Hello loyal followers: I have the great honor of announcing that the American Geophysical Union will now host my blog. AGU is a preeminent global society dedicated to supporting, disseminating, and advancing Earth science. They run a number of the most prominent Earth science academic journals and annually host–among a number of smaller regional conferences–the largest Earth science conference on the planet. As part of their outreach efforts they have assembled the AGU blogosphere, a group of passionate science bloggers with the itch and ability to discuss science, from how it’s done to what it shows to how it relates to you and the rest of the world. It is with honor that I join their ranks, and look forward to the opportunity to share my passion for things seismological through an outlet that will open the discussion to scientific and public audiences alike.
The Wasatch Range looms beautifully behind downtown Salt Lake City, which is dropping off the face of the mountains along the Wasatch Fault, one earthquake at a time.
Today as my final SSA conference event I’m attending a field trip to visit the Wasatch Fault and see Utah’s efforts at understanding and mitigating the risk from this fearsome structure. The trip is being handily led by Utah Geological Survey (UGS) scientists Chris DuRoss and Bill Lund, and involves the contributions of a lot of scientists and engineers. We’ll visit geologic trench sites, seismic stations, and retrofitted buildings all around Salt Lake City, and I’ll have a full report later on. While I’m out seeing the real thing, you all can take your own tour of the Wasatch Fault with this well produced, informative video from the UGS.
Today at 10:15am Mountain Daylight Time (UTC -8) tens of thousands of Utahns will Drop, Cover, and Hold On in a massive earthquake drill set to alert the state to the dangers posed by its numerous fault lines.
Scientists have calculated a number of potential earthquake scenarios for Utah, compiled here. A quake on the Salt Lake City segment of the Wasatch fault is the most destructive example, but the state is littered with earthquake faults, and so destructive earthquakes could happen anywhere.
This week I’m attending the Seismological Society of America annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah. The society was founded in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, so the annual meetings generally coincide with the quake’s April 18 anniversary.
Salt Lake City’s pioneer past is still evident overlooking the Wasatch front from the Utah State Capitol
This year’s conference is held in Salt Lake City, at the foot of the gorgeous and seismically ominous Wasatch Mountains. As such the conference is nominally focused on earthquake hazards in the U.S. intermountain west. The organizers have done a marvelous job arranging events, public lectures, and coordinating with Utah’s statewide ShakeOut drill on Wednesday in order to raise public awareness of the risks posed by the Wasatch Fault.
Below are details on the two big public events, if you’re in Utah and looking for some straight-from-the-source earthquake info. I’ll report more throughout and after the week on other goings-on at the conference, including the discussion and results from my own session on what stops earthquake ruptures, and a big field trip to see the Wasatch fault and SLC’s seismic preparedness on Saturday.
Public Events
The Great Utah ShakeOut http://www.shakeout.org/utah/
Wednesday, April 17
10:15am
Everywhere – under a table!
Apologies for the tardiness. I suppose for some of you this is Sunday evening reading, if that’s what people even do on Sunday evenings. Maybe for those of you hunkering down in the U.S. midwest.
Here are two weeks’ worth of seismic tidbits I posted on Twitter, since the first week was a little dry. Catch up on all things quakey!
“The Earthquake Machine” How do you scale down faults so that you can understand their frictional and mechanical behavior in controlled tests? Popular Science has a neato infographic on the equipment used in rock mechanics tests–earthquake laboratories. http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-03/earthquake-machine
Animal earthquake predictors There has been a modest buzz this week about research on a longstanding legend of seismic phenomena. Animals have occasionally been reported to appear to foretell earthquakes, but anecdotal evidence generally fails any rigorous scientific test, and most such observations are thus dismissed as unreliable indicators of any impending quake. Researchers in Germany, however, have begun to study ants that live in colonies along fault lines. Surprising finding: their level of activity changes from a daily average before small tremors. I wouldn’t make too much of this yet, but I think it’s really cool to finally see some potential for scientific tests of a long-standing, intractable myth/puzzle about quake phenomena. Now if only we could fill all our fault lines with German Redwood ants…. I wonder if they distinguish between magnitude 2 and magnitude 7…
A modest but substantial 5.8 tremor rattled the southern Japanese island of Honshu this week, doing a fair bit of damage on Awaji island and the densely populated area surrounding it. A collection of videos record the shaking from a few urban cameras, the second of which demonstrates the noise created by a rattling city:
YouTube user KOJI PEI posted a video showing a real-time (actually ~2 or 3x speed) animation of shaking intensity at each of Japan’s seismometers during this quake. I’m not sure where this video came from nor how specifically it was generated (it appears to be maximum acceleration averaged over a several second time window), but I’m hoping to find out and to find more like it. You can see seismic waves radiate outward from the epicenter, with the relatively gentle P-waves leading the charge, and swishy S-waves ringing outward behind them.
