June 12, 2015 • 47 mins
Will we ever be able to predict earthquakes? If not, how can we better prepare for them? We delve into the past, present and future of seismic detection and protection.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Hi, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks at the future and says, I feel the
Earth move under my feet. I'm Lauren voc Obama, and
(00:21):
I'm Joe McCormick, and our regular host Jonathan Strickland is
not with us today as having a beautiful vacation. Yes,
hopefully not along the fault line anywhere, which introduces today's topic,
which is earthquakes. We after we did our super volcano episode,
we received a couple of messages, one from Jacob via
Twitter and one from Matt via Facebook, who both wrote
(00:43):
in to request an episode about another big disaster, earthquakes. Yeah,
and not just about what earthquakes are and how they work,
of course, but seeing as this is Forward Thinking, what
are we going to do about them in the future?
Will we ever be able to predict earthquakes and understand
what causes them, when and where they're going to happen,
and how to stop them and protect against them? Oh? Sure?
(01:05):
And especially that protect protect against them thing, because even
if we can't predict them, how can we prepare ourselves
better for them? Sure? And I'm sure One of the
reasons people want to know about earthquakes right around now
is the grand trailer for this movie that's out this
summer called San Andreas. Yeah. Yeah, that came out on
(01:26):
May nine. I believe it features the rock right. It's
not a grand theft auto movie. It is a movie
about a big earthquake, in the tradition of other movies
about big disasters where stuff falls over. Yeah, lots of
stuff falls over, as it turns out. I have not
seen this movie. I'm probably not going to, but I
(01:46):
gotta be honest. I saw the trailer when I was
in the theater watching Mad Max Fury Road, and it
was hilarious. I I have to say that I laughed
through that entire trailer, and I'm not I feel I
felt kind of bad out it at the time because
although I knew that those digital people were fine, like, like,
no digital people were harmed in the making of those
(02:07):
digital effects shots. Earthquakes are very serious matters, of course,
right there are terrifying and unpredictable attack upon our placid
urban lives and and a lot of times they seem
to come out of nowhere and they can kill thousands
of people, and so of course earthquakes are worth understanding
to figure out, not just for the pure science of it,
(02:27):
but to save lives. Oh of course. Yeah. And and
the thing, of course about the ground that we stand
on is that it is not solid at all. Well,
I mean, i'd say it is solid, but it's not.
It's not what stationary should we yes, and not just
in the way that that planet Earth is like a spaceship, uh,
(02:49):
that the ground is always moving. Earth's crust is made
up of continent sized slabs of rock called tectonic plates,
which are constantly moving and rubbing up again to each other,
pushing over under one another, or moving slightly apart. And
that's fine, that's great, that's I don't know if that's fine. Yeah,
(03:10):
it's fine. Well, it's normally on a day to day basis,
it's usually fine. Um. But sometimes those those edges, those
faults can crack or slip against each other abruptly, causing
these very powerful vibrations to shake the edges of those
plates in in patterns radiating outward from the point of
that slippery origin. Um. And those vibrations a k a.
(03:32):
Seismic waves are what we feel as earthquakes. Yeah, I
was trying to think of a good analogy for how
earthquakes are created in a at a scale that we
can experiment with. And I think this sort of works.
If you put on some rubber soled shoes and then
try to walk along on say like a hardwood floor
or like a basketball gym floor, without lifting your feet,
(03:55):
just scooting your shoes along, well, you'll probably notice if
or shoe scooting experiences anything like mine, is that for
a certain length of the slide, the shoe will move
kind of smoothly, but every now and then it will
sort of get caught for a second. The forward momentum
will briefly pause, and then you'll experience a sort of
sudden jolt forward, sometimes accompanied by the classic vibratory sounds
(04:18):
of scooting, scoot, And these vibrations you can think of
as being kind of analogous to what's happening when these
plates are scooting against each other. Sure, and and researchers
think that it's a it's a build up of potential
energy over periods of time that are not, to our
knowledge predictable yet. Um, but we'll address that question later
(04:42):
in this episode. Yes, yes, but but earthquakes happen constantly.
Oh yeah, yeah. The U S Geological Survey estimates that
as many as one point three million earthquakes happen every year.
And that's just the ones that are over a two
point oh on the Richter scale, which is the point
at which human can feel them. Right, And then it's
not even just the primary effects of the vibration of
(05:06):
the ground of the earthquake, right, Earthquakes have lots of
secondary causes that can become disasters on their own. Oh,
of course, there's a tsunami, and avalanches and landslides and liquification,
which is a thing where solid ground starts acting like
a liquid which uh, and and flooding and you know,
the collapse of human made structures and the lack of
(05:29):
resources and the aftermath that ensues and all of these
terrible things. Of course. Yeah, So we have very good
reason to want to understand how earthquakes work and what
we can do about them. So so I figured we
should start by going back a little bit and looking
at how our understanding of earthquakes developed over time. Yeah, yeah, what,
(05:50):
I bet people had some interesting ideas about earthquakes and
ancient times. Well, you'd be right. So the ancient world,
of course, experienced plenty of earthquakes, just as many earthqua
wakes as we do today, and without the scientific framework
to explain them, they came up with some pretty weird
and sometimes funny explanations. So religious spiritual magical explanations were
(06:15):
extremely common all over the world West and the East.
People sort of explained earthquakes as often as divine punishments
or divine im portents. Gods were either like giving a
warning or were angry and issuing punishment. I found this
one funny example of both the magical explanations given by
(06:36):
the ancients and some of the practical explanations. And these
are chronicled in the writings of the Roman historian Ombianus Marcellinus,
who is a soldier by trade, and he lived during
the fourth century CE, and he wrote a surviving history
at the time, and and he he has a little
discourse on earthquakes, and what he says is that when
(06:57):
you're talking about earthquakes, quote, in all priests the ceremonies,
whether ritual or pontifical, care is taken not at such
times to name one god more than another, for fear
of impiety, since it is quite uncertain which God causes
these visitations. I love it. They didn't want to they
didn't want to assign blame without all the facts. Well
(07:22):
that's that's good. I mean, you know, that's covering your bass.
I approve of the hypothesis format of finding knowledge. Sure,
and then of course you had sort of spiritual or
supernatural explanations in in the East as well. So like
some ancient Chinese explanations seem to have read earthquakes again
as divine punishments importance. But to continue with what our
(07:44):
historian Marcellinus had to say, this was great because he
also chronicled what some of the dominant practical explanations of
the day were. So it wasn't that everybody just had
this religious explanation. There were also the ancient natural philosophers
who were like, no, let's figure this out. Truly, something's
going on under the earth. I mean, Aristotle surely had
(08:05):
something to say about it. Oh yes, So quoting again
from Marcellinus, and all of these quotes from Marcellinus are
from the seedy Youngae translation in English. But as the
various opinions among which Aristotle waivers and hesitates suggest earthquakes
are engendered either in small caverns under the earth because
(08:25):
of the waters pouring through them with a more rapid
motion than usual, or, as Anaxagoras affirms, they arise from
the force of wind penetrating the lower parts of the Earth,
which when they have got down to the encrusted solid mass,
finding no vent holes shake those portions in their solid
state into which they have got entrance when in a
(08:47):
state of solution. And this is corroborated by the observation
that at such times no breezes of wind are felt
by us above the ground, because the winds are occupied
in the lowest recesses of the earth. Oh that's delightful.
That is that is so delightfully incorrect. I adore that. Yeah. So,
I think the idea that was being propagated at the
(09:09):
time by Aristotle and some of the other well not
at the time by Aristotle, but had previously been propagated
by Aristotle and then continued to be believed by many
people was something having to do with the exchange of
gases like wind and evaporation under the earth. And sometimes
when like gases or evaporating uh vapors would get trapped
(09:30):
under the earth, sometimes they'd be released in a big burst. Sure. Sure,
Although I suppose it is interesting that they were thinking
about liquids and the motion that propagates in liquids because
earthquakes are in fact caused by by waves of energy,
which at their time was analogous. So analogous, which yes,
(09:51):
that thing. Yeah, but but I'm sure they probably weren't
quite thinking yet of the idea of propagation of waves
through rock, which must have seemed imposs of all So,
as with many subject areas see cosmology and physics and
plenty of things, Aristotle's ideas held sway for a long
(10:14):
long time in Europe and in the Islamic world, despite
the fact that they were super super wrong. Um Like,
don't get me wrong about Aristotle. I'm not saying he
was stupid. He was obviously a super smart guy of
the ancient world. I guess just everybody must have assumed
he was right about everything. That's what they did. It's
(10:35):
kind of funny if if you've never done this, like
look up what Galileo overthrew about Aristotelian physics, and it'll
just kind of make you wonder, like, how did people
miss this for so long? It seemed so easy to
figure out. But anyway, Aristotle's ideas about earthquakes hell were
very popular until the early modern period in Europe, and
(10:56):
then some other physical explanations for earthquakes began to take
hold in some circles, like explanations involving fire and explosive properties.
