earthquake (Page 8)

Research turns up more amazing speculations all the time: New studies reveal that major quakes shake Southern California about every 88 years, which is THREE times as often than seismologists previously thought they did. This means that the area is OVERDUE for a massive quake along the San Andreas fault.

For years, scientists thought that major earthquakes occurred every 250 to 450 years along this fault line. In the August 21st edition of the Los Angeles Times, Rong-Gong Lin II quotes earthquake expert Lisa Grant as saying, “The next earthquake could be sooner than later. It was thought that we weren’t at risk of having another large one any time soon. Well, now, it might be ready to rupture.”
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The quiet, stealthy ones – What’s quiet but sneaks up on you? California’s San Andreas fault is notorious for repeatedly generating major earthquakes and for being on the brink of producing the next big one in a heavily populated area. But the famously violent fault also has quieter sections, where rocks easily slide against each other without giving rise to damaging quakes. These are the quiet quakes.

The relatively smooth movement, called creep, happens because the fault creates its own lubricants–slippery clays that form ultra-thin coatings on rock fragments. The question of why some fault zones creep slowly and steadily while others lock for a time and then shift suddenly and violently, spawning earthquakes, has long puzzled scientists.
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Unexpected things are happening: Because an earthquake anywhere in the world can set off another, even on the other side of the globe, scientists are predicting that a major earthquake, similar to the one that hit Chile and Haiti, has more than a one-in-three chance of striking the Pacific Northwest within the next 50 years.

Earlier estimates put the chance of such a quake at once every half century, but new analysis has changed the opinion of geologists studying the Cascadia Subduction zone, where the ocean floor slips below the North American Plate, and where the region’s earthquakes originate.
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Amphibians don’t just teach us how to stay married, they can also predict earthquakes. Biologists have discovered the common toads can sense an impending earthquake because they have been seen to flee their underground colonies days before one strikes. Other animals that seem to sense quakes, such as fish, mice and snakes, do so shortly before an earthquake strikes, rather than DAYS ahead, like toads do. Maybe it’s time to get a pet toad!

Rather than sensing movement in the ground, scientists think that the toasts may sense the disruptions in the ionosphere (the uppermost electromagnetic layer of the earth’s atmosphere) which have been linked to the release of radon gas prior to an earthquake.
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