Earthquake

Campus News Briefs — Summer 2018

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 19:40:00 +0000

Campus News Briefs — Summer 2018 Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/01/2018 - 13:40

Ralphie-Shaped Swimming Pool

2014

Opened at �� Rec Center

Thousand gallons of water (volume)

Months in use, annually, give or take

One

Pool volleyball net and basketball hoop

150-200

Student users on a sunny summer day

Weekly movie and music evening (summer)

The Violinist

The Grammy-winning Takács Quartet, based at �� Boulder since 1986, has a new member for the first time in more than a decade. Harumi Rhodes, a �� Boulder assistant professor of violin, has joined the globe-trotting classical ensemble as second violinist. Founding second violinist Károly Schranz retired from the group May 1, after more than 40 years. The quartet, which originated in Hungary in 1975, now has an even number of women and men for the first time.

Heard Around Campus

Imagine 20,000 people trapped in a metal box for days. That’s pretty scary.”

— �� Boulder engineering professor Keith Porter, who recently estimated the number of people likely to get stuck in elevators following a major San Francisco Bay Area earthquake.

A Lover’s Touch

When Pavel Goldstein’s wife, Alexandra, was in labor with their daughter, Alexandra felt less pain while he was holding her hand.

This made Goldstein wonder: “Can one really decrease pain with touch, and if so, how?”

So the �� Boulder postdoctoral researcher devised an experiment, and the results are in: A loving human touch can, indeed, ease physical pain.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he and collaborators found that women subjected to mild heat pain reported less discomfort when they held hands with their partners than they did without the benefit of touch.

The study, involving 22 heterosexual couples, showed that holding hands synchronized the couples’ breathing, heart rate and brain waves, which correllated with diminished pain.

“It appears that pain totally interrupts this interpersonal synchronization between couples and touch brings it back,” said Goldstein, of �� Boulder’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab.

For additional details, visit �� Boulder Today.

Photo © iStock/bob_sato_1973

Takács Quartet, the Ralphie pool and the power of a lover's touch.

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Earthquake

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 07:00:00 +0000

Earthquake Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/01/2017 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

At 10:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, an alarm pinged on geophysicist Dale Grant’s work computer in Golden, Colo. An earthquake had struck Japan’s northeast coast.

“I knew it was big right away,” said Grant (Geol’79), a senior seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC). “We needed to figure out when, where and how big. Quickly.”

As the only 24/7 earthquake team of its kind in the U.S. — and one of the world’s best equipped — Grant and the NEIC team are among the first to gather key details in a quake’s immediate aftermath and relay it worldwide.

Grant assigned two colleagues to monitor the aftershocks, which could cause more shaking, damage and casualties. The remaining five personnel answered a surge of incoming media calls.

Meanwhile, Japan reeled from six minutes of trembling.

Analyzing seismometer data, Grant worked to determine the depth of the quake — the closer to the surface, the greater the risk of damage. Based on its coastal location, off Honshu, tsunami risk was also high. The Japanese needed to prepare for more that might come.

Within 20 minutes, all the team’s analyses were public: Everyone from the White House to scientists to the public throughout the world knew what the team knew.

With the quake’s exact location and magnitude, the NEIC released information about its estimated impact, including potential causalities and economic loss for the area after the shaking, based on its existing structural environment and population numbers.

At magnitude 9.1, the earthquake — soon known as the Tohoku earthquake — was the largest ever recorded in Japan and the fourth most powerful worldwide. Within an hour, tsunami waves devastated the coast.

Ultimately it became clear that the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was damaged and a nuclear meltdown was underway. Nearly 16,000 people died in the quake’s aftermath, and the NEIC located nearly 2,400 aftershocks of magnitude 4.0 or greater in Japan in the following year.

“It was very intense,” said geophysicist Carrieann Bedwell, a �� Denver grad who did most of her high-level geology studies at �� Boulder and was on duty at NEIC the night of the quake.

An earthquake can happen near the surface or as deep as 400 miles inside the planet. Its magnitude determines whether people will feel it or not.

In the aftermath of catastrophic earthquakes, the NEIC, where geophysicist Julie Dutton (Geol’97) also is a member of the team, records every detail about the event, including specific location, damage, casualties, buildings destroyed, landslides and tsunamis.

“Nearly every seismologist in the world is linked to [their] system via text messages,” said �� Boulder geological sciences professor and earthquake expert Roger Bilham. “For damaging earthquakes greater than magnitude 6.5 that have occurred near cities, it is often possible to assess damage remotely many days or weeks before local communities can do so.”

Devastating earthquakes are rare, but earthquakes are not, keeping the team busy.

Worldwide there are on average about 1,000 earthquakes of notable magnitude (about 4.0) each month, according to USGS. An earthquake occurs when two of earth’s tectonic plates suddenly slip by each other on a fault, a break in the earth’s crust. Bound-up energy is then released in the form of seismic waves, which shake the ground as they move through it.

