subduction zone. All subduction zones are capable of huge quakes. The article seems to imply that because there had been no quake bigger than 7.5-8.0 from the area in recorded history, scientists didn't believe anything bigger was possible. The problem with that is these huge 9+ quakes typically have intervals of centuries or millenia. So unless you have several thousand years of good records, you're on shaky ground (no pun intended) predicting a huge earthquake cannot happen at a portion of a subduction zone.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the moment magnitude scale used to classify earthquakes is a measure of the energy released by the quake. The energy released is roughly the amplitude of movement of the two chunks of land along the fault multiplied by the surface area (m^2, not area at the surface) of the fault which slipped. Slip-strike faults like the San Andreas have two chunks of land moving past each other sideways. They extend only a few tens of km down into the ground because that's how thick the Earth's crust is. Essentially they're long and skinny. So they only way they can generate huge magnitudes is if a very long segment of the fault (several hundred km, probably several thousand for a 9.0) were to slip. This is (1) unlikely to happen - one segment of the fault is likely to slip before the other thus making several smaller quakes instead of one huge one, and (2) would distribute the energy of the earthquake over a much larger land surface area, blunting its impact on any one area.

A subduction zone quake OTOH involves one plate moving underneath the other. This results in a broader contact area, sometimes a hundred km in breadth or more. A shorter length of the fault slipping involves a larger area because the area which slips is shaped more like a square or broad rectangle, rather than a long, thin rectangle. As a result, a shorter segment of the fault slipping has more energy released, that energy is directed at a smaller land surface area, and because of the broader contact area it's easier for a longer segment of the fault to slip. The segment of earth which slipped in the 1960 Chilean quake (9.5) is estimated to be 800 km long. That'd be like a California earthquake stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which is just inconceivable due to the relatively small depth of the San Andreas fault.

People have been predicting a big California earthquake for many years. Yes, it'll happen at some point but if you're really worried about it then don't live in California (or the Pacific Northwest).

The most dangerous area for an earthquake in the continguous U.S. is in the south-central Midwest. That area has produced the largest earthquake in recorded U.S. history (8.0), and because of the infrequency of earthquakes there the building construction codes and preparedness are woefully inadequate. I live in Southern California which has a reputation as a hotspot for earthquakes, but you could not pay me enough to live around St. Louis. Well, maybe if I got to design and build my own house, and it came with its own drinking water well and power generation facilitie

...

There were certainly many more large earthquakes between 1700 and 1900, but they weren't recorded.

...

It is useful to note how we happen to know about one of the great earthquakes that occurred during this period - the last great Cascadia quake on Jan. 27, 1700. We know about this one because of the "orphan tsunami" that hit Japan that day. It was a tsunami of historic proportions that appeared without warning due to a distant great earthquake. The evidence conclusively points to a Cascadia subduction zone quake up to Magnitude 9. Without the Japanese observation of the tsunami we might not know about this quake (though dating tree rings killed by the quake would have eventually uncovered it).

It's very likely that there were more than eight 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes before 1900. The Wikipedia you reference says "(est)" after those quakes because reliable global earthquake monitoring only started in the last century. Those eight quakes are famous and, deadly, and most importantly, directly affected (and killed) Europeans. The magnitudes were estimated from historical records.

There were certainly many more large earthquakes between 1700 and 1900, but they weren't recorded.

A little more info on large quakes (including references to the sources for the data on large earthquakes since 1900) here, if you're interested: USGS list of 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes since 1900

And, for those not in Japan, a frequently updated plot of earthquakes around the island and their magnitudes.

If Fukushima goes up in nuclear smoke, along with the tons of spent fuel rods stored atop each reactor (who the hell approved THAT design?)

From what I've been reading, the storage pond on top of the reactors isn't a spent fuel storage area, it's where still-usable fuel that was in the reactor core is temporarily stored when it's removed for maintenance. So it's like taking your gas tank out of your car to work on it (say it's a Lotus or something) and putting it on the car's roof, and then having it damaged by a nearby car explosion. Not really a bad idea, just really bad luck.

