PBS Frontline - The Quake (Haiti)

The excellent PBS program Frontline is broadcasting a show this Tuesday on The Quake (the one in Haiti).

The trailer:



Online materials will also become available on March 30, and I hope I can stream the program online from Germany.

On Jan. 12, 2010, one of the most devastating earthquakes in recorded history leveled the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Those responsible for handling the catastrophe, including the Haitian government and the United Nations, were among the victims. FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith (The Storm, Obama’s War) bears witness to the scale of the disaster and takes viewers on a searing and intimate journey into the camps, hospitals and broken neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. Featuring never-before-seen footage of the moments after the earthquake and interviews with top officials from Port-au-Prince to Washington, The Quake, airing Tuesday, March 30, 2010, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), ultimately asks, how will the world respond?

The Risk Society

Yesterday I took a break from my sabbatical projects in Munich to attend an event at the Deutsches Museum (DM) sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) and the DM.

It was very refreshing to listen for the day to academics from the social sciences and the humanities, who approach the "environment" with a different perspective, vocabulary, and mindset than we natural scientists do.

For the topic of this blog, perhaps my most interesting discovery yesterday was the concept of the risk society, part of the talk by Dr. Egner. At the "risk" or presenting the words of an unknown person, I will refer you to the entry on the risk society in Wikipedia - the idea of how modern societies deal with natural and manufactured risk, and how social relations are related to the nature of risk.  As I have previously blogged about, I think of seismic risk evaluation as a rather technical and objective exercise.  However, Dr. Egner's presentation discussed, from her perspective as a geographer, the social decisions that might go into a risk evaluation, and the differential impact of risk on various groups within a population.  I'm not sure I agreed with all of it, but the point of view was provocative. I think these ideas must be useful, for example, in contrasting the hazard situations related to the Chile and the Haiti earthquakes.

The Hasbro board game

Carson Workshop Program

Sherry Johnson, Florida International University, USA
Climate, Colonialism, Crisis, and Change in the Carribean in the Age of the Revolution, 1748-1804

Andrew Isenberg, Temple University, USA
The American Government Program in 1832 to vaccinate Indians against Smallpox

Martin Knoll, TU Darmstadt, Germany
Topographies of Nature - Nature of Topographies. Settlements, Territories, and Environment in early modern historicaltopographical Literature

Heike Egner, Universität Mainz, Germany
Space, Place and Knowledge: Natural Disasters and Cultures of Risk in Modern Societies

Gary Martin, Global Diversity Foundation, Marrakech, Morocco
Anthropogenic Forests, Agroecosystems and post-agrarian Landscapes: Local Knowledge Societies in a globalized World

Earthquakes, urbanization, and fatalities

Roger Bilham is a fellow of CIRES,the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research includes archival research into historical earthquakes, the statistics of urban earthquakes, and global seismic hazards. His web page on the Haiti earthquake includes a link to a news piece he wrote for Nature, where he argues that the destructiveness of the Haiti quake was due not only to its large (although not enormous) magnitude and energy release, but also the amplification of ground shaking by softer sediments, the proximity of Port-au-Prince to the epicenter, and especially to poor building construction practices in a large urban center.

He presents the rather fascinating diagram below, plotting fatalities against earthquake magnitudes:

Note that the vertical scale is logarithmic. There is a general correlation that larger magnitudes cause more deaths, but this is far from a linear plot. Notice that may of the most deadly quakes have been in fairly recent years, and don't highly correlate with magnitude. Why? Urbanization and poor construction. Better earthquake engineering is one of the reasons that the damage in Chile, although bad enough, was less than that in Haiti, although the Chilean quake was much larger.

Dr. Bilham comments:

With a Richter magnitude of M=7 the Haiti earthquake is classed as a major earthquake, however, no previous M=7 earthquake has resulted in this many fatalities (the Messina, Italy, earthquake of 1908 killed 82,000). At 230,000 the death toll is close to being the most lethal earthquake since 1900, and the second most lethal earthquake ever. The large death-toll was caused by the almost complete absence of earthquake resistance in most of the structures in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding towns and villages.

A recent article (2009) discussing the seismic future of cities may be downloaded here. It forecasts a rising death toll from earthquakes, especially in the developing nations, where earthquake resistance building codes are either absent or not enforced.

Michio Kaku (tell us something new)

I sometimes add an entry related to the feeds that show up in the sidebar here, generated by a Google search that feeds into the page.

One of the entries there led me to the Big Think collection of blogs. This looks like an interesting site, one I will follow for a while to decide if I should add it to the few similar sites (Wired, Salon, Slate, NY Times, AlterNet) that I peruse on a regular basis.

I became aware of Michio Kaku, one of BT's contributing bloggers, some years ago, probably via a Nova special, I don't really remember. We certainly need scientifically oriented public intellectuals (think Carl Sagan, Stephen J. Gould) who can explain science to the public, and Kaku is one of those who, besides his stellar academic credentials, resides part of his time in that niche. Like Brian Greene, although Greene's presence online is a bit more sedate and academic-like.

(By the way, here is an interesting piece from NPR on quantum physics.)

