Earth Creating A Tremor
There are many natural disasters that happen every year all over the world
. Some create more damage and confusion than others.
No matter where you live, it is important to be prepared by having an emergency plan in place with your family and having a good food storage that will last your family at least two weeks. One of these natural disasters that you need to prepare for is an earthquake.
Also known as a quake, tremor, temblor, or seismic activity, the results can be devastating. Basically it is a sudden release of energy in the crust of the Earth that creates waves.
An instrument called a seismometer can measure the magnitude of the temblor on the Mercalli scale. This scale rates seismic activity on a range from zero to ten with ten being the most intense.
Tremors are caused by the following reasons; rupture of geological faults, volcanic activity, landslides, mine blasts, and nuclear experiments. Obviously mine blasts and nuclear experiments do not happen on their own, but are caused by humans.
The initial point of rupture is called the focus or hypocenter. Epicenter is the point at ground level which is directly above the hypocenter.
When the epicenter is located in the ocean, the sea bed becomes disrupted and causes significant water displacement which can cause a tsunami on shore somewhere. When there is a temblor, then the shaking will sometimes trigger landslides and volcanic activity.
In volcanic regions, tremors can be caused by tectonic faults and the magma that moves around in the volcanoes. These kind of quakes can be a warning sign of an eruption that is about to happen.
They can be used as sensors to predict future eruptions along with instruments such as seismometers and tiltmeters (instrument that measure the ground slope). So what causes natural quakes?
Think of the earth's crust as a bunch of plates that are loosely connected together with fault lines between them. When they start to move around, you will have one of these tectonic plates that slides beneath another plate causing areas of subduction and creating the hypocenter at the place where it happened.
A lot of times, this movement will cause a sequence of events that makes a cluster of quakes. Most of these clusters will not cause that much damage because they are smaller that the initial one.
The main quake can also cause several aftershocks which are tremors that are adjusting to the effects on the main quake. They happen in the same area or just outside the area as the main tremor did and are a lot smaller than the first one.
Areas that have fault lines already are at a higher risk of feeling another earthquake than other locations that have had no previous history of temblors. Places in the United States like California and Alaska have a ton of minor tremors that happen every year.
Even though most tremors are felt consistently in the same areas, this does not make everywhere else immune to them. Temblors can happen anywhere although they seem to follow some kind of pattern that scientists have not yet figured out.
There are about five hundred thousand tremors that occur each year while only about one hundred thousand are felt by people. Most of these are very minor and cause little to no damage to the surrounding areas.
Because the minor earthquakes happen so frequently, the major ones occur with a lot less frequency. But when they do happen, their magnitude is usually measured to be larger than a five.
In fact, the average of major tremors every year is eighteen quakes that measure between seven point zero and seven point nine magnitude. And there is only one great earthquake that has a magnitude of eight point zero of higher each year.
But in the past few years, these averages have gone down according to the statistics that have been taken since 1900. The United States Geological Survey or the USGS have pretty much concluded that this is because of statistical error rather than any kind of trend in the earth's seismic activity.
by: Jack Landry
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