Post: #1

The massive earthquake off Indonesia surprised scientists: Usually this type of jolt isn’t this powerful.

The biggest earthquakes tend to occur in subduction zones where one plate of the Earth’s crust dives under another.

Wednesday’s magnitude-8.6 occurred along a strike-slip fault line similar to California’s San Andreas Fault. Scientists say it’s rare for strike-slip quakes, in which blocks of rocks slide horizontally past each other, to be this large.

“It’s clearly a bit of an odd duck,” said seismologist Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Calif.

"A week ago, we wouldn’t have thought we could have a strike-slip earthquake of this size. This is very, very large,” said Kevin Furlong, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University.

It’s probably the largest strike-slip event though there’s debate about whether a similar-sized Tibet quake in 1950 was the same kind.

A preliminary analysis indicates one side of the fault lurched 70 feet past the other — a major reason for the quake’s size. By contrast, during the 1906 magnitude-7.8 San Francisco earthquake along the San Andreas — perhaps the best known strike-slip event — the ground shifted 15 feet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/h...ingtonpost


Are 4 Big Earthquakes in 2 Days Connected?

It's possible, geophysicists say, that quakes off the coast of Oregon, Michoacan, Mexico, and in the Gulf of California ranging from magnitudes 5.9 to 6.9 on the Richter Scale had something to do with the large earthquake that struck near Indonesia. But the west coast quakes were fairly standard for their location.

"The Earth is in constant motion," said Aaron Velasco, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, El Paso. "I wouldn't necessarily say it's unusual, but we will definitely be looking at these earthquakes to see if there's any link between them."

Quakes can trigger other quakes in two ways, said John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Washington. First, they can put stress on nearby faults, deforming the crust and making another rupture more likely. That mechanism is limited to regions close to the original quake.

But earthquakes also send surface waves over long distances. The shaking from yesterday's Sumatra quake, for example, was picked up by seismic monitoring stations in the United States. The shaking may not deform the crust, but researchers leave open the possibility that it could still jump-start small quakes.

"My guess is that the shaking was strong enough to actually trigger a little bit of activity," Vidale told LiveScience. But if the west coast activity of the last few days was related to the Sumatra quake, it wasn't out of the ordinary, he added.

"The activity it triggered isn't that much more than was already there," Vidale said. "It doesn't add much to the overall danger."

Proving that two earthquakes are linked over long distances or more than a couple of hours of time is "one of the toughest challenges we face," Velasco told LiveScience. With the earthquake records that are available, it hasn't yet been possible to find any firm patterns, he said.

"We don't have enough data to say yes, and we don't have enough data to say no," he said.

http://www.livescience.com/19657-sumatra...ction.html

Post: #2

April 11 Sumatra Quake Echoes in U.S.

The 8.6-magnitude quake that struck Sumatra on April 11 sent surface waves across the globe. Undetectable by humans, the waves were picked up on seismic monitoring stations in the United States.

video at link-
http://www.livescience.com/19655-april-1...choes.html

Post: #3

Plates are all greased now. Have ya noticed? More to follow I would think...

Post: #4

Alien Welcome  Wrote:

Plates are all greased now. Have ya noticed? More to follow I would think...

I think you might be right.

Post: #5

Indonesia quake a record, risks for Aceh grow

The powerful undersea earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra this week was a once in 2,000 years event, and although it resulted in only a few deaths, it increases the risks of a killer quake in the region, a leading seismologist said.

Wednesday's 8.6 magnitude quake and a powerful aftershock were "strike-slip" quakes and the largest of that type recorded, Kerry Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, told Reuters.

"It's a really an exceptionally large and rare event," he said.

"Besides it being the biggest strike-slip earthquake ever recorded, the aftershock is the second biggest as far as we can tell," said Sieh, who has studied the seismically active, and deadly, fault zones around Sumatra for years.

Wednesday's quake caused few casualties and triggered very small waves, despite its magnitude. But the sting in the tale is that it likely to have increased stress on the plate boundaries near Aceh, increasing the risks of another major earthquake in the same area as the 2004 disaster.

In addition, research by Sieh and colleagues published in 2010 showed that the 2004 Aceh quake only relieved about half the stress that has built up over the centuries along a 400 km portion of the megathrust faultline.

That makes another major quake in the area a matter of time.

"We've had so many big earthquakes around in Sumatra in the past few years that it seems like an awful lot of the faults around there seem ready to go."


http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/04/12...KX20120412

Post: #6

If the plates are all lubed up, one hiccup from the core could launch one of them.

Imagine sitting around with friends on a warm summer night, gazing at the stars, when suddenly, the entire planet lurches, and the Juan de Fuca Plate goes sailing off into space!!!

