Global earthquake ALERT: California told to prepare for ‘BIG ONE’ after Mexico tremors
THE SERIES of large earthquakes that brought death and destruction to Mexico last month may have triggered a chain reaction of tremors on the global scale.
By Joshua Nevett
DailyStar.co.uk
7th October 2017
Mexico was rattled last month when the biggest earthquake in more than a century, measuring 8.1 on the Richer Scale, struck off its southern coast, killing 90.
Then, just over a week later, Mexico City was virtually flattened by a magnitude 7.2 earthquake that reduced entire communities to rubble and killed 300.
In the following days a swarm of tremors greater than magnitude 5.0 continued to blight the nation.
These tremors were thought to be “aftershocks”, when stress is transferred from one fault line to another close by.
Natural disaster specialist Dr Simon Day told Daily Star Online similar aftershocks may have caused the record magnitude 8.1 quake through a process known as “stress triggering”.
He said: “For several months leading to the big 8.1 earthquake, there was a sequence of smaller earthquakes on a zone further south.
“This may have stressed the deep fault zone that produced the 8.1 earthquake.
“That then stressed the fault zone in the part of the slab further north that produced the 7.1 earthquake a week later.”
Dr Day, of University College London, said research shows this process could continue in the coming weeks and months, causing small and large earthquakes on neighbouring fault lines.
The chain reaction could have global consequences, with many countries in the Pacific Ocean at risk from a large destructive earthquake.
He said: “There is a huge and long-standing argument in seismology, also involving statisticians, about whether the significance of such sequences extend globally producing temporal clusters of earthquakes on a global scale.
“Seismological standard theory says that earthquake occurrence is random.
“But when you get sequences in adjacent fault zones, stress transfer effects are physically plausible especially where continuous plate boundaries of the same type are involved.”
The Rest…HERE
