Interesting article in view of the 8.2 Chile Quake...

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12 Signs That Something Big Is Happening To The Earth?s Crust Under North And South America

12 Signs That Something Big Is Happening To The Earth’s Crust Under North And South America

By Michael Snyder, on March 30th, 2014

Earthquake Damage - Cracks In The Earth are fault lines and volcanoes all over North and South America suddenly waking up? Are we moving into a time when major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will become much more common? For the past several decades, we have been extremely fortunate to have experienced a period of extremely low seismic activity along the west coast of the United States. You see, the west coast lies right along the infamous Ring of Fire. Approximately 75 percent of all the volcanoes in the world are on the Ring of Fire, and approximately 90 percent of all global earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire. Scientists tell us that it is inevitable that "the Big One" will hit California someday, but people have gotten very apathetic about this because things have been so quiet out there for so many years. Well, now it appears that things are changing in a big way - and not just along the California coast. The following are 12 signs that something big is happening to the earth's crust under North and South America...

#1 The 5.1 earthquake that shook Los Angeles on Friday was the worst earthquake that the city had seen in many years.

#2 Following that earthquake, there were more than 100 aftershocks.

#3 A 4.1 earthquake shook Los Angeles on Saturday. Scientists are hoping that this earthquake swarm in southern California will end soon.

#4 Earlier this month, a 4.4 earthquake rattled Los Angeles so badly that it caused news anchors to dive under their desks.

#5 A 6.9 earthquake just off the coast of northern California in early March was the largest earthquake to hit the west coast of the United States since 2010.

#6 Up in Oregon, Mt. Hood recently experienced more than 100 earthquakes over the course of just a few days.

#7 During the past month, there have also been some other very unusual geologic events that have been happening up in Oregon...

Two large landslides – one in the Columbia River Gorge dumped about 2,000 cubic yards of rock and debris on highway I84 just 3 miles west of the Hood River, and another blocked US30 near Portland.

Loud booms and ground shaking reported by people from Lincoln to Tillamook Counties; some reported hearing a rumble, as well (No earthquakes recorded by the USGS in the area at the time.)

A 20 ft. deep sinkhole swallowed a woman and her dog in her Portland backyard.

#8 A 4.8 earthquake rattled Yellowstone National Park on Sunday, and there have been at least 25 earthquakes at Yellowstone since Thursday.

#9 Scientists recently discovered that the Yellowstone supervolcano is now releasing far more helium gas than they had anticipated.

#10 Over the past month, there have been more than 130 earthquakes in the state of Oklahoma. This is highly unusual.

#11 There have been several dozen earthquakes in Peru over the past month, including a 6.3 earthquake that made headlines all over the globe.

#12 Earlier this month, the northern coast of Chile was hit by more than 300 earthquakes in a seven day stretch. 41 of those earthquakes were stronger than magnitude 4.5.

Fortunately, the quake that hit Los Angeles on Friday did not cause too much lasting injury. But it sure did shake people up. The following is how the Los Angeles Times described the damage...

The quake, centered near La Habra, caused furniture to tumble, pictures to fall off walls and glass to break. Merchandise fell off store shelves, and there were reports of plate glass windows shattered.

In Brea, several people suffered minor injuries during a rock slide that overturned their car. Fullerton reported seven water main breaks. Carbon Canyon Road was closed.

Residents across Orange and Los Angeles counties and the Inland Empire reported swinging chandeliers, fireplaces dislodging from walls and lots of rattled nerves. The shake caused a rock slide in Carbon Canyon, causing a car to overturn, according to the Brea Police Department.

Why this particular earthquake is of such concern is because it occurred along the Puente Hills fault line. According to one seismologist, this is the fault line that would be most likely to "eat L.A."...

Experts said that the earthquakes occurred on the Puente Hills thrust fault, which stretches from the San Gabriel Valley to downtown Los Angeles.

Last night's quake was shallow, which 'means the shaking is very concentrated in a small area,' said Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson.

Hauksson revealed that the earthquake was unusual because the 5.1 quake was preceded by the weaker foreshock.

Scientists such as Hauksson are very concerned about the Puente Hills fault because it runs directly under downtown Los Angeles.

'This is the fault that could eat L.A.,' seismologist Sue Hough told The LA Times in 2003.

The fact that this fault appears to be waking up is really bad news.

According to seismologists, a major earthquake along this fault line could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage...

Video simulations of a rupture on the Puente Hills fault system show how energy from a quake could erupt and be funneled toward L.A.'s densest neighborhoods, with the strongest waves rippling to the west and south across the Los Angeles Basin.

