I sat in on a lecture by a Stanford geophysicist, and he said that seismologists have every legal incentive to communicate that a large earthquake is imminent in the Bay, even if their work is inconclusive or suggests otherwise.
They might get sued or prosecuted if they say it’s safe and a big one strikes.
No epidemiologists were going around saying "eh it could never happen". In fact, many of them were warning after SARS. Trump actually took apart Obama's virus disaster-readiness warehouses and other programs in 2018-2019. Very bad timing, many such cases!
I would suspect the majority of disaster-related experts are not going to be so laid back.
Secondarily anyone else with a doctorate and a Twitter account; a lot of doctors started popular alarmist accounts and then you'd find out they were doctors of something completely unrelated.
There's some references to Berkeley health officers posting the kind of thing I mean, but they deleted it.
Soon after, of course, everyone would switch to "it's real and it's here" and instead start giving out irrelevant health advice about handwashing because the CDC was biased towards treating everything like a food poisoning case.
From your first article above: "At a middle school a few blocks from my house, a rumor circulated among the children that all Asian kids have the coronavirus and should be quarantined.”
How is that not racism and xenophobia?
The parts about washing your hands was because they didn't know that the virus was airborne yet. They were giving out reasonable recommendations while waiting for more information. What were you expecting? That they would magically know exactly what to do for this particular pandemic from day one?
Do you realise if they did, then it would have been one of those "oh the experts panicked and nothing bad happened" (like previous sars outbreaks). There's inherent asymmetry in the possible outcomes.
It is, but it's not "the real pandemic". As it turned out, the real pandemic was the pandemic.
The immediately available silly reaction linked from there is all the articles about how actually the flu was a more real threat, but the one I originally referenced was on social media.
> The parts about washing your hands was because they didn't know that the virus was airborne yet.
You should assume a respiratory virus is airborne. Western public health people had two big problems; one being they were stuck on the last battle and couldn't ever admit anything was airborne because norovirus, HIV, etc weren't, and the other being that leaders were only capable of saying things that sounded leader-y and social media people were only capable of saying things that sounded progressive, and neither of them were interested in if those things were true. So the leaders went to lying about face masks not being effective because they thought it would reduce panic somehow, and the social media people went to telling people not to be racist.
> What were you expecting? That they would magically know exactly what to do for this particular pandemic from day one?
Yes, because that's what China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan did, and they were closer to the action.
> Do you realise if they did, then it would have been one of those "oh the experts panicked and nothing bad happened" (like previous sars outbreaks).
The difference was pretty immediately observable since this one actually did break out and the previous ones didn't.
> As it turned out, the real pandemic was the pandemic.
No, it wasn't a pandemic yet. I "knew" it was going to blow up, because I'm a pessimist, I predicted 5 of the last 0 world wars since the 90s. But they were right to say it wasn't a pandemic, because it wasn't one yet.
The east Asian countries have been tough on respiratory diseases for a while because they're used to it and they have a more community/society bent than the western world. They are also more willing to be authoritarian especially with public health. But you wouldn't like it if your door was welded shut, and you'd cry like a bitch.
> The difference was pretty immediately observable since this one actually did break out and the previous ones didn't.
Do you think there might be a reason the others didn't?
> But they were right to say it wasn't a pandemic, because it wasn't one yet.
It was in China. You could see it.
> The east Asian countries have been tough on respiratory diseases for a while because they're used to it
Only two of them. Japan and Korea weren't - Japanese people wear face masks mostly because of pollen allergies.
> and they have a more community/society bent than the western world.
I listed four completely different countries. (Also, IME Japanese people are actually more individualistic than Americans. Though they pretend they aren't.)
> They are also more willing to be authoritarian especially with public health.
Japan's policies involved no such thing, in fact they have fewer legal powers than US public health officers do and explicitly said this was the reason they didn't do several things we did. Nevertheless, they were both successful and reversed policies a lot less often than we did. It mostly involved discouraging large crowds indoors ("C3") but not what you'd call "lockdown".
> Do you think there might be a reason the others didn't?
We don't need to construct a cause, since you do that to predict an outcome, but we could already observe different outcomes from the different growth rate.
Even if he has one. What is the credibility of "public health influencer". I could announce that i'm that kind of influencer and record you whatever video that generates engagement no mater the facts.
Well it's different if he means Fauci, or some guy in his mom's basement. But yes, I do believe he was speaking from the wrong end, as Seneca might say.
Similarly, I've known of a psychic who was known for regularly making catastrophic earthquake predictions. Naturally he was wrong 99 times out of 100. But that 1 he got right was enough to build his whole career. "The Great Zambini, who predicted the 1998 earthquake"... People just forgot all his misses, only remembered his hit.