Seismological Society of America Meeting

SSA 2010 Annual Meeting
21–23 April, Portland, Oregon

SSA’s 2010 Annual Meeting will provide a stimulating exchange of research on a wide range of topics with like-minded professionals from all over the world. Oral presentations, poster sessions, exhibits, field trips, business meetings and social gatherings all provide members the opportunity to meet and share with their peers.

Special Sessions:

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Advances in Seismic Hazard Mapping

At the Interface Between Earthquake Sciences and Earthquake Engineering in the Pacific Northwest

Building Code Uses of Seismic Hazard Data

Characterizing the Next Cascadia Earthquake and Tsunami

Deterministic Simulated Ground Motion Records under ASCE 7-10 as a Bridge Between Geotechnical and Structural Engineering Industry

Earthquake Debates

Engaging Students and Teachers in Seismology: In Memory of John Lahr

The Evolution of Slow Slip and Tremor in Time and Space

Ground Motion: Observations and Theory    

The January/February 2010 Earthquakes in Haiti, Offshore Northern California, and Chile: Origins, Impacts and Lessons Learned

On January 10 2010, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake ruptured a fault within the Gorda plate off the coast of Northern California, ending 15 years of relative seismic quiescence on California's North Coast and causing over $40 million in losses in Humboldt County. Three days later, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake occurred near Port-au-Prince, Haiti in an event that is likely to be listed as one of the great earthquake catastrophes of all time. We welcome papers addressing the mechanisms and tectonic settings of these earthquakes, the geotechnical factors, strong motion, remote sensing aspects, and direct observations of the earthquake zones including associated deformation, tsunami, landsliding and other evidence, as well as impacts and implications for regional seismic hazards. Addendum- This session will also include papers addressing these aspects of the Chile earthuake.

Joint Inversion of Multiple Geophysical Data Sets for Seismic Structure

Magnitude Scaling and Regional Variation of Ground Motion

Monitoring for Nuclear Explosions

Near-Surface Deformation Associated with Active Faults

Numerical Prediction of Earthquake Ground Motion

Operational Earthquake Forecasting

Quantification and Treatment of Uncertainty and Correlations in Seismic Hazard and Risk Assessments

Recent Advances in Source Parameters and Earthquake Magnitude Estimations

Seismic Hazard Mitigation Policy Development and Implementation

Seismic Imaging: Recent Advancement and Future Directions

Seismic Networks, Analysis Tools, and Instrumentation 

Seismic Structure and Geodynamics of the High Lava Plains and Greater Pacific NorthwestSeismicity and Seismotectonics 

The Seismo-Acoustic Wavefield: Fusion of Seismic and Infrasound Data

Seismology of the Atmosphere, Oceans, and Cryosphere

State of Stress in Intraplate Regions

Statistics of Earthquakes

Subsurface Imaging for Urban Seismic Hazards at the Engineering Scale

Time Reversal in Geophysics

Volcanic Plumbing Systems: Results, Interpretations and Implications for Monitoring

Important Dates

Call for Special Sessions	1 October 2009
Travel Grant Application Deadline	30 November 2009
Abstract Submission Deadline	12 January 2010
Program w/ Abstracts Online	26 February 2010
Meeting Pre-registration Deadline	19 March 2010          TODAY
Hotel Reservation Cut-Off	29 March 2010
Online Registration Cut-Off	9 April 2010

Field Trip Information:
Both field trips will take place on Saturday, 24 April 2010 (the day following the close of the regular meeting program).
Field Trip #1: Portland Geology by Tram, Train, and Foot
Field Trip #2: Geology and Hazards of Mount Hood, Oregon 

Largest global earthquakes

There was an interesting pdf file from the USGS on the largest earthquakes (magnitude 8 and above) ever measured by seismographs. I have the link so you can download the file, but I can't even reconstruct where and how I found this. I did find a similar web page here.

Anyway, the three figures in the file are copied below.

The map shows the association of these large quakes with plate boundaries.  You can see the 2010 quake off the west coast of Chile, and the largest quake ever measured, nearby in Chile in 1960. The ones in the India-China region seem enigmatic, but they are presumably related to the collision of India and the rest of the Asian continent.

The figure below plots these events vs. time.  On the whole, this appears to be random.  There seems to have been a few more larger quakes in recent years, but there were even more in the late 50s-early 60s.   Hmmm, a Cold War effect?

The figure above shows the cumulative seismic moment, roughly a measure of total seismic energy released. Note how this pattern is dominated by the very largest quakes.

Chile aftershock report

The U.S. Geological Survey presents more interesting information on the Chile magnitude 8.8 quake here. The aftershock report notes

In the time period since the earthquake's origin at 2010-02-27 06:34 to 2010-03-15 15:00 UTC, the USGS NEIC has located 229 aftershocks of magnitude 5.0 or greater. Eighteen of these aftershocks have magnitudes of 6.0 or greater.

You've been hearing about many of these not insignificant aftershocks in the news.

Below is a current aftershock map, which can be found with updates here. Note the scale - these have been occurring along the plate boundary over a distance of about 1000 km, and over an area of about 50,000 square kilometers!