Posted on 04/01/2007 2:40:17 PM PDT by GATOR NAVY
EMSC has revised the magnitude up to 7.9 and the latest PTWC message had 8.1, and considering the "A Team" at USGS isn't there on weekends, I suspect the magnitude was higher than 7.6.
For any WWII History Buffs this was right under New Georgia - near Munda, Vella Lavella, etc.
Fairly significant population in New Georgia, over 50,000.
What this not a April Fools Day joke?
I am not falling for this one.
If I where in a Tsunami warning area I would dare the "tsunami" wave to prove wrong and I would win....
Repeating: I am not falling for this lame April Fools Day joke....
Ummm
Straight off of USGS sites...
Not an April fools
pflr
It always seems like the initial magnitude reports for large earthquakes are low.
The Boxing Day Earthquake was initially reported as a 7.6 on the Richter Scale. They just kept moving the magnitude, along with the death toll, higher. Ended up as a 9.1. Hopefully, this won't be the case this time. And anyone know the difference between Moment and Richter magnitudes? Richter was 7.6 for this, but Moment was 8.1.
So much stuff on the web today
hard to pick through the wheat from the chaff
The larger the earthquake the harder it is to estimate magnitude. Also most nearby seismographs get "saturated" ("pegged" if you will) by big quakes.
There are several different magnitude scales - the only one that works for really big quakes is the Moment Magnitude.
To be perfectly anal-retentive and pedantic, technically the "Richter" scale only applies to Southern California and is no longer used, thus technically it's basically misused all the time.
Good article on all the scales:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_scale
Very sparse stuff on google news so far, apparently there was no damage from the quake itself on Guadalcanal, where most of the Solomon Islands population lives.
Link to Google map
I've been to Guadalcanal. There's not a lot to damage, unless they've really built up in the last 20 years.
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