Just one example like what if iron is reacting with
sulfur deep under the ground and this explosive chemical reaction
is causing earthquakes? Even kind of makes sense because you
(11:19):
can see like, okay, earthquakes sometimes or happening around fault lines,
which they didn't know about then, but but around volcanoes
they certainly knew about, yeah, bingo, and that volcanoes have
this explosive fiery element. Eventually, however, we started to get
some more correct ideas about seismology, and according to a
(11:41):
brief history of seismology given by a Duncan car Agony,
which was my source on most of this historical stuff,
one of the main events that seemed to trigger the
modern era of earthquake research was the Lisbon earthquake of
seventeen fifty five, which was huge and had crazy effects
throughout are up, including causing uh Sasia's or Seisha's. I
(12:03):
believe it's satias, which are standing waves in these enclosed
bodies of water. So if you've ever seen standing waves
in water, it's where instead of the waves propagating along
the surface, they sort of bob back and forth. Looks
really crazy, especially if you were going to see that
in like the lake Oh yeah, yeah, or I don't know,
(12:24):
I'm picturing the scene in Jurassic Park where where the
the cup of water is just going but but but
but not like that, just continually bounce back and forth. Yeah,
I do not want creepy so this so anyway, this
event caused some writers at the time to sort of
see the effects of an earthquake as pressure waves propagating
(12:44):
outward from a source through the elasticity of the rock
in the Earth's crust, kind of like sound emanates through
a solid medium. And from this time through the people
began to study earthquakes more scientifically. But you can kind
of understand the faculty they would have, because think about it,
how do you study earthquakes. You can't like cause an earthquake,
(13:07):
especially not with the technology of the time, and you
can't predict when they're going to happen to set up
your equipment, So it was very much an exercise in
sort of gathering what data you could after the event
and then trying to sort of do backwards experiments by
analyzing the data you had available to you, which is
(13:28):
very difficult to do, oh sure, especially right given the
technology of the time and the lack of electricity, let
alone computers and all of that stuff. Although the first
step I would say was around the mid eighteen hundreds
when one Robert Mallett actually coined the term seismology. Yeah,
and he also sort of brought a quantitative approach to
studying wave propagation through the earth. He was big into
(13:51):
looking at maps and collecting all kinds of data and
analyzing it quantitatively. But then, of course, one of the
big things that's led to modern era of studying wave
propagation through the Earth has been the development of seismometers
or seismometers as one might say for some reason. Uh yeah,
(14:11):
those being machines that detect seismic waves as seism graphs,
which I think is the more frequently used term in
in in popular culture at any rate, are our seismometers
that record those waves, and many seismometers are in fact
seismic graphs. Yeah, it would obviously not be very helpful
to detect waves and then forget about them. Uh no um.
(14:37):
And and actually there's historical records of these from from
way before the eighteen hundreds. Yeah. I think we don't
fully understand exactly everything about this ancient one. But the
idea is that the first mechanical seismometer was created in
ancient China by the Han Chinese inventor in general all
purpose genius Chang Hang in the one thirty two CE.
(15:01):
Oh goodness. And supposedly this device could tell the operator
from which direction the vibrations of an earthquake originated, and
even on at least one occasion anecdotally it recorded an
earthquake that humans could not feel, so it was like
too faint for humans to know been one. But the
machine said, hey, there's an earthquake over here. Cool uh
(15:25):
during that wave of interest wave huh um. In the
in the eighteen hundreds, um, several mechanical models were produced
and kind of refined. Um. By nineteen o three we
saw the first electromagnetic seismometer, and then digital equipment and
and data processing technology started to be developed around the
(15:46):
nineteen seventies or so, we could probably do an entire
like series of episodes about seismometer technology. And maybe that's
the thing. I'll poke Jonathan and see if he wants
to do some episodes about about that on tech stuff,
because there's so much out there and it's it's kind
of fascinating. Maybe it would be better in video because
it's a whole lot of like pictures of pendulums working
(16:07):
in different ways and spring loaded things. Dude, all of
a sudden, to Jonathan talk about some pendulums do a
good job, I bet he would. Okay, No, wait, how
about some related technology? What about technology to measure those
secondary effects of earthquakes that we're talking about earlier. Yeah,
there's some I think within the past few decades. UM
a device called a sonometer. I think I'm saying that correctly.
(16:33):
Tenometer either way, Uh yes, tsonometer is probably probably the
correct way of saying that. UM. A sosonometer is a
thing that detects changes in water pressure way deep within
the ocean and can transmit that info via satellite to
warning centers. It's it's a weighted anchor containing sensors attached
(16:56):
via tether to a boy on the surface that has
you know, data crunching computer and transmission system, and it
can give you a few hours of warning, um for
tsunami activity. Yeah, so super valuable of course, because I mean,
tsunamis can be especially devastating when you've got that wall
of water. I don't know if you've ever seen video
(17:17):
of what that looks like. It's absolutely terrifying. Oh yeah,
it's completely mind blowing. Um. Also mind blowing, I find um.
It was basically readings from these early seismometers that led
scientists to build the modern hypotheses of the makeup of
the Earth, starting around like nineteen o nine and then
(17:38):
ranging up through the thirties. That is when we figured
out that the Earth has a solid core and molten
stuff and a crust. And that is so recent it's
it's crazy to me, Like I had, for some reason
assumed that had happened in like the sixt dreds at
some point, but nope, yeah, crazy, So go seismology. Good job.
(18:00):
That's just astonishing like that we had like relativity and
quantum physics before we had a full understanding of the
the Earth, right Yeah, And you know, to be fair,
you can't go that deep into the earth. Um, you
also can't go the speed a light, Lauren. Maybe you can't, Joe, Okay,
(18:20):
but uh so. So it's really cool, of course that
we were learning all of this stuff and and learning
how to take measurements of earthquakes. But how has all
of this learning been applied in actually saving lives and
preventing damage and predicting earthquakes. Well, I think one thing
we should actually look at first before we talk about
(18:41):
predicting earthquakes, because that's, as you will learn, quite a
strange and iffi proposition. But we can at least talk
about what we can do to our buildings and our
cities to make them safer in the event of an earthquake. Yeah. Yeah, Um,
there are a bunch of different concepts of material and
(19:01):
construction engineering that can help us safeguard our stuff against
getting super destroyed. Yeah. I remember. I actually saw a
headline a while back that was it was a piece
I think in the wake of a recent earthquake that
said something along the lines of earthquakes don't kill people,
buildings do. Right. That seems quite true to me. I
(19:22):
mean that if you're standing in the middle of a
field and an earthquake, you're gonna get knocked on your butt.
But you know, I mean, I mean maybe if a
fault in the earth opens up directly under your feet,
that would suck. But but basically it just trips you. Sure,
but when you come into real danger is when you
are near a structurally unsound building that come toppling over
(19:43):
and crush you. Yeah, that that is that is much
worse than falling on your butt on on a galactic scale.
So what are some of the answers that material science
and construction engineering have given us. One of the classic
ones is called base i selation, And this is super
not a new idea. Um. There's evidence that Iranian architects,
(20:06):
or pre Iranian architects rather and engineers were purposefully constructing
buildings with seismic base isolation starting around like five fifty BC,
So two five years ago folks were working on this. Well,
I don't know if I should be impressed, because I
don't know what it is, Okay. Base isolation is constructing
(20:27):
two separate layers of a foundation for your building, that
the layer against the ground is solid with the ground,
and the the secondary layer between the first one and
your building is solid with the building, but it is
capable of sliding against the lower foundation. Okay, Um, so
if the ground shakes, the upper foundation and the building
(20:50):
remain intact. Yeah yeah, um or I mean like up
to a certain point. I think that over like a
eight on the Richter scale, and you're just kind of
it anyway. But um, but but this is really cool.
Archaeologists have found structures such as the Tomb of Cyrus
that have been standing for over two thousand years, partially
(21:10):
thanks to this type of structural safeguard. Safeguard, Well, how
did they do it back then? I mean if they
didn't have like ball bearings and or whatever, I don't
know what people would actually use today. Giant loose slabs
of rock is how they did it, basically, Um, like
like one giant slab of rock for the base and
a and a secondary unattached slab of rock for the
(21:30):
secondary base. I can just imagine the ancient Persian conversation
that like create you know, like you can't have just
one slab Nope, nope, we need two slabs here because
then your earthquake comes and what are you going to do?
You have an exposed Cyrus corpse that would just be rude.
We don't we can't have that, um modern okay, oh sorry,
(21:54):
I just want to update. I am impressed. Now that's smart.
Yeah yeah, well, I mean it shows that they were
thinking about it, and even thinking about it at that
point in time was probably pretty impressive. Modern Ly, a
lot of buildings that are in danger zones will use
these things called lead rubber bearing pads between the solid
foundation and the building. And and these pads consist of
(22:17):
a solid lead core that's wrapped in in alternating layers
of rubber and steel bands. So vertically speaking, it's super solid. UM.
Horizontally it's wibbly wabbli right, so it's not going to
get crushed, but it can shimmy. Yeah there yeah. UM.
And a newish technology out of a Japanese company called
(22:39):
Air Dunsion Systems Incorporated UM can temporarily suspend a smallish
structure like a private home, on a cushion of air
as a secondary foundation. UM. They work by having these
seismic sensors in the homes primary foundation detect a coming
quake and UM when that happened, and a really powerful
(23:01):
air compressor will activate and feel like a like an
air bag in the secondary foundation in less than a second. Um.
