>> The biggest quakes in The Big One are a bit bigger, <<
Another piece, difficult to remember but utterly crucial to the severity of this event: the earthquake scale is logarithmic. That means even a slightly higher number means MUCH higher damage. 9.0 is ten times worse than 8.0 and a hundred times worse than a fairly common 7.0 that can still fuck up a city pretty bad. Compare with the last full rip, after which a tsunami hit Japan with devastating force because they had no warning. Parts of the West Coast shoreline dropped ~36 feet in minutes, flooding formerly dry land with saltwater.
>> and I keep having to remind myself there are just so darn *many* of them. <<
It's all one planet. Even the Ring of Fire as a subset of that is a collection of cracks and folds connected around the big center mass of the Pacific floor. When you have a system like that, and it's already overstressed in several places (e.g. Cascadia and the southern San Andreas) then when one piece goes, it throws more pressure on other places, and more of them will give way. That's exactly how a full rip of the Cascadia is described in the seismic literature.
Someone else pointed out that antipodal earthquakes are likely, or ones clustered at weaker spots that are more generally on the far side of the globe. Those are more likely to be in the 6-7 range.
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dancing_serpent
Re: Aww ...
Date: 2018-10-16 10:20 pm (UTC)Another piece, difficult to remember but utterly crucial to the severity of this event: the earthquake scale is logarithmic. That means even a slightly higher number means MUCH higher damage. 9.0 is ten times worse than 8.0 and a hundred times worse than a fairly common 7.0 that can still fuck up a city pretty bad. Compare with the last full rip, after which a tsunami hit Japan with devastating force because they had no warning. Parts of the West Coast shoreline dropped ~36 feet in minutes, flooding formerly dry land with saltwater.
>> and I keep having to remind myself there are just so darn *many* of them. <<
It's all one planet. Even the Ring of Fire as a subset of that is a collection of cracks and folds connected around the big center mass of the Pacific floor. When you have a system like that, and it's already overstressed in several places (e.g. Cascadia and the southern San Andreas) then when one piece goes, it throws more pressure on other places, and more of them will give way. That's exactly how a full rip of the Cascadia is described in the seismic literature.
Someone else pointed out that antipodal earthquakes are likely, or ones clustered at weaker spots that are more generally on the far side of the globe. Those are more likely to be in the 6-7 range.