California fault capable of producing a magnitude 8 earthquake has begun moving | Hacker News Reader

California fault capable of producing a magnitude 8 earthquake has begun moving

stripes.com

220 pointsspking153 comments

> But new satellite radar images now show that the fault has started to move, causing a bulging of land that can be viewed from space.

Wow, it'd be sure be great for the article mentioning this to, you know, either host the pics or provide a link.

I imagine it's something most people would look at and go "I have no idea what I'm looking at".

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaging_radar

If you showed me the images in the Wiki entry with no context, I would assume i was looking at lichen growing on a rock like in this image https://cumuseum-archive.colorado.edu/Research/Objects/Image...

And it seems like most of the articles are just copies of the LA Tribune or AP stories.

Relatively relevant, there's a review of the current challenges in detecting, correlating and acting on seismic events:

http://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/escidoc:2405891:...

Having listened to a short podcast about the predicted big earthquake that would hit California ("the Big One"), I'm not sure how people in California manage to get a good night's sleep.

The New Yorker wrote about a similar issue for Oregon and Washington, in a 2015 article called “The Really Big One”. It would appear that the entire west coast of the United States is uninhabitable on a geologic timescale, and yet... here we are!

That's a bit like saying that Japan is uninhabitable because it experience devastating >9.0 earthquakes and accompanying tsunamis perhaps 1-2 times per millennia as seen most recently in 2011. Disasters happen but people rebuild, that's just the way it is. A full rupture of the Cascadia subduction[1] zone that that article[2] references would be devastating but would hardly end human occupation of the U.S. west coast.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone

[2]https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...

That article was absolute garbage. They completely over-exaggerated things especially related to the waves considering seattle is in a bay. There's a reddit AMA thread with actual earthquake experts that debunks a lot of the exaggerations [0].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3da1mh/we_are_earthqu...

This article [0] makes the San Andreas big one seem relatively mild. California buildings are prepared for it and the fault is only capable of an 8.2 or so. Now Portland is overdue for a much worse quake...

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...

There've been recent suggestions that older, post-1950 buildings, which generally used welded joints now known to be inadequate, may not fair well or may even fail catastrophically. Older steel buildings used riveted connections, while newer buildings use improved welding techniques and, at critical points, bolting. Riveting is more resilient, while bolting is considerably stronger.

Don't oversell rivets. They replaced the lattice trusses on the western span of the Bay Bridge with box beams and bolts, in part because of rivets. The cool thing with hot rivets is they contract as they cool, so they tighten well. The major downside is the steel isn't hardened--bolts are.

For a building on the drawing board today, there's no difference. The loads are the loads. Bolted, welded or riveted,the joints are designed to resist the same forces. Moderately recent buildings are the same. When an engineered system is stronger, less is used.

It is even worse than that. I read an article and had discussions with my civil engineer friend. Many of the different techniques used to "Earthquake" proof a building, especially tall towers, vary a lot and have NEVER had a real life test. On top of that, the regulatory oversight in insuring the ACTUAL construction was done properly based on the plan, is... not great. So hypothetically, if a 8.2+ Mag hit SF... we know many buildings like soft first floors, anything not on bedrock, etc, will fall, but even the towers.. it is all based on models. We really don't know what will and won't happen. As some famous (forgot name) architect in SF said back in the mid 1900's, "Don't build anything over 100ft in SF, just don't do it".

Earthquake risk comes up in discussions about reasons for not building taller. Meanwhile Tokyo has plenty of tall buildings and gets earthquakes all the time. I've never gotten a good explanation for this and don't know enough to judge if this is just another NIMBY excuse or legitimate.

It's not legit.

There's techniques to build tall in earthquake prone areas; such as building on rollers (New Zealand has some interesting examples of this approach), framing techniques, etc.

The notion that we have no real-world experience with how modern skyscrapers behave in earthquakes doesn't pass muster, for exactly the reason you pointed out. Not only is the scientific research easy to find on Google, but we can see videos of events on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zw-BvKo0pI, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gglhWS23HfM

The notion that bedrock is a requirement is also easily refuted by a simple search of the scientific literature. TL;DR: it's complicated, obviously, but one potential advantage of friction piles and a floating foundation is less movement.

We don't need to be professional structural engineers to reject such simplistic, categorical notions; they're patently flawed.

