...............................was felt here outside of Moca. Stronger than the last 2 big ones, but not like first. What we do as soon as we start to feel the shake is get out of the house. Our new house already has stress cracks from the shakes.
- Thread starter AZB
- Start date
Another strong one in santiago. freakin earthquake
I heard that two rumors on the street about what's causing the earthquakes are:
a) A volcano is forming under us, and
b) The evil Gringos are doing nuclear testing underwater.
Yesterday there was a guy driving around on his pasola here in Los Jardines screaming that a big earthquake was coming like a regular prophet of doom. He seemed like an otherwise normal guy who had recently snapped. (though you have to be borderline suicidal to ride a pasola) I think a lot of people are going to be coming unhinged if this keeps up.
The earthquake last night was probably the most dramatic since the first big one, but I must have gotten hardened to the whole thing, I didn't feel scared even though I was up here on the 4th floor with no clothes on, I just waited calmly for the doors and windows to stop rattling in their frames and then tried to get my wife to stop crying.
It's nice not to be scared anymore, but it would be even nicer if the ground would lie still like it's supposed to.
a) A volcano is forming under us, and
b) The evil Gringos are doing nuclear testing underwater.
Yesterday there was a guy driving around on his pasola here in Los Jardines screaming that a big earthquake was coming like a regular prophet of doom. He seemed like an otherwise normal guy who had recently snapped. (though you have to be borderline suicidal to ride a pasola) I think a lot of people are going to be coming unhinged if this keeps up.
The earthquake last night was probably the most dramatic since the first big one, but I must have gotten hardened to the whole thing, I didn't feel scared even though I was up here on the 4th floor with no clothes on, I just waited calmly for the doors and windows to stop rattling in their frames and then tried to get my wife to stop crying.
It's nice not to be scared anymore, but it would be even nicer if the ground would lie still like it's supposed to.
Re: Ditto
In other words, was the debris on the avenida Estrella Sadhal? (going straight through the traffic circle/rotunda), or on the avenue you enter when making a right turn at the traffic circle coming from Villa Gonzalez/Navarrete? (is that the ave. 27. of Feb.?)
Just curious. I watched some riot scenes on Primer Impacto the other night, but I figured those were from Sto. Domingo.
Glad I'm safe at home "east of the Atlantic" at the moment, no riots nor earthquakes here. Just gray and cold and rainy. Looking forward to February, the above notwithstanding.
Regards,
Henning aka Paulino
Pardon my ignorance, but where is the Central Market located?D & D said:
In other words, was the debris on the avenida Estrella Sadhal? (going straight through the traffic circle/rotunda), or on the avenue you enter when making a right turn at the traffic circle coming from Villa Gonzalez/Navarrete? (is that the ave. 27. of Feb.?)
Just curious. I watched some riot scenes on Primer Impacto the other night, but I figured those were from Sto. Domingo.
Glad I'm safe at home "east of the Atlantic" at the moment, no riots nor earthquakes here. Just gray and cold and rainy. Looking forward to February, the above notwithstanding.
Regards,
Henning aka Paulino
I was at my dest, since we had lights for the first time in ages...
I felt it very well and was amazed at how long it kept shaking.
I kept saying to may son, it's still shaking, it's still shaking.
I sort of figured that it was above the 4.6s we had last week..
4.8 sounds about right. The university kids in third and second floors were really shook..
HB
I felt it very well and was amazed at how long it kept shaking.
I kept saying to may son, it's still shaking, it's still shaking.
I sort of figured that it was above the 4.6s we had last week..
4.8 sounds about right. The university kids in third and second floors were really shook..
HB
What's amazing to me, HB, is the differences in this last 'after'shock. Here, just one sharp jolt, and a roll. Maybe 3-5 seconds. There, everybody described a long shake. And it was about equidistant between us. What's up with that?
Tom (aka XR)
Tom (aka XR)
I talked to some of the experts yesterday
they are in agreement that the BIG ONE is a possibility, but the "when" is as much a mystery to them as it is to any of us.
Their take on this is that the main fault line in the North has been static for about 800 years. IF there has been energy abuilding, then logic and past studies indicate that "something" will occur.
However, all the fairly intense events of 4.5 and over have to signify the release of pent-up energy, and therefore, should be seen as very positive.
What the experts are saying is that construction must be supervised with very strict criteria in order to avoid huge losses of human life. Like if 22/9 had occured during school hours!
A 'great' earthquake of 8.0 or higher would certainly do a lot of damage to most of the urban areas, but many would survive..at least.
HB
they are in agreement that the BIG ONE is a possibility, but the "when" is as much a mystery to them as it is to any of us.
Their take on this is that the main fault line in the North has been static for about 800 years. IF there has been energy abuilding, then logic and past studies indicate that "something" will occur.
