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Geologists Say California May Be Next
Hugh Pickens writes "Newsweek reports that first there was a violent magnitude-8.8 event in Chile in 2010, then a horrifically destructive Pacific earthquake in New Zealand on February 22, and now the recent earthquake in Japan. Though there is still no hard scientific evidence to explain why, there is little doubt now that earthquakes do tend to occur in clusters: a significant event on one side of a major tectonic plate is often — not invariably, but often enough to be noticeable — followed some weeks or months later by another on the plate's far side. 'It is as though the earth becomes like a great brass bell, which when struck by an enormous hammer blow on one side sets to vibrating and ringing from all over. Now there have been catastrophic events at three corners of the Pacific Plate — one in the northwest, on Friday; one in the southwest, last month; one in the southeast, last year.' That leaves just one corner unaffected — the northeast. And the fault line in the northeast of the Pacific Plate is the San Andreas Fault. Although geologists believe a 9.0 quake is virtually impossible along the San Andreas, USGS studies put the probability of California being hit by a quake measuring 7.5 or more in the next 30 years at 46 percent, and the likelihood of a 6.7 quake, comparable in size to the temblors that rocked San Francisco in 1989 and Los Angeles in 1994, at 99 percent statewide."
Where are our floating cities, we've been promised floating cities and flying cars. I want my god damned flying car!
...is right twice a day! If you keep saying it enough, and it inevitably happens, then you can claim that you "predicted" it.
Your laptop can be used to detect earthquakes:
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2008/03/quake_network
Join the Quake Catcher network
http://qcn.ucr.edu/
Bert
The link doesn't explain why the San Andreas fault can't have a 9.0 magnitude earthquake. Can anybody please explain what makes this fault line so special or immune to such devastation? I'm of the belief anything is possible. Especially when I have my Snake Plissken eye patch ready for some over the top action sequences.
Jonathanjk.com
At least the San Andreas fault line runs inland, so the likelihood of getting the double whammy like the one that hit Japan is fairly remote.
I would think the Yellowstone caldera is a more frightening prospect and more worth mentioning than the San Andreas. They both seem to me to be pretty much closely connected and one is likely to set off the other. But it never gets mentioned, probably because the prospect of the western half of the United States going through a Krakatoa-like event is rather harrowing and would drive people away from the Northwest (which for those people wouldn't be a bad idea).
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The New Madrid fault (along the Mississippi River) is about to pop. It has a history of extremely violent earthquakes. None of the structures built near it were designed with tremors in mind. Ill bet there are Nuke plants along it.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Hello!
I am currently forming an investment group that is buying land around Carson City, NV and all along the Nevada and California border. With the next earthquake, our analysts expect California to drop into the Pacific making all of our land BEACHFRONT!
Yours,
Lex
The rest of the Rim has already had quakes (South America, New Zealand, and Japan). It makes sense for either Alaska or California to get the next hit. (BTW, I am a geologist, though not a seismologist or vulcanologist).
Geologists also believed a 9.0 earthquake virtually impossible from the location where the Japanese earthquake happened: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/japan-earthquake-surpise/
People have been predicting a big California earthquake for many years. Yes, it'll happen at some point but if you're really worried about it then don't live in California (or the Pacific Northwest).
does anybody else remember the house cat flu episode from simpsons? "We're here to come up with the next phony baloney crisis to put Americans back where they belong - in dark rooms, glued to their televisions, too terrified to skip the commercials."
There was an article in the Economist on this issue this week. The potential for a really big Earthquake lies further north off the cost of Washington State and British Columbia.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/03/megaquakes
Some states will do anything to get out of paying their bills....
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Hey now, time travelers need that stuff. Nothing like checking the newspaper machine for the paper and looking at the date and recent major disasters.
Where are our floating cities, we've been promised floating cities and flying cars. I want my god damned flying car!
Research performed by Larry Niven suggests that we need at least two unrelated forms of superconducting material to have minimal redundancy in the power distribution subsystems, preferably four unrelated forms for quad redundancy.
Hollywood? ... Um, okay, you got that right.
JPL? Google?
