#earhtquake

Earthquake hits Italian resort island of Ischia

An earthquake hit the tourist-packed holiday island of Ischia on Monday night, killing two people, injuring dozens and trapping three young brothers who survived for up to 16 hours before being rescued.

Tourists and residents on the island off the coast of Naples ran out onto the narrow streets after the quake wrecked a church and several buildings. Fearing aftershocks, many decided to leave the island early.

Rescuers found a baby boy called Pasquale in the wreckage and pulled him out alive in his nappy early on Tuesday, seven hours after the shock. There was a hush followed by loud applause.

Fire crews found his brothers Mattia and Ciro, aged seven and 11, stuck under a bed nearby. They kept talking to them and fed water to them through a tube.

“I promised them that after this was all over we would all go get a pizza together,” one emergency worker said on Italian television.

They freed Mattia late on Tuesday morning and later extracted Ciro more than 16 hours after the quake hit. The parents were safe because they were in another room. (Reuters)

Photos from top: Marco Cantile/NurPhoto via Getty Images, Ivan Romano/Getty Images, Ciro De Luca/Reuters, Marco Cantile/NurPhoto via Getty Images, Alessio Paduano/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The hills of East L.A.

In 1987, a fault east of Los Angeles let loose a magnitude 5.9 earthquake that caused over $350 million in damage and 8 deaths. In addition, in 2008 there was a magnitude 5.4 earthquake nearby, centered in a location known as the Chino Hills (shown in this photo).

These earthquakes illustrate some fundamental properties of the Los Angeles Basin and thus are worth a bit of extra discussion. By analyzing the properties of the earthquake in detail, geologists can determine the kind of fault it occurred on. All of these earthquakes take place on faults that are mixed – they’re mostly thrust faults, with a bit of strike-slip (side to side) motion on them. The strike-slip component makes sense because these faults are a short drive from an enormous strike-slip fault; the San Andreas. The stress from giant fault permeates the area, sometimes adding a small strike-slip component when faults do move.

The thrust fault component tells the other part of the story of the L.A. Basin. The mountains surrounding L.A., like the San Gabriel Mountains and the Santa Monica Mountains, started their lives far to the south, somewhere near San Diego. As the San Andreas Fault began to move, these rocks were ripped from the coast to the south and pushed north. Eventually, the rocks ran back into the continent, causing them to be squeezed upwards.

This compression forced mountains like the San Gabriels to shoot upwards rapidly, rising from sea level to over a thousand meters in only a couple million years. The forces that built these mountains impact the entire area; creating faults throughout the L.A. basin.

Almost every set of hills in the basin is created by a thrust fault resulting from this collision. The force that built the mountains north of L.A. is propagating into the basin, creating faults everywhere, beneath everyone’s feet. 10 million people live on top of rocks penetrated by these faults, causing the ground to, on occasion, rock and roll.

These faults are capable of producing much larger events as well, including the Northridge earthquake in 1994. Small quakes like this should serve as a reminder of the necessity of preparation for the L.A. basin; bigger ones are coming.

-JBB

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/modern_artifacts/4719307111

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqdiWTiyBHA)

Studio video from a song on my EP called Earthquake. You can find it on my sound cloud.  https://soundcloud.com/elijahstavena-gmail-com