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7.7 Magnitude Quake Hits British Columbia
schwit1 writes "A magnitude 7.7 earthquake hit Canada's Pacific coast province of British Columbia on Saturday night, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The quake was centered 123 miles south-southwest of Prince Rupert at a depth of 6.2 miles. 'Earthquakes Canada said the quake in the Haida Gwaii region has been followed by numerous aftershocks as large as 4.6 and said a small tsunami has been recorded by a deep ocean pressure sensor.
'It was felt across much of north-central B.C., including Haida Gwaii, Prince Rupert, Quesnel, and Houston. There have been no reports of damage at this time,' the agency said in a statement on its website.'"
Ah ha! Proof that seeding the ocean with iron causes earthquakes!
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
Of course, that didn't stop anyone from fearmongering and once more tens of thousands were evacuated needlessly - ensuring that hundreds or thousands won't follow evacuation orders when a real tsunami is coming. It is about time to stop using logarithmic scales for earthquakes. A 7.7 isn't anywhere near as bad as a 9.0 or a 9.2 that created the tsunamis of Japan iand Indonesia respectively.
0.2 more on the scale is a doubling of the energy released by the earthquake and a doubling of the energy potentially creating a tsunami. A difference of 1.3 is a factor 90-100.Yes, a 7.7 earthquake can create locally devastating tsunamis - but in this case your only warning will be the earthquake itself, as the wave will arrive within minutes and any official warning will be too late.
We're doing a disservice to people who may one day be affected by a real tsunami, if tell them to evacuate hundreds of times because of waves barely reaching the height of an average humans knee. (The 1m height reported is from peak to the lowest point - and the lowest point was 2 feet below normal sealevel.)
The only sane course of action if you're somewhere in the pacific or indian ocean and hear a tsunami warning, is to tell people to go and fuck off. Stop crying wolf!
A 6.2 is still a pretty damn big earthquake. Any quake above a 5.0 can be very destructive if it hits in a populated area where building codes aren't up to earthquake-resistant standards.
Canadian reporting in. I can confirm that the maple syrup and Celine Dion are both OK.
Of course, that didn't stop anyone from fearmongering and once more tens of thousands were evacuated needlessly - ensuring that hundreds or thousands won't follow evacuation orders when a real tsunami is coming.
And they'd be idiots for ignoring a tsunami warning.
It is about time to stop using logarithmic scales for earthquakes. A 7.7 isn't anywhere near as bad as a 9.0 or a 9.2 that created the tsunamis of Japan iand Indonesia respectively.
It's not the logarithmic nature of the scale that's an issue, but the type of earthquake. A subduction quake causes more water displacement, hence greater tsunami, for a given magnitude. This was not a subduction quake, but a parallel slipping.
if tell them to evacuate hundreds of times because of waves barely reaching the height of an average humans knee. (The 1m height reported is from peak to the lowest point - and the lowest point was 2 feet below normal sealevel.)
I've told you eleventeen trillion times not to exaggerate. I don't believe there's been a tsunami warning since the Japan quake.
The only sane course of action if you're somewhere in the pacific or indian ocean and hear a tsunami warning, is to tell people to go and fuck off. Stop crying wolf!
That's an insanely stupid course of action. You're quite welcome to follow it however.
God's reaction to that kid's arrest...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There have been 5 tsunami warnings of some description stemming from 5 different earthquakes in the pacific area within the last 30 days alone.
http://ptwc.weather.gov/
Without a doubt. But it just won't create much of a tsunami 4000km away.
"It was felt across much of north-central B.C., including ... Houston."
Houston, we have a problem. Houston... where the hell are you, Houston?
I sure hope nobody recently said an earthquake was unlikely.
In other news, I plan on suing the weather man when I catch a cold after getting caught out in the rain without an umbrella after being told it was probably going to be sunny.
The northwest is overdue for a big earthquake... 8.5 or greater.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
There have been 5 tsunami warnings of some description stemming from 5 different earthquakes in the pacific area within the last 30 days alone.
http://ptwc.weather.gov/
Fair enough, but they have not been "fearmongering". Plus it's better to have warnings that don't pan out than no warnings at all.
To quote one of the warnings, for a 7.1 magnitude from Queen Charlottes / Haida Gwai (emphasis added):
There's only one "warning" on that page, the one from last night's earthquake. The others are "information statements" and "information bulletins".
Now, if you want to say that people should not treat every mention of the word "tsunami" as a warning to evacuate, you'd be right. But you said they should ignore the hundreds of "warnings", and there haven't been hundreds of "warnings". There's just been one in the last month. (I think there were others this year, but I can't find a list of all of them.)
The west coast gets earthquakes and the east coast gets hurricanes and all middle America gets is drought.
