Two active Southern California faults may cause a Big One by rupturing togethe

Two of Southern California's most active faults could rupture together in a magnitude-7.5 earthquake, according to a new study, raising a grim seismic scenario for communities east of Los Angeles.

The study established how a major earthquake could begin on the San Jacinto fault and continue on the San Andreas, which is California's longest and one of its most dangerous faults.

The San Andreas historically has produced stronger earthquakes than the San Jacinto. But it's farther away from major development than the San Jacinto fault, which runs through San Bernardino, Colton, Moreno Valley, Redlands, Loma Linda, Hemet and San Jacinto, as well as near Riverside, Rialto and Fontana.

Full Coverage: Earthquakes in Southern California and beyond

"Because the San Jacinto fault cuts into the middle of the Inland Empire — instead of the edge of the desert — it cuts through a lot more people. There's just more people directly living on this fault," said Julian Lozos, a Cal State Northridgeprofessor of geophysics, who wrote the study while working on post-doctoral research at Stanford University and at the U.S. Geological Survey.


The faults also cut through freeways that connect Southern California to Nevada and Arizona, as well as lifelines that bring in electricity, fuel and water.

The earthquake envisioned in Lozos' scenario is not the biggest earthquake that could strike Southern California. The San Andreas alone could produce a magnitude-8earthquake.

But the study shows it's not just the San Andreas that should worry Southern California. There are, in fact, multiple pathways to get to a Big One, the kind of earthquake that could cause more than 1,000 deaths, ignite hundreds of fires, collapse buildings and leave lasting scars that take a generation from which to recover.

"There's a growing recognition that the fault network is more complex — and you can have the participation of multiple faults in a single rupture," said U.S. Geological Survey research geologist Katherine Scharer, an expert on the San Andreas fault who wasn't affiliated with the study.

"I think this study reflects the general agreement that the San Jacinto plays an almost-equal role to the San Andreas in terms of direct hazards to Southern California," Scharer said. "The San Jacinto goes right through downtown San Bernardino.

"For the larger Los Angeles region, a rupture on this fault could produce equivalent amounts of damage as the San Andreas," she said.


San Bernardino has no law requiring owners to retrofit brick buildings, which have collapsed catastrophically in previous earthquakes and are a known killer. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

The reality could not be worse for San Bernardino — a city of 215,000 people that fell into bankruptcy in 2012 and suffers from one of the highest poverty rates among the nation's largest urban areas. San Bernardino has one of the largest concentrations of earthquake-vulnerable brick buildings in a location with a high risk of intense shaking.

San Bernardino has no law requiring owners to retrofit brick buildings, which have collapsed catastrophically in previous earthquakes and are a known killer. As of two years ago, there were more than 100 brick structures that haven't been retrofitted in the city.

Despite its lower profile, the San Jacinto fault has been a known risk for some time. It stretches for 130 miles, from the Cajon Pass in San Bernardino County southeast toward the Mexican border. The 1987 Superstition Hills earthquakes, which hit about 90 miles east of San Diego, topped out at magnitudes 6.5 and 6.7, and caused $3 million in damage in Imperial County.

The idea behind the study, funded by the National Science Foundation and published last week in the journal Science Advances, resulted from the scientific mystery of the great 1812 earthquake.

The quake was so extensive that the missions of San Gabriel, San Fernando Rey and San Buenaventura in Ventura reported damage. The quake sent the masonry of the Great Stone Church at Mission San Juan Capistrano tumbling, killing more than 40 people attending Mass; its ruins still remain to this day.

A classic explanation has been that it was the San Andreas fault alone that caused that earthquake.

But concrete evidence indicated only that the fault ruptured in 1812 on a 40-mile segment of the fault, between the Cajon Pass and Palmdale, Lozos said. The problem? That segment was too short to make an earthquake of that size.

Lozos began exploring a relatively new idea based on newly published paleoseismology reports generated by scientists investigating evidence of ancient earthquakes along the San Jacinto fault. These other scientists discovered evidence of a mystery earthquake in the early 1800s.

Lozos then posed a hypothesis: What if the 1812 earthquake was caused by the San Jacinto and San Andreas faults?

To test the idea, Lozos created a computer model. He gathered information on the shape of the faults, how seismic waves work with the local geology, and the suspected seismic stress on the faults.

The computer model showed that both the San Jacinto and San Andreas needed to rupture to produce the movement observed by the paleoseismologists, Lozos said.

Scharer said further study should occur to determine if the study's conclusions stand up to more scrutiny. But she said the approach was interesting: "It's using state-of-the-art computer models to ask if what has been observed in geology is possible, given the physics of the earth."

"It reminds people — just because they don't live on the San Andreas, that doesn't mean they aren't near an active earthquake fault," Scharer said.

There have been several examples of earthquakes jumping faults.

Earthquakes ruptured across multiple faults simultaneously in two earthquakes in the Mojave Desert: the 1992 magnitude-7.3 Landers earthquake and the 1999 magnitude-7.2 Hector Mine earthquake.

In Alaska, the magnitude-7.9 Denali earthquake ruptured across three different faults totaling more than 200 miles in length in 2002.

It happened again during the Easter Sunday earthquake of 2010, when a 7.2 earthquake and its aftershocks along the California-Mexico border triggered movement on at least six faults. One of the largest aftershocks, a magnitude 5.4, occurred about three months later from the main shock, and struck on the San Jacinto fault, Lozos said.


