Earthquake off Northern California

merger writes "A 7.0 earthquake (7.4 according to NOAA) occured off of the northern California coast occured at 7:50 p.m. PST triggering a tsunami warning (which was then downgraded to a tsunami bulletin). While searching Google News for information I learned about an earthquake preparedness study for the area which was just published today."

Comments

Re:Undersea Cables?

[Forbman]

No, the amusement is in realizing that if the earthquake caused a break underwater, that it's not going to be fixed in ~2 hrs, thus indicating the cluelessness of the question pondered.

Re:Earthquake? Bah....

[1u3hr]

Yeah, it always good to joke about events that can and do kill hundreds of thousands.

Slashdotters seem to think so, as long is it doesn't affect Americans. every "foreign" disaster eleicts a bunch of ethnic/outsourcing (if in Asia or particularly India) jokes, all modded "Funny". Make similar jokes about American deaths and it's an instant flamebait/troll mod. He might get away with it here since no one seems to have died.

Re:Earthquakes can't be usefully predicted

[Somegeek]

This is just a small nit-pick with this assertion. Sorry for dragging it out as I have.

The poster never asserted anything about predicting earthquakes based upon the average. The poster just stated that historical data shows a 200 year average, and from that data one could say that one was 'fairly likely in the near future'. That's the way averages work; we may not understand the reason behind the pattern, but if there is enough data to create a pattern, its reasonable to guess that the pattern will continue. Just because the geological time scale is huge doesn't mean that there can't be regular geological events that occur with a short frequency. For a specific example, look at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) test site in Parkfield, California:

http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/research/parkfield/

Historical data showed earthquakes occurring in 1857, 1881, 1901, 1922, 1934, and 1966. The pattern average showed an earthquake due by around 1993. The next significant earthquake did not happen until 2004, not exactly on time, but dead accurate compared to your time span of 'millions of years'.

Regarding the advice from your friends; a scientist once told me 'Half of everything that scientists teach is wrong, and we don't know which half it is.' Much of current scientific theory is just that, someone's current theory. Take it with a grain of salt.

until an 8th magnitude quake suddenly releases ten times as much energy,

Nope. From the USGS again: "The total amount of energy released by the earthquake, however, goes up by a factor of 32."

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/glossary.ht m#magnitude