Stories tagged earthquakes
Columbia's Nevado del Huila region
Courtesy USGS/R.L. SchusterThe eruption of a volcano in southern Columbia has claimed the lives of at least 10 people and officials fear the death toll will rise.
Nevado del Huila is the highest volcano in Columbia, towering at 17,602 feet. Early last year It came to life after being dormant for more than 500 years.
The volcano is located in a remote area of southeastern Columbia about 150 miles south of Bogota. A number of isolated villages surround the mountain, and thousands were evacuated earlier this week for fear of an impending eruption.
When the eruption finally happened yesterday, it triggered two large landslides along the Paez River. Seven people are still listed as missing and the region remains on high-alert. But the locals have good reason to be nervous. In 1994 several hundred people were killed by landslides from Nevado del Huila induced earthquakes. And nine years before that a nearby volcano named Nevado del Ruiz erupted and killed more than 25,000 people.
LINKS
Tags : Here's the USGS data on the earthquake, and CNN's developing story.
My homepage: This is my homepage with a couple of the mentioned gadgets.
Courtesy JoeIf you are interested in tracking hurricanes, typhoons, tropical storms, etc. there is a cool gadget available for your Google hompage (and probably others) that allows you to view, track and interact with maps that show the most current active of these tropical weather systems. Its an interesting way to keep up and monitor the systems - and remind yourself that they happen all over the world. The one I use is here but I am sure there are others that are similar.
There are also gadgets for earthquakes, volcanoes and even one specific to world disaster photos.
earth and space science...
i just want to tell my observations..every morning from march to june of 1991 i observed some unusual formations of the clouds... and then 6.5 mag. of earthquake striked... that was here in the philippines..and then every now and then i can see and observed those unusual formations of clouds... i can say that there would be an earthquake but i can;t tell when is the exact place and the exact date will it strike...
Are you just like JGordon? Do you feel smugly safe not living in earthquake-ridden California? Well, you may not be as safe as you think.
Midwest earthquake zone
Courtesy USGS via Wikimedia CommonsA powerful earthquake emanating from southern Illinois rattled skyscrapers in downtown Chicago this morning, and was felt as far away as Des Moines, Iowa, Atlanta, Georgia, and southern Ontario, Canada.
Folks in the region surrounding the quake's epicenter near the town of West Salem (map), in southeast Illinois, were rudely shaken out of bed at 4:37am CDT. Some places reported minor structural damage, such as bricks knocked from structures, and a collapsed porch.
The 5.2-magnitude quake (which coincidently has occurred on the very same day of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) is thought to involve the Wabash Valley fault, an extension of the famous New Madrid fault in southern Missouri. Back in the early 1800s, the New Madrid fault was the source of one of the largest earthquakes felt in the contiguous United States (although at the time, the town of New Madrid, Missouri, for which the fault is named, was a part of the Louisiana Territory).
There will no doubt be more information about this current Midwest tremblor as the day goes on.
LINKS
New York Times story
USA Today
Doom and gloom from National Geographic
Here today, gone tomorrow: Undated photo combination showing five acre lake that disappeared mysteriously in the southernmost region of Magallanes, Chile. Photo credit: CONAFA glacial lake in Chile has suddenly disappeared according to park rangers at Bernardo O’Higgins National Park in the southern Andes.
“In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal,” said Juan Jose Romero from CONAF Chile’s National Forestry Corporation. “We went again in May and to our surprise we found that the lake had completely disappeared. All that was left were chunks of ice and an enormous fissure.”
The fissure could mean an earthquake may be responsible for the disappearance, since the Magallanes region is known to experience lots of tremors, but the problem is there haven’t been any quakes recently in the park.
“No one knows what happened,” Romero said.
However, an earthquake hasn’t been completely ruled out as the cause. A recent quake in nearby Aysen last April could be the culprit. According to glacial specialist, Andres Rivera, the Magallenes area has seen interesting changes in the last few decades. He noted that the lake didn’t exist 30 years ago.
When the lake was there, it covered about 5 acres, (330 ft by 660 ft) and was about 100 feet deep. It’s not a huge lake, but it’s no backyard fish pond either. Here’s a link that will give you a better idea just how large an area 5 acres is.
Geologists and other experts are heading to the area 1250 miles south of Santiago to investigate so maybe they’ll come up with some answers.
In geological terms lakes are considered ephemeral events, and sometimes changes in the landscape happen gradually, sometimes they happen quite rapidly. This is a good example of the latter.
STORY LINKS
BBC Website Story
OttawaCitizen.com Story (Neat photo)
More on Bernardo O'Higgins National Park
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