The Earthquakes Continue: Matthew 24

People come out of a restaurant after a tremor was felt in Lahore, Pakistan on 21 March, 2023 (REUTERS)
People come out of a restaurant after a tremor was felt in Lahore, Pakistan on 21 March, 2023 (REUTERS)

Huge earthquake hits Afghanistan as tremors felt in India and Pakistan

ELEANOR NOYCE

Updated March 21, 2023, 2:27 PM

A huge earthquake of 6.8 hit Afghanistan on Tuesday, with tremors felt as far as Pakistan and India.

The quake was at a depth of 184 km (114 miles), hitting at 16:47 UTC.

It was felt in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, alongside a number of Pakistani cities including Islamabad and Lahore.

Elsewhere, India’s ANI news agency reported that tremors were felt in New Delhi, the country’s capital.

Witnesses have described to the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre feeling “strong jolts” and “vertical shaking.”

The earthquake located on a map (USGS)
The earthquake located on a map (USGS)

According to CNN, residents were seen evacuating their homes out onto the street. Trees were also seen shaking.

At present, the United States Geological Survey has issued a green alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. To this end, it estimates a low likelihood of casualties and damage.

At least seven people including two children have been injured in Khyber, Swabi, Mardan and Shangla in Pakistan, as confirmed to CNN by Bilal Faizi, spokesperson of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial rescue services.

The resulting landslides have also blocked roads in the northern Pakistani city of Abbotabad.

People come out of a restaurant after a tremor was felt in Lahore, Pakistan on 21 March, 2023 (REUTERS)
People come out of a restaurant after a tremor was felt in Lahore, Pakistan on 21 March, 2023 (REUTERS)

According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 7,000 people have been killed in earthquakes in Afghanistan over the last decade.

In June 2022, an earthquake measuring 5.9 struck in the south-east region of Afghanistan. 80% of homes were damaged in the heavily impacted areas of Khost and Paktika.

Triggering huge casualties, the 2022 quake saw over 1,000 deaths and 1,500 injuries.

Afghanistan is situated on the edge of the Eurasian plate, located between a number of fault lines between the Indian and Eurasian plates.

Measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, the strongest earthquake recorded in Afghanistan occurred on 6 June 1956 in the Kabul region.

Preparing for the Sixth Seal (Revelation 6:12)

Scenario Earthquakes for Urban Areas Along the Atlantic Seaboard of the United States
NYCEM

The Sixth Seal: NY City DestroyedIf today a magnitude 6 earthquake were to occur centered on New York City, what would its effects be? Will the loss be 10 or 100 billion dollars? Will there be 10 or 10,000 fatalities? Will there be 1,000 or 100,000 homeless needing shelter? Can government function, provide assistance, and maintain order?

At this time, no satisfactory answers to these questions are available. A few years ago, rudimentary scenario studies were made for Boston and New York with limited scope and uncertain results. For most eastern cities, including Washington D.C., we know even less about the economic, societal and political impacts from significant earthquakes, whatever their rate of occurrence.

Why do we know so little about such vital public issues? Because the public has been lulled into believing that seriously damaging quakes are so unlikely in the east that in essence we do not need to consider them. We shall examine the validity of this widely held opinion.

Is the public’s earthquake awareness (or lack thereof) controlled by perceived low SeismicitySeismicHazard, or SeismicRisk? How do these three seismic features differ from, and relate to each other? In many portions of California, earthquake awareness is refreshed in a major way about once every decade (and in some places even more often) by virtually every person experiencing a damaging event. The occurrence of earthquakes of given magnitudes in time and space, not withstanding their effects, are the manifestations of seismicity. Ground shaking, faulting, landslides or soil liquefaction are the manifestations of seismic hazard. Damage to structures, and loss of life, limb, material assets, business and services are the manifestations of seismic risk. By sheer experience, California’s public understands fairly well these three interconnected manifestations of the earthquake phenomenon. This awareness is reflected in public policy, enforcement of seismic regulations, and preparedness in both the public and private sector. In the eastern U.S., the public and its decision makers generally do not understand them because of inexperience. Judging seismic risk by rates of seismicity alone (which are low in the east but high in the west) has undoubtedly contributed to the public’s tendency to belittle the seismic loss potential for eastern urban regions.

