Earthquakes Essay example -- essays research papers

I chose to research temblors and the omenion of quakes be lawsuit I was meddling 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 suck up friction between them whichbuilds up as it tries to push away and suddenly ruptures and then rebounds. The vibrations can range from nevertheless noticeable toa disastrous, and destructive act of nature. Six kinds of shock waves be generated in the process. Two be classified as bodywaves, that is, they be active through the inside of the earth and the different four are ascend waves. The waves are further classifiedby the kinds of motions they incur to rock particles. counterbalance or compressional waves, known as P waves, send particlesmoving endure and forth in the same direction as the waves are travelin g, as secondary or 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 first to arrive and to be accedeed at geophysical research station worldwide.During antediluvian 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. about AD 130 the Chinese scholar ChangHeng, believing that waves must knit 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 rigid 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 quakeswere not proposed until modern-day times. One such concept was recreated and advanced in 1859 by an Irish engineer, Robert mallet.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 utter area and none within a 50 mile roentgen of my approximation. The next coupledays I predicted earthquakes that were within a deoxycytidine monophosphate mile radius than were they actually occurred. From my experiments Iconcluded that predicting earthquakes was easy, you just have to pick a spot on the fault. The only thing that profuse me andprobably most scientists, is magnitude, there is no possible way of predicting an earthqua kes magnitude. Which is what we are real trying 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 learned that earthquakes are almost unpredictable, and devastating acts of nature. I also learned how earthquakes occur andalmost all of the "earthquake mental lexicon". There is let off alot more to be known about earthquakes that we withal 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.