Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking, Hi, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
Speaker 1: that looks at the future and says, I feel the
Speaker 1: Earth move under my feet. I'm Lauren voc Obama, and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick, and our regular host Jonathan Strickland is
Speaker 1: not with us today as having a beautiful vacation. Yes,
Speaker 1: hopefully not along the fault line anywhere, which introduces today's topic,
Speaker 1: which is earthquakes. We after we did our super volcano episode,
Speaker 1: we received a couple of messages, one from Jacob via
Speaker 1: Twitter and one from Matt via Facebook, who both wrote
Speaker 1: in to request an episode about another big disaster, earthquakes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and not just about what earthquakes are and how they work,
Speaker 1: of course, but seeing as this is Forward Thinking, what
Speaker 1: are we going to do about them in the future?
Speaker 1: Will we ever be able to predict earthquakes and understand
Speaker 1: what causes them, when and where they're going to happen,
Speaker 1: and how to stop them and protect against them? Oh? Sure?
Speaker 1: And especially that protect protect against them thing, because even
Speaker 1: if we can't predict them, how can we prepare ourselves
Speaker 1: better for them? Sure? And I'm sure One of the
Speaker 1: reasons people want to know about earthquakes right around now
Speaker 1: is the grand trailer for this movie that's out this
Speaker 1: summer called San Andreas. Yeah. Yeah, that came out on
Speaker 1: May nine. I believe it features the rock right. It's
Speaker 1: not a grand theft auto movie. It is a movie
Speaker 1: about a big earthquake, in the tradition of other movies
Speaker 1: about big disasters where stuff falls over. Yeah, lots of
Speaker 1: stuff falls over, as it turns out. I have not
Speaker 1: seen this movie. I'm probably not going to, but I
Speaker 1: gotta be honest. I saw the trailer when I was
Speaker 1: in the theater watching Mad Max Fury Road, and it
Speaker 1: was hilarious. I I have to say that I laughed
Speaker 1: through that entire trailer, and I'm not I feel I
Speaker 1: felt kind of bad out it at the time because
Speaker 1: although I knew that those digital people were fine, like, like,
Speaker 1: no digital people were harmed in the making of those
Speaker 1: digital effects shots. Earthquakes are very serious matters, of course,
Speaker 1: right there are terrifying and unpredictable attack upon our placid
Speaker 1: urban lives and and a lot of times they seem
Speaker 1: to come out of nowhere and they can kill thousands
Speaker 1: of people, and so of course earthquakes are worth understanding
Speaker 1: to figure out, not just for the pure science of it,
Speaker 1: but to save lives. Oh of course. Yeah. And and
Speaker 1: the thing, of course about the ground that we stand
Speaker 1: on is that it is not solid at all. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, i'd say it is solid, but it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not what stationary should we yes, and not just
Speaker 1: in the way that that planet Earth is like a spaceship, uh,
Speaker 1: that the ground is always moving. Earth's crust is made
Speaker 1: up of continent sized slabs of rock called tectonic plates,
Speaker 1: which are constantly moving and rubbing up again to each other,
Speaker 1: pushing over under one another, or moving slightly apart. And
Speaker 1: that's fine, that's great, that's I don't know if that's fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fine. Well, it's normally on a day to day basis,
Speaker 1: it's usually fine. Um. But sometimes those those edges, those
Speaker 1: faults can crack or slip against each other abruptly, causing
Speaker 1: these very powerful vibrations to shake the edges of those
Speaker 1: plates in in patterns radiating outward from the point of
Speaker 1: that slippery origin. Um. And those vibrations a k a.
Speaker 1: Seismic waves are what we feel as earthquakes. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was trying to think of a good analogy for how
Speaker 1: earthquakes are created in a at a scale that we
Speaker 1: can experiment with. And I think this sort of works.