Let us compare two hypothetical locations, one in California and one in New York City. Assume the location in California does experience, on average, one M = 6 every 10 years, compared to New York once every 1,000 years. This implies a ratio of rates of seismicity of 100:1. Does that mean the ratio of expected losses (when annualized per year) is also 100:1? Most likely not. That ratio may be closer to 10:1, which seems to imply that taking our clues from seismicity alone may lead to an underestimation of the potential seismic risks in the east. Why should this be so?

To check the assertion, let us make a back-of-the-envelope estimate. The expected seismic risk for a given area is defined as the area-integrated product of: seismic hazard (expected shaking level), assets ($ and people), and the assets’ vulnerabilities (that is, their expected fractional loss given a certain hazard – say, shaking level). Thus, if we have a 100 times lower seismicity rate in New York compared to California, which at any given point from a given quake may yield a 2 times higher shaking level in New York compared to California because ground motions in the east are known to differ from those in the west; and if we have a 2 times higher asset density (a modest assumption for Manhattan!), and a 2 times higher vulnerability (again a modest assumption when considering the large stock of unreinforced masonry buildings and aged infrastructure in New York), then our California/New York ratio for annualized loss potential may be on the order of (100/(2x2x2)):1. That implies about a 12:1 risk ratio between the California and New York location, compared to a 100:1 ratio in seismicity rates.

From this example it appears that seismic awareness in the east may be more controlled by the rate of seismicity than by the less well understood risk potential. This misunderstanding is one of the reasons why earthquake awareness and preparedness in the densely populated east is so disproportionally low relative to its seismic loss potential. Rare but potentially catastrophic losses in the east compete in attention with more frequent moderate losses in the west. New York City is the paramount example of a low-probability, high-impact seismic risk, the sort of risk that is hard to insure against, or mobilize public action to reduce the risks.

There are basically two ways to respond. One is to do little and wait until one or more disastrous events occur. Then react to these – albeit disastrous – “windows of opportunity.” That is, pay after the unmitigated facts, rather than attempt to control their outcome. This is a high-stakes approach, considering the evolved state of the economy. The other approach is to invest in mitigation ahead of time, and use scientific knowledge and inference, education, technology transfer, and combine it with a mixture of regulatory and/or economic incentives to implement earthquake preparedness. The National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program (NEHRP) has attempted the latter while much of the public tends to cling to the former of the two options. Realistic and reliable quantitative loss estimation techniques are essential to evaluate the relative merits of the two approaches.

The current efforts in the eastern U.S., including New York City, to start the enforcement of seismic building codes for new constructions are important first steps in the right direction. Similarly, the emerging efforts to include seismic rehabilitation strategies in the generally needed overhaul of the cities’ aged infrastructures such as bridges, water, sewer, power and transportation is commendable and needs to be pursued with diligence and persistence. But at the current pace of new construction replacing older buildings and lifelines, it will take many decades or a century before a major fraction of the stock of built assets will become seismically more resilient than the current inventory is. For some time, this leaves society exposed to very high seismic risks. The only consolation is that seismicity on average is low, and, hence with some luck, the earthquakes will not outpace any ongoing efforts to make eastern cities more earthquake resilient gradually. Nevertheless, M = 5 to M = 6 earthquakes at distances of tens of km must be considered a credible risk at almost any time for cities like Boston, New York or Philadelphia. M = 7 events, while possible, are much less likely; and in many respects, even if building codes will have affected the resilience of a future improved building stock, M = 7 events would cause virtually unmanageable situations. Given these bleak prospects, it will be necessary to focus on crucial elements such as maintaining access to cities by strengthening critical bridges, improving the structural and nonstructural performance of hospitals, and having a nationally supported plan how to assist a devastated region in case of a truly severe earthquake. No realistic and coordinated planning of this sort exists at this time for most eastern cities.

