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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Earthquakes in Britain’s green and pleasant land While watching a rather silly movie about volcanoes, starring Pierce Brosnan, I idly surfed the Web to see how many examples there have been of tectonic movements in the United Kingdom.
It turns out there have been quite a few, albeit not on the catastrophic scale recorded in the US west coast, or Japan, Greece, Turkey and Iran. But even in little ol Blighty, the earth has moved. The British Geological Survey website is worth a look. I was taken aback to see that there was even a minor tremor in Norfolk. Yes, Norfolk, home of turkeys, mustard and birthplace of Lord Nelson.
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I felt an earthquake in Manchester once a few years back. The earth did not so much shake, more like it suddenly jolted sharply. I think the odd chimney was dislodged, but nothing much worse. I certainly would not swap our geology for the San Andreas Fault.
There is a mini San Andreas fault in the Church Stretton area of Shropshire. It is apparently well known to geologists, but I came across it while hiking some years ago. The section I encountered had a distinct split in the ground, perhaps 3cm across, and obviously quite deep.
I had a similar experience back in the 80s.
I am not a gracious riser of a morning.
So I was trying to catch a few more moments under the duvet whilst the wife used the bathroom when I felt what were like two sharp kicks to the bottom of the bed.
Fer chrisakes woman Ill be up in a minute I said cos I thought it was Ness. But when I looked up all indignant there was nobody there.
Only later in the day did we hear there had been an earthquake.
The Church on top of Glastonbury Tor was demolished by a big quake back in the 13th Century. The Tower that is there now is all that remained.
I’m afraid this kinda bumps me back to the global warming fanatics.
We live on a thin skin of earth and rock that shifts around, floating on a sea of lava and more as you go down to the core. Britain has been on a journey that geologists say started around the South Pole and will end up near the North Pole.
In between it has been so hot as to lay down our coal deposits and so cold as to have been covered in ice 2 miles thick.
Yet the likes of Manbiot wants to take a snapshot of 1950 and preserve it forever as the ideal for the planet.
What fools!
Timely post – today is the 101st anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (we always try to mention that the fire did all the damage – fires can happen anywhere and are not as bad for the tourism business!).
In geological terms, Britain is in an active earthquake zone. When I worked in the nuclear industry, we used to have to verify that the designs of stuff like cranes could withstand what seismologists call the 1,000-year and 10,000-year events, which are, respectively, the maximum earthquake the location could expect to see every 1,000 or 10,000 years. Surprisingly, they were pretty damned large, far more than a little tremor. Of course, nobody knows if these events could happen today or in 1,000 (or 10,000 years), but the designs had to withstand them nonetheless.
I’m a little more worried now. There have been warnings of an earthquake in South Sakhalin for April. Of the 12 most powerful earthquakes recorded since 1900, one of them occurred off the Kuril Islands and a further two off Kamchatka. In 1995, 2,000 people were killed in the town of Neftegorsk in the north of Sakhalin Island when an earthquake of magnitude 7.6 struck the town, causing the total collapse of all seventeen large-block buildings in the town. The earthquake struck at night, when most of their inhabitants were at home. An earthquake of magnitude 6 struck Sakhalin Island in 2000, but thankfully the ground has been mainly steady since then. This is just as well, because the Neftegorsk earthquake demonstrated all to well the poor performance of Soviet era housing – which constitutes almost all the accommodation in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, including my own apartment – during a seismic event.
From here(Link)
From here(Link)
Was that second posting an aftershock, Ian?
30 years ago there was a small quake in Scotland and a friend at the Geological Survey had the job of phoning around to establish people’s reactions. He found that the Richter scale was redundant, there being a natural Scottish scale that people had developed themselves. “Ma budgie fell off his perch” they reported.
The anti-spambot thingy was having a few tremors of its own…