Thursday, September 9, 2010

New Zealand Earthquake Report

Reference

Yahoo! An incredible report has been released almost instantly. I never expect this!!!

Strong ground motion was very weak, shows the whole area is contaminated with extremely 'shitay' soil! Here the PGV only hits 10 cm/s before the soil gives out. The fault only slipped 200 cm at the source! If you could find firm ground in that area, you would have slept through this earthquake, with firm ground PGV probably at 1-2 cm/s. No wonder nothing collapsed, since you need 30-50 cm/s PGV to break a bearing frame. Leads me to suspect that the 'fault' they traced is soil slip. Need some drilling here!

ps. I now have to call this the Canterbury earthquake, which isn't even on this map! Makes me think that when we have our big Toronto earthquake, we'll have to call it the Ancaster Earthquake!



1 comment:

Matt said...

Canterbury is the entire region on that map.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterbury_New_Zealand