Post: #7

•REC  Wrote:

Indonesia quake a record, risks for Aceh grow

The powerful undersea earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra this week was a once in 2,000 years event, and although it resulted in only a few deaths, it increases the risks of a killer quake in the region, a leading seismologist said.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/04/12...KX20120412

Let us see what else is unusual at this present time -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle_24
Solar cycle 24
NASA predicts that solar cycle 24 will peak in early or mid 2013 with about 59 sunspots. This would make it the least active cycle in the past one hundred years.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sci...c_voyager/
The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...nking.html
Sun's protective 'bubble' is shrinking
The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, Nasa scientists have warned.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sci...antbreach/
NASA's five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth's magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. Solar wind can flow in through the opening to "load up" the magnetosphere for powerful geomagnetic storms.

My opinion is that we are entering a period of more rapid Earth Expansion.

Post: #8

tethys  Wrote:

•REC  Wrote:

Indonesia quake a record, risks for Aceh grow

The powerful undersea earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra this week was a once in 2,000 years event, and although it resulted in only a few deaths, it increases the risks of a killer quake in the region, a leading seismologist said.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/04/12...KX20120412

Let us see what else is unusual at this present time -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle_24
Solar cycle 24
NASA predicts that solar cycle 24 will peak in early or mid 2013 with about 59 sunspots. This would make it the least active cycle in the past one hundred years.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sci...c_voyager/
The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...nking.html
Sun's protective 'bubble' is shrinking
The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, Nasa scientists have warned.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sci...antbreach/
NASA's five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth's magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. Solar wind can flow in through the opening to "load up" the magnetosphere for powerful geomagnetic storms.

My opinion is that we are entering a period of more rapid Earth Expansion.

Jupiter Solar Conjection is May 13, another event assoicated with earthquakes.

It will be interesting to see what that brings.

Post: #9

Recent Indonesia quake added pressure to key fault

Seismologists say last week's powerful earthquake off western Indonesia increased pressure on the source of the devastating 2004 tsunami: a fault that could unleash another monster wave sometime in the next few decades.

"The spring was pushed a little bit tighter," said Kerry Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore.

The timing of another megathrust temblor, if it's on the way, "could have been advanced by a few years," he said.

Since 2004 scientists have conducted a flurry of research, looking at tsunami sand deposits, uplifted coral and GPS data. By observing past patterns of quakes, which tend to be cyclical, they better understand what might happen next, though it's impossible to make predictions with any certainty.

The two last behemoth quakes occurred around 1393 and 1450, and Sieh said the 2004 earthquake may be just the first part of a similar couplet.

Stresses loading up on the fault for centuries were relieved only about halfway eight years ago, Sieh. And last week's tremor effectively squeezed the overlapping tectonic plates that form the fault.

"The next megathrust rupture could be in 50 years or in five," he said. "It's impossible to know."

He said a separate section of the fault, hundreds of kilometers to the south, also could snap within the next 30 years, sending a tsunami slamming into Padang, a low-lying Sumatran city of 1 million.

Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, a geologist with the Indonesia's Institute of Science, agreed that last week's quake piled a small amount of new stress onto the megathrust, and that "both Aceh and Padang need to be prepared."

Countries along the Indian Ocean have spent millions of dollars installing buoys capable of detecting waves generated by seismic activity, and building up a vast communications network, from alarms on beaches to systems that deliver warnings by TV, radio, Internet and mobile phone text message.

But last week's quake shows that Aceh has a long way to go, even though there was almost no damage and the only deaths were from heart attacks.

Had it been the next Big One, sending waves crashing to shore within 30 minutes, tens of thousands of people could have died in Aceh, where about three-quarters of the 2004 deaths occurred.

Traffic was at a complete standstill as the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, emptied out, people screaming and crying as they piled into cars and motorbikes to try to get to high ground. Many said that after two hours they had only moved 10 kilometers. Some finally gave up, abandoning their vehicles and walking.

"It was a big mess," said Syamsul Maarif, head of the national disaster management agency.

"What we found out last week ... was that evacuations were nothing like the simulations," he said.

Among the proposals now being discussed are adding new evacuation routes and expanding existing roads to high ground out of Banda Aceh. Officials also are thinking about building more strong, tall structures along the way so that people unable to get out of town would have better chance of surviving.

Only seven buildings, all built with the help of international aid that poured in after the 2004 disaster, have been set up as emergency shelters. Maarif said some buildings such as shopping malls, mosques and schools should be added to the list of possible safe havens.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/...fault.html

Post: #10

Post: #11

most fascinating