Updated January 2008
"A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over fluid; one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced"
Charles Darwin, 1860
RECOMMENDED READING
"Surviving the Volcano" by Stanley Williams & "Krakatoa" by Simon Winchester, plus the excellent 'Fire Mountain' by Peter Morgan
Remember to shout JISHIN! if you're ever in Japan and feel the earth tremble: it's Japanese for earthquake...
" Prepare: earth's plates change gears, groan, scrape and grind,
dissolve (in thirty seconds) peace of mind"
Dolores Hayden
The first priority is to find out what the latest activity has been. There is the classic NEIC site which has archives of all major quakes from the last few years and is particularly good for updates on the day of the lesson - amaze your students by telling them there was an earthquake in Papua New Guinea 2 hours ago... Recommended.
You can also go HERE to see a GIF of the activity in the last 30 days.
Found this very recently, but it's great fun! Go to the TOOLS - VIRTUAL EXPERIMENTS section and you can explore ISOSTASY and VISCOSITY. The best thing, however, is the chance to rebuild PANGAEA. You have a map of the earth with all the continents on it. You can select any continent, and move it into place, and rotate it so that it recreates the jigsaw fit which was noticed almost 400 years ago, and was one of the pieces of evidence for Continental drift. Then go on and explore the other sections of this excellent site. Recommended.
Try the University of Edinburgh's GLOBAL REPORT.
There's also the excellent maps produced by the IRIS SEISMIC MONITOR (probably the best for showing how the location of earthquakes lie along the tectonic boundaries)
The BBC's news page has a Science/Technology section which often features earth science reports, and has an in-depth feature on the Gujarat quake. There are some good articles at the UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA Seismic laboratory's site (which has a much copied illustrated article on plate tectonics)
For advice on how to prepare yourself, there are several sites: one based in CALIFORNIA is good. Or there's one called SHAKY GROUND.
For reducing the risks try the IDNDR site. All issues relating to disaster reduction.
Try IDEERS: which is an acronym for
'Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research in Schools'
and looks at how to build structures which can withstand earthquakes.
The Channel 4 series 'Equinox' did a program called 'A Sense of Disaster' where they looked at earthquake prediction and interviewed people who claimed to sense the onset of earth tremors. It looked at the 'precursors': the signs that earth movements are about to occur. One person is JIM BERKLAND.
I was recently given a tip off by Paul Kelley from Tyne and Wear about the developing BBC Broadband site. This has a home page which promises links for all the major curriculum subjects, and within Geography there are links to lots of different areas, including Geomorphology, Brazil, Weather and Climate. At present (Jan 2002) however, the only link that works is to Geography, and Tectonics. This then offers the chance to see animations and videos, take part in labelling exercises, and print out worksheets and activities. Check it out HERE and keep checking on its progress. Recommended.
The PRINCETON EARTH PHYSICS PROJECT has a load of stuff.
If plates are continuing to move, the earth will obviously change. For a look at future and past positions of the map, go to the PALEOMAP PROJECT. Some good ideas for producing past globes and good images to download. Has some excellent animations of the drift of the continents that you can watch. A MAP OF THE AGE OF THE OCEAN CRUST is here.
Fancy some interactivity ? Try the FAULTLINE PROJECT: an 'exploratorium' based on an exploration of the San Andreas fault area.
The BBC's WALKING WITH BEASTS area has some good Flash animations showing the movement of the Tectonic plates across the face of the earth over the last 6 million years.
A useful distillation of material from various sources can be found at the Earth Science pages of MOORLAND SCHOOL.
There are several different ways of measuring the size of earthquakes. There is the EUROPEAN MICROSEISMIC SCALE (EMS) - this is the scale used in Europe. It was a scale updated in 1998, and is the basis for seismic intensity evaluation. It is known as EMS98. It has 12 divisions:
| 1 | Not Felt |
| 2 | Scarcely Felt |
| 3 | Weak |
| 4 | Largely observed |
| 5 | Strong |
| 6 | Slightly damaging |
| 7 | Damaging |
| 8 | Heavily damaging |
| 9 | Destructive |
| 10 | Very destructive |
| 11 | Devastating |
| 12 | Completely devastating |
The Japanese scale is called the OMORI SEISMIC INTENSITY SCALE. This is a 7 point seismic scale created by Fusakichi Omori, and used in Japan. This relates phenomena to maximum ground acceleration (movement) and is related to the Mercalli scale, but only goes up to 7, which means that the Kobe earthquake rated around a 4 or 5. Room for much larger quakes then...
Useful evidence for Plate tectonics HERE at Berkeley University, USA.
How FAST do plates move ? There are various Plate Motion Calculators which can be accessed via the Internet. Japanese ones, and others are available (try a search....)
The USGS also have a site '4 KIDS'. This has downloadable items such as Plate Maps, details on the Mercailli Intensity scale, cartoons etc.
Evidence: from USGS site. Click to enlarge.
There are occasionally earthquakes in the UK. In September 2002, an earthquake of magnitude 4.8 hit the area around Dudley, and was felt as far away as Norfolk. The Richter Scale was developed in 1935 by Charles Richter. The earthquake made the news around the country, as the effects were felt over a wide area, and there hasn't been a major one for some time.
