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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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These quakes are like, sooooo psychadelic, man.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
We had a small earthquake a while ago, and about a minute before it happened my miniature pinscher jumped on my back and woke me up. If a single minpin can predict an earthquake a minute before it happens then a beowulf cluster of 1024 minpins could give people several hours notice.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
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.
"...with a likely chance of showers. Tomorrow's forecast also includes a 20% chance of EarthQuakes on the 7.0 scale. Watch out Los Angeles, you could have a shaky morning. Phil." "That's right Tom, and speaking of shaky mornings, here's Wolf with the sports..."
Jason Lotito
Who knows when the next Quake is coming? What will probably happen is that they'll predict a date but when the date arrives the Quake will be nowhere to be seen and then the Quake people will announce another date that may or may not be accurate.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
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
'High above the internet where packets never reach, satellites may be able to detect the slashdot effect--before it strikes.'
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 ?
"The planet does not revolve around the US. There are many places where earthquakes are a major part of everyday life."
You are absolutely correct. The problem is that this article is coming from NASA, and last I checked, NASA is a US government agency. So, we'll be using our resources and spending our money to develop a technology that we'll probably be nice enough to let the rest of the world use. So read about the San Andreas fault and say thank you.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
Any resident of California could tell you that...
I guess with the current state of affairs, any progress would be good
Makes me think, though. Ability to detect variations of 1mm over the course of a year? How do they account for, say, a satellite drifting slightly (gravity, solar wind, whatever)? How do they measure that? What are their tolerances, a few angstroms?
(Not trolling, just asking)
Have EVDO, will travel.
You could always use sheeps bladders...
- m4. f0x
"Don't let your schooling interfere with your education." -Mark Twain
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
...before they strike.
This is a follow up to a previous program that was predicting them after they struck. Just last year they managed to predict the 1906 San Francisco Quake with amazing accuracy, and results like that are money in the bank for further research.
"the Global Earthquake Satellite System (GESS)"
If I want money from Congress to deploy a constellation of satellites to detect earthquakes, would calling it GESS be my first choice?
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.
The nice moire pattern in the photo showing changes in elevation was from after the quake. It does a nice job of showing how the stress along the fault was released at this point during a quake, but isn't directly a lot of help in predicting anything. However, one would assume that if you looked at similar photos along a known fault for long enough, there would be areas that did not show any colorfull moire patterns, surrounded by lots of color (indicating movement in the fault). Pretty cool, but I think most of the major faults already have this information from ground measurements.
The "60% chance of earthquakes in the next two days" portion of the prediction seems to rely on some piezo electric effect detected via magnetometers and thermal imaging. This has been speculated about for at least a couple of decades now, but I guess the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad since they haven't declared success yet. Maybe QuakeSat, mentioned at the end of the article, will provide enough comprehensive data to make some useful predictions. Predicting 12 out of the last 3 earthquakes isn't going to win you any friends!
Good point - I was getting earthquakes confused with Godzilla attacks. Though while *you* may know that, I suspect a great proportion Joe Public would still want to get out of the city completely, which could cause gridlock, people stuck in their cars when the quake strikes, etc.
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.
Yeah, an early warning system for earthquakes sounds all well and good, but how exactly do you go about warning the public? If you go on TV and say "tomorrow there will be a 7.5 Earthquake under downtown Los Angeles", you run the risk of causing a panic in which people will die trying to get out of the city in what could only be described as the traffic jam from hell to get west or north.
If the earthquake occurs, you're a hero; you saved the lives of hundreds if not thousands. If the earthquake doesn't, or is much smaller than predicted, you caused lots of people to die for no apparent reason, and you've lessened the public?s readiness to believe you the next time you make an earthquake prediction like this.
This is nothing like trying to evacuate the shoreline of a major city for an approaching hurricane, because when those evacuations are issued they are in fact for the shoreline. You would be, in theory, proposing the evacuation of an entire metropolis, which no city in this country, or the world for that matter, has the proper infrastructure to handle such an evacuation unless you gave a lead time of a week or so.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
"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.
Sort-term earthquake prediction- hours to weeks- is pyschologically comforting, but not that important in saving lives or property. One needs to predict the maximum likely earthquake force in a neighborhood in order to properly contruct buildings and roads to last for at least 30 years and save lives. In this area the USGS and State Geologic Surveys have made great progress. Case in point: The 1994 Northridge, California earthquake and 1995 Kobe, Japan were the same magnitude, yet the second killed ONE HUNDRED TIMES more people than the first. The success of the Northridge quake was partially attributed to luck and partly to that Los Angeles had more newer buildings than Japan that had implemented the more serious construction codes. It is tragic that M5 quakes that barely spill coffee in San Jose, California, but level mud-brick buildings and kill hundreds in some third world country.
