Earthquakes In The Late 1800s And Early 1900s

James Hutton was the first scientist to address the Earth was millions of years old, as well as alive and is continuously being formed. Charles Lyell popularized uniformitarianism, and believed the Earth was being shaped by slow moving forces. Alfred Wegener introduced the foundation for the theory of continental drift. Wegener was one of the first to recognize and have an understanding of how the Earth works which required data and information from earth sciences. In the 1960s, the theory for the continental drift became known as the theory of plate tectonics or plate building.

On April 18, 1906, in San Francisco, California there was an earthquake that was a major geological disaster that affected people in many ways. According to www.History.com, San Francisco had a population of around 400,000, and 3,000 people. The earthquake destroyed over 28,000 buildings and around 250,000 people became homeless. The damage costs were $500 in 1906. The magnitude of the earthquake was estimated to be a 7.8, but only lasted for 1 minute. The earthquake started many fires that burned for days and destroyed around 500 city blocks. The earthquake could be felt from Los Angeles to southern Oregon, and in central Nevada. This earthquake was caused by the transform plate boundary from the pacific and North American plates. The 2 plates rubbed against each other creating the earthquake. (decodedscience.org).

Over more than 50 decades there has been multiple earthquakes that have been caused by the activity that takes place beneath and above the surface of the earth. For every earthquake there are various effects and consequences, these are generally not preventable but teachable moments. As we study and explore landforms we learn and better understand how today 's structures came about, what took place decades ago and where do we go from here. Thanks to the technology and inquiring minds we are able to study past events like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the 1964 Alaska earthquake. In comparing these two events we can get an overview of what happened and better prepare ourselves for something like that in the future.

Did you know in 1906 an earthquake with a 7.1 on the Richter scale hit San Francisco? Not only that the damages were huge, the fire resulted from the earthquake burned down twenty-eight thousand buildings alone! But, the earthquake made around two hundred and twenty-five thousand residents homeless which was more than half the amount of residents in San Francisco at the time. Also, if we presume that there were four people in a house then that’s fifty-six thousand two hundred and twenty-five housing that's been demolished, oh you might have noticed, but that is just a 7.1 earthquake which isn’t even the strongest earthquake to hit the world! Now here is an interesting question, what makes these earthquakes so dangerous? Or rather how does earthquake destroy things anyway because you know that earthquakes are just the shifting of the earth's crust.

According to Brillinger (2011), earthquakes were recorded after happening to get an earthquake statistics. Earthquakes may be large or small, serious or trivial; however, the higher the magnitude, the greater the damage to a particular location and the surrounding area. Earthquakes can also create other natural disasters, like tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, which bring more dangerous disasters than earthquakes. Statistics of earthquakes can be extremely important for it can give governments plans to do rebuilding after earthquakes, can help scientists better detect and anticipate earthquakes, and can provide more information to public to learn about earthquakes. It is helpful to take a look at existed statistics; from the website of US government,

The earthquakes above give a brief glimpse into the importance of analyzing past and present fault configurations. If scientists could make a breakthrough in this area perhaps we could better predict earthquake activity and better prepare ourselves if it is deemed a potential disaster is looming.

GeoCosmo is a non-profit research institute devoted to understanding and formalising the field of pre-earthquake science. The team comprises of a number of multidisciplinary and highly accomplished scientists whose mission is to understand pre-earthquake science with the goal of establishing a true global earthquake forecast system that could save billions of dollars and thousands of lives each year (GeoCosmo, 2015). NASA scientist, Dr. Friedemann Freund, is the chairman of GeoCosmo’s science team and was propelled into earthquake science when he discovered his theory of positive holes. Although pre-earthquake science has been deemed inherently impossible (Kagan, 1997; Geller, 1997), Freund has proposed and tested a number of theories that

Earthquakes are a sudden and violent shaking of the ground, sometimes causing great destruction, as a result of movements within the earth's crust. You can’t know when or how much the damage of the shock will be. I think that predicting earthquakes is a bad science because of how often and not they happen.

The amplitude of the ground motion appear due to the lines that occur caused by the pendulum. Many series of earthquakes accident happened across the world and killed thousand of people. Therefore it made more mechanical devices were created.

Geologists began plotting the locations of earthquakes on a map and a pattern emerged showing clusters of earthquakes along the ocean’s ridges and trenches. This led to the knowledge that movement must be occurring beneath the ridges

At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the people of San Francisco were abruptly awaken to one of the world’s most expensive and impacting earthquakes of the 20th century. The magnitude of the earthquake is debatable, ranging from 7.7 to as high as 8.2. However, the most accepted Richter measurement is 7.9. This is debated because Charles Richtor developed his scale in 1935, after the killer quake. The main shock epicenter occurred offshore 3.2 km from the city, near Mussel Rock. It ruptured along the San Andreas Fault northward and southward for 476 km (296 miles). The quake was felt from Oregon to Los Angeles, inland as far as Nevada. Though the earthquake was impacting in itself, it lasted less than a minute and the most damage was done by the resulting fire that lasted 4 days. The earthquake bears inexhaustible remembrance as one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States and has had lasting social, fiscal, and political impact.

The first major earthquake in this series was in December 1811 where the center of the earthquake was said to be started in northeast Arkansas; the people of Arkansas were the first to be shake. How did all this start? Earthquakes start when rock beneath the earth’s surface shifts in a swift and sudden way. I believe we see the earth changing overtime, but its overtime where as an earthquake is not. An earthquake is under the surface and we only see the effects of one. How do we know the New Madrid Earthquake occurred? It’s a tough question, but there’s enough documentation at our fingertips to answer the question. Many of the people that lived during the earthquake shared their experience, Crist wasn’t the only one. And that’s how we can say it’s

Early people had many explanations for earthquakes. In one theory, the Earth was attached to a platform. The sfin obn and stars revolved around the Earth and it's platform. "When the platform moved earthquakes happened. In one culture, this platform was a great spider, in other cultures, this platform was a giant catfish, tortoise, or whale. OAristotles four elements of the universe-air earth fire and water were also used to explain earthquakes. As hot masses of underground air struggled to escape the ground shook. According to scientists today, most of the worlds earthquakes are caused by the mobility of the Earths surface. It is estimated that there is 1 great earthquake 10 major earthquakes 1,000 damaging shocks and 100,000 minor shocks

Where are earthquakes and volcanoes found? Volcanoes and earthquakes have been known to man for thousands of years, but until fairly recently their distribution on the globe was thought of as totally haphazard with each event an isolated phenomenon. Yet, if the positioning of the world’s volcanoes is considered, it can be seen that most volcanoes are situated within several hundred kilometres of the sea, and moreover, that the regions of volcanic activity are concentrated into several girdles or bands circling the Earth. Most notable amongst these are the so-called “Ring of Fire” surrounding the Pacific Ocean (see figure 1), and the more tenuous and disjointed line running down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean. Throughout geological history, igneous activity has been restricted in the same way, as studies of ancient igneous rocks show.

Earthquakes, they destroy, kill, and demolish. Earthquakes have been recorded for a long time. Records have been and always will continue to be recorded for centuries. Earthquakes are recorded by instruments called seismographs. The recording that they make is called a seismogram. These drum sized tubes of decades of earthquakes are more than likely stored in science labs. Earthquakes however, are the releasing of stored energy from plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is the study of 7 massive pieces of rock called continents. They build up energy from pressurized rock that is pushed against each other. When it releases it is like ripples in the water but those ripples are about 10 times the size, plus the waves can go through the earth and hit outer parts of the earth on the other side. Yet, because of different types of materials, the waves will never pass straight through the earth. The thing that powers plate tectonics is convection currents.