Other Big One scenarios rely on multiple faults rupturing at once. One is a theoretical magnitude 7.7 to 8.1 earthquake if faults rupture offshore of Santa Barbara and thencontinue east through Ventura, the San Fernando Valley, Altadena, Azusa and eventually to Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County.

ron.lin@latimes.com

A version of this article appeared in print on March 17, 2016, in the News section of the Los Angeles Times with the headline "2 faults could add up to Big One - San Andreas and San Jacinto rupturing together may cause a magnitude-7.5 quake, a new study indicates." 

How rocks shaped the Civil War

SCIENMAG
March 17, 2016



Boulder, Colo., USA: The most studied battleground from the American Civil War, from a geological perspective, is the rolling terrain surrounding Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Here, the mixture of harder igneous and softer sedimentary rocks produced famous landform features such as Cemetery Hill and Little Round Top that provided strong defensive positions for the Union Army.

Another even more common type of rock — carbonates such as limestone — provided similarly formidable defensive positions at numerous other battlefields in both the eastern and western theaters of conflict.

Limestones and dolostones shaped the terrain of multiple important battle sites, including Antietam, Stones River, Chickamauga, Franklin, Nashville, and Monocacy, and these rock types proved consequential with respect to the tactics employed by both Union and Confederate commanders.

This article by Scott P. Hippensteel of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte describes how carbonate rocks produced rolling terrain that limited the range and effectiveness of both artillery and small arms. Additionally, thin soils above limestone bedrock prevented tillage and the resulting forests provided concealment and cover for advancing troops. From a defensive perspective, on a larger geographic scale carbonates provided natural high ground from chert-enriched limestones. On a smaller scale, erosion of these same rocks produced karrens (or "cutters") that provided natural rock-lined trenches for defending troops.

FEATURED ARTICLE

Carbonate rocks and American Civil War infantry tactics

Scott P. Hippensteel, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, North Carolina 28223, USA. Themed issue: Human Dimensions in Geoscience.

This article is online at http://geosphere.gsapubs.org/content/early/2016/03/16/GES01266.1.abstract

Parks Canada juggles competing claims to Franklin shipwrecks

Discovery of HMS Erebus wreck in Arctic waters produced dazzling objects — and ownership claims

Dean Beeby · Senior reporter, Parliamentary Bureau · CBC News March 8, 2016




Parks Canada has been in a tug of war with the government of Nunavut about who controls artifacts from the sunken Sir John Franklin ships in Arctic waters — and so far Nunavut is winning.

Nunavut officials refused to issue archeological dive permits to Parks Canada unless the federal government agreed to give up the authority to retrieve whatever artifacts it wants from the ocean floor.

Parks Canada initially balked at the restriction, but relented after getting advice that defying the Nunavut government could get their divers arrested by the RCMP.

Now, the agency must seek prior permission from Nunavut's director of heritage before retrieving anything from HMS Terror, the remaining lost ship from Franklin's ill-fated 19th century Arctic expedition to find the Northwest Passage.

A cannon from HMS Erebus, one of the ship's two six-pounder guns, is hoisted toward the surface during the 2015 artifact recovery mission in the Arctic. The government of Nunavut is requiring Parks Canada to seek prior authorization before divers can recover any artifacts from the still-lost companion ship, HMS Terror. (Thierry Boyer/Parks Canada)

The awkward outcome is yet another headache for Parks Canada, which is delicately navigating competing claims to the Franklin wrecks and artifacts.

Other claimants include the Kitikmeot Inuit, who have a say in the fate of the artifacts under a land claims treaty, and the British, who have the right to cherry-pick any artifacts that are of "outstanding significance" to the Royal Navy.

A CBC News investigation uncovered the jurisdictional tensions behind the dazzling headlines of the discovery of the wreck of HMS Erebus in September 2014 and the continued search for HMS Terror.

The spat with Nunavut began last spring, when Parks Canada applied for a permit to send divers to both the wreck of HMS Erebus and, if found, the wreck of HMS Terror.

"During the permit application process for the spring 2015 ice dive on HMS Erebus, the government of Nunavut included a condition that denied Parks Canada the authorization to recover artifacts from the wreck site," says a briefing note for Leona Aglukkaq, who was then the environment minister.

"Parks Canada responded to the government of Nunavut that it could not accept the condition," says the briefing, which noted the "risk of being charged" under the Nunavut Act. "The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have the authority to lay a charge." The note, and related documents, were obtained by CBC News under the Access to Information Act.
Trumps permit regulations

The federal cabinet subsequently declared the HMS Erebus wreck and surrounding waters a national historic site, which decisively trumped Nunavut's permit regulations.

But the other lost Franklin ship, HMS Terror, posed a problem because the wreck is almost certainly outside the boundaries of the national historic site and is therefore under Nunavut's jurisdiction.

Nunavut's insistence that Parks Canada get prior permission before retrieving any object from the wreck of HMS Terror put the agency in a difficult position.

"The ability to recover artifacts is a critical requirement of the search operation," says the briefing note.
'Ice conditions are ... raising the risk of permanent loss of artifacts'- Environment minister's briefing note

There's a "likelihood that evidence for HMS Terror will be spread over a debris field.… ice conditions are unpredictable, and there are no guarantees that additional searches will be possible in the coming years, raising the risk of permanent loss of artifacts."

In the end, Parks Canada acceded to Nunavut's demands, and agreed last June to seek prior permission of Nunavut's director of heritage before its divers remove any HMS Terror artifacts they may come across. Parks Canada is again applying for an HMS Terror dive permit this year, and Nunavut spokesman Doug Stenton says the same conditions will apply.

