Power of a 8.9 Earthquake

[Rolo]

Quake shook Earth to core, say scientists

The quake that set off the devastating tsunami literally shook the Earth to its core, scientists believe, accelerating its rotation and shortening days by a fraction of a second. It may be necessary to add a "leap second" in years to come in order to correct the change.

Meanwhile, experts said the quake, which measured 9.0 on the Richter scale, may have shifted some small islands in the region by more than 30 metres.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in California, said he believed a shift of mass towards the Earth's centre caused the planet to spin three microseconds - one millionth of a second - faster. It also caused the planet to tilt around 2.5cm on its axis.

"[The forcing of one tectonic plate beneath the edge of another] had the effect of making the Earth more compact and spinning faster," he said, saying that the changes were too slight to be detected by global positioning satellite networks.

Mr Gross said the circular path of the Earth's poles normally varied by up to 10 metres. As a result, an added wobble of a few centimetres was unlikely to have any long-term effects. "The rotation is not actually that precise. The Earth does slow down and change its rate of rotation," he said. When the tiny variations accumulate, planetary scientists must add a "leap second" to the end of a year, something that has not been done in many years.

Geologists said changes on the Earth's surface were more noticeable, shifting the island of Sumatra 36 metres to the south-west. Ken Hudnutt of the US Geological Survey said: "Some of the smaller islands off the south-west coast of Sumatra may have moved to the south-west by about 20 metres."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/scienc...sp?story=596798 (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=596798)

[Rolo]

These images are from the Quickbird satellite showing the Tsunami in Sri Lanka... the energy to create so fast and massive coastline flooding must have been huge!

PDF Analysis: http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/tsunami...nami_Damage.pdf (http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/tsunami/Sri_Lanka_Tsunami_Damage.pdf)
Image Gallery: http://www.digitalglobe.com/tsunami_gallery.html

[Rolo]

No dead animals in Sri Lanka? Can they "sense" major earthquakes and/or Tsunamis?


COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Wildlife officials in Sri Lanka said yesterday that although thousands of people perished in the quake and tidal wave catastrophe, no dead animals had been found on the island nation.
A photographer who flew over Sri Lanka's Yala National Park spotted "abundant wildlife," but not one carcass.
Almost 23,000 people are thought to have died in the country, but H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of the Department of Wildlife Conservation Sri Lanka, said it appeared that the animals had sensed danger and headed to safety.

"The strange thing is, we have not recorded any dead animals. No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit. I think animals can sense disaster. They know when things are happening in nature," he said.
Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne, who runs a hotel in the park, said, "I am finding bodies of humans, but I have yet to see a dead animal."

Yala, Sri Lanka's largest wildlife reserve, is home to 200 Asian elephants, crocodiles, wild boars, water buffaloes and gray langur monkeys. The park also has Asia's highest concentration of leopards. The Yala reserve covers 391 square miles, but only 56 square miles are open to tourists.
Rupert Sheldrake, biologist and author of "The Sense of Being Stared At," a book about unexplained human and animal abilities, said animals "seem to sense when a disaster or catastrophe is about to occur."
"The most striking examples concern earthquakes," he said.
In some instances, cats have been said to go into hiding up to 12 hours before an earthquake, while dogs would bark "frantically" shortly before it struck, he said.

Roger Tabor, an animal behaviorist, said initial reports from Sri Lanka about the miraculous escape of the animal population were "intriguing," but would need to be investigated further.
In these situations, he said, dead animals often are ignored or not even noticed because of the scale of the human tragedy.

A French official coordinating European aid to Sri Lanka told the French government by telephone yesterday that almost 23,000 were killed in that country in the weekend tsunami disaster.

Col. Philippe Nardin, of the national civil emergency service, told French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin in a telephone briefing from Sri Lanka that "we can expect 40,000 to 50,000 dead" in the end, officials said.

http://washingtontimes.com/world/20041229-094052-1140r.htm

[Winetalk.com]

The strange thing is, we have not recorded any dead animals. No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit. I think animals can sense disaster.

To all my doggie sitters:
The price of babysitting my dog just went up.
When you see Sonia run for the hills,
I suggest you follow. I do....

[Rolo]

Dec. 27 - As at least nine nations searched for the missing following the world’s biggest earthquake in 40 years, geologist Gianluca Valensise of the Italian Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Eric Pape Monday about the shifts in the earth’s tectonic plates that sparked a 9.0 quake and a 33- to 40-foot-high wave that blanketed thousands of miles of Asian, Indian and African coastlines with death and destruction.

...

What about other events, like say the detonation of a nuclear bomb?
This quake was more powerful. It has been calculated that the energy released on Sunday was 23,000 times that of the explosion of the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima (Japan). A large portion of the earth’s crust—1,000 km (620 miles) in length by 100 km (62 miles) in width running from Western Sumatra to Myanmar—moved. And that is where they are feeling the aftershocks now.

....

How would you compare this quake to others of the last decade?
It’s just so much bigger. The Bam earthquake in Iran a year ago that destroyed a very vulnerable city (and killed more than 26,000) was much smaller. But this earthquake will not be famous for the shaking, it will be known for the tsunami, which is pretty unusual.

The risks of tsunamis have been greatly underestimated. A tsunami can travel 3,000 or 5,000 km (1,900-3,000 miles), in this case to regions like Somalia where people died on the beach because they had no idea that there had even been an earthquake. This is something that people will have to face in the next few years.

How fast can such a wave go?
In the open ocean, it can travel as fast as 800 kilometers (500 miles) per hour—like a commercial airplane—so it took two or three hours. This leaves time for a system to warn people, but there wasn’t one in place.

...

If a quake this magnitude hit on land, how would it have been different?
First of all, on land, you wouldn’t have the tsunami. Then, depending on whether it was close to a large city, it would have destroyed it—or done nothing. In the high mountains of Tibet, there are 8.5s that change the landscape, but they don’t kill anyone. Earthquakes like the one yesterday, in a subduction zone, have a repeat time of 200 or 300 years. A subduction zone is where one plate flows under another—in this case the Indian plate flows under the Burma plate. Subduction zones have the fastest repeat times in the world.

Could we see another huge earthquake in the near future?
This was so large that it consumed all of the stored energy in the area. We are recording aftershocks, but no one is expecting another humongous one.

The chance of a massive aftershock?
Very low. We are recording magnitude 6s and a few larger than that, but an 8 on the Richter scale seems unlikely in the same region—unless this quake triggers one in a different area. Some people are saying that another one is more likely to the southeast of Sumatra, in the coming days or weeks—but it probably wouldn’t be as big. This was the fifth largest of the last century.

...

What are the most likely spots for another monster quake or a tsunami?
The ring around Sumatra toward the east and Japan. It is where the largest tsunamis in the world strike. The region where 95 percent of the earth’s seismic activity is released and where there are the most active volcanoes is part of a band spanning from Myanmar, around Sumatra to the southeast toward the Sea of Japan, Alaska and the Western U.S., and then south toward New Zealand.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6759529/site/newsweek/

[Rolo]

- WARNING this is NOT pleasant viewing -

Videos of the Tsunami hitting the coastline: http://www.waveofdestruction.org/videos/

[hotmama]

very scary :(

[pearl noir studio]

damn whish i didn't see it. poor people