I come from the New Madrid Fault area of the Mississippi River. California's faults are hilariously weak in comparison to what New Madrid does/did.

When one of California's faults can shift the entirety of the Mississippi River basin for a couple thousand miles, then I'll worry. Until then, you're probably better off worrying about the residents of Memphis, because if New Madrid happens to break out like it did in 1811, Memphis will sink into the aquifer upon which it was built. People like to joke about California 'falling into the water' with a big earthquake - Memphis is pretty much the only place in the country which has the actual chance of such an event happening due to its geographical location.

Wow, I’d never heard of the new Madrid fault, but FEMA said a recurrence if that earthquake series would cause thousands of fatalities! In California we’re aware of earthquakes since they happen with some regularity. Places like Oregon and apparently the Midwest scare me more, since they don’t have that low-level awareness (including building codes that take earthquakes into account).

If you're thinking of the maximum potential for a single quake event to impact human lives, the Newark Basin is high on the list due to its location. It's close to some of the highest concentrations of population in the nation, in an area of the continental plate that transmits seismic energy efficiently, and the vast majority of buildings nearby have zero earthquake resistance.

Earthquakes seem rare and relatively randomly distributed, so, as with New Madrid, the likelihood is definitely lower than it is in California. But the deep subsurface geology in the Basin is older, more complex, and less well understood than the plate boundary along the west coast. It's hard to rule out the possibility of a quake that would be big enough to have significant impacts on New York, Boston, etc.

I keep coming back to an observation that the places where civilization tends to exist are geologically and climatologically 'interesting'. If it's not one thing it's another.

I suppose so - if you ignore the whole continent of Europe.

Italy (Pompeii), Greece (Thera), and Iceland (Eyjafjallajokull) are all in Europe. Africa, most of Russia, and Northern Europe are volcano-free as they're not near fault lines (except the ones in the atlantic ocean and meditteranean sea)

> Africa, most of Russia, and Northern Europe are volcano-free as they're not near fault lines (except the ones in the atlantic ocean and meditteranean sea)

The East African Rift Zone is both an emerging plate boundary and a locus of volcanic and seismic activity.

Comment I read about Pompeii was the soil was really good because of Mount Vesuvius.

How soon we forget the Great Lisbon Earthquake.

North Sea flood of 1953 killed 2500 people.

I suppose there are some happy places unaffected by earthquakes, volcano's, floods, extreme weather. I'm dubious we can all move there.

Italy is pretty interesting geologically, Greece is not bad, Istanbul is amazing.

There are plenty of places without any particular natural risks, e.g., New York City and London, both of which standard and dull four-seasons temperate climates and dead geology.

There was significant flooding in NYC just a few years ago due to Hurricane Sandy.

A large part of London is built on floodplain though, hence the need for the enormous Thames barrier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Barrier). Flooding is a pretty big natural risk here.

> There are plenty of places without any particular natural risks, e.g., New York City

I suspect New York City has more deaths per capita over time from the combination of natural environment events (earthquakes, weather, etc.) than California.

It's certainly not free of natural risks.

NYC earthquake risk is on-par with the Bay Area because while the magnitude of the quakes would be lower, the bedrocks transmits the energy better, the buildings are under-engineered for earthquakes, and it has a higher population density.

NYC is not close to any major geological activity. The east coast, unlike the west coast, has been quiet for, what, 60 million years? The Appalachian mountains are worn-down nubs. The closest seismic zones are, what, the Caribbean and the New Madrid area of Missouri, IIRC.

Depending on how you define “major” (I just saw a Twitter status arguing that San Francisco does not get “truly big” earthquakes because it’s a transform boundary and not a subduction zone), New York has a bunch of faults and does get significant geological activity. https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1183984933733158913 https://nypost.com/2017/09/09/new-york-city-is-overdue-for-a...

Living in Ontario the only thing I'm worried about is minor flooding, nothing on the scale that you see on the coasts. Storms (Nothing like in the US), Snow, Rain, Sun. No real major catastrophes possible.

I'll point out that weather related deaths in Ontario are higher than earthquake related deaths in California.

Blizzards (including Nor'easters) are a valid, natural danger for NYC and the rest of the Northeastern U.S.

Part of it is we like building on water. Part of it is that a lot of the world has interesting natural disasters.

How can you manage to get a good night's sleep knowing you'll eventually die, with 100% certainty?

