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Midwest Earthquake Hazard Downplayed
swellconvivialguy writes "Next year marks the bicentennial of the 1811-12 New Madrid earthquakes, with earthquake drills and disaster tourism events planned across the Midwest, including the Great Central US ShakeOut. But despite the fact that Earthquake Hazard Maps equate the New Madrid seismic zone with California, geologist Seth Stein says new science (especially GPS data) tells us that the hazard has been significantly overestimated, and that we should not spend billions on earthquake preparations in the Midwest."
When we look at faults around the world, we see them storing up that energy. So when we first put markers in the ground and measured the position of the Midwestern fault lines we were surprised that we didn’t see any motion at New Madrid. We concluded that there’s no sign that a big earthquake is on the way.
I'm not a geologist so I'm very confused, if something is 'storing up energy' how does moving around equate to that? I mean, if the moving of the ground in violent ways is the releasing of that 'stored energy' then how is small movements indications that it's storing up energy? I would assume that the worse earthquake areas are those when there's a lot of movement going on deep underground but nothing on the surface releasing that energy until a very devastating movement.
So from the Wikipedia article:
The lack of apparent land movement along the New Madrid fault system has long puzzled scientists. In 2009 two studies based on eight years of GPS measurements indicated that the faults were moving at no more than 0.2 millimetres (0.0079 in) a year. This contrasts to the rate of slippage on the San Andreas Fault which averages up to 37 millimetres (1.5 in) a year across California.
Can somebody who knows a lot about this stuff explain to me why we are so sure that a lack of movement in GPS measurements indicate no potential earthquake? My intuition would guess that no movement is not a good indicator either way unless we've figured out how to drive GPS receivers down into the faults themselves and retrieve that information. I think they're just ground stations that are taking these GPS measurements, right?
What about the northern earthquakes? Do GPS stations up there report tiny movements in the crusts leading up to those earthquakes? I'm just curious if it's possible that you're dealing with different kinds of faults when comparing the San Andreas fault line versus the Ramapo fault line versus the New Madrid fault line.
What we’re learning is that faults switch on and off. They will be active for a thousand years or so, and then inactive for several thousand years. And then other faults may become active. From a scientific standpoint, that’s the really exciting thing we’ve learned from New Madrid. It has been the key to the door that opened up a whole new understanding about how faults inside continents work.
This sounds, at best, questionable or highly fitted to very recent events that we've had the privilege to watch. It's difficult to look over long swaths of time historically when our precision instruments for measuring are a very recent thing compared to the age of the crust. I'm not arguing for the spending of billions in the mid-west but I'm not sold on a single expert's opinion, is this consensus in the geological community?
My work here is dung.
Tectonic plate movement is exceedly slow, and rarely remembers anniversaries.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It is a bold man that tells people that they shouldn't take out insurance - and even bolder given the level of uncertainties there are in seismology. That said, IANAS.
But how could it forget? It was our diamond in raw form anniversary!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
...for the release of cataclysm
Money would be better spent making a few places secure for winter time emergencies. Unlike California, if we're without power or housing, we die.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It is a bold man that tells people that they shouldn't take out insurance - and even bolder given the level of uncertainties there are in seismology. That said, IANAS.
And it is a coward that tells people to remain very careful when danger is overestimated - and an even bigger coward if he does that so he doesn't have to take responsibility if it goes wrong. Especially when it is his job to estimate the risk.
This is part of a vast, left-wing conspiracy to rid the nation of the so called "fly over" country and its citizens, thereby keeping the current "leadership" in place. Since they won't be prepared, the ensuing earthquake will render "Middle America" unlivable and force those from the middle of the US to the coastal areas and force them into Welfare.
Step 1: Run outside and watch for falling corn kernels and cotton balls
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
you've invented an acronym that bothers me more than IANAL
My mind always reads that as "I anal", or in "I'm anal", Which makes sense if you're a lawyer meaning anal in the psychological sense, but it has certain sexual overtones as well that I don't want to think about on a website mostly populated by men.
Now you've invented an acronym for saying you're not a seismologist, IANAS, and my brain processes it as "I anus" or "I'm an anus."
Never mind why you have low self esteem: basically I just want to read about earthquakes and legal issues without thinking about so much goddamn anal and anuses.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm confused. Are we talking about midwest earthquakes or terrorist plots?
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Money would be better spent making a few places secure for winter time emergencies. Unlike California, if we're without power or housing, we die.
If you look at the map, you'll see that the New Madrid fault line is mostly in Missouri and will affect several states further south. It won't even touch Minnesota. Serious earthquakes are pretty rare, even historically in Minnesota.