And then you know, when when the sensors detect the
earthquake is over, the compressor switches off and the bag deflates,
kind of bringing the home back down, um gently onto
its first foundation. It's only lifting the structure like a
(23:21):
little over an inch in the air. Maybe so, but
that can make a difference. But that can make a
huge difference. Yeah, yeah, so uh kind of inexpensive way
I suppose of conducting a base isolation on, especially a
small home. As I read that the company was hoping
to expand their systems for use in high rises, but
I haven't been able to find anything more recent about
(23:43):
what they've been doing, so I don't know. I hope
they're out there. Yeah, good luck to them. Yeah. Well,
one of the things that I think is interesting is
studying the way that the ground actually transfers energy to buildings.
Oh yeah, because that's really your problem, right, that you've
got all this energy coming into a rigid structure, and
how do you dissipate it? Right? But I mean, really,
(24:06):
the damage that earthquakes cause is because of how efficient
energy transfer is. Like thanks a lot physics, um, but
but see any given object has a resonant frequency or
a group of resonant frequencies. And we've talked about that
a little bit on the show before. Um it means
that when when the object vibrates, based on its its
(24:29):
size and its shape and the materials it's made of,
it's going to resonate at this specific frequency or group
of frequencies maybe, And it's really hard to get something
to resonate at a non resonant frequency. Um So, if
you if you put mechanical energy into an object the
way that a seismic wave does, uh, it will vibrate
(24:50):
just as much as it can, like a whole bunch
at its resonant frequency, because energy is so efficient like that.
Um But ut, what if you could get a structure
to vibrate at a different frequency, at a lower frequency.
But it's really hard to get an object to do that.
It just wants to resonate at that one frequency, unless,
(25:12):
of course, you physically change the object on the fly,
which is also not really a thing that you want
to do to a building, or that it's physically possible
to do to a building. I mean, unless you're like
magneto or something like that. Um So, how can magneto
do that. You'd have to be something else right now.
He could change the shape of a building by way
(25:32):
by by moving around the steel structures or you know,
or he could take some of the metal out of
it put extra metal into it. I'm usually right about magneto, UM,
but engineers who are not magneto have come up with
various damper systems. One that's really great for skyscrapers is
(25:53):
called a tuned mass damper. And in the system you
suspend like a big old massive ing near the top
of a skyscraper. UM. It can be held in place
with like fluid cushions or hydraulics or springs or cables
or some wacky combination of the above, and UM that
the mass and the hang of the system is tuned
(26:15):
precisely to the resident frequency of the building, so that
when an earthquake hits uh at, the building rocks one
way and the system rocks in the opposite direction, which
which helps reduce or kind of balance out the forces
that are acting on the building, UM, thus preventing damage. Okay,
I can see. So it's like it's almost like trying
to create a canceling wave for holding Yeah, exactly. Um. Yeah, yeah,
(26:40):
it's sort of like noise canceling headphones of earthquakes. Yes, yeah,
and you can think about it if it if it
helps with the visualization, it's sort of like a pendulum awesome. Um.
Another thing that engineers due to help to help prevent
damage to buildings is by bracing. And it sounds pretty obvious,
(27:01):
but but but the way that they look at it
is since most of the ground's movement during an earthquake
is lateral, engineers can can compensate with incisive elements of
strength and flexibility throughout a building that are designed to
kind of spread the forces out evenly across the vertical
and the horizontal elements of the structure. Um. And and
(27:22):
things that help with that include like having parallel and
symmetrical designs, using diagonal trusses against walls, and using a
moment resisting frames which are uh columns and beams that
are bendy but have connectors that are rigid, so that
during an earthquake, UM, the the whole the whole thing,
(27:45):
the whole frame moves is a single piece. Those elastic
elements absorbs some of the energy and they can dissipate
it without causing the building to crack or something right, right,
it spreads the shock out across the entire structure, reducing
damage to you one part or Another interesting way to
approach bracing that I read about was specifically directing the
(28:07):
energy dissipation or sort of like the damage centric zone
to a replaceable part of the bracing structure, like like
a fuse. Yeah, that'd be something like the fuses you
might have in your house. Well, hopefully you have circuit
breakers now, but the house that had fuses would have
You know, if a circuit gets overheated, well it can
just melt the fuse and that's fine. You can just
(28:29):
change that out. You've got a box full of them
and it's no big deal. But in two thousand nine,
a team led by researchers at Stanford University in the
University of Illinois successfully tested a building protection design that
would keep multi story buildings from falling apart, and it
would help return them to basically standing straight up upon
(28:49):
the foundation after the shaking is over, so that the
building doesn't like remain a hazard and then maybe fall
over afterwards. And they tested this design on a shake table,
which is sort of what it sounds like, it's this
huge thing to simulate earthquakes, and it was shown that
it was capable of withstanding earthquakes with a magnitude up
to seven, which is pretty serious earthquake. But basically, these
(29:12):
are steel frames that are designed to reinforce a building
at the core or along the edge, and they dissipate
the energy of the earthquake by rocking up and down
within these cages at the foundations that they actually called shoes.
They act like shoes, and so running along the vertical
length of the frames are steel cables or steel tendons,
(29:34):
which are elastic, so you can think of that kind
of like having a bunch of rubber bands or like
those elastic stretcher cables holding your building in place and
helping return it to an upright position right upon its
rightful place on the foundation. But at the bottom of
these frames they had these things that they referred to
(29:55):
as fuses, And basically the idea is that the fuses
are the parts of the structure that will absorb the
most energy and become damaged, and the fuses are designed
to be replaceable. So if there's an earthquake, it tries
to channel the energy into this fuse area which will
be damaged and you'll have to replace it. But that's
(30:17):
you know, pretty easy to do. Cool. Uh So, so
these are all ways that we have of preventing damage
in the case of an earthquake. But but but let's
say that an earthquake does strike and damage is caused. Um,
how how are science and technology helping us better deal
with the aftermath of earthquakes? Well, I know one of
(30:39):
the things that is going on is something we talked
about in our very recent episode about radar. Uh yeah, yeah,
the finder. Yeah. So just to revisit this concept briefly,
it is a way of using radar technology to locate
human beings trapped underneath rubble. Uh yeah, microwave radar specific
(31:00):
lee and it this is radar so sensitive that it
can detect the tiny palpitations of a human heartbeat through
up to twenty feet of solid concrete or thirty feet
of wreckage or a hundred feet of open space. So
that's a bunch um and uh this is technology that
I think was developed in out of NASA and and
(31:21):
it and it worked. And in the recent earthquake that
happened in a Nepal in India, in april of rescuers
located at least four living victims under ten ft of rebel. So,
uh go team Doppler effect. That's awesome. UM. Other things
that we have actually also touched on in the course
(31:41):
of this podcast include, um using like robots and drones
for rescues where it is impractical or unsafe for human
rescuers to go. Yeah, we've talked about programming cockroach drones
to find people in in rubble right right, um. And
also smart infrastructure that can engineers uh as to when
(32:02):
and where damage has been done, so that hopefully before
you know, if if a minor shock one year makes
a crack somewhere in a foundation, that could be a
problem later. That's a thing that like a sensor could go,
oh hey, engineers, come, come, pay attention to me, and
hopefully that gets repaired before a larger quake could bring
the whole building down. That's what you call a smart city,
(32:24):
smart city, smart buildings as opposed to all these dumb
buildings we live in now. Oh yeah, so dumb. But hey,
what about the big question? How about the elephant in
the room. Can we predict earthquakes? Can we do it?
Can we know when and where they're going to happen,
so that we can get people out of harm's way
ahead of time. This is I think the main thing
(32:48):
everybody wants to know, of course, And should we just
go ahead and say it. The answer is not really Yeah, yes,
certainly not right now. Um And and a lot of
a lot of researchers are are doubtful that we ever
will be Um. The seismology community seems to at large
(33:09):
be saying we'll probably never be able to determine this. Well,
I mean we're trying, yeah, Um, like with with earth
earthquake forecasting, which is studying the history and the present
configuration of a fault and predicting how likely seismic activity
is in that area within a given period of time. Um.
(33:32):
But again, according to a lot of seismologists, it's impossible
to forecast when earthquakes will happen given what we currently
know about how earthquakes work. We we haven't found a
pattern despite all of the data that we've been recording. Sure,
and despite the fact that we can't say when I
think we do want to emphasize something you just said,
which is true, we can with some reasonable degree of
(33:55):
accuracy say where earthquakes are going to happen, oh yeah,
and not just I mean like obviously along the fault lines,
but like along specific sections of a fault line. Yeah,
so it's not necessarily going to be super specific, like
telling you, you know in this will be right here.
But we can generally have a pretty good regionally based
(34:16):
prediction about earthquakes. Unfortunately, the painful element of it is
you just never really know exactly where or even roughly win.
And there's actually a good article in the Washington Post
about this by the writer Joel Aichenbach, who who talks
about the frustration of scientists who sort of have this knowledge.
Like he he talks about how the earthquake scientists predicted
(34:40):
that Catman Do would be, you know, would be vulnerable
to an earthquake, that something was coming there, but they
couldn't say they did in April of this year, and
they couldn't say when and then when it happens. It's
just kind of this sense of frustration and like, well,
I mean, there wasn't that much that we could do
(35:00):
about it, because I mean, you can't you can't evacuate
an entire population based on well probably sometimes soon sure,
I mean unless you were just going to say, well,
we just shouldn't have a city here. And then on
top of that, there there can be unknown fault lines
in places that we're not even you know, really privy to, Like,
(35:21):
there can be earthquakes in places that surprise us. They
will happen less often, but they will happen, oh sure.
