Posted on 04/26/2008 12:09:21 AM PDT by skippermd
No sense of humor, T?
ME, it would ruin the landscape. I like looking at the trees.
Some great info on the Nevada seismic lab website;
There have been two Magnitude 6 quakes near Verdi in the last 100 years.
One in 1914, other in 1948. Here’s info on the Mag 6; sounds ominously similar to what is going on now; seems like if there’s a long pause, that could be the sign a mainshock is coming:
http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/papers/renoeq/renoeq.html
Verdi Earthquake, December 29, 1948, M6.0
On December 29, 1948, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake near Verdi caused Intensity VII damage to that community. The main event was preceded by several foreshocks. On December 27, notable foreshocks occurred at 5:15, 6:24, 8:21, 8:24, 9:24, and 10:04 p.m. (PST). The event at 9:24 p.m. is described as “a prolonged jolt beneath the city [Reno] for perhaps 30 seconds.” On December 28, numerous earthquakes were felt, and at Verdi there were almost continuous vibrations. Following a lull of nearly 36 hours, almost everyone in a radius of 80 km (50 mi) was awakened by the mainshock at 5:53 AM on December 29th. Nearly every building in Verdi had some sort of damage. Brick parapets on the east and west sides of the Verdi school building were sheared and thrown off. A wall of a grocery store fell down. Several chimneys came down in Verdi and Floriston, and bricks fell from many others. A chimney was also broken in Dog Valley. Windows were broken as far away as Reno. A water main between Reno and Sparks was sheared. In Verdi, stoves were knocked out of line and in some cases went sliding into walls. Large boulders up to 1.5 m (5 ft) came down in the Truckee River Canyon along U.S. Highway 40 south of Verdi, knocking out both power and telephone lines. Telephone service in Reno was out for one to two days.
The earthquake is thought to have originated in Dog Valley and to have possibly occurred along the Verdi fault (which is northerly striking as is the orientation of the most severe damage) or the Dog Valley lineament. In addition to foreshocks, “mysterious rumbles” or subterranean roars were heard in the Verdi-Reno region for about a year before the Verdi earthquake (Bell et al., 1982). [MSL 6, MBM 6.0]
No.
LOL
4.9 is just under the 5.0 minimum that is worthy of a thread. However, since nothing else is happening in the world the high posting standards of FR can be relaxed slightly.
That's not normal!
:-)
Was revised to a 4.7; however, it’s in a medium-sized urban area, and is part of a MASSIVE swarm of quakes that has lasted two months.
And as I noted, it seems a similar swarm in the same place in 1948 included a Magnitude 6.0 earthquake; such a quake, while not an epic disaster, would cause fatalities and damage potentially topping a billion dollars.
Have you experienced a 6.0 quake personally? I have, (6.1 actually) and while it knocked me to my butt (I was in the shower at the time), it was hardly life-threatening.
A 6.0 causes damage to buildings that are made of unreinforced concrete, and it knocks stuff off the shelves of supermarkets.
Magnitude isn’t the relevant question; it’s the intensity that matters for the purposes of that discussion. A Magnitude 6 would do a lot more in some places than others.
It’s interesting how seismically dead it has been historically at the epicenter. Has it been confirmed this is an extension of the Dog Valley lineament (seems very possible/likely), or could it be related to one of the smaller dip-slip faults mapped near Reno?
I’ve never experienced an earthquake.
How far away were you from said 6.1? Distance is everything.
The Whittier Narrows earthquakes in Los Angeles in 1987, a 5.3 and a 5.9 three days apart, killed 3 people directly and 5 indirectly, and did over $300 million dollars of damage.
The 6.3 Long Beach Earthquake in 1933 killed 115 people.
You shoulda been here! The dollar machines started spitting out coins like the U.S. Treasury under George W. Bush (now worth half as much as when he started out seven years ago.). I grabbed me five pocketfuls (I wear those Vietnamese jeans with pockets on the knees), before the casino security guys arrived and started grabbing them for themselves.
According to an press release earlier in the swarm (late March) from the Nevada Sesimic Lab,
http://www.seismo.unr.edu/feature/2008/Reports/Mogul_report.pdf
Figure 4 shows the focal mechamisms of the two largest earthquakes, as identified in the figure. These mechanisms consistently show strike-slip motion. The two alternatives are right-lateral strike-slip on a northwest-trending fault, or left-lateral strike-slip on a northeast-trending fault. Because the aftershocks are aligned along a northwest trend, we have high confidence that the causative fault is a right-lateral fault with a strike in the northwest direction.
Causative Fault
One relevant reference for a causative fault is the US Geological Survey Quaternary Fault and Fold Database. This can be accessed from the web site http://earthquake.usgs.gov/qfaults/. Faults from this database can also be downloaded into files compatible with Google Earth. These files were downloaded and all faults in the database were plotted for the west Reno area. Our conclusion is that none of the faults in this database can match the location and orientation of the earthquake distribution in the Mogul swarm. On the other hand, Pat Cashman and Jim Trexler have been mapping the faults in bedrock in west Reno. Following the March 8 earthquake, they looked at new exposures in a housing development north of Mogul. The bedrock there, as well as other sites they have mapped in west Reno, is highly faulted. They confirm that a right-lateral strike-slip fault with a northwest orientation is consistent with the fault orientations in the area. With greater precision in the earthquake locations, it may be possible to associate the earthquakes with one of the faults that they have mapped.
I was 12 miles from the epicenter, but there were no deaths, and I believe no injuries, at the epicenter which was located in the town of Oroville, California.
Don’t get me wrong. It was a strong quake and I ran out of the bathroom naked and dripping wet thinking the earth was ending. Since I was the only one in the house at the time, nobody laughed at me.
It didn’t cause any damage to the house, but it sure scared me.
It was a rhetorical question, LOL. :-)
No. If that were the case, He would drop a meteor on the compound in Searchlight.
First, I cannot believe I am the first to notice the typo in the headline. 2007???
Second, my house is located near the epicenter of the 2000 Nisqually quake, and was seriously damaged in that quake. (Fortunately, I had earthquake insurance, and the insurance company forgot to fill in the blank where the deductible was supposed to go, so they wound up covering all but $500.00 of the cost of the repair).
Chimneys were knocked down all over my neighborhood, and a house down the stree from me was totally destroyed. So, earthquakes can be serious business.
Chortle!
I'd say you're the first.
Thanks for the info, including the pointer to the stereonets... I hadn’t been following this cluster at all.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.