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19 February 2018
78 seconds of Earthquake Early Warning
Late on Friday afternoon, February 16, during the Chinese New Year street fair in la Ciudad de México, the tight hold between the North America and Cocos plates failed, the fault slipped, and the Pacific coast of Oaxaca lurched around a meter out toward the ocean. Within six seconds, the profound ripple this let loose through the crust heaved the Huazolotitlán seismic recording station westward as well, followed shortly by …
20 September 2017
Get Prepared Now
The scenes of violent shaking in dense urban Mexico City from the new Sept 19 earthquake are genuinely horrifying. Buildings twist, collide, crumble, buckle, and collapse before your eyes like some scene out of a movie; trees thrash wildly as boatmen on the Xochimilco Canals struggle for balance on a river being thrown violently from its banks; inside, furniture flies across rooms and ceilings cave in while desperate residents and officeworkers …
25 April 2017
Strong earthquake widely filmed in Chile
A swarm of magnitude ~5-6 earthquakes offshore Chile on April 23 was punctuated two days later by a much larger M6.9 earthquake yesterday evening. While nobody could have specifically predicted the size and timing of this earthquake, it is a terribly unsurprising event, occurring as it did in the midst of this swarm of heightened seismic activity, and in the highly seismically hazardous region of coastal Chile. As has been pointed out …
18 November 2016
Complex, compound New Zealand earthquake – Part 2: Faulting by Day
Reeling from the massive M7.8 earthquake at midnight, its relentless aftershocks, and the continuing coastal threat of tsunami, New Zealanders awaited daylight on Monday to see the full extent of the destruction. The bizarre seismic records observed overnight had raised confusion and speculation about what faults were to blame for this earthquake. With an epicenter on land but also a several meter tsunami, it was clear that some complicated combination of on- …
16 November 2016
Complex, compound New Zealand earthquake – Part 1: Seismology by Night
Just after midnight last Sunday, the whole country of New Zealand was rocked by a massive earthquake at the north end of the South Island. From the outset, this earthquake was more confounding than most, and as more reports and data amass, we’re gaining a picture of a complicated earthquake that stemmed from the failure of several large faults in succession. These successive failures may have resulted from structural linkages …
26 October 2015
Indian slab lurches downward beneath Afghanistan
As I walked into the department this bright brisk morning, coffee cheerily in hand, the live global seismogram display in the atrium caught my eye with an alarming event that had just happened during my bike ride into work. BIG earthquake, somewhere in the vicinity of Central/Southern Asia. Indeed, an earthquake deep (>200 km) beneath the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan had shaken a huge swath of Central and South …
24 September 2015
Chile keeps having earthquakes
…and keeps surviving them barely scathed. Chile has this year been rocked by its 3rd Great earthquake this century–its 14th if you include the last. Though the earthquake’s magnitude and the resulting Pacific-wide tsunami earned it headlines, it was a very mild earthquake in the global scheme of seismic impacts. This has a bit to do with the nature of offshore, subduction zone earthquakes, and a LOT to do with …
17 August 2015
Wake-up call from the Hayward Fault
During a brief visit to California this week, I, along with a metroregionfull of people, was treated to a rattling little temblor from the Hayward Fault. The quick jolt struck conveniently just before everyone’s morning alarms went off, serving as a wakeup call for the day, and as this season’s broader “wakeup call” reminder that there are big active seams in the crust inching along around and below our cities. …
29 May 2015
Views of strong shaking in Nepal and what they teach us
When the ground shook throughout Nepal in April, it was neither predicted nor surprising–the paradox of inevitable but chaotic large earthquakes within well known seismic zones. Though warnings of Nepal’s catasrophic earthquake risk have been sounded for years, and though this magnitude 7.8 and its energetic 7.3 aftershock wrought plenty of death, destruction, and tragedy, scientists are finding themselves somewhat surprised at the apparently rather limited degree of overall damage …
16 June 2014
Watch buildings move during earthquakes
Through literal eons of Earth’s history, earthquakes have heaved the ground, shuddered the trees, and sent fauna scurrying. Yet aside from the occasional tsunami and the localized sloughing of rock faces and hillsides, they’d never really been directly injurious to the animal kingdom. …Until the animals started “sheltering” themselves under ponderous weights of precarious things. As the adage goes, “earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do.” That edifice that so importantly protects you …