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Are we going to be treated to a live feed of the greatest disaster movie of all time? Come on, Big Media, it'll be worth it!
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
"Though there is still no hard scientific evidence to explain why, there is little doubt now that earthquakes do tend to occur in clusters"
"Fucking plate tectonics, how do they work?"
Hint: It's moving in more then one direction at any given time. Think of them as slowly spinning instead of moving linearly (though they do move gradually westward due to the rotation of the earth too).
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
...against the San Andreas Fault Line!
We must destroy this threat to the stability of California with all available military power!
I suspect that the next 'big one' is more likely to be offshore of Washington or Oregon, on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The San Andreas fault zone is a strike-slip type which is more commonly associated with quakes up to about 7. The Cascadia zone is a subduction type (between three plates, just to make it interesting) where one plate is riding up over another, that is associated with quakes up to 9 or even 10. This is the same type as the one off Japan. It has historically had a big quake about every 300 years off of Oregon - 41 times in the last 10,000 years. The last one, on January 26 1700 IIRC (that would be 350 years ago - it's overdue - it's gone from 200 to 600 years in the past), resulted in some areas dropping six feet, among other things. Historically the tsunami from these quakes have been very large - 10 and up. Some people predict 30 meters.
If it happens close to Seattle, one might expect Puget sound to act like a bathtub, with the water sloshing back and forth across the sound. That part of downtown that is built on rubble fill is likely to get washed out.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Ardra's return is imminent! It's the only way to explain the quakes!
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
There have been FIVE magnitude 8.5 or greater mega-quakes since 2004. This seems odd since there have only been two dozen of these bad boys since the 1700s.
Hmmmm. We're just coming out of the deepest solar minimum in the last century or more. Wonder if other mega-quakes happened around solar minima? Yup. November 1755 (Lisbon), November 1833 (Sumatra), August 1868 (Arica Peru), November 1922 (Valenar Chile), March 1964 (Prince William Sound Alaska), February 1965 (Rat Islands Alaska). Could there be a link between the solar cycle and plate techtonics? Think interplanetary magnetic fields and remember that we're riding big plates that float on a molten spinning magnet.
Step 1: Get a list of reaaallly big quakes since the 1700s. 8.5+. The interplate kind, not the run-of-the-mill intraplate stuff. You can find a list here. Or get a fuller list of historical quakes at usgs.gov.
Step 2: Get the monthly sunspot numbers since records were kept. The Royal Observatory of Belgium has a data set here.
Step 3: Note the correlation between mega quakes and low sunspot numbers. The median sunspot number is 47, the median sunspot number at the time of 8.5+ quakes is 23. (Same when you move the hurdle down to 8.3+ and include a lot more earthquakes) Make an x-y scatter plot in OpenOffice Calc or MS-Excel. Visually note how many occur within a few months of solar minimum.
Step 4: Recall that the next solar minimum is due in ten years.
Steps 5-9: ...
Step 10: Profit!
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
When we lived in the Pacific Northwest, I paid attention to the predictions/analysis of the Pacific/San Juan de Fuca (SJF) plate boundary. The predictions there are for a really big earthquake associated with the boundary. As I recall (and I hope some geologist will correct me if I get it wrong), the San Andreas fault is a lateral slip fault, the plates slide against each other. But the SJF fault is a buckle(?) fault. Instead of sliding laterally, the pressure builds up as the plates collide by pushing into each other, like pushing the fingers of your hand against your palm, keeping your fingers straight. Eventually, your fingers slip and kinda "sproing," creating a Really Big earthquake. Historical evidence indicates this happens fairly frequently and when it does, the resulting quake and tsunami are doozies!
We have friends in both Seattle and Vancouver, I hope I'm wrong...