The current efforts by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) via the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) to provide a standard methodology (RMS, 1994) and planning tools for making systematic, computerized loss estimates for annualized probabilistic calculations as well as for individual scenario events, is commendable. But these new tools provide only a shell with little regional data content. What is needed are the detailed data bases on inventory of buildings and lifelines with their locally specific seismic fragility properties.Similar data are needed for hospitals, shelters, firehouses, police stations and other emergency service providers. Moreover, the soil and rock conditions which control the shaking and soil liquefaction properties for any given event, need to be systematically compiled into Geographical Information System (GIS) data bases so they can be combined with the inventory of built assets for quantitative loss and impact estimates. Even under the best of conceivable funding conditions, it will take years before such data bases can be established so they will be sufficiently reliable and detailed to perform realistic and credible loss scenarios. Without such planning tools, society will remain in the dark as to what it may encounter from a future major eastern earthquake. Given these uncertainties, and despite them, both the public and private sector must develop at least some basic concepts for contingency plans. For instance, the New York City financial service industry, from banks to the stock and bond markets and beyond, ought to consider operational contingency planning, first in terms of strengthening their operational facilities, but also for temporary backup operations until operations in the designated facilities can return to some measure of normalcy. The Federal Reserve in its oversight function for this industry needs to take a hard look at this situation.

A society, whose economy depends increasingly so crucially on rapid exchange of vast quantities of information must become concerned with strengthening its communication facilities together with the facilities into which the information is channeled. In principle, the availability of satellite communication (especially if self-powered) with direct up and down links, provides here an opportunity that is potentially a great advantage over distributed buried networks. Distributed networks for transportation, power, gas, water, sewer and cabled communication will be expensive to harden (or restore after an event).

In all future instances of major capital spending on buildings and urban infrastructures, the incorporation of seismically resilient design principles at all stages of realization will be the most effective way to reduce society’s exposure to high seismic risks. To achieve this, all levels of government need to utilize legislative and regulatory options; insurance industries need to build economic incentives for seismic safety features into their insurance policy offerings; and the private sector, through trade and professional organizations’ planning efforts, needs to develop a healthy self-protective stand. Also, the insurance industry needs to invest more aggressively into broadly based research activities with the objective to quantify the seismic hazards, the exposed assets and their seismic fragilities much more accurately than currently possible. Only together these combined measures may first help to quantify and then reduce our currently untenably large seismic risk exposures in the virtually unprepared eastern cities. Given the low-probability/high-impact situation in this part of the country, seismic safety planning needs to be woven into both the regular capital spending and daily operational procedures. Without it we must be prepared to see little progress. Unless we succeed to build seismic safety considerations into everyday decision making as a normal procedure of doing business, society will lose the race against the unstoppable forces of nature. While we never can entirely win this race, we can succeed in converting unmitigated catastrophes into manageable disasters, or better, tolerable natural events.

Earthquakes and Birth Pains Continue: Matthew 24

At least 16 dead after magnitude 6.8 earthquake shakes Ecuador

Estimated 381 people injured in quake, officials say

At least 16 people died after a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck southern Ecuador on Saturday afternoon, according to government officials.

The earthquake struck near the southern town of Baláo and was more than 65 km (nearly 41 miles) deep, according to the United States Geological Survey, CNN reported.

An estimated 381 people were injured in the quake, the General Secretariat of Communication of the Presidency of Ecuador tweeted on their official account.

In the province of El Oro, at least 11 people died. At least one other death was reported in the province of Azuay, according to the communications department for Ecuador’s president. In an earlier statement, authorities said the person in Azuay was killed when a wall collapsed onto a car and that at least three of the victims in El Oro died when a security camera tower came down.

People who were injured were being treated at hospitals, the Presidency added, but did not provide further details.

The USGS gave the tremor an “orange alert,” saying “significant casualties are likely and the disaster is potentially widespread.”

“Past events with this alert level have required a regional or national level response,” the USGS added. It also estimated damage and economic losses were possible.

Relatives of a CNN producer in the western port city of Guayaquil said they felt “very strong” tremors.

CNN afiliate Ecuavisa reported structural damage to buildings in Cuenca, one of the country’s biggest cities. The historic city is in the UN list of world heritage sites.

There is no tsunami warning in effect for the area, according to the US National Weather Service.

The airports of Guayaquil and Cuenca remained open and operational, the country’s statement said.

(The-CNN-Wire & 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.)

Man’s Fruit Continues to Fail

Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse will not be a one-off – a banking crisis was long overdue

Sun 19 Mar 2023 09.47 EDT

It has been a year since the Federal Reserve started to raise interest rates and banks are starting to fall over in the US. Anybody who thinks Silicon Valley Bank was a one-off is deluding themselves. Financial crises have occurred on average once a decade over the past half century so the one unfolding now is if anything overdue.

The reckoning has been delayed because since 2008 banks have been operating in a world of ultra-low interest rates and periodic injections of electronic cash from central banks. Originally seen as a temporary expedient in the highly stressed conditions after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, cheap and plentiful money became a constant prop for the markets.

