If I told you right now you have two minutes before a large earthquake
what would you do?
So the big question I get asked, almost daily is,
when is the big one gonna happen? Tell us when
exactly. It could be today, tomorrow,
or a hundred years from now. But our uncertainties are so large that we can't
pinpoint it
but there is one hundred percent chance that we'll have an earthquake today.
Every day we have at least
30 earthquakes just here in Southern California every single day.
Okay, so if we look at the bigger earthquakes, because that's what most people are more concerned with,
if we look at the last about
seven large earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault, we would have earthquake,
wait about 180 years, earthquake, wait about a 180 years, earthquake,
wait about 180 years, etc., and the last earthquake,
boom, was about three hundred years ago.
So that's much larger than the 180 that we're expecting.
Are we concerned about it? Well, we're 100 years overdue.
No, I think it's a call to action to say, sure we know there's gonna be a large
earthquake on the san andreas fault
so let's go in and look at that area in detail and try to scratch our heads and say well
what
could we be missing? So, when a large earthquake occurs its gonna shake the earth
like a bell and the seismic waves are going to start where the earthquake was, and is
gonna go around the world once,
twice, three times and depending how big the earthquake was, it's gonna keep going and
we can keep measuring that and that's gonna tell us a lot about
what's inside the Earth. The other thing we can do is we can say
let's have a plan of action. So if we have some kind of lead time, saying that
oooh, we think a large earthquake is going to occur we think it's going to be in
this region,
what are we gonna do? Some of the obvious things, we can slow down fast trains,
we can alert hospitals to take precautionary measures, and we can alert
gas and electric. So, as much as we can mitigate
earthquakes, as much as we can understand earthquakes, and as much as we can have
earthquake early warning systems or tsunami warning systems in place
I think everybody in the world will benefit. For a typical earthquake, we're gonna
have
three main seismic phases. The first one is the P wave
and it goes really really fast. It's always the first, nobody can beat it.
The second one is the S-wave and then the larger one is the surface wave
and that's the one that's typically the most damaging. If you're in San Diego,
a p-wave will get to Disneyland in 25
seconds.
25 seconds. An s-wave about 40 seconds and surface waves
less than a minute.
Everything is a matter of how fast it takes to get
information from one location to information from another location.
The seismometers record something they sent that to the seismologists. The
seismologists have some kind of automated routine and say ooh big earthquake
and that's pushed out to, for example the BART train operators
and the BART train is slowed down. So that's in place today. What's really moving the science
forward in my mind right now is the multi-disciplinary
ability for people from different disciplines to come together and work
well. And what does Scripps have? We have a program here,
it's the Greens Foundation and the purpose of that is to bring people from
different disciplines together in one spot
to basically have a think tank. Together in one room, maybe to look at those
visualizations and to have the conversations,
for the people outside of the discipline to look and say what's that thing
and what's that's thing is really gonna take us to the next level. So I'm encouraging
the
scientists out there, in fact anybody to just question what's that wiggle what's
going on,
ask the questions. If I I told you right now you have two minutes before a large earthquake
what would you do? You'd probably get out your phone and tweet it, right? We're
actually encouraging people to tweet it.
The USDS has this new program where they're actually using the tweets
of earthquakes in multiple languages to see if there's some earthquake at some
location
that we didn't necessarily know about. And we're finding
that some of the tweets that identify the earthquake are
pointing out the information twice as fast as what are seismometers are doing.
And the reason for that is that we have people all over the Earth. We do have seismometers
all over the Earth, but not to the extent that the people.
So as a seismologist, what do I do when I feel an earthquake? Maybe a decade
ago, I would check the data,
call my friends so I can confirm some things. Now I want to be the first one to
tweet it. So if you ever feel an earthquake, you definitely want to get on and tweet it,
make sure you spell correctly.
Hashtag earthquake will work, whatever you think.