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Very Strong Quake Off Chile With Tsunami Warnings

Now up to 15 ft. tsunami waves. That's very bad especially because a tremendous amount of water follows those waves inland.
 
I felt the main quake at home, two thousand kilometres away from the epicentre (one aftershock was 7.6). It's because of the epicentre some 50 miles away from the coastline and the rigorous Chilean building code since the sixties that we don't have a lot of victims. In our side of the Andes, in Mendoza, some 600 km away from the epicentre, there were reported broken window glasses -probably without the gaps to conform to local code-
 
So far, a young woman dead and twenty injured.

This is a video of a strong aftershock -in it, the reporter on the TV is saying "it must be 6 or even 7 degrees"- in a location about 400 kilometres away from the epicentre.



I hope Patricio Elicer, our forum member local to the events, to be well and able to comment on the matter.
 
Information piles up. Some videos showing the effect of the tsunamis are shocking -look for Conca, Talcahuano or Viña del Mar-. Dozens, maybe a few hundred houses knocked down by the main quake in several towns located less than 80 km from the epicentre. The number of victims is going to be high.
 
aleCcowaN said:
The Argentine service gives it 10 km. And the Chileans, much more experienced, with more and better accelerometers and being local, give 14 km.
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I don't know about more or better, but I think the closer to the epicenter the more accurate the readings. The USGS may have posted preliminary numbers.
 
25km is 82,000ft. That greatly exceeds the ocean depth so they are measuring beyond the seafloor and crust.
 
William Parcher said:
25km is 82,000ft. That greatly exceeds the ocean depth so they are measuring beyond the seafloor and crust.
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Beyond the seafloor is where the plates are moving past each other. No way the crust is only 25km thick.

From Google:
The Earth's Crust is like the skin of an apple. It is very thin in comparison to the other three layers. The crust is only about 3-5 miles (8 kilometers) thick under the oceans(oceanic crust) and about 25 miles (32 kilometers) thick under the continents (continental crust).
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From Wiki on the Nazca Plate
It was on the Nazca Plate that the 1994 Bolivia earthquake occurred; this had a magnitude of 8.2 M_w, which at that time was the strongest instrumentally recorded earthquake occurring deeper than 300 km.
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That is a subduction zone, then the depth should depend on where both plates contact each other: if a bit inland and not on other crack, some 45 kilometres down; if 120 km from the coast, some 10 km down. Think the process as someone trying to slip a thick and wet newspaper under a door. It seizes up and releases repeatedly. Every release is a quake. In this quake the newspaper -Nazca plate- probably "slid" many inches beneath the "door" -Sudamerican plate- and the "door" expanded a few inches towards Australia, all in the region of the epicentre.

[Got to go. Here it's Thursday]
 
I have a report from someone in Hawaii that people are crowding the gas stations. They live less than a mile from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. My suggestion was "If you see people from the PTWC getting into their cars, it's time to head for the hills."
 
Beaches, harbors, piers and marinas are now closed in Orange County, California as a precaution.
 
Earthquakes don't kill people, unreinforced masonry buildings do. I'm happy to hear that Chile has building codes.

And so far a Tsunamis go, it takes the correct underwater topography near the shore to make them a hazard. Which beaches face the right way, with that correct topography? If I thought So. Cal was a problem, I'd go down to an overlook to watch.

But hmm, maybe that inlet in Alaska again?
 
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