New Brunswick earthquake swarm

I'm just referring to my old post on Miramichi.  This earthquake is out of my range with the nice maps from Ceri, and into Canada with horrible mostly-non-existent maps.  Most of these swarms are due to deep fluid motions, and a random M6 almost never signals itself like this.  It is sad to say that most M6's are one-shot deals and never repeat.  That is, the life of an M6 is that it sucks all the stress out of the surrounding rock, and then locks itself up in its own stress shadow, like a hole.  I'm only interested in growing fault mechanisms with no real limit in size.

Hot water tank games

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So, back a few years ago, Consumers Gas sold all the hot water tanks to sleazy Direct Energy without telling anybody.  Whereas they used to replace old tanks, DE waited until the tank busted and destroyed your basement.  Then they replaced it with some old recycled thing from the 60's.  I went with Livclean, and wrote a huge series about it, with a zillion comments (since destroyed).  Problem was that soon everybody and their dog was into hot water tanks, and DE fought back stating how wonderful they were, and how everybody else were sleazes.  I was afraid of legal consequences.

Now DE has pulled out of Canada, and left some turds behind.  My hot water heater went to Reliance, and I couldn't be happier with their service.  There are lots of other options besides renting, but they all look like too much work for me!  :)

ps.  All those other sleazy companies are now into door-to-door sales of furnaces and such.  They still try to suck in fresh unemployed university students, and it is sheer hell to work for them.

Rogue Virginia Earthquake

M2.2.  Some people are calling this an aftershock, but it isn't.  For now, just some random event in the middle of nowhere (no, I didn't mean Oshawa!).  :)

Elliot Lake isn't bad for nuclear waste

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I remember my trip into Elliot Lake more than 20 years ago.  I was at the height of my career, we had a thriving Geotechnical Department, and we were looking for more nuclear plants, and even had a big project on an underground nuclear plant.  Ah, those were the days!

So you had to fly in on this tiny 13 seater airplane.  I was jammed right behind the pilot.  They only have a single runway, and there was a cross-wind.  Wow!

The rock there is very tight and under very high horizontal stress.  We were looking at a uranium mine which had experienced some large rockbursts.  We climbed through the mine looking at the devastation.  That's where I got a real appreciation for the power of stressed rock, and it led me to more earthquake studies.

We must realize that there is no difference between 'intermediate' waste and the used fuel, which is called 'high level' waste.  Really, in Canada, we don't have high level waste, which I would classify as pure liquid Plutonium, extracted.  That's high-level waste!  The only thing about the fuel is that it can still produce a lot of heat.  Thus we have a problem in that extra heat will stress the rock.

Even if we go to my favourite site in Wesleyville, we have the problem of highly stressed rock and heat.  This is a rock mechanics question at its best!  I believe it is easily done.

Famous earthquakes: 1952 Kern County M7.5

Some rather high estimates of possible ground motions for the next big Cascadia slip, have led me to look for high ground motions with historical earthquakes.  Invariably these earthquakes are 'Superquakes', or my own term 'Fist of God'.  These are deep faults, near vertical thrusts, and they are so smooth when they rupture, that the rupture velocity approaches the speed of sound in rock (P wave velocity).  Most fault ruptures just trundle along at S-wave velocity or less.  I have written extensively about this.

The White Wolf Fault only had a length of 34 miles, and was thought to be only a minor threat.  This is a typical length for an M7'ish earthquake.  In actuality it was quite amazing that this fault showed its face at all, since most of these types of faults are deeply buried.

The highest intensity was MM XI, which has a PGV of about 2 m/s.  At this level outstanding things tend to happen:  things fly, trees and poles snap, etc.  There was absolutely nobody living around there, so just the railways got the worst of it.  These superquakes only produce the 'super motion' in a small zone around the fault.

Had there been buildings in the thrust zone, nothing would have survived.  Thus, we can see that the biggest threat in terms of ground motion are these superquakes at around M7.  M8's are just a string of M7's, which you can see if you look at the detailed rupture velocity maps.  M9's are a series of M8's.  :)  Oceanic M9's do not produce high ground motions.

Why the sweet spot at M7?  That's because the fault rupture length is 30 km or so, which is the usual depth to Moho (molten rock).  This is the maximum length where we can get a pure thrust pulse.  When you get to the M8 300 km, you can see that it is a long thin spaghetti on the crust, and has to rip like a zipper.