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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."
Anyone?!?!?! I have family that live there... I am going to call them now.
My hacked site
Nah, probably someone spilled the bottle of beer on console and short-circuited it.
Nothing felt here, most people will not even know about it until tomorrow in our area.
Link to CNN article.
Plates shifted, relatively high richter scale, but keep in mind the Richter scale is *not* a linear scale. Nothing like the big tsunami a few months back.
Hell, I live in San Diego, I felt a 5.6 a few days ago. Shook my bed a bit, that was more of an event than this.
Towns like Crescent City are at huge risk, and the city and state are trying to compensate with warning systems (that have been improved since the tsunami in the Indian Ocean). While some buildings have been constructed to withstand tsunamis (the national park headquarters was designed as a "flow through" building so tsunami waves will just break out the first floor windows and flow through the building), the best advice is to climb. Get to high ground as soon as you feel the earth shake. Don't wait for a tsunami warning--just climb!
Also, don't go back to the ocean until you know for sure that it's safe to do so. Apparently, many of the deaths in the 1960s tsunami were a result of the mayor and several other people going down onto a pier to suvery the damage. Because tsunamis are really sets of high waves and sea levle changes, the next set of waves washed them away.
One more interesting tidbit--most tsunami deaths aren't caused by the water itself. Instead, what happens is that the water crashes into buildings destroying them. Additional waves then take all of that debris and use it like battering rams to destroy more buildings. It's the debris that most often causes human deaths and damage in the city. Perhaps a good case for building more tsnuami-safe buildings?
Interesting that this happened. Here is an article that was published just yesterday talking about exactly this topic. I guess the subduction zone reads the Chronicle.
http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/step/
If you look now though, there are two areas of fairly high risk.
Don't use this map for anything important, like planning picnics.
Still, I check this every day, and I am suprised that I was given a reference to test its accuracy so soon.
Still, it has updated today in light of the events.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
So earlier, when this was first breaking news, my roommate got a phone call from her friend Erin about a possible tsunami warning. My first thought? "I'll check slashdot; if it's actually going to kill us (especially as we're in Southern California) slashdot will have an article on it".
that you had to post to slashdot before calling them to see if they were ok.
The earthquake was caused by the impact of the news that Sarge is finally out. (It took several days before that news truly sank in.)
According to a friend who is a geologist, the quake was on a slip fault, not a thrust falt, and therefore could not produce a tsunami. And, since it was something like 70 miles offshore, the shaking itself didn't do any real damage, either.
Am I the only one who finds it amusing that an EARTHQUAKE occured, human lives are put in danger, and one of the first questions posted asks about if the internet connection survived?
The Matrix has you, parent poster.
What's that? the quake was up north you say?
That's it. No more LSD on weeknights.
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.
quakes: http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/
/. geting 2-300 500 server errors a day.
you can see this big one off to the upper left, but 'quakes are no big thing around these parts - just look, we get ~hundreds a day; similar to
do you have shinyfeet?
that's what tornados are for
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
Surf's Up, Dude!!
--Residential Interior Design
In this case the same thing is happening. You'll note in the list that there have already been a number of aftershocks over the past few hours.
They also have a RSS feed, so presumably you could create your own tsunami warning system.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
This earthquake didn't really rattle us very much locally (Eureka CA area), but it triggered the tsunami warning from 2001 to 2113 PDT, and was fully lifted at 2155 PDT. The warning came via email to those of us who subscribe to the Tsunami Warning Center emails. However, the email wasn't sent out until about 10 minutes after the quake, and didn't set off the Emergency Broadcast System on the radio for about another 5 minutes after the emails. Folks, in 15 minutes, a Tsunami could have already happened locally. Even though the watch/warning was broadcast, most locals just shrugged it off, or didn't even hear about it until I mentioned it to them over an hour later. The local supermarket has been promoting Emergency Awareness lately, but in view of the reaction of the people, we really aren't prepared should the epicenter of a 7+ quake happen under our feet, or should a Tsunami actually hit. Fortunately, I live inland far enough and high enough to be above a wave line similar to that of the Indian Ocean tsunami of last December. But I don't live far enough away to not have to clean up bodies of non-prepared apathetic persons who become victims should one occur. I did live right on the beach, previously, and had an evacuation package and procedure ready. Others along the Coast were ready, but not enough of them. Everyone should really do a self-preparedness check to see if they are indeed ready for such an emergency. This includes those who live in earthquake, tornado, flooding, mountains (slides and fires), and hurricane areas. Prepare yourself and your neighbors today, should you have to help each other tomorrow.
