Isn't that amazing? Look at the water gooshing up, and the swaying dirt. Holy cow. I'd rather be in open space, even liquefying open space, in a big quake, than in the middle of a city, or *sigh* within the first few blocks of a Japanese coastal town, but still, that just makes the bottoms of my feet crawl to watch.
In the San Francisco bay area, we keep talking about building on marshes. Look at that ground! You are going to have a hard time convincing me to live on that.
I have a big Japanquake post in notepad on my desktop, just waiting for some more anchor tags and rounding out with citations, and I will finish it today. This doesn't really fit in there, though, so I'm sticking it here now. The baby is due this weekend (but might come a little late) so I'm a tad bit distracted.
3 comments:
What we didn't have here was the tidal effect along with the liquefaction - before the guy in the video said it, I'd already guessed he was on reclaimed land.
Interesting video - reminds me that I still need to upload my photos of the silt volcanoes in our park. More bubbling up, less sloshing.
I'd love to see (and link from here?) your silt volcano photos.
We have a fair bit of land like yours here, basic alluvium, but we also have far too much reclaimed land. Maps of the bay from a century ago have a markedly different coastline in some parts of the region than they do now, and fortunately, we put the brakes on -- some plans from the fifties had a good third of what's still bay (and one of the richest estuaries in the world) filled in for development.
So we have bedrock, fill, quaternary (and older) alluvium. Our weird damage maps from the Loma Prieta quake reflect the underlying geology quite strongly.
Wow...what a surreal sight. I can't imagine witnessing it in person, thanks for the video. A reminder that we can't just change the landscape to fit our needs at the moment and think nature will cooperate indefinitely!
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