2002 seems to have been the year for UK earthquakes. There have been a series of earthquakes in Manchester in October 2002, which were smaller than the Dudley one. The Dudley one has now been upgraded to point 5.
A recent article in The Guardian (December 2002) considered the potential for large quakes in the UK. Over 100 quakes have now hit Manchester since October 21st. The Rhine Valley is apparently a geological rift which splits Europe from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea. A major earthquake hit Switzerland in 1356, which had an apparent magnitude of at least 6 on the Richter scale. In 1992, a quake of 5.8 struck the nearby Roer Valley. The quake was made worse because the valley floor is made up of loose flood-plain sediments, which amplified the quake movement.
This site from BINGHAMTON on Seismic eruptions and Waves has some useful materials if you're prepared for a reasonably lengthy download. It provides a visual map of earthquakes and eruptions from 1960 to the present. Information on each quake or eruption can be displayed and matched to an overlay of the Tectonic Plates. Good stuff. Example illustration below to give you an idea of the quality.
Excellent resources designed for undergraduates but which could easily be relevant to anyone wanting to have a little more 'depth' in their notes. They have been produced by TIM HARRIS from Staffordshire University. There are materials on a range of Earth Science topics
LEEDS UNIVERSITY has a very useful section called DYNAMIC EARTH. Click on the sections for resources, images and Flash animations of various aspects of Plate Tectonics. Some of it is at a higher level than you would need, but as I've said about the previous link, we have to think about the G&Ts.
In Japan, they are spending millions of Yen on preparing for the next major earthquake. THIS REPORT from the Times Online site gives details of the large 3D earthquake simulator which they have produced for assessing the earthquake susceptibility of certain types of buildings. It is big enough to house a 7 storey apartment block which can then be shaken.
An interesting story on the BBC website: Plumbing the Earth's depths - apparently there are plans to send a grapefruit sized craft to the centre of the earth using a nuclear explosion - you couldn't make it up!
One good extra resource is the video or DVD of 'ICE AGE' - after the main feature is a short film featuring the squirrel type creature which spends the film trying to bury an acorn. In the short film, when he finally succeeds in this, the ground cracks open, and the ground moves away, and this then pans out to the earth in space with the continents drifting apart - so that's how it happened... I use this as a starter activity and it always goes down very well...
Here's an article which talks about the issue of JUST IN TIME delivery of parts....
This was one downside of an earthquake in Japan back in 2007
Quake Forces Toyota to Halt Production
Japanese automakers, including Toyota Motor Corp., called production halts Wednesday at factories in Japan because of quake damage at a major parts supplier.
The temporary closure of auto parts maker Riken Corp.'s plant at Kashiwazaki city, near the epicenter of Monday's magnitude 6.8 quake, has forced Toyota, Nissan Motor Co. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. and Fuji Heavy Industries to scale back production.
Toyota, Japan's No. 1 automaker, will stop production lines at a dozen factories centered in central Aichi prefecture Thursday afternoon and all day Friday, said Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco.
The company will assess the situation at Riken, supplier of key transmission and engine parts to Toyota, before deciding whether to resume production on Monday, he said.
Nolasco said it was "too early to tell" whether the halt would affect deliveries to domestic and overseas dealers.
Tom Libby, J.D. Power and Associates' senior director of industry analysis, said customers shouldn't notice the shutdown because Toyota likely has sufficient inventory to cover a few days of lost production.
"I don't think their inventory is that tight. I think they'll be able to adjust and probably make up for it afterwards," Libby said.
He said he was unsure of the impact if the shutdown lasts beyond the end of the week.
Nissan Motor Co. said Wednesdasy it was also halting some production lines at two factories on the main island of Honshu for at least two days starting Friday because of supply delays from Riken.
But Nissan expected to quickly make up for any delays, said spokesman Yuichi Nakagawa.
Fuji Heavy, maker of Subaru cars, said earlier Wednesday it would stop production of its five mini car models because it is uncertain when it will receive its next shipment of piston rings from Riken.
Mitsubishi Motors also said it was stopping assembly at three plants later in the week for several days because it is unable to procure enough parts from Riken.
The problems at Riken were also threatening production at Honda Motor Co., the automaker's president told public broadcaster NHK.
"If things don't get better today, we're going to stop, too," Takeo Fukui said. "We are just able to hold out until the weekend," he said.
Riken said in a statement it was rushing to fix the damage at its Kashiwazaki plant and hoped to get the factory online as soon as possible.
Still, fears of production delays at Japanese automakers drove share prices down in Tokyo on Wednesday.
Fuji Heavy shares fell 1.82 percent to 592 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Honda shares fell 0.66 percent to 4,490 yen.
Toyota lost 1.32 percent to 7,460 yen, and Nissan Motor Co. lost 0.53 percent to 1,313 yen.
Monday's quake, which killed at least 9 people and caused a slew of problems at a nuclear power plant, has wreaked havoc on other companies with factories in the region.