That will not happen in the US court system. Also, the Guardian article below about this happening to scientists was in the Italian court system, not the US.
Funny. In with the roar of multiple paragraphs spent explaining all the reasons this spot will be the next big one. And then out with a quick whimper that the scientists are not convicted.
I'll have to add it to the page, but it was also used as the introduction for The Compound by S.A. Bodeen[1]. It's an interesting young adult novel about a family living underground in a state of the art bomb shelter after a nuclear attack occurs.
Likely what they meant, but convicted could be correct here, in that the scientists may not have much conviction in their assessment, i.e. do not feel certain.
The earthquake might cause unexpected damage. The Crystal Springs reservoir sits right on the San Andreas fault line. The reservoir supplies drinking water to the SF county and San Mateo county, all the way to Palo Alto. An earthquake might drain the water underground, disrupting water supply to a million people.
Reading this article it says that scientist expect an earthquake because every 22 years it pops and it's due, however, there are no signs indicating that it will soon so therefore scientists won't make a formal prediction. Am I reading this incorrectly?
San Andreas is a transform fault, also known as a 'strike-slip' fault.
These generally do not cause as much damage as a subduction zone event, also known as dip-slip. An example of this type of event (dip-slip) would be the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, or the violent 1700 Cascadia Megathrust Earthquake.
Personally, Cascadia is /more/ dangerous than any strike-slip earthquakes like SA. We have sedimentation records of massive Cascadia tsunamis going back to about ~900CE.
One thing which isn't discussed enough is how bad the Tsunami is environmentally. The coastline of Japan is absolutely littered with crap from the 2011 Tsunami. All manner of chemicals were sucked into the nearby sea, tires, carpets, hard and soft plastics, absolutely everywhere. It almost looks unrecoverable.
I know that seems like a non-issue in the grand scale of things, but Tsunami's of the past didn't do this. Most pollution was biodegradable.
I can't imagine what the coast of LA would look like after a similar event :(
More of a concern in the bay area, the geological composition is sand, mud, basic river delta sediments--not the most stable stuff.
eg: During a hypothetical Earthquake in the Bay area, the liquefaction of sand occurs, which causes underground structures to move upward due to buoyancy (think of a lower level parking garage), and the soil mass from the structure collapses.
the liquefied sand diffuses to the surrounding area after the earthquake, causing the sand beneath the underground structure to be lost, and the building will return to its original position or even collapse.
The Parkfield region is very sparsely populated. A disruption on this segment of the San Andreas Fault, comparable to past similarly-sized events, would probably NOT have significant effects in major populated regions of either the San Francisco Bay Area (San Jose is 128 miles north) or Southern California (Santa Barbara, which is the northernmost extant of the SoCal conurbanation is 110 miles south). That's roughly 120 and 180 km respectively.
Earthquakes' effects are most strongly felt immediately around the epicenter, and diminishes with the square of the distance.
The San Andreas Fault, being a strike-slip fault (plates moving laterally against one another) and lying principally inland has very low tsunami risk. Tsunami are most associated with superthrust faults, in which one plate rides up over another, and energy is release with a strong vertical displacement, as with the 2011 Tohoku and 2004 Indian Ocean earthquakes.
I wonder what happens if someone hits the fault with an explosive while it's in this state of "near-earthquake". Would it make it better by relieving pressure or make it worse by triggering the main event?
Basically neither really. the energy unleashed by even moderate earthquakes through natural tectonic tension release is proportional to the degree of accumulated tension getting released, and in all such cases, these tensions contain a potential energy that is far, far greater than what any normal nuke generates. In other words, a nuke placed in the San Andreas fault even with extreme care to have maximum impact, would probably do almost nothing against the much bigger energy, and resistance to its release, already going on.
A key thing is that with nukes or any large artificial blast, the energy is pretty much released in a compact area right out into the open. With earthquakes, energy is spread across large areas and often starts far underground, yet still causes damage over a very extensive area. This is part of why earthquakes are much more energetic then man-made blasts.
Large explosions (especially nukes) do produce earthquakes and minor seismic movement, but it just doesn't compare to the comparative megaton-equivalent forces that natural tectonic movements create underground during really notable earthquakes, just like the one being "predicted" in the article above.
The energy released by an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 on SA is approximately
6.31×10^16 joules. When converted to an equivalent in terms of TNT, this energy amounts to about 15,080 kilotons of TNT. (About the same as the Castle Bravo nuclear test)
Now, to use such a weapon to cause a stress-relief earthquake, some factors need to come into play: Depth at which the device should be detonated to optimize stress relief without causing surface damage. detailed seismic imaging and rock mechanics studies. Geometry of the fault zone.