A boot was among the artifacts found during last summer's search of the wreck of HMS Erebus. (Parks Canada)

Just how that awkward arrangement will work is unclear. "The approval process would be managed on a case by case basis once Parks Canada archeologists identify potential artifacts for recovery," agency spokeswoman Kassandra Daze says in an email.

Complicating the artifact dispute is the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement, which requires the federal government to negotiate what's called an Inuit Impact Benefits Agreement for any area that it declares a national historic site, in this case the location of the wreck of HMS Erebus.

Talks on the benefits agreement have begun. A Kitikmeot Inuit spokesman says ownership and control of Franklin artifacts is a priority because the Inuit want the objects to be displayed in local communities to enhance tourism. So far, all 55 objects retrieved from HMS Erebus remain in Ottawa for conservation, including the ship's bell.
Britain has claim

"We'll all be coming to a table with our legal opinions at some point and trying to finally establish the ownership," says Fred Pedersen, director of planning and communications for the Kitikmeot Inuit Association in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

The British government also has a stake, based on a 1997 memorandum of understanding signed with Canada before any elusive Franklin wreck objects were found. The agreement acknowledges Britain's ownership of the wrecks and their contents, but says that country will assign ownership to Canada of everything recovered from the wrecks.

But there are two key exceptions. Any gold found will not be given up by Britain (none has been discovered yet). And "any recovered artifacts identified by Britain as being of outstanding significance to the Royal Navy will be offered to Britain for display in an appropriate museum."

A spokesman for the British High Commission in Ottawa, Nathan Skolski, says that "at present no items have been returned to the U.K. nor has the U.K. sought to do so." He adds that there currently is "no protocol for determining ownership."

A Parks Canada underwater archeologist positions reference lines in the debris field near the wreck of HMS Erebus. The search for Franklin's other ship, HMS Terror, will continue this year. (Parks Canada)

Daze confirms Britain has not assigned ownership of anything to Canada, 18 months after HMS Erebus was discovered.

She adds that Parks Canada's goal is to make the artifacts available for public display somewhere in Nunavut after a lengthy conservation process.

Since 2008, Parks Canada has spent about $1 million on its archeological dives for the Franklin wrecks.

Follow @DeanBeeby on Twitter

Virtual time machine of Earth's geology now in the cloud

Phys.org
March 9, 2016

A reconstruction of the supercontinent Pangea 180 million years ago. The colors correspond to fluctuations in the continental gravity field, which reflect the deep continental structure such as roots of ancient mountain chains, basins and …more

How did Madagascar once slot next to India? Where was Australia a billion years ago?


Cloud-based virtual globes developed by a team led by University of Sydney geologists mean anyone with a smartphone, laptop or computer can now visualise, with unprecedented speed and ease of use, how the Earth evolved geologically.

Reported today in PLOS ONE, the globes have been gradually made available since September 2014. Some show Earth as it is today while others allow reconstructions through 'geological time', harking back to the planet's origins.

Uniquely, the portal allows an interactive exploration of supercontinents. It shows the breakup and dispersal of Pangea over the last 200 million years. It also offers a visualisation of the supercontinent Rodinia, which existed 1.1 billion years ago. Rodinia gradually fragmented, with some continents colliding again more than 500 million years later to form Gondwanaland.

"Concepts like continental drift, first hypothesised by Alfred Wegener more than a century ago, are now easily accessible to students and researchers around the world," said University of Sydney Professor of Geophysics Dietmar Müller.

"The portal is being used in high schools to visualise features of the Earth and explain how it has evolved through time."

The virtual globes includes visual depictions of a high-resolution global digital elevation model, the global gravity and magnetic field as well as seabed geology, making the amazing tapestry of deep ocean basins readily accessible.

The portal also portrays the dynamic nature of Earth's surface topography through time. It visualises the effect of surface tectonic plates acting like giant wobble boards as they interact with slow convection processes in the hot, toffee-like mantle beneath Earth's crust.

"When continents move over hot, buoyant swells of the mantle they bob up occasionally causing mountains," said Professor Müller. "Conversely the Earth's surface gets drawn down when approaching sinking huge masses of old, cold tectonic slabs sinking in the mantle, creating lowlands and depressions in the earth's crust."

Since its inception the portal has been visited more than 300,000 times from more than 200 countries and territories. Individual globes have featured in numerous media articles around the world. The seafloor geology globe is the most popular, viewed on average 500 times per day. The globe allows the viewer to explore how different types of deep-sea sediments vary between ocean basins, and at different latitudes and depths.

"These cloud-based globes offer many future opportunities for providing on-the-fly big data analytics, transforming the way big data can be visualised and analysed by end users," said Professor Müller.

The interactive globes can be viewed on any browser at: portal.gplates.org


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-virtual-machine-earth-geology-cloud.html#jCp

Intricately Color-Coded Maps Marking Bomb Damage from the London Blitz

See the tragic effects of the aerial bombardment on London’s landscape.

Anika Burgess

Atlas Obscura

MARCH 11, 2016

A map of Bethnal Green, showing WW2 bomb damage. (All Maps and Map Key: © 2015 The City of London (London Metropolitan Archives))

As one of the oldest medieval churches in London, St. Giles' Cripplegate had survived for centuries until the summer of 1940. Days before the start of the eight-month bombardment of London known as the Blitz–from the German for Blitzkrieg, or lightning war–St. Giles received a direct hit. Later that year, a series of incendiary bombs rained down on the church. Afterward, there was rubble instead of pews, sky instead of roof.