With California, it's even easier - while dying is pretty much guaranteed, The Big One may be hundreds of years in the future.

Yeah you might get lucky and something else kills you first!

The experts have been talking about the big one for decades. I think most people are becoming desensitized to the phrase.

Easy: you don't fret over low probability events that are unlikely to cause you major damage anyway. (I've lived through multiple major earthquakes! meh, what's one more.)

People are resilient. Earthquakes are nothing compared to repeated terrorist attacks experienced by people in places in Israel and Palestine, but yet the endure:

https://www.economist.com/international/2016/09/03/learning-...

Many people are resilient, but your reply lacks nuance.

Some people are completely incapacitated (e.g. PTSD, Agoraphobia, etcetera) by the various effects of an earthquake (destruction, death, loss of home or job, other hardships). Many more have lower-level permanently ongoing problems that affect their work or life.

Source: friends and acquantances after Christchurch 2011 earthquake.

Edit: startups can be hit particularly hard since they are fragile and a big external event can wipe them out.

Funny enough, we just had a small earthquake a few minutes ago here in Los Angeles. And yes, it woke up my wife (but not the kids).

Even a REALLY big earthquake is probably not going to knock down my house... we will likely be ok. Have the emergency kits ready.

Have an earthquake kit handy, buy earthquake bonds, and sleep tight.

TL;DR one gallon of water per person per day, expect a boil-water order for one month and disruption of telco and transit for a bit, so keep a stash of cash on hand. Stay put for the immediate time after the foreshock and aftershocks. Not much else you can do.

TL;DR go look at a real earthquake kit guide.

"the big one" isn't expected to cause significant damage to the area in which I live, so there you go.

There's a non-zero probability that you'll tunnel through the floor and get buried under dirt - quantum mechanics 101.

How do you manage to sleep now?

I would assume the probability of that is roughly comparable to the probability of a Boltzmann brain[1] assembling, which is roughly one in 10^10^50, or 10 with 10^50 zeros after it. Could be as high as 1 in 10^10^30 based on a discussion of the probability of macroscopic tunneling that I read. Assuming you wrote this number down in decimal form using the most efficient available technology[2], it would require the material in roughly 400,000 galaxies the size of the milky way.

Regarding earthquakes, the USGS estimates[3] the probability of a magnitude 7.5 quake near LA is about 30% in the next 30 years. A magnitude 8 is probably 150 times less likely, so the probability might be roughly 1/15,000 to happen this year.

The difference between 1/15,000 and 1/10^10^40 is...roughly 10^10^40 times. So if you worry about tunneling through the floor, then a devastating earth quake is essentially as likely as not tunneling through the floor.

Really, have a sense of proportion!

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms)

[3]https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-probability-earthquake-will-o...

Question: What's the fastest earthquake notification source publicly available? I ask because USGS seems to have a 5-10 minute delay, whereas I'm hoping for less (ideally a few seconds).

I was also hoping to create an early warning system and at least wake me out of bed a few seconds before an earthquake hits so I'm at least on the way to sheltering myself from falling objects.

The response I got from USGS was this:

> You can read our FAQ on that at https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-fast-does-earthquake-informati....

> You may also be interested in ShakeAlert - see https://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/.

So in short, no, they don't really have it yet. I wonder though if we (hackers) could create a realtime system for the bay area since USGS has been on it for years without results. About 20-50 sensors scattered in homes around the bay would probably be enough for an early warning system. Warnings can be delivered via a mobile app, or some kind of realtime API that anyone can use for their own purposes (e.g. stopping machinery, sounding building alarms, ...).

If you want to do this, look to Japan.

I'm not working in this field, but I know they put a lot of effort into not just the geology, but also the psychology of warnings, esp. compared to acceptable false positive rates.

They were able to warn everyone in real-time when North Korea launched those missiles. A quick search turned up this article that the J-Alert system is not perfect: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/04/10/national/japans...

> I was also hoping to create an early warning system and at least wake me out of bed a few seconds before an earthquake hits so I'm at least on the way to sheltering myself from falling objects.

Wouldn't it be safer to not put objects that might fall above your bed?

he might have a roof

...which you also can't really get out from under in a few seconds.

I'm also not really sure what I could actually do to "shelter" myself in that timeframe.

If you google "earthquake-proof bed" you'll find at least one way to avoid getting crushed by (a typical) falling roof.

