For people in the small town of Concepcion, Chile, the sirens must seem to be never ending. Early this morning, another powerful aftershock awakened already gun shy citizens there according to the USGS. Am magnitude 6.7 quake off Chile’s coast rattled an already terrified public promoting ever more frenzied evacuations of key buildings and danger areas.
Other significant quakes shocked many parts of the rest of the world over the last few days too. All this activity has to make observers wonder; “Is the world shaking itself to pieces?”
Savage Earth
From the tip of South America, up the Pacific coastline to Nicaragua, and on around the Pacific basin to California, Alaska, Korea, Japan, Australia, and down to the Pacific Islands, the unstable seismic are known as the “rim of fire” seems alive with geological event after event this year. The devastating Earthquake of Haiti being the evident announcement, subsequent earth shaking events in Chile and elsewhere seem to be rattling the world as in no previously recorded time frame. Without sounding too alarming, it seems safe to conclude something unique is going on with the world’s crust.
USGS Seismic activity this week
We have been covering these events via the USGS website and the news for some weeks now, and from ah historical standpoint, no time period in recent history seems more turbulent with regard to these types of events. The map above from the USGS reveals activity over the last seven days. You can readily see the after effects of Haiti, those in Chile, as well as very significant activity in or around Alaska and elsewhere – in just 7 days. Here is a list of activity worldwide above magnitude 5.0.
Let me stress something here please. We are not experts here at Everything PR News, though we do have some expertise and experience in geology and engineering, we do not want to be the cause of undue alarm. But, from this author, in over half a Century of noting such events, I have never seen either the magnitude or proliferation of activity as we have seen. That being said, please take the time to look into Savage Earth, a superb PBS informative about volcanoes and earthquakes, as people need to “catch up” on these events as suggested by our many comments on the subject.
Fearing the Known and Unknown
As for predicting earthquakes? While information from the USGS and other scientific organizations breaks new ground daily, there is still no reliable way to forecast these events. At least not with any high degree of certainty. Still, all this activity tweaks our alarm sensors for good reason. In examining all this data, and receiving any number of comments and emails about Earth’s apparent uneasiness, I began to wonder what other events might be triggered by all this activity. I was immediately interested in volcanic activity relative to earthquake events. Though some experts as USGS contend earthquakes surrounding volcano eruptions are separate, one report of “swarm quakes” before the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 caught my eye (PDF).
Taking Chile as having some of the most dangerous and least monitored volcanoes as an example, a real worse case scenario could easily be built if increased seismic activity recently did affect other geological events. As before, such speculation should not be cause for alarm, but rather far reaching awareness. The Chilean quakes are happening in an area substantially sensitive (in my view at least) to scenarios not previously experienced. 5 very active volcanoes reside very near the center of all this seismic activity; Cerro Azul, Copahue, Llaima, Villarrica, and Cerro Hudson. The closest to the events centered around Concepcion, Copahue, being somewhat similar to St. Helens.
Mt. St. Helens (left) and Copahue Chile (right)
It is interesting to note also that just before Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, a magnitude 5.2 quake in Washington preceded that event by only a few seconds. All in all that year, some similarity exists in the numbers of magnitude 7.0 and above earthquakes as well. Of course there is literally too much such data over the years with regard to thousands of such events. All that can empirically be gleaned from all this should be a hightened sense of awareness. But more crucially, the need for additional funding (PDF) of the USGS for monitoring volcanoes worldwide, not to mention advanced study of potentially life threatening quakes.
