[X] My Assistant

[belleraphon1]

Sincerely hope all you UMSFers on the West Coast are OK! Read Emily's blog....
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001576/

Widfires and now an earthquake... scary...

Concern from an Ohioan who only worries about getting snowed in once or twice a winter season.

Craig

p.s. With global climate change this forum may get a few posts or two in this century!

[nprev]

Ah, ground-dancing ain't so bad...

Here's my tornado story. Out on the flightline @ McGuire AFB on an early June evening. 10-12 C-141s lined up & chained at the nose gears to the ground in anticipation of bad weather. I looked over to the West, to the edge of the base where there was a line of trees. The sky above them was black, red, yellow, green...(no direct sunlight! Electrostatic/flourescent effects?) Oh, crap.

The expediter truck came roaring up & picked me up, because there was a tornado warning. I jumped in with my toolbox, along with 20 or so other people & their tools, just riding on top of them (little bumpy). We blasted back to the squadron building just as the rain began.

Once there, me & a couple of other people who were stupid (okay...we wanted to smoke) stuck our heads out of one of the side doors to do so. It was pitch black out, and there were these things that looked like small black dust devils whirling around outside. There was a small tree about 10 ft. (3m) in front of the doorway, and as I watched one of the "dust devils" hit the tree...and broke it in half!!!! I said "TORNADO!!!!", and dived back inside.

Once the all-clear was given, we went back out to the flightline. All the nose gear chains had broken. Some of the planes looked normal, still facing forward, but their nose gears were sideways: they'd been blown one way, then blown back. Several aircraft weren't so lucky; their noses (radomes) had crashed into the wingtips of adjacent planes. A transient C-5 had a #1 engine that was flat on the bottom and a bent left wing; the tornado had rocked the plane so hard that it had impacted the ground. Spookiest of all, the treeline at the edge of the base had a neat cutout about 300m wide where the damn thing came through and hit the base. All told, it missed us being out there by about 2 minutes at the most.

Are tornadoes scarier then earthquakes? To me, oh, hell, yes!!!!!!

[pandaneko]

Ah, ground-dancing ain't so bad...

I have been wanting for a long time to upload a movie of 2011 M9 earthquake. I found
just the right one recently, quite by accident, which is here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqP-mar25a4

This is probably the most compreheisive record of what it was like in the region up north. In
my area, which is Devon to London equivalent, I think, it was different. It was a lot milder and
the ground actually felt like slowly dancing below me.

It was a typical simple harmonic motion of perhaps 0.5 Hz and lasted for 5 minutes or so. Amplitude
felt like 30cm, and something like that is actually shown in the movie with gaping pavement.

We are currently expecting another big one like this. There is a local saying here which says that
at leats once in your life time you will experience a giant earthquake. My auntie who lives up north
in Sendai, close to the epicentre of this earthquake, has had 3 such experiencies already with her cats.

I have had one, but it may not be the last... P