The principle of base isolation is already successfully applied in buildings around the world, and this mini-version may be hugely popular with companies and museums whose equipement and specimens need to be seismically protected. One of the commenters also has some insightful things to add, including the major deficiencies in maximum displacement and vertical protection.
Big news on a big move this week – I’ll update you all shortly!
Here’s the second installment of my now weekly series in which I compile all the neat-o earthquake things I’ve relayed via Twitter over the prior week.
National Tsunami Week
From March 24-30, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) teamed up to raise awareness of tsunami hazard, assembling a huge number of resources. Get informed about the tsunami risk to your coast line, and learn what you should do–I compiled their compilations here.
Earthquake Anniversaries
There were some notable earthquake anniversaries this past week: in 1983 a hefty jolt shook Portland–the “Spring Break quake.” In 1964, the largest earthquake in North America’s modern history, the M9.2 Good Friday earthquake, shook Anchorage for several minutes, jostling loose all kinds of landslides and faults, and sent a massive tsunami racing across the Pacific.
Turkey’s Urban Renewal/Quake Retrofitting Plan Kicks In
Earlier this year, the government of Turkey initiated an urban renewal project in Istanbul that will replace deadly apartment blocks with housing built to withstand their inevitable temblor(s).
www.invest.gov.tr – info from Turkey’s gov’t Earthquake Hazard for Istanbul – blog article summarizing the policy
YouTube’s “EarthquakeVideoMex” compiled a few new videos of earthquake footage, one from a M6.3 in Mexico a few years ago (with some amazing standing waves in an upper story pool):
…and one from the M6.5 that jolted Taiwan earlier this week.
Earthquakes and Cheese
In potentially the most important earthquake-related development of the week, we learned how the Parmagiano-Reggiano industry recovered from a devastating earthquake that struck almost a year ago and wrecked millions of dollars worth of cheese. The Miracle After Italy’s ‘Parmesan Quake’ – WorldCrunch news
See you next week! Or hopefully before then. Happy reading. Join in the fun and get these in real time @TTremblingEarth on Twitter!
The bottom line is that we face threats on all fronts, although they’re greatest along the Pacific shore. Local megaquakes in the Pacific Northwest will one day wash torrents of water ashore in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. More frequently than that (we have two examples from this decade alone), giant quakes elsewhere around the Pacific will send tsunamis racing across the ocean to flood our shorelines and swirl around our harbors. Large quakes in the Caribbean and landslides out in the Atlantic pose a tsunami threat to our Gulf and Atlantic coasts.
Fortunately we’re familiar with this risk because we’ve seen the effects of even 1-meter-high tsunamis on our coastline:
NOAA’s Center for Tsunami Research has a ton of cool models and animations (their YouTube channel is chock full, at YouTube.com/noaapmel) that represent the best measurements and calculations from actual tsunami events that have happened. One recently released model shows the best estimate of what happened during the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 in Alaska. The tsunami from that quake ravaged the U.S. coastline in Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, and California and caused fatalities. Get informed! These things happen.
This is the inaugural post of a weekly series I promised to start that will supplement my more in depth but sporadic blogging about topical seismic events. A couple months ago I joined Twitter to broadcast some of the interesting seismic news snippets I come across daily, including lots of content that didn’t really warrant drawn out posts. As I promised then, I’m now compiling my full week of Tweeted links into a “weekend reading” sort of post, to let you catch up on all the earthquake news you missed as it flew by on Twitter. So here goes: a bunch of articles about earthquakes to read, and why to read them.
To me the highlight of the New York Times piece was the imaginative explanation of what benefits early warning of an earthquake could provide:
“[Japan’s EEW system was able to] activate computerized programs to slow commuter trains so they did not go off their tracks, stop elevators so passengers were not stranded between floors, flash highway warning signs instructing motorists to slow down and avoid overpasses, and open doors at fire stations so they would not be stuck shut should power be lost.
The warning would go out to home computers and personal cellphones, giving surgeons a moment to withdraw scalpels, workers at Disneyland time to shut down Space Mountain, home cooks an opportunity to turn off the gas and everyone a moment to… dive under a desk.
If you are cooking, you can step away from the boiling water… it would help people psychologically, decreasing the surprise that can freeze people in confusion and fear when the ground starts moving, or lead to panicked and dangerous reactions, like running outside a building.”
I like the introduction of the intangible psychological benefits of reducing the paralyzing suddenness with which earthquakes set upon us.
Emergency Kits
A bunch of articles have just come out regarding earthquake survival kits.