Over the years, there was debate about what would happen were central banks to raise interest rates and to suck the money they had created out of the financial system. Now we know.

The action deemed necessary to rein in inflation has deflated housing bubbles, sent share prices plunging and left banks nursing big losses on their holdings of government bonds.

The Bank of England was quicker out of the blocks than the Fed. Threadneedle Street began raising rates in December 2021 and has now raised them 10 times in a row. The European Central Bank waited until July last year before making the decision to increase borrowing costs for the first time in a decade, and went ahead with an increase last week despite news that the banking malaise had spread across the Atlantic to Credit Suisse.Credit Suisse: Bank of England won’t object to takeover as UBS considers $1bn bid

Ignore the fact that the US, UK and eurozone economies have all held up better than was expected in the immediate aftermath of the energy price shock caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It takes time for changes in monetary policy – the decisions central banks make on interest rates and bond-buying or selling – to have an impact.

As Dhaval Joshi of BCA Research pointed out last week there are three classic signs that a recession is coming in the US: a downturn in the housing market, bank failures, and rising unemployment. Housebuilding is down by 20% in the past year, which means the first has already happened. The problems at SVB and other US regional banks suggest the second condition is now being met. The third harbinger of a US recession is a rise in the US unemployment rate of 0.5 percentage points. So far it is up by 0.2 points.

“Banks tend to fail just before recessions begin,” Joshi says. “Ahead of the recession that began in December 2007, no US bank failed in 2005 or 2006. The first three bank failures happened in February, September, and October of 2007, just before the recession onset.

“Fast forward, and no US bank failed in 2021 or 2022. The first bank failures of this cycle – Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank – have just happened. If history is any guide, the start of bank failures presages an economic recession that is more imminent than many people anticipate.”

The Fed and the Bank of England meet to make interest-rate decisions this week and the financial markets think that in both cases the choice is between no change and a 0.25 point increase. Frankly, it should be a no-brainer. Given the lags involved, even a cut in interest rates would be too late to prevent output from falling in the coming months, but against a backdrop of falling inflation, plunging global commodity prices and evidence of mounting financial distress any further tightening of policy would be foolish.

Central banks seem to think there is no problem in achieving price stability while maintaining financial stability. Good luck with that. The Fed, the ECB and the Bank of England have tightened policy aggressively and things are starting to break.

It wasn’t always thus. There was a marked absence of banking crises in the 25 years after the second world war, a period when banks were much more tightly regulated than they are today, and played a more peripheral economic role. Reforms put in place after the Great Depression, including capital controls and the US separation of retail and investment banking were designed to ensure governments could pursue their economic objectives without fear that they would be blown off course by runs on their currencies or turmoil in the markets.

Over the past 50 years, the financial sector has been liberalised and grown much bigger. Regulation and supervision has been tightened since the global financial crisis but with only limited effect. SVB was supposed to be a small bank that could operate with less stringent regulation than a bank deemed to be “systemically important”. Yet when it came to the crunch, all the depositors of SVB were protected, making the distinction between a systemic and non-systemic bank somewhat academic. The financial system as a whole is both inherently fragile and too big to fail.

There is not the remotest possibility of a return to the curbs on banks that were in place during the 1950s and 1960s. Desirable though that would be, there is no political appetite for taking on an immensely powerful financial sector. But that, as has become evident in the past 15 years, has its costs.

One is that economies dominated by the financial sector only really deliver for the better off: the owners of property and shares. A second is that the financial markets have become hooked on the stimulus that has been provided by central banks. A third is that the crises endemic to the system become much more likely when – as now – that stimulus is removed. Which means that eventually more stimulus will be provided, the markets will boom, and the seeds of the next crash will be sown.

The Next Major Quake: The Sixth Seal of NYC

New York is overdue an earthquake from faults under city

New York is OVERDUE an earthquake from a ‚brittle grid‘ of faults under the city, expert warns

  • New York City last experienced a M5 or higher earthquake in 1884, experts say
  • It’s thought that these earthquakes occur on a roughly 150-year periodicity 
  • Based on this, some say the city could be overdue for the next major quake 

By

Cheyenne Macdonald For Dailymail.com

Published: 15:50 EDT, 1 September 2017 | Updated: 12:00 EDT, 2 September 2017

When you think of the impending earthquake risk in the United States, it’s likely California or the Pacific Northwest comes to mind.