(According to this USGS study done during the Clinton administration, coal doesn't typically contain any more uranium than common rocks or dirt: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html [usgs.gov])

Yeah but we don't burn rocks or dirt by the metric fuckton and release the exhaust through the top of a smokestack.

Correction:

the epicenter is/was only roughly 100 miles east (slightly north) of Fukushima. You can enter the coordinates into http://maps.google.com/ (38.322 142.369). They are found on this site http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.php
So it is ofc plausible that the earthquake indeed also hit the reactor area.
The epicenter is roughly 400 miles north east of Tokyo ... I mixed that up.
angel'o'sphere

The ash from coal plants is radioactive. Coal has low concentrations of radioactive elements in it. When you burn the coal the radioactive elements are among the ash and are at a higher concentration of the ash than they are of the source coal.

http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/tenorm/coalandcoalash.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html

A lot of the commentary about radioactivity and coal plants come from this Scientific American article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Many people read the headline of that article and didn't really bother to read the article. The argument that Scientific American makes is that a coal plant puts more radiation into the surrounding environment than a nuclear plant. The nuclear waste is still obviously more radioactive than the ash. However, the nuclear plant carefully controls their waste and materials.

In both cases the radiation released is low and not a health risk.

But coal powerplants cause up to 13,000 - 30,000 premature deaths per year in the US alone (quick google) and in general emit more radiation over their lifetimes compared to nuclear because of the trace amounts of uranium found in coal.

Compared to nuclear plants that aren't experiencing a meltdown, maybe. If Fukushima goes up in nuclear smoke, along with the tons of spent fuel rods stored atop each reactor (who the hell approved THAT design?), it'll emit more radioactive material than every coal fired plant in recorded history. And much of it will be far more dangerous than the minuscule amounts of uranium in coal.

(According to this USGS study done during the Clinton administration, coal doesn't typically contain any more uranium than common rocks or dirt: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html)

Seismic lull? Activity increasing? There's no evidence for either. The only thing that has changed is improvement of detection limits at the lower earthquake sizes because of better instrument arrays, which means you might be able to count more earthquakes in a given year that were undetectable or could not be precisely located previous years -- i.e. a data collection bias. Also, because the world population is increasing, the number of deaths caused by earthquakes might be increasing, but that doesn't mean their frequency is.

Magnitude 8 and above earthquakes are rare -- so rare that there are only a few every year, and some years they don't happen anywhere in the world.

there is no particular trend over time.

Seismic lull? Activity increasing? There's no evidence for either. The only thing that has changed is improvement of detection limits at the lower earthquake sizes because of better instrument arrays, which means you might be able to count more earthquakes in a given year that were undetectable or could not be precisely located previous years -- i.e. a data collection bias. Also, because the world population is increasing, the number of deaths caused by earthquakes might be increasing, but that doesn't mean their frequency is.

Magnitude 8 and above earthquakes are rare -- so rare that there are only a few every year, and some years they don't happen anywhere in the world.

there is no particular trend over time.

Seismic lull? Activity increasing? There's no evidence for either. The only thing that has changed is improvement of detection limits at the lower earthquake sizes because of better instrument arrays, which means you might be able to count more earthquakes in a given year that were undetectable or could not be precisely located previous years -- i.e. a data collection bias. Also, because the world population is increasing, the number of deaths caused by earthquakes might be increasing, but that doesn't mean their frequency is.

Magnitude 8 and above earthquakes are rare -- so rare that there are only a few every year, and some years they don't happen anywhere in the world.

there is no particular trend over time.

Seismic lull? Activity increasing? There's no evidence for either. The only thing that has changed is improvement of detection limits at the lower earthquake sizes because of better instrument arrays, which means you might be able to count more earthquakes in a given year that were undetectable or could not be precisely located previous years -- i.e. a data collection bias. Also, because the world population is increasing, the number of deaths caused by earthquakes might be increasing, but that doesn't mean their frequency is.

