Woken half an hour ago by earthquake that shook the house for several seconds. People running about in the streets. Now unable to get back to sleep.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-32840579
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Kent has had more than its fair share of quakes over the last 100 years. There was a fair one in Folkestone a few years ago.
The North doesn’t so far seem to have many.
I remember the earthquake we had in Folkestone. It woke me in Deal, and made me think a lorry was crashing into the house.
We get quakes or tremors, usually about 4 on the Richter scale, in the West Midlands about every ten years or so. These are because of the Apedale fault which runs through Wenlock Edge and up through the Potteries, and a NW-SE fault which runs down through the Black Country. These faults intersect at the Wrekin (an extinct volcano … Wenlock Edge is the result on an ancient slippage along the line of the Apedale fault, presumeably from the time when the Wrekin was active)..
Thanks for that. There was an earthquake in Sandwich so powerful in the 16th century that it left cracks in one of the churches.
The planet is very tectonically active, still. This is unusual in cosmology, and results from its enormous size (for a planet), its composition (most of the mass is metal and concentrated in the cores) and the effect that radioactive decay of metal nuclides has in generating internal heat – a lot of it. This heat drives convection currents in the Mantle, causing crust plates to be driven about on the surface, whether they will it or no.
In one way, we are lucky to be here and not on Mars. Mars, being too small, has no Magnetosphere because no part of its core is now molten, and so no currents flow in it. Thus, its atmosphere – which might have supported aerobic (oxygen using) life if photosynthesis had got going, has all been blasted off – literally – by the Sun’s solar particle-wind.
As a result of being small, Mars has no – as far as we can tell now – earthquakes…at all. It is, truly, a Dead Planet. Just a big rock, the size of Russia and Canada and Ch-Indo-Brazilia (with a bit of Greenland thrown in) with a little bit of solid iron in the middle. Like the Moon, which is not that much smaller. Even the Moon could have held on to an uncomfortably-thin atmosphere, if it had had a Magnetosphere.
The other advantage of being on an “active” planet is that, although we mine about 20 tons of Ruthenium every year and the estimated reserves are 5,000 tons (250 years’ supply at present rates of extraction) this reserve total can only increase as crustal movements and heating bring more Ruthenium ores nearer the surface for us to get at.
Truly, and Blair said, “Things Can Only Get Better”.
It’s all very well for you – you don’t live in what has become an earthquake belt!
#NeverForget #WeWillRebuild
A fascinating book that explodes all the myths and misconceptions about earthquakes (and there are many) : “The Million Death Quake – the science of predicting earth’s deadliest natural disaster” by Roger Musson. One misconception he explodes is that of the so-called Richter Scale as a measure of earthquake severity.
Thanks. fortunately, we don’t get them very often in Kent.
Yes, it is of course dangerous to generalise. But I don’t think Kent is going to fall down any time soon from a big quake. Nor, hopefully, is The North. We all here in these islands live mercifully far from active plate boundaries.