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The Really Big One

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Re: The Really Big One

#111

Post by jofer »

kenferry wrote: post #35

Is there any work on inducing earthquakes to relieve stress before it builds to catastrophe levels?

It's a matter of magnitude.

A magnitude 2 earthquake releases ~30x the energy as a magnitude 1 earthquake. A magnitude 3 releases ~900x the energy of a magnitude 1. You can see where this is going. (Note, the "shaking intensity" of the earthquake doesn't increase as quite as rapidly as the amount of energy released, but the relationship depends on a lot more than the earthquake's size.)

Let's say we were to trigger many magnitude 5's. We'd need to trigger 810,000 of them to equal the energy released in a Mw 9.0 earthquake.

Interestingly, though, there are other types of earthquakes that _do_ release accumulated elastic strain over large areas. Cascadia is actually where they were first noticed.

Every ~11 months, the cascadia subduction zone has a magnitude 6 or 7 earthquake. You'll never notice in Seattle, though, because it occurs over about a month.

These "slow earthquakes" _do_ release significant amounts of accumulated strain. Sometimes they trigger "normal" earthquakes and vice versa. We don't really understand the details. The most interesting part (and the part most relevant for seattle) is that the same fault can have both these "slow earthquakes" and a full on >Mw 9 "normal" earthquake.

This is one of the "hottest" topics in earthquake seismology and convergent margins research at the moment.

Re: The Really Big One

#112

Post by elorant »

Sven7 wrote: post #86
nostrademons wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DiRT drills include the simultaneous loss of whole offices, including the complete obliteration of the Bay Area. Participants are instructed to pretend that they've been eaten by zombies and not communicate with anyone in a remote office, and that's backed up (as described in the article) by cutting the network links to & from the Mountain View corporate office. Now, there may certainly be larger systemic effects…

What happens if Google goes down for a while? Is it really that bad? Yes, Gmail and Drive may cause all kinds of chaos but I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine and YouTube.

If Google App Engine goes down many sites will stop working. OAuth services will also start to fail. So will custom search provided to 3rd party sites (ok that may not sound too bad but you never now). Then there is cloud storage which in many cases is used as a backup mechanism. And how about the gazillion of sites that load js libraries from Google's CDN? Sure, a day or two is bearable, but make it a week and then the shit hits the fan.

The one thing you should bear in mind about earthquakes is that in many cases the aftershocks make more damage than the main one, because damage accumulates. Which means that critical infrastructure could take weeks to become fully operational.

Re: The Really Big One

#113

Post by CamperBob2 »

deegles wrote: post #30
civilian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The viaduct's collapse in the next big earthquake and the ~80 lives it'll take is the _reason_ we're building something as a replacement! Granted, Bertha is a huge fuckup. A MBA in my python night class said that one approach to the viaduct problem would be to: fund a "victims of the viaduct" fund, today, with a couple million. And then pass a law that the compensation for families of the victims is limited to what's…

Could a tunnel even survive an earthquake above 8.5?

The purpose of the tunnel is to provide a better view of Puget Sound for real estate development, not to provide any sort of substitute for the viaduct. We will lose significant traffic capacity and downtown accessibility when the viaduct comes down, tunnel or no tunnel.

Engineers have told us that the tunnel will be safer in an earthquake, but then, essentially everything those engineers have told us has been straight out of the Brothers Grimm.

Re: The Really Big One

#114

Post by [deleted] »

qq66 wrote: post #107
waynecochran wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only would there be significant downtime of major internet services, but lots of people would die as well!

Downtime of major internet services could also cause deaths elsewhere, as more industries become reliant on cloud services. I could imagine hospitals losing access to health records, emergency responders losing access to mapping or route planning software, people losing access to Uber and not being able to get to the hospital because the taxi companies have gone out of business. Of course all this stuff is supposed t…

[deleted]

Re: The Really Big One

#115

Post by freehunter »

nappy-doo wrote: post #100
iamcurious wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you think. If we are going to have an earthquake, at the very least we should have an scheduled organized mild one.

