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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
Damn, even the earthquakes go offshore now.
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.
Hi Roger!
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.