8 H October 26, 2012 1886 Charleston Earthquake In Charleston August 31, 1886, a devastating earthquake shocked millions throughout the country. Not only was this earthquake reported in South Carolina, but in distant places such as Boston, Massachusetts, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, Cuba, Bermuda, and many more. Why so many places? The earthquake recorded a 7.4 on the Richter scale. This tells us that it’s a powerful earthquake, reaching and being felt by farther away places.
According to CBC News World, “The storm hit Haiti's rural western tip hard, flooding the refugee-camp homes of quake survivors.” (2010). The storm was actually downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm but still caused massive flooding with the vast amount of rain and mudslides that were rampant. The country also has a long history of earthquakes dating back to 1564. The most recent in this list is the 2010 earthquake close to Port-Au-Prince. The nation is located in a region seismic activity due to the movement of the Caribbean tectonic plate, which is compared with which a finger shoving away against two larger plates, the North American and South American.
The Eastern side of the county must be accessed by a round-trip through adjacent Skagit County. Risks of potential natural hazards are listed in the above table. Whatcom County has a high vulnerability to earthquakes related to the location of oceanic and continental crusts. The University of Washington seismology lab reports up to 1000 earthquakes per year in Washington and Oregon. With a severe earthquake the county could be at risk for a Tsunami.
They can cause widespread destruction, such as the 1980 eruption of Mt St Helens. Lahars are a secondary effect of a volcanic eruption and are cement-like mudflows consisting of volcanic ash and water. They often occur in the days following an eruption when people are at their most vulnerable and with the capacity to travel up
These two normally push together steadily, but when they jam the pressure builds up, and then is realised as an earthquake, such as the Kashmir quake [pic] How were the people affected? Many people had their houses destroyed, or made inaccessible, from damage. Landslides disrupted travel and emergency aid from getting to the region, and possibly causing more deaths. Fires from broken gas main could easily destroy what people had left of their belongings. Most of the buildings were flattened due to the materials they were made of and how they were built (without foundations or to be able to move with the shock waves).
It registered a 7.0 on the Richter scale. The earthquake’s epicenter was extremely shallow at only 8.1 miles below ground, which released the energy close to the surface and intensified the shaking. The increased level of destruction led to a high loss of life. The earthquake epicenter was only 15 miles from Port-au-Prince and was the strongest earthquake to hit the area since 1770. “The 7.0-magnitude earthquake would be a strong, potentially destructive earthquake anywhere, but it is an unusually strong event for Haiti, with even more potential destructive impact because of the weak infrastructure of the impoverished nation” (Thompson, 2010, p.1).
It was miles away from the capital called Port au Prince. The quake moved horizontally, the tectonics plates moved past one another, southwest of the capital which was densely populated. An associate coordinator, Michael Blanpied, of the Geological Survey’s Earthquake Hazards Program described the plates as grinding and crushing past one another. He also said the quake was a relatively shallow earthquake as it occurred 6 miles below the Earth’s surface and that this caused the populated areas to be shaken extremely strongly. Rene Preval, the president of Haiti, said to the Miami Herald that she would think that the death toll would be “unimaginable”.
The Sierra Nevada create uplift of moist oceanic air masses and it rains. Much of the water reaches the San Joaquin valley but by the time the storms reach the eastern Sierra and Owens Valley, most of the water has been wrung from the clouds. The White and Inyo mountains, only twenty five miles east of the Sierra crest, are semi-arid. They suck the remaining water from the skies and by the time the air reaches the Saline and Death Valleys, it is bone dry. Such weather patterns have a great influence on the surface geology as well: erosion, deposition and chemical alternation take place rapidly in many parts of
I shall use examples of the Kobe Earthquake 1995, Boxing Day Tsunami 2004 and the Haiti Earthquake 2010. The earthquake of 2004 was caused by subduction of the Australian plate and the Eurasian Plate ,a 15-20m slip occurred along the fault line which then caused an earthquake measuring a 9.1 on the Richter scale. This a very high recording on the Richter scale so therefore it would always cause devastating hazards , but human factors could be seen as making the impacts far worse. The earthquake in the ocean had caused a tsunami to occur within the Indian Ocean. The wave reached up to 30 metres high causing devastation to the 13 countries surrounding the ocean.
Scientists have since seen these patterns as precursory to eruptions at many other volcanoes, including the 2004-2008 eruption of Mount St. Helens. At Mount St. Helens the value of an extensive system of seismic sensors has greatly improved our ability to determine the location and depth of earthquakes, and our ability to understand the physics of magma systems underground. The lack of short-term seismic or other geophysical indications in the hours and days prior to the May 18, 1980, debris avalanche, as well as prior to many short discrete explosions both before and after May 18, underscores that fact that scientists and public officials will not always have warning sufficient to issue short-term predictions of impending eruptive activity. Today, seismic