Monday, January 02, 2012

[jules' pics] New Year sunrise

What everyone at the beach was waiting for.
Happy New Year
Due to some cloud, the sun did not appear until a good 15 minutes after sunrise, but people didn't start celebrating until they saw the sun. So I wonder what happens on a fully cloudy morning. Perhaps it has never happened in living memory! Pondering living memory, we had a large (magnitude 7) earthquake yesterday, off the south coast from us. The big ones last year were north and east of here. Hmmmm... On our road the shaking was not sufficient to knock James off his unicycle, but it did go on for quite a while. I will be looking out to see how it is explained in GRL. I suppose the advantage of apocalypses is an in increase in the number of Japanese authors getting published in high impact publications, which must surely improve the national papers-per-Yen factor.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/02/2012 07:27:00 PM
Posted by James Annan at Monday, January 02, 2012

3 comments:

tonylearns said...

I only heard about this from an agent in japan, right after it happened. it seems after the mother of earthquakes a mere 7 magnitude is not news worthy regarding Japan anymore.

3/1/12 4:41 am
Martin Vermeer said...

It seems it was a very deep earthquake, 370 km, meaning it was in the Benioff zone -- the Pacific crustal plate penetrating the upper mantle under Japan under what, for some reason, always seems to be a fairly precise 45 degrees angle.

http://earthquake-report.com/2012/01/01/massive-deep-earthquake-sends-a-vibration-all-over-japan/

These deep quakes tend to cause less damage than their Richter number suggests, as the energy is spread out over a large area. But the Benioff zone and its associated "island arc" volcanism, which pushes up magma through conduits to the Earth surface, is the reason Japan exists in the first place ;-)

3/1/12 11:04 am
James Annan said...

Thanks Martin, yes the number seems impressive but it was far enough away to have no impact hence hardly made much news even here.

3/1/12 12:57 pm

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