Here in Japan they have the very sensible system of reporting not only (and not even mostly) the energy released at the epicenter, but most prominently the expected effects at any area affected by the earthquake.
They have a seven-point scale, with 1 being that you only just feel the quake if you are lying down or otherwise sensitive; to 7 being that nonhardened buildings collapse, and many expected injuries and deaths. Quake reports are usually in the form of maps with this info overlayed.
For most of the public, that is the kind of info you want when an earthquake has occurred, rather than the intensity at the origin. It tells you much clearer if it's time to worry about friends and relatives or not.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
" Aleutians rocked by series of big quakes
The countless quakes started short after midnight. The biggest one, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.9, struck at 9:10 a.m. Tuesday. There were reports of items falling off shelves in Adak, about 175 miles from the epicenter.
The series of quakes occurred where the Pacific and North American plates collide. Most were in the range of 4.5 and 5.7."
Seems to be a relation.
KoA
Eagle crashes into living room of a Ketchikan home
God is angry over the Michael Jackson verdict!
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Nothing felt here. Roger.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
Courtesy of the US Geological Survey right here. Plenty of info that I don't understand, plus pretty maps!
Yes. But 2h is roughly the time it takes to get alternative capacity running on a friend of mine basis. Been there, done that, hate fishermen.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Don't go panic tomorrow if you read a "new" tsunami warning here.
Slashdot's getting better at posting news while it's new... this one's only about 3 or 4 hours out of date. Meanwhile Fark, a comedy site, had the newsflash up while the tsunami warning was still in effect. I know where I'm going for my news...
If Utah doesn't get tornadoes, then explain the F3 tornado that hit downtown Salt Lake City a couple of years ago? Nice damage to the Delta Center and other fun stuff, and a couple of homes totally destroyed. I'm sure their insurance companies (of the home owners) would like to have scientific confirmation that it is impossible to occur so a claim couldn't be made.
And local TV stations routinely (about once every month or so in the summer) show pictures of an F1 somewhere... sometimes as a waterspout in the Great Salt Lake (where it is somewhat common to be seen... not as common as Kansas, but it does happen). I guess that is just Photoshop, right?
I used to live in Southern Minnesota, and I will admit that tornadoes are much more common there. And in Utah (where I am living now), not only do you have problems with relative energies to produce tornadoes, you also have mountains that tend to muck up any consistant rainfall patterns. It is common for a major storm to dump 2" to 4" of rain in one area and just a trace 10 miles to the north or south. Wind going around a mountain range has similar distortions, all which contribute to breaking up systems that might produce tornadoes.
All that said, and to get this more on topic, I would hate to be near large bodies of water like the Great Salt Lake, Bear Lake, or Lake Powell if an earthquake was triggered underneath. It could certainly produce Tsumai-like effects in a localized area. Or imagine a major earthquake under Lake Michigan and what damage it could do to shoreline properties around that lake. That would be billions of dollars in damage at a minimum.
Still, it is more likely that something would happen in the Pacific (due to "Ring of Fire" combined with the extraordinarly large size of the Pacific Ocean), and why the money is being dumped into warnings for that area of the USA, and not the Rustbelt of the Great Lakes region.
Ya know, there do exist Americans who think that folks who get up in arms over jokes about (say) the Twin Towers are largely uptight assholes. Quite a few of us, actually (though I'd avoid such jokes were I visiting New York, just to avoid offending local sensibilities).
Don't judge the group by the vocal (readily offended) minority. There are plenty of Americans who don't mind jokes about our own tragedies -- what better way to get it behind than with humor?
I used to joke that insurance companies didn't care about the very imminent geological dangers that face California, because, they reckon, once the big one hits, there won't be anyone left in California to make any claims.
On the other hand, it's been pointed out to me, semi-recently, that most Californians do not have earthquake insurance.
I dunno about you, but that, with the combination of homes which average $509k, is a source of worry for me. Any Californians able to comment on earthquake/tsunami insurance?
Slashdot is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."
Reporting on Tsunamis is nothing more than sensationalism for a site like this. This article should definately be moderated as off-topic.
Which brings up a point. We moderate posts, we even moderate how other people moderate. Let's get the ability to moderate articles. This way we will stop getting "News for non-nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter."
Looking for a job?
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DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
Something I noticed after the 5.2 quake in southern California, is that there was a tremendous number of temblors immediately following, but they were all focused around the site of the original quake. I had to wonder how much stress was building up along the fault line, to the north and south.
As I type this, I see >800 quakes on the California/Nevada quake map, and I wonder how much more stress is building up around Silicon Valley. (Yes, I live and work in the Valley.)
