Athens – Seismologists say an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.7 rattled southern Greece and was widely felt in the capital, Athens. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
The U.S. Geological Survey put the preliminary magnitude at 5.7, with an epicenter 25 kilometers (15 miles) east of the island of Hydra and about 78 kilometers (48 miles) south of Athens. The Web site of the Athens Geodynamic Institute put the magnitude at 5.6. Different seismology institutes often have varying magnitudes in the early hours after a quake.
The quake occurred at 11:08 p.m. local time (2008 GMT).
Greece lies in a very seismically active area. A series of strong earthquakes in January on the western island of Kefalonia damaged hundreds of homes and injured more than a dozen people.
Southern California, particularly Los Angeles, is not ready for the major impact of a high-magnitude earthquake shifting the San Andreas fault, a leading earthquake expert warns.
“Loss of shelter, loss of schools, loss of jobs and emotional hardship,” Dr Lucy Jones, a science adviser for risk reduction for the U.S. Geology Service, said this week. “We are risking the ends of our cities.”
Jones’ remarks came during a lecture to the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, during which her lecture, “Imagine America Without Los Angeles,” painted a horrifying picture of the state’s future, reports CBS affiliate KCAL9. h
Jones, pointing to a USGS study called said a major earthquake does far more damage than just collapsing buildings and freeways like earthquakes in the past.
Modern life and conveniences are creating new vulnerabilities for California’s population that could be devastating if the “big one” hits, Jones explained.
Los Angeles’ supermarkets don’t even warehouse their own food, said Jones, as the Internet and quick shipping allows them to store supplies on the other side of the San Andreas Fault.
Fiber optics would also be disconnected if there is a large earthquake, said Jones, meaning Los Angeles would be completely cut off from the rest of the world.
“Two-thirds of the connectivity from Los Angeles to the rest of the world go through fiber-optic cables crossing the San Andreas fault,” Jones said. “So we expect at the time of the earthquake when the fault moves, we will break these fiber-optic cables and two-thirds of the data capacity between L.A. and everyone else will disappear.”
Natural gas and water would also be in short supply, said Jones. Natural gas pipelines cross the fault, and L.A.’s aging water lines, which already break frequently, likely would not stand up to a major earthquake, she said.
Water lines could take at least six months to be replaced, the USGS report says. “The ShakeOut Scenario” from the USGS estimates it could take six months for the broken water pipes to be replaced across Southern California after the earthquake.
Damage to the area’s high-tech capabilities could also hinder recovery efforts in Southern California, Jones said.
“The World Wide Web wasn’t in existence at the time of the Northridge earthquake,” she said, speaking of the region’s last major quake, which hit back in 1994. “Right now, think of how much both your personal life, but also our economic system, depends on having cellphone communications and Internet connectivity.”
The Northridge quake affected about a half-million people, Jones said, but a major earthquake on the San Andreas fault would hit about 10 million Californians.
A collapsed tower in Finale Emilia is among the rubble after a strong earthquake rocked a large swathe of northern Italy in 2012. (Reuters/Giorgio Benvenuti)
When you grow up in California, “earthquake drills” are as common as fire drills. A teacher announces the presence of a quake. She may simulate, unconvincingly, the shaking of walls and windows and shelves. At that point, and as quickly as possible, you crawl under your desk, crouching and collecting yourself into a ball and covering, as much as you can, your head and neck. The idea is to take up as little space as possible so that toppling ceilings won’t topple onto you. The further idea is to use the rest of your body to protect the part of it that is at once the most delicate and the most important: your brain.
The drills emphasize speed above all else, because, of course, earthquakes have a terrible tendency to strike at any moment. “Earthquake prediction” has long been a goal of seismologists; it’s been largely, however, a quixotic one. The new island created in Pakistan last week, and the quake in Sichuan this spring — and, of course, the devastation that struck Haiti and Japan in years past — are, among so much else, reminders of how instant and destructive earthquakes can be. Hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, for all their horrors, at least give some warning of their coming; earthquakes, in general, are guests that are not only uninvited, but unannounced.
