look at what liquefaction can do

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.

Do I corrupt my friends or do they corrupt me?

My friend Andy sent me this IM conversation with our friend Paul:

Paul: what is the tensile strength of ROCK AND ROLL quick I need to build this city on it
Andy: The tensile strength of ROCK AND ROLL isn't relevant. Unless you planned to build this city out of it.
Andy: Since you want to build the city *on* Rock and Roll, you'd want to know it's ductility.
Andy: The ductility determines how big the buildings can be without risking sinkage. also, in earthquake zones, low-ductility Rock and Roll would lead to liquifaction, damaging entire regions of the city.

I might be weird, but my friends might be weirder.

At least the birds got a few extra mud-critters for lunch

This covers the first two-thirds or so of a tsunami surge cycle at Point Loma, in San Diego. A small tsunami sloshed around the entire Pacific Ocean on February 27, 2010, in response to an 8.8 earthquake in Chile.

As much as that this video is nearly ten minutes long, I wish it had been longer. I'm not sure I'd want it edited, either -- I like the everydayness of it, the way people are talking to each other, and their wonder at the water.

I'm working on a bigger post about Chile, which I'll post in 12 hours or so.

quickie - SF after the big quake

Strangemaps shows San Francisco immediately post '06 quake. I love comparing old geography to modern geography, to see how humans have changed things. Look how China Basin once had so much water, and is now mostly filled in.

The epicenter (long thought to be at Olema, at the neck of Point Reyes) was actually a bit left of where the P in "Pacific Ocean" is, on this map, just offshore where the San Andreas goes into the sea near the Daly City/SF line.

Earthquakes simultaneously fascinate and terrify me. I can read just so much about them, and then I have to stop. Seismology is one of my favorite hobby fields, but I don't think I could study it as a focus in geology without becoming a gibbering mass of anxiety.