Top 10 Groundbreaking Facts about Earthquakes
And the lazy-ass puns for natural disasters continue. Perhaps this is getting a bit turbulent, but these are solid content, and take extensive, excruciating research. Without further ado, here I go again!
Seeing all the electrical transformers "blow" is quite a sight. My friends and I were coming back from a show in Hollywood on the night of the Landers quake in 1992. After stopping and eating at a nasty Denny's, we were on the freeway when the quake (7.3 magnitude) struck at 4:57 am.
We could just see huge bright flashes everywhere. We were freaking out. It's something you probably have to witness yourself to understand how gnarly it was. At the same time, my friend who was driving was swerving and said, "Dude! Earthquake!" We pulled to the side and turned on the radio. The radio DJ was freaking out! That's when we learned for sure a major earthquake had just hit.
We were about 15 minutes away from our city, so we rushed home. One of my buddies ended up crashing at my house that night and as soon as we were falling asleep... BOOM! The first quake triggered another big quake (6.8) out of Big Bear at 8:05 am. I remember sitting up and my friend was already standing up in a "surfing" position, staring at me with the most freaked out look on his face.
We calmly but quickly got out of the house, along with my dad and stepmom, and rode out the rest of the quake. Man, what a night. I'll never forget it. On a side note, when you're outside during a major quake, you can feel the ground "waving" like rough seas. The ground feels almost like jello. Also, a lot of times I see ignorant people online saying that the transformers blowing are "earthquake lights." This is nonsense. I assure you that it's the transformers blowing.
Magma and lava trying to reach the surface of the earth cause the earth to tremble and shake. The extremely high temperature of the magma can also play a role in causing earthquakes.
Volcanoes don't necessarily need to erupt for magma to cause an earthquake, because magma under the earth still has an influence on the volcano itself. Volcanic quakes can happen even when the volcano does not erupt.
The death toll of this earthquake in China is about 830,000, and it could be felt in an area of about 850 kilometers. Shaanxi was not the only area affected. Anhui, Hebei, Henan, Hunan, and Shanxi (all other areas in China) were damaged by it as well.
Earthquakes make massive amounts of water move rapidly, kind of like a little kid splashing in a bathtub or several people doing a cannonball in a pool at once. In the deeper parts of oceans, the traveling of the waves isn't obvious, and sailors at sea don't sense tsunamis under them.
They only notice after they come ashore, to wherever their home may be, and find the beaches destroyed by a tsunami. Tsunamis can also travel far, with earthquakes from the coasts of North and South America causing damage in nations as distant as Japan and even China.
There was a belief in "earthquake weather" that because a large amount of air was trapped underground, the weather would be hot and calm before an earthquake. A later theory stated that earthquakes occurred in calm, cloudy conditions, and were usually preceded by strong winds, fireballs, and meteors.
I would've only thought they happened in winter for some reason. Guess I'm wrong.
This earthquake killed roughly 240,000 people and wrecked about 80% of the Tangshan skyline. It also caused mass flooding in coal mines in Tangshan, and their coal industry needed an entire year to rebound.
This quake also destroyed railroads that connected Tangshan to the rest of China, most importantly Beijing. This isolated Tangshan from the rest of China and delayed any aid for quite a while.
Japan has the most earthquakes in the world. For the most accurate answer, you must rephrase this question four different ways, such as "Which country experiences the most earthquakes?" You'd get Japan. The nation is in an active seismic area, and they have the most advanced seismic network.
Yeah. Unfortunately, the home of anime and Nintendo has the most earthquakes. It's nothing to do with the fact Japan is an island. It's about the tectonic plates.
The Earth's crust is fragmented into about fifteen major blocks referred to as "tectonic plates." These slabs form the lithosphere, which is made of the crust (continental and oceanic) and the upper part of the mantle.
Tectonic plates move quite slowly relative to each other (usually a few centimeters annually), but they still cause significant earthquakes at the plate boundaries.
Sewage water produced by the oil industry and sent into storage wells caused underground fractures in the Wilzetta fault. The fracture resulted in a 5.5 magnitude earthquake, following a 4 magnitude aftershock. Two people sustained severe injuries from the earthquake, but there were no deaths.
On the other side of things, fourteen houses in Prague, Oklahoma, suffered multiple degrees of property damage, as well as St. Gregory's University in Shawnee.
Earthquakes cause landslides by both head-on fractures of the earth and by sustained tremors on rocky slopes. These landslides can destroy buildings in their paths, obstruct roads and railroads, or knock down weak structures as the rocks tumble.
They can also create dams in rivers from time to time, like in the August 17, 1959, Hebgen Lake earthquake in Montana.
That's right. It's not just the largest fault line. It's the largest and most active! It stretches from New Zealand, all the way around the eastern part of Asia, to most of North America (except Mexico), and down to the bottoms of Chile and Argentina.
The Ring of Fire is 40,000 kilometers (24,854.848 miles) long. It is responsible for more than 90% of the world's earthquakes.
I fell down into a burning ring of fire. On a more serious note, although much of New Zealand experiences a lot of earthquakes, Auckland where I live doesn't really get any.