There’s reason to think, however, that humans will soon have a leg up when it comes to anticipating, and reacting to, earthquakes. And that’s because of the little computers we carry around in our pockets. Smartphones and tablets have accelerometers built into them — the little chips that help the phone distinguish between up and down, reorienting its screen for its user. Those chips, essentially the same technology that allow automotive airbags to work, detect and record a device’s movements at granular levels of detail. Which is another way of saying that an increasingly large portion of humanity is carrying extremely sensitive motion-detection technology around with them every day, and at pretty much every moment.
Scientists, smartly, are looking to take advantage of that. Over at UC Berkeley, a team of researchers has been developing an app that will work with a phone’s accelerometer to record the shaking that takes place during quakes – and, then, to aggregate that information. (Their project is similar to the Community Seismic Network being run out of CalTech, except that it focuses on apps rather than purpose-built seismometers.) The phones, working in tandem, could theoretically detect the P-waves – primary waves – that move more quickly than the S-waves – secondary waves – during an earthquake. (P-waves are why dogs are known to show distress right before an earthquake: They feel the P-waves, it seems, in a way humans don’t.)
Since it’s the S-waves that tend to be the most destructive during an earthquake, the little bit of warning time that would result could be extremely valuable. It wouldn’t be enough to evacuate an impact area before a quake hits; it might, however, be enough to give, say, surgeons a “stop operating” warning, or pilots an “abort landing” message. Or to give non-patients and non-passengers time to take cover under a table or in a doorway.
A phone-based network might also prove valuable once, and even after, an earthquake has hit. Antonino D’Alessandro and Giuseppe D’Anna, seismologists at the Istituto Nazionale di Geosifica e Vulcanologia in earthquake-prone Italy, have been testing whether inexpensive MEMS accelerometers, in particular — yep, the ones that are found in iPhones — can reliably detect the motion of an earthquake. Their finding? They can. At least, when the earthquakes in question are greater than a magnitude 5 (moderate to strong) on the Richter scale, and when the accelerometers are located near the quakes’ epicenters. (Smaller quakes are harder to detect because of the “noise” that results from the fact that phones, in a real-world setting, are regularly jostled and tilted, making it hard to distinguish between the tremors of an earthquake and those of everyday life.)
D’Alessandro and D’Anna have published the results of their research in the October issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. And their findings, they say, are particularly relevant to urban areas, which marry both a concentration of smartphones and a tendency to be especially ravaged by quakes. The idea would be to take advantage of accelerometers’ geographical density to increase the amount of strong motion data that can be collected during a large earthquake — to create, essentially, a “real-time urban seismic network.” Not only, the thinking goes, would seismologists benefit from the resulting data about how earthquakes strike; the information would also allow first responders to quickly assess the impact of earthquakes and allocate resources accordingly. Our smartphones would make us smarter — or, at least, better equipped to outwit nature.
A powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake hit southwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 45 people in Balochistan, besides creating a new island off the Gwadar coastline in its wake, Express News reported.
Tremors were felt as far as the Indian capital New Delhi.
The quake struck at 4:29 pm local time (1129 GMT) around 100 kilometres (60 miles) southwest of the city of Khuzdar in Balochistan province, at a depth of 15 kilometres.
On the Gwadar coastline, the quake created a small island about half a mile into the sea near an area called ‘Jhanda’, according to Express News.
The newly appearing island is said to have a mountainous terrain rising up to a hundred feet. A large crowd was seen gathering at the site to see the new island.
The area of the epicentre is sparsely populated, but the USGS issued a red alert for the quake, which left aftershocks of up to 5.9 magnitude, according to the meteorological department.
A senior Pakistani meteorologist, Muhammad Riaz, told Dunya TV station it was a “major” earthquake and “heavy destruction” was likely.
Minor tremors were felt as far away as New Delhi, while office workers in the city of Ahmedabad near the border with Pakistan ran out of buildings and into the street.
Mumtaz Baluch, senior local administration official in Awaran district, 350 kilometres southwest of Quetta, told AFP: “There are reports of houses being collapsed in the district due to earthquake.”
