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April 11, 2017
Who feels earthquakes?
Earthquakes are felt by people somewhere on the globe just about hourly (see this USGS list of felt earthquakes in just the last 24 hours). Some places are particularly prone to them–think Japan, Indonesia, Chile, Italy, California–while some stable parts of the continents will go generations, or even millennia, without anyone there feeling any quaking of the ground. But even in, say, California, where “felt” earthquakes occur daily, most individuals go months …
March 11, 2015
Hollywood and the USGS both have announcements about California quakes
The last day has been chock full of big public-facing announcements regarding earthquakes, so it’s a good time to step in and sort them out, as well as a good time for (real life) earthquake scientists to capitalize on the surge of awareness. The big real news comes from the USGS, which has finalized and released the most advanced seismic hazard model of California to date, the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture …
February 18, 2014
How hard has your zip code shaken?
Did you feel it? …Ever? These USGS maps show the highest shaking intensity reported in every zip code throughout the U.S. (and cities of the world) in the past two decades. 1991 – 2012 The USGS’s crowd-sourced Community Internet Intensity Maps, popularly known as “Did-You-Feel-It” maps, have been collecting online surveys of seismic shaking intensity since 1997. There’ve been plenty of quakes in that time, and in 2012 researchers put together …
July 22, 2013
Help the USGS record a building implosion!
We all love watching the coordinated kabooms and dusty disappearance of a defunct building imploding in demolition, right? Heck, in Las Vegas it’s a spectacular ritual, touted flamboyantly as a tourist draw. Well the thunderous collapses of these buildings don’t merely satisfy our childish, sand-castle-smashing destructive tendencies; they radiate rumbling seismic waves through the soil and deep into the crust beneath them, “echoing” off of layers and boundaries hidden in …