Speaker 1: If you put on some rubber soled shoes and then
Speaker 1: try to walk along on say like a hardwood floor
Speaker 1: or like a basketball gym floor, without lifting your feet,
Speaker 1: just scooting your shoes along, well, you'll probably notice if
Speaker 1: or shoe scooting experiences anything like mine, is that for
Speaker 1: a certain length of the slide, the shoe will move
Speaker 1: kind of smoothly, but every now and then it will
Speaker 1: sort of get caught for a second. The forward momentum
Speaker 1: will briefly pause, and then you'll experience a sort of
Speaker 1: sudden jolt forward, sometimes accompanied by the classic vibratory sounds
Speaker 1: of scooting, scoot, And these vibrations you can think of
Speaker 1: as being kind of analogous to what's happening when these
Speaker 1: plates are scooting against each other. Sure, and and researchers
Speaker 1: think that it's a it's a build up of potential
Speaker 1: energy over periods of time that are not, to our
Speaker 1: knowledge predictable yet. Um, but we'll address that question later
Speaker 1: in this episode. Yes, yes, but but earthquakes happen constantly.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah. The U S Geological Survey estimates that
Speaker 1: as many as one point three million earthquakes happen every year.
Speaker 1: And that's just the ones that are over a two
Speaker 1: point oh on the Richter scale, which is the point
Speaker 1: at which human can feel them. Right, And then it's
Speaker 1: not even just the primary effects of the vibration of
Speaker 1: the ground of the earthquake, right, Earthquakes have lots of
Speaker 1: secondary causes that can become disasters on their own. Oh,
Speaker 1: of course, there's a tsunami, and avalanches and landslides and liquification,
Speaker 1: which is a thing where solid ground starts acting like
Speaker 1: a liquid which uh, and and flooding and you know,
Speaker 1: the collapse of human made structures and the lack of
Speaker 1: resources and the aftermath that ensues and all of these
Speaker 1: terrible things. Of course. Yeah, So we have very good
Speaker 1: reason to want to understand how earthquakes work and what
Speaker 1: we can do about them. So so I figured we
Speaker 1: should start by going back a little bit and looking
Speaker 1: at how our understanding of earthquakes developed over time. Yeah, yeah, what,
Speaker 1: I bet people had some interesting ideas about earthquakes and
Speaker 1: ancient times. Well, you'd be right. So the ancient world,
Speaker 1: of course, experienced plenty of earthquakes, just as many earthqua
Speaker 1: wakes as we do today, and without the scientific framework
Speaker 1: to explain them, they came up with some pretty weird
Speaker 1: and sometimes funny explanations. So religious spiritual magical explanations were
Speaker 1: extremely common all over the world West and the East.
Speaker 1: People sort of explained earthquakes as often as divine punishments
Speaker 1: or divine im portents. Gods were either like giving a
Speaker 1: warning or were angry and issuing punishment. I found this
Speaker 1: one funny example of both the magical explanations given by
Speaker 1: the ancients and some of the practical explanations. And these
Speaker 1: are chronicled in the writings of the Roman historian Ombianus Marcellinus,
Speaker 1: who is a soldier by trade, and he lived during
Speaker 1: the fourth century CE, and he wrote a surviving history
Speaker 1: at the time, and and he he has a little
Speaker 1: discourse on earthquakes, and what he says is that when
Speaker 1: you're talking about earthquakes, quote, in all priests the ceremonies,
Speaker 1: whether ritual or pontifical, care is taken not at such
Speaker 1: times to name one god more than another, for fear
Speaker 1: of impiety, since it is quite uncertain which God causes
Speaker 1: these visitations. I love it. They didn't want to they
Speaker 1: didn't want to assign blame without all the facts. Well
Speaker 1: that's that's good. I mean, you know, that's covering your bass.