I suspect that big slips north and south increase the odds of a slip in between. Are there any geologists out there who can verify this?
> Pedantics. I am not up for it.
That's PEDANTS
HTH
Sig out of date
Oh and re not eating shellfish: we have fridges now, thanks.
[1] Consider where the two main cocksnipping religions originated.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
California has about 840 miles of coastline.
You bet we've got a north (Oregon sorth to roughly the Golden Gate), central (Godlen Gate south to Santa Barbara) and south (Santa Barbara on down) coast. North, central, and southern sections represent the general north-south location of that west-facing coastline.
While the coastline in southern california faces southwest and Los Angeles is east of Reno (the state is distinctly boomerang-shaped), most Californians think of the coast as a westerly-facing one.
The area is a caldera, from what I can tell, and it looks like it's ready to blow !!!!!!
1.9 2005/06/14 21:19:08 38.803N 122.814W 2.9 1 km ( 1 mi) NW of The Geysers, CA
3.9 2005/06/14 19:57:00 38.848N 122.823W 3.6 6 km ( 4 mi) NNW of The Geysers, CA
1.7 2005/06/14 18:46:08 38.832N 122.799W 1.3 4 km ( 2 mi) N of The Geysers, CA
1.6 2005/06/14 09:30:10 38.814N 122.809W 4.1 2 km ( 1 mi) N of The Geysers, CA
2.3 2005/06/14 07:32:45 38.822N 122.810W 4.6 3 km ( 2 mi) N of The Geysers, CA
1.0 2005/06/14 03:45:04 37.249N 122.009W 5.8 2 km ( 1 mi) NW of Monte Sereno, CA
1.9 2005/06/13 18:38:38 37.647N 122.043W 5.6 3 km ( 2 mi) E of Hayward, CA
1.2 2005/06/13 14:58:03 37.926N 122.297W 5.1 1 km ( 1 mi) NNE of El Cerrito, CA
1.9 2005/06/13 14:48:43 38.830N 122.808W 2.8 4 km ( 2 mi) N of The Geysers, CA
1.3 2005/06/13 06:56:32 38.176N 121.979W 5.0 8 km ( 5 mi) SSE of Suisun City, CA
1.7 2005/06/13 06:13:25 38.819N 122.798W 3.8 2 km ( 1 mi) NNE of The Geysers, CA
2.4 2005/06/13 06:09:21 38.819N 122.797W 4.0 2 km ( 2 mi) NNE of The Geysers, CA
1.5 2005/06/13 03:55:00 38.720N 122.339W 7.4 19 km (12 mi) NNE of Angwin, CA
1.4 2005/06/13 03:11:26 38.795N 122.829W 3.0 2 km ( 1 mi) W of The Geysers, CA
1.7 2005/06/12 19:41:58 38.810N 122.790W 2.1 2 km ( 1 mi) NE of The Geysers, CA
1.9 2005/06/12 16:55:24 37.303N 122.096W 5.9 5 km ( 3 mi) WSW of Cupertino, CA
2.0 2005/06/12 14:25:53 38.792N 122.749W 4.4 5 km ( 3 mi) E of The Geysers, CA
1.7 2005/06/12 11:23:44 38.827N 122.799W 3.4 3 km ( 2 mi) NNE of The Geysers, CA
1.7 2005/06/12 11:21:42 38.823N 122.828W 3.3 3 km ( 2 mi) NW of The Geysers, CA
1.4 2005/06/12 07:19:53 38.788N 122.970W 4.8 4 km ( 3 mi) ESE of Cloverdale, CA
1.5 2005/06/12 02:35:46 38.706N 122.362W 2.1 16 km (10 mi) NNE of Angwin, CA
1.9 2005/06/12 00:28:32 38.804N 122.809W 3.0 1 km ( 0 mi) NNW of The Geysers, CA
1.7 2005/06/11 18:33:55 38.796N 122.754W 1.6 5 km ( 3 mi) E of The Geysers, CA
2.6 2005/06/11 10:22:38 38.825N 122.825W 2.7 3 km ( 2 mi) NNW of The Geysers, CA
2.1 2005/06/11 08:18:13 38.821N 122.793W 3.8 3 km ( 2 mi) NNE of The Geysers, CA
1.9 2005/06/11 08:03:00 38.823N 122.800W 3.9 3 km ( 2 mi) NNE of The Geysers, CA
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.
