Some jarring footage out of Lorca, Spain, from the 11th of May: One of the persistent scenarios that has come up when talking about earthquakes is what to do if you happen to be walking down a sidewalk and surrounded by buildings. If you’re inside a building, you should take cover under a sturdy desk [...]
Read Part I and Part II of Devoted to a Fault. You can download the entire text (without images) as one file here. The following was reported in late 2007 and early 2008. The 1868 Earthquake Alliance held its April 2008 meeting in an Oakland building undergoing a seismic retrofit. In the lobby, plywood and [...]
This is Part II of this article. Read Part I here. You can download the entire text (without images) as one file here. The following was reported in late 2007 and early 2008. At 7:53 in the morning on October 21, 1868, a major earthquake struck the Bay Area. It had a magnitude of about [...]
The following is part one of a three-part series of posts. You can download the entire text (without images) as one file here. It was reported in late 2007 and early 2008. Hayward Phil Stoffer squinted through the glass to see a sign of the past and, almost certainly, the future of this part of [...]
All of California may not one day fall into the ocean, but right now, parts of it do. Erosion occurs all along the coast. Every ocean wave pounds on the bluffs and scours the beaches. Here is the Pacifica Municipal Pier. It’s shaped like an “L” — you can see that it makes a right [...]
This morning, NASA and the Exploratorium webcast live from Xinjiang, China. You can watch their hour-long production at the Exploratorium’s Total Solar Eclipse web site. (That’s a photo from the Exploratorium blog above.) The broadcast starts about 30 minutes before totality, when the moon completely blocks out the sun. The first fifteen minutes include a [...]
They’ve made the rounds, but in case you missed them, here are a few wedding photos taken during and just after the earthquake. More here.
Gray skies are a common feature of many photos coming from Sichuan. Word is that it’s been raining. The destruction that follows an earthquake’s shaking is often the result of fire. San Francisco in 1906 is the classic example: in much of the city, whatever the shaking didn’t break later went up in flames. The [...]
Hard times around the globe these days. Earthquake in China. Cyclone in Burma. Tornados in the U.S. An enormous volcano on the verge of collapse in Chile. Over the past several months, I’ve been working on a story about a possible earthquake here in the Bay Area. One thing I’ve learned is starkly visible in [...]
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