Blogs

Today at 16:35:50 GMT, an earthquake with magnitude M7.4 occurred offshore of Guatemala.  It was felt as far away as Mexico City.  In the figure below, I have used the earthquake viewer to snap some screenshots of the global forecast contours for an M>6.5 earthquake within the next year.  The contours are pre-earthquake contours, since they were updated at midnight last night.  We will see how the probabilty contours evolve over the next few days.

Image below shows the change in forecast contours over 7 days following the October 27, 2012 M7.7 Prince Rupert, British Columbia earthquake.  Contours representing probabliities of future earthquakes in the region are continuing to change rapidly.  The red star denotes the epicenter of the M7.7 event.  The images below are screen shots from the earthquake viewer.  Site visitors can repeat this type of analysis for themselves in any world wide location.

Changes from September 29, 2012 thru today, November 2, 2012.  Red boxes indicate areas that some of the changes can be seen.  Both increases and decreases in contours can be seen.

This is one of a series of blogs pointing out the changes that are occurring in forecast contours in Japan, California, and elsewhere.  Below are changes from September 29, 2012 through today, November 2, 2012.

I'm sitting in the audience at the Santa Fe Institute annual fall Trustees Symposium, between Paula Sabloff, a faculty member at SFI, and Abhas Jha from the World Bank, a speaker at the meeting.  The Santa Fe Institute was founded about 28 years ago by a group of physicists to study the dynamics of systems that are nonlinear, interacting, and self-adapting.  Since that time, the focus of the institute has ranged broadly from physics to economics, to finance, social dynamics, networks, cities, ecology, and the origins of life itself.

Below are shown screen shots from before last saturday's M7.7 earthquake, compared to screen shots from yesterday and today.  It can be seen that the forecast contours continue to increase in size.  In the NTW forecast, this is because the large increase in the number of smaller earthquakes (aftershocks) must inevitably lead to larger events so that the Gutenberg-Richter relation must eventually be obeyed.

I made some screen shots from the earthquake viewer page from before the BC earthquake, and compared it to a screen shot taken today.  The pre-earthquake shot was made on 10/28/2012, but before the ANSS catalog had updated with the earthquake and its aftershocks.  The results are shown in the first figure below. 

Many apologies if you have come to the site in the last few hours and found it offline or not operational.  Our primary servers are in the northeast, a location we chose because we assumed it was safe from effects of earthquakes, wildfires, flooding and hurricanes (as Irene demonstrated last year).  But apparently not from storms of the century.  Who knew?  Please check back with us later today when full functionality should be restored.

If you are a regular visitor to this site, you can track the change in earthquake probability in regions such as southern California by the simple technique of taking screen shots and then comparing images from different dates.  Below I show two screen shots of forecast probabilities for two dates, 9/29/2012 and 10/29/2012.  I use the forecast for M>5 within 1 year from the date indicated.  Boxes show regions where the forecast has changed over 1 month's time from 9/29/2012 to 10/29/2012.

As a matter of interest, I ran an ANSS catalog search of the region surrounding yesterday's Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) earthquake.  It appears there were 4 M>5 foreshocks of the M7.7 event that occurred in the hours before the mainshock.  These events are listed below.