The article asserts that major earthquakes cluster around the edges of plates, but doesn't give references. Yes, major earthquakes cluster in time, but this isn't suprising. Any set of rare events will see clustering in time. It'd be a surprise if it weren't. It doesn't need a cause. Second, the Christchurch earthquake wasn't anything exception as far as strength, and it wasn't even located on the subduction zone, but another unknown fault 100km inland. What made that earthquake exceptional was that it was very shallow and was directly under the city. It wasn't even that strong of an earthquake. The Nisqually quake in Washington state 10 years ago was 0.5 magintudes stronger, but was very deep, which is why it didn't do nearly the damage that it could have, considering it was of the same magnitude of the Loma Prieta quake. And to predict that the San Andreas is next isn't anything special either. The southern part of the San Andreas is well overdue for a large quake. It could happen tomorrow, but it wouldn't have anything to do with the Chille or Japan quakes. Third, what geologists are claiming that these quakes are connected anyway? The Newsweek doesn't quote any, and the journalist is not a seismologist.
If you look at earthquakes over many years, it's random. Humans love to see clusters. Actors die in threes. Airplanes crash in threes. It's what we do. Will a major earthquake happen on the San Andreas? Yes. Can we say when? No. Be prepared, but don't fear monger based on tenuous "global patterns" that have not been vetted by any peer reviewed science. Notice the probabilities in this new item. That is not prediction. It works like the 100-year flood. We know it'll happen based on "reoccurrence" intervals (which for earthquakes are more tenuous than for floods) and can assign a probability. We can know that there are a lot of stress on faults and know that a fault has not slipped in a very long time... but we can't know when the rocks will break.
-Drache Kubisuro
The author's only claim to being a geologist is a college degree in Geology he earned in the 60s. For the last 50 years, this guy's been a novelist. So where's the research that says that California is _due_ for an earthquake _because_ of the other massive quakes along the Ring of Fire?
California could experience a 8.0 or greater easily. Remember, where the Japan quake struck a 9.0 wasn't "supposed" to happen. Now, we know for certain the Juan de Faca subduction zone, responsible for the Cascade range of Volcanoes is capabable of 9+ magnitude earthquakes and the devastating Tsunamis that follow. The last such even was recorded in Japan about 350 years ago and they occur every 300-400 years. We can tell from the rock record. I can say with almost 100% certainty that the US Pacific Northwest will be hit with such an event with increasing probability over the next 100 years.
Put that in Google and read away.
Forget about the San Andreas, this is where the big ones come from.
Fortunately not too often.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone
http://earthquake.usgs.gov
..and panic dance. Lived in So.Cal my entire life...went thru the LA shake..and was in Oakland during its quake. If you live here you should be prepared for it.
Joe Investor
Not only does the Pacific plate go nowhere near Chile (the Nazca plate intervenes)... There's a hell of a lot of border of the the Pacific plate that doesn't go anywhere near California *and* hasn't had a big quake recently. (Ever heard of the Aleutian Islands?)
This just taking what we already knew (that California is at severe risk for a Big One) and wrapping it in unsourced journalistic hype.
If the 2012 movie taught me anything, it's that any disaster can be prepared for....except for maybe a movie with a really horrible plot line. There's nothing really to prepare you for that.
The damage to Vancouver, Seattle and Portland will be significantly higher from the earthquake itself due to the lack of bombardment (and subsequent rebuilding) in WW2, so that the building codes for many older buildings aren't up to snuff. Plus those three cities will be closer to the epicenter than Tokyo was. As far as the Tsunami goes, the damage won't be as great simply because the coast isn't as populated. I think the largest town is 9,000 people. Though on the other hand, there will be less time between the quake and the tsunami.
Terrible article.
They don't even mention the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which is perfectly capable of producing a +9 quake.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone
Yep, Consider doomsday in general. What is the optimal ammount of time for a doomsdey prophet to get his message out? He needs time to build a following, get buzz, donations, etc. When it doesn't come true he fades into the background with a modest take. If it does come true, he/she can cash in big. IIRC, Jean Dixon did this with the Kennedy Asassination. I'm not sure how she worded here prediction, or what the timeframe was; but a lot of people believe she predicted it. That got her a lucrative horoscope column for decades. Not sure what she's up to now; might be dead. Anyway...
Let's say you want to break into the doomsday business. You can just choose a year; but that's a bit too easy. There are 365 days in a year. Pick a day 10-20 years from now. That gives you roughly 3650 days. The clock is starting--build your buzz. Really, if you can't get funding for your "startup" in that time you shouldn't be in the business anyway.
