Home > Earthquake
3 Causes
Some earthquakes are caused by the movement of magma in volcanoes, and such quakes can be an early warning of volcanic eruptions. A rare few earthquakes have been associated with the build-up of large masses of water behind dams, such as the Kariba Dam in Zambia, Africa, and with the injection or extraction of fluids into the Earth's crust (e.g, at certain geothermal power plants and at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal). Such earthquakes occur because the strength of the Earth's crust can be modified by fluid pressure. Finally, earthquakes (in a broad sense) can also result from the detonation of explosives. Thus scientists have been able to monitor, using the tools of seismology, nuclear weapons tests performed by governments that were not disclosing information about these tests along normal channels. Earthquakes such as these, that are caused by human activity, are referred to by the term induced seismicity.
4 Preparation for earthquakes
5 Specific fault articles
6 Specific earthquake articles
- Lisbon earthquake (1755)
- 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (1906)
- Great Kanto earthquake (1923) — On the Japanese island of Honshu, severely affecting Tokyo
- Great Chilean Earthquake (1960), biggest earthquake ever recorded, 9.5 on Richter scale.
- Sylmar earthquake (1971). Caused great and unexpected destruction of freeway bridges and flyways in the San Fernando Valley, leading to the first major seismic retrofits of these types of structures, but not at a sufficient pace to avoid the next California freeway collapse in 1989.
- Tangshan Earthquake (1976). The most destructive earthquake of modern times. The official death toll was 255,000, but many experts believe that two or three times that number died.
- Loma Prieta earthquake (1989). Severely affecting Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Oakland in California. Revealed necessity of accelerated seismic retrofit of road and bridge structures.
- Northridge, California earthquake (1994) Damage showed seismic resistance deficiencies in modern low-rise apartment construction.
- Gujarat Earthquake (2001)
- Parkfield, California earthquake (2004) Not large (6.0), but the most anticipated and intensely instrumented earthquake ever recorded and likely to offer insights into predicting future earthquakes elsewhere on similar slip-strike fault structures.
- 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake
7 Related articles