It sounds like they have it, ShakeAlert, they just don't give access to the public for some reason.

I found this document that has some interesting technical details https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2018/1155/ofr20181155.pdf

We have it, it was tested out just yesterday.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/10/17/20919639/ca...

You can get small raspberry pi based seismographs from https://raspberryshake.org/ ... could be interesting to integrate it with a small alarms or web/mobile apps that go off when it detects p-wave/s-wave arrivals with amplitudes above a user-specified threshold (so its not going off every day with smaller/distant events that are not felt by humans at the measurement location)

If you haven't, take a look at the crowd sourced real-time lightning maps. Loads if sensors are scattered world-wide triangulating lightning strikes - there are even websites that estimate the sound wave as it grows & you'll hear the thunder right as the circle envelopes your location. Very fun to play around with during storms!

Thanks! It's nice to see someone finally address my question head-on. I feel the same way as you -- I can't fathom why it's taking them so long. Sad to hear nothing exists yet, but glad it's not just me being unable to find something.

The USGS has a RabbitMQ broker for distributing early alerts but it's not available to the general public.

It seems like they should just allow one or two vetted members of the public access to the broker, and then they can re-broadcast it to whoever wants it (with strong disclaimers about reliability)

That's pretty much what they're doing, the city of LA and the state of CA (by way of UC Berkeley) have their own apps that I believe are just rebroadcasting that data

Write a bot that detects earthquake-related tweets, a la xkcd.

https://xkcd.com/723/

I've actually done this and get notifications usually 30 seconds post quake just like xkcd suggested.

I thought of that but 30 seconds is too long for an early warning system, the waves travel pretty fast.

Depending on where the epicenter is, it may take 1-2 minutes for the S waves (which are the slower, damaging ones) to travel to the major population center. Up to 30s of warning for an earthquake early warning system is enough for people to take cover and for cities to shut off things like water/gas lines. That being said my system is definitely not ready for that, and twitter can be seen as one source of information used to augment other early detection systems.

The only way to get notification of an earhquake in time is a prediction system.

The newly updated MyShake app detects seismic events using peoples cell phones, then sends notifications to people nearby 5-10 seconds before the shock waves arrive.

https://myshake.berkeley.edu/

> MyShake uses a neural network to decide which motion is produced by earthquakes and which isn’t.

Thanks, but oh man... I've tried this a year or two ago, but I was hoping there would be something that wouldn't require my phone to have constant data connectivity? I turn it off sometimes especially at home/work. :\

Edit: I'm also not sure how much battery it uses... hopefully the battery-saver mode won't use much?

How would something like this work without connectivity?

In Japan you can get early earthquake notifications, before the seismic waves arrive, via area broadcast.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Ja...

I didn't say without connectivity, I just said without phone data connectivity. Email would be best, SMS could work too.

Email doesn't work without phone data

Sure it does? It goes to my computer.

Ah geez. I was assuming you wanted the alerts to be sent to your mobile while you were away from home.

And your assumption was right. The original premise was "how can I get notified within seconds after tremors occur" and not "please send an email for me to read when I happen to use a desktop PC".

Some people spend most of their day on their laptops and try to limit phone time. People in this thread are all assuming everyone does things they way they do, but not all people are the same.

Email delivery can easily be delayed 1-2 minutes. I’m not sure it’s the best method for an early warning system.

I usually get my emails instantly, but if they get delayed, then they get delayed. At least a chance of getting a notification quickly is far better than nothing.

A mix of technologies might help: say 10 cellphones in a given area detect a tremor, they start communicating each other via mesh WiFi (long range BT, LoRa if available etc.) their data and if one of them is connected to the Internet, it packs all data and send it to a central server where it is matched with other (groups of) cellphones data and evaluated if an alert is to be sent. If yes, it can use the same path (central server->Internet->connected phone->phones nearby) plus broadcasting an alert to other media sources, TV, radio etc. All it would need is one cellphone to be connected at a time, which in non rural areas should be almost the norm today. Also, the amount of data sent and received would be trivial so it wouldn't impact connectivity costs.

I agree, having an API or some such would be nice; I don't usually carry around a phone indoors when I have massive screens available to me, and also put my phone in airplane mode while sleeping.

The system only works because people run the app on their phones to produce the data.

