Word: temblor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Japan, at least, scientists may also have been looking and listening in the wrong places. Japanese seismologists understandably have positioned underground sensors to pick up rumblings along the notorious faults that run under the Pacific off Japan; they are believed to be the source of the devastating 1923 temblor that killed 143,000 people in Tokyo and Yokohama. American scientists have kept a close watch on the San Andreas fault that runs for 650 miles through California from north of San Francisco nearly to the Mexican border. But the Kobe and Northridge quakes occurred not along these major inter-plate...
...Riordan's blue-ribbon panel on retrofitting city buildings, he believes that the Bullock's, which made up part of the mall, probably should have been retrofitted. Similar observations are being made by many regarding the numerous major highways crippled by the quake. After the area's last big temblor, in 1971, L.A. swore it would strengthen its freeway bridges. But costs slowed the project, and the legislature voted down a 2 cents-per-gal. gas tax that might have goosed it along. Infuriatingly, I-10, the most important and hardest hit of the freeways, had been scheduled for retrofitting...
Registering 6.6 on the moment-magnitude scale, a measure of earthquake energy that among scientists has largely replaced the Richter scale, the Northridge temblor didn't qualify as a Big One. (The San Andreas Fault, 30 miles east of Los Angeles, could produce a magnitude-8 quake, which would be more than 85 times as powerful.) But don't tell that to the people of Northridge and surrounding communities...
Surprisingly, the hazards of thrust faults were largely overlooked until 1983, when a fierce temblor hit the small central California town of Coalinga. The culprit turned out to be a deeply buried fault (four to 10 miles down) that no one had known about. Its only sign on the surface had been a fold, or buckling, in the earth's crust. Many scientists had thought such folds were harmless, formed by an imperceptibly gradual lifting of the ground. But when Ross Stein, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and geologist Robert Yeats of Oregon State University examined the seismic...
...temblor shakes the lives of everyone still alive at the conclusion of the movie. But not more so than the events they have endured prior to it. Among the characters: the grieving parents of a little boy who dies mysteriously after a hit-and-run accident from which he calmly walked away; a group of fishermen who steadfastly pursue their sport despite a dead body floating in their favorite fishing hole; a woman who runs a telephone sex service while tending her children and sexually ignoring her husband (ultimately with terrible results); a wide variety of men and women...