Word: temblor
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...reliable as weather forecasting. Such optimism has proved premature. True, other quakes have been predicted in China and elsewhere. But more often than not they have struck without specific warning, as in Italy last week, and in Algeria last October. Only a year and a half after the Haicheng temblor, an 8.2 quake near Tangshan, 90 miles southeast of Peking, caught seismologists by surprise and killed as many as 650,000. Says Polish-born Volcanologist Haroun Tazieff: "At the present level of research, nature almost always surprises...
...evening last week, technicians at the big nuclear plant in Wiscasset, Me., felt the floor vibrate under their feet. A minor earthquake had struck. It measured only 4.0 on the Richter scale and did no damage to the plant or much of anything else in New England. But the temblor must have caused shudders of delight in Washington. For once the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had guessed right. Maine Yankee was one of five power plants on the East Coast, not known for its seismic risks, that it had ordered temporarily shut down last month ?only two weeks before...
...Hassan Bandegi, 52, head of the town council in the pleasant northeastern Iran community of Tabas, to comprehend what was happening. In a country that has recorded 20,000 earthquakes and aftershocks in the past 18 years and suffered an estimated 100,000 casualties as a result, another temblor of major proportion had struck. In its aftermath last week, even seasoned rescue workers were appalled by what they found as they dug through the ruins of Tabas. Of the town's 17,000 people, as many as 15,000 had perished in 90 horrifying seconds. Of 100 smaller villages scattered...
Kerry Sieh, 27, a Caltech geologist, bases his prediction on Southern California's earthquake history, which until recently was quite sketchy; the earliest reported quake, an apparently minor temblor described by a Spanish explorer, was chronicled in 1769. Seeking evidence of earlier quakes, Sieh in 1974 began a painstaking tour of hundreds of miles of the San Andreas Fault in central and southern California. The following year, under an ancient marsh that straddles the fault 88 km (55 miles) northeast of downtown Los Angeles, he struck pay dirt...
...turn, could eventually enable them to predict if-and possibly when and where -an earthquake will strike. "'Uplifts have been observed before several major earthquakes," notes Seismologist Peter Ward, chief of earthquake mechanics and predictions for the U.S.G.S. Among these quakes is California's last large temblor, the one that shook the San Fernando Valley in 1971, taking 58 lives...