FWIW this app failed to detect an earthquake yesterday that I felt in Mountain View (the origin was in Hollister). I think they still have some fine-tuning.

Almost certainly they detected the earthquake and decided not to notify people because it was too small to warrant a notification.

Almost certainly, that's pure conjecture.

The article I read announcing statewide rollout actually goes into some detail regarding what threshold the quake has to hit for notifying people. I found it interesting, because I had initially expected it to send out warnings for every quake. Some people complained that the app didn’t warn them about quakes they felt that had been quite mild, so they lowered the threshold for alert to more closely conform to people’s expectations (even though that level of shaking was very minor and not necessary to warn people about).

[0] https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/10/17/20919639/ca...

Yesterday, on the anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, they tested out an early warning system hooked up to the system that drives Amber alerts. This will deliver warning of an impending earthquake, tens of seconds before an earthquake hits (in supported areas, like SF) due to the propagation speed differences between an earthquake's P-wave and S-waves.

(Japan has had such a system in place since the 90's, and will stop bullet trains and surgeries just before the earthquake hits.)

My phone got the alert half an hour after the advertised alert window (advertised: 5:15 to 5:45, actual: 6:15), so that’s not great.

Haha, well we just had an earthquake a few minutes ago here in Los Angeles. It was up on Reddit /r/losangeles within a few seconds.

Yep, just woke me up. Here's the seismograph from Occidental college: https://apps.oxy.edu/ws/seismoday.aspx

For the life of me, I can't work out the axes on that graph.

Seismographs have time on the X axis and magnitude on the Y. This one wraps the X axis so each line across the paper is 15min.

I live in Greece and often I check: https://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/

It appears to have quite immediate reporting, in the region of couple of minutes.

Twitter.

Seriously. If you can get a real-time feed of all tweets with the word “earthquake” it should be pretty easy to detect all ~4+ magnitude earthquakes in (moderately? heavily?) populated areas.

Exactly. And Twitter is also in the best position to build a dedicated alert system since many times they have the mobile location of each user tweeting. They could even have the app tell the user to then set the phone on a flat surface and use that to try and crowdsource a magnitude/validate the quake. I don't think any other company/org is in a position to be even remotely as accurate than Twitter is for real-time.

If a bad enough erathquake hit the network would probably malfunction or overload due to distress and "are you OK" calls. I guess there is need for satelite or some long wave RF system.

The Earthquake Alert! app on Android showed me the recent earthquake about 1 minute after the event - the time it took to figure out what's happening, get the phone, unlock, fire up the app, etc.

Sounds like room for improvement: Shout "earthquake" through the phone's speakers (overriding any volume setting), flash "earthquake" on the screen (turning the screen on if necessary, but if that takes a second, don't have it delay the sound output but do it in parallel), and especially without unlocking or opening the app.

Something like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKhFCMO78OE

Why do you need to fire up the app? Are you looking to receive alerts or send them?

I wrote a script that monitors twitter for earthquake related tweets and notifies me when a certain threshold is hit. It pretty reliably notifies me 20-30s post-quake. Main problem is that very few tweets actually have location data associated with them. I try to grab the location string users can specify in their bio and infer the location based on the most common occurrence in a body of tweets- works decently well although its usually a broader region.

California has a earthquake warning system they started just publicizing. http://earthquake.ca.gov/mobile-application/ Its been a few years in the making. Also it will give warnings only if close to your proximity by cellular location.

I'm not meaning to be obtuse and I've only experienced a few earthquakes first-hand, but why would you need a near real-time notification? It's kind of obvious when one is happening in your vicinity and if it's not nearby why would the delay matter?

1) Tsunami early warning system. The difference of 30 seconds might be enough to save a life. 5-10 minutes might save many more?

2) Stabilize machinery, close windows, blinds, turn off gas, start emergency generator in hospital. I'm sure the financial people would be able to sell stocks with earlier notice than others!

One reason is that I've noticed sometimes it takes me a few seconds to be able to tell if it's genuinely an earthquake or if something else is causing a vibration, and sometimes it actually takes a few seconds for it to become noticeable... then a few seconds on top of that for me to figure out how to react. Any kind of confirmation notification at that point would be extremely helpful to snap me into action and avoid needless delays.

Another reason is that, well, I might be asleep, and ideally I'd prefer to wake up with a notification, rather than (say) with something falling on my head...