The area surrounding St Giles was destroyed. Across London, as bombardments persisted, it was the job of the rescue services to document the extent of the damage. Officers had to complete an "Incident Report and Record of War Damage," which were used by the London City Council's Architect's Department. Those records helped create the detailed maps that are the focus of the new book, The London County Council’s Bomb Damage Maps, 1939-1945.

A map showing the bomb damage in Deptford.

The effect of the Blitz on London’s population and built environment is laid bare in these meticulously detailed maps. The color-coding offers a bleak and immediate sense of what the landscape must have been like, and the tragedies the Londoners endured. Orange is "general blast damage–not structural"; light red is "seriously damaged–repairable at cost"; red is "seriously damaged–doubtful if repairable"; purple is "damaged beyond repair"; black is "total destruction."

The maps help to contextualize the staggering statistics from the Blitz: in London alone, there were 57 consecutive nights of bombing. An estimated 43,000 people lost their lives. Over one million houses were destroyed or damaged. 

(Photo: Arthur Cross and Fred Tibbs © 2015 The City of London (London Metropolitan Archives) and reproduced by the kind permission of the Commissioner of the City of London Police)

The panorama above provides a glimpse of the destruction in "the Barbican area following the demolition of unsafe buildings in the summer of 1942," the book reports. St. Giles' Cripplegate Church, which was located in this area, was not rebuilt until 1966, more than two decades after the war ended.

The maps featured in the book also played a part in rebuilding postwar London. Including original incident reports and archival photographs alongside the mapsThe London County Council’s Bomb Damage Maps, 1939-1945 provides a graphic representation of the tragic cost of the bombing and how it shaped the London landscape.

Key to LCC Bomb Damage Maps. 

Wapping; Bermondsey.

Waterloo; Elephant and Castle.

Regent’s Park; Somerstown.

Upper-Holloway; Parliament Hill.

Mayfair; Soho.

Stepney; Limehouse.

Clerkenwell; Islington (Part).

The cover of The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps 1939-1945. (Photo: Courtesy Thames and Hudson)

This App Identifies Geological Features From the Friendly Skies

Kirstin Fawcett

Mental_floss




Plane trips provide a tantalizing bird’s-eye glimpse of the world’s geographical wonders. For voyagers who want more information on the mountains, rivers, and plains below them, a geology student named Shane Loeffler developed an app called Flyover Country that's now available for free download.

According to Smithsonian, Flyover Country works with a phone’s GPS, and uses maps and information from scientific databases to identify land features miles away. A map tags the features you’re seeing from your window, and you can pull up cached Wikipedia pages to learn about a given peak or body of water.

Loeffler received a National Science Foundation grant to develop the app while studying at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He and a team of geologists at the University of Minnesota are now working on adding more information to the app. Their end goal is for geologists and paleontologists to upload their fieldwork research to create a massive, ever-changing Earth science database.

The app works best in cloudless skies. (The Flyover Country team does hope to tap a meteorologist at some point to write an article about clouds and how they form, so even a cloud-filled view can be a learning opportunity.) For more information, check out Flyover Country’s website, or read Smithsonian’s full interview with Loeffler online.

The race to get an earthquake early warning system in B.C. When the next earthquake hits — will we get a heads-up?

By Johanna Wagstaffe, CBC News

Posted: Mar 16, 2016 3:29 PM




Whether it's the big one under the Pacific Ocean, or a smaller one closer to home, earthquakes are inevitable on the West Coast. Inevitable — but unpredictable.

Now imagine you had a few seconds, or even a minute of warning time before the ground started shaking? Enough time to drop, cover and hold-on; manoeuvres that have been proven to save lives.

It's a race against a ticking time bomb — to get an earthquake early warning system in place before the next big one strikes.

And ever since the magnitude 4.8 earthquake that struck near Victoria, December 29, shaking a reminder into much of the South Coast, the pace has picked up.
How do early warnings work?

An early warning system is based on the fact earthquakes send out seismic waves in all directions. These waves travel at different speeds and they don't all shake the ground in a damaging way.

The fastest waves, called primary or p-waves, can't even be felt — but they can be picked up by sensors.

The secondary waves, called shear or s-waves, are the ones that cause the damage, shaking the ground back and forth as they travel through the earth.

Sensitive instruments can detect the first waves and trigger a network of warnings if it is indicating a large earthquake has just struck.

The farther away you are from the epicentre, the sooner the warning. 

The first waves sent out by an earthquake don't shake the ground — but they can trigger alarms. (CBC)

Believe it or not, the South Coast has a number of earthquake early warning systems already in place right now.

Research groups, as well as commercial companies, have been developing cutting edge technology over the past few years that will detect early earthquake waves.

So what's out there already, and why aren't you connected?

UBC's early warning network
​
UBC has been making headlines for their collaboration with schools across the South Coast. The university has a network of sensors and alarms in 60 schools — part of a pilot project with fund raising from the Catholic school board.

Accelerometers buried under the ground at some of the schools will detect the p-waves and trigger the alarms in all the schools connected to the network.

The alarm will sound over the school's PA system and the students have been trained to drop, cover and hold on — before the shaking even begins.

The designer of the accelerometers is Civil Engineering Research Associate Dr. Kent Johansen. His family had a 13-second warning when the December 29 earthquake struck — the first real test of the equipment.

Dr. Kent Johansen is a UBC civil engineering research associate and the designer behind the earthquake early warning network that has been installed in some schools across the South Coast. (CBC )

"I expect to see a little spike and I see a big spike! And I get out of the door, and of course I want to see the data because finally my system is doing something!"

"But I hear my wife shouting 'ìs that you, are you doing something?' 'Nope that's not me. That's an earthquake'" he said about the night the earthquake struck.
Connect to UBC's network from your home

Now Johansen is working on a home alarm that the public can use to connect to the early warning network via the internet.

