preview

The Alaska Earthquake Research Paper

Decent Essays

An earthquake with a magnitude of 9.2 occurred in the northwestern state of Alaska in 1964. It was so powerful that it made fishing boats in Louisiana, which is a southeastern state in the U.S., sink. Magnitude is the amount of energy that’s given off during an earthquake. What exactly is an earthquake?
Our planet has four main layers, which are: the inner core, outer core, mantle, and crust. The inner core is the center, or middle, of Earth. The crust is the top layer, and it’s the layer we walk on. Both the mantle’s top area and the entire crust have many pieces in them, kind of like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The pieces that make up the crust and mantle are called tectonic plates. They’re always slowly moving, and they can slide past each other or even bump into one another. The edges of these pieces, or plates, are called plate boundaries. They have lots of faults, which are the surfaces where they slip past each other, and these faults are where most earthquakes happen. …show more content…

When the plate moves far enough, a fault unsticks, or breaks apart the edges, which causes an earthquake. Basically, earthquakes are what happens when two plates suddenly bump into one another or slide past each other, usually along a fault.
The reason the earth shakes during an earthquake is because of stored energy. When the edges are stuck together but the plates continue to move, the energy that would usually make the pieces slide past each other becomes stored or saved. When the rough edges unstick, this stored energy is released in every direction in seismic

Get Access