Seismometers, instruments set up worldwide to detect and document earthquakes, record all seismic activity. Scientists use their data in real-time and in subsequent analyses.

An earthquake can happen near the surface or as deep as 400 miles inside the planet. Its magnitude determines whether people will feel it or not. Bedwell once noticed a trace amount of movement in her Golden office from a magnitude 5.3 earthquake that occurred in Telluride, more than 300 miles away.

Worldwide there are on average about 1,000 earthquakes of notable magnitude (about 4.0) each month.

“I was so excited about that one,” said Bedwell, a mother of two who works the night shift full time. “My earthquake notification was going off on my computer and all of the sudden, it said ‘Colorado.’”

All U.S. earthquakes with a magnitude of 2.5 or greater are publicly announced by the team, as well as earthquakes abroad of 4.0 magnitude or greater. For bigger quakes — such as 2016’s magnitude 6.6 quake in population-dense Italy — the team has a direct call line to the White House Situation Room, the U.S. Departments of State and Interior and Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“They are expecting our phone call,” said Grant, an adventurer who spent years traveling the world studying earthquakes beginning in the 1980s and has worked in the NEIC for nearly 16 years. “They want to know if we have any other information on damage or casualties.”

When the team isn’t compiling and releasing information real-time, they catalog smaller earthquake readings. Researchers and universities worldwide use their information for hazard maps, fault models and to infer what’s happening inside the earth.

“For small earthquakes, it is important to know where they occurred, since sometimes small earthquakes offer clues about future trends, especially near volcanos,” said ��’s Bilham.

If you look back on the last 40 years, this is normal." — Dale Grant

There is no way to predict an earthquake — nor, say Grant and Bilham, will there ever be, as it’s impossible to predict when stress in fault regions will rupture.

“In some rare cases, we have quakes in the middle of plates that should never have quakes but still do,” said Grant. “These are still not well understood.”

However, it’s possible to evaluate where a damaging earthquake may be overdue based on past fault line activity, said Bilham, who studies historical earthquakes and earthquakes’ effects on cities, especially in the Himalayas and India. Certain areas — such as Japan, Indonesia, China and Iran — are more prone because of their density of active faults.

“This is actually more important than prediction, because you can build better houses,” he said.

For Grant and many others, the seismically active San Andreas fault on the West Coast remains a serious concern.

“We’ve had some big quakes in San Diego and the San Francisco area, but Los Angeles has been really quiet,” he said, and a big earthquake in that area during our lifetime is a real possibility.

If it seems like earthquakes have been in the news a lot — Italy, New Zealand and Fiji have all had serious ones recently — it’s not because they’re happening more often, according to Grant. Midrange magnitude quakes may be getting attention simply because there are more seismometers gathering data, he said.

“If you look back on the last 40 years, this is normal,” said Grant.

But as long as we live on this planet, we’ll be dealing with them.

“It’s just the earth doing its thing,” he said.

Christie Sounart (Jour’12) is associate editor of the Coloradan.

Source: USGS

When a major earthquake strikes, �� alumni shift into high gear.

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Bringing Down the House

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Bringing Down the House Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/01/2010 - 00:00

Jennie Lay

Earthquake-prone cities like Kathmandu in Nepal, Japan’s Tokyo and Turkey’s Istanbul, have fast-growing populations that could suffer devastating damage when a large earthquake hits.

For his third weekend jaunt to Haiti in less than two months, ��-Boulder earthquake expert Roger Bilham packed in a frenzy. On the eve of his departure, Haiti’s unnecessary loss of human lives weighed on him as he prepared to address a meeting of reconstruction policy-makers in Port-au-Prince.

Roger Bilham. Photo by Ken Abbott.

Since the turn of the century, earthquakes — including tsunamis — have directly or indirectly claimed the lives of more than 640,000 people, four times more than in the preceding two decades, and proportionately more than the global increase in population would anticipate, according to Bilham.

But many of these deaths were preventable. Ill-constructed buildings have become weapons of mass destruction, Bilhams says. If buildings are not made earthquake resistant, the death toll will continue to rise as cities grow in population, he projects.

Tokyo, Japan

Bilham is one of a large number of ��-Boulder experts in structural geology and geophysics who do critical earthquake studies around the world. These scientists are making detailed pictures of the Earth’s crust and mantle, using Global Positioning System (GPS) and satellite radar to see how earthquakes alter the Earth, and even studying tectonics in relation to climate change over time. Bilham takes his research in another direction by studying the seismic future of cities, calling attention to serious social issues plaguing many earthquake-prone areas.

There are more than 150 cities with populations of more than one million, and two-thirds of them are in earthquake zones. There are likely another 500 cities in harm’s way with populations around a half-million.

