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."

Comments

Screw you ground.

[jack2000]

Where are our floating cities, we've been promised floating cities and flying cars. I want my god damned flying car!

Re:Screw you ground.

[Kokuyo]

Seasickness right in your living room.

Re:Screw you ground.

[Dunega]

Depends on how high it is.

Re:Screw you ground.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

On the plus side, if a tsunami occurs, it results in an instant free upgrade of your regular car to a flying model.

Also your house will be upgraded to floating parts-of-a-house.

Re:Screw you ground.

[dgatwood]

Where are our floating cities? We've been promised floating cities and flying cars.

Underwater eathquakes cause tsunamis.

Which cause floating cities and flying cars. There you go.

Re:Screw you ground.

[rhalstead]

I would think the Pacific North West would be more likely as it's a more dangerous megafault like the one off the coast of Japan, that would be likely to trigger a Tsunami in addition to a large quake. Plus it's over due according to records.

Re:Screw you ground.

[rhalstead]

Yes a Tsunami is a wave as it travels across the ocean and is measured by sensors floating on the surface. The difference is that where the water is deep the volume is large so the height of the wave is quite low, from a few inches to a few feet. Even at a couple of feet it's likely to go unnoticed where the average waves are far larger than that. It also travels at high speed in deep water and slows drastically when reaching shallow water. As it slows the water behind the crest catches up building height. Although it's called a "wave" it would be more correct to think of it is the same terms as a storm surge. If you notice in the images it is more a wall of water and not a wave just rolling through as the water behind the leading edge is about as deep as the front. It gets deep and keeps getting deeper to the max. Then following waves come though for an hour or even hours. This thing was 33 feet high where it came ashore in Northern Japan and where funneled through inlets was probably quite a bit higher. This is what is expected in the Seattle area and could run several hundred miles North and South of that area. It would likely affect the entire area from the subduction zone (several hundred miles at sea) all the way to the mountains and from Norther California to Alaska. The San Andreas is a "Strike Slip" fault where the sides move laterally. The fault in the Pacific North West is a Subduction Zone and not part of the San Andreas.

A broken clock...

[Computer_kid]

...is right twice a day! If you keep saying it enough, and it inevitably happens, then you can claim that you "predicted" it.

Re:A broken clock...

[Rakshasa Taisab]

I can predict with 100% certainty that you can't read the difference between Chile and California.

Also, lol at not understanding what the numbers actually mean and why they are useful. These earthquakes are caused by stress having been built up between tectonic plates, and the predictions give you an indication of how likely that stress is to be released at a certain magnitude. Your prediction of >7.5 with 80% likelihood the next 30 years is useless because it is an intentionally low-ball figure that doesn't give us any useful information abut the estimated stresses in the fault lines.

Re:A broken clock...

[hedwards]

By that logic, I guess we can tell the health inspectors to knock if off because all their predictions of food poisoning outbreaks are just a statistical probability.

Seriously, people like you that suggest that these predictions aren't useful because the time frame is so long are a part of the problem. Had the Japanese heeded the warnings about nuclear reactors of that variety in an area that's subject to earthquakes, they wouldn't have spent the last week or working to avoid a major catastrophe.

I'm sitting here in WA and we're still waiting for our mega quake, we know from the energy build up that it's going to be big, but we really don't know how big or when, but because of those predictions we've at least got our building code in order, so that hopefully we'll be in a much better position when the inevitable quake comes along.

Re:A broken clock...

[Peaceful_Patriot]

A 9.0 quake could have been predicted on that type of fault. And is certainly possible in northern California. The San Andreas Fault gets lots of press because it is a clearly visible scar that runs the length of the state. It slips constantly, producing small quakes and occasionally, big ones. The lesser known danger is the Cascadia Fault, the same subduction type fault which is responsible for the recent massive quakes elsewhere in the world.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone runs off the coast from Washington to northern California and was unknown until recently. It doesn't 'slip.' It locks for long periods and then releases with a massive quakes, producing tsunamis equivilent to what has just hit Japan. In fact, the date of the last quake on Cascadia is well known, 12/26/1700, due to the tsunami it produced being well documented in Japan. The videos we are seeing from there are a preview of what will happen in the Pacific Northwest and the clock is ticking.

Re:A broken clock...

[517714]

Magnitude 9.3, between 9 and 10 PM PST to be precise. The only problem with this evidence is that it didn't exist at the time the Japanese were making their design decisions. The man who put the date on the event said, "There was plenty of respectable scientific opinion at the time that an earthquake of a magnitude-9 was just ludicrous. A tsunami modeler in the late 1980s could not have assumed an earthquake of that magnitude without being called an alarmist or being laughed at." All in the citation.