The project, launched on Kickstarter, is a "not for profit" community project, aiming to provide Earthquake Early Warning at a reasonable cost.

Johansen also hopes that the simple, open-source design will encourage experimenting with the device — connecting it to apps as well as existing home systems like gas shutdowns.

He thinks this 'grassroots' approach to connecting people to an existing network of sensors might be the fastest way to get everyone an early warning.

Johansen runs a demonstration of the waves that the network of accelerometers detected during the December 29, 2015 earthquake that struck 20 km north of Victoria. (CBC)

The only downside to the home system is that it does require the internet to operate. In the rare cases that internet happens to be down before an earthquake happens, or there are network back-up issues, the alarm might not work.

But Johansen acknowledges this and says the network approach is "the only way it can be done without liability. We have something that is a lot better than nothing."

"We're not interested in earning money. We are interested in saving lives and that's the objective."

Johansen also hopes that this system can be implemented in Eastern Canada where moderate sized earthquakes can also happen.

And eventually — to countries that don't have big budgets for this kind of warning network but have very vulnerable infrastructure, like Nepal.

So Kent is part of one group interested in earthquake early warning systems — the research sector — where innovation meets trying to do things under a budget.

But UBC isn't the only group that has a working earthquake early warning system in place. When it comes to hardware — the commercial sector is king.

Johansen has developed a Kickstarter page to fund an open source, earthquake early warning device kit for the home, using UBC's existing network. (CBC )

ShakeAlarm's early warning units

ShakeAlarm® is an on-site earthquake early warning system developed by a Vancouver based, family run company — Weir-Jones Group. And they already have some big clients.

The ShakeAlarm® technology is different than what UBC is using because they install stand-alone units — rather than a network of sensors.

Andrew Weir-Jones is the Operations Manager for the company and he says that they decided to basically go off the grid.

All the units make the decisions themselves, they do not rely on a network or a power source. So there is minimal concern for network traffic or problems with the internet.

Andrew Weir-Jones is the operations manager for the Vancouver-based Weir-Jones group that created the earthquake early warning system — ShakeAlarm®. (CBC)

Up until this year, the price tag prohibited individuals from buying the system for their home. The cost has now come down to $9,500 for a unit.

The company will install it into the bottom of your house and it will feed a signal into your app. If someone wants to tie the unit into a control system in their home — like a gas shut-off valve, then they have to buy the whole system.

But if people just want the service on an app, that 30 users can connect to, the cost is $85 a month. 

The ShakeAlarm® home system is available for purchase as a single unit connected to your home, or as an app with a monthly fee. (CBC )

The real strength may lie in these stand alone units. Reliable and robust may be the way to go for city infrastructure like hospitals and office buildings.

In fact, a government contract back in 2009 put a ShakeAlarm® in the Massey Tunnel — a place where thousands of cars pass ever day. That's the connector between the U.S. and one of the Lower Mainland's major arteries.

In a large earthquake where a tunnel collapse is a concern, the stand-alone unit will trigger an alarm to get the cars out of the tunnel, and put gates down to stop more cars from entering — all before the damaging waves arrive.

There is an earthquake early warning system at the Massey Tunnel — a major highway tunnel in Metro Vancouver where thousands of cars pass every day. (CBC )

Weir-Jones says that it's up to the province to decide what they want to do moving forward but he estimates he could put a province-wide system in place for less than $5 million.

And he says there is interest from across the border in their system and technology.

So with at least two options already in place ready to be expanded upon — where does the government stand when it comes to investing in earthquake early warning technology?
Government funding

On February 29, the B.C. government announced a huge investment in the technology — $5 million to Ocean Networks Canada. This is big news for the scientific community and big news for B.C.

Dr. Kate Moran, president and CEO of Ocean Networks Canada and Naomi Yamamoto, B.C.'s minister of emergency preparedness during the funding announcement on February 29, 2016. (CBC)

Ocean Networks Canada is a research group out of the University of Victoria, world-renowned for its underwater technology off the coast of Vancouver Island. They will use the money to install eight sensors designed to detect these early p-waves.

Three of the new sensors will be placed right on the subduction zone — where one day the big one will happen. For an earthquake early warning system, that means extra warning time.

The closer a sensor is located to the epicentre of an earthquake — the more lead time a warning can give.

Ocean Networks Canada will be adding earthquake sensors to the network of other instruments they currently have on the ocean floor. (Ocean Networks Canada)

But part of the funding will also go towards collaborating — and that will be key. Ocean Networks Canada doesn't have a network of sensors in place across the Lower Mainland — where smaller, but shallow and potentially damaging earthquakes can happen closer to major population centres.

These are called crustal earthquakes and that's what we got on December 29. 

Collaboration is key 

The Juan de Fuca plate is subducting under the North America plate. The 'big one' will happen somewhere along this boundary, out in the Pacific Ocean. Earthquakes on the North American plate are more common and are smaller in magnitude and generally shallower than a megathrust earthquake but can be damaging due to their proximity. (CBC)

So between UBC's network, ShakeAlarm sensors, Natural Resources Canada's existing seismograms and any other industry that has a stand alone sensor — all of the ingredients exist for a comprehensive, public earthquake early-warning system.

And it's a two-way information share. UBC and ShakeAlarm will also get the data from Ocean Networks Canada.

Kate Moran, the president and CEO of Ocean Networks Canada says they will be "working with our partners to density the network.

The goal is to have a sensor every 20 kms and we'll see how far we can get with the funds we have".