About Phil Butler
if climate science were certain then we would know about past present and future. but it’s not certain enough. And as discussed here it’s nowhere near to understanding it’s relationship with tectonics and volcanics.
but my main point here would be to do with this assumtion, less than a hundred days into the year, that it’s just a normal year for quakes. probability would say that it probably is normal.
but based on known history how many quakes of what size do we need to declare it an abnormal year? just now while we’re mostly calm and collected i’d like some expert to tell me where the limits of normal are. twice the quakes of 1976? 5 times the death toll of 2004? ten times the axis shift of feb.2010? if there’s no definable limits to normal than we can always be told that everythings normal, and some set of statistics will be used to
bolster such claims. assuming earth science is semi-mature, it shouldn’t take much funding to come up with a definition of a seismically abnormal period. consider how the WHO/CDC pre-define what a pandemic or how global economists pre-define recession.
but let me propose the following: science, unwittingly, already has just such a defined limit to normal. this limit is based on any single event and is known as magnitude 10. henceforth if we should see any events of magnitude 10 or greater then we may know that normal is out.
until such time let us not assume that our detriment and ignorance is purely in the physical realm.
Glad that you responded to my comments – it’s often difficult to find the right words in order to express facts and theories and possibilities that complex. Even more so if your job is to put these things into a language that everybody (or nearly so) can understand. This is one of the challenges of the business I am in (volcanologist), and which many of us still have to learn to handle.
In any case, I would say if a volcano is already pretty much ready to erupt but maybe it still would rather wait a month or two, then a strong earthquake can accelerate things. Same is true for a number of external factors that many people love to put into relation with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions – such as sunspot activity, planetary constellations, tidal forces, not to speak of human influences (HAARP being a popular one recently). Here the same is true – maybe one or the other of these things can be the ultimate trigger but in any case, also without this trigger the quake or eruption would happen, maybe just a bit later. We need to remember that volcanoes and earthquakes can do their thing all alone, and the forces that drive them are millions of times stronger than those that might come from these external factors. Still, very large earthquakes are now largely accepted by many scientists to be possible triggers of volcanic activity.
I do strongly appreciate your effort in communicating the necessity of funding for research that might help saving countless lives in a world where more and more people live in dangerous places, and growing living standards make us more and more vulnerable. I hope the message will reach a few that otherwise would not have noted.
For anybody interested in learning more about earthquakes and their impact, there is a web page that is packed with interesting information (including numerous publications for download), it’s by seismologist Roger Bilham of Colorado University: http://cires.colorado.edu/~bilham/
Thanks Boris, I would have bet :) You hit the nail on the head in more places than one. I studies environmental geology as well as geography about a million years ago. As you say, it it is not always so much these Earth systems as it is growing proximity, which puts people at risk. It only makes sense that if one of these, say Chilean, volcanoes (which are grossly under monitored) gets whopped any number of times by displacements – well the end of that is kinda obvious. These volcanoes have a rather monstrous negative potential.
No one wants people to panic, but the reverse of this is being uneducated about where to live, and the dangers inherent. I thank you so much for sharing your knowledge of these things. You would not believe the number of people who write me and ask about these things. I have not the time, nor the expert knowledge to do more than point them in the right direction.
Thanks again , Boris, and when you get time maybe you can elaborate via a news story or post on your work.
Always,
Phil
It would be interesting to find out if their is any corolation to global temp vs coefficient of thermal expansion of the crust
Hi Gina, I think this is possible, but as of yet have not had time to correlate any such data. Any event, especially as wide spread as global warming, seems like it would have its effects in either of two ways (a sort of time over pressure thing). First, warming would have similar far reaching and global ramifications. Secondly, those effects could also be localized and more dramatic. This is a gross speculation until more data is process, and processed correctly.
My feeling is, the world has undergone a great deal of change these last 40 years. On such a wide scale, it will obviously be very difficult to classify it all. What happens in the long term when you uproot 10 million acres of trees, for instance? Does that have any effect, however small, on the substrata? And so on. I know it does have its effect, just how much is speculative too. If we take all that takes place, weigh it, and then make some kind of model? Well, it would not be very accurate probably.