It was caused by the construction of that secret RCMP underground command base for spying on everyone. It was their fault.
I've contacted Canadian Strategic Command. Fortunately, the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve was on the other side of the country at the time, where it's supposed to be, rather than in some seismically unstable criminal warehouse. The rumors of an impending Maple Tsunami are greatly exaggerated.
I have a radio with S.A.M.E and I got no tsunami alert. I load earth alerts and it shows 0 tsunami warning
I load noaa.gov http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/events/PAAQ/2012/10/28/mcl1uw/13/WEPA41/WEPA41.txt
However, I am quickly left trying to convert UTC to local time to find out what the fuck is going on.
I try a google search nice online widgets. Fuck me I don't want widgets. I don't want a fucking google tracker desktop.
That's not what I want, I want something I can use OFFLINE to CONVERT THE MOTHERFUCKING TIME FAST!!!
I finally figure out the conversion from the truth tables here http://www.maar.us/utc_time_converter.html
A joke, searching through softpedia, cnet, google looking for motherfucking apps to convert UTC to PST
Also search them for better apps than Earth Alerts, Earthquake 3D, the tsunami would have HIT already, and yet even though I half ass knew where to find information I didn't until after the fact
side note - the hamclock.exe might be useful after the tsunami alert goes out keeping track of UTC to local
I only want to know if I am going to be grabbing my dog and my go bag.
Out of all this technology is there anything that fucking works to warn for a tsunami? Not only that, but hell this thing was headed for another part of the world, seems we should care about tsunami from the Japan side of the world. There's like two different websites from what I can tell that warn us. Couldn't there just be one single site with an RSS feed?
The radio failure has me especially pissed off.
http://www.midlandweatherradios.com/product_page.asp?mfgname=Midland+Weather+Radio&itmky=444179&mfgno=9
I almost feel like selling it now, but who's fucking soul would I DOOM with this $49 piece of shit that don't work?
I also love how now that the DTV switchover how when the weather is bad, those fucking packets for the television over air get munged, nice coincidence, nice plausible deniability, where the old fucking analog rabbit ear signal at least had AUDIO with the video snow.
The people making emergency decisions for the United States fucking suck dick.
You have a point: people have difficulty discerning the difference between a 7.0 and a 6.0 yet they are massively different in terms of threat to life and property but they don't appear much different.
I disagree with you on the "crying wolf" portion. Six Italian scientists were recently convicted of manslaughter for not warning citizens of an impending earthquake and because they made it seem innocuous. Crying wolf may be the safe thing to do for safety (e.g. better safe than sorry) and to avoid going to jail.
Source:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/23/world/europe/italy-quake-scientists-guilty/index.html
I'm not sure what you're getting wound up about. I'm about 200 miles from the epicenter. We didn't get a tsunami warning but they did activate the reverse 911 system to tell people that there WASN'T a warning.
The actual warning area was quite small. The problem (if there is one) is the brain dead 'reporting' that implied that there was some sort of major quake and wave going on. We have these sorts of 'alerts' a couple of times per year and although some people get all wound up, they're the same people that cry when Lindsey Lohan gets arrested (again). The PD and fire department got about 100 calls (which swamped the single person sitting at the desk), hence the reverse 911 call.
Some people seem to live on the hair trigger edge of terminal boredom and anxiety - can't do much about them (except perhaps to disabuse them from going into the news media as a career).
If we went back to reporting earthquakes on an exponential scale then you'd have to try and teach reporters what an exponent was. That would not end well.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Look harder: I had to edit this down because of slashcode complaints of "junk characters"
MEASUREMENTS OR REPORTS OF TSUNAMI WAVE ACTIVITY
REPORTS OF 4FT OSCILLATIONS CONTINUING AT WAILOA HARBOR NEAR HILO
ON THE BIG ISLAND
HILO HAWAII 0.37M / 1.2FT 16MIN
KAWAIHAE HAWAII 0.43M / 1.4FT 08MIN
KAHULUI MAUI 0.76M / 2.5FT 12MIN
HALEIWA HI 0.43M / 1.4FT 10MIN
MAKAPU`U HI 0.41M / 1.3FT 08MIN
CRESCENT CITY CA 0.42M / 1.4FT 24MIN
ARENA COVE CA 0.32M / 1.1FT 06MIN
4 feet is enough to turn your nap on the beach into a bad day.
The fearmongering comes from the media who don't understand anything more complex than a traffic ticket (or perhaps Brittney Spears on a good day). There was a tsunami alert for about a 100 mile stretch of coastline north and south of the quake which probably affected a thousand people at the very top end.
