Friday, December 17, 2010

Earthquake on Greek Islands



This is a clear case where a beautiful setting is directly related to earthquakes.  In fact, all the real scenic places of the world have something to do with earthquakes, and without them it would all be as boring as Pt. Hope!


So there's this quake, buried in the historical seismicity!  But we can see there have been a lot of big quakes.


It's very interesting that these islands are being pulled apart, so that we have normal (extension) faulting.

The whole landscape pulls apart and leaves these beautiful islands, with one side steep and one side shallow sloped.  Now, there have been some huge earthquakes here, and I wonder if you can get supershear with normal faulting.  Instead of a 'Fist of God', you would get the 'Yank of God'.  The main pulse would be tension instead of compression, but I don't think it would make much difference at the surface!

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