Shinkansens apply full breaks automatically if dangerous earthquake is detected (there are about 50 on the way just between Osaka and Tokyo). Thanks to this system many trainsets will already be stationary when the seismic waves hit them.

The real-time notifications to cell phones in Japan are faster than the actual seismic waves, so if it's a decently sized earthquake a little ways away, it gives you a 5-15 second head start

Usually I see the earthquake on the USGS recent earthquake feed within a minute of feeling the event.

Wouldn't SMS fit the bill?

Everyone has it and it's quick to send out if you have the system set up for it.

Yes, as a system for publishing. But it's only a way to transfer the notification, not a source.

SMS isn't a notification source, it's a communication medium.

It's used for urgent notification of the public by the Norwegian government and municipalities. It's also very easy to accurately target specific areas as all the numbers are registered with the address of the owner.

The benefit is that you don't need any infrastructure except for the phone network so there are very few servers that can go down etc.

Edit: I see my error!, Yes it's not a source. Never mind my comments :)

> HTTP isn't a notification source, it's a communication medium.

> WebSockets isn't a notification source, it's a communication medium.

> Email isn't a notification source, it's a communication medium.

Seems like sometimes communication mediums are being used as notification sources. And that's fine.

Twitter lol

You just dont get magnitude, depth and location data

You can also make your own seismoter, its not complicated but everything makes them go off

I've got the googley eyes seismometer on my fridge.

Excusing the commentor's misuse of grammar and punctuation: I'm Not sure why this comment is being down voted.

I haven't done the research, but is @rolltide incorrect in his assertion that you can get certain data from USGS (such as magnitude, depth, and location)? That information is available on the USGS website.

Or are people down-voting him/her because of the claim of making your own seismoter? (rolltitde did misspel seismometer).

> Excusing the commentor's misuse of grammar and punctuation: I'm Not sure why this comment is being down voted.

I downvoted it for "Twitter lol".

1) The "lol" is unnecessary and juvenile

2) The statement indicates that either using Twitter should somehow be obvious, or that the poster is not taking the posed question seriously

On balance, it pulls the level of discourse down, which is my (and the proper) criteria for a downvote.

> I downvoted it for "Twitter lol".

I would appreciate that you not censor other people comments over such trivial things.

Because it's really annoying to everyone else. And thus rude.

It sounds like they just meant random people tweeting about earthquakes the moment they happen, instead of actual data or reliable notifications.

seems the consensus is that it's not inaccurate, they just didn't like the format of the contribution

so you can learn a lot from downvote censored comments on this site

For one, twitter can't give you a notification for an earthquake.

@earthquakesLA is very quick to post info

Edit: for example...

“A 3.7 magnitude earthquake occurred 0mi WSW of Compton, CA. Details: http://eqbot.com/2iV Map: http://eqbot.com/2ii”

Money quote from the article: “We don’t know what it means.”

I remember a Seismologist that said that moving rocks in a region with fault lines are a good sign. At least better than not moving rocks that are constantly building pressure. Of course "we don't know" is probably the most accurate prediction.

The small energy released by small movements doesn't add up to a large earthquake. For example, magnitude 8 earthquake is a billion times more energy than a magnitude 3 earthquake. This was the sobering perspective of a geophysicist when I asked if small earthquakes are a good thing in California to help relieve potential energy.

I wonder if this is posted because of the California Shakeout drill today.

>Whether the destabilization will result in a major quake soon cannot be predicted. In September, the U.S. Geological Survey said the most likely scenario is that the Ridgecrest quakes probably won’t trigger a larger earthquake. Nevertheless, the USGS said that the July quakes have raised the chances of an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or more on the nearby Garlock, Owens Valley, Blackwater and Panamint Valley faults over the next year.

So keep your china cabinets tidy, keep your earthquake kit stocked, but don't fret and carry on like normal? Seems a tad alarmist.

It's not possible to please people with these kinds of notifications. On a long time scale, that fault IS gonna rip and if civilization exists around it at the point it goes, a LOT of people are going to die.

But, our ability to predict quakes on a short time span (read: human lifetime) is abysmal. The best we can say is eh, maybe. There are no consistent, confirmed precursors.

So, what can you do? Every warning will be accused of being alarmist if it doesn't eventuate, and every failed prediction (note that you don't see these from reputable professionals working in the field) mocked. If a warning is ever actually borne out by a significant seismic event, expect a TON of criticism that someone knew but didn't provide sufficient urgency in their warning.