According to estimates by the USGS and Southern California Earthquake Center, a massive quake on the Puente Hills fault could kill from 3,000 to 18,000 people and cause up to $250 billion in damage. Under this worst-case scenario, people in as many as three-quarters of a million households would be left homeless.

For years, we have watched as the rest of the Ring of Fire has been absolutely ravaged by major seismic events.

We all remember the earthquakes that caused the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 and the Japanese tsunami of 2011.

And the world mourned when major earthquakes devastated New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Japan and the Philippines.

Scientists assured us that it was only a matter of time before the west coast started to become seismically active again, and now it is happening.

If you live on the west coast, I hope that you will consider these things very carefully.

Just because the earth under your feet has been relatively quiet for a very long time does not mean that it will always be that way.

Something big appears to be happening to the earth's crust, and you won't want to be in the "danger zone" when things finally break loose.

 

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[pat-tekker-cat]

Deep,
I been thinking about how these last few quakes almost seem to be running southward on the ring of fire.
I keep hoping there is no major mantle slip.
I watched this last week, just unreal to me. I kept saying dude, you're just way too calm.... LOL, and
can you say liquefaction? If it did like the New Madrid fault way back when, they'll be sand eruptions popping up anywhere(I would think).
I would think it's got to be a scary thing, when the ground under you, won't hold.

 

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7.6 aftershock rattles Chile's far-northern coast

7.6 aftershock rattles Chile's far-northern coast

IQUIQUE, Chile (AP) — A powerful 7.6-magnitude aftershock hit Chile's far-northern coast late Wednesday night, shaking the same area where a magnitude-8.2 earthquake hit just a day before causing some damage and six deaths.

Chile's Emergency Office and navy issued a tsunami alert and ordered a precautionary evacuation of low-lying areas on the northern coast, meaning many people could be spending another sleepless night away from their homes.

The aftershock caused buildings to shake and people to run out into the streets in the port of Iquique, which was one of the cities that saw some damage from Tuesday night's big quake. But there were no immediate reports of new damage or injuries from the latest tremor, which was one of dozens that have followed the 8.2 quake.

"I was evacuated like all citizens. One can see that the people are prepared," tweeted President Michelle Bachelet, who was in the nearby city of Arica to assess the damage.

The aftershock was centered 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of Iquique at a depth of 25 miles (40 kilometers), the U.S Geological Survey said. The USGS initially reported the tremor's magnitude at 7.8, but downgraded it to 7.6.

It was felt across the border in southern Peru, where people in the cities of Tacna and Arequipa reportedly fled buildings in fear.

On Tuesday, authorities reported just six deaths from the initial quake, but said it was possible others could have been killed in older structures made of adobe in remote communities that weren't immediately accessible.

About 2,500 homes were damaged in Alto Hospicio, a poor neighborhood in the hills above Iquique, a city of nearly 200,000 people whose coastal residents joined a mandatory evacuation ahead of a tsunami that rose to only 8 feet (2.5 meters). Iquique's fishermen poked through the aftermath: sunken and damaged boats that could cost millions of dollars to repair and replace.

Still, as President Michelle Bachelet deployed hundreds of anti-riot police and soldiers to prevent looting and round up escaped prisoners, it was clear that the loss of life and property could have been much worse.

The mandatory evacuation lasted for 10 hours in Iquique and Arica, the cities closest to the epicenter, and kept 900,000 people out of their homes along Chile's 2,500-mile (4,000 kilometer) coastline. The order to leave was spread through cellphone text messages and Twitter, and reinforced by blaring sirens in neighborhoods where people regularly practice earthquake drills.

But the system has its shortcomings: the government has yet to install tsunami warning sirens in parts of Arica, leaving authorities to shout orders by megaphone. And fewer than 15 percent of Chileans have downloaded the smartphone application that can alert them to evacuation orders.

Chile is one of the world's most seismic countries and is particularly prone to tsunamis, because of the way the Nazca tectonic plate plunges beneath the South American plate, pushing the towering Andes cordillera ever higher.

 

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Earthquakes in Chile and L.A. Raise Fears About ‘Ring of Fire’

Earthquakes in Chile and L.A. Raise Fears About ?Ring of Fire? - ABC News

Apr 2, 2014 1:48pm

The 8.2 earthquake that shook northern Chile and surrounding countries late Tuesday night was one of a string of recent earthquakes along what is known as the “Ring of Fire,” a circle of quake-prone areas on the Pacific Rim.

