Pop quiz: I am
a) an expert on earthquakes
b) an expert on tsunami
c) from the US west coast
d) none of the above
If you guessed d, you’re right. I’m none of those things. However, I do live in San Diego, California now. Shortly after moving here from the US eastern seaboard, I started checking out the US Geological Survey’s World Earthquake Map on a somewhat regular basis. If nothing else, it’s kinda neat. Something that caught my eye was that the western side (Asia, Australia) of the ring of fire has much more large earthquakes than the eastern side (US west coast). Granted, the earthquake maps only show large earthquakes world wide, while showing all of the smaller ones stateside. However, if they were to only show large ones period, there would be next to none in the US.
Recent Earthquakes in the Australian Region
Recent EarthQuakes in the United States
You may have also heard about the 29 September tsunami causing earthquake in the south pacific. The details of this are still coming in, so the Wikipedia page linked to above is a work in rapid progress; if you read it, it probably won’t be what I read a few minutes ago.
Recent earthquakes in South Pacific. Red are within past hour, blue within past 24 hours.
Now, living in San Diego, whilst there is a tsunami warning – perhaps not something one might take shruggingly.However, the tsunami danger is relatively low, mostly due to the underwater terrain and the sort of geological activity that occurs in this part of the planet. Shortly after the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, which claimed 230,000 people, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran a story detailing the low tsunami danger. As I write this, I’m reading twitter updates that the first tsunami waves hit the SD coast a few minutes ago – and they were little more than a ripple. I’ll try to update this post in the morning with exact wave heights.
The sea floor off the SoCal coast, riddled with valleys & mountains.
The sea floor off the coast of southern California and northern Baja California is riddled with underwater mountains and valleys. These mountains and valleys sap tsunami strength. In fact, on underwater mountain chain known as the Cortes Bank rises from 5,000 feet to within 5 feet of the surface 115 miles off the coast. As such, this the home to some fantastic surfing waves! Surfing waves – awesome; tsunami waves, no so great. Luckily however, tsunami’s are not much a concern in southern California.
Surfing on the Cortes Bank
