Kuril Islands Earthquake M7.3 January 15, 2009

  4 Responses to “Kuril Islands Earthquake M7.3 January 15, 2009”

1. 

   RC Tucker says:

   January 19, 2009 at 23:42

   Seems we are having a lot of bigger quakes this year. The year is isn’t even a month old and there have been a lot with a magnitude greater than 4 globally in countries such as Japan, Greece, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Costa Rica, Philippines, USA and Indonesia. Research into precursors really needs to be taken seriously so we can at least attempt to save lives. …

   [promotion for electromagnetic prediction of earthquakes removed]
   sorry, my blog – my rules : see my comment below
   hypocentre
2. 

   Mesila says:

   January 22, 2009 at 06:09

   I am interested in earthquakes myself and though I would find things like “electromagnetic earthquake prediction” duly scoffworthy my interest stretches into non-scientific areas which I will gladly keep to myself.

   I do have a question, though. I found this blog after the little Firefox eQuake widget detected several small-to-medium quakes in a row on 21 January. I now note that these quakes have been happening here all through January.

   I live in San Francisco, and even in this quake-famous place we get maybe one magnitude 4 to 5 quake a year, sometimes two. I’m curious about what makes that Kuril Island area so seismically active and will be looking around to see if there are any active volcanoes in the region.

   Thanks for writing this blog – I’m going to start following it.
3. 

   hypocentre says:

   January 22, 2009 at 08:38

   Thanks Mesila. The Kuril Islands are caused by the subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath what is technically still geologically speaking part of the North American Plate. The islands themselves are a chain of volcanoes forming what is known as a volcanic arc. The 20 main islands have 45 volcanoes combined.
4. 

   hypocentre says:

   January 20, 2009 at 00:31

   “Seems we are having a lot of bigger quakes this year” is a weasel expression. We have had three magnitude 7+ earthquakes so far this year (and two of those were related), entirely within the random scatter. See the diagram of historic activity from my recent blog post here. You will see that statistically we are overdue a few large earthquakes.

   Precursors do need to be taken seriously, but by proper, verifiable science. I’m sorry, I can not be seen to endorse such unverified techniques on this blog. The way to get the technique accepted is by publishing in advance verifiable predictions (specific geographic, time and magnitude windows) that can be checked against random chance.

   The way your comment starts looks ill-informed and designed to be misleading. Prove me wrong with some genuine prediction hits better than chance and I will gladly blog about it.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.