Community | July 10, 2008 | 4 comments

California "99% certain to experience a major Earthquake", but new prediction methods are promising

source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7498840.stm

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rwylie
The San Andreas fault in California is a giant fissure in the Earth's crust which separates the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, and whose ruptures have the potential to cause massive devastation to the neighbouring metropolises.

Earth scientists estimate that California is "more than 99% certain to experience a large quake in the the next 30 years".

Four years ago, in an attempt to better understand how earthquakes occur, scientists drilled directly into the fault zone in central California, and installed monitoring equipment. In an exciting development, during a recent small magnitude 3 earthquake the seismometers picked up changes in the crustal rocks.

"Normally you wouldn't expect the rocks to change at all", explains Pual Sliver, a seismologist at the US Geological Survey, but "what was surprising was that we saw a big change, ten hours before this ... earthquake."

If this corresponds to a change in stress, i.e. the 'squashing' of the rocks before an earthquake, then he believes that "that's something we definetly want to pursure [to try to predict future earthquakes]".

The last major quake was over 100 years ago in 1906, and the recent devastation in Western China, where hundreds of children were killed after poorly built schools collapsed far too easily, highlights the importance of an early warning system. According to Dr. Fenglin Niu, also of the USGS, "If we can predict earthquakes to within even a few minutes ... we can help them to evacuate [earlier]".

Now the race is on before the next large earthquake hits the west coast: the success of the scientists at the USGS success could save many lives.
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4 comments // California "99% certain to experience a major Earthquake", but new prediction methods are promising

  • OTTO72
    • 0
      OTTO72  

    • i agree with jbreceda78 the invention tesla made was a small box that could replicate certin vibrations and it was strong enough to bring his appartment building to the ground so to make it stronger and bigger you could replicate a earth quake but you would have to be carefull not to go to far

    • 3 years ago
  • rwylie
    • 0
      rwylie  

    • Could you explain about Tesla's invention a bit more? It's not possible with our current technology for earthquakes to be triggered manually.

    • 3 years ago
  • jbreceda78
  • jbreceda78
    • 0
      jbreceda78  

    • Hey why wait for the big one to hit us.
      Why not try Nicholi Tesla's invention on the amplifier of the movement of the earht to slowly increase the movement of the earht and gradually have the earht settle in its place where it neeed's to be and than we don't need to wait to have a big surprise and have a bunch of casualties.

      Think about it.
      Is it green light or red light.

    • 3 years ago
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