However, all the fairly intense events of 4.5 and over have to signify the release of pent-up energy, and therefore, should be seen as very positive.
What the experts are saying is that construction must be supervised with very strict criteria in order to avoid huge losses of human life. Like if 22/9 had occured during school hours!
A 'great' earthquake of 8.0 or higher would certainly do a lot of damage to most of the urban areas, but many would survive..at least.
HB
Re: I talked to some of the experts yesterday
In all of the aftershocks that I have looked at the Tensor Moment Solutions indicate that the temblors have originated along the subduction fault along the North Coast. Not one has originated along the falut running through the Cibao Valley. Unfortunately, that fault is the one that's been building up energy for 800 years.
Now I haven't looked at the data for every little shake. But I don't believe that any pressure has been relieved on the fault line that we're all worried about, sorry to say.
Tom (aka XR)
That depends.Hillbilly said:
In all of the aftershocks that I have looked at the Tensor Moment Solutions indicate that the temblors have originated along the subduction fault along the North Coast. Not one has originated along the falut running through the Cibao Valley. Unfortunately, that fault is the one that's been building up energy for 800 years.
Now I haven't looked at the data for every little shake. But I don't believe that any pressure has been relieved on the fault line that we're all worried about, sorry to say.
Tom (aka XR)
And
That is the one we live near!!
What I am hoping is that the rumbles we are getting is somehow taking off energy from the Cibao Faoul. Probably not doing it but ???what else can we do but hope.
The team placed a few gauges that will study movement, so slowly, but surely we are learning more. I understand that "something important" in the study of seismic activity is going to happen soon. I think that it will be the announcement of a seismic laboratory at our university PUCMM....then there will no longer be a monopoly on the information. A freer flow of information is needed.
I was told that any request for seismic activity information has to go through the Ministry of Foreign Relations!! WTF!
HB
That is the one we live near!!
What I am hoping is that the rumbles we are getting is somehow taking off energy from the Cibao Faoul. Probably not doing it but ???what else can we do but hope.
The team placed a few gauges that will study movement, so slowly, but surely we are learning more. I understand that "something important" in the study of seismic activity is going to happen soon. I think that it will be the announcement of a seismic laboratory at our university PUCMM....then there will no longer be a monopoly on the information. A freer flow of information is needed.
I was told that any request for seismic activity information has to go through the Ministry of Foreign Relations!! WTF!
HB
Hillbilly said:
HB, what I would like to know is where the experts were last year, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, when all the present buildings were being constructed. A few less years shouldn't have any reason to think that a major earthquake was likely at any time.
Actually, they have been preaching
Caution for over 25 years. One look at the first buildings at the PUCMM campus in Santiago will confirm that. They are so over designed that they stagger the imagination. Later buildings were built to the more modern codes and have withstood all the tremors quite well.
Seismic engineers like Orlando Franco and Rafael Corominas have been preaching solid construction for decades. The problem is that , for example, in POP, the commercial buildings that fell down were done on the cheap and they paid the price. The public buildings that were badly damaged were the result of the way the government does things. They let the contract and make a down payment but then the engineer has to use every trick in the book to (A) get the job done and (B) get the government to pay up. Just look at what is happening at the PanAm Games. There are a bunch of contractors that will probably never see the money they are owed, and will lose their houses and everything, since the government has little intention of paying.
Basic problem: Government does not have "teeth" nor the money to enforce building codes....
HB
Caution for over 25 years. One look at the first buildings at the PUCMM campus in Santiago will confirm that. They are so over designed that they stagger the imagination. Later buildings were built to the more modern codes and have withstood all the tremors quite well.
Seismic engineers like Orlando Franco and Rafael Corominas have been preaching solid construction for decades. The problem is that , for example, in POP, the commercial buildings that fell down were done on the cheap and they paid the price. The public buildings that were badly damaged were the result of the way the government does things. They let the contract and make a down payment but then the engineer has to use every trick in the book to (A) get the job done and (B) get the government to pay up. Just look at what is happening at the PanAm Games. There are a bunch of contractors that will probably never see the money they are owed, and will lose their houses and everything, since the government has little intention of paying.
Basic problem: Government does not have "teeth" nor the money to enforce building codes....
HB
Vamos a ver. The tremors we have had, even the 9/22 quake, have been nothing compared with what the experts are now saying will someday occur. You mentioned 8 in a previous post. I can't even imagine how powerful that would be. The experts say that a 7.5 quake would be 30, repeat 30, times stronger than the 9/22 quake. Are the PUCMM structures ready for that?
In theory, Ken, in theory
The codes are designs brought from Mexico and supposed to resist a 7.5 quake.