Why? That underwater link that guy mentioned might still be broken, if was indeed broken they probably activated an auxiliary/backup link to route their traffic through and are still working on the severed cable. I rely on a connection via a series of undersea links that have been severed a few times over the last few years by anything from fishermen to mechanical diggers and underwater sand-mining operations. Over here it rarely takes the local telecom more than half an hour to start routing traffic through backup connections but then of course we don't get as quite as many earthquakes here as they do in California
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
seriously - on UK news channels, BBC etc, they always quote 'earthquake of strength X on the Richter scale'. personally i find this extremely annoying since it's a completely superfluous figure-of-speech - unless there's some other scale which people use to measure earthquakes.
anyone know different?
This is just a small nit-pick with this assertion. Sorry for dragging it out as I have.
I don't know where you're getting your information from, but I also have a good friend who's a geophysicist, and I know a lot of others in the Earth Sciences department next door to my own. (We have a lot of major earthquake-causing fault lines in New Zealand, and it's a popular place for geophysicists from around the world to hang out.) If someone knows more then I'd welcome a correction, but my understanding is that earthquakes are still almost entirely unpredictible with today's knowledge.
We can look at the history of any site and calculate an average earthquake frequency, just as your site averages every 200 years. If you look a short time into the future, it'll probably remain an average of about 200 years.
But in Earth science terms, a "short" time is millions of years. When the frame of reference is so large, attempting to predict events accurately to hundreds of years is hopeless. An historical average of a big quake every 200 years really doesn't tell us anything useful about the immediate future of a site in terms comparable with a human lifetime.
I've heard people argue about how the stress is released after an earthquake and there's a relation. I think this is a very common misconception that seems intuitive, but doesn't really match the facts as we know. All the geophysicists I've spoken to have claimed that this is mostly fiction, though.
The biggest problem with this approach is that there's no clear and accurate way to even estimate, let alone measure, how much stress there was in the first place. Most of what we can guess simply comes from analysing historical records, and accurate records often don't even exist beyond the past few hundred years, if even that. You might have thought that 7th magnitude quake was big and released a lot of stress, until an 8th magnitude quake suddenly releases ten times as much energy, with the earlier quake having made a negligible dent in its force.
If you look historically at the quakes in your area, you'll probably see that they're not set at all evenly. Even if you've gone for 300 years without an earthquake, chances are it's about as likely that you'll get a big one tommorrow as it is that you'll get a big one 1000 years from now. Perhaps you'll get 3 or 4 big ones in the next 3 or 4 decades.
This isn't to say that it's not worth preparing for, though. If you live on a fault, chances are that you'll at least get moderate earthquakes, and over a wide enough population, it's quite likely that some part of it will be hit every so often. (The media doesn't normally report about all of the places that didn't have earthquakes.) Good building standards and response strategies, for instance, are the reason that there may only be a few tens or hundreds of casualties in a well-off country, whereas it might be hundreds of thousands or millions of casualties for an equivalent quake in a third world country.
I wouldn't bank on it unless Steve Jobs issues the tsunami warning himself.
Hi Roger!
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
But one in captivity somewhere appearently has internet access and learned english.
But he disappeared after sending an e-mail to the human race that only contained one line: "So long, and Thanks for All the Fish."
Unfortunately due to the number of recipients his message was almost universally classified as SPAM and never received by most of the human race who now only had hours to live....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Oh come off it. Humor is a healthy way of dealing with tragedy. If you get offended that's your choice. Moping about isn't going to bring anyone back, and I prefer to smile.
Not so long ago I lost my dad to heart disease, a perpetual natural disaster that kills more people than 10 WTC attacks every month. And you know what, I still laugh when Homer has a heart attack. If I were to die a horrible horrible death, I'd at least hope someone could get a giggle out of it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Since the 1700s, not a single earthquake in California that was over 6.5 has caused a tsunami there.
There have been 8 California quakes that have generated tsunamis. Though the San Andreas Fault isn't liable to generate a tsunami because it slips to the right instead of up/down, some California quakes are able to generate undersea landslides. Click on the image on this Mbari page and you'll see a substantial scar left by a landslide off the Santa Barbara Coast.
Secondly, yesterday's quake was north of Cape Mendocino which is at the southern end of a series of subduction faults that head up to Alaska. Unlike transform faults, subduction faults can, and do, cause tsunamis.
If anything, I think the media is ignoring some of the risks. Portions of Monterey Bay have very steep submarine walls. A 7.0 quake centered in the bay could generate a landslide that would send a tsunami towards the low-lying regions in Monterey and Carmel. The best advice for anyone in California who feels a quake while they're near the shore is to climb right away. Don't wait for the media to tell you there's a risk because the warning will come too late. Most of the time climbing will be unnecessary, but sometimes it'll save someone's life.