... my mom would fill the bathtub full of potable water in case the pipes froze to our well. We had a fireplace as our only heat until I was fifteen when we got a gas heater. Yes, I woke up some mornings to see my breath had frozen to frost on my pillow in front of my face. And there were more than a few nights when I opt to sleep next to the fireplace rather than my bed which seemed to be the furthest away in the house.
I don't know what the winters are like in Missouri and I don't know if many people die from them down there. The threats from poor driving on the road are probably their biggest problems and I don't know if any amount of money will fix that sort of behavior. I grew up near Buffalo Ridge in Minnesota and there were a couple of earthquakes I remember but they didn't leave any visible damage. But yeah there were several ice storms and snowstorms that left us snowbound
Knowing how to survive a bad winter or a hot summer in Minnesota is important but if you look at the area these earthquakes could affect, the area is staggering. I don't know if it would hit quite the population that the San Andreas could but you're talking about a potential large area without utilities, increased lawlessness and a logistical nightmare for support/rescue. It might be worth risking billions to inform people of how to prepare and handle this sort of disaster. I guess that's up to the geologists and seismologists to recommend though.
My work here is dung.
Midwives Earthquake Hazard.
Do I need more of less coffee?
The terrorists are plotting an earthquake! Everybody panic!
These earthquakes are caused by global warming. Please mod me troll. Thanks very much.
I'm confused. Are we talking about midwest earthquakes or terrorist plots?
Both are just risks, both are difficult to estimate, and both are treated the same by lawmakers...
So, to answer your question: we talk about risks in general - not just terrorism or earthquakes.
sorry for people who live on such places :(
The New Madrid fault is totally different from the faults in California. The earth in and around the New Madrid fault lines are covered with millions of years of river silt, clay, and other soft strata. It is several miles underground making observation of its activity difficult at best. The most observable activity is the sand boils. They usually indicate pressure pushing up to the surface. The faults in California are within harder, drier strata, making them much easier to see, even with the naked eye. The plates which make up the faults in CA also move with greater frequency causing the strata around them to be splintered with spiderweb cracking, making them easier to move when pressure builds up. The New Madrid fault doesn't move much because it is not along a significant induction/subduction area between plates like those in CA (though the plates on the coast are not actually diving under one another but rather rubbing against each other). This is why the last major quake at New Madrid was so large. There's very little movement to reduce the strain.
That comment from the geologist looks like the perfect way to summon the Murphy undergod. May be it wouldnt was to happen anything bad before, but now the resulting megaquake will even trigger the Yellowstone supervolcano.
The theory of plate tectonics easily explains the earthquakes at the boundaries of tectonic plates due to the differential grinding motions of these plates. New Madrid is one of the 10%-15% of earthquakes that does not happen a current plate boundary, so its cause is less clear. There are motions of sub-blocks inside a plate. But these are typically an order of magnitude less that at established plate boundaries. So it may take millennia to build the same kinds of strains (20+ feet) it only takes centuries in a place like California. Geophysicists are divided by the amount of strain at New Madrid. Dr. Stein's group only sees a small amount in GPS data. Others see a lot more. The data has noise. Its quality depends on the experimental setup. The more stations you record, the more complexity you see.
The US government and university scientists are spending a lot of money and effort to understand the New Madrid area. It more a lack of understanding of intra-plate earthquakes than the amount of money spent. In this era of "no risk is too small" political correctness (e.g. TSA) perhaps no government authority is willing to demote The New Madrid risk as Dr. Stein claims.
(I was a classmate of Dr. Steins at MIT decades ago,)
Some sections of the Mississippi River appeared to run backward for a short time. Sand blows were common throughout the area, and can still be seen from the air in cultivated fields. The shockwaves propagated efficiently through midwestern bedrock. Residents as far away as Pittsburgh and Norfolk were awakened by intense shaking. Church bells were reported to ring as far as Boston, Massachusetts and York, Ontario (now Toronto), and sidewalks were reported to have been cracked and broken in Washington, D.C." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1812_New_Madrid_earthquake)
"...chimneys were toppled and log cabins were thrown down as far distant as Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, Missouri, and in many places in Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee." (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1811-1812.php)
Don't worry folks! There's nothing to worry about! It's only flyover country anyway...
Because I know /. has significant international readership, I'd like to point out that we don't say "New Meh-DRID", like the city in Spain; but "New MAH-drid" (rhymes with "Eldred").
Also, I live in St. Louis and was 9 years old when Irving Browning predicted, to the day, when the fault go off. In the paranoia, some students practiced earthquake safety (crouching under your desk).