I'm going to bet that there are newsrooms who have the direct feeds for earthquakes and tsunamis fed into a semi automatic story generator. Get a 7+ quake and it spits out a story to somebody who doesn't think about it too carefully but dumps in on the wire. Then the Internet echo chamber has fun with it and you get this sort of over exaggeration.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yes, it is. Next question.
People only seem to take notice of the fact that there is an alert issued, not the actual content of it. I suppose part of that is due to the media wanting to hype it up and focus on the fact that something interesting happened, not that it isn't actually very interesting.
It is highly irresponsible really. Japanese media will always deliver the important information when it comes to earthquakes and tsunami. You get alerts on TV and radio about 50cm tsunami quite regularly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I take it you don't live in an area where tsunamis are a risk? Trust me, those of us who live in areas where such natural disasters are a risk take the warnings seriously every time.
Please cite an occasion where people have been told to evacuate "hundreds of times". Otherwise, you're just exaggerating and blowing smoke. And you also forget (generously presuming you even knew) the problem isn't the height - it's the energy. A tsunami wave that's only 1 foot over average can run a considerable distance further overland than you might think because it has more energy. Heck, even a brief visit to a normal beach observing normal waves can show you how wave can travel above the nominal water level.
I happen to live a it further down from the epicenter, on the Oregon Coast. The beach is 7 blocks from my front porch.
No sirens, no reverse-911 calls, nada. I live right on an official evacuation route (my street), and no traffic at all on it.
The only reason I even knew about it last night is from my mother-in-law, who recently moved the to the north WA coast, and is a bit of a drama queen at times... she calls up at 11:30pm local time to breathlessly warn us. Seems the local media up in SeaTac is kinda stupid. Checked the NOAA tsunami site, and they only had a warning out for Hawaii.
Hell, given the typical late-autumn storms around here, we likely had a bit of tsunami action, but it would've been lost in and among the usual surf.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I was talking about Hawaii.
This earthquake was the largest ever recorded in the region, so yes, it is.
After the precedent established in Italy, any seismologists who failed to predict this quake had better pack some bags.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
My home has never in my lifetime experienced seismic activity. The story is interesting in that we live in an area that should experience more but do not. We are so unprepared that as far as I could tell last night we don't have an equivalent to the USGS quake tracker website.
Even Canadian earthquakes are nice and overly polite.
Oh, the media totally understand.
They understand that they have to sensationalize EVERYTHING to maximize their ratings.
Everything is putting you in imminent danger, so you must watch us 24/7/365, so we can warn you and tell you what you need to do to prepare yourself for todays danger.
Something like this just helps the media, as it's perceived to actually be a more real threat [nature!] than other ones they come with.
Other things to worry about:
-ice falling off planes
-children attacking school with guns/knives
-speeding drivers
-random attacks
-home invasions
-terrorist attacks
They basically have another one to helpfully report to us each day.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Welcome to Nashville, "A city waiting to die." when not a 5 but a 7+ smashes it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Driving out on the Sunset Highway a couple months back at about the halfway point from Hillsboro I passed a sign that said something about a "Tsunami Zone." The print was way too small for readability at high speed but I figured this was advertising the fact that I was entering one of Oregon's Tsunami Hazard Awareness Zones, nothing more; but I can well imagine a tourista getting the impression that tidal waves could inundate them tens of miles inland. They should make those signs oversized, like the Forest Fire Danger Level signs.
I live right here.. On Vancouver Island. I was up when it happened.. but never felt a thing. Really.
I live right here.. On Vancouver Island. I was up when it happened.. but never felt a thing. Really.
Likewise. I'm in Victoria, and didn't know about it until reading the late news.
7.7 Magnitude Quake Hits British ColumbiaPosted by samzenpus on Sunday October 28, @05:40AM
Sorry! Sorry! We didn't realize you were an EFF supporter, God! We'll retract the bill, you just...stop...the earthquakes...
Fear the penguin.
Per:
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/earthquake+hits+Haida+Gwaii+Region/7459506/story.html
Emphasis mine
So no.
Ouch
Look at the aftershocks. Maybe you'll get lucky. Seems like the fault it really trying to dump some energy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's on the north side of the Cascadia subduction zone (but not a subduction quake, and not part of the zone). On the downside, Japan's quake was preceded by a 7.2 foreshock nearby. Could this be a foreshock? On the upside, since this is a different type of quake it seems like a stretch to draw parallels. On the downside, if Cascadia was disturbed by this quake, it could be "shaken loose", or there might be a "mirror" quake on the other side of Cascadia--just south of Mendocino, ie, in Sonoma County California. We might spill our wine, so this is definitely Slashdot worthy.
