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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.
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.
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/
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.)
where the hell are you, Houston
Where it's always been - Between Burns Lake and Smithers. Sheesh.
Don't they also get tornados?
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.
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!
If you cannot do simple addition or subtraction (depending on where you live), you need more than a computer program.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yes, it is. Next question.
It was caused by the construction of that secret RCMP underground command base for spying on everyone. It was their fault.
You wil find Bush's Fault running through the epicenter.
This earthquake was the largest ever recorded in the region, so yes, it is.
Even Canadian earthquakes are nice and overly polite.
Per:
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/earthquake+hits+Haida+Gwaii+Region/7459506/story.html
Emphasis mine
So no.
Ouch
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.