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Posts Tagged ‘earthquakes’

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is heading up the design effort, which is currently in the midst of a $50,000 feasibility study. If the plan is approved, Ban plans to erect a massive 78-foot-high A-frame cathedral from cardboard tubes that will sit upon a foundation of 20-foot shipping containers (and we’re pretty positive that building plan is nowhere in the Good Book).

Don’t be misled by the term “temporary.” This structure is meant to serve as a stand-in for Christchurch Cathedral--the city’s iconic landmark--for a full ten years. It will cost about $3.4 million and could be erected in as few as three months. And try not to associate cardboard with “temporary” either--Ban has been building cardboard structures since 1989 (including a church in Kobe, Japan and several temporary housing buildings in Haiti), and he builds them to last.

Known as an “emergency architect,” Ban is a big proponent of cardboard as a building material, particularly after natural disasters when the prices of building materials spike. It’s cheap and abundant, it recycles when you’re done with it, and it’s surprisingly strong. In a pinch, you can usually get your hands on a lot of it fast at low cost.

If the plan is approved, the cardboard cathedral may be swiftly built to open on Feb 22 of next year, the one-year anniversary of the earthquake. That means a lot of cardboard will have to be erected in quite a hurry. But it’s silly to think of the strength of a building in terms of how much time you spend moving heavy materials into place, Ban says. After all, he said in remarks to Christchurch Cathedral officials, paper buildings don’t collapse during an earthquake.

[Yahoo Real Estate]

Colorado was hit with a 5.3 magnitude earthquake yesterday, the state's biggest in decades. A series of minor earthquakes hit Northern and Southern California last week, with some continuing today, but the big one today was centered in Northern Virginia, near Richmond. Though no injuries or damage have been reported, several news sources are reporting that the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol building, both located nearby, have been evacuated. Cell phone service in New York city appears spotty, especially AT&T, though it's not clear whether that's related to the earthquake or the high number of calls undoubtedly being placed right now.

We'll keep you updated as we learn more.

Icebergs have long been suspected to have a link with seismic activity, but the creation of icebergs is usually a sudden and mostly unpredictable event, the culmination of lots of pressure over decades or centuries. The Tohoku Tsunami, triggered by the earthquake off the coast of Japan this past March, was a tremendous enough seismic event that cryosphere specialists immediately knew that tracking the wave could provide the first visual proof that this connection exists.

Tohoku didn't disappoint. Eighteen hours after the tsunami struck Japan, the wave--now only about a foot high--met the Sulzberger ice shelf, a 260-feet-thick sheet of ice extending from Antarctica's land mass towards New Zealand. The Sulzberger ice shelf is no brittle sheet of ice, either, having not moved in nearly half a century. Despite the relatively short height, the continuous pressure was massive enough to snap off several huge pieces of ice, one of which is about four by six miles in surface area--roughly the same size as the other chunks combined, and close to Manhattan's 23-square-mile surface area.

Using satellite imagery (including some help from MODIS), the scientists were able to see the calving, or breaking off, in nearly real-time. (For a visualization of the worldwide earthquake's effect, click here.) It's definitive proof that a big enough tsunami can have huge effects, not just on the immediate site, but even a hemisphere away.

[NASA]

The hurricane house, the seismograph camera, the forest-fire-fighting dirigible, and more technologies developed for reducing the consequences of natural disasters

Sturdy skyscrapers, a capable warning system and disaster training didn't come from nowhere, though. As sad as it is to admit, most disaster-prone countries had to learn from destruction in order to improve their technology. We've collected several examples of early disaster-fighting tech from the Popular Science archives.

Click to launch the photo gallery.

We begin in the fall of 1919, just after World War I, when dirigibles glided across national forests in search of fires. After the war, scores of airplanes and zeppelins were commissioned to join horseback-riding firefighters to extinguish the flames consuming our trees. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Japan was about to suffer an earthquake that would kill an estimated 140,000 people. After the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and tsunami destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama, scientists collaborated to devise methods that would reduce the body count in future disasters. Japanese scientists simulated earthquakes on scale models of buildings to see what kind of engineering held up, while an American professor proposed installing ball bearings within houses for stabilization.

Meanwhile, laypeople did everything they could to protect themselves from disasters. One architect built a teardrop-shaped "hurricane house" that turned with the wind during a storm, while businesses sold the all-steel cyclone cellar, which could be delivered in one piece, no assembly required. Simply dig a hole in your front yard, embed the cellar below, and hop in when the winds begin to stir.

See more technologies by browsing through our gallery.

The combination of vulnerability to earthquakes and a natural affinity for robotics has led to a surplus of Japanese rescue robots

Predicting earthquakes is still a remarkably fruitless effort--seismologists are not reliably able to predict even a particular month in which an earthquake will occur, let alone a day. So the work done to mitigate the damage done by earthquakes is often in post-quake search-and-rescue tactics. Interestingly, two of the most earthquake-prone places in the world are also two of the world's hotbeds of robotics engineering. Japan is situated along the so-called Pacific Rim of Fire, at the point where the Pacific and Eurasian tectonic plates collide. The country is continually at risk of massive earthquakes, and as a technological world power, is uniquely capable of creating technological salves for 'quakes.

Click to launch the photo gallery

Hopefully, advances like the ones shown here will be able to somewhat lessen the destruction of earthquakes in the future.

Note: While most of these creations come from Japan, we stumbled across a few from elsewhere that were so cool we couldn't keep them to ourselves. Although, interestingly, those were mostly from another high-tech and high-risk earthquake area--California.

The map above is a model of wave heights, generated at the Center for Tsunami Research at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. Wave energy dissipates over longer distances, so Hawaii and the west coast didn’t see the devastating waves that inundated Japan already, but the scope is still incredible — the entire Pacific Ocean is impacted. Waves were lower in areas where the ocean floor is deeper.

The animation below shows the tsunami as it propagated from the earthquake’s epicenter, about 80 miles off the Japanese coast at a depth of around 15 miles. The ripples’ calm, slow spread belies their destructive force.

The death toll keeps rising, now said to be more than 1,000, according to news reports. USA Today has compiled this list of ways you can help.

Aftershocks are adding to the problems, with almost 100 reported as of 1 p.m. EST Friday.