As I understood the Richter Scale, a 7 was ten times stronger than a 6, so a 7.5 would be what? 13 or 14 times greater that 22/9?
even so, it staggers the imagination to even think of a 7.5...
HB
The codes are designs brought from Mexico and supposed to resist a 7.5 quake.
As I understood the Richter Scale, a 7 was ten times stronger than a 6, so a 7.5 would be what? 13 or 14 times greater that 22/9?
even so, it staggers the imagination to even think of a 7.5...
HB
We're Confusing a Couple of Things Here ...
The Richter scale is a logarithmic scale. So each whole unit on the scale represents ten times the ground shaking of the next lower whole number. So for example, a 3/10's difference on the scale represents a factor of about two in the amplitude, or shaking motion, which is how far the ground actually moves.
However, as the strength of an earthquake rises by each whole number up the Richter scale, the quake releases 31 times more energy!
The Richter scale does not measure an earthquake's effects, but gives its strength in terms of the energy released, as measured by the seismographic displays we're all constantly looking at down here nowadays. The scale starts at one and has no upper limit. Each unit is 10 times greater than the one before. That's a mathematician's definition of logarithmic, by the way.
A quake's strength is ranked on the basis of the maximum amplitude of the signal recorded by a seismograph and how far the instrument is from the earthquake. Earthquakes with a magnitude of about 2.0 or less are called microearthquakes. Peoople don't usually feel them and they are usually tracked only by local seismographs. Events ranking about 4.5 or greater, of which there may be several thousand every year, are strong enough to be recorded by sensitive instruments from anywhere in the world. Great earthquakes, such as the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Alaska, have magnitudes of 8.0 or higher. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 has since been calculated at 8.3. The one in Mexico in 1985 registered 8.1 on the scale.
Just to keep everyone here on DR1 sleepless, on average, one earthquake of that size occurs somewhere in the world each year according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Richter scale has no upper limit, but the largest known shocks have had magnitudes in the 8.8 to 8.9 range.
Tom (aka XR)
The Richter scale is a logarithmic scale. So each whole unit on the scale represents ten times the ground shaking of the next lower whole number. So for example, a 3/10's difference on the scale represents a factor of about two in the amplitude, or shaking motion, which is how far the ground actually moves.
However, as the strength of an earthquake rises by each whole number up the Richter scale, the quake releases 31 times more energy!
The Richter scale does not measure an earthquake's effects, but gives its strength in terms of the energy released, as measured by the seismographic displays we're all constantly looking at down here nowadays. The scale starts at one and has no upper limit. Each unit is 10 times greater than the one before. That's a mathematician's definition of logarithmic, by the way.
A quake's strength is ranked on the basis of the maximum amplitude of the signal recorded by a seismograph and how far the instrument is from the earthquake. Earthquakes with a magnitude of about 2.0 or less are called microearthquakes. Peoople don't usually feel them and they are usually tracked only by local seismographs. Events ranking about 4.5 or greater, of which there may be several thousand every year, are strong enough to be recorded by sensitive instruments from anywhere in the world. Great earthquakes, such as the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Alaska, have magnitudes of 8.0 or higher. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 has since been calculated at 8.3. The one in Mexico in 1985 registered 8.1 on the scale.
Just to keep everyone here on DR1 sleepless, on average, one earthquake of that size occurs somewhere in the world each year according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Richter scale has no upper limit, but the largest known shocks have had magnitudes in the 8.8 to 8.9 range.
Tom (aka XR)
The largest known quake was in Chile in 1960. It was originally thought to only be an 8.something, but they later realised it was a 9.5.
It was so powerful that it caused a tsunami wave so big that arrived in Hawaii 15 hours later and killed 180 people.
What is interesting about the Chile quake is that not many people were killed, relative to the size of it. This was because there was a much smaller quake first, and so people rushed out of their homes into the streets (at 4am). Then when the big one came, most people were outside.
Our expected one is only a 7.6-7.8, which is much smaller than that, but as others have said, 30 times larger than the 6.5 we already experienced.
It was so powerful that it caused a tsunami wave so big that arrived in Hawaii 15 hours later and killed 180 people.
What is interesting about the Chile quake is that not many people were killed, relative to the size of it. This was because there was a much smaller quake first, and so people rushed out of their homes into the streets (at 4am). Then when the big one came, most people were outside.
Our expected one is only a 7.6-7.8, which is much smaller than that, but as others have said, 30 times larger than the 6.5 we already experienced.
Ahem.adrianb said:
31 times more energy released and 10 times more shaking. :: smile :: What? I can't help it. I am a scientist by trade!
Tom (aka XR)
Edited to Add:
Perhaps a brief explanation is in order. Let me use the square-cubed law as an example. Suppose you wanted somehow to make your casino table dice twice as big. Let's start with a pair of dice 20mm on a side. The area of a side then is 20x20mm or 400 square mm. The original volume of each die is 20x20x20mm or 8000 cubic mm.