I've been in three near M7 quakes in California and I can testify how psychologically traumatic a sudden quake is. Short term prediction would be comforting. It would also save some lives in large buildings like schools and stadiums (even though the 1989 San Francisco quake happended during a Wolrd Series baseball game without fatallity). And in reving up rescue crews.
Short term earthquake prediction (hours to weeks) has not been unsuccessful due to lack of effort. After some promising hints in Russia and China in the early 1970s, scientists around the world looked for a systematic precursor. All kinds of things happen before A COUPLE of large quakes: well-level changes, radon gas burps, scared animals, magnetic anomalies, heat anomalies, foreshocks, and so on. The problem has been they have not been systematic and repeatable. Is is not clear whether a GENERAL THEORY OF PREDICTION is even possible then. One hypothesis is that each seismic region may have its characteristic precursors. However, even the most active seismic areas like the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles experience large quakes tenty years apart, so its not easy to these this second hypothesis.
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.
Mexico City is both cursed and blessed by its earthquake situation. It is built on old lake mud which amplifies seismic waves, making buildings collapse. However, the worst quakes occur on the west coast, which takes seismic waves about five minutes to propagate through the rocks to Mexico City. They've used this delay to install a siren warning system for quakes, so people could leave buildings and turn off power. The first few years it issued too many false alarms, but has worked OK for recent west coast quakes.
A siren system would not work that well in California quakes, because the cities are too close to the earthquake faults for a general warning. However, refineries, power plants, subways, and computer disk farms, all which could react to a 10-30 second warning, are connected to an automatic warning system run by a jopint government corporate progam.
If you are interested in knowing more about earthquake hazards, but you're not a seismologist, check out Earthshaking Science by Susan Hough. She works for the U.S. Geological Survey. She first discusses the basics of determining earthquake hazard, then discusses the currently estimated hazard in various regions in the United States. She's not optimisitic about specific earthquake prediction, but she thinks that we can improve our estimates of longer-term hazards. These estimates are critical for guiding hazard-mitigation efforts (building codes, for example).
A good number of volcanoes - such as those on Hawaii, are fitted with tiltmeters and laser-ranging reflectors.
As magma moves up towards the surface, some volcanoes start to 'inflate', bulging outwards. By measuring changes in tilt, and the geometry of the mountain, vulcanologists can get some warning of the changes under the mountain.
They usually combine this with seismic evidence (that moving magma creates swarms of tiny 'quakes), changes in gas production and the like to try and predict eruptions.
However, volcanoes are just as unpredictable. The USGS made a series of predictions about the Long Valley Caldera in Eastern California. It is an ENORMOUS crater which is underlain by an active magma chamber. The last volcanic activity in the region was about 400 years ago, and it is likely to continue into the future. Slap bang in the middle of Long Valley is the Mammoth Mountain ski resort, built around a dormant volcano.
In the early 1980s, the area around Mammoth Mountain began to bulge, molten rock was being forced upwards, there were swarms of 'quakes, trees began dying as CO2 bubbled up from underground. The USGS cautiously announced that they expected Mammoth Mountain to become active in the near future.
It didn't. The area remains highly active, but doomsday was put off for now.
BTW. if you ever get a chance to go to Mammoth Mountain, Long Valley and the Inyo Craters, do take it - the landscape is simply awe-inspiring.
Another example is Pozzuoli, which lies West of Naples in an area known as the Phlaegrean Fields. This is another colossal caldera with an active magma chamber. The last eruption was in 1538 when a new mountain (called Monte Nuovo somewhat unoriginally) was formed, the crater of Solfatara is still somewhat active, disgorging water and sulphurous fumes.
Pozzuoli is in the the middle of the Fields, a nice seaside town with some Roman ruins. However, during the 1970s, the area began to be shaken by hundreds of 'quakes a day. Even more worryingly, the area began to bulge upwards, sometimes by a centimetre a day! The Italian government ordered the evacuation of the entire city for several years, fearing another massive eruption. Eventually, the bulge subsided, the 'quakes faded and the people went back. But millions had been spent and enormous social dislocation caused.
It's quiet there at the moment, so everyone is looking East, over Naples to Vesuvius, which has been suspiciously quiet for far too long now.
Best wishes,
Mike.
At Yellowstone, one of the world's largest volcanoes, there are indications that something is going on. There's a big bulge on the bottom of Yellowstone Lake, but nobody is sure how long it's been there. It's emitting lots of hot water, though, and there is plentiful evidence of large hydrothermal (i.e. superheated steam) eruptions in Yellowstone's recent past. Also, trails in Norris Geyser Basin have been closed because the ground temperature is near 200 degrees Farenheit. While this is probably hydrothermal, not magmatic, activity, if Yellowstone ever does decide to have another major eruption (as it last did 600K years ago), you can pretty much count on massive worldwide social disruption. Ever wonder what it would be like if all food production in the western U.S. were to go away?