Posts treating: "Earthquakes"
Monday, 13 November 2023
The other day I strolled the length of Center Street, a kilometer of pure classic century-old West Oakland residences. Along the way I passed Cypress Freeway Memorial Park, the park at Mandela and 14th that commemorates the 1989 earthquake. This is the back end―that is, at Center and 13th Streets. I was stopped in my
The Hayward fault, as many have noted, is the most threatening earthquake source in the Bay area. It won’t necessarily produce the largest possible quake in these parts, but in terms of likely damages — dollars and lives — it’s number one. And it’s ready to let loose, maybe as you’re reading this post. HayWired,
We all know that the Earth’s mostly iron core is divided into a molten outer core and solid inner core. But that may not be the whole story: some just-published seismic data suggests that the Earth’s inner core is divided … Continue reading →
I think about earthquakes nearly every day, in one aspect or another. Every now and then I toy with the pre-scientific ideas about them. Before science, before literacy itself, every culture stored knowledge about the world in the form of images and especially in stories, told and sung, that were passed down the generations. Natural
So if I’m reading this summary in Eos right, there is a new study suggesting that there was significant deformation of the subducted plate in the lead up to the M9 2011 Tohoku earthquake occurred – enough mass was redistributed to measurably … Continue reading →
Relish these articles.1) Mexico City Deep Time Sickness. Modern day Mexico City is built on the bed of lakes that formed around 2 million years ago. The Mexica people in the 14th century constructed a series of dams and dykes partitioning salt water and fresh water areas. They developed agriculture called as 'chinampas' on islands made up of mud and organic debris. This region became the
Here’s a very interesting analysis of aftershock patterns in the wake of M9+ megathrust events: the aftershocks in a ‘core’ region closest to the rupture shut off within a few years of the main shock, after which seismicity might remain … Continue reading →
Continuing on through my pile of photos I come across the start of the lockdown in March of 2020 and I am reminded that at the very start of the lockdown, Utah was hit with the largest earthquake it has seen in recent memory and the largest earthquake I personally have ever been a part of.
On the morning of March 18th, 2020 at 7:09 am local (MST) time, western Salt Lake County was hit with a 5.7 magnitude earthquake. At the time we lived in the valley to the west, not 13 miles from the [...]
The last week has had its share of local earthquake news, even though there weren’t any earthquakes nearby. It all centered around the release of volume 3, the last part, of the massive HayWired Scenario report, conveniently timed for 21 October, anniversary of the 1868 Hayward earthquake (not to be confused with the 17 October
There’s already a lot of good info out there about this week’s magnitude 5.9 earthquake near Melbourne, Australia. I wanted to dig a little more into the broader reasons you can get earthquakes like this in places you might not … Continue reading →
Soft-story damage in San Francisco’s Marina district, 1989. Retrofit programs in Oakland aim at preventing this kind of destruction. As you all know, the Hayward fault runs through the middle of Oakland and the whole East Bay, and as you all know it will rupture some day in a large, destructive earthquake — a catastrophe
The pandemic has eased enough that Mountain View Cemetery, the Bay area’s finest landscape, has opened its gates again to the public, though only on Wednesdays and Saturdays for the moment and with an earnest plea for your good behavior. Thus on Wednesday I was finally able to visit Plot 1, where the first earthquake
The first thing to do about earthquakes in Oakland is PREPARE! Well OK, but prepare for what? To get our attention, a team of federal and state geologists got together a few years ago and prepared an elaborate forecast of a seriously large earthquake on the Hayward fault, a magnitude 7 rupture from Point Pinole
The first two posts in this series were about the Hayward fault itself in Oakland and about the different types of ground in Oakland that earthquakes on the fault will affect. This post goes into some details about the kinds of earthquakes we can expect in Oakland. I’m going to try and ignore all the
In my last post I talked about the Hayward fault itself, the actual crack in the ground. I argued that the extra hazard of living right on the fault doesn’t add much to the risk, which is already high for other reasons. Those reasons are mainly two: the size of likely earthquakes and the type
The topic of this set of posts arises from the terrible wildfire season we’re experiencing in 2020, on top of the terrible pandemic, on top of the unemployment crisis, and other more distant events that may be affecting our friends and family. We’re all learning a lot about these topics because directly or indirectly they
The location of this earthquake seems a little odd because North Carolina is about as far as it’s possible to get from an active plate boundary – thousands of km from the mid-Atlantic spreading ridge to the east and the … Continue reading →
Bibek Bhattacharya has written a fine article in liveMint about Himalaya earthquake risk. He describes the geological story fairly accurately and also properly focuses on our woeful preparedness in terms of citizen awareness and in constructing earthquake resilient buildings.
Seismologist Roger Bilham too has been talking and writing about this topic from time to time. He has been quoted in
This is such a cool study, and such an interesting result! Earthquakes triggering landslides is not a surprise, but surface waves from a magnitude 5.5 earthquake in the Gulf of California triggering a landslide in the Gulf of Mexico (1500 … Continue reading →
Two reflections on the largest earthquake yet recorded, 60 years later. It has been 60 years since a magnitude 9.5 earthquake struck the Chilean coast near Valdivia. The stats for this earthquake remain pretty mind-blowing even today. It is still the … Continue reading →