But for Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and one of the world’s leading experts on a little-known fault line, the main quake was itself a kind of foreshock: a preview of another earthquake still to come. The shaking earlier in the week turned out to be the foreshocks of the largest earthquake in the nation’s recorded history. In the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast Japan, triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an estimated two hundred and twenty billion dollars. Thirty minutes after Goldfinger first stepped outside, he watched the tsunami roll in, in real time, on a two-inch screen. One of them pulled out a cell phone and started streaming videos from the Japanese broadcasting station NHK, shot by helicopters that had flown out to sea soon after the shaking started. Almost immediately, though, it became extremely uncool, because Goldfinger and every other seismologist standing outside in Kashiwa knew what was coming. Now, Goldfinger realized as the shaking hit the four-minute mark, the planet was proving the Japanese Cassandra right.įor a moment, that was pretty cool: a real-time revolution in earthquake science. The presentation was met with polite applause and thereafter largely ignored. In 2005, however, at a conference in Hokudan, a Japanese geologist named Yasutaka Ikeda had argued that the nation should expect a magnitude 9.0 in the near future-with catastrophic consequences, because Japan’s famous earthquake-and-tsunami preparedness, including the height of its sea walls, was based on incorrect science. For decades, seismologists had believed that Japan could not experience an earthquake stronger than magnitude 8.4. Oh, shit, Goldfinger thought, although not in dread, at first: in amazement. His watch swept past the three-minute mark and kept going. He thought better of it, and lurched away. The base was lurching, too, back and forth a foot at a time, digging a trench in the yard. The building itself was base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body of a structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its foundation. The flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just vacated was whipping through an arc of forty degrees. The trees, still hung with the previous autumn’s dead leaves, were making a strange rattling sound. It was, Goldfinger thought, like driving through rocky terrain in a vehicle with no shocks, if both the vehicle and the terrain were also on a raft in high seas. The earth snapped and popped and rippled. Nor, from the feel of it, was there ground on the ground. There was a chill in the air, and snow flurries, but no snow on the ground.
At a minute and a half, everyone in the room got up and went outside. Goldfinger, who is tall and solidly built, thought, No way am I crouching under one of those for cover. The seats in the conference room were small plastic desks with wheels. Then it ticked past the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week.
The earthquake was not particularly strong. The speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his talk. The conference was wrapping up for the day.
IPad 3, iPad 4, iPad Air, iPad iPad, iPad Mini 2, iPad Mini 3, iPad Mini 4, 9.When Goldfinger looked at his watch, it was quarter to three.
#1080 civilization v background pro#
IPhone 14 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro Max: 1290x2796 IPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPhone 14 Plus: 1284x2778 IPhone Xs Max, iPhone 11 Pro Max: 1242x2688 IPhone X, iPhone Xs, iPhone 11 Pro: 1125x2436
IPhone 6 plus, iPhone 6s plus, iPhone 7 plus, iPhone 8 plus: 1242x2208 IPhone 6, iPhone 6s, iPhone 7, iPhone 8: 750x1334 IPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, iPhone SE: 640x1136 IPhone: iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS: 320x480
0 kommentar(er)