She says that she came into working on earthquake early warning systems three years ago, and there were already players at the table. Moran says the expertise in B.C. is world class.

And that's why the U.S. wants in on the collaboration. Especially since earthquakes know no borders.

"With the fact that we have so many great people here, we feel like we might even be able to have it in place first. Fingers crossed." says Moran.

Yup. Canada might have a robust early earthquake warning system before the U.S.

So we've got the universities, the private companies and the government agencies all wanting ultimately the same goal. And now the government has assigned someone to be in charge of that alliance.

One thing's for sure — it's happening fast with some of the world's brightest innovators. Moran couldn't give an exact timeline on the whole project but says it could be in place within a few years.

Only time will tell if that's faster than the next earthquake.
Education is just as important

All sides couldn't stress enough the importance of earthquake education. Everyone in the province needs to be more knowledgeable.

Having extra seconds won't mean as much if you don't know what's going on, you don't know what to do, you don't have an earthquake plan or kit in place.

So many people didn't know what was happening on Dec 29 when the earthquake struck — they thought it was a truck; they stumbled out into hallways or froze in place or even worse — got under doorways.

Drop, cover and hold on is what saves lives. 

Grade 8 students at the Notre Dame Regional Secondary school practice how to react to an earthquake early warning alarm. (CBC )


So along with talking to your family about what to do, get educated about the earthquake and tsunami risks where you live — earthquakes can happen almost right across the country.

And there are options out there if you don't want to wait for the public system.

Ice Shelf Bigger Than Manhattan Could Be About To Break From Antarctica

IFLScience!
March 15, 2016
Robin Andrews

photo credit: Nansen Ice Shelf and the crack, taken by Landsat 8 on December 16, 2015. USGS


Antarctic scientists have documented ice shelves disintegrating from the southern continentat an unprecedented rate, thanks in no part to the pace of man-made climate change. The icy realm’s next victim may be the Nansen Ice Shelf, through which resides a ginormous crack that threatens to cleave it off at a moment’s notice.

As spotted by the United States Geological Survey's (USGS) Landsat 8 satellite, Nansen – which at 1,750 square kilometers (600 square miles) in size is twice the size of Manhattan Island – is suffering the fate of many ice shelves in recent history. The current stability of Antarctic ice shelves, which are the floating seaward extensions of ice sheets, is hazardously low. Increased global temperatures are causing the undersides of huge ice masses to melt and weaken.

Consequently, Larsen-A in the Antarctic Peninsula collapsed in 1995, followed by Larsen-B in 2002. Larsen-C, which is 2.5 times the size of Wales, is treading on thin ice. Nansen, which is “fed” by the Priestly and Reeves Glaciers and backsup against the peculiar-looking Drygalski Ice Tongue, is looking decidedly wobbly: Two years ago, the crack was barely visible, whereas now it spans almost the entire length of the ice shelf.

“The front of Nansen Ice Shelf… looks ready to calve off into a tabular iceberg,” wrote Ryan Walker, a researcher at NASA Goddard, on a blog for NASA’s Earth Observatory. “There’s a huge crack, miles long and sometimes over a hundred yards wide, which runs more or less parallel to the front of the ice shelf.”

Although this may sound rather catastrophic, there are two points worth considering here. Firstly, ice shelves make up around 75 percent of the Antarctic coastline, and their total combined area is equivalent to 1.56 million square kilometers (603,000 square miles). If all of Nansen collapses, it will reduce Antarctica’s ice shelf coverage by just 0.1 percent.



The mega crack, photographed in December 2015. Christine Dow/NASA Goddard


Nansen doesn’t even register as a “major” ice shelf, with those such as Ross, at around 472,000 square kilometers (182,000 square miles), dwarfing it. The Ross Ice Shelf partly collapsed at the end of the last ice age around 10,000 years ago, when a colossal chunk280,000 square kilometers (108,000 square miles) in size fell into the sea over 1,500 years. That’s 360 times the size of Manhattan Island, by the way.

Secondly, these ice shelves may be anchored to the land, but they do not actually significantly contribute to sea level rise – after all, they’re already floating on the sea. So the collapse of Nansen by itself won’t cause much harm, per se.

However, ice shelves like Nansen do act as vast barricades for glaciers behind them. When an ice shelf is removed, glaciers begin to tumble into the sea at surprisingly fast speeds – sometimes moving ten times faster than normal – and these will definitely cause the sea level to rise. So in effect, man-made climate change is breaking Antarctica’s huge ice dams.

Although the Antarctic winter is now setting in, strong winds can prevent the nearby water from freezing up into ice, meaning that we might not have to wait until the summer to see Nansen’s epic break-up.

Can You Outrun a Supervolcano? Maybe, Study Finds

Becky Oskin, Contributing Writer

Livescience

March 07, 2016 09:49am ET



When a supervolcano like Yellowstone erupts, residents may have a few hours to escape once the disaster has started, a new study suggests.

Credit: "Windows into the Earth," Robert B. Smith and Lee J. Siegel

Can you outrun a supervolcano? New evidence from an ancient eruption suggests the answer is a surprising yes.

"I wouldn't recommend anyone try to outrun a volcano, but there's a few of us that could," said Greg Valentine, a volcanologist at the University at Buffalo in New York.

By analyzing rocks trapped in volcanic ash, Valentine and his colleagues discovered the lethal ash flow spread at street speeds — about 10 to 45 mph (16 to 72 km/h). It might be hard to sustain this pace on foot, but it's certainly possible by car. [Big Blasts: History's 10 Most Destructive Volcanoes]

The findings were published March 7 in the journal Nature Communications.