A magnitude 5.1 quake hit Los Angeles last week, followed by aftershocks along the California coast. And South America will be on the lookout in coming days for aftershocks that have already started following Tuesday night’s temblor.

Both cities lie along the so-called Ring of Fire, where two plates underneath the earth’s surface occasionally bump up against other plates, according to Kate Hutton, staff seismologist at California Institute of Technology.

“That affects South America, the California coast, Alaska, Japan, the Philippines. Basically any places around the Pacific Rim are at risk,” she said.

The 9.0 magnitude quake that hit Japan and cause the Fukushima meltdown in 2011 was on the Pacific’s Ring of Fire.

Hutton said the current risk is not greater because California and Chile experienced quakes.

“The biggest risk is aftershocks for the 8.2 in the same area where the 8.2 occurred. They’ll become less frequent with time, but the risk still exists for days and weeks,” Hutton said.

Scientists still don’t have a way to predict when and where earthquakes will hit, so it is impossible to say whether other quakes will strike along rim areas, she said.

The most susceptible areas on the Ring of Fire include such populated cities as Santiago, Chile; Los Angeles and San Francisco, California; Seattle, Washington; Tokyo, Japan; and Lima, Peru.

“The most obvious aspect of earthquake distribution is its randomness in time,” Hutton said, “though not geography.”

 

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Chile earthquake: Is the 8.2 temblor only a foreshock?

Chile earthquake: Is the 8.2 temblor only a foreshock? - CSMonitor.com

The temblor was centered some 42 miles offshore and 59 miles northwest of the port city of Iquique, home to 182,000 people. People reported shaking as far south as Antofagasta, another coastal city nearly 240 miles from Iquique, to La Paz, Bolivia, some 300 miles to the northeast of the port. Towns in southern Peru also reported shaking from the quake.

The event struck along a 7,000-mile-long boundary between two plates in the Earth's crust – the Nazca plate beneath the eastern Pacific Ocean and the South American plate. The Nazca plate is sliding underneath the South American one at an average rate that ranges from three inches a year along its southern half to 2.6 inches a year along its northern extent.

While the quake was large by any measure, seismologists remain concerned that it could have been a foreshock to a much larger quake that could strike this region – a section of plate boundary that hasn't seen a major rupture in 137 years.

The small number of fatalities reported so far can be traced to several factors, according to Rick Allmendinger, a Cornell University geophysicist who has conducted extensive research in the affected region.

Although the quake affected a major port city, the region as a whole is sparsely populated. And while the quake generated a tsunami, the highest reported tsunami along the coast was a seven-footer that reached Iquique. Had the quake occurred beneath deeper water, the tsunami could have been much larger, Dr. Allmendinger says.

In addition, Chile has seismic building codes "that are top notch," he says, and that are enforced. "Chileans take those things seriously."

Also, over the past few years, the government has held several planning exercises to hone evacuation and emergency-response procedures.

"These planning exercises make a big difference" in preparing people to take the appropriate action when a big quake hits, Allmendinger says.

Chile and other countries along South America's west coast are no stranger to large earthquakes. The subduction of the Nazca plate beneath the South American plate has given rise to the Andes Mountains, the spectacular chain that hosts a large number of volcanoes as part of the Pacific's Ring of Fire.

The quakes along subduction zones tend to be more powerful than quakes along faults such as California's San Andreas one because subduction ruptures involve faults that have much larger surface areas along which stress can build, so they release more energy when they snap. And the segments that rupture tend to be relatively shallow, between six and about 40 miles deep, according to the US Geological Survey.

In May 1960, the most powerful quake ever recorded struck offshore near Valdivia, Chile. At magnitude 9.5, the quake released some 90 times the energy released by Tuesday's quake. Tsunamis up to 82 feet tall hit Valdivia and other areas along Chile's southern coast.

Tuesday's quake struck a 300-mile section of the plate boundary known as the Iquique seismic gap. The last quake to occur in this gap ruptured it in 1877.

Seismologists have known for decades that this section of the plate boundary was due for action in the relatively near future, says Cornell's Allmendinger.

In fact, Tuesday's quake was preceded by a magnitude-6.7 quake about two weeks ago "with a lot of little, what we thought were then, aftershocks," he says. "It turns out that those were the foreshocks" for Tuesday's rupture.

The temblor Tuesday struck a small segment of the gap. If the entire segment were to snap all at once, it would produce a much bigger quake, he explains.

Indeed, "one of the possible scenarios that we're monitoring right now is that it is still possible that the earthquake we had last night is actually a foreshock to a much bigger earthquake," he says. "For the sake of our Chilean friends, we hope that it doesn't happen."