Posted on 03/28/2005 8:46:46 AM PST by Helmholtz
Dow Jones News Reports at 11:39 "DJ Singapore Official: 7.5 Quake Hits Sumatra - Kyodo"
No other reports yet.
Tsunami danger not over: Aussie
March 29, 2005
From: AAP
AN earthquake off Indonesia could still produce a tsunami as big as the killer waves which left nearly 300,000 dead following a similar quake in December, seismologists in Australia said today.
Australia's bureau of meteorology said a 25cm tsunami had already hit Australia's remote Cocos Island and bigger tidal surges were expected to strike Australia's west coast.
Phil Cummins, of Geoscience Australia, said that although no major tsumani had yet been reported near the quake epicenter off Indonesia's Sumatra island, a big tidal surge could still be heading across the Indian Ocean towards Africa.
"I would say there is still potential for this to have generated a large tsunami," he said.
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Australia's bureau of meteorology initially reported that the tsunami measured just 10cm at Cocos Island, located in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean south of Sumatra, but later upgraded that to 25cm.
"That's fairly big for the deep ocean," Mr Cummins said of the wave which hit Cocos, adding that an alert had been issued for a one metre surge expected to hit the Western Australia coast.
Asked if the east coast of Africa could still be struck by a major tsunami from the latest quake, Mr Cummins said: "I would say it's still something we have to regard as a possibility.
"We've seen the thing at Cocos Island and that really does tell us we have to exercise caution."
The reaction was sadly predictable.
sw
Nias has a population of 600,000 so even without a large tsunami quite a lot of people are going to end up having been killed.
Sad, You just know that total is going up, Prayers.
Explain to me, how pointing out that there is a gay festival in Phuket is germane to the tsunami discussion.
Seems to me like you are of that whole crowd that wants God to get into that smiting mood.
LOL, RW! My sister is an ER nurse and has expressed the same to me, so it's a common perception in the trade. But I remember seeing a story based on a study from (IIRC) UC Med school that put the statistics to rest.
As Strategerist has mentioned elsewhere, the general population has an extremely difficult time accepting the concept of random behavior - whether it's Ma Nature or 'human nature'.
There's a completely different story everywhere you look. :)
There sure is a big crowd of 'em. Criminy.
Full moon, the nuts are out.
(he doesn't think there are gay parades in his home town, he is happy in denial)
Tsunamis come a range of sizes, Lainie, from barely detectable to 2x or more what the world saaw just after Christmas in this region. I believe I saw somewhere in this thread that a 3m tsunami (10 ft) was triggered by this latest quake.
The magnitude of a tsunami is determined by 3 factors: a) magnitude of quake, b) type of seafloor movement, and c)bottom topography where the tsunami makes landfall. There's still some small possibility that a tsunami generated by this quake as yet to hit a distant coast in, say, E Africa/Madagascar.
Also, it's still dark in the immediate region (5:30am by my calculation) and with primitive - if any - communications, I don't think we'll know about the nearby regions of W Sumatra and its outlying islands for a few more hours yet.
Feel free to continue to entertain me; I'm getting quite a laugh out of your posts.
You mean to tell me that you predicted Christians might attribute and Act of God to... God?
Whoa. You must clean up at the track.
Eh, it's a bit over-simplified. It's different times for each segment; I was referring to the central segments immediately around SLC.
http://geology.utah.gov/online/pdf/pi-40.pdf
"These earthquakes took place on the fault's five central segments (Brigham City, Weber, Salt Lake City, Provo, and Nephi) and one distal segment (Levan). Collectively, the "composite recurrence interval," or how often a large earthquake has occurred on the central portion of the Wasatch fault, is approximately once every 350 years. The last large earthquake happened about 600 years ago on the Provo segment, and possibly earlier on the Nephi segment (although the starburst position indicates a carbon-dated event closer to 1,200 years ago, some researchers estimate an earthquake occurred as recently as 400 years ago on the Nephi segment)."
A PDF unfortunately...
A non-pdf:
http://www.journalnet.com/articles/2003/09/14/news/local/news11.txt
"Simple timing underscores why geologists are putting a target on Salt Lake City: The Wasatch fault here last slipped with a violent shudder about 1,283 years ago - and the intervals between each of the four most recent prehistoric quakes ranged from 1,269 to 1,441 years.
All dates are qualified by different margins of error, but the implication is clear.
"The earthquake strain has been accumulating all this time and there is sufficient energy to release the big one," said Walter Arabasz, director of the University of Utah's Seismograph Stations.
"What's overdue is strong shaking. Since 1847 we've just been lucky," he said.
A magnitude 7.5 quake could kill 7,600 people in the Salt Lake basin, injure 44,000 others and cause $12 billion in building damage alone, a pair of Stanford University engineers calculated in 1994.
The main Wasatch fault, which snakes along the base of the Wasatch Range, isn't the only threat to Utah's largest city. Out on the basin floor, the West Valley fault group also is poised to release a powerful quake.
Over the past 12,000 years, the West Valley complex produced a powerful jolt every 1,700 to 2,000 years - most recently about 2,000 years ago, geologist Jeffrey Keaton determined."
Why is it that every time there is a FR thread on a natural disaster it is always taken over by the religious fruit cakes?
I thought the same thing, but was waiting for some intelligent FReeper to explain the possible signifigance.
Check out the number of your post. Scary.
People are terrified that anything can happen, especially bad things, that don't have anything to do with humans...and "people being punished by God" has something to do with humans as it's a divine response to human action or inaction.
Interestingly, the Apocalyptikooks and radical leftist environmentalists are extremely similar; they have difficulty accepting that anything happens that wasn't directly caused by humans; they also share a passion for deception and exaggeration to further their aims.
Regarding the earlier discussion of randomness this quake wasn't "random" in one sense; It was caused by the movement of the Indo-Australian plate Northwards into India, and was on a deep subduction zone; you won't see a quake like this off, say, the East Coast of the US because we don't have a subduction zone (at least not for the next 20 million years or so, when we MAY get one) and one would only expect such quakes in these locations. We're not "randomly" going to have an 8.7 quake under New York City.
But these quakes were happening long before human beings evolved, or moved to the area, or converted to Islam, or Protestantism, etc.
From a HUMAN perspective the quake doesn't really have any meaning other than signfiying the plates are still moving and that living near a subduction zone is dangerous; that isn't enough for a lot of people; the idea that it just basically "happened" and doesn't specically mean anything or wasn't caused by human action or inaction is absolutely terrifying (for the same reason people keep wanting to connect quakes to nuke tests, etc.)
it hit.
only 10 centimeters high though.
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