Earthquakes Essay example -- essays research papers

I chose to research landquakes and the prediction of earthquakes because I was curious as to how they work. In this paper, Iwill discus the history of earthquakes, the kinds and locations of earthquakes, earthquake effects, intensity scales, prediction,and my own predictions.An earthquake can be defined as vibrations produced in the earths crust. tectonic plates have friction between them whichbuilds up as it tries to push a focusing and suddenly ruptures and then rebounds. The vibrations can range from barely noticeable toa disastrous, and injurious act of nature. Six kinds of shock waves are generated in the process. Two are classified as bodywaves, that is, they travel through the inside of the earth and the early(a) four are surface waves. The waves are further classifiedby the kinds of motions they incur to rock particles. Primary or compressional waves, known as P waves, invest particlesmoving back and forth in the same direction as the waves are traveling, as secondary o r transverse shear waves, known as Swaves, create vibrations perpendicular to their direction of travel. P waves always travel at faster speeds than S waves, sowhenever an earthquake occurs, P waves are the send-off to arrive and to be recorded at geophysical research stations worldwide.During ancient times very little was know about. Some of the ancient Greek philosophers connected earthquakes tounderground winds, where others blamed them on fires in the depths of the earth. Around AD 130 the Chinese scholar ChangHeng, believing that waves must ripple through the earth from the source of an earthquake, created a bronze object to recordthe directions of such waves. Eight balls were carefully balanced in the mouths of eight dragons placed around the outside ofthe object. When a passing earthquake occurred the wave would cause one or more of the balls to drop.Earthquake waves were observed in this and other ways for centuries, but more scientific theories as to the causes of quakesw ere not proposed until modern times. One such concept was recreated and advanced in 1859 by an Irish engineer, RobertMallet.Perhaps recalling on his knowledge of the strength and behavior of construction materials, Robert Mallet proposed thatearthquakes occurred "either by sudden flexure and constraint of the elastic materials forming a portion of the earths crust orby their giving way an... ...orth of the earthquake that occurred the day before, this time I was wrong, there weretwo that occurred near the San Francisco bay area and none within a 50 mile roentgen of my approximation. The next coupledays I predicted earthquakes that were within a 100 mile radius than were they actually occurred. From my experiments Iconcluded that predicting earthquakes was easy, you just have to alternative a spot on the fault. The only thing that troubled me andprobably most scientists, is magnitude, there is no possible way of predicting an earthquakes magnitude. Which is what we arereally essay to predict. Earthquakes happen all the time, but what we are really trying to figure out how to predict is when amajor earthquake is going to occur.I larn that earthquakes are almost unpredictable, and devastating acts of nature. I also learned how earthquakes occur andalmost all of the "earthquake dictionary". There is still alot more to be known about earthquakes that we still do not knowabout today. Prediction of large earthquakes is still under development, where prediction of small, unnoticeable earthquakescan be easy to predict because they happen mainly around fault lines.