16 May 2014
An earthquake live at the symphony
Earthquakes have been orchestrated in some of the most important musical works of the past two centuries (take for example the close of the first part of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, or the 5th movement of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony); now in some musical works the orchestras have been quaked. On March 29, 2014, the L.A. Philharmonic was performing Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé at Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, when a 5.1 earthquake jostled …
12 March 2014
Tohoku tsunami maps: lessons for the Pacific Northwest
As we pass the three-year mark since one of the most astoundingly gargantuan earthquakes in human history, we marvel at the unprecedented opportunity it gave us to understand earthquakes, tsunamis, oceanic subduction, litho-hydro-atmospheric coupling, plate tectonics, and the Earth itself. We can also appreciate, with humble reverence, the lessons it continues to teach us about the social dimensions of disaster trauma, risk, and resilience. Japan continues to struggle, now largely …
5 February 2014
Stunning HD videos show volcanoes erupting … gorgeously
As the Tectonic Plates bend, creak, snap, and rattle in earthquakes, blobs of heated rock rise through them from within and punch through the surface, puffing out vast clouds of rock dust and volatile gas, and pouring out mounds upon mounds of hardening molten rock. Volcanoes may fall under the purview of some other realms of the blogosphere, but a spate of recent videos are just too stunning (and informative!) …
25 November 2013
The strongest quaking ever seen on video
Earthquake videos abound on Youtube, but there are a select few that truly stand apart for the astonishing strength of the ground motion they capture. Even with gargantuan earthquakes that have hit tech-savvy, video-grabbing cities, very few cameras have ever been located in places that experienced truly extreme ground motions. Of course, in the future this number will increase. For now, in all my perusal of YouTube quake videos, I …
21 October 2013
Watch the whole U.S. ripple
Want to see what happens to the ground in the United States when an earthquake snaps the crust elsewhere in the world? The waves ripple outward through the continent oscillating each county and city in turn. This video shows real data from seismometers deployed across the country. Each dot represents a seismometer. Each instrument’s motion is displayed here as alternating red (for upward motion) and blue (for downward motion). Individually …
13 August 2013
Another heart-stopping tsunami video from Japan
A “new” video has emerged of the Tohoku tsunami racing inland in a Japanese port town. I don’t know that it’s never been released before, but I sure haven’t seen it, and I’ve seen basically all of them. The video is embedded at the end of this post. Update 8/19/13: I have changed the video link to a more original YouTube video. It appears that the videographer is a Mr. …
21 July 2013
Earthquakes shake NZ capital
New Zealand is at it again–or as usual–seismically. This time a series of strong earthquakes in the Cook Strait culminated Sunday morning with a M6.5 between the South and North Islands, shaking the national capital of Wellington and exacting a fair bit of damage around the region. The shocks started with two oddly steep convergent events, a 5.3 Friday morning and a 5.8 in the wee hours Sunday morning. Each …
11 June 2013
Videos of Taiwan earthquake
On June 2, Taiwan was rocked by a pretty large earthquake. The magnitude 6.2 temblor resulted in 4 deaths, ~20 reported injuries, and a great deal of modest damage. EarthquakeVideoMex, a YouTube user/channel with consistently timely access to hard-to-find quake footage, has compiled the rather impressive videos captured during this quake. The Taiwanese appear to have the same affinity for dashboard cameras as the Russians, so a lot of these videos …
29 May 2013
Significant quake in the Northern Sierra
Last Thursday my heart sank when, driving home along I-80, my phone exploded with texts and calls after an earthquake rolled through Davis. My friends had generally felt it, or at least had noticed and been confused by it, but alas, after five years of waiting around for one up here, I had been separated from it by four rubber dampers, metal shock absorbers, and 70 miles per hour. Even …
21 November 2012
Amazing liquefaction in Tokyo
A new video from Japan [embedded below] shows liquefaction occurring at a scale and scope that I haven’t seen before in video footage. The video is from Urayasu town, Chiba Prefecture–an industrial suburb of Tokyo that appears to be sited on made land adjacent to Tokyo Bay. No wonder it sloshes so heavily: made land (fill) is particularly susceptible to liquefaction. We just can’t pack things down the way nature can …
