Posted on 11/02/2015 9:45:47 AM PST by JimSEA
As I walked into the department this bright brisk morning, coffee cheerily in hand, the live global seismogram display in the atrium caught my eye with an alarming event that had just happened during my bike ride into work.
*gasp* that looks bad *gasp* that looks bad BIG earthquake, somewhere in the vicinity of Central/Southern Asia. Indeed, an earthquake deep (>200 km) beneath the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan had shaken a huge swath of Central and South Asia. The great depth of the earthquake meant less extreme shaking at the epicenter (nobody lives closer than 212 km from the source), but wider zones of strong and perceptible shaking. Indeed this M7.5 earthquake was felt in most of the Central Asian capitals–Dushanbe, Tashkent, Bishkek, Ashgabat–and throughout South Asia, from strong shaking in the nearby Kabul and Islamabad, to mild but perceptible ground motion in Kathmandu, Kolkata, and capitals as far west as Doha and Kuwait City. This impressive range is consistent with previous earthquakes in the region, and may in fact reveal the configuration of tectonic elements at depth (pdf).
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.agu.org ...
Sorry, I omitted the depth, it was 132 miles.
Tectonics ping if you still have that list.
That has to be on the outer boundary of depths isn’t it?
Glad I’m not there. That would have given me a Himalaya.
Pretty much so. The subducting slabs do go pretty deep. Average crust thickness Is A mere three miles in the ocean to 20 to 30 miles beneath the continental crusts.
Perhaps we'll lose a Call Center, or maybe a horde of H1Bs.
that seems strange if the crust is only abt 3 mi thick in the oceans how do we get away with drilling at least 5 miles below the sea floor in the near middle of the Gulf of Mexico and still have low enough temperatures for liquid hydrocarbons.
Much of the Gulf is part of the continental shelf. Plus, the 3 mile average is found closer to a ridge like the Mid - Atlantic ridge. That’s the problem with averages that they gloss over a lot of detail. Continental shelves are part of the continental crust and are geologically similar to the continental crust. The ocean floor is basically heavy basalt.
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