@geologynews wanted to know where he could find “a list of all earthquakes from 2010 (say, >M5.0+), not just from the past week or month.” At the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Earthquake Browser, of course!
The following map shows all 963 earthquakes between January 1st, 2010 and today.
In two months, a tiny fraction of a percentage of a blink of the geological eye, there were almost a thousand recorded movements of the lithosphere. They nicely outline Earth’s plates and some intra-plate activity: Oceans subducting under continents, the mid-Atlantic rift quietly creating new crust, the furious Pacific Ring of Fire, the East African Rift, India ramming away at Asia and America unraveling at the Basin and Range. The Earth is alive and doing its thing. Earthquakes aren’t oddities, they are the natural norm. Never forget that.
Next up are all earthquakes above Magnitude 5.0 for the same time frame. These make up a third of all earthquakes in the last two months.
The IRIS Earthquake Browser uses the Google base map and interface, so you can zoom in on particular earthquake-hit regions and look at satellite imagery & terrain data along with regular map view.
I urge everyone to donate as much as they can to the victims of the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, and also ask you to take an objective stance towards why natural disasters happen. As I explained to my physician brother who was concerned about the frequency and severity of recent earthquakes and attendant natural disasters, think of the earth as the human body, i.e. it’s all inter-connected and there is a perfectly plausible reason for all “ailments,” even ones we don’t yet fully understand.
Let’s use Haiti and Chile themselves as examples. Haiti is an impoverished and deforested former French island colony sitting on the steep, clayey soil over an active strike-slip fault which just moved in a catastrophic manner in the lead-up to the rainy and hurricane seasons. I hope to still be alive when the nation is rebuilt and recovers from its ongoing and upcoming physical, emotional and social trauma. The geographic shape of Chile could not have been fashioned more disastrously by God himself. The nation parallels an active subduction zone to the west and a highly-explosive mountain range to the east. When were this earthquake and associated tsunami NOT going to happen? (As it happened half a century before. And how long until the Andes let one loose?) Thankfully, Chilean buildings are more sturdy in build and the earthquake occurred offshore and not directly underfoot as in the case of Haiti. This also highlights the difference between the magnitude and intensity of an earthquake and why a 7.0 in Haiti wreaked more havoc than an 8.8 in Chile. Again, this time around, the generated tsunami did not take as many lives as in 2004.
Each new natural and unnatural disaster definitely weakens our collective will, but it’s not an excuse for brain rot. This is why I’m glad to be alive in the internet age. We use this interconnectedness to give and get help, hope and knowledge. Vive Haiti. Vive Chile.
A geospatial and engineering study, recently conducted by my firm in support of relief operations in Haiti, shows that much of the island nation is susceptible to landslides. And by “much,” I mean MUCH. About 80%. This should not be surprising considering young volcanic rock, active tectonics and steep slopes. Easily-weathered, clay-rich soil at an angle will slide when shaken, right?
A structural geology and geophysics nerd, I was initially more enamored with and engrossed in the earthquake’s ground motion numbers, which were fed into predicting building failure, than ground sliding. Thankfully, the Katrina levee failures have led me to a more holistic view of disasters. To come up with solutions, we do need subject matter experts, but it is crucial that the general scientific attitude is less “I’ll take the seismic stuff, you take the soil stuff and let’s not be bothered by policy which is for suits in Washington” and more interdisciplinary cooperationin the name of scientific progress and human betterment. Never will I sift through sediments or poke at fossils, but I’ll be damned if I ever view a problem through the blinders of specialization again. At some point, we have to grow up as scientists and citizens and want to incorporate other research as well as demand and follow through on change implementation.
More on the need for synthesis:
1) Disasters aren’t things that happen to other people, parts of which you later study for academic purposes. The paper Katrina’s unique splay deposits in a New Orleans neighborhood by Tulane University’s Stephen Nelson et al. documents some fascinating patterns of deposition of canal sediment in the Gentilly neighborhood, which ultimately show WHY the levee there failed as it did (pilings driven into ground all wrong due to poor sampling of and little care for the subsurface).
2) Disasters are normally compounded by other disasters. These things rarely happen in isolation. Landslides and floods triggered by earthquakes (and Atlantic hurricanes) are worsened by deforestation for charcoal in a job-starved and subsequently energy-starved country. The need for aid and housing now is appreciated, but what of the larger problems of disappearing trees and moving coastlines?
3) “If the disasters themselves are not preventable, sometimes the way we handle the aftermath is,” says Adele Barker in Disaster’s Aftermath. Ms. Barker speaks of aid agencies not being prepared in the wake of Haiti and how it reminds her of botched aid following the Southeast Asian tsunami (which in turn puts me in mind of our own New Orleanian disaster after the disaster). Sometimes, the way we handle the scientific aftermath is preventable, too.
There is no room for academic and political ivory towers. We work together or bust.
***
I will admit immense joy in science as an end in itself and a certain freedom in ignoring government and the social contract as petty constructs. Forget you jokers with your grabs, wars and laws; when I’m in my lab, in my world, you cease to exist. Science is a magical thing that way. *ironic chuckle* Moreover, within science itself, too much generalization leads to master-of-none paralysis. You have to be good at something, do something, prove something, in order to move forward. But, there’s no roadblock or harm in being good at something, learning more and sourcing from work outside of your expertise. It makes you better. More human. In the end, isn’t that the point of science?
JAN 19TH AM UPDATES
Spatial Sustain | A call for a coordinated and conflated mapping effort between OpenStreetMaps and Google MapMaker in light of the Haitian earthquake. “Not surprisingly, the two data sets don’t match, and the question becomes what data is correct and how can the data be conflated to create a unified and accurate map.”
The Rumpus | “No one will ever know an actual death toll because no one is counting the bodies.”
JAN 15TH PM UPDATES
* BBC’s Jonathan Amos | How Satellites Are Being Used In Haiti: How geospatial science and technology can and do help during disasters
* Slashdot | Tech NGO’s Working In Haiti: Please also give to Télécoms Sans Frontières which “brings mobile telecom rigs and satellite phones to disaster sites, making sure that responders on the ground can communicate with each other and that individuals can contact families abroad.” Their donation site is super-slow, so please be patient.
JAN 15TH AM UPDATES
* New York Times Interactive Map: Use the slider to compare before and after satellite imagery of key buildings in Port-Au-Prince. Good job, NYT!
* Servir Maps: Damage assessment (before and after) maps and a good preliminary assessment of erosion/landslide potential.
* John McQuaid | Why Haiti Is Not New Orleans: “Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquake are fundamentally different. That many people are lumping them together shows how superficial and ignorant we collectively remain about disasters – and also why we never do an adequate job of preparing for them.” Wonderful essay, I encourage you to read all of it. Haiti needs the spotlight on its disaster in itself, and not for the global media to make wrong and useless comparisons to other disasters when idiot armchair critics far away can do that all by themselves.
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With gorgeous Dakota sandstone dipping away from the sunset.
