It’s been 50 years since the Magnitude 9.2 Great Alaskan Earthquake so dramatically altered people’s perceptions of the power of earthquakes. Check out this short video from the USGS:
[Source: YouTube via AEG Insider. Image: YouTube]
On 22 October, 2012, an Italian court convicted six internationally respected scientists of manslaughter. The scientists Enzo Boschi, Giulio Selvaggi, Franco Barberi, Claudio Eva, Mauro Dolce, and Gian Michele Calvi have been sentenced to prison terms, barred from public office, and ordered to pay court costs and damages.
Their offense could have been avoided by precisely predicting the timing and nature of the tragic 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila. However, such precise, short-term earthquake prediction of the type evidently sought by L’Aquila is currently impossible. Because of the ungainly complexity of earthquake systems, knowledge of physical details is incomplete; the diverse expressions of earthquake processes deliver contradictory messages; and measurements of earthquake phenomena can be inaccurate. Glaringly, the indictment accused the scientists of having provided “incomplete”, “contradictory”, and “inaccurate” information.
[Editor] Click through for the rest of the press release from the GSA. [/Editor]
A magnitude 7.2 earthquake in the Baja region of Mexico on April 4, 2010 (Easter Sunday) caused significant damage in the towns of Mexicali and Calexico and was felt as far away as Phoenix, San […]
Audio files and PowerPoint presentations from an ENR-moderated panel discussion on June 8, 2010 discussing US seismic codes in the context of the observations made from the recent Haiti and Chile earthquakes. The 2010 earthquakes […]
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