But, experts warn a system of faults making up a ‘brittle grid’ beneath

New York City could also be loading up for a massive temblor.

The city has been hit by major quakes in the past, along what’s thought to be roughly 150-year intervals, and researchers investigating these faults now say the region could be overdue for the next event.

Experts warn a system of faults making up a ‘brittle grid’ beneath New York City could also be loading up for a massive temblor. The city has been hit by major quakes in the past, along what’s thought to be roughly 150-year intervals. A stock image is pictured

THE ‚CONEY ISLAND EARTHQUAKE‘

On August 10, 1884, New York was struck by a magnitude 5.5 earthquake with an epicentre located in Brooklyn.

While there was little damage and few injuries reported, anecdotal accounts of the event reveal the frightening effects of the quake.

One newspaper even reported that it caused someone to die from fright.

According to a New York Times report following the quake, massive buildings, including the Post Office swayed back and forth.

And, police said they felt the Brooklyn Bridge swaying ‘as if struck by a hurricane,’ according to an adaptation of Kathryn Miles’ book Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake.

The rumbles were felt across a 70,000-square-mile area, causing broken windows and cracked walls as far as Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

The city hasn’t experienced an earthquake this strong since.

According to geologist Dr Charles Merguerian, who has walked the entirety of Manhattan to assess its seismicity, there are a slew of faults running through New York, reports author Kathryn Miles in an

adaptation of her new book Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake.

One such fault passes through 125th street, otherwise known as the Manhattanville Fault.

While there have been smaller quakes in New York’s recent past, including a magnitude 2.6 that struck in October 2001, it’s been decades since the last major tremor of M 5 or more.

And, most worryingly, the expert says there’s no way to predict exactly when a quake will strike.

‘That’s a question you really can’t answer,’ Merguerian has explained in the past.

‘All we can do is look at the record, and the record is that there was a relatively large earthquake here in the city in 1737, and in 1884, and that periodicity is about 150 year heat cycle.

‘So you have 1737, 1884, 20- and, we’re getting there. But statistics can lie.

‘An earthquake could happen any day, or it couldn’t happen for 100 years, and you just don’t know, there’s no way to predict.’

Compared the other parts of the United States, the risk of an earthquake in New York may not seem as pressing.

But, experts explain that a quake could happen anywhere.

According to geologist Dr Charles Merguerian, there are a slew of faults running through NY. One is the Ramapo Fault

‘All states have some potential for damaging earthquake shaking,’ according to the US Geological Survey.

‘Hazard is especially high along the west coast but also in the intermountain west, and in parts of the central and eastern US.’

A recent assessment by the USGS determined that the earthquake hazard along the East Coast may previously have been underestimated.

‘The eastern U.S. has the potential for larger and more damaging earthquakes than considered in previous maps and assessments,’ the USGS

report explained.

The experts point to a recent example – the magnitude 5.8 earthquake that hit Virginia in 2011, which was among the largest to occur on the east coast in the last century.

This event suggests the area could be subjected to even larger earthquakes, even raising the risk for Charleston, SC.

It also indicates that New York City may be at higher risk than once thought.

A recent assessment by the USGS determined that the earthquake hazard along the East Coast may previously have been underestimated. The varying risks around the US can be seen above, with New York City in the mid-range (yellow).

The Sixth Seal Long Overdue (Revelation 6)

ON THE MAP; Exploring the Fault Where the Next Big One May Be Waiting

The Big One Awaits

By MARGO NASH

Published: March 25, 2001

Alexander Gates, a geology professor at Rutgers-Newark, is co-author of “The Encyclopedia of Earthquakes and Volcanoes,“ which will be published by Facts on File in July. He has been leading a four-year effort to remap an area known as the Sloatsburg Quadrangle, a 5-by-7-mile tract near Mahwah that crosses into New York State. The Ramapo Fault, which runs through it, was responsible for a big earthquake in 1884, and Dr. Gates warns that a recurrence is overdue. He recently talked about his findings.

Q. What have you found?

A. We’re basically looking at a lot more rock, and we’re looking at the fracturing and jointing in the bedrock and putting it on the maps. Any break in the rock is a fracture. If it has movement, then it’s a fault. There are a lot of faults that are offshoots of the Ramapo. Basically when there are faults, it means you had an earthquake that made it. So there was a lot of earthquake activity to produce these features. We are basically not in a period of earthquake activity along the Ramapo Fault now, but we can see that about six or seven times in history, about 250 million years ago, it had major earthquake activity. And because it’s such a fundamental zone of weakness, anytime anything happens, the Ramapo Fault goes.

