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Anticipating Earthquakes
dnahelix writes "Science @ NASA reports 'High above Earth where seismic waves never reach, satellites may be able to detect earthquakes--before they strike.'"
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Sure, if you detect an earthquake before it strikes you could get lots of people out of say a city in danger. That still wouldn't prevent the city itself though. And with most people away from town, bad guys could break in to a lot of stores and so on, with little risk of being caught. Or perhaps there could be panic situations with riots where people get robbed, injured or killed when everybody finds out about the earthquake. It's a nice technology, but there are many questions around it that need to be solved.
Martin
Ever heard about the Northern Appalachian Seismic Zone?
It's just not as densely populated as California.
I dunno, I thought there was somewhat of a history of quakes around the mississippi. They happen less frequently but on a larger scale or something.
d rid/Charleston1895.gif
Check out this image of damage done by similar quakes: http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/prepare/factsheets/NewMa
Morphing Software
If the TV comes on with the news, and the reporter says, "NASA has recored that we are goning to enter a 6.0 sized earthquake in 1 hour" everyone is going to panic. Then criminals know that people are going to run away from there home. So they go and steal. As all the scared people run (because they a lot of trust in NASA) they get in traffice jams, there are tons of car crashes, roits start on the road, and then people start to fight. But wait! NASA was mistaken. There new system had a little flaw in it..oops
they can also predict the slashdot effect then ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
". .
I disagree. Dogs can hear much lower frequency sounds than humans and so would have a significant advantage at detecting imminent earthquakes. Farm animals (such as detected the China quake) can be readily shown to be aware of chanegs in a wide variety of situations: Earth's magnetic field fluctuations, gravitational disturbances, minute environmental chemical changes. I was at an air force base where the CO assigned men to watch the nearby reindeer herd. Their behaviour detected (and warned the base) of several natural and unnatural phenomenon. Among them being approaching weather fronts, seismic events and approaching Soviet aircraft and submarines. They were not as good as radar but more accurate at telling changes from routines.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Niagara Falls, NY. You think we don't get earthquakes here? I've lived here since 199-fsckin'-5 and lived through TWO earthquakes. Not big ones, but certainly earthquakes.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
The Japanese system envisages, ultimately, being able to give a few minutes' warning, and that should be enough to save the majority of deaths. (Of course, the warning consists of gathering a bunch of learned people who learnedly pool their various thoughts on the matter, and get it wrong, in a learned manner, but the concept's reasonable.)
Having been in a couple of interesting earthquakes in Japan and the US, if someone gives me a 3-minute warning, I'm happy to go stand in the local park for 20 minutes.
And not all cultures loot after an earthquake, but here I'll obviously agree that NASA, spending US taxpayer's money, should clearly focus on the US population.
I read about a system very similar to this before in a book called, of all things, The Illuminati, by Larry Burkett. Burkett didn't go into the science behind it, but one of his characters utilizes satellites and their orbits to monitor seismic anomolies. By working in gravity and nice computer simulations, he is able to predict earthquakes several months in advance. Of course, no one listens to him, so its usefulness is somewhat mitigated by human stupidity. At any rate, I thought this a very interesting article.
"High above Earth where seismic waves never reach..." ...except perhaps for the solar ones.
Only two weeks ago my current boss invited me to accompany him to an evening lecture... on solar seismology! Turns out the guy is not just a paper pusher but actually has some serious qualifications in nuclear physics (of the solar, not bomb, sort - albeit a fine line between). Gave me a fascinating insight into more of the complexities of our sun, how its quakes make ours seem like mere trembles and its potential effects on us.
Unfortunately, coming to Oz from an eastern european country meant he had little opportunity to use those skills, so now he's a frustrated project manager - there ain't no justice, eh?
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
Meterologists have found that people ignore tornado predictions until they got into the 20% range for a couple hour, single county window. Before that the citizenry would treat these predictions as spam. Now the warnings are good enough to save lives.
Californians are very blazee, and would ignore predictions of low probability. Scientists are happy if they can beat random probablity, which is about 1 in 20,000 of a destructive quake happening on a given day in Los Angeles. This is a far cry from a 1 in 5 that meteorologists have discovered necessary to get people to react.