Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Seismic tomography under broken Japan reactor

As readers are aware, I have engaged in fighting the 'pay wall' for some time now.  Nearly all the papers I need to fight things like the Bruce silliness, are hidden behind this wall.  Right now Elsevier is using the US gov't to reinforce the wall.  And I have given up my journal subscriptions due to my self-imposed miserable poverty.  :)

So, I am happy to report that there is an open journal covering geophysics, which actually has a quality paper about the recent big Japan earthquake.  This is amazing for me, since I've always had a problem with Japanese papers due to their bizarre terms.


This one is quite beautiful, and shows the migrating fluids that come from a subducting slab.  Now, being an open paper, they strive a bit too much for relevancy.  They paint a picture of great danger for the bashed-up nuclear plant.  This has been taken up by the 'science porn' business with lurid headlines.

Is there some great new danger?  No.  These M7's are not 'superquakes' like Kobe.  They are extension quakes like Christchurch, but this part of Japan is not on a big soup like those poor folks.  These quakes can only produce something like 10 cm/s, which was about the shaking of the big quake, which makes the general hazard similar to the aftershock field of any large earthquake.

Nevertheless, I love the concept of open papers.

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