And fault lines are not these these straight, perfect map lines.
They're they're they're very jagged in crooked and can can
go around to interesting new places that you didn't think
that they would go. Sure. Yeah. One thing is that
when you have an earthquake in one place, it can
(35:42):
dissipate energy that that puts stress on another part of
the tectonic plate or another part of the fault line
where you wouldn't have expected an earthquake before. And we
won't necessarily know what's going to happen until it happens. Though,
it is worth saying that earthquake forecasting is a real thing.
I is. Cartography is sort of what you'd call it.
(36:02):
You can make maps and say, based on what we know,
earthquakes are more likely to happen in these places within
a certain long given period of time, right right, Um,
And there are relatively early warning networks. UM. As digital
communication technology has improved, UH, seismologists have started constructing these
(36:27):
these large networks of a whole bunch of highly sensitive
seismometers that can automatically send out alerts not just to
researchers but also to the general public and therefore give
a little bit more warning, maybe seconds, maybe minutes before
an earthquake strikes. Um. And that's I mean, basically because
seizemic waves only travel about three miles per second tops,
(36:50):
and information can of course travel a lot faster than that.
Your internet is faster than the earthquake. Yeah, yeah, hopefully
fingers crossed. Um And And it sounds like that's absolutely
no time at all, but but it's plenty enough to
save lives of say, construction workers who are in precarious positions,
or of patients who are undergoing surgery, or of of
(37:12):
people driving on the road. Um. And it also allows
emergency responders time to begin to prepare. Yeah, it is certainly,
I mean, even if it's just having a siren go
off or something that could potentially be useful. But of course,
what people really want to know is can we get
much further ahead of the game and One of the
(37:32):
big things that often comes up when you hear people
saying no, I think we can predict earthquakes maybe weeks
ahead of time. Is animals. Oh right, Yeah, there are
all of these kind of circumstantial reports of animal behavior
changing dramatically a week or two before an earthquake. Yeah,
people have reported this for years, supposedly, according to scores
(37:53):
of anecdotes, fish, birds, rats, reptiles, I mean, what every
all kinds of animals start acting we're weird before a
seismic event strikes. One early record is that the ancient
Greeks reported that animals, including rats and snakes deserted the
city of hellicay En mass before a huge earthquake destroyed
it in the fourth century BC. Weird. But whether or
(38:17):
not that's true, we would need to verify that it's
a continuously occurring scientific phenomenon, not necessarily like just something
that happened once, right, because I mean the behavior of
for example, rats and snakes is relatively ineffable. I mean
sometimes they just do stuff. Yeah, sure, I mean, can
animals really predict earthquakes well in advance? Number one? That
(38:41):
would be a really useful fact were true. It would
help us save lives, so it's worth studying. Unfortunately, this
is one of those weird questions that's just really hard
to answer. It seems to me, based on my reading,
that generally most scientists are pretty skeptical about using animals
to predict earthquakes. Some researchers have claimed to discover links
(39:02):
between animals and earthquakes, but the larger scientific community seems
to remain pretty unconvinced. Us Unsurprisingly, one person who likes
this idea is the biologist and parapsychologist Rupert shell Drake.
He's expressed fondness for the idea that animals can predict
seismic activity. Though, if you know anything about this guy,
(39:23):
shell Drake is one of those interesting people who's very smart,
but it seems to me just generally in favor of
whatever ideas are opposed to the mainstream scientific establishment. So
you know, he's into paranormal phenomenon and he's the guy
who promotes the concept of the morephic residence. Matter has
a memory and stuff like that. But there actually are
(39:47):
some studies that we could look at, Like some people
have claimed that animals might be using their extra sensory
auditory capabilities to detect sounds outside the normal hearing range
or something like that. And some these claims are totally
believable when they concern animals going nuts directly before an earthquake,
but not so much weeks before, because if it's right
(40:08):
before the earthquake strikes, that could be the same kind
of thing we're talking about with these these Uh yeah, exactly,
it could be the earliest four shocks are just that
first pee wave that hits before the subsequent shocks do.
But I did find one recent study that's I think
worth sighting, though I think I want to site it
(40:29):
with caution because it just came out pretty recently, and
it's one of those things that I don't know. It
just seems like we would definitely want to get some
more studies of this kind before we assign too much
credit to it. But anyway, it was a March study
in the journal Physics and Chemistry of the Earth Parts
(40:49):
A B n C by Grant, Rollin and Freund, and
they claim that disturbances in animal behavior were present in
the weeks leading up to a tooth As an eleven
earthquake in the Peruvian Andies. So here's what happened. They
claimed that they used motion triggered cameras in a national
park in Peru to measure the extent of wildlife activity,
(41:13):
like you know, physical wildlife movement in the area, and
they found that in the three weeks leading up to
the earthquake, quote, animal activity declined significantly, and there was
even less activity in the final like seven days before
the earthquake. Now, the author's explanation for the claimed reduction
and animal behavior was really interesting. They suggested that it
(41:36):
was another thing they measured concurrent with this reduction and activity,
which was an increase in the positive airborne ion injection
at the ground to air interface. So basically the earth
injecting positively charged particles positive ions up into the air
(41:57):
and this disturbing animal behaviors. And they were suggest testing
that this injection of positively charged ions into the air
could be a result of some kind of preliminary earthquake
precursor underground. Huh so so maybe maybe I mean, like
I said, I want to stress caution with this kind
(42:17):
of thing, because, uh, it seems to go against what
we know so far, and it's it just came out recently.
There might be good reasons for thinking there could be
problems with this study that we haven't read about yet. Sure. Um,
I I did read another similar report that was published
UM from the Open University in the UK via the
(42:39):
Journal of Zoology back in and Uh they were reporting
that five days before an earthquake struck struck Italy in
two thousand, nine of the male toads in a population
abandoned their breeding site. Uh. Their normal behavior would have
been to have stayed through the awning, but they just
(43:00):
kind of up and left. And apparently, um, this behavior
coincided with ion A sphere disruptions, although the cause of
those disruptions was not discussed in the report or not
reported in the report. Yes, yeah, I mean so I
think that's very interesting. But I guess we again we
don't really know. Yeah, but two reports does not make
(43:24):
an appropriate sample for making scientific decisions. Sure, but I
do think that this is worth studying because if there
is any truth to the fact that animal behavior can
predict earthquakes, I mean, the scientists aren't suggesting that they
have telepathy or something triggering the animal reactions. These triggers
should be normal physical events that we could design instruments
(43:44):
to look for. Oh yeah, one that I one possibility
that I read about was emissions of rate on from
underground rock UM. Right on being a gaseous decay product
of uranium which gets trapped in rocks UM, and the
theory here goes that before an earthquake, kind of pre
movements underground break apart rocks and release rate on up
(44:07):
into the soil and water above UM. Since radon is
radioactive and has a half life of of just like
three to four days UM, it would be really a
very useful metric to gather if a connection is in
fact proven, But uh, no conclusive evidence has been found
as of yet. So you know, what I'm really thinking
(44:29):
is if we determine that animals can sense earthquakes, and
then we can use that to make an earthquake sensing machine,
and then we can evacuate cities where earthquakes are going
to happen before they happen. What's going to happen to
the future of the earthquake disaster movie genre? Oh man,
They'll all have to be fabulous period pieces. Yeah, Oh
(44:50):
that's right. The rock will have to put on like
some like plaid and pretend to be some like grunge
guy from the nineties when there is an earthquake in California.
Yeah yeah, or like like a toga of some kind,
and so that he can run around in a ancient
Greek or Roman city. Oh yeah, yeah, while all the
rats and snakes are fleeing. Yeah, you know, like the
(45:14):
wind and the caverns under the earth. Where is it
gonna go? She's gonna blow? It would have to be
Paul Gimi saying that though, Yeah, where's that wind a
gonna go? How was my Paul impression? But I'm not
I'm not positive about the quality of either the movie
(45:34):
that we are hypothesizing or of your Paul Madi impersonation. Well,
I apologize, No, never apologize for Paul impersonations. They're really
They're all good. Well, anyway, bringing it back a little bit, well,
I do think that this is really interesting. And even
if it turns out to be the case, which a
lot of seismologists think is the case, that we will
(45:57):
never be able to predict earthquakes, we can at least
make our cities better, We can make our buildings better,
we can do a better job protecting ourselves when the
earthquakes do strike. And who knows, maybe one day we
will find out that we can predict him ahead of time.
Ah yeah yeah. And this isn't even for for new
cities alone. There are lots of ways that engineers are
looking at for retrofitting buildings to make them stronger in
(46:20):
places that we strongly suspect a quake will strike eventually. Yeah,
so let's look at those seismographic maps and get to work.
Yeah yeah. Um. So, thank you so much Jacob and
Matt for for writing in. This has been a fascinating
thing to research. And we got to watch the San
Andreas trailer a whole bunch and that was endlessly entertaining.
