Among all natural disasters, earthquakes stand out as the least predictable and the most destructive. The extensive damages they cause that have made them feared since antiquity. Since there are no scientifically proven means of predicting earthquakes (at least, not yet), the only lesson that we’ve learned from past quakes is that mitigation is more reliable than forecasting. It’s important that, rather than adopting techniques or practices based on myths (e.g. standing in doorways during an earthquake), we educate ourselves about the importance of earthquake engineering as the best way to minimize damages and save thousands of lives.
10 Earthquake Lights
For centuries, eyewitnesses have reported seeing mysterious lights appearing in the sky moments before or during major earthquakes. The lights were described alternately as bright flashes, blue flames, or faint rainbows that emerge from the ground and sometimes stretch up to 200 meters (650 ft). Before the 1960s, geologists dismissed these reports as hallucinations, as no photographs or video footage existed. However, this changed in the mid-1960s, when series of earthquakes hit Nagano, Japan, giving skeptical geologists an excellent chance to document and finally acknowledge the phenomenon.
Several theories have been proposed to explain how earthquake lights form. One of them includes disruption of the Earth’s magnetic field by piezoelectric effect, which is caused by quartz rocks in the tectonic stress region. However, since not every major earthquake is preceded by lightning, these theories haven’t yet been investigated.
9 Soil Liquefaction
Many of us are familiar with quicksand, which has earned notoriety in movies and cartoons for swallowing people. In reality, quicksand is not as scary as we thought as children. However, another form of quicksand, called soil liquefaction, is truly worth our fear.
In addition to tsunamis and landslides, liquefaction is an adverse effect of earthquakes. This phenomenon occurs when loosely packed, water-saturated soils are subjected to strong earthquake tremors, causing the soils to lose strength and stiffness. As a result, any object relying on the soil for support (e.g. buildings, roads, or vehicles) will simply sink or fall over. This scenario was demonstrated in 1964, when the combination of a quake and poor subsoil triggered liquefaction that destroyed or damaged 16,534 houses in the city of Niigata, Japan. Liquefaction was also largely blamed for the colossal damage to roads, cars, and other structures that occurred during the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
8 Earthquake Storms
The sight of collapsed buildings, dead bodies, and traumatized citizens might seem like the end of an earthquake’s terror. Unfortunately, that is not always the case, according to the earthquake storms theory. Conceived by Stanford professor Amos Nur after studying several ancient and modern earthquakes which he believed were related, the theory suggests that a single earthquake can trigger a series of other large quakes along the same tectonic plate boundary. The subsequent quakes might take place months or even years apart.
Nur’s theory is supported by series of large earthquakes that occurred along the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey between 1939 and 1999. Out of the 13 major quakes that hit the area, seven occurred in a systematic way. Each successive earthquake took place in a segment of the fault that was immediately west of the previous quake. Nur attributed the cause of earthquake storms to the stress transfer that occurs following every quake.
