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posted by martyb on Friday September 08 2017, @12:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the shaken-AND-stirred dept.

Reports are coming in about a massive earthquake which hit late Thursday night in Mexico.

The Telegraph has live coverage; most recently:

A rare and powerful 8.2-magnitude earthquake struck southern Mexico late Thursday, killing at least 15 people as seismologists warned of a tsunami of more than 10 feet.

The quake hit offshore in the Pacific about 75 miles southwest of the town of Tres Picos in far southern Chiapas state, the US Geological Survey said, putting the magnitude at 8.1.

Mexico's president said the earthquake magnitude was 8.2, the strongest in a century in the country.

The USGS (United States Geological Survey) has a page with copious data and reports available. Here is their Tectonic Summary:

The September 8th, 2017, M 8.1 earthquake offshore Chiapas, Mexico, occurred as the result of normal faulting at an intermediate depth. Focal mechanism solutions for the earthquake indicate slip occurred on either a fault dipping very shallowly towards the southwest, or on steeply dipping fault striking NW-SE. At the location of this event, the Cocos plate converges with North America at a rate of approximately 76 mm/yr, in a northeast direction. The Cocos plate begins its subduction beneath Central America at the Middle America Trench, just over 100 km to the southwest of this earthquake. The location, depth, and normal-faulting mechanism of this earthquake indicate that it is likely an intraplate event, within the subducting Cocos slab, rather than on the shallower megathrust plate boundary interface.

Wikipedia has a well-written summary of the event available:

On 7 September 2017, at 11:49 p.m. CDT, a magnitude 8.2[3] earthquake occurred off the coast of Chiapas, Mexico, approximately 87 kilometres (54 mi) south of Pijijiapan in the Gulf of Tehuantepec.[4] The earthquake caused some buildings in Mexico City to shake, prompting people to evacuate.[5] At least five people have been killed, according to the state governments of Chiapas and Tabasco.[6] The earthquake also generated a tsunami with waves of 1 metre (3 ft 3 in) above tide level;[2] tsunami alerts have been issued for surrounding areas.[7] It was the strongest earthquake recorded in Mexico in a century[8] as well as the second strongest recorded in the country's history, behind the magnitude 8.6 earthquake in 1787.[9] It is also the most intense recorded globally in 2017.[10]

See also: Huffington Post.

North American has not been doing so well, lately... Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and now this. What's next? Tornado alley gets a sudden surge, as well? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @01:03PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @01:03PM (#565055)

    In the next days there will be another earthquake with equivalent magnitude in another part of the world.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by martyb on Friday September 08 2017, @02:46PM (2 children)

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 08 2017, @02:46PM (#565116) Journal

    In the next days there will be another earthquake with equivalent magnitude in another part of the world.

    I disagree. According to the USGS, looking at magnitude 8+ earthquakes worldwide, including this earthquake, there have been 8 since 2010, 20 since 2000, and 27 since 1990. That looks to me to average about 1 such earthquake per year.

    Link: Earthquake Lists, Maps & Statistics [usgs.gov].

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @11:23PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @11:23PM (#565383)

      12 earthquakes in 2000 and then none until 2012 would also average 1 per year. Maybe you need to give us more details.

      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday September 09 2017, @02:18AM

        by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 09 2017, @02:18AM (#565454) Journal

        12 earthquakes in 2000 and then none until 2012 would also average 1 per year. Maybe you need to give us more details.

        Yes, it would. OTOH, I don't recall any reports of a year having 12 mag 8+ quakes. Do you?

        In my original comment, I gave the link to the page where one can request info for any given year.

        After I saw a single hurricane listed for the first few years I tried, I noticed the URL it was sending, wrote some custom URLs to request data on a range of multiple years, submitted the requests, extracted the JSON from the reply, parsed out the number of hurricanes over that period, and reported what I found. (Said code was written in a tmp directory which has since been deleted... don't feel like recoding the whole thing atm.)

        Maybe you need to enumerate the years where the number of magnitude 8+ quakes per year was far greater than average?

        --
        Wit is intellect, dancing.