(46:43):
So if any of you guys have any other questions
that you would like to ask us, or any other
topics uh you would like us to cover, please do
let us know. You can find us via email that's
FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. You can
go to our website, which is ft of you Thinking
dot com, or you can contact us via Facebook, Twitter,
(47:04):
or Google Plus. Our screen name in those places is
some iteration of f W thinking You're smart people. I
believe in you, and uh, I hope that you will
believe in us again very soon. For more on this topic,
(47:24):
in the future of technology visit forward thinking dot Com
brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Hi, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks at the future and says, I feel the
Earth move under my feet. I'm Lauren voc Obama, and
(00:21):
I'm Joe McCormick, and our regular host Jonathan Strickland is
not with us today as having a beautiful vacation. Yes,
hopefully not along the fault line anywhere, which introduces today's topic,
which is earthquakes. We after we did our super volcano episode,
we received a couple of messages, one from Jacob via
Twitter and one from Matt via Facebook, who both wrote
(00:43):
in to request an episode about another big disaster, earthquakes. Yeah,
and not just about what earthquakes are and how they work,
of course, but seeing as this is Forward Thinking, what
are we going to do about them in the future?
Will we ever be able to predict earthquakes and understand
what causes them, when and where they're going to happen,
and how to stop them and protect against them? Oh? Sure?
(01:05):
And especially that protect protect against them thing, because even
if we can't predict them, how can we prepare ourselves
better for them? Sure? And I'm sure One of the
reasons people want to know about earthquakes right around now
is the grand trailer for this movie that's out this
summer called San Andreas. Yeah. Yeah, that came out on
(01:26):
May nine. I believe it features the rock right. It's
not a grand theft auto movie. It is a movie
about a big earthquake, in the tradition of other movies
about big disasters where stuff falls over. Yeah, lots of
stuff falls over, as it turns out. I have not
seen this movie. I'm probably not going to, but I
(01:46):
gotta be honest. I saw the trailer when I was
in the theater watching Mad Max Fury Road, and it
was hilarious. I I have to say that I laughed
through that entire trailer, and I'm not I feel I
felt kind of bad out it at the time because
although I knew that those digital people were fine, like, like,
no digital people were harmed in the making of those
(02:07):
digital effects shots. Earthquakes are very serious matters, of course,
right there are terrifying and unpredictable attack upon our placid
urban lives and and a lot of times they seem
to come out of nowhere and they can kill thousands
of people, and so of course earthquakes are worth understanding
to figure out, not just for the pure science of it,
(02:27):
but to save lives. Oh of course. Yeah. And and
the thing, of course about the ground that we stand
on is that it is not solid at all. Well,
I mean, i'd say it is solid, but it's not.
It's not what stationary should we yes, and not just
in the way that that planet Earth is like a spaceship, uh,
(02:49):
that the ground is always moving. Earth's crust is made
up of continent sized slabs of rock called tectonic plates,
which are constantly moving and rubbing up again to each other,
pushing over under one another, or moving slightly apart. And
that's fine, that's great, that's I don't know if that's fine. Yeah,
(03:10):
it's fine. Well, it's normally on a day to day basis,
it's usually fine. Um. But sometimes those those edges, those
faults can crack or slip against each other abruptly, causing
these very powerful vibrations to shake the edges of those
plates in in patterns radiating outward from the point of
that slippery origin. Um. And those vibrations a k a.
(03:32):
Seismic waves are what we feel as earthquakes. Yeah, I
was trying to think of a good analogy for how
earthquakes are created in a at a scale that we
can experiment with. And I think this sort of works.
If you put on some rubber soled shoes and then
try to walk along on say like a hardwood floor
or like a basketball gym floor, without lifting your feet,
(03:55):
just scooting your shoes along, well, you'll probably notice if
or shoe scooting experiences anything like mine, is that for
a certain length of the slide, the shoe will move
kind of smoothly, but every now and then it will
sort of get caught for a second. The forward momentum
will briefly pause, and then you'll experience a sort of
sudden jolt forward, sometimes accompanied by the classic vibratory sounds
(04:18):
of scooting, scoot, And these vibrations you can think of
as being kind of analogous to what's happening when these
plates are scooting against each other. Sure, and and researchers
think that it's a it's a build up of potential
energy over periods of time that are not, to our
knowledge predictable yet. Um, but we'll address that question later
(04:42):
in this episode. Yes, yes, but but earthquakes happen constantly.
Oh yeah, yeah. The U S Geological Survey estimates that
as many as one point three million earthquakes happen every year.
And that's just the ones that are over a two
point oh on the Richter scale, which is the point
at which human can feel them. Right, And then it's
not even just the primary effects of the vibration of
(05:06):
the ground of the earthquake, right, Earthquakes have lots of
secondary causes that can become disasters on their own. Oh,
of course, there's a tsunami, and avalanches and landslides and liquification,
which is a thing where solid ground starts acting like
a liquid which uh, and and flooding and you know,
the collapse of human made structures and the lack of
(05:29):
resources and the aftermath that ensues and all of these
terrible things. Of course. Yeah, So we have very good
reason to want to understand how earthquakes work and what
we can do about them. So so I figured we
should start by going back a little bit and looking
at how our understanding of earthquakes developed over time. Yeah, yeah, what,
(05:50):
I bet people had some interesting ideas about earthquakes and
ancient times. Well, you'd be right. So the ancient world,
of course, experienced plenty of earthquakes, just as many earthqua
wakes as we do today, and without the scientific framework
to explain them, they came up with some pretty weird
and sometimes funny explanations. So religious spiritual magical explanations were
(06:15):
extremely common all over the world West and the East.
People sort of explained earthquakes as often as divine punishments
or divine im portents. Gods were either like giving a
warning or were angry and issuing punishment. I found this
one funny example of both the magical explanations given by
(06:36):
the ancients and some of the practical explanations. And these
are chronicled in the writings of the Roman historian Ombianus Marcellinus,
who is a soldier by trade, and he lived during
the fourth century CE, and he wrote a surviving history
at the time, and and he he has a little
discourse on earthquakes, and what he says is that when
(06:57):
you're talking about earthquakes, quote, in all priests the ceremonies,
whether ritual or pontifical, care is taken not at such
times to name one god more than another, for fear
of impiety, since it is quite uncertain which God causes
these visitations. I love it. They didn't want to they
didn't want to assign blame without all the facts. Well
(07:22):
that's that's good. I mean, you know, that's covering your bass.
I approve of the hypothesis format of finding knowledge. Sure,
and then of course you had sort of spiritual or
supernatural explanations in in the East as well. So like
some ancient Chinese explanations seem to have read earthquakes again
as divine punishments importance. But to continue with what our
(07:44):
historian Marcellinus had to say, this was great because he
also chronicled what some of the dominant practical explanations of
the day were. So it wasn't that everybody just had
this religious explanation. There were also the ancient natural philosophers
who were like, no, let's figure this out. Truly, something's
going on under the earth. I mean, Aristotle surely had
(08:05):
something to say about it. Oh yes, So quoting again
from Marcellinus, and all of these quotes from Marcellinus are
from the seedy Youngae translation in English. But as the
various opinions among which Aristotle waivers and hesitates suggest earthquakes
are engendered either in small caverns under the earth because
(08:25):
of the waters pouring through them with a more rapid
motion than usual, or, as Anaxagoras affirms, they arise from
the force of wind penetrating the lower parts of the Earth,
which when they have got down to the encrusted solid mass,
finding no vent holes shake those portions in their solid
state into which they have got entrance when in a
(08:47):
state of solution. And this is corroborated by the observation
that at such times no breezes of wind are felt
by us above the ground, because the winds are occupied
in the lowest recesses of the earth. Oh that's delightful.
That is that is so delightfully incorrect. I adore that. Yeah. So,
I think the idea that was being propagated at the
(09:09):
time by Aristotle and some of the other well not
at the time by Aristotle, but had previously been propagated
by Aristotle and then continued to be believed by many
people was something having to do with the exchange of
gases like wind and evaporation under the earth. And sometimes
when like gases or evaporating uh vapors would get trapped
(09:30):
under the earth, sometimes they'd be released in a big burst. Sure. Sure,
Although I suppose it is interesting that they were thinking
about liquids and the motion that propagates in liquids because
earthquakes are in fact caused by by waves of energy,
which at their time was analogous. So analogous, which yes,
(09:51):
that thing. Yeah, but but I'm sure they probably weren't
quite thinking yet of the idea of propagation of waves
through rock, which must have seemed imposs of all So,
as with many subject areas see cosmology and physics and
plenty of things, Aristotle's ideas held sway for a long
(10:14):
long time in Europe and in the Islamic world, despite
the fact that they were super super wrong. Um Like,
don't get me wrong about Aristotle. I'm not saying he
was stupid. He was obviously a super smart guy of
the ancient world. I guess just everybody must have assumed
he was right about everything. That's what they did. It's
(10:35):
kind of funny if if you've never done this, like
look up what Galileo overthrew about Aristotelian physics, and it'll
just kind of make you wonder, like, how did people
miss this for so long? It seemed so easy to
figure out. But anyway, Aristotle's ideas about earthquakes hell were
very popular until the early modern period in Europe, and
(10:56):
then some other physical explanations for earthquakes began to take
hold in some circles, like explanations involving fire and explosive properties.
