Posted on 03/30/2006 9:31:26 PM PST by Flavius
Northridge was only 6.7? I thought it was more. :-P
It was 6.7, but it was shallow, which made it very destructive. I lived through the 6.8 here in Seattle five years ago. That one was deep, so it did much less damage.
Northridge was indeed "just" Magnitude 6.7
Keep in mind the energy release, and thus destructive power of a quake, goes up 1.4 times for each .1 magnitude, 3 times for each .3 magnitude, 5.5 times for each .5 magnitude, and 32 times for each full magnitude point.
Northridge was 32 times more powerful than this quake in Iran, for example.
The biggest credible quake you could get directly under LA is in the 7.2 to 7.4 range, or upwards of of 5+ times more powerful than Northridge.
Funny as the Whittier quake extracted more damage on my house than Northridge. Although Northridge was a wild ride.
It was much shallower than the Nisqually quake but not REALLY shallow; it was still fairly far underground on a blind thrust.
Also, most of the energy of Northridge was actually directed into fairly uninhabited mountains.
It could have been much, much worse...in timing as well.
Quakes actually direct their energy in many cases like rayguns. It's not surprising at all that you would have had more damage from Whittier....I presume you are further south in the LA area.
That scares the heck outta me. Although my family came here from Germany in the 1870s and not one was hurt in any way by a quake.
Maybe I am in denial.
I was living in La Crescenta for the Whittier event, and that one scared the hell out of me. But other than the mirror separating from my chest of drawers, I did all right.
My home is on a newly discovered fault that runs under downtown LA. I am in the Silverlake range ... an off shoot of downtown LA.
The Whittier quake appeared to "twist" the structure ... not so much shake.
There's some evidence that the Los Angeles basin has been in an unusual seismic lull for the last 150 years or so.
Unfortunately, that's when everyone moved there.
In part because they've trenched a lot of faults and found a lot of prehistoric earthquakes, and also because the total stress release of the earthquakes in the last 100+ years hasn't been nearly enough to relieve the stress in the region.
Silverlake? The "swish alps"?
Yup, the Swish Alps. But my living room has a killer view of the downtown skyline, the Hollywood sign and the beach in the far distance.
But you are in WA. You used to live here?
We HAARP'd em'!
I have a friend who lives in Los Feliz.
They found an assortment of blind thrusts under LA once they started looking for them after Northridge...Elysian Park, Puente Hills, etc. I presume that's what you're referring to.
I lived in the L.A. area from 1974 to 1989, and then from 1993 to 1997.
Yah, but my family is in Ventura for all these years. But then, that is not so far away.
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