Predicting EQ's
 

Bogus Claim: Japan Earthquake Won't Trigger a California Quake - Yahoo! News

This guy Winchester is using the same Idea I was using about a year ago...on this Board to predict EQ's. That is that the entire Pacific Rim Ring Of Fire is connected and thus if one section gets hit it puts stress on a corresponding section at the other corner..So the whole system gets readjusted.

The only thing is that the dummy is using the recent NZ quake as a basis...he should be using the large Indonesian quakes that started i 2004. Moving to the Chilean and now Japanese. If one recalls there was a 6 something quake off of Japan about a year ago as a precursor to the recent Japanese quake. Shortly after the Japanese quake a year ago a moderate quake hit in Western China.

So the only major area that has not been hit is S CA.....Alaska had a 9 EQ in 64 so that has effectively removed stress in that area...one might even think that it was the precursor to the Indonesian quakes. As geologic time is measured in centuries and millennium and not years. The last major EQ on the S part of the San Andreas was in 1850.

What got me interested was a rather large EQ on the Mendocino fault off Eureka in early 2010.

yea but yer forgetting the 2012 factor *sarcasm*

I predict an EQ in California within 40 years.

I fell in to a burning ring of fire
I went down,down,down
and the flames went higher.
And it burns,burns,burns
the ring of fire
the ring of fire.

Why don't you just say the sun is going to come up tommorow in the east and set in the west..

I did.

So did you.

Japan has about the most sophisticated earthquake prediction system installed - xx (80?) billion $$ - and it worked -- people had many minutes or warning.

Ms. Carter appeared to be well worth a slight singe.

Interesting. I had to go find out.

How Japan's Earthquake prediction system worked | Curious? Read

Japan has spent well more than $1 billion on earthquake prediction systems, including a network of more than 1,000 GPS-based sensors scattered around the country — and the payoff came today when Tokyo's residents were given up to a minute's warning that a Big One was on the way. That may not sound like much, but it's enough time for people to switch off their gas lines and get beneath a table or a door frame. [via]

"The system functioned well, because warnings were seen on television across the country," Hirohito Naito, a seismic expert at the Japan Meterological Agency, told AFP.

The agency is in charge of quake preparedness as well as weather forecasting, and researchers have invested decades of effort into Japan's early-warning system. It's considered a model for the rest of the world, and U.S. researchers are adapting it for a system known as the California Integrated Seismic Network.

The system capitalizes on the fact that a seismic event sends out two types of shock waves: primary or P-waves, which move up and down; and secondary or S-waves, which shake from side to side. The P-waves travel faster but are weaker, while the S-waves are slower but do more damage. When Japan's system picks up the P-waves, it calculates how far away the source of the shaking is and issues an alarm while the S-waves are still en route. A warning can be broadcast via TV, radio, cell phones and home alarms less than 10 seconds after the P-waves are detected.


The early warning system isn't that useful for those who are close to the epicenter, because the S-waves come quickly behind the P-waves. But because Tokyo is about 230 miles away, that city's residents could have taken action as much as 80 seconds before the serious shaking began. As noted in this Technology Review report, that amount of time can give people a chance to stop a train, lower a crane, pull a car over to the side of the road, stop performing surgery in a hospital or get off an elevator in an office building.

That's assuming that you get the alarm immediately, of course. Some reports from Japan suggested that the alarms provided somewhat less advance warning, in the range of 15 to 30 seconds. This webpage from the Japan Meteorological Agency explains the early-warning system in much more depth.

Tsunami warnings worked
It takes longer to issue a tsunami warning, because that's dependent on an analysis of wave propagation from an undersea seismic source. The Japanese government issued a local warning three minutes after the quake struck. Technology Review estimates that residents in the hardest-hit coastal areas had 15 minutes of warning, and that Tokyo would have had at least 40 minutes to prepare.

Meanwhile, experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (in Hawaii) and West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center (in Alaska) issued their first alerts nine minutes after the earthquake. They used computer modeling as well as readings from ocean buoys to track the waves as they sped across the Pacific at jetliner speeds. The wave-monitoring system has been beefed up significantly since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which pointed up gaps in the network.
Tsunami forecasters and emergency officials called for an evacuation of coastal areas in Hawaii, which were hit by walls of water measuring as much as 7 feet high.
"We called this right," Gerard Fryer, a geophysicist for the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, told The Associated Press. "This evacuation was necessary. There's absolutely no question, this was the right thing to do."

Longer-term predictions
Could today's quake have been predicted days in advance rather than seconds in advance? In retrospect, maybe so: A 7.4-magnitude quake that hit Japan on Wednesday is now thought to be a foreshock heralding the bigger quake to come.
Two years ago, researchers looked at the records from Japan's crustal movement sensors and determined that large quakes could be anticipated by analyzing the "pre-signals" in the seismic data.
Then again, it's always easier to predict an event in retrospect. Five years ago, The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach wrote that Japanese geologists were sure the next Big One would take place southwest of Tokyo. Today's quake certainly qualifies as that Big One ... but it happened to the northeast, not the southwest.

Paul,
Thanks for the good info!

Almost 80 seconds... Wow. That's truly not much. Works out to ~$12,500,00 per second of warning. At that cost, for another $3 billion they could have had nearly 320 seconds' warning time, a little over 5 minutes.

I used to work at the USGS on an earthquake prediction project in Parkfield, CA. Earthquakes can theoretically be predicted before they happen. There's evidence that there is a "strain event" that precedes the rupture by hours or days.

My project used anomalous water level changes in deep water wells to indicate a strain event. Unfortunately, the correlation between a strain event and a subsequent earthquake appears to sporadic. It can be done, but it's not reliable.

As for a quake in Japan triggering a quake in California, I doubt it. The Hayward fault is overdue, and if it goes next year, it won't be because of what happened in Japan. Faults do affect one-another, and one earthquake has caused another, but only where the faults are within much less than 100 miles of each other.

Everything is interrelated. When you think of a Tectonic Plate it is really one interrelated set of fault zones. So when an EQ the size of the one that hit Japan can move the land mass of Japan 8 to 10 feet and cause the rotation of the earth to slow..doesn't one think that much of an energy release (adjustment) is going to have an effect on a related set of fault zones on the other side of its' Tectonic Plate?


The thing is to think bigger and be inclusive as we are talking about a complete system and not just random pieces.

Since 64 you have had Alaska at roughly a 9, You have had Indonesia in 04 at close to 9, Chile a a couple of years back at close to 9 and now in Japan a 9...so what piece of this Tectonic Plate map has still been quite? The only question is when...

The problem is that TABS time and Geologic time don't mesh very well...I might very well be dead before the earth moves again...in such a significant way.

U must think I am a fool...but U should be very careful as ultimately the joke may very well be on you.

No piece of the tectonic plate has been quiet. Here in CA, we had the '06, M7.9, in SF, and the Fort Tejon, M8.25, in 1857. Geologically speaking, that's recent.

Tectonic plates are not rigid. Especially thin ocean crust. Ocean crust is very ductile over long distances. Pushing on the crust at one side of the Pacific Ocean will have no effect on the other side of the ocean. Plates are shoved around from below, by circulating magma. Local tectonic forces control fault movement.

It's easy to predict earthquakes. Just make thousands of presictions and wait for one of em to come true, and then say I told you so.

But I don't have to tell you that ........... SmileWavy;)
j/k


BTW it sure it earthquake weather here today ............

here's a picture of how many earthquakes we've had in California over the past week. It shows one measureable earthquake every 24 minutes on average.
that's pretty much normal, we have that many almost every week. Sometimes lots more.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1300906510.jpg