Just one example like what if iron is reacting with
sulfur deep under the ground and this explosive chemical reaction
is causing earthquakes? Even kind of makes sense because you
(11:19):
can see like, okay, earthquakes sometimes or happening around fault lines,
which they didn't know about then, but but around volcanoes
they certainly knew about, yeah, bingo, and that volcanoes have
this explosive fiery element. Eventually, however, we started to get
some more correct ideas about seismology, and according to a
(11:41):
brief history of seismology given by a Duncan car Agony,
which was my source on most of this historical stuff,
one of the main events that seemed to trigger the
modern era of earthquake research was the Lisbon earthquake of
seventeen fifty five, which was huge and had crazy effects
throughout are up, including causing uh Sasia's or Seisha's. I
(12:03):
believe it's satias, which are standing waves in these enclosed
bodies of water. So if you've ever seen standing waves
in water, it's where instead of the waves propagating along
the surface, they sort of bob back and forth. Looks
really crazy, especially if you were going to see that
in like the lake Oh yeah, yeah, or I don't know,
(12:24):
I'm picturing the scene in Jurassic Park where where the
the cup of water is just going but but but
but not like that, just continually bounce back and forth. Yeah,
I do not want creepy so this so anyway, this
event caused some writers at the time to sort of
see the effects of an earthquake as pressure waves propagating
(12:44):
outward from a source through the elasticity of the rock
in the Earth's crust, kind of like sound emanates through
a solid medium. And from this time through the people
began to study earthquakes more scientifically. But you can kind
of understand the faculty they would have, because think about it,
how do you study earthquakes. You can't like cause an earthquake,
(13:07):
especially not with the technology of the time, and you
can't predict when they're going to happen to set up
your equipment, So it was very much an exercise in
sort of gathering what data you could after the event
and then trying to sort of do backwards experiments by
analyzing the data you had available to you, which is
(13:28):
very difficult to do, oh sure, especially right given the
technology of the time and the lack of electricity, let
alone computers and all of that stuff. Although the first
step I would say was around the mid eighteen hundreds
when one Robert Mallett actually coined the term seismology. Yeah,
and he also sort of brought a quantitative approach to
studying wave propagation through the earth. He was big into
(13:51):
looking at maps and collecting all kinds of data and
analyzing it quantitatively. But then, of course, one of the
big things that's led to modern era of studying wave
propagation through the Earth has been the development of seismometers
or seismometers as one might say for some reason. Uh yeah,
(14:11):
those being machines that detect seismic waves as seism graphs,
which I think is the more frequently used term in
in in popular culture at any rate, are our seismometers
that record those waves, and many seismometers are in fact
seismic graphs. Yeah, it would obviously not be very helpful
to detect waves and then forget about them. Uh no um.
(14:37):
And and actually there's historical records of these from from
way before the eighteen hundreds. Yeah. I think we don't
fully understand exactly everything about this ancient one. But the
idea is that the first mechanical seismometer was created in
ancient China by the Han Chinese inventor in general all
purpose genius Chang Hang in the one thirty two CE.
(15:01):
Oh goodness. And supposedly this device could tell the operator
from which direction the vibrations of an earthquake originated, and
even on at least one occasion anecdotally it recorded an
earthquake that humans could not feel, so it was like
too faint for humans to know been one. But the
machine said, hey, there's an earthquake over here. Cool uh
(15:25):
during that wave of interest wave huh um. In the
in the eighteen hundreds, um, several mechanical models were produced
and kind of refined. Um. By nineteen o three we
saw the first electromagnetic seismometer, and then digital equipment and
and data processing technology started to be developed around the
(15:46):
nineteen seventies or so, we could probably do an entire
like series of episodes about seismometer technology. And maybe that's
the thing. I'll poke Jonathan and see if he wants
to do some episodes about about that on tech stuff,
because there's so much out there and it's it's kind
of fascinating. Maybe it would be better in video because
it's a whole lot of like pictures of pendulums working
(16:07):
in different ways and spring loaded things. Dude, all of
a sudden, to Jonathan talk about some pendulums do a
good job, I bet he would. Okay, No, wait, how
about some related technology? What about technology to measure those
secondary effects of earthquakes that we're talking about earlier. Yeah,
there's some I think within the past few decades. UM
a device called a sonometer. I think I'm saying that correctly.
(16:33):
Tenometer either way, Uh yes, tsonometer is probably probably the
correct way of saying that. UM. A sosonometer is a
thing that detects changes in water pressure way deep within
the ocean and can transmit that info via satellite to
warning centers. It's it's a weighted anchor containing sensors attached
(16:56):
via tether to a boy on the surface that has
you know, data crunching computer and transmission system, and it
can give you a few hours of warning, um for
tsunami activity. Yeah, so super valuable of course, because I mean,
tsunamis can be especially devastating when you've got that wall
of water. I don't know if you've ever seen video
(17:17):
of what that looks like. It's absolutely terrifying. Oh yeah,
it's completely mind blowing. Um. Also mind blowing, I find um.
It was basically readings from these early seismometers that led
scientists to build the modern hypotheses of the makeup of
the Earth, starting around like nineteen o nine and then
(17:38):
ranging up through the thirties. That is when we figured
out that the Earth has a solid core and molten
stuff and a crust. And that is so recent it's
it's crazy to me, Like I had, for some reason
assumed that had happened in like the sixt dreds at
some point, but nope, yeah, crazy, So go seismology. Good job.
(18:00):
That's just astonishing like that we had like relativity and
quantum physics before we had a full understanding of the
the Earth, right Yeah, And you know, to be fair,
you can't go that deep into the earth. Um, you
also can't go the speed a light, Lauren. Maybe you can't, Joe, Okay,
(18:20):
but uh so. So it's really cool, of course that
we were learning all of this stuff and and learning
how to take measurements of earthquakes. But how has all
of this learning been applied in actually saving lives and
preventing damage and predicting earthquakes. Well, I think one thing
we should actually look at first before we talk about
(18:41):
predicting earthquakes, because that's, as you will learn, quite a
strange and iffi proposition. But we can at least talk
about what we can do to our buildings and our
cities to make them safer in the event of an earthquake. Yeah. Yeah, Um,
there are a bunch of different concepts of material and
(19:01):
construction engineering that can help us safeguard our stuff against
getting super destroyed. Yeah. I remember. I actually saw a
headline a while back that was it was a piece
I think in the wake of a recent earthquake that
said something along the lines of earthquakes don't kill people,
buildings do. Right. That seems quite true to me. I
(19:22):
mean that if you're standing in the middle of a
field and an earthquake, you're gonna get knocked on your butt.
But you know, I mean, I mean maybe if a
fault in the earth opens up directly under your feet,
that would suck. But but basically it just trips you. Sure,
but when you come into real danger is when you
are near a structurally unsound building that come toppling over
(19:43):
and crush you. Yeah, that that is that is much
worse than falling on your butt on on a galactic scale.
So what are some of the answers that material science
and construction engineering have given us. One of the classic
ones is called base i selation, And this is super
not a new idea. Um. There's evidence that Iranian architects,
(20:06):
or pre Iranian architects rather and engineers were purposefully constructing
buildings with seismic base isolation starting around like five fifty BC,
So two five years ago folks were working on this. Well,
I don't know if I should be impressed, because I
don't know what it is, Okay. Base isolation is constructing
(20:27):
two separate layers of a foundation for your building, that
the layer against the ground is solid with the ground,
and the the secondary layer between the first one and
your building is solid with the building, but it is
capable of sliding against the lower foundation. Okay, Um, so
if the ground shakes, the upper foundation and the building
(20:50):
remain intact. Yeah yeah, um or I mean like up
to a certain point. I think that over like a
eight on the Richter scale, and you're just kind of
it anyway. But um, but but this is really cool.
Archaeologists have found structures such as the Tomb of Cyrus
that have been standing for over two thousand years, partially
(21:10):
thanks to this type of structural safeguard. Safeguard, Well, how
did they do it back then? I mean if they
didn't have like ball bearings and or whatever, I don't
know what people would actually use today. Giant loose slabs
of rock is how they did it, basically, Um, like
like one giant slab of rock for the base and
a and a secondary unattached slab of rock for the
(21:30):
secondary base. I can just imagine the ancient Persian conversation
that like create you know, like you can't have just
one slab Nope, nope, we need two slabs here because
then your earthquake comes and what are you going to do?
You have an exposed Cyrus corpse that would just be rude.
We don't we can't have that, um modern okay, oh sorry,
(21:54):
I just want to update. I am impressed. Now that's smart.
Yeah yeah, well, I mean it shows that they were
thinking about it, and even thinking about it at that
point in time was probably pretty impressive. Modern Ly, a
lot of buildings that are in danger zones will use
these things called lead rubber bearing pads between the solid
foundation and the building. And and these pads consist of
(22:17):
a solid lead core that's wrapped in in alternating layers
of rubber and steel bands. So vertically speaking, it's super solid. UM.
Horizontally it's wibbly wabbli right, so it's not going to
get crushed, but it can shimmy. Yeah there yeah. UM.
And a newish technology out of a Japanese company called
(22:39):
Air Dunsion Systems Incorporated UM can temporarily suspend a smallish
structure like a private home, on a cushion of air
as a secondary foundation. UM. They work by having these
seismic sensors in the homes primary foundation detect a coming
quake and UM when that happened, and a really powerful
(23:01):
air compressor will activate and feel like a like an
air bag in the secondary foundation in less than a second. Um.