What really bothers me, and what should bother everyone, is the virtual ignorance or dismissal of all the effects our actions can cause. Extremes in every direction obviously. I appreciate the dialogue very much though. This is what we need really. People willing to talk about it, learn from one another, and hopefully help. Boris down there, clarified something I was talking about in my most recent article. I wish I had more time to study actually.
Again, thanks for commenting, and maybe together, a road to greater discovery can me paved.
Always,
Phil
This report has a few important messages. The most significant is that indeed more research is necessary, and this needs funding, and heightened awareness is imperative, which, however, needs to be complemented with preparedness and prevention. Awareness seems to have increased strongly with the recent events, but whether this will result in a change in attitude and behavior in determined areas at high seismic risk (like Sicily, where I live and where prevention remains an issue foreign to most administrators) will be seen in the future.
However, there are a few statements in this article that need correction. Foremost, there is absolutely no increase in seismic activity on this planet in the recent past.
It is important to understand that in geological terms, the earthquakes of 2010 are nothing unusual. Someone remember the year 1976? It had a vast number of devastating earthquakes, starting on 4 Feb with a magnitude 7.5 in Guatemala, killing 23,000, then on 6 May there was a magnitude 6.5 in northeast Italy (1000 dead), on 26 June a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed possibly up to 9000 in Papua New Guinea, followed on 14 July by a 6.5 in Bali (560 dead), then the tremendous magnitude 7.5 Tangshan (China) quake on 28 July with at least 240,000 victims, on 17 August about 8000 died in a magnitude 7.9 quake in the Philippines, and finally, on 23 November, eastern Turkey was shaken by a 7.3 that caused about 3500 deaths.
Memory is short-lived, but it is necessary to understand the real context of such events. On the other hand there is a true and massive increase in the human death toll during recent earthquakes, which is not due to more earthquakes but more and more people living in high-risk areas without necessary prevention being taken (like, application of earthquake-resistant building codes). This is also a problem here in Italy, where the latest destructive and deadly earthquake (L’Aquila, 6 April 2009) will be still in vivid memory. The fatalities in that case were due to poor construction, not to a particularly powerful quake.
The magnitude 5.2 earthquake that immediately preceded the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption was actually caused by movement of magma within the volcano and thus cannot be compared to the recent earthquakes, which are of tectonic origin – although this is not specified in the USGS source you cite. But it is true that volcanic activity has been observed after some very large earthquakes, like in 1960 in Chile and after the December 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake in Indonesia. None of these was a dangerous or destrucive eruption. On the other hand, the 1991 Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines – the second largest volcanic eruption worldwide during the 20th century – may have been triggered by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that occurred nearby some 10 months earlier. So we might see some increased volcanism in Chile in the next few months, but not necessarily a major event – the country had a major eruption just two years ago at Chaitén volcano, which was not preceded by any major earthquake.
Hi Boris, I completely defer as well as concur. As you suggest, 2010 so far, is not so extraordinary except perhaps because of a few added variables. I was trying to suggest (only) that a few more instances, or maybe a 100 year event, would distinguish these events from many others.
So many people are concerned now with the devastation in Haiti, and now Chile, being so close at hand. I do not have the time to properly correlate all this data, but I do know the USGS (like many agencies) is on the edge of being under funded. As you suggest too, the seismic aspects of earthquakes of the one kind, are not generally accepted as associated with volcanic or magma movement. I suspect this is not altogether true, and I will look into it some more – time permitting. Someone just asked if temperatures might be associated, but this is obviously a much more minute measurement atop a wide spread effect to analyze. I suppose it is possible.
I just wanted to thank you for stopping in and giving you rather more expert advice on all this. I tried to clarify what I wanted to suggest, and to be honest I knew there would be a little misunderstanding in this regard – it helps a great deal to have qualified discussion as I know you will agree. I did not go so far as to guess some volcanic activity would occur, though somehow I feel it is likely. Normative rather than empirical I admit.
Again, thanks so much for coming here to help out with this. People need to be more informed – even me :)
Always,
Phil