Word: temblor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bouquet of daffodils from the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Their tour of the disaster area was delayed two weeks, so as not to interfere with rescue operations. Though Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama got a cool reception when he was in Kobe 48 hours after the temblor, seeing their Emperor and Empress was a symbol of hope for most quake survivors...
...aftershocks are not always physical, the damage not always measured in coffins and cracked pillars. Just as the port city of Kobe stirred painfully back to life last week from the quake that killed more than 5,000 people and left 300,000 homeless, a psychological temblor hit the Tokyo exchange. On the blackest trading day in nearly four years, the Tokyo exchange's Nikkei average shed 1,054 points, or 5.6% of value, as investors began to size up the blow Japan had suffered. Among the army of construction crews that moved in to occupy Kobe last week...
...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...
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...