And then you know, when when the sensors detect the
earthquake is over, the compressor switches off and the bag deflates,
kind of bringing the home back down, um gently onto
its first foundation. It's only lifting the structure like a
(23:21):
little over an inch in the air. Maybe so, but
that can make a difference. But that can make a
huge difference. Yeah, yeah, so uh kind of inexpensive way
I suppose of conducting a base isolation on, especially a
small home. As I read that the company was hoping
to expand their systems for use in high rises, but
I haven't been able to find anything more recent about
(23:43):
what they've been doing, so I don't know. I hope
they're out there. Yeah, good luck to them. Yeah. Well,
one of the things that I think is interesting is
studying the way that the ground actually transfers energy to buildings.
Oh yeah, because that's really your problem, right, that you've
got all this energy coming into a rigid structure, and
how do you dissipate it? Right? But I mean, really,
(24:06):
the damage that earthquakes cause is because of how efficient
energy transfer is. Like thanks a lot physics, um, but
but see any given object has a resonant frequency or
a group of resonant frequencies. And we've talked about that
a little bit on the show before. Um it means
that when when the object vibrates, based on its its
(24:29):
size and its shape and the materials it's made of,
it's going to resonate at this specific frequency or group
of frequencies maybe, And it's really hard to get something
to resonate at a non resonant frequency. Um So, if
you if you put mechanical energy into an object the
way that a seismic wave does, uh, it will vibrate
(24:50):
just as much as it can, like a whole bunch
at its resonant frequency, because energy is so efficient like that.
Um But ut, what if you could get a structure
to vibrate at a different frequency, at a lower frequency.
But it's really hard to get an object to do that.
It just wants to resonate at that one frequency, unless,
(25:12):
of course, you physically change the object on the fly,
which is also not really a thing that you want
to do to a building, or that it's physically possible
to do to a building. I mean, unless you're like
magneto or something like that. Um So, how can magneto
do that. You'd have to be something else right now.
He could change the shape of a building by way
(25:32):
by by moving around the steel structures or you know,
or he could take some of the metal out of
it put extra metal into it. I'm usually right about magneto, UM,
but engineers who are not magneto have come up with
various damper systems. One that's really great for skyscrapers is
(25:53):
called a tuned mass damper. And in the system you
suspend like a big old massive ing near the top
of a skyscraper. UM. It can be held in place
with like fluid cushions or hydraulics or springs or cables
or some wacky combination of the above, and UM that
the mass and the hang of the system is tuned
(26:15):
precisely to the resident frequency of the building, so that
when an earthquake hits uh at, the building rocks one
way and the system rocks in the opposite direction, which
which helps reduce or kind of balance out the forces
that are acting on the building, UM, thus preventing damage. Okay,
I can see. So it's like it's almost like trying
to create a canceling wave for holding Yeah, exactly. Um. Yeah, yeah,
(26:40):
it's sort of like noise canceling headphones of earthquakes. Yes, yeah,
and you can think about it if it if it
helps with the visualization, it's sort of like a pendulum awesome. Um.
Another thing that engineers due to help to help prevent
damage to buildings is by bracing. And it sounds pretty obvious,
(27:01):
but but but the way that they look at it
is since most of the ground's movement during an earthquake
is lateral, engineers can can compensate with incisive elements of
strength and flexibility throughout a building that are designed to
kind of spread the forces out evenly across the vertical
and the horizontal elements of the structure. Um. And and
(27:22):
things that help with that include like having parallel and
symmetrical designs, using diagonal trusses against walls, and using a
moment resisting frames which are uh columns and beams that
are bendy but have connectors that are rigid, so that
during an earthquake, UM, the the whole the whole thing,
(27:45):
the whole frame moves is a single piece. Those elastic
elements absorbs some of the energy and they can dissipate
it without causing the building to crack or something right, right,
it spreads the shock out across the entire structure, reducing
damage to you one part or Another interesting way to
approach bracing that I read about was specifically directing the
(28:07):
energy dissipation or sort of like the damage centric zone
to a replaceable part of the bracing structure, like like
a fuse. Yeah, that'd be something like the fuses you
might have in your house. Well, hopefully you have circuit
breakers now, but the house that had fuses would have
You know, if a circuit gets overheated, well it can
just melt the fuse and that's fine. You can just
(28:29):
change that out. You've got a box full of them
and it's no big deal. But in two thousand nine,
a team led by researchers at Stanford University in the
University of Illinois successfully tested a building protection design that
would keep multi story buildings from falling apart, and it
would help return them to basically standing straight up upon
(28:49):
the foundation after the shaking is over, so that the
building doesn't like remain a hazard and then maybe fall
over afterwards. And they tested this design on a shake table,
which is sort of what it sounds like, it's this
huge thing to simulate earthquakes, and it was shown that
it was capable of withstanding earthquakes with a magnitude up
to seven, which is pretty serious earthquake. But basically, these
(29:12):
are steel frames that are designed to reinforce a building
at the core or along the edge, and they dissipate
the energy of the earthquake by rocking up and down
within these cages at the foundations that they actually called shoes.
They act like shoes, and so running along the vertical
length of the frames are steel cables or steel tendons,
(29:34):
which are elastic, so you can think of that kind
of like having a bunch of rubber bands or like
those elastic stretcher cables holding your building in place and
helping return it to an upright position right upon its
rightful place on the foundation. But at the bottom of
these frames they had these things that they referred to
(29:55):
as fuses, And basically the idea is that the fuses
are the parts of the structure that will absorb the
most energy and become damaged, and the fuses are designed
to be replaceable. So if there's an earthquake, it tries
to channel the energy into this fuse area which will
be damaged and you'll have to replace it. But that's
(30:17):
you know, pretty easy to do. Cool. Uh So, so
these are all ways that we have of preventing damage
in the case of an earthquake. But but but let's
say that an earthquake does strike and damage is caused. Um,
how how are science and technology helping us better deal
with the aftermath of earthquakes? Well, I know one of
(30:39):
the things that is going on is something we talked
about in our very recent episode about radar. Uh yeah, yeah,
the finder. Yeah. So just to revisit this concept briefly,
it is a way of using radar technology to locate
human beings trapped underneath rubble. Uh yeah, microwave radar specific
(31:00):
lee and it this is radar so sensitive that it
can detect the tiny palpitations of a human heartbeat through
up to twenty feet of solid concrete or thirty feet
of wreckage or a hundred feet of open space. So
that's a bunch um and uh this is technology that
I think was developed in out of NASA and and
(31:21):
it and it worked. And in the recent earthquake that
happened in a Nepal in India, in april of rescuers
located at least four living victims under ten ft of rebel. So,
uh go team Doppler effect. That's awesome. UM. Other things
that we have actually also touched on in the course
(31:41):
of this podcast include, um using like robots and drones
for rescues where it is impractical or unsafe for human
rescuers to go. Yeah, we've talked about programming cockroach drones
to find people in in rubble right right, um. And
also smart infrastructure that can engineers uh as to when
(32:02):
and where damage has been done, so that hopefully before
you know, if if a minor shock one year makes
a crack somewhere in a foundation, that could be a
problem later. That's a thing that like a sensor could go,
oh hey, engineers, come, come, pay attention to me, and
hopefully that gets repaired before a larger quake could bring
the whole building down. That's what you call a smart city,
(32:24):
smart city, smart buildings as opposed to all these dumb
buildings we live in now. Oh yeah, so dumb. But hey,
what about the big question? How about the elephant in
the room. Can we predict earthquakes? Can we do it?
Can we know when and where they're going to happen,
so that we can get people out of harm's way
ahead of time. This is I think the main thing
(32:48):
everybody wants to know, of course, And should we just
go ahead and say it. The answer is not really Yeah, yes,
certainly not right now. Um And and a lot of
a lot of researchers are are doubtful that we ever
will be Um. The seismology community seems to at large
(33:09):
be saying we'll probably never be able to determine this. Well,
I mean we're trying, yeah, Um, like with with earth
earthquake forecasting, which is studying the history and the present
configuration of a fault and predicting how likely seismic activity
is in that area within a given period of time. Um.
(33:32):
But again, according to a lot of seismologists, it's impossible
to forecast when earthquakes will happen given what we currently
know about how earthquakes work. We we haven't found a
pattern despite all of the data that we've been recording. Sure,
and despite the fact that we can't say when I
think we do want to emphasize something you just said,
which is true, we can with some reasonable degree of
(33:55):
accuracy say where earthquakes are going to happen, oh yeah,
and not just I mean like obviously along the fault lines,
but like along specific sections of a fault line. Yeah,
so it's not necessarily going to be super specific, like
telling you, you know in this will be right here.
But we can generally have a pretty good regionally based
(34:16):
prediction about earthquakes. Unfortunately, the painful element of it is
you just never really know exactly where or even roughly win.
And there's actually a good article in the Washington Post
about this by the writer Joel Aichenbach, who who talks
about the frustration of scientists who sort of have this knowledge.
Like he he talks about how the earthquake scientists predicted
(34:40):
that Catman Do would be, you know, would be vulnerable
to an earthquake, that something was coming there, but they
couldn't say they did in April of this year, and
they couldn't say when and then when it happens. It's
just kind of this sense of frustration and like, well,
I mean, there wasn't that much that we could do
(35:00):
about it, because I mean, you can't you can't evacuate
an entire population based on well probably sometimes soon sure,
I mean unless you were just going to say, well,
we just shouldn't have a city here. And then on
top of that, there there can be unknown fault lines
in places that we're not even you know, really privy to, Like,
(35:21):
there can be earthquakes in places that surprise us. They
will happen less often, but they will happen, oh sure.
And fault lines are not these these straight, perfect map lines.