To further that analogy, when you put one end of the rubber band around the end of your finger, say, and pull it back with the other hand, the end around your finger will start to roll up closer to the end of your finger as you pull harder and harder until it finally snaps off the end of your finger. The small movements geologists look for as a warning of impending earthquakes are similar to the rubber band rolling up your finger as more and more energy is stored in the rubber band. Just because the end of the rubber band moves a little bit closer to the end of your finger does not mean the rubber band as a whole is not storing lots more energy as it is being pulled harder and harder. Similarly, small areas of tectonic plates may slip and slide, causing small earth quakes, while at the same time pressure builds up in much greater areas. Geologists look for movement of the plates as a whole, analogous to the rubber band as a whole being pulled back. They also look for small earth quakes, which are analogous to the end of the rubber band rolling up your finger. They can calculate how much energy is being stored up by the plates moving and compare that to the energy released by the small quakes. If the amount being stored up is much greater than that released then they know something big is building up. Just as you learn from experience when that rubber band is about to pop off the end of your finger, geologists have learned from experience and studying the geology of an area how to tell when an earthquake is pending. Some areas are more "stretchy" than others and some areas tend to release all their energy in a series of small quakes. As far as I know, the New Madrid fault, where my family originally came from, tends to do a little of both. That is why it is a long time between big quakes.
P.S. In fear of creating yet another acronym, IANAG.
The government will decide to do earthquake (building damage) mitigation only when they figure out a way to funnel the money to a small group of select contractors who have spent a lot of money getting them elected. So when Haliburton decides it has milked the Middle-East situation for all it can get and decides Mid-West earthquake mitigation is its next profit center, then we will see more mitigation than there is any need for. Suddenly the media will be up in arms about the pending disaster to the Mid-West, the Mississippi river will be predicted to stop flowing, and they will be spending billions shoring up buildings that are better off bulldozed.
...Earthquakes are nobody's fault. Sorry, bad joke!
I hate to break it to you Seth, but in every disaster movie I've ever seen, the guy who dies first (usually in an ironic way) is the scientist who says there's no danger and we don't need to prepare.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
It strikes me as one hell of a coincidence that this article comes up shortly after Nebraska experienced a 3.3 magnitude earthquake last week (11/18/10). More information can be found here. The cows were producing curdled milk for days...
As an aside, why was this article tagged with "globalwarming"?
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Seismologist (in training -- Ph.D. student), here.
The scientific and engineering consensus is that there is an earthquake hazard in the central US. New Madrid had three massive events at around ~M8.0 200 years ago, a dozens of M6.0 events, and there is paleontological evidence showing that these earthquakes have occurred every few hundred years dating back quite some time. The USGS gives the New Madrid seismic zone a 25-40% chance to have a M6.0 or larger earthquake in the next 50 years. I might note that seismic waves in this area travel significantly farther due to the older, less smashed-up ground underneath this region of the country. Additionally, the New Madrid seismic zone is filled with up to 1km of thick sediment. How, exactly, seismic waves propagate through thick sediment is still undergoing much study, but we do know that they focus earthquake energy, and studies in Taipei have shown that sharp velocity gradients in the sediment can double the peak ground acceleration of an earthquake at the surface.
Seth Stein and a few others in the GPS area look at surface measurements as the only sign for strain to build up causing an earthquake. This works with very pretty models of earthquakes, like near San Andreas and Eric Calais' famous "Haiti prediction" (he looked at the strain rates, calculated how much strain had built up since the last earthquake, and stated that if an earthquake were to happen soon, it'd be ~M6.8 or so), but it breaks down significantly for inter-continental seismic zones. The New Madrid seismic zone is one of those zones, and it is poorly understood. However, it doesn't take brain-busting thinking to entertain the idea that strain rate at the surface doesn't mean that nothing is happening at the subsurface, and, in fact, the New Madrid seismic zone has very frequent small magnitude earthquakes every day.
The scientific consensus is that the New Madrid seismic zone presents a serious seismic hazard based on tons of historical evidence and current seismological research. Seth Stein is the devil's advocate to that view and frequently and very public tells the world that there will never, ever be another big earthquake in New Madrid, ever. He is in the minority.
I might note that seismic hazard assessment for Wenchuan, China, was rated very highly in the 1950s due to historic evidence of horrible earthquakes in that area. Since the 1950s, the Chinese seismic hazard map has been revised several times and, due to very very slow strain rates measured by GPS, Wenchuan's risk of a catastrophic earthquake was downgraded to basically negligible. In 2008, however, we all saw that massive M7.9 that struck and killed so many people in this area where strain rates were "too small for a large earthquake."
I also might note that physicists at USGS have used the very same data that Seth Stein collected and used, and when they subtracted out the average movement of the North American continent, they found strain rates in the central US that were very high, more than enough to create a catastrophic earthquake. There is more than one way to interpret Stein's data.
...like a balloon and... something bad happens!
Which is wiser:
A) Ignore geologically recent history or
B) Prepare for the worst
Of course, the New Madrid area isn't all that wealthy. I guess we should look for every excuse to not cough up retrofitting budgets.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)