“We have dispatched our teams to the affected area to ascertain the losses.”
In April a 7.8-magnitude quake centred in southeast Iran, close to the border with Baluchistan, killed 41 people and affected more than 12,000 on the Pakistan side of the border.
People working in offices Karachi rushed out of their building and sat on the footpaths along the roads or stood away from the buildings.
“My work table jerked a bit and again and I impulsively rushed outside,” Noor Jabeen, a 28-year woman working for an insurance company said while breathing heavily.
“It was not so intense but it was terrible,” said Owais Khan, who works for a provincial government office.
“Whenever I feel jolts it reminds me of the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir,” said Amjad Ali, 45, IT official standing on the road said.
Pakistani office workers evacuate a building after an earthquake struck Karachi on Sept. 24, 2013.Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images
A 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck western Pakistan Tuesday, killing at least 25 people and destroying mud houses in a sparsely populated area of the South Asian country, officials and residents said.
The earthquake struck at 4:29 p.m. local time southwest of the city of Khuzdar in Balochistan province at a depth of nine miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Balochistan is a remote, mountainous area with no major industrial infrastructure.
Tremors were felt across the province, as well as in the port city of Karachi, residents said. People as far as the capital New Delhi also reported mild tremors.
Local officials in the Awaran district confirmed to Al Jazeera that at least 25 people had been killed by the quake.
Muhammad Riaz, a senior Pakistan meteorologist, told local media that the earthquake was “major” and that “heavy destruction” was likely.
Mumtaz Baloch, a senior local administration official in Awaran district, 217 miles southwest of provincial capital Quetta, told Agence France-Presse he had received reports of houses collapsing in the area due to the quake.
“We also have initial information about injuries to people as a result of the collapse of houses but there are no reports of any deaths. We have dispatched our teams to the affected area to ascertain the losses,” Baloch said.
In April, another 7.8-magnitude quake centered in southeast Iran, close to the border with Balochistan, killed 41 people.
NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A strong earthquake struck a remote mountainous part of western Pakistan on Tuesday and was felt as far away as the Indian capital of New Delhi, hundreds of miles to the east, where buildings shook.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
The United States Geological Survey said that the 7.8 magnitude quake struck 145 miles southeast of Dalbandin in Pakistan’s western province of Baluchistan.
Tremors were felt across the province as well as in the sprawling port city of Karachi, residents said.
The epicenter is in a remote, thinly populated mountainous area of Baluchistan with no major industrial installations.
The magnitude 9 earthquake that shook Japan in 2011 more than doubled the risk that a big quake will rattle Tokyo in the next five years, geologists report May 2 in Geophysical Research Letters.
The 2011 quake hit 373 kilometers northeast of Tokyo. Afterwards, seismic activity around Japan’s capital spiked, and small earthquakes are now three times as frequent as they were before the 2011 event. The ground movement comes from a piece of Earth’s crust that’s wedged between the Eurasian plate, on which Tokyo sits, and the Pacific plate, which slides into the mantle beneath the Eurasian plate.
Shinji Toda of Tohoku University in Japan and Ross Stein of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., suggest that the 2011 quake transferred stress to the wedged fragment, triggering the increase in seismic activity. The pair calculates that the added stress raised the probability of a magnitude 7 or larger earthquake striking Tokyo in the next five years, from 6.6 percent to 17.2 percent.
Citations
S. Toda and R.S. Stein. The 2011 M=9 Tohoku oki earthquake more than doubled the probability of large shocks beneath Tokyo. Geophysical Research Letters. Published online May 2, 2013. doi: 10.1002/grl.50524. [Go to]
Suggested Reading
E. Wayman. Quakes may bring nearby rocks closer to rupture. Science News. Vol. 183, February 9, 2013, p. 13. [Go to]
D. Powell. Japan quake location a surprise. Science News. Vol. 179, April 9, 2011 p. 5. [Go to]
A. Witze. Great quake one of the biggest ever in Japan. Science News Online, March 11, 2011. [Go to]
Information about the 2011 earthquake from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earthquake Hazards Program [Go to]
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Tribune – by Mohammad Zafar