So, no, they could not have predicted a 9.0 quake.

9.0 magnitude earthquake Unpossible?

[CrackedButter]

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.

Re:9.0 magnitude earthquake Unpossible?

[Dolphinzilla]

I've heard of you, I heard you were dead....

Re:9.0 magnitude earthquake Unpossible?

[C_amiga_fan]

>>>The link doesn't explain why the San Andreas fault can't have a 9.0 magnitude earthquake

Quote: "Geologists believe a 9.0 quake is virtually impossible along the San Andreas, a network of "strike-slip" faults smaller and more fragmented, than the great chasm that exists where two continent-sized plates of the Earth's crust meet along the Japanese islands."

"This subduction zone beneath the Pacific, where one tectonic plate is thrust up over another, is capable of producing the biggest quakes on Earth, on an order of magnitude higher than any recorded in California."

Re:9.0 magnitude earthquake Unpossible?

[heehau]

The San Andreas fault is a strike-slip fault, which means that at its location two tectonic plates rub against each other. That's fairly benign compared to the amounts of energy accumulating at a subduction zone (like in Japan), where one plate has to dive under another.

Re:9.0 magnitude earthquake Unpossible?

[whathappenedtomonday]

> That's fairly benign compared to the amounts of energy accumulating
> at a subduction zone (like in Japan)

...or in the Pacific Northwest? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cascade_Range_related_plate_tectonics-en.svg

Re:9.0 magnitude earthquake Unpossible?

[hedwards]

Actually, we've been expecting a magnitude 8+ for the last 30 years, and probably more, I can recall the last 25 of those years. At this point it's likely approaching a 9. We've only had a magnitude 5.3 and a 6.8 in the last 15 years or so on top of the regular minor earthquakes. So, we are very much aware that we're due for one.

OTOH, our mayor McJackass seems more concerned with killing our tunnel than with replacing the viaduct that we've known will go down in an earthquake ever since the Loma Prieta quake did the same thing to 880.

Yellowstone

[eyenot]

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).

Re:Yellowstone

[cpu6502]

>>>both seem to me to be pretty much closely connected

First Yellowstone is a VOLCANO not an earthquake. It doesn't have any connection to the Japanese or California tragedies. Second, it has been mentioned multiple times on cable channels like National Geographic, Discovery, and History.

Third, it only happens once every tens-of-thousands of years. Last time it happened, Mammoths were still the dominant species in america. (Man had not yet arrived.) Fourth it makes little sense to discuss an event that is predicted to happen circa 10,000 or 20,000 A.D. By that point human beings might have self-exterminated or developed forcefields to contain the blast.

And (babylon) Five..... if it did happen tomorrow, there's nothing you could do to prepare for it (like moving away). Yellowstone blowing-up would basically exterminate everyone in the US/Canada, unless you were lucky enough to live upwind of the event, like British Columbia, Yukon, or Alaska. Therefore no reason for government to "prepare" for something that cannot be escaped. Even if you lived in Europe, you can expect a "year without a summer" like happened when Krakatoa blew up & dimmed the sun.

Yellowstone Supervolcano is one of those events, like an asteroid strike, which really cannot be avoided, or prepared for. It has global impact.

Re:Yellowstone

[Dunega]

This week's scaremongering by the media is brought to you by earthquakes. They did volcanos about a year ago.

Investment

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Big earthquakes

[dogmatixpsych]

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).

Re:Big earthquakes

[Solandri]

IANAS (I am not a seismologist), but I did study earthquake-resistant building construction safety as part of my structural engineering courses, which involved a fair amount of info on earthquakes and expected degree of shaking.

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/

I don't really buy that. It was a subduction zone. All subduction zones are capable of huge quakes. The article seems to imply that because there had been no quake bigger than 7.5-8.0 from the area in recorded history, scientists didn't believe anything bigger was possible. The problem with that is these huge 9+ quakes typically have intervals of centuries or millenia. So unless you have several thousand years of good records, you're on shaky ground (no pun intended) predicting a huge earthquake cannot happen at a portion of a subduction zone.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the moment magnitude scale used to classify earthquakes is a measure of the energy released by the quake. The energy released is roughly the amplitude of movement of the two chunks of land along the fault multiplied by the surface area (m^2, not area at the surface) of the fault which slipped. Slip-strike faults like the San Andreas have two chunks of land moving past each other sideways. They extend only a few tens of km down into the ground because that's how thick the Earth's crust is. Essentially they're long and skinny. So they only way they can generate huge magnitudes is if a very long segment of the fault (several hundred km, probably several thousand for a 9.0) were to slip. This is (1) unlikely to happen - one segment of the fault is likely to slip before the other thus making several smaller quakes instead of one huge one, and (2) would distribute the energy of the earthquake over a much larger land surface area, blunting its impact on any one area.

