Posted on 12/26/2004 4:09:30 PM PST by backhoe

Recent World Earthquake Activity


As requested- the usual inelegant fast grab of links, but it covers the best and worst of it.
Imagine the power of 12 H bombs all going off at once.
Bless you, backhoe. You do FreeRepublic proud!
Thanks for this information - as I said last night, I may be sent as part of Australian government efforts to help assist in this, and FR is proving rather useful at helping me find information about how bad this actually is, so I can try and work out if I am likely to be sent or not.
This is looking bad enough now that I suspect I won't be going for a while. My job in such situations is to help restore educational infrastructure - reopening schools etc, finding supplies they need. This is pretty important - but if the disaster is bad enough (and this is looking like it is) it's a lower priority than getting other services working. I might wind up going in a few weeks, or months.
has anyone heard about Diego Garcia at all? I can't find out about anything....
-Proud To Be An American (on Nevergore's computer)
Does anyone know how long a time elapses between the earthquake and the tsumanis hitting lang? I was a little surprised better advance warnings could not have been given, even if it's just a police officer in a truck with a bullhorn.
Does anyone know what the tide level was for the psunamis, and they velocities of which hit shore?
Follow the link at #7 and about halfway through are photos, maps & comments on DG. I had been wondering, myself.
Do you know if those are current pictures or old ones?
-PTBAA (on Nevergore's computer)
Actually, an 8.0 earthquake releases the equivalent energy of a 6 megaton hydrogen bomb. This was a 9.0 so it would release the energy equal to 60, 1 megaton hydrogen bombs.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Somewhere, among all those links, are some diagrams of the sea, land masses, wave action, and a little more- but dogged if I can remember which ones they were in-- you'll have to hunt. Look for a blue-green cross-section drawing of an island in the water.
It's a function of distance. I believe Sri Lanka and India had 1 1/2 hours from the quake to the Tsunami impact. Phuket Thailand would have had the wave hit sooner.
The USGS tried to contact areas but since there was no formal warning network set up by India and Sri Lanka there was no organized way to get a warning out.
It looked like an old stock photo to me- but I did not read the fine print!
Tsunamis can travel across open ocean at up to 500 mph. You could be on a cruise ship out in the middle of the sea and have one go under you and never notice it, because it would only be a foot or two high. It's only when they hit shallow water inshore that they slow down and pile up to great height.
Considering that this one caused devastation 1500 miles away from the earthquake's epicenter, there would've been at least a three-hour time lag before it hit some places. But, I guess that not all earthquakes, even powerful ones, create tsunamis this devastating...any seismologists have an idea?
}:-)4
Good work as usual backhoe. Ping Dolly
Thanks, prairie!
12? It's much more than that. A Magnitude 9 earthquake is 1,800 megatons.
The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated was 50 megatons (and that was a one-off stunt by the Russians that wasn't a real weapon.) This quake was the power of 36 of those.
The thermonuclear warheads we have on our missles (minuteman and Trident) are 300 kilotons.
Thus, this quake was as powerful as about 54,000 warheads from American ICBMs. Or many times more powerful than every single nuclear weapon on the world going off at once.
I have seen NO discussion of the prior 8.3 earthquake not too far from there only a few days ago - how it relates to this quake.
Did it cause this earthquake - on the same plate/fault line?
Even more mysterious and definitely never talked about was this near miss by an asteroid on Christmas Eve opposite from the earthquake centers !!??
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/db?name=2004+VW14
you can step the simulation forwards/backwards one day at a time!
Magnitude 9.0
Energy Equivalent Weight of TNT* 32,000 mtons
Energy in Joules 0.200E+19
10,666.6667 300 kton warheads
but who's counting - it makes one hell of a mess.
thank you both. good info!!!!
The previous M 8.1 earthquake south of Australia was 5,200 miles away from the M 9 quake near Sumatra. Completely different fault system.
As you get further away from the US people tend to underestimate how far away things are from each other.
Thank you.
2 pentillion watts of energy released
This is a good explanation of what a Tsunami is.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1308458/posts?page=167#167
http://asc-india.org/events/041226_bob.htm
Thanks- here you are:
http://asc-india.org/events/041226_bob.htm
Lots of good data there!
. . . .sounds like the aftereffects of a good chili cook-off. . . . . minus the methane !! (Grin)
It expands from the epicenter at the velocity of sound in water. Generally, that's a little under a mile per second.
That's the initial shockwave. The actual tsunami follows, the speed being a factor of depth of the ocean at the epicenter and along the way to the point of impact. . .
Thanks...this bump's for you!
has anyone heard about Diego Garcia at all?
I read on Fox that the Pentagon is saying no reports of damage have been received.
Since this one's in the northern hemisphere, the opposite point would have to be in the southern... say, Peru.
600 MPs +/- is a good rule of thumb.
There's absolutely no evidence that large quakes cause other large quakes on the other side of the globe.
There are a lot of claims regarding quakes that really aren't backed up by anything, made by non-scientists.
Thanks for sharing your duties with us. This does look terrible, life needs will be primary. Good luck to you.
Makes Iraq look like a pretty good place to live.
Thanks, backhoe, for your usual good work.
This whole event is unbelievable. Makes you think of the End of the World As We Know It.
That would be the spot to watch over the next 48 hours.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/brochures/tsunami.htm
Tsunami
They cannot be felt aboard ships nor can they be seen from the air in the open ocean. In deep water, the waves may reach speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour.
I was wondering the same thing about DGAR myself. Haven't heard or seen anything as yet. Ping me if you do, please.
I bet people are going to demand that heads roll for that.
India has a nuke program. For a tiny fraction of that budget they could easily have set up an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system, with sirens, if they had felt like it.
If you were watching the program I'm thinking of they found evidence of a splash line within one narrow Alaskan inlet 1400 feet high. Now that's one monster wave. On the high seas tidal waves are fast, but quite short, gaining height in shallows. They used to be thought mythic, but they have recently shown that waves over 100 feet high can occur on the high seas, likely through some other mechanism than tsunamis.
Pics of historical tsumanis:
http://www.warriorprincess.com/Ep65_Tsunami/tsunami.jpg
http://www.ulst.ac.uk/faculty/science/crg/tsunami.jpg
Thanks for the background information. I just spoke to someone who lives on Phuket and works along Patong Beach. (I was there a month ago).
She was given the day off because of Christmas and planned on lounging on the beach but slept late instead. She said Patong Beach is gone! The optical shop she manages was destroyed. She would have been injured if she would have been working.
She went to the hospital to volunteer since she speaks fluent English (she's from the Philippines originally). She said it is full of people with severe injuries, most of them western tourists. She went to one room and it was full of bodies, including many children. She just started sobbing and decided it was too much for her. There were warnings of bigger waves so many people spent the night at the top of a hill...and was very cold through the night.
People were scared so there were lots of injuries and deaths from motor vehicle accidents. She has a motor scooter there but is not riding it after seeing so many accidents.
She saw cars stacked atop each other and jet skis and boats hundreds of feet inland.
I was really worried about her and thank God she decided to stay in bed instead of going to the beach in the morning.
I told her the news is reporting 500 dead in Thailand. She says that when the real numbers come out it will be MUCH higher.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.