The simple answer is that you can't drill to 50 km depth. The deepest holes ever drilled were to a little more than 12 km, one is named the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, which was a scientific drilling project. The very few others were oil exploration boreholes. Drilling that deep is extremely expensive and hard. If you go and ask anyone who ever ...
10 seconds is a worthwhile warning time. The Japanese use it to switch off compressors on gas lines (or open release valves on them), emergency break bullet trains, and in particular shut down nuclear power plants, all in anticipation of a power loss moments later. In the case of Japan, however, the warning time doesn't come from having deep sensors, but ...
I can see two major benefits of having a 10 second warning time: shutting down gas lines to prevent uncontrollable ruptures and fires after the tremor when comms channels are either destroyed or overloaded; giving people inside buildings time to hide in relatively more survivable spots before the building collapses. Duck and cover, reenacted against ...
The idea of trying to limit energy released by earthquakes and the damage that may result via the use of controlled smaller blast induced quakes is an interesting idea. One of the problems with this is that we don't know enough about the snags along faults that cause stresses to accumulate during the normal movements along a fault. We also don't know enough ...
The partial release of strain energy makes another major earthquake in the same area less likely - in the near future. That said, there is not just a single slip plane between the converging Indian and Tibetan tectonic plates. Rather, the nappes (slabs of rock) are stacked about 12 layers deep, with Tibet over-thrusting India at a low angle. The main ...
I hope I understand your question right, I think there are some confusion about frequency range and wave-types. Seismic waves are acceleration of matter that transfer kinetic energy from a seismic source (e.g. an earthquake, an explosion or ambient noise) to heat. It's similar to sound waves, vibrations from the surface of e.g. a music instrument set the ...
I think you've answered your own question when you ask if 10 seconds is too short notice and is it worth it. A question for you, what can anyone do in 10 seconds and how far can anyone travel in 10 seconds? The only way to possibly save lives when an earthquake is about to occur for people to move away from the earthquake site to a safe area. As you state ...
I'll add to Ben MS's answer by mentioning the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, that shut down air traffic for quite some time. Another example that comes to mind are tsunamis. The 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean mostly affect South East Asia: Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the eastern part of India. But other areas were affected as well, ...
Yes, it is quite possible to have a number of earthquakes over an extended period of time. The phenomenon is actually quite common. Some famous sequences are: New Madrid in 1811-1812, Eastern California Shear Zone (1992-1999), Italy (2009-2016), New Zealand (2010-2011) etc. These are all areas where rates of seismicity are relatively low so a number of ...
The main problem with this entire proposal is that of simple "Trust:" Causing an earthquake is hardly like causing a spring rainstorm! "Human activities" may indeed cause earthquakes, but determining the "Magnitude" of the proposed earthquake in advance is, in all practical senses, an actual "crap-shoot." Further, it's exceedingly difficult to get ...
The only possible linkage between moderate earthquakes and population is that more people create increased groundwater extraction, and hence near-surface fault planes tend to dry out. This effectively increases the friction so that there are less frequent but more violent quakes. However, this would only affect near-surface earthquakes which seldom exceed ...
earthquakes seismic-hazards
The cost of digging very deep boreholes is generally prohibitive and unnecessary given the accuracy that detectors can be built with modern technology and the time advantages of deep mine detectors is minimal given the velocity of wave propagation through a solid. The Tevatron Particle Accelerator in the US was able to detect earth quakes from the other side ...
Earthquakes happen everywhere, even in places where some people think earthquakes are "not supposed to happen". Tectonic boundaries, where crustal plates meet, such as the west coast of North America (San Andreas fault), the Himalayas, New Zealand and Japan are more prone to earthquakes than places in the middle of continental plates, such as Australia. ...
Yes. Earthquakes are Dangerous No. Because big earthquakes happen so infrequently (~300 years in Seattle's case) that one shouldn't really worry about it. Engineers design buildings to withstand large earthquakes. Of course there is the possibility of failure, but generally the US is very good about their infrastructure. Seattle is not like Oklahoma, where ...