Word: stress
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...Sumatran fault has entered an intensely unstable period. On March 17, little more than a week before the earthquake struck, Professor John McCloskey of the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland published a paper in the scientific weekly Nature, arguing that the Dec. 26 quake had not relieved the stress on the tectonic plates in the area. In fact, McCloskey's team of seismologists found, the pressure had shifted farther south along the fault lines. The paper concluded that the chance of another major earthquake in the area, perhaps one capable of generating a tsunami, was high. In the case...
...ourselves," says Waru. Certainly, they received no earthquake warning from local officials. Because the reality is, it's still impossible to predict with any accuracy when the earth's plates will shift, triggering a quake. All the same, seismologist McCloskey believes the omens aren't good. He says the stress that brought about the two massive convulsions of the past three months has still not been relieved and has simply shifted farther south along the fault line. That means another massive temblor is not out of the question. "We dearly hope we are wrong," says McCloskey. Asia's challenge...
...December's quake? A: A major earthquake alters the tectonics of an entire region, relieving pressure in some areas and increasing it in others. As Professor John McCloskey and his team at the University of Ulster showed in a recent paper in Nature, the Dec. 26 quake intensified the stress on two nearby faults that are close to the epicenter of the March 28 temblor: one running directly beneath the city of Banda Aceh and one running beneath the Sunda Trench, a deep seam in the ocean floor. That additional stress may have precipitated last week's quake...
...Have these two earthquakes finally relieved the region's tectonic stress? A: Don't bet on it. The area off the coast of Sumatra is a subduction zone, a highly unstable region where the India Plate, the Australia Plate, the Sunda Plate and the Burma Micro-Plate collide and dive beneath one another. Earthquakes tend to occur in clusters in subduction zones, and McCloskey says his initial findings indicate that the latest quake has accentuated the stress along the Sunda Trench fault for another 300 km south. The result is like the steady growth of a crack...
...Almost certainly yes. "This is obviously a cluster of quakes," says Sieh. "The question now: Is it a cluster of two, or a cluster of more?" He points out that quakes tend to hit the region every 200 years or so. The last earthquakes to occur near the newly stressed area south of last week's temblor were in 1797 and 1833?meaning quakes could be primed to occur again soon. There's no way to tell when an earthquake will strike?scientists can measure the stress on a fault, but they don't know how much force...