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You are browsing the archive for Earthquake Footage Archives - The Trembling Earth.

February 19, 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 …

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September 20, 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 …

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April 25, 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 …

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November 18, 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- …

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November 16, 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 …

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October 26, 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 …

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September 24, 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 …

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August 17, 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. …

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May 29, 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 …

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June 16, 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 …

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