Earthquakes

We all know earthquakes to be considered a natural disaster which on the simpler side of things starts off with a lot of shaking in the ground feeling like something is erupting from below which can cause a lot of disturbance on the affected terrain, damaging roads or knocking down trees on the smaller scale of things. On the larger scale of things it can cause land slides or even cause very tall buildings to completely collapse.

What is an earthquake?

As explained before, the simple definition can be expanded to the shaking of the earths surface which is caused when there are movements in the earths outer layer. Just below the surface of the earth within the lithosphere are lots of things called tectonic plates which continuously shift to the mantle layer below. Because of all of these movements, there is a big build-up in stresses which lead to what are known as 'faults', which essentially are just giant cracks on the earths surface. When vibrations happen at this crack is what causes an earthquake and the vibrations of it can be felt from up to thousands of kilometres away.

How are earthquakes measured?

Earthquakes are measured using a seismic scale which operates on a logarithmic scale. With the scale going from 1-10, each integer increase is 10 times the magnitude of the previous which when you think about the difference between a 6 and an 8 on the scale being 100 times different is enormous. Earthquakes of 8-9 will almost never happen in the average span of a human lifetime and a magnitude 10 earthquake is practically impossible.

Interesting enough, earthquakes do no just happen on earth, they can also happen on Venus, Mars and have even been detected to have happened on many of Jupiters moons. Earthquakes definitely are scary and especially for cities that live on the borders of tectonic plates especially in Japan can cause massive damage. Thankfully, from the advancement in engineering, they have structures that are very resilient against the general earthquakes to minimise damage however comes the time a scale 8 or 9 earthquake comes will be brutal. It would be nice if engineering can come to a point where structures can be more resilient to these upper levels of earthquakes however with the infrequency of these happening, mankind may just have to accept these events as rare natural disasters that we cannot avoid.