Maybe none that you could feel. I'm fairly certain that every home everywhere has been subject to them at one time or another in the last hundred years.
about as many would notice. difference, instead of camels there be seals and white bears and maybe an eskimo, donchaknow.
Look harder:
I had to edit this down because of slashcode complaints of "junk characters"
MEASUREMENTS OR REPORTS OF TSUNAMI WAVE ACTIVITY
REPORTS OF 4FT OSCILLATIONS CONTINUING AT WAILOA HARBOR NEAR HILO
ON THE BIG ISLAND
4 feet is enough to turn your nap on the beach into a bad day.
I think you're reinforcing my point - don't ignore tsunami warnings, they're not fear mongering, and even for the 7.1 magnitude quake, no one at the warning centre was setting their hair on fire.
Um, look harder?
In the lower mainland, I have not seen any reports of it being felt. Same with most of vancouver island. It was up by prince rupert and haidia gwaii. So for the most part, that area is sparsely populated. The closest major city would be prince rupert with a pop of 12,508.
If this had occurred 500 km south, we would have had some major damage. Judging by this cbc article of eyewitness reports:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/10/28/bc-earthquake-witnesses.html
But there is actually another small plate called juan de fuca that buffets the lower mainland (pop 2.5 million) as well as part of the northern US.
I guess no one really knows what this means in terms of more earthquakes down south in the populated areas. Earthquakes seem to be completely unpredictible. And living on the coast, you do tend to read up often about this particular threat.
-
It was very far from Vancouver Island, especially Victoria
I would advise those here who think they're earthquake experts to do a little research before they write.
The magnitude of an earthquake doesn't equate directly to the risk of a tsunami. The displacement of water is a much more relevant factor. A slip-strike earthquake (like the M 7.7 near Haida Gwaii that these posts are about) doesn't displace much water, hence it doesn't cause a large tsunami. The tectonic places slip horizontally past each other. This is the same type of fault as the San Andreas fault in California.
A thrust fault in which techtonic plates move vertically relative to each other can displace significant amounts of water can therefore cause tsunamis. Megathrust earthquakes occur at subduction zones and can cause large tsunamis due to their large displacement of water.
Yes, megathrust earthquakes are generally larger than other types of earthquakes, but it is not the magnitude, per se, that determines whether a tsunami was generated. It's a lot more complicated than that. And using a logarithmic scale or not would not make it much clearer. There are also other secondary causes of tsunamis such as submarine slides triggered by earthquakes.
This is why it IS important to take caution and move to higher ground following an earthquake in coastal areas and why it IS important to warn the public. There is often uncertainly and delay in getting the full information related to the earthquake following the event, and with only 15 minutes of time from the earthquake itself to when a tsunami may hit shores in some areas, warnings and evacuations need to be issued with limited information.
I take it you don't live in Hawaii? I do. Was the media overhyping it? Of course. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a real danger. Based on looking at the buoy data and what the pacific tsunami warning center folks were saying, I figured it probably wouldn't be a big deal, but why take the risk? They actually didn't issue the warning until they had actual buoy data, and on the tv and radio they were interviewing the folks at the pacific tsunami warning center as much as possible. We actually did get hit by the tsunami, but not enough to cause damage. Even as of midday today currents were surging, creating potential danger for swimmers - that's not based on what the media said but actual observation from friends who were out paddling.
It was my anniversary and we were planning on having sex on the beach (not the drink), and the surges that we did experience (3-6ft rise) could have swept us away, so while being in the car uphill wasn't as much fun it might have actually saved our lives.
Yeah a 5.x quake will barely rattle the windows in new zealand (6.3 was deadly), japan (9.0 quake was deadly) or california (6.9 was deadly),
but in countries like greece or turkey or italy it will destroy towns because they are
built from rubble from the last quake. Their solution? Jail the scientists who did not predict the quake,
instead of building their houses out of something that won't kill them at the slightest tremor.
...how come they didn't predict that one, eh? Maybe we can add it to the list of charges...
It's nice to see that earthquakes use metric when they hit Canada.
Well, duh. Never having felt, or experienced a quake is the point of such a statement.
Fucking pedantics. I haven't had the flu all year.
"Maybe none that you could feel. I'm fairly certain that everybody everywhere has been subject to influenza at one time or another in the last year."
-1 uninformative and just downright misleading.
Your "warnings" are information such as "BASED ON ALL AVAILABLE DATA A DESTRUCTIVE PACIFIC-WIDE TSUNAMI IS
NOT EXPECTED"
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
FTFY. It's important to remember what the driving forces are.
It's (probably) not that that the editorial staff are manipulative fuck-tards ; it's that commercial broadcasting systems put manipulative fuck-tards into positions of power in broadcasting organisations.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"