"It's really interesting how you can have such a violent eruption producing such slow-moving flows," said Valentine, co-author of the new study. "They still devastate a huge area, but they're slow and concentrated and dense," he told Live Science. His collaborators include Olivier Roche, of Blaise Pascal University in France and David Buesch, of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Of course, the safest way to deal with any rumbling volcano is to get as far away as possible. Lots of distance can prevent the most common cause of death associated with volcanoes: being trapped and suffocated by a torrent of ash, rocks and superhot gas that explode out at speeds of up to 300 mph (about 480 km/h). These "pyroclastic flows" are the real volcanic killer, not lava. A pyroclastic flow wiped out the Roman town of Pompeii, and in 1902, Mount Pelée on Martinique unleashed a pyroclastic flow that killed some 29,000 people. [Preserved Pompeii: Photos Reveal City of Ash]

You should still evacuate

Volcanologists try to account for such hazards when planning for future disasters. But it's hard to know what will happen when a supervolcano the size of Yellowstone blows its top. The last supereruption on Earth was 74,000 years ago, in Toba, Indonesia. Looking at the rocky remains of past supereruptions can reveal how and why supervolcanoes erupt.

These rocks were picked up and moved across the Arizona landscape by pyroclastic flows from the Silver Creek caldera, a supervolcano, eruption 18.8 million years ago.

Credit: Greg A. Valentine


When a supervolcano blew in Arizona 18.8 million years ago, the ash spread more than 100 miles (160 km). This single layer, called the Peach Springs Tuff, is more than 450 feet (140 meters) thick in the area close to the volcano and 10 feet (3 m) thick at its edge, 100 miles away. (A tuff is a volcanic rock made of solidified ash.)

The researchers measured rocks at the bottom of the tuff in Arizona that were carried in the flow. They matched unique rock types back to their source, and found that many of the rocks, whether fist-size or boulders, were carried no farther than a football field.

Accounting for the size and position of these rocks helped the researchers build a model of how fast and thick the ash flow was as it traveled. It turns out that only a dense, slow-moving pyroclastic flow could suck up the rocks from the surface and trundle them along. A fast, relatively thin flow would have to reach impossible speeds — up to 1,454 mph (2,340 km/h) — to carry the rocks, the researchers found.

"I think it's plausible but speculative," said Calvin Miller, a volcanologist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, who was not involved in the study. "It will be interesting to see how the [scientific] community responds to it. Even if they're right for the Peach Springs Tuff, this is just part of a continuum of eruption styles," Miller told Live Science.

The origins of the Peach Springs Tuff can be spotted in southwestern Arizona's Black Mountains, near the town of Oatman. The eruption left behind a very large crater called a caldera, though it has been mostly obliterated by erosion and faulting.

The caldera, called Silver Creek, spewed magma for several days, releasing a volume of about 1,000 times the Mississippi River's daily flow at New Orleans, Valentine said. "If you think about 1,000 Mississippi Rivers coming out of the ground, you can see how [the ash] would have spread out across a huge area," he said.

However, one expert on the Peach Springs Tuff doesn't buy the scenario. Charles Ferguson, a research geologist with the Arizona Geological Survey, said there are outcrops that suggest the ash moved quickly and energetically, like a typical pyroclastic flow.

"I think their hypothesis is more problematic than explanatory," Ferguson told Live Science.

Southwestern supervolcanoes

Kodachrome slides, held by geologist Greg Valentine of the University of Buffalo, show images of geologic formations associated with the supereruption of the Silver Creek caldera.
Credit: Douglas Levere

The Peach Springs Tuff covers parts of Arizona, Nevada and California, from Barstow, California, to Peach Springs, Arizona. Geologists use the creamy white and pink rock as a unique marker in the region.

The western United States suffered at least 100 of these huge eruptions starting about 40 million years ago (a consequence of shifting tectonic plates). It's not clear whether every one of these supervolcanic blasts sent out slowly moving ash flows, but Valentine said he sees similar evidence in other areas.

The powerful Peach Springs eruption ejected 72 cubic miles (300 cubic km) of pulverized rock into the air. For comparison, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington blasted out 0.24 cubic miles (1 cubic km) of material. And the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines spewed 2.4 cubic miles (10 cubic km) of material.

Any supereruption will likely come with a fair amount of warning, similar to the bulge that foreshadowed the Mount St. Helens eruption. The new findings suggest that people living near a supervolcano might have a few hours to evacuate once the disaster starts, the researchers said.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Teaching across the curriculum with digital maps

Written by Rachel Jones

09 March 2015

Rachel Jones, who loves sharing ideas, is a Google Certified Teacher interested in creativity and innovation in the classroom. ...

Website: Createinnovateexplore.com





Maps are objects of fetish; there is something special about tracing a route across the London Underground map or blowing the dust off maps that chart countries which don’t even exist anymore. The thrill of places we have never been, or the familiarity of home, all appeal, and can be imagined through the medium of maps. It is no coincidence that with the power to look at almost the whole (can’t find out exactly how much!?) of the globe, the first search the people do in Google Earth is to look at their house. In the classroom, maps can intrigue learners, and be used to add context and depth to learning across the curriculum. Long the reserve of Geography departments, maps that you can access with technology are a cost-effective way to bring the real world into the classroom - giving extended meaning to many subject disciplines.