On the Richter scale, the difference a full step (7.0 to 8.0) is about a factor of 32. So if we're trying to mitigate an 8.0 earthquake every 100 years, you're talking about a magnitude 7.0 every 3 years to release the same amount of energy. Most engineering structures on the west coastare built to withstand a 6-7. When a magnitude 8 comes (and it will come, and in some sense we're coming out of the stress shadow fro…

And even if they were built to withstand a mag 7 earthquake every three years, the things inside of them likely won't be. Imagine the engineering that would have to go into designing every single item in your house to withstand a deadly earthquake on a regular basis. No more popping out to Ikea to grab the same furniture everyone else uses. Your TV stand is on springs. Your TV is on springs connected to the TV stand on springs. Your cupboards have notches where your dishes can lock into them so they don't slide. The cupboard doors have latches that let them open when pulled slowly, but resist opening when sudden force is applied. Your refrigerator bolts to the floor and is filled will elastic pockets that hold every item individually.

Its either that, or spend a significant amount of time every few years packing all of your items into boxes to ensure they won't be damaged when it's earthquake time.

Re: The Really Big One

#116

Post by jsprogrammer »

cm2012 wrote: post #97
jsprogrammer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are now fully retrofitted to survive a 9.0, why do we absolutely have to set off this earthquake now using hundreds of nuclear bombs?

Moral hazard. If you don't cause the quake that was promised, no one will ever believe you again.

After 30 years? Probably enough time for enough people to wake the fuck up and realize what they are about to do.

Re: The Really Big One

#117

Post by cossatot »

nestlequ1k wrote: post #36
nkoren wrote: post #27

I used to live in Portland, and thought about this impending catastrophe a lot. Once -- under the influence of intoxicants, most likely -- I came up with a way of dramatically reducing its impact. It's a batshit crazy solution which will never actually happen -- but even when I'm sober, I still think it would work. Here's what I'm thinking: the major problem with a disaster like this is the uncertainty surrounding it…

Idea is fascinating. Aside from the political unfeasibility (people won't be convinced an earthquake will ever happen here), I'd be worried about technical execution. Could we really cause an earthquake? How many nukes would it take? How much would the operation cost? What if someone steals a nuke while they are installing it (add some more to security cost)? What if we can't predict how it will react and end up caus…

Excellent book by John McPhee on the general topic of your last paragraph: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77.The_Control_of_Nature

Re: The Really Big One

#118

Post by codingdave »

fizixer wrote: post #87

In recent past, I had this thought that Silicon Valley is sitting on top of, or very close to, potential future fault activity. And I have a hard time believing that the key component of human civilization (technology) is so vulnerable, and was built after the 1906 disaster. It's one of the factors I would consider when deciding if I really want to move to west coast.

You think technology is the key component to human civilization?

I would have thought of food.

Re: The Really Big One

#119

Post by freehunter »

PaulyGlott wrote: post #43
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, your medium is free content as often as you want it? What's in it for them?

There's no shortage of advertising on The New Yorker.

That killed me when I subscribed to the NYT online. I was paying $15/mo and seeing as many ads as I would expect from a free site. I love the NYT journalism and am willing to pay for it, and I understand they have bills to pay, but it's a lot of money to be sitting on ads. In fact I canceled my subscription (not a quick or easy process) and have the same amount of advertising on their NYT Now app whether I subscribe or not. So what's the point?

Re: The Really Big One

#120

Post by astrodust »

cossatot wrote: post #96
astrodust wrote: post #26

Worth noting that the state of warning systems there is somewhere between dismal and non-existent and the disaster preparedness of most cities seems to vary between unprepared and comically inept. Is there anything anyone can do to set up an alert for these sorts of things? If these predictions are true, there's a good chance that the entirety of Silicon Valley could be utterly destroyed. You'd think people would tak…

Earthquakes are, for now, impossible to predict so there is little forewarning (and not for the lack of people trying). However, there is a huge interest in the geological/hazards community in earthquake early warning systems in the US, especially focused on California[1][2]. The Napa earthquake last summer was the first real test of the more modern components and was successful. But again, you're dependent on warnin…

It takes measurable time for communities miles away from the epicentre to get hit, and in that time you could easily send a warning.

Many of the videos from the Japan tsunami showed people getting alerted well before the quake hit. All TV stations flipped over to a warning screen with information on the quake and a map of tsunami danger areas based on computed projections.

I can see how having the fault line directly under your city is a problem, but this "mega quake" is projected to originate off-shore.

I guess the US solution is to keep watching Twitter.

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