Geologists Say California May Be Next 258
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."
9.0 magnitude earthquake Unpossible? (Score:4, Interesting)
Big earthquakes (Score:5, Interesting)
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:9.0 magnitude earthquake Unpossible? (Score:5, Interesting)
> at a subduction zone (like in Japan)
Blame it on the solar cycle (Score:3, Interesting)
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. [wikipedia.org] 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. [sidc.oma.be]
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:A broken clock... (Score:5, Interesting)
Magnitude 9.3, between 9 and 10 PM PST to be precise. [livescience.com] 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.
Re:Pacific/San Juan de Fuca boundary? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Threats against humanity (Score:4, Interesting)
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