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Tsunami warning issued after magnitude 7.9 quake hits east of Papua New Guinea
- foota 10y agoI was mostly joking last time I posted this (and as perhaps should have been, was downvoted) but this is the third or fourth major earthquake on the pacific rim in the last month or so. Couldn't these be signs of a very strong earthquake to come?
- neffy 10y agoI also have this picture in my mind of the pacific plates slowly twisting progressively clockwise... not that I know a whole lot about how this all works.
- Meegul 10y agoThat... Doesn't seem likely. I've only taken a few geology classes during my undergrad, but considering these are earthquakes in a subduction zone, it doesn't seem possible that some lateral forces would be causing these quakes.
- vonklaus 10y agoI started noticing this and did a bit if research. These are fairly significant size earthquakes and since measurement there are not very many >8 in magnitude.
- vtange 10y agoWhat scares me is how it's been mostly the western Pacific Rim (Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia) getting quakes. That tells me that things might be getting a little unstable on the eastern Pacific Rim, assuming the Earth keeps things "balanced". Chile did get a huge one a while ago, no?
- thesmallestcat 10y agoWell, an earthquake relives stress along a fault. It's not like there's some feedback effect where the shocks before, during, and after a quake cause further instability on the other side of the planet just because they share a tectonic plate.
- cashmonkey85 10y agoNew Zealand has also had three large quakes on the bottom of the Pacific ring recently
- hownottowrite 10y agoUSGS runs a customizable earthquake notification service: https://sslearthquake.usgs.gov/ens/ https://sslearthquake.usgs.gov/ens/
- themoat 10y agoThey have a interactive map of latest earthquakes I've been looking at for a few minutes now. I have never considered how many earthquakes (albeit mostly minor) occur daily. There were 68 with magnitude of 2.5 or higher today! Really fascinating to consider.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y agoThat was a massive earthquake and it's unbelievable luck that there are no reports of casualties (probably because it hit a rural area). But, please, can the title be corrected? The magnitude of the quake was 7.9 on the (logarithmic) Richter scale. That's considerably different to 8.0 scale (by a few million gigajoules at that). Edit: Thanks for the correction. To give an idea of the difference in magnitude: 8.0 Richter in joules: 63,095,730,000,000,000.00 7.9 Ricther in joules: 44,668,360,000,000,000.00 (According to: http://www.convertalot.com/earthquake_power__calculator.html http://www.convertalot.com/earthquake_power__calculator.html)
- lucb1e 10y agoHonestly, would you have pictured the damage in your mind differently if you read about 7.8 vs 7.9? I can imagine the jump from 7 to 8 makes a difference, but it's just 0.1, which I doubt anyone can picture the difference between.
- zdkl 10y agoAnd how much difference is a few million gigajoules in terms of observable effects?
- sambe 10y agoMakes sense for the title to reflect the article content, but isn't it normal for the measurement to be updated several times after such incidents? I thought it was based on estimates from nearby locations, with full data only arriving and being analysed after several days. I often see multiple different numbers, and separated by more than 0.1.
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- rwmj 10y agoSounds like it would be easier to understand if they just published the energy numbers in GJ. To confuse things, Japan has its own scale which has similar numbers to the Richter scale but with different meaning.