Think about that. Even if these guys are so bold as to pick a particular day, you only need about 3k guys in the ENTIRE WORLD to cover a timeframe that people care about. Less than 10 years? Too soon if you haven't got buzz yet. More than 20? Too far off. The old people figure they'll be dead anyway, and the youngsters think they'll live forever. I'm not sure if the 10/10 rule is optimal. I'll leave "optimal doomsday buzz building" for some PhD Psychology candidate.
BTW, this works for anything not just Jesus coming back. A lot of guys do it in finance particularly. They don't pick a date. I don't think just anybody can do it. You have to have charisma, and you have to have been doing it for a while. Once again, when it actually looks like the market is going in the direction you predict (which it usually will at some point if you pick something that's happened before) you start cashing in. CNBC, here you come. Write a few books. Retire. Pretty sweet gig. Funny thing is, I don't think these guys could pull it off if they didn't actually believe it themselves.
Statisticly though, I think it's BS which is while I'll probably never make it in the doomsday business.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Everyone hold on to that land in Arizona, looks like it's going to be ocean front property soon.....
no one said it before me? /. What are you coming too.
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
s/why/while
I wonder if I'm getting senile, or if there is a spell checker going over my posts.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
There is no doubt a lot of government money that will now be thrown at whomever can scream "FUD" the loudest in the next few years...
I vote for Chicago to be next. Screw that place!
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
The last great quake M8+ in the S.F. area was in 1906. Great quakes happen about every 150 years and we are 105 years past the last one. The last great great on the southern San Andreas was in 1857. Great quakes happen there about every 160 years and we are 153 years past the last one. The last great quake occured on Cascadia in 1700. Great quakes happen there about every 600 years and we are 310 years past the last one.
Average recurrence is not clockwork. Great quakes repat in in as little as 1/3 the average period or as long as 3x the average period.
There was a 7.0 earthquake in CA last Easter. The biggest damage was in Mexicali, MX.
No points today, somebody hook this AC up.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
If you really want to be alarmist about disasters, you should be worried about other things than earthquakes. The most rational investments (not war, and not earthquake prevention) are these:
1) Make sure we have the best possible drugs and technology for fighting microbes.
2) Make sure our food supply is uninterrupted.
An earthquake can devastate a region, yes. But diseases can wipe out large segments of humanity worldwide. And diseases can also wipe out our food supply.
Look up what is happening to bananas, cocoa plants, citrus, and wheat. All of them are being wiped out by pathogens we can't really control yet. I think that most of these pathogens aren't spreading very fast, so we have time, but think what would happen if a rapidly spreading pathogen destroyed wheat production in a large area.
A rational allocation of resources would put fighting disease and ensuring our food supply absolutely first, ahead of trillions on useless wars, and yes, ahead of earthquake prevention/mitigation. However, we allocate resources based on perceived threat rather than actual risk--how else is it that we are still using coal power, and spending trillions to fight terrorism that killed 3k of us in one single year when antibiotic resistant bugs kill 50k+ of us per year?
That's right, folks, antibiotic resistant bugs inflict casualties on us at a rate of > FIFTEEN 9/11 scale attacks EVERY YEAR and the THREAT IS GROWING but WHERE ARE THE BILLIONS TO DEVELOP NEW ANTIBIOTICS????
When it comes to allocating resources in proportion to risk, we are ABSOLUTE MORONS.
--PeterM
They should build nuke plants on steep cliffs near the ocean in fault zones. Then when they go, the whole reactor will be dumped into the sea. No need to pump sea water then.
That is a medium size quake. those happen every 5-10 years.
It's important to know if the paper holds together (particularly when wet), or whether you fingers go through it? Does the ink run and leave difficult-to-explain stains? Are the staples easy to remove?
All of these factors affect whether the paper is any better than Gideon's (as supplied by shitty hotels the world around) arse-wipe paper.
If this is the normal standard of Newsweek journalism, this is the only further information I need to know about Newsweek.
(For those wishing to know, I AM a geologist, and the article under discussion is crap. It doesn't even make it up to the level of not even not even [sic] being wrong.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"