Q. Where is the Ramapo Fault?

 A. The fault line is in western New Jersey and goes through a good chunk of the state, all the way down to Flemington. It goes right along where they put in the new 287. It continues northeast across the Hudson River right under the Indian Point power plant up into Westchester County. There are a lot of earthquakes rumbling around it every year, but not a big one for a while.

Q. Did you find anything that surprised you?

A. I found a lot of faults, splays that offshoot from the Ramapo that go 5 to 10 miles away from the fault. I have looked at the Ramapo Fault in other places too. I have seen splays 5 to 10 miles up into the Hudson Highlands. And you can see them right along the roadsides on 287. There’s been a lot of damage to those rocks, and obviously it was produced by fault activities. All of these faults have earthquake potential.

Q. Describe the 1884 earthquake.

A. It was in the northern part of the state near the Sloatsburg area. They didn’t have precise ways of describing the location then. There was lots of damage. Chimneys toppled over. But in 1884, it was a farming community, and there were not many people to be injured. Nobody appears to have written an account of the numbers who were injured.

Q. What lessons we can learn from previous earthquakes?

A. In 1960, the city of Agadir in Morocco had a 6.2 earthquake that killed 12,000 people, a third of the population, and injured a third more. I think it was because the city was unprepared.There had been an earthquake in the area 200 years before. But people discounted the possibility of a recurrence. Here in New Jersey, we should not make the same mistake. We should not forget that we had a 5.4 earthquake 117 years ago. The recurrence interval for an earthquake of that magnitude is every 50 years, and we are overdue. The Agadir was a 6.2, and a 5.4 to a 6.2 isn’t that big a jump.

Q. What are the dangers of a quake that size?

A. When you’re in a flat area in a wooden house it’s obviously not as dangerous, although it could cut off a gas line that could explode. There’s a real problem with infrastructure that is crumbling, like the bridges with crumbling cement.

 There’s a real danger we could wind up with our water supplies and electricity cut off if a sizable earthquake goes off. The best thing is to have regular upkeep and keep up new building codes. The new buildings will be O.K. But there is a sense of complacency.

MARGO NASH

Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake: Revelation 6

Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake

Roger BilhamQuakeland: New York and the Sixth Seal (Revelation 6:12)

Given recent seismic activity — political as well as geological — it’s perhaps unsurprising that two books on earthquakes have arrived this season. One is as elegant as the score of a Beethoven symphony; the other resembles a diary of conversations overheard during a rock concert. Both are interesting, and both relate recent history to a shaky future.

Journalist Kathryn Miles’s Quakeland is a litany of bad things that happen when you provoke Earth to release its invisible but ubiquitous store of seismic-strain energy, either by removing fluids (oil, water, gas) or by adding them in copious quantities (when extracting shale gas in hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, or when injecting contaminated water or building reservoirs). To complete the picture, she describes at length the bad things that happen during unprovoked natural earthquakes. As its subtitle hints, the book takes the form of a road trip to visit seismic disasters both past and potential, and seismologists and earthquake engineers who have first-hand knowledge of them. Their colourful personalities, opinions and prejudices tell a story of scientific discovery and engineering remedy.

Miles poses some important societal questions. Aside from human intervention potentially triggering a really damaging earthquake, what is it actually like to live in neighbourhoods jolted daily by magnitude 1–3 earthquakes, or the occasional magnitude 5? Are these bumps in the night acceptable? And how can industries that perturb the highly stressed rocks beneath our feet deny obvious cause and effect? In 2015, the Oklahoma Geological Survey conceded that a quadrupling of the rate of magnitude-3 or more earthquakes in recent years, coinciding with a rise in fracking, was unlikely to represent a natural process. Miles does not take sides, but it’s difficult for the reader not to.

