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Merged 8.8 quake in Sendai, Japan

William Parcher said:
Are you kidding? I'd spend the rest of my life in a Costa Rican mountaintop cloud forest if I had the choice!

I was there before the ecotourism stampede and got to see the Golden Toads before they went extinct.
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Yeah, I'm kidding. Just don't do it during earthquakes, huh? (And remember, the very top of a mountain is where most of the erosion is going on.)
 
MG1962 said:
Depends on the soil type - Sandy soil is extremely vunerable and there are reports of houses sinking during quakes. A lot of damage in the Bay area quake in 89 was caused by liquerfaction
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I know that part, but why should the guy making the video need to flee? There were some trees I suppose, but there were no buildings that looked nearby and it was flat ground, not a landslide prone hillside.

SoapySam said:
I'd have been running the hell away from the area.
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Soapy Sam said:
There's really no way to guarantee safety. I think that's partly why people consistently describe raw terror during quakes. It sounds like the same thing I feel in turbulence in aircraft. We expect the Earth beneath our feet to be solid. When it isn't, we are disoriented , confused and terrified.
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I think the sound plays a big part too. I have been through a piddling 3.7 back in the day, woke me at night. I recall the house shaking like a bad wind storm only to look out my window and see nothing moving in a way I expected
 
Rolfe said:
The only earthquake I ever felt was a very minor tremor, and I was asleep in bed at the time (the tremor was enough to wake me). So I have no idea, really. It sounds absolutely terrifying.

Rolfe.
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If you live in Earthquake country, you get use to it. If a minor tremor wakes you up, you wait a couple of minutes and then go back to sleep.
On the other hand, I think that living in Tornado country would be really hard for me to adapt to.
 
Rolfe said:
The point is, I don't have this thought through because the chances of a tsunami in inland Scotland are zero.
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Not zero I'm afraid. Well, it will depend on how far you are inland. I was looking up info on a possible tsunami event very local to me (HERE) (BBC) when I came across THIS (Wiki)


The three Storegga Slides are considered to be amongst the largest known landslides. They occurred under water, at the edge of Norway's continental shelf (Storegga is Norwegian for the "Great Edge"), in the Norwegian Sea, 100 km north-west of the Møre coast, causing a very large tsunami in the North Atlantic Ocean. This collapse involved an estimated 290 km length of coastal shelf, with a total volume of 3,500 km3 of debris.[1] Based on carbon dating of plant material recovered from sediment deposited by the tsunami, the latest incident occurred around 6100 BC.[2] In Scotland, traces of the subsequent tsunami have been recorded, with deposited sediment being discovered in Montrose Basin, the Firth of Forth, up to 80 km inland and 4 metres above current normal tide levels.
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Compus
 
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dudalb said:
On the other hand, I think that living in Tornado country would be really hard for me to adapt to.
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When I finally do, I will let you know how long it took. To be fair the local network in towns is amazing. You are in no doubt how much danger you are in. Farms out in the hinterland.....now that would be tough
 
CompusMentus said:
Not zero I'm afraid. Well, it will depend on how far you are inland. I was looking up info on a possible tsunami event very local to me (HERE) (BBC) when I came across THIS (Wiki)

Compus
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Probably not so much how far, but where you are. The south of Scotland is quite low-lying, whereas further north it's much more mountainous.
 
"Not on the same scale as the previous explosions."

I still don't like the sound of it at all. Highly likely that the rods might melt, if the BBC knows what it's talking about.

As if the Japanese didn't have enough to worry about.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Yeah. My house is at 230 metres elevation. I'm cool with that.

Rolfe.
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Aye. Which puts you about 70m vertically below both the West Water and Baddingsgill reservoirs, whose outflows - the West Water and the Lyne Water meet about what- a two minute stroll from your house?
Have you ever wandered up the Lyne gorge north of the A702? Know how it got there?
Note that the hill behind you, CastleLaw, consists mostly of fluvioglacial sand and gravel (hence the issue of quarrying) and is as stable as piles of sand and gravel generally are.
Oh and to add to the fun, the A702 essentially follows the outcrop of the Pentland Fault, one of the biggest fault structures in the Midland Valley.

Not that I think you are at serious risk, but I'm making the point that we rarely assess these sort of once in a lifetime hazards. Until it happens. By which time it's too late.

You are safe from tsunamis, but catastrophic flooding is by no means impossible.

ETA- To clarify, lest anyone send a chopper to evacuate Rolfe- the Pentland Fault is a very old structure and not active in the tectonic sense the way the faults off Japan are; but such faults can have relict stresses, often due to overburden of ice during the last ice age. That can release unexpectedly - and while such resulting movements are very small, I doubt that either of those dams has any particular earthquake resistance at all. The likely worst case - and it's really very unlikely- would be cracks in the dams and a hasty draining thereof by local authorities. But it's probable most folk in the area- including those in the narrow gorge north of the fault- have never even given it a thought.
 
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Let's say they can't cool the plant and it suffers total meltdown. Then what?
 
Flooding has happened here, but it was a flash flood from Tarfhaugh Hill. Twice. It seems only to happen when the hill is ploughed. If the farmer tries to plough it again, he may get a visit from the boys....

Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about, and I've seen the Lyne Water when they opened the sluice gates at Baddingsgill. Mothers were snatching their children away, literally. However, we're a fair bit below the gorge (yes I've walked, and cycled, the Cauldstane Slap), and you know what haugh means. There's a pretty wide flood plain here. (Lyne Park, those houses you liked - that would give me the screaming ab-dabs actually.)

My assessment is that serious property damage is far from impossible if the wrong stuff happened, but actual washing away of the house is probably a different matter. I actually eyed it all up and looked at the contour lines before I bought the house. If you think Tarfhaugh and/or Castlelaw Hills are capable of pulling an Aberfan, then that could be different of course.

And fault lines - I'll take my chances with any of the ones in Scotland. It's not exactly the Ring of Fire.

Rolfe.
 
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