And the New Zealand Herald describes an effect I think most seismologists would be ecstatic to learn of: small tremors have a huge impact on emergency kit sales (up 300%), signaling that people really do treat the benign moderate jolts as reminders of real hazard. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10873205
Prediction vs. Mitigation
On a subject intimately related to the prior two, The Guardian published an article by Dave Petley, director of the Institute of Hazard, Risk, and Resilience at the University of Durham (and perhaps known more familiarly as the author of AGU’s Landslide Blog). Dave presents the elusive ideal of earthquake prediction through a simple and plainspoken set of thought exercises, which ultimately illustrate that prediction isn’t truly what we want. Mitigation, preparation, and a few moments warning should suffice… and may have to. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/may/30/attempts-predict-earthquakes-harm-good
Tsunamis Galore
On the 2nd anniversary of the March 11, 2011 M9.0 Tohoku earthquake, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reminded us that twenty eight other tsunamis have struck various parts of the world since then. http://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/MediaDetail2.php?MediaID=1304&MediaTypeID=1
Earthquakes Rock the Atmosphere
A widely circulated research result this past week was the discovery of significant signals from the Tohoku earthquake… recorded by satellite gravity measurements as pressure waves passed through the edge of the atmosphere. There’s a great animation of the data here: http://spaceinvideos.esa.int/Videos/2013/03/Earthquake_felt_in_Space
That should do it for now. Tune in again next weekend, or Follow me on Twitter! @TTremblingEarth
On most of the planet this quake would have been unremarkable, but having shaken a population exceeding 7 million people, it earned some remarks. In fact, in the 24 hour period surrounding this earthquake there were 27 of similar or larger magnitude around the world, but this one earned the attention. (That link will probably update with time… if you need convincing you can just set up a “custom data feed” for March 11, 2013.)
The screen grab below shows all M4+ earthquakes that occurred on March 11, 2013. Most of these went unnoticed. Some were felt by many, but didn’t receive the (U.S.) coverage of the SoCal tremor.
I love seeing the bimodal reactions of southern Californians to an earthquake of this size. No doubt the unnerving sensation of the ground suddenly shuddering beneath you is frightening to many, but there seem to be just as many who could scarcely care less.
Watch as it disrupts (or doesn’t) the coverage of the nearby Indian Wells BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament:
The other interesting facet of the quake was the initial determination of its location and magnitude, which was ironically marred by having a sizeable precursory foreshock, a sizable and immediate aftershock, and great instrumental sensitivity/coverage. At the outset, seismic waves from the foreshock and aftershock, which were separated from the mainshock by 16 and 51 seconds, respectively, tricked the automated system into mislocating the source and origin time of shaking. Initially the USGS identified three earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from 4.7-5.1 that occurred within two minutes of each other. Of course to most of the populace that distinction in the wavetrain would have scarcely been discernable. It was moot anyway, because as the system and seismologists further processed additional data the true sequence of events became clear. A 2.3… 16 seconds… a 4.7… 51 seconds… a 3.0. Meanwhile the shaking from each of those was rippling outward through the L.A. region and desert, overlapping with each other in their rattling. This confusion is an interesting artifact of having a great, quickly responsive seismic network… that’s not quite dense enough to pick out the details of everything it detects right away.
Southern California’s dense seismic network allows detection of minuscule earthquakes, so there is a rich foreshock and aftershock sequence evident surrounding the mainshock hypocenter. Viewing the list of foreshocks makes me intensely curious about the nucleation process of larger earthquakes.
Foreshocks and aftershocks in the 2 days before and after Monday’s quake
The L.A. Times has a good informative piece about the quake and its regional significance as expressed by USGS scientists:
I have finally returned and settled back into life in a quiet NorCal college town after living for a month in the bustle of Beijing, where I conducted four weeks of lab work for my dissertation project.
I spent my time there working with and in the lab of colleagues at the China Earthquake Administration, a collaboration that I’ll describe in more detail in a later post. Stuck on the other side of the Great Firewall from Facebook, Twitter, and even WordPress, I missed a great deal of the global online fun during some major Earth-shaking events that happened during February. It killed me deep inside, though I had my own great time in Beijing.
I may break these events down into individual posts if I manage the time, but for now I’ll leave you with a cursory summary:
The month began with a monstrous earthquake in the South Pacific, the culmination of weeks of foreshocks in an area that has seen a years-long sequence of large and fascinating ruptures. The M8.0 quake produced a local tsunami that wiped out some villages, and was followed (and continues to be) by hundreds of sizable aftershocks. One of the most interesting aspects of earthquakes is the complex way in which fault ruptures unfold–in both space and time–and the Solomon-Vanuatu Trench has undergone a marvelous sequence.
While I was in China, the south of the country had a strange spate of moderate earthquakes, at least one of which proved a successful test of their new Early Warning System. In rural parts of that country many buildings cannot withstand the shaking of even a magnitude 5 earthquake, so these were a bigger deal than they might otherwise have been given the size.
Other seismological things are happening–Christchurch is debating retrofits, for example–so I’ll just have to keep you posted. Glad to be back; you can finally expect more posts in the future!
I'm a Ph.D. student in earthquake geology, using topographic and stratigraphic investigation to unravel the seismic history and dynamic behavior of continental faults. I get excited about all things seismological, and I bring them to you here.
Big quakes in the past week
The Trembling Earth 