She visits New York City, marvelling at subway tunnels and unreinforced masonry almost certainly scheduled for destruction by the next moderate earthquake in the vicinity. She considers the perils of nuclear-waste storage in Nevada and Texas, and ponders the risks to Idaho miners of rock bursts — spontaneous fracture of the working face when the restraints of many million years of confinement are mined away. She contemplates the ups and downs of the Yellowstone Caldera — North America’s very own mid-continent supervolcano — and its magnificently uncertain future. Miles also touches on geothermal power plants in southern California’s Salton Sea and elsewhere; the vast US network of crumbling bridges, dams and oil-storage farms; and the magnitude 7–9 earthquakes that could hit California and the Cascadia coastline of Oregon and Washington state this century. Amid all this doom, a new elementary school on the coast near Westport, Washington, vulnerable to inbound tsunamis, is offered as a note of optimism. With foresight and much persuasion from its head teacher, it was engineered to become an elevated safe haven.

Miles briefly discusses earthquake prediction and the perils of getting it wrong (embarrassment in New Madrid, Missouri, where a quake was predicted but never materialized; prison in L’Aquila, Italy, where scientists failed to foresee a devastating seismic event) and the successes of early-warning systems, with which electronic alerts can be issued ahead of damaging seismic waves. Yes, it’s a lot to digest, but most of the book obeys the laws of physics, and it is a engaging read. One just can’t help wishing that Miles’s road trips had taken her somewhere that wasn’t a disaster waiting to happen.

Catastrophic damage in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1964, caused by the second-largest earthquake in the global instrumental record.

In The Great Quake, journalist Henry Fountain provides us with a forthright and timely reminder of the startling historical consequences of North America’s largest known earthquake, which more than half a century ago devastated southern Alaska. With its epicentre in Prince William Sound, the 1964 quake reached magnitude 9.2, the second largest in the global instrumental record. It released more energy than either the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake or the 2011 Tohoku earthquake off Japan; and it generated almost as many pages of scientific commentary and description as aftershocks. Yet it has been forgotten by many.

The quake was scientifically important because it occurred at a time when plate tectonics was in transition from hypothesis to theory. Fountain expertly traces the theory’s historical development, and how the Alaska earthquake was pivotal in nailing down one of the most important predictions. The earthquake caused a fjordland region larger than England to subside, and a similarly huge region of islands offshore to rise by many metres; but its scientific implications were not obvious at the time. Eminent seismologists thought that a vertical fault had slipped, drowning forests and coastlines to its north and raising beaches and islands to its south. But this kind of fault should have reached the surface, and extended deep into Earth’s mantle. There was no geological evidence of a monster surface fault separating these two regions, nor any evidence for excessively deep aftershocks. The landslides and liquefied soils that collapsed houses, and the tsunami that severely damaged ports and infrastructure, offered no clues to the cause.

“Previous earthquakes provide clear guidance about present-day vulnerability.” The hero of The Great Quake is the geologist George Plafker, who painstakingly mapped the height reached by barnacles lifted out of the intertidal zone along shorelines raised by the earthquake, and documented the depths of drowned forests. He deduced that the region of subsidence was the surface manifestation of previously compressed rocks springing apart, driving parts of Alaska up and southwards over the Pacific Plate. His finding confirmed a prediction of plate tectonics, that the leading edge of the Pacific Plate plunged beneath the southern edge of Alaska along a gently dipping thrust fault. That observation, once fully appreciated, was applauded by the geophysics community.

Fountain tells this story through the testimony of survivors, engineers and scientists, interweaving it with the fascinating history of Alaska, from early discovery by Europeans to purchase from Russia by the United States in 1867, and its recent development. Were the quake to occur now, it is not difficult to envisage that with increased infrastructure and larger populations, the death toll and price tag would be two orders of magnitude larger than the 139 fatalities and US$300-million economic cost recorded in 1964.

What is clear from these two books is that seismicity on the North American continent is guaranteed to deliver surprises, along with unprecedented economic and human losses. Previous earthquakes provide clear guidance about the present-day vulnerability of US infrastructure and populations. Engineers and seismologists know how to mitigate the effects of future earthquakes (and, in mid-continent, would advise against the reckless injection of waste fluids known to trigger earthquakes). It is merely a matter of persuading city planners and politicians that if they are tempted to ignore the certainty of the continent’s seismic past, they should err on the side of caution when considering its seismic future.

1884 A Forewarning Of The Sixth Seal (Revelation 6:12)

The Coney Island earthquake of 1884

New York City isn’t immune to earthquakes; a couple of small tremors measuring about 2.5 on the Richter scale even struck back in 2001 and 2002.