Magnitude 8 and above earthquakes are rare -- so rare that there are only a few every year, and some years they don't happen anywhere in the world.

there is no particular trend over time.

The equations you describe may be quite right (or maybe not, I'm not a seismologist), but they can never describe the sheer terror of living through a mag 8.8+ earthquake. The fear of not knowing whether the building you're in will withstand the strength of the ground motion. Of not knowing how your family and friends are faring. Or having communications networks collapsing, keeping you even more in the dark. Power lines falling, leaving you completely incommunicated with the rest of the world. Yes, I lived through one of these.

My best wishes to all affected by this catastrophe.

There have been more than that. Look here - it's impressive the aftershocks that are above 6. Anything above 6 can trigger another tsunami.

Hi,

It's a common misconception that the power of a mag 9 earthquake is 10x more than an 8, or 1,000x that of a 6. It's not. It's more like 31,000x stronger than a 6. If you've ever had the misfortune to experience a 6, you can appreciate that the energy released by these big ones are rather hard to contemplate.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/measure.php
        1 J = 1e7 erg
        1 PJ = 1e15 J
      Energy_petajoules = ( 10^(11.8 + 1.5*Ms) ) * 1e-07 * 1e-15

here's a picture of what this looks like, although ring size scaling has been reduced from the above formula to fit on the screen.

Since Slashdot summaries are always a bit dated, it's been bumped up to an 8.9 by the USGS. The good news is that it was off-shore and 15.2mi down, the bad news is that it was off-shore and generated a large tsunami that is still wrecking havoc in Japan and may be heading elsewhere.

Best of luck to the Japanese; if anyone is prepared it's them, but I don't know how one prepares for something quite like this.

Meanwhile for the US there are active tsunami warnings in Hawaii, and NOAA has just issued a watch for the US West Coast.

Quake was upgraded to 8.9 some time ago. Also aftershocks continue.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/region/Asia_eqs.php

Of course, you're also ignoring the fact that Mt Saint Helens put more CO2 into the atmosphere than all of mankind before that point, so we really aren't making that big of a dent.

CHECK THE FACTS befor posting bullshit. Human activities generate 150 times as much CO2 as volcanos.

"t could be mere coincidence that seismic activity spiked right about the time the well was put in service, but how likely is that, really?"

over that time span, it's fairly likely.

Well, not really. That there were multiple magnitude 5+ quakes, primarily over a decade beginning with the Army mucking with a deep dry well, and very little seismic activity of that sort documented prior to or since that event, AND that the seismic activity was centered mostly around north Denver, I'm mostly of the mind that, while nothing can be conclusively proven based on our current understanding of those events, that there are far too many coincidences to simply dismiss as coincidence. OTOH, if the quakes didn't stick out from the baseline of seismic activity and were spread all around the region, there would be no reason to believe the events were related to the well.

I should've looked-up a citation, here's a good writeup: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/colorado/history.php Synopsis: there are generally sporadic, low-magnitude quakes in this region. During the decade of the 60s, right after the well was drilled, there were thousands of measurable quakes, some of them being uncharacteristically high magnitude ones, and they seem to have been focused on an area within 40 miles of Rocky Mountain Arsenal, with much of the damage focused at the Arsenal itself.

That makes a really compelling case overall. In fact, when observing natural phenomena that we don't really understand throroughly, it honestly doesn't get more compelling than that. This is an even stronger case for causation than even I understood based on the talk that I've heard my entire life regarding the quakes.

Well, there is the fact that historical seismic records show at least one similar event as well as definite general regional seismicity before the wells were in place.