Putting all the stuff about warnings aside for a moment, let's examine at individual's justification for and capacity to make preparations for such an event. At one extreme you have preppers, and at the other end there's folk that do nothing. Both approaches seem predominantly to hinge on pure opinion on the immediacy of the threat. If you immerse yourself in various materials on the topic to be found online, you'll probably adopt a prepper mindset. If you simply never bother to do that and continue about your day, you'll likely sit on the 'do nothing' extreme. There really isn't a 'right' here without a crystal ball, which everyone seeks from seismologists and get frustrated when they can't provide any tangible insights.

In summary: Mankind's ability to risk assess and rationally respond to long-interval threats of high severity is very, very poor.

I'd distinguish between prepping and doomsday types. Prepping can be as simple as having some basic supplies and nonperishable goods such that you're not going to die if, for any reason, you need to survive independently for some period of time. It's not like some lifestyle or even dependent upon an assumption that you'll even ever need these things. So it's a relatively low cost decision to be able to be at least somewhat prepared for an eventuality that, though extremely improbable, would have disproportionately negative consequences if you were of the 'do nothing' extreme on the other end.

To put it mathematically, if I said there was a 1 in a million chance of you losing a billion dollars sometime in your life, and you agreed with me, it'd certainly be logical, if you could, to provide insurance against that eventuality for $1. In fact it'd still be mathematically sound to spend $1000. But this is for an event that you are literally 99.9999% sure will not happen. I think the big difference is in seeing reality as a neverending stream of probabilities as opposed to seeing reality as a neverending stream of certainties. The probabilistic mindset can lead you to conclusions and decisions that look peculiar to a deterministic mindset. By contrast doomsday types are those who have a deterministic mindset and have decided that the world (as we know it) is going to end and thus make that a part of their persona and worldview. Granted, they could also be of a probabilistic mindset with a different weighting but, at least in my experience, that's not usually the case.

I distinguish between prepping vs doomsday as;

1) Acknowledging there is a chance of a significant event vs. I know what is coming.

2) It takes a minor part of your life vs. significant proportion/resource.

Personally I keep a couple months food stored. I dont keep freeze dried barrels of meals etc, just buy bulk on stuff we use that's 1) on special and 2) stores; like jars of pasta sauce, peanut butter, toothpaste etc so really it also saves money as a portion of my grocery is always half price rather than that weeks on special usage.

The way I look at it is pretty much every 2nd generation experiences a significant catastrophic at some time. If I can keep things covered for a couple months it covers most non-extreme scenarios, where as if the end of civilisation did come I figure there would be so many variables there not much you can really do unless you devote you life to this and sacrifice you lifestyle for a likely non-existent outcome.

Keeping some extra food/supplies is insurance of a kind. And surprised more people dont while so many have things like house content insurance.

For me I dont have content insurance on my house while most people do. Many people would think I'm strange for having a couple months food, but the way I look at it is, if all my house goods disappeared it would suck but I can sort it out fairly easily over 3-12 months. If something happened that broke supply lines, while significantly less likely than the house being being burgled/fire etc, the consequences are so much greater. I prefer to be covered for a much less likely event that would have significant impact on me, than a more likely (though still low) event that will have little impact on me in the over arching story of my life. PLus there something nice about the planning organising mental exercise of it

Precisely! While the risk of most disasters is rather low for most people, there is a considerably larger risk that _something_ will happen at some point. It's only reasonable to be able to survive on one's own if society is disrupted for a few weeks or so.

There's a long way to go from that to bunkering down in the wilderness and withdrawing from society.

One thing I wonder about here is: How do people with chronic health conditions prep for this?

- Is there a form of insulin which can be shelf-stable for a year and isn't so expensive that throwing it out yearly is a hardship?

- Suppose someone has a chronic pain condition and after a year of debilitating pain, found a specific treatment regimen that works for them. Is it possible for them to stockpile drugs without being accused of drug-seeking-behaviour?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudo...

I broadly agree with you, although I don't see a distinguishing line between preppers and doomsday-ers, to me it looks like more of a gradient.

Also, I think most people have that deterministic mindset, not just the doomsday folks. It's just they've come down on the other side of the fence. It's why you see so many folks making no preparations, even though they have received warnings from reputable sources.