They're they're they're very jagged in crooked and can can
go around to interesting new places that you didn't think
that they would go. Sure. Yeah. One thing is that
when you have an earthquake in one place, it can
(35:42):
dissipate energy that that puts stress on another part of
the tectonic plate or another part of the fault line
where you wouldn't have expected an earthquake before. And we
won't necessarily know what's going to happen until it happens. Though,
it is worth saying that earthquake forecasting is a real thing.
I is. Cartography is sort of what you'd call it.
(36:02):
You can make maps and say, based on what we know,
earthquakes are more likely to happen in these places within
a certain long given period of time, right right, Um,
And there are relatively early warning networks. UM. As digital
communication technology has improved, UH, seismologists have started constructing these
(36:27):
these large networks of a whole bunch of highly sensitive
seismometers that can automatically send out alerts not just to
researchers but also to the general public and therefore give
a little bit more warning, maybe seconds, maybe minutes before
an earthquake strikes. Um. And that's I mean, basically because
seizemic waves only travel about three miles per second tops,
(36:50):
and information can of course travel a lot faster than that.
Your internet is faster than the earthquake. Yeah, yeah, hopefully
fingers crossed. Um And And it sounds like that's absolutely
no time at all, but but it's plenty enough to
save lives of say, construction workers who are in precarious positions,
or of patients who are undergoing surgery, or of of
(37:12):
people driving on the road. Um. And it also allows
emergency responders time to begin to prepare. Yeah, it is certainly,
I mean, even if it's just having a siren go
off or something that could potentially be useful. But of course,
what people really want to know is can we get
much further ahead of the game and One of the
(37:32):
big things that often comes up when you hear people
saying no, I think we can predict earthquakes maybe weeks
ahead of time. Is animals. Oh right, Yeah, there are
all of these kind of circumstantial reports of animal behavior
changing dramatically a week or two before an earthquake. Yeah,
people have reported this for years, supposedly, according to scores
(37:53):
of anecdotes, fish, birds, rats, reptiles, I mean, what every
all kinds of animals start acting we're weird before a
seismic event strikes. One early record is that the ancient
Greeks reported that animals, including rats and snakes deserted the
city of hellicay En mass before a huge earthquake destroyed
it in the fourth century BC. Weird. But whether or
(38:17):
not that's true, we would need to verify that it's
a continuously occurring scientific phenomenon, not necessarily like just something
that happened once, right, because I mean the behavior of
for example, rats and snakes is relatively ineffable. I mean
sometimes they just do stuff. Yeah, sure, I mean, can
animals really predict earthquakes well in advance? Number one? That
(38:41):
would be a really useful fact were true. It would
help us save lives, so it's worth studying. Unfortunately, this
is one of those weird questions that's just really hard
to answer. It seems to me, based on my reading,
that generally most scientists are pretty skeptical about using animals
to predict earthquakes. Some researchers have claimed to discover links
(39:02):
between animals and earthquakes, but the larger scientific community seems
to remain pretty unconvinced. Us Unsurprisingly, one person who likes
this idea is the biologist and parapsychologist Rupert shell Drake.
He's expressed fondness for the idea that animals can predict
seismic activity. Though, if you know anything about this guy,
(39:23):
shell Drake is one of those interesting people who's very smart,
but it seems to me just generally in favor of
whatever ideas are opposed to the mainstream scientific establishment. So
you know, he's into paranormal phenomenon and he's the guy
who promotes the concept of the morephic residence. Matter has
a memory and stuff like that. But there actually are
(39:47):
some studies that we could look at, Like some people
have claimed that animals might be using their extra sensory
auditory capabilities to detect sounds outside the normal hearing range
or something like that. And some these claims are totally
believable when they concern animals going nuts directly before an earthquake,
but not so much weeks before, because if it's right
(40:08):
before the earthquake strikes, that could be the same kind
of thing we're talking about with these these Uh yeah, exactly,
it could be the earliest four shocks are just that
first pee wave that hits before the subsequent shocks do.
But I did find one recent study that's I think
worth sighting, though I think I want to site it
(40:29):
with caution because it just came out pretty recently, and
it's one of those things that I don't know. It
just seems like we would definitely want to get some
more studies of this kind before we assign too much
credit to it. But anyway, it was a March study
in the journal Physics and Chemistry of the Earth Parts
(40:49):
A B n C by Grant, Rollin and Freund, and
they claim that disturbances in animal behavior were present in
the weeks leading up to a tooth As an eleven
earthquake in the Peruvian Andies. So here's what happened. They
claimed that they used motion triggered cameras in a national
park in Peru to measure the extent of wildlife activity,
(41:13):
like you know, physical wildlife movement in the area, and
they found that in the three weeks leading up to
the earthquake, quote, animal activity declined significantly, and there was
even less activity in the final like seven days before
the earthquake. Now, the author's explanation for the claimed reduction
and animal behavior was really interesting. They suggested that it
(41:36):
was another thing they measured concurrent with this reduction and activity,
which was an increase in the positive airborne ion injection
at the ground to air interface. So basically the earth
injecting positively charged particles positive ions up into the air
(41:57):
and this disturbing animal behaviors. And they were suggest testing
that this injection of positively charged ions into the air
could be a result of some kind of preliminary earthquake
precursor underground. Huh so so maybe maybe I mean, like
I said, I want to stress caution with this kind
(42:17):
of thing, because, uh, it seems to go against what
we know so far, and it's it just came out recently.
There might be good reasons for thinking there could be
problems with this study that we haven't read about yet. Sure. Um,
I I did read another similar report that was published
UM from the Open University in the UK via the
(42:39):
Journal of Zoology back in and Uh they were reporting
that five days before an earthquake struck struck Italy in
two thousand, nine of the male toads in a population
abandoned their breeding site. Uh. Their normal behavior would have
been to have stayed through the awning, but they just
(43:00):
kind of up and left. And apparently, um, this behavior
coincided with ion A sphere disruptions, although the cause of
those disruptions was not discussed in the report or not
reported in the report. Yes, yeah, I mean so I
think that's very interesting. But I guess we again we
don't really know. Yeah, but two reports does not make
(43:24):
an appropriate sample for making scientific decisions. Sure, but I
do think that this is worth studying because if there
is any truth to the fact that animal behavior can
predict earthquakes, I mean, the scientists aren't suggesting that they
have telepathy or something triggering the animal reactions. These triggers
should be normal physical events that we could design instruments
(43:44):
to look for. Oh yeah, one that I one possibility
that I read about was emissions of rate on from
underground rock UM. Right on being a gaseous decay product
of uranium which gets trapped in rocks UM, and the
theory here goes that before an earthquake, kind of pre
movements underground break apart rocks and release rate on up
(44:07):
into the soil and water above UM. Since radon is
radioactive and has a half life of of just like
three to four days UM, it would be really a
very useful metric to gather if a connection is in
fact proven, But uh, no conclusive evidence has been found
as of yet. So you know, what I'm really thinking
(44:29):
is if we determine that animals can sense earthquakes, and
then we can use that to make an earthquake sensing machine,
and then we can evacuate cities where earthquakes are going
to happen before they happen. What's going to happen to
the future of the earthquake disaster movie genre? Oh man,
They'll all have to be fabulous period pieces. Yeah, Oh
(44:50):
that's right. The rock will have to put on like
some like plaid and pretend to be some like grunge
guy from the nineties when there is an earthquake in California.
Yeah yeah, or like like a toga of some kind,
and so that he can run around in a ancient
Greek or Roman city. Oh yeah, yeah, while all the
rats and snakes are fleeing. Yeah, you know, like the
(45:14):
wind and the caverns under the earth. Where is it
gonna go? She's gonna blow? It would have to be
Paul Gimi saying that though, Yeah, where's that wind a
gonna go? How was my Paul impression? But I'm not
I'm not positive about the quality of either the movie
(45:34):
that we are hypothesizing or of your Paul Madi impersonation. Well,
I apologize, No, never apologize for Paul impersonations. They're really
They're all good. Well, anyway, bringing it back a little bit, well,
I do think that this is really interesting. And even
if it turns out to be the case, which a
lot of seismologists think is the case, that we will
(45:57):
never be able to predict earthquakes, we can at least
make our cities better, We can make our buildings better,
we can do a better job protecting ourselves when the
earthquakes do strike. And who knows, maybe one day we
will find out that we can predict him ahead of time.
Ah yeah yeah. And this isn't even for for new
cities alone. There are lots of ways that engineers are
looking at for retrofitting buildings to make them stronger in
(46:20):
places that we strongly suspect a quake will strike eventually. Yeah,
so let's look at those seismographic maps and get to work.
Yeah yeah. Um. So, thank you so much Jacob and
Matt for for writing in. This has been a fascinating
thing to research. And we got to watch the San
Andreas trailer a whole bunch and that was endlessly entertaining.
(46:43):
So if any of you guys have any other questions
that you would like to ask us, or any other
topics uh you would like us to cover, please do
let us know. You can find us via email that's
FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. You can
go to our website, which is ft of you Thinking
dot com, or you can contact us via Facebook, Twitter,
(47:04):
or Google Plus. Our screen name in those places is
some iteration of f W thinking You're smart people. I
believe in you, and uh, I hope that you will
believe in us again very soon. For more on this topic,
(47:24):
in the future of technology visit forward thinking dot Com
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