A good read: Earthquake History of Arkansas"

Can fluid injection cause earthquakes? Sure, so can extraction. The problem in this case is that the article is rather light on details, leaving out whether or not any well operations are happening at the depth of the earthquakes. If the hypocenters are 2.4 miles deep, and the wells are only 1 mile deep, the chances are rather slim that there was any effect from the well operations.

Also, it's a bit silly that they want to verify if fluid injection was happening at the time of the earthquake. I suspect that you can inject fluid and have an earthquake after you've stopped, and still be a contributor to the cause of the earthquake.

Another thought... the focal mechanism of the main shock indicated strike-slip motion. I wonder if that's consistent with regional seismicity or not. It would also be interesting to compare it to similar earthquakes that were confirmed to be associated with drilling. A quick Google search didn't give me anything useful for comparison, though.

This statement bothers me: "The quakes were also more powerful than previous events. The previous cluster of quakes was in the 4.4 to 4.5 range, whereas the most recent one was 4.7."

Yes 4.5 is more powerful than 4.7, but in the grand scheme of things, *barely*. The correct way to say it would be "slightly more powerful."

As mentioned in the parent post, a very similar swarm of earthquakes was triggered at Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado, when "they" tried disposing of chemical weapon waste by pumping it underground.

Sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere reflects sunlight. This is a known fact.
Volcanoes spew sulfur dioxide. Large eruptions cause it to reach the stratosphere. This is also a known fact.
The effect of global cooling caused by sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere has been measured and reported in numerous science journals.
http://terra.nasa.gov/FactSheets/Aerosols/ http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Glossary/VolcWeather/description_volcanoes_and_weather.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/opinion/24caldiera.html?_r=1

I'd like to see this get pushed out as an iPhone notification or something.

The USGS operates a really neat email/SMS earthquake notification service) that allows fine-grained control of notifications.

I'm pretty sure this was discovered some months ago...however, these articles don't mention anything about the bacteria's DNA. Perhaps that's the new discovery NASA made. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14537-arseniceating-bacteria-rewrite-evolutionary-history.html http://water.usgs.gov/nrp/highlights/arsenic.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7558448.stm

The results look an almost identical to the kind of data I get from the NextEngine 3D laser scanner. To create a 3D surface, the device sweeps a laser across the object in front of it. The laser sweeps a vertical line, and shines on the (arbitary) surface of the object in front of it. Stereo cameras capture the shape of the laser line from different angles, and software is able to extract the 3D surface from there. An accompanying visible light image from one camera or the other is used to apply a "skin" to what is otherwise a wireframe. By using a laser and taking its time, rather than broadcasting an infrared grid of fiducial dots, the results are very good: sub-millimeter accuracy is easy, though for handheld objects, not people in a room. Similar technology can be used for very large scale models, such as the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

Some sections of the Mississippi River appeared to run backward for a short time. Sand blows were common throughout the area, and can still be seen from the air in cultivated fields. The shockwaves propagated efficiently through midwestern bedrock. Residents as far away as Pittsburgh and Norfolk were awakened by intense shaking. Church bells were reported to ring as far as Boston, Massachusetts and York, Ontario (now Toronto), and sidewalks were reported to have been cracked and broken in Washington, D.C." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1812_New_Madrid_earthquake)

"...chimneys were toppled and log cabins were thrown down as far distant as Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, Missouri, and in many places in Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee." (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1811-1812.php)

Don't worry folks! There's nothing to worry about! It's only flyover country anyway...

Then you come along with some volcano analogy, despite the fact the entire study is based on the *high altitude* generation of soot particles and I haven't seen any flying volcanos recently.

The GP is absolutely correct though. The article was talking about stratospheric effects. As it happens, vulcanism is perfectly capable of ejecting all sorts of substances that can have profound effects on weather into the stratosphere. How do you think eruptions like Krakatoa and Pinatubo had globe-spanning effects?

Looking at this map it seems that they may have been in contact.

There was a 4.4 earthquake in WY two days ago, with two aftershocks since then. Could this have affected underground cables or the computer?