> I'd distinguish between prepping and doomsday types

The New Zealand government sure does! https://getthru.govt.nz/ / https://getprepared.nz/

There are also sometimes ads on TV reminding people to keep an emergency kit.

And yesterday the annual ShakeOut event happened where everyone does the drop'n'cover exercise at a particular time of day.

Some councils supply discounted emergency water tanks for home install, too. Got one hooked up last Autumn, and a second in the garage waiting for better weather.

I do some work with MCDEM, the operator of getthru (and getready, and civil defence). Fascinating area - They cover the governance/policy aspects of emergency management but also some of the operational/practical execution of it (that which isn't devolved to regional civil defence or emergency sector e.g. FENZ).

Most people preparing an earthquake kit don't consider themselves "preppers". You might want to take that social issue into account before you pick a label.

I get what you're saying but this post isn't about a fault experiencing a catastrophic event, but cascading events. If this fault rips it could trigger an event on another fault.

Now I'm no geologist, but I question why the order the authors listed possible sites as this:

>A large quake on the Garlock fault has the potential to send strong shaking to the San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita, Lancaster, Palmdale, Ventura, Oxnard, Bakersfield and Kern Count

Which seems to be influenced by the population of those areas and not the geographic distance from the Garlock fault itself. All the propabalistic models I've seen for "the Big One" have the waves that reach the SF Valley (which has iirc 2 million people) originating from the southwest from a major quake on the San Andreas fault, not a ripple effect from the northeast.

That paragraph is literally about the impact on society that it would cause. Yes, they are listing metropolitan areas.

And yes, all the models you've seen before moooooost likely did not take into account activity from Garlock that had literally never been seen. That should not be a surprise.

There was just an earthquake in LA

If you picked up a paintbrush, you could say "human capable of painting the Mona Lisa has started painting". The article doesn't really give any information about what makes this fault special, besides not having seen it move before. Is the original paper available?

"A major California fault capable of producing a magnitude 8 earthquake has begun moving for the first time on record, a result of this year’s Ridgecrest earthquake sequence destabilizing nearby faults"

Is that not information enough?

Not really, because the article goes on with this quote:

>“We don’t know what it means.”

Then...

And of course...

>Also, a creeping fault triggered by a nearby quake doesn’t necessarily mean a big quake is coming. The southernmost tip of the San Andreas fault has traditionally crept in response to distant quakes, including the magnitude 8.2 quake off the coast of southern Mexico in 2017, nearly 2,000 miles away. “But that doesn’t mean the San Andreas went off,” said USGS research geologist Kate Scharer, who was not part of the study.

They do their best to not link to the actual study for which the alarmist headline seems to be derived. It is probably this:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/346

What I'm really wondering is whether the '8.0' figure is present in this paper or not. Because otherwise, where did they pull that number?

No - because it doesn't give any context about what the consequences of that might be.

The next paragraph could say something like "this is perfectly normal, though, and is very unlikely to lead to an earthquake" or "this means an earthquake is nearly inevitable in the next month" and I'd be no more surprised by one that the other.

Believe the article is referring to this article:

"Hierarchical interlocked orthogonal faulting in the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence", Ross et al.

Abstract

A nearly 20-year hiatus in major seismic activity in southern California ended on 4 July 2019 with a sequence of intersecting earthquakes near the city of Ridgecrest, California. This sequence included a foreshock with a moment magnitude (Mw) of 6.4 followed by a Mw 7.1 mainshock nearly 34 hours later. Geodetic, seismic, and seismicity data provided an integrative view of this sequence, which ruptured an unmapped multiscale network of interlaced orthogonal faults. This complex fault geometry persists over the entire seismogenic depth range. The rupture of the mainshock terminated only a few kilometers from the major regional Garlock fault, triggering shallow creep and a substantial earthquake swarm. The repeated occurrence of multifault ruptures, as revealed by modern instrumentation and analysis techniques, poses a formidable challenge in quantifying regional seismic hazards.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/346

>The creeping illustrates how the Ridgecrest quakes that began on the Fourth of July have destabilized this remote desert region of California between the state’s greatest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, and its lowest point, Death Valley.

A cruel joke one could say.

man... some of these titles are getting harder and harder to understand

Temblor, his arms wide.

When the walls fell.

Sokath, his eyes uncovered!

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