Statewide Mega Quake May Be Possible After All

ktla ^ | 5 hours ago

[BenLurkin]

For decades, scientists have assumed the central portion of California’s San Andreas fault acts as a barrier that prevents a big quake in the southern part of the state from spreading to the north, and vice versa. As a result, a mega-quake that could be felt from San Diego to San Francisco was widely considered impossible.

But that key fault segment might not serve as a barrier in all cases, researchers wrote Wednesday in the online edition of the journal Nature.

Using a combination of laboratory measurements and computer simulations, the two scientists showed how so-called creeping segments in a fault — long thought to be benign because they slip slowly and steadily along as tectonic plates shift — might behave like locked segments, which build up stress over time and then rupture.

Such a snap caused the 9.0-magnitude Tohoku-Oki earthquake that hit Japan in 2011, triggering a tsunami, killing nearly 16,000 people and destroying the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Forecasters had not believed such a large quake was possible there.

A supposedly stable section of fault also ruptured during the 1999 Chi-Chi quake in Taiwan, a 7.6-magnitude temblor that killed more than 2,400 people.

[Wuli]

“I heard a report the other day which said that the location of the nuclear plant had received 30 meter (95 ft) tsunamis in the historical past, but the plant was not sited or protected to reflect this historical reality.”

From everything I have read, if the site of the plant had ever received a 95 ft tsnami in the past, it was not in the living memory of any Japanese living today.

Such assessments are based on the statisical most likely scenarios not the radomly, rarely possible though not likely scenarios.

Many things can be on the order of “possible” but it does not make them likely or certain and that sort of unpredictability leaves all kinds of planning left dealing responsibly with statistically greatest, most frequent, most often recorded case scenarios.

No one can afford to build for D-Day every day in every way. If we were asked to, civilization would slowly shut down.

[gleeaikin]

Perhaps the story misspoke and meant 30 feet not meters. They certainly should have built to that standard, and I think they did not. Maybe like the mistake where we sent a rocket to the moon and the program mixed up meters and feet and crashed the rocket.