As one of the first seismologists to visit Haiti’s devastation, Bilham returned home to write a Feb.18 opinion piece for the journal Nature. In it he pleads for enforcement of earthquake-resistant construction.

“It is time to formulate plans for a new United Nations mission— teams of inspectors to ensure that people do not construct buildings designed to kill their occupants,” he wrote. “The catastrophic earthquakes that have occurred since 1999 in Turkey, Taiwan, Sumatra, Kashmir and Sichuan demonstrate that elementary engineering guidelines for earthquake resistance in crucial civil structures (schools, hospitals and fire stations) have been alien concepts to local authorities or have been ignored.”

Illustrative of Bilham’s research is the contrast in loss of life between Chile’s 8.8 earthquake on Feb. 27 that was 500 times stronger than Haiti’s 7.0 on Jan. 12. Haiti suffered more than 230,000 deaths, while Chile’s quake killed about 500.

Kathmandu, Nepal

Bilham emphasizes that quake devastation casts a global burden that could be “significantly reduced” with minimal construction guidelines. Eighty-five percent of all deaths from earthquakes occur from Spain to Indonesia, and every house in that belt needs resistance, he says.

“(But) if your country lives on corruption with bribery on every level, it’s almost certainly going to be prevalent in the building industry,” he says. “Construction is the most lucrative industry in the world. I’m a bit disappointed because the world of engineering knows exactly how to build [earthquake-resistant] buildings.”

The greatest hurdle is no longer in designing cities to be earthquake resistant, but finding a means to keep corruption and bribery out of the lucrative construction industry, so building regulations and codes are applied properly.

A country’s transparency index ranking has a direct relationship to the number of people killed by earthquakes, according to Transparency International, the global nonpartisan anti-corruption group. Again, Haiti’s and Chile’s experiences in weathering the recent quakes provide a glaring example. Haiti ranks 168th on the world corruption index while Chile ranks 25th. Eighty percent of Haiti’s population lives below the poverty line versus 18.2 percent in Chile.

Istanbul, Turkey

“In Chile, the death rate was remarkably small for such a large quake over such a wide region,” he says. “It tells you that earthquake-resistant construction really pays if you’re interested in saving lives.”

Bilham points to Kathmandu in Nepal,Tehran in Iran and Turkey’s Istanbul as primary examples of cities with seismic activity and insufficient building codes.

“Although we can do it right . . . human nature is battling human intelligence and integrity,” he says.

In 1800 Beijing became the first city since ancient Rome with a population exceeding 1 million. Urban populations have increased tenfold since 1900, and many of the megacities are on earthquake faults. Courtesy Roger Bilham.

Transport in and out of Haiti nearly came to a halt after the earthquake struck, but getting scientists in to study the moving fault was clearly a priority.

“We are rushing around trying to measure the adjustments to the earthquake,” Bilham says. “It set up a new set of stresses that are redistributing themselves.”

A secondary earthquake will most certainly occur, he says, forecasting a 7.2 to 7.5 magnitude.

“There’s a lot to worry about with future seismicity,” he says.

Curiously, the top three or four surface kilometers along the Caribbean and North American plates did not slip during the Haitian earthquake. But measurements indicate there were 10 to 20 centimeters of uplift. While a 50-kilometer section of the fault slipped deep in the Earth, the surface could still be creeping and trying to catch up — a best-case scenario since there would be no jolt, Bilham says. He’s actively observing the fault using a broad array of instruments that measure to 1 millimeter accuracy, including GPS, radar, seismometers and the newly installed tide gauges he hauled down in his carry-on bags.

Bilham has creep meters on the mighty San Andreas Fault in California, GPS in the Himalaya, tiltmeters in Italy and a team of students working to understand the tectonics and strain changes in India, Pakistan and Baluchistan. That India-Asia plate boundary scenario mirrors Haiti.

“It’s exactly the same thing, moving at the same rate and velocity . . . and like Haiti it hasn’t had a quake in the
last 200 years,” he says.

Scientists are able to forecast earthquakes at a particular point on a fault, and even their magnitude — but predicting exactly when they will happen is impossible. That’s why building codes become critical.

“Saying there will be a magnitude 7.5 earthquake sometime in the next 30 years in Los Angeles is helpful because they have to keep their building codes organized and up-to-date and they have to build accordingly,” Bilham says. “Such a forecast was made for Haiti . . . but that was only made five years ago. Nothing could happen in those five years.”

Earthquake-prone cities like Kathmandu in Nepal, Japan’s Tokyo and Turkey’s Istanbul, have fast-growing populations that could suffer devastating damage when a large earthquake hits.

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Earthquake

Campus News Briefs — Summer 2018

Ralphie-Shaped Swimming Pool

The Violinist

Heard Around Campus

A Lover’s Touch

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