But on August 10, 1884, a more powerful earthquake hit. Estimated from 4.9 to 5.5 in magnitude, the tremor made houses shake, chimneys fall, and residents wonder what the heck was going on, according to a New York Times article two days later.

The quake was subsequently thought to have been centered off Far Rockaway or Coney Island.

It wasn’t the first moderate quake, and it won’t be the last. In a 2008 Columbia University study, seismologists reported that the city is crisscrossed with several fault lines, one along 125th Street. 

With that in mind, New Yorkers should expect a 5.0 or higher earthquake centered here every 100 years, the seismologists say.

Translation: We’re about 30 years overdue. Lucky for us the city adopted earthquake-resistant building codes in 1995.

Reported seismic-like event before the Sixth Seal: Revelation 6

QUAKE DATA | INTERACTIVE MAP | NEW: SEISMOGRAMS | USER REPORTS | EARLIER QUAKES HERE | QUAKES IN THE US | QUAKES IN THE US | QUAKES IN THE US | NEW YORK | WASHINGTON DCReported seismic-like event (likely no quake): 11 km northeast of Brooklyn, Kings County, New York, USA, Sunday, Mar 12, 2023 at 1:32 pm (GMT -4)

Reported seismic-like event (likely no quake): 11 km northeast of Brooklyn, Kings County, New York, USA, Sunday, Mar 12, 2023 at 1:32 pm (GMT -4) – 1 day 2 hours ago

Updated: Mar 13, 2023 19:18 GMT – 21 minutes ago refresh

12 Mar 17:35 UTC: First to report: VolcanoDiscovery after 3 minutes.

Earthquake details

Date & timeMar 12, 2023 17:32:26 UTC – 1 day 2 hours ago
Local time at epicenterSunday, Mar 12, 2023 at 1:32 pm (GMT -4)
Statusdisregarded
Magnitudeunknown (3?)
Depth10.0 km
Epicenter latitude / longitude40.69026°N / 73.83053°W
Antipode40.69°S / 106.169°E
Shaking intensityWeak shaking
Felt1 report
Primary data sourceVolcanoDiscovery (User-reported shaking)
Nearby towns and cities1 km (1 mi) NNE of Queens (New York) (pop: 2,272,800) | Show on map | Quakes nearby
1 km (1 mi) NNE of Borough of Queens (New York) (pop: 2,272,800) | Show on map | Quakes nearby
2 km (1 mi) W of Jamaica (New York) (pop: 216,900) | Show on map | Quakes nearby
11 km (7 mi) ENE of Brooklyn (New York) (pop: 2,300,700) | Show on map | Quakes nearby
15 km (9 mi) NE of Sheepshead Bay (New York) (pop: 122,500) | Show on map | Quakes nearby
15 km (9 mi) E of New York (pop: 8,175,100) | Show on map | Quakes nearby
18 km (11 mi) NW of Long Beach (New York) (pop: 33,600) | Show on map | Quakes nearby
339 km (211 mi) NE of Washington (District of Columbia) (pop: 601,700) | Show on map | Quakes nearby
Weather at epicenter at time of quakeBroken Clouds  7.7°C (46 F), humidity: 57%, wind: 2 m/s (4 kts) from ESE

The History Of New York Earthquakes: Before The Sixth Seal (Rev 6:12)


Historic Earthquakes
Near New York City, New York
1884 08 10 19:07 UTC
Magnitude 5.5The History Of New York Earthquakes: Before The Sixth Seal (Rev 6:12)
Intensity VII
USGS.gov
This severe earthquake affected an area roughly extending along the Atlantic Coast from southern Maine to central Virginia and westward to Cleveland, Ohio. Chimneys were knocked down and walls were cracked in several States, including Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Many towns from Hartford, Connecticut, to West Chester,Pennsylvania.
Property damage was severe at Amityville and Jamaica, New York, where several chimneys were “overturned” and large cracks formed in walls. Two chimneys were thrown down and bricks were shaken from other chimneys at Stratford (Fairfield County), Conn.; water in the Housatonic River was agitated violently. At Bloomfield, N.J., and Chester, Pa., several chimneys were downed and crockery was broken. Chimneys also were damaged at Mount Vernon, N.Y., and Allentown, Easton, and Philadelphia, Pa. Three shocks occurred, the second of which was most violent. This earthquake also was reported felt in Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Several slight aftershocks were reported on August 11.
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