Now, let's double the size, or area and see what happens. The new die is 40x40mm on a side or 1600 square mm. The new volume is 64000 cubic mm! That means while doubling the size, the surface area increased 400%, but the volume increased 800%! That means to simply double the size of the die, we needed to increase the surface 4x, and the interior space by 8x! In other words we now have twice as much interior space per square millimeter of surface area as we had before!
What does this have to do with the earthquakes I hear you all getting ready to type? Well, basically the same principal is at work. If you want to increase the amount of shaking that's felt at all those spots you have to do more than just increase the amount of energy proportionally and it is not a direct one-to-one relationship between the two. A 31 fold increase in energy results in just a 10 fold increase in the amount of shaking felt. And even that shaking is subjective based on location and distance from both the epi- and hypo-centers! And it gets worse (or better depending on your point of view).
From a 3.5-4.5 earthquake, 31x more energy is released for 10x more shaking. A 3:1 ratio. From 3.5-5.5, 961x more energy for 100x more shaking. A 10:1 ratio. From 3.5-6.5 we need nearly thirty thousand times more energy to get one thousand times the shaking for a ratio of 30:1. And from that 3.5 aftershock to a 7.5 biggie? Nearly one million times more energy is needed to make the ground shake ten thousand times as much, a ratio of over 90:1! Sort like CrissColon's perennial Dominican chair purchasing story. $30 buys you 10 ($3/each) but $1,000,000 buys you just 10,000 ($100 each!)
That's why even though the scale is theoretically open ended, there is a practical limit to the magnitude of an earthquake simply based on the increased amounts of energy required to produce decreasingly smaller increases in shaking.
So be verrrrrry careful when applying these scientific terms and measurements to your idea of what the next "Big One" will feel like.
Last edited:
wow, more great info
In two months, I've learned more about power and weather than I would ever have predicted. This is awesome.
XR, has it been quiet there lately with respect to the tremors?
I actually experienced one in PP before I left. Felt like I was on a large ferry in some good-sized swells, and unsafe to crawl out of bed. I know I felt one or two others, but only for a moment, and only as a passing sensation of dizziness. I think.
The weather here could not have been more unwelcoming. If I had flown in one night earlier, the plane wouldn't have been able to land... too cold, too much ice. yuk.
It's been a deep freeze here ever since... down to -23 C one day, about a foot of snow on the ground, black ice everywhere.
grumble... complain
Just thought I'd place the rainshowers in perspective.
To be honest, it rained almost every day while I was there, around 5 pm it seemed, but ... I loved it anyway. Can't wait to return.
Hey! I almost forgot. I owe you a hundred pesos. Upon return, drinks on me next time there's a get-together at one of those cute places in Sosua or Cabarete.
I believe I must find some Marmite for P & A this time. hee.
D
In two months, I've learned more about power and weather than I would ever have predicted. This is awesome.
XR, has it been quiet there lately with respect to the tremors?
I actually experienced one in PP before I left. Felt like I was on a large ferry in some good-sized swells, and unsafe to crawl out of bed. I know I felt one or two others, but only for a moment, and only as a passing sensation of dizziness. I think.
The weather here could not have been more unwelcoming. If I had flown in one night earlier, the plane wouldn't have been able to land... too cold, too much ice. yuk.
It's been a deep freeze here ever since... down to -23 C one day, about a foot of snow on the ground, black ice everywhere.
grumble... complain
Just thought I'd place the rainshowers in perspective.
To be honest, it rained almost every day while I was there, around 5 pm it seemed, but ... I loved it anyway. Can't wait to return.
Hey! I almost forgot. I owe you a hundred pesos. Upon return, drinks on me next time there's a get-together at one of those cute places in Sosua or Cabarete.
I believe I must find some Marmite for P & A this time. hee.
D
No more Marmite........
for a bit, anyway.
Feel a bit like a squirrel - sitting here in Cabarete with 5 huge jars of the stuff in my cupboard. (Nearly 2.5 kgs of Satan's Pooh in case we get trapped in the house by the BIG one)!!
It's an acquired taste!!!
Peter
for a bit, anyway.
Feel a bit like a squirrel - sitting here in Cabarete with 5 huge jars of the stuff in my cupboard. (Nearly 2.5 kgs of Satan's Pooh in case we get trapped in the house by the BIG one)!!
It's an acquired taste!!!
Peter
Re: wow, more great info
Tom (aka XR)
I haven't noticed anything more. Even the trembling of my desk chair, bed, patio rails etc. seems to have subsided. But then I've been dealing with other crises here so maybe I just haven't noticed.dawnwil said:
Tom (aka XR)