Even w/ a Castle Bravo type test, massive radioactive fallout would occur in groundwater as well as air. There's also the chance that such an event would cause local volcanic activity.
>this energy amounts to about 15,080 kilotons of TNT. (About the same as the Castle Bravo nuclear test)
I thought of mentioning Castle Bravo or Tsar Bomba as contray examples of my general argument, but I simply stated "normal nuke". Neither Bravo or Tsar were at all normal nukes and especially by modern design standards that focus more on the multi-kiloton range and precision-guided multiple strikes against a given area target.
Even with those insanely giant old bombs, I wouldn't absolutely be sure that they'd achieve a massive tension release, even in a fault as tense as the San Andreas. Such a thing is likely just a bit too variable-prone to model effectively.
As for something like a Hiroshima type bomb doing it, bloody unlikely. The original post comment simply mentioned a bomb so I didn't want to stray into the biggest mega explosives of human military history.
For what it's worth, the last major earthquake here killed 63 people, the significant majority of which were on various freeways and bridges that collapsed. All infrastructure has undergone significant retrofitting since then.
The paper is actually science, but it’s not news. It is, however, being portrayed that way. This type of writing seems like a job that could, and possibly should, be replaced by AI.
I personally believe the Cascadia fault will go off on June 18, 2025, but I may be wrong!
It's "on San Andreas Fault", in the usual "the"-dropping style of headlines. The fault is named after the town of San Andreas but extends well beyond it.
They might get sued or prosecuted if they say it’s safe and a big one strikes.
Imagine suing epidemiologists because they didn't predict Covid-19 in a timely manner.
I would suspect the majority of disaster-related experts are not going to be so laid back.
Secondarily anyone else with a doctorate and a Twitter account; a lot of doctors started popular alarmist accounts and then you'd find out they were doctors of something completely unrelated.
Here's the timeline of misguided Vox articles.
https://www.vox.com/2020/2/7/21126758/coronavirus-xenophobia... - early "the real pandemic is racism" stuff (note this is hard to find because the phrase was later totally overwritten by George Floyd/BLM protests)
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/13/21128209/coronavirus-fe... - people in Silicon Valley care too much
There's some references to Berkeley health officers posting the kind of thing I mean, but they deleted it.
Soon after, of course, everyone would switch to "it's real and it's here" and instead start giving out irrelevant health advice about handwashing because the CDC was biased towards treating everything like a food poisoning case.
https://www.vox.com/2020/2/28/21157769/how-to-prevent-the-co...
How is that not racism and xenophobia?
The parts about washing your hands was because they didn't know that the virus was airborne yet. They were giving out reasonable recommendations while waiting for more information. What were you expecting? That they would magically know exactly what to do for this particular pandemic from day one?
Do you realise if they did, then it would have been one of those "oh the experts panicked and nothing bad happened" (like previous sars outbreaks). There's inherent asymmetry in the possible outcomes.
It is, but it's not "the real pandemic". As it turned out, the real pandemic was the pandemic.
The immediately available silly reaction linked from there is all the articles about how actually the flu was a more real threat, but the one I originally referenced was on social media.
> The parts about washing your hands was because they didn't know that the virus was airborne yet.
You should assume a respiratory virus is airborne. Western public health people had two big problems; one being they were stuck on the last battle and couldn't ever admit anything was airborne because norovirus, HIV, etc weren't, and the other being that leaders were only capable of saying things that sounded leader-y and social media people were only capable of saying things that sounded progressive, and neither of them were interested in if those things were true. So the leaders went to lying about face masks not being effective because they thought it would reduce panic somehow, and the social media people went to telling people not to be racist.
> What were you expecting? That they would magically know exactly what to do for this particular pandemic from day one?
Yes, because that's what China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan did, and they were closer to the action.
> Do you realise if they did, then it would have been one of those "oh the experts panicked and nothing bad happened" (like previous sars outbreaks).
The difference was pretty immediately observable since this one actually did break out and the previous ones didn't.
No, it wasn't a pandemic yet. I "knew" it was going to blow up, because I'm a pessimist, I predicted 5 of the last 0 world wars since the 90s. But they were right to say it wasn't a pandemic, because it wasn't one yet.
The east Asian countries have been tough on respiratory diseases for a while because they're used to it and they have a more community/society bent than the western world. They are also more willing to be authoritarian especially with public health. But you wouldn't like it if your door was welded shut, and you'd cry like a bitch.
> The difference was pretty immediately observable since this one actually did break out and the previous ones didn't.
Do you think there might be a reason the others didn't?
It was in China. You could see it.
> The east Asian countries have been tough on respiratory diseases for a while because they're used to it
Only two of them. Japan and Korea weren't - Japanese people wear face masks mostly because of pollen allergies.