One way to use mapping tools is to create a narrative. Google Tour Builder lets you drop pins in Google Earth to create a story based on map positions. You are also able to add details and images about why the location is important, or to cite website or primary resource materials. This could be used effectively in the classroom by many subject areas - consider charting the life or conquests of a Roman Emperor. The events of their lives might look impressive as statistics, but seeing the distances ancient cultures travelled is truly awesome on a map. In a lesson on Greek Temples, the concentration in the room was broken by a student squeaking with excitement that they ‘could walk right inside the Parthenon.’ You can pay money for exciting learning moments like that.





In History, nothing illustrates the futility of the First World War as charting the ground taken in trench warfare. In English, students could create a tour based on the places that a fictional character travels to, and then write their controlled assessments after strolling the same streets in street view. Learning should be authentic and mean something beyond a worksheet, and by allowing the students the chance to walk in the footsteps of those they are studying, Google Tour Builder gives learning an extra dimension.

Google Earth itself is being used by the WWF to help engage people in their conservation projects. By using the resource to map the conservation projects that they fund, they are able to raise awareness of the work that they do and the causes they they support. This real-time information contains the number any species of protected animal that they are helping, allowing students access to the most recent data on these types of animals. It could be of massive use for topic work on endangered animals in a primary curriculum, but could also be used for detailed work at secondary level looking at the impact of human activity, both economic and political, on animal species in Biolo



While we are on the topic of Science, I know that street view might not be the most stimulating of tools for many teachers - but did you know that you can now see underground too, such as the Akiyoshi-do caves in Japan? Tell me that won’t give any lesson on rock formations some va va voom!



In many ways, mapping is about imagining and re-imagining community groups, be they local or national. We use maps to draw lines in the dirt and declare ourselves as belonging to a group either side of a line. You can add details to to pre-made maps using Google Map Maker, this could be a very powerful tool for asking learners to map their understanding of the environment. The sum of a learner’s cultural understanding of their position in society, and the ability that they have to express this, can be used to further discussion on social class and equality. As a classroom activity there is a lot that can be gained from a discussion about how students would annotate their local environment, and could be a useful in road for pastoral discussion that otherwise might not have surfaced. So take the bland map of your school environment and do some real learning about those in your classroom and their perspective of the world.



Tutor time can be a bit of a dead zone with kids fiddling on their phones and not much of anything going on. Well. Have a go at competitive Smarty Pins, which is a game that uses places on the map as answers to general knowledge questions. Guaranteed to keep students interested for at least a week of tutor groups. Some teachers have even run competitions in school to see who can get the most points! All good fun - but also gearing the brain up to do good learning the rest of the day



For interests of balance, an awesome non-Googleish tool is the app Sphere, which can be used to take 360 degree photographs. These are linked to a map so that you can find 360 degree environments to explore. You could use these to immerse yourself in a landscape or culture that you are studying, or it would make a really great project to photograph the local environment and link it to the maps in the app. It would also serve as an excellent memory jogger to do this on school trips, so that landscapes can be virtually re-experienced and prompt better quality work.

Maps are very much about the spirit of adventure, something which can be missing from the modern classroom. It can be very exciting to set up a treasure hunt for your class outside using Google Earth Coordinates - a sort of educational geocaching. I have, in the past, set up a trail of hidden clues (particularly like the camouflage bags you can get to hide the clues in!) which had a puzzle and the next coordinates the group had to find. I split the class into small groups and they used their mobile devices to find the coordinates and find the puzzles. You can do something very similar using XNote app where you can hide messages for your class. This is a brilliant starter activity if you have an outdoor lesson, and can really get the blood pumping to the brain as the students rush to find the hidden message. Brilliant and, crucially, not achievable without maps and technology.

Although geography fiends are getting to grips with Geographical Information Systems, ESRI’s Story Maps offers loads of information for the non-geographer. There are plenty of pre-made maps that can be found in the gallery, and it’s a straightforward procedure to sign up and get creating. Imagine a tour of your school built using this!



Speaking of creating maps, an essential tool for whole school goodness is Edina’s Digimap and shouldn’t be confined to the geography classroom

Although it’s a subscription service, what you get is great value and students can create their own maps of any area. In addition, there are high-quality historical maps and images available.

Another free source of Ordnance Survey maps can be found through the Bing Search engine. Navigate to a place in the UK and choose the OS map layer option. This is fantastic for comparing different locations within our nation. At some point, students should get used to ‘proper’ maps and understand that many of the smartphone apps we use today rely upon geospatial data, which is supplied by the Ordnance Survey.



Talking of apps, if you haven’t found geocaching.com, you really should. Watch this video for a background of what geocaching is. If you do nothing else, download one of the free smartphone apps and find a geocache. There are over 2 million of them worldwide, and the likelihood is that there’s one very close to where you are sitting now.

One of the best things is to buy cheap trackables. These are objects that geocachers take from one cache and hide in another. Set it a mission: for example, my son’s trackable has the aim of visiting every continent. I use the map in school to calculate all sort of maths problems, such as average distance, total distance.



One school I worked in set up two trackables, each with a different mission: to reach Sochi for the Winter Olympics and to reach Rio for the 2016 Summer Olympics. We also linked the geocaching project to a local Site of Special Scientific Interest. It’s simple to set up your own geocache, and you can read more about that here.

Maps can be used across the curriculum in many ways - to inspire and engage and make our classes see beyond the boundaries of the classroom walls. However, the best use of these mapping tools is yet to be found - subverting them to tell stories is the order of the day, and being used to maps the lives of our educational communities.

[This article was co-written by David Rogers, assistant headteacher at Patcham High School, Brighton. David is a geographer and Microsoft Educator; his blog can be found at www.davidrogers.org.uk.]

Do you use mapping tools in your school? Let us know in the comments.