Earthquake
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An earthquake is a trembling or shaking movement of the Earth's surface. Earthquakes typically result from the movement of faults, quasi-planar zones of deformation within its uppermost layers. The word earthquake is also widely used to indicate the source region itself. The solid earth is in slow but constant motion (see plate tectonics) and earthquakes occur where the resulting stress exceeds the capacity of Earth materials to support it. This condition is most often found at (and the resulting frequent occurrence of earthquakes is used to define) the boundaries of the tectonic plates into which the Earth's lithosphere can be divided. Events that occur at plate boundaries are called interplate earthquakes; the less frequent events that occur in the interior of the lithospheric plates are called intraplate earthquakes.
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Characteristics
Earthquakes occur every day on Earth, but the vast majority of them are minor and cause no damage. Large earthquakes can cause serious destruction and massive loss of life via a variety of agents of damage including fault rupture, vibratory ground motion (i.e., shaking), inundation (e.g., tsunami, seiche, dam failure), various kinds of permanent ground failure (e.g. liquefaction, landslide), and fire or hazardous materials release. In a particular earthquake, any of these agents of damage can dominate, and historically each has caused major damage and great loss of life, but for most earthquakes shaking is the dominant and most widespread cause of damage.
| Damage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. |
| Section of collapsed freeway after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. |
Most large earthquakes are accompanied by other, smaller ones, known as foreshocks when they occur before the principal or mainshock and aftershocks when they occur following it. The source of an earthquake is distributed over a significant area -- in the case of large earthquakes, over the entire planet. Ground motion caused by very distant earthquakes are called teleseisms. It is usually possible to identify a point from which the earthquake's seismic waves appear to emanate. That point is called its "focus" and usually proves to be the point at which fault rupture was initiated. The position of the focus is known as the "hypocenter" and the location on the surface directly above it is the "epicenter." Earthquakes, especially those that occur beneath sea- or ocean-covered areas, can give rise to tsunamis, either as a direct result of the deformation of the sea bed due to the earthquake, or as a result of submarine landslips or "slides" indirectly triggered by it.
Intensity
A class of earthquakes known as silent earthquakes are thought to be caused by very slow slippage. They are of extremely low intensity but can last for days or weeks releasing as much energy as large earthquakes.
In the 1930s, a California seismologist named Charles F. Richter devised a simple numerical scale (which he called the magnitude) to describe the relative sizes of earthquakes, which has come to be called the Richter scale. Since Richter, seismologists have developed a number of magnitude scales. Most of the scales in use in the Western world (such as the moment magnitude scale) are mutually consistent to a sufficient extent that the term "Richter scale" is routinely used in reporting these numbers to the public. Other scales (and other ways of describing the size of earthquakes) are used in some non-Western countries, and by earthquake specialists. For example, the Japanese scale for measuring the force of earthquakes measures horizontal movement. The press sometimes mistakenly reports such values as "Richter magnitude", and this has given rise to public confusion.
Earthquake effects are described in terms of intensity, a scale which attempts to quantify the severity of shaking at a given location. A number of intensity scales are in use, and there is a significant degree of consistency amongst them. The best known is the Mercalli (or Modified Mercalli, MM) scale, but the more consistent and analytical European Macroseismic Scale (EMS) is now increasingly widely used. In Japan the Japan Meterological Agency seismic intensity scale (JMA) is used.
Causes
Some earthquakes are caused by the movement of magma in volcanoes, and such quakes can be an early warning of volcanic eruptions. A rare few earthquakes have been associated with the build-up of large masses of water behind dams, such as the Kariba Dam in Zambia, Africa, and with the injection or extraction of fluids into the Earth's crust (e.g, at certain geothermal power plants and at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal). Such earthquakes occur because the strength of the Earth's crust can be modified by fluid pressure. Finally, earthquakes (in a broad sense) can also result from the detonation of explosives. Thus scientists have been able to monitor, using the tools of seismology, nuclear weapons tests performed by governments that were not disclosing information about these tests along normal channels. Earthquakes such as these, that are caused by human activity, are referred to by the term induced seismicity.
Preparation for earthquakes
Specific fault articles
- Calaveras Fault
- Hayward Fault Zone
- New Madrid Fault Zone
- San Andreas Fault
Specific earthquake articles
- Lisbon earthquake (1755)
- 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (1906)
- Great Kanto earthquake (1923) — On the Japanese island of Honshu, severely affecting Tokyo
- Great Chilean Earthquake (1960), biggest earthquake ever recorded, 9.5 on Richter scale.
- Sylmar earthquake (1971). Caused great and unexpected destruction of freeway bridges and flyways in the San Fernando Valley, leading to the first major seismic retrofits of these types of structures, but not at a sufficient pace to avoid the next California freeway collapse in 1989.
- Tangshan Earthquake (1976). The most destructive earthquake of modern times. The official death toll was 255,000, but many experts believe that two or three times that number died.
- Loma Prieta earthquake (1989). Severely affecting Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Oakland in California. Revealed necessity of accelerated seismic retrofit of road and bridge structures.
- Northridge, California earthquake (1994) Damage showed seismic resistance deficiencies in modern low-rise apartment construction.
- Gujarat Earthquake (2001)
- Parkfield, California earthquake (2004) Not large (6.0), but the most anticipated and intensely instrumented earthquake ever recorded and likely to offer insights into predicting future earthquakes elsewhere on similar slip-strike fault structures.
- 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake
Related articles
- Earthquake insurance
- Earthquake lights
- Elastic-rebound theory
- Geophysics
- Intraplate_earthquakes
- List of earthquakes
- Plate tectonics
- Seismic wave
- Seismology
- Tsunami
External links
- The U.S. National Earthquake Information Center
- Southern California Earthquake Data Center
- European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC)
- The Destruction of Earthquakes - and a List of the Worst ever recorded
- The European Macroseismic Scale
- EQNET: Earthquake Information Network
- Geowall- An interesting 3d presentation system for looking at and understanding earthquake data.
- Earthquakes in Iceland during the last 48 hours, updated automatically once every 2 minutes.
- Recent earthquakes in California and Nevada
- Virtual Earthquake Educational site explaining how epicenters are located and magnitude is determined.
Earthquake is a video game character. See Earthquake (video game character).
Earthquake is a 1974 movie starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and others. See: Earthquake (movie).
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