> and they have a more community/society bent than the western world.
I listed four completely different countries. (Also, IME Japanese people are actually more individualistic than Americans. Though they pretend they aren't.)
> They are also more willing to be authoritarian especially with public health.
Japan's policies involved no such thing, in fact they have fewer legal powers than US public health officers do and explicitly said this was the reason they didn't do several things we did. Nevertheless, they were both successful and reversed policies a lot less often than we did. It mostly involved discouraging large crowds indoors ("C3") but not what you'd call "lockdown".
> Do you think there might be a reason the others didn't?
We don't need to construct a cause, since you do that to predict an outcome, but we could already observe different outcomes from the different growth rate.
Edit: looks like they eventually were saved in appeals court https://www.nature.com/articles/515171a and finally completely cleared after their Supreme Court ruling https://www.science.org/content/article/italy-s-supreme-cour...
Still a lot of time and money wasted on absolute bullshit.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/89761/san-joaquin-v...
Well, no, this isn't Italy.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
---
Excerpt from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot[0].
I'll have to add it to the page, but it was also used as the introduction for The Compound by S.A. Bodeen[1]. It's an interesting young adult novel about a family living underground in a state of the art bomb shelter after a nuclear attack occurs.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men
[1] https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-compound-s-a-bodeen/1554853...
https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/11/7193391/italy-judges-cle...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23823917
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24116552
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701182
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23823917
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11634338
"as is always the case with earthquakes, everyone will just have to wait and see what happens"
Oh well, off to watch a B-Grade disaster movie then ..
If there's an earthquake on this fault, how bad would it be? Would it trigger a tsunami? Would SF and LA be damaged?
Could this cause "the big one" that gets mentioned occasionally? How bad would such a quake be?
These generally do not cause as much damage as a subduction zone event, also known as dip-slip. An example of this type of event (dip-slip) would be the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, or the violent 1700 Cascadia Megathrust Earthquake.
Personally, Cascadia is /more/ dangerous than any strike-slip earthquakes like SA. We have sedimentation records of massive Cascadia tsunamis going back to about ~900CE.
I know that seems like a non-issue in the grand scale of things, but Tsunami's of the past didn't do this. Most pollution was biodegradable.
I can't imagine what the coast of LA would look like after a similar event :(
eg: During a hypothetical Earthquake in the Bay area, the liquefaction of sand occurs, which causes underground structures to move upward due to buoyancy (think of a lower level parking garage), and the soil mass from the structure collapses.
the liquefied sand diffuses to the surrounding area after the earthquake, causing the sand beneath the underground structure to be lost, and the building will return to its original position or even collapse.
Earthquakes' effects are most strongly felt immediately around the epicenter, and diminishes with the square of the distance.
The San Andreas Fault, being a strike-slip fault (plates moving laterally against one another) and lying principally inland has very low tsunami risk. Tsunami are most associated with superthrust faults, in which one plate rides up over another, and energy is release with a strong vertical displacement, as with the 2011 Tohoku and 2004 Indian Ocean earthquakes.
A key thing is that with nukes or any large artificial blast, the energy is pretty much released in a compact area right out into the open. With earthquakes, energy is spread across large areas and often starts far underground, yet still causes damage over a very extensive area. This is part of why earthquakes are much more energetic then man-made blasts.
Large explosions (especially nukes) do produce earthquakes and minor seismic movement, but it just doesn't compare to the comparative megaton-equivalent forces that natural tectonic movements create underground during really notable earthquakes, just like the one being "predicted" in the article above.
Now, to use such a weapon to cause a stress-relief earthquake, some factors need to come into play: Depth at which the device should be detonated to optimize stress relief without causing surface damage. detailed seismic imaging and rock mechanics studies. Geometry of the fault zone.
Even w/ a Castle Bravo type test, massive radioactive fallout would occur in groundwater as well as air. There's also the chance that such an event would cause local volcanic activity.
I thought of mentioning Castle Bravo or Tsar Bomba as contray examples of my general argument, but I simply stated "normal nuke". Neither Bravo or Tsar were at all normal nukes and especially by modern design standards that focus more on the multi-kiloton range and precision-guided multiple strikes against a given area target.
Even with those insanely giant old bombs, I wouldn't absolutely be sure that they'd achieve a massive tension release, even in a fault as tense as the San Andreas. Such a thing is likely just a bit too variable-prone to model effectively.
As for something like a Hiroshima type bomb doing it, bloody unlikely. The original post comment simply mentioned a bomb so I didn't want to stray into the biggest mega explosives of human military history.
I personally believe the Cascadia fault will go off on June 18, 2025, but I may be wrong!