Hey look, I made an update to my real blog!

The El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake was a M7.2 event in Baja California on 4 April 2010. I felt it quite clearly up here in Riverside, and a bunch of people from UCR went down to Mexico the following day to deploy GPS equipment and measure fault offsets. This blog post is a little bit about what the earthquake felt like, but much more about the immediate field response the following day.

migeo:

by renowned seismologist Susan Hough:

1. Animals sense impending earthquakes: “Every pet owner understands that, say, cats and dogs sometimes behave strangely for no apparent reason; that’s what cats and dogs do. And if an earthquake had not subsequently struck, you can bet we would not be talking about strange animal behavior this week — because we wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary.”
2. The frequency of large-scale earthquakes has spiked: “The number of earthquakes greater than magnitude 7.0 has been somewhat high in recent years but well within the range throughout the 20th century.”
3. Small earthquakes are helpful because they release pressure and prevent larger ones: “For each unit increase in magnitude (i.e., going from 5.5 to 6.5), the energy released rises by a factor of about 30. (…) If enough stress has built up on a fault to generate a magnitude-7.0 earthquake, say, it would thus take about 1000 earthquakes with a magnitude of 5.0 to release the equivalent energy. The Earth doesn’t work that way. (…) If there is significant strain energy to be released, it must be released in large earthquakes.”
4. “Don’t worry, it was just an aftershock.”: “The implication is that an aftershock is somehow a less worrisome event. Yet, as far as we understand, an aftershock of a certain magnitude is no different from an independent temblor of a similar magnitude. The shaking and rupture are the same; the energy released is the same. And aftershocks can be more damaging than larger “mainshocks” if they strike closer to population centers.”
5. Earthquakes are a West Coast problem: “As millions of people on the East Coast were just reminded, less active does not mean inactive. By the end of the 19th century, two of the most notable temblors in the United States were the 1886 quake in Charleston, S.C., and a sequence of large events centered near the boot-heel along the New Madrid Fault of Missouri in 1811-1812. We don’t know exactly when or where the next Big One will hit the United States, but the central and eastern United States will inevitably experience large quakes in the future. (…) You have been warned.”