A subduction zone quake OTOH involves one plate moving underneath the other. This results in a broader contact area, sometimes a hundred km in breadth or more. A shorter length of the fault slipping involves a larger area because the area which slips is shaped more like a square or broad rectangle, rather than a long, thin rectangle. As a result, a shorter segment of the fault slipping has more energy released, that energy is directed at a smaller land surface area, and because of the broader contact area it's easier for a longer segment of the fault to slip. The segment of earth which slipped in the 1960 Chilean quake (9.5) is estimated to be 800 km long. That'd be like a California earthquake stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which is just inconceivable due to the relatively small depth of the San Andreas fault.

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).

The most dangerous area for an earthquake in the continguous U.S. is in the south-central Midwest. That area has produced the largest earthquake in recorded U.S. history (8.0), and because of the infrequency of earthquakes there the building construction codes and preparedness are woefully inadequate. I live in Southern California which has a reputation as a hotspot for earthquakes, but you could not pay me enough to live around St. Louis. Well, maybe if I got to design and build my own house, and it came with its own drinking water well and power generation facilitie

house cat flu

[greenfruitsalad]

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."

Economist Article

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Time to fire-up your laptop, then

[isorox]

Your laptop can be used to detect earthquakes

Yes, if it falls off the table, it's probably an earthquake.

Need superconducting materials first ...

[perpenso]

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.

Re:What about New Nadrid

[confused one]

And the nuclear plants will be fine. If you check, there were 4 power plants, each with multiple reactors, near the site of the Japanese 9.0 quake. All of those reactors shut down normally and survived the earthquake.

Only one of those sites is having any trouble -- and it is only because an 8m tall wall of water topped their tsunami protection wall (it was designed to stop a 6m tsunami). The water knocked out their connection to the power grid, flooded their backup generators AND the backup backup generators. It also damaged many of the electrically driven pumps. Fukushima Dai-ichi is a rare case where, due to an essentially unforeseeable event, a single cause destroyed the primary power connection, primary cooling pumps and all of the backup systems simultaneously.

You can be sure that once the situation in northern Japan is stabilized, changes will be made. Now that they know an 8m tsunami is possible they will upgrade all of the tsunami barriers over the next decade or two.

Blame it on the solar cycle

[clyde_cadiddlehopper]

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!

Re:Blame it on the solar cycle

[SwedishPenguin]

IANA Geologist, but I doubt there's any reliable data on earthquakes from the 1700's. Human settlement was much less widespread at the time as well so many earthquakes may not have affected many people or anyone at all, thus there was no one around to tell the story, and there were no seismometers so any Richter scale estimates would probably be based on damage to human settlements, which could have been far from the epicenter.

Re:Blame it on the solar cycle

[__roo]

It's very likely that there were more than eight 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes before 1900. The Wikipedia you reference says "(est)" after those quakes because reliable global earthquake monitoring only started in the last century. Those eight quakes are famous and, deadly, and most importantly, directly affected (and killed) Europeans. The magnitudes were estimated from historical records.

There were certainly many more large earthquakes between 1700 and 1900, but they weren't recorded.

A little more info on large quakes (including references to the sources for the data on large earthquakes since 1900) here, if you're interested: USGS list of 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes since 1900

Pacific/San Juan de Fuca boundary?

[david.emery]

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...

Re:Pacific/San Juan de Fuca boundary?

[Grishnakh]

I know this is rather extreme and probably rather expensive, but isn't there something that can be done to prevent or lessen earthquakes by relieving the pressure along the fault line? Perhaps a series of bombs buried along the fault, detonated simultaneously or in sequence, to cause a small earthquake instead of allowing the pressure to build up so much? Even if it were an expensive project, it'd be a lot cheaper than allowing Seattle and Vancouver to be laid waste.

Re:What about New Nadrid

[blue trane]

They should have put more of a debt burden on their grandchildren who would at least be around to pay it or see it forgiven.

Geologist? That's no Geologist...

[ironjaw33]

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?

Re:What about New Nadrid

[maxume]

I thought the "last mile" to the grid was the problem, not the power available on the local grid (grid power is the first supply in an emergency).

I don't think they have run hundreds of miles of new cable in a week, just new local infrastructure.

Threats against humanity

[PeterM from Berkeley]

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