Speaker 1: I approve of the hypothesis format of finding knowledge. Sure,
Speaker 1: and then of course you had sort of spiritual or
Speaker 1: supernatural explanations in in the East as well. So like
Speaker 1: some ancient Chinese explanations seem to have read earthquakes again
Speaker 1: as divine punishments importance. But to continue with what our
Speaker 1: historian Marcellinus had to say, this was great because he
Speaker 1: also chronicled what some of the dominant practical explanations of
Speaker 1: the day were. So it wasn't that everybody just had
Speaker 1: this religious explanation. There were also the ancient natural philosophers
Speaker 1: who were like, no, let's figure this out. Truly, something's
Speaker 1: going on under the earth. I mean, Aristotle surely had
Speaker 1: something to say about it. Oh yes, So quoting again
Speaker 1: from Marcellinus, and all of these quotes from Marcellinus are
Speaker 1: from the seedy Youngae translation in English. But as the
Speaker 1: various opinions among which Aristotle waivers and hesitates suggest earthquakes
Speaker 1: are engendered either in small caverns under the earth because
Speaker 1: of the waters pouring through them with a more rapid
Speaker 1: motion than usual, or, as Anaxagoras affirms, they arise from
Speaker 1: the force of wind penetrating the lower parts of the Earth,
Speaker 1: which when they have got down to the encrusted solid mass,
Speaker 1: finding no vent holes shake those portions in their solid
Speaker 1: state into which they have got entrance when in a
Speaker 1: state of solution. And this is corroborated by the observation
Speaker 1: that at such times no breezes of wind are felt
Speaker 1: by us above the ground, because the winds are occupied
Speaker 1: in the lowest recesses of the earth. Oh that's delightful.
Speaker 1: That is that is so delightfully incorrect. I adore that. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: I think the idea that was being propagated at the
Speaker 1: time by Aristotle and some of the other well not
Speaker 1: at the time by Aristotle, but had previously been propagated
Speaker 1: by Aristotle and then continued to be believed by many
Speaker 1: people was something having to do with the exchange of
Speaker 1: gases like wind and evaporation under the earth. And sometimes
Speaker 1: when like gases or evaporating uh vapors would get trapped
Speaker 1: under the earth, sometimes they'd be released in a big burst. Sure. Sure,
Speaker 1: Although I suppose it is interesting that they were thinking
Speaker 1: about liquids and the motion that propagates in liquids because
Speaker 1: earthquakes are in fact caused by by waves of energy,
Speaker 1: which at their time was analogous. So analogous, which yes,
Speaker 1: that thing. Yeah, but but I'm sure they probably weren't
Speaker 1: quite thinking yet of the idea of propagation of waves
Speaker 1: through rock, which must have seemed imposs of all So,
Speaker 1: as with many subject areas see cosmology and physics and
Speaker 1: plenty of things, Aristotle's ideas held sway for a long
Speaker 1: long time in Europe and in the Islamic world, despite
Speaker 1: the fact that they were super super wrong. Um Like,
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong about Aristotle. I'm not saying he
Speaker 1: was stupid. He was obviously a super smart guy of
Speaker 1: the ancient world. I guess just everybody must have assumed
Speaker 1: he was right about everything. That's what they did. It's
Speaker 1: kind of funny if if you've never done this, like
Speaker 1: look up what Galileo overthrew about Aristotelian physics, and it'll
Speaker 1: just kind of make you wonder, like, how did people
Speaker 1: miss this for so long? It seemed so easy to
Speaker 1: figure out. But anyway, Aristotle's ideas about earthquakes hell were
Speaker 1: very popular until the early modern period in Europe, and
Speaker 1: then some other physical explanations for earthquakes began to take
Speaker 1: hold in some circles, like explanations involving fire and explosive properties.
Speaker 1: Just one example like what if iron is reacting with
Speaker 1: sulfur deep under the ground and this explosive chemical reaction
Speaker 1: is causing earthquakes? Even kind of makes sense because you
Speaker 1: can see like, okay, earthquakes sometimes or happening around fault lines,
Speaker 1: which they didn't know about then, but but around volcanoes
Speaker 1: they certainly knew about, yeah, bingo, and that volcanoes have
Speaker 1: this explosive fiery element. Eventually, however, we started to get
Speaker 1: some more correct ideas about seismology, and according to a
Speaker 1: brief history of seismology given by a Duncan car Agony,
Speaker 1: which was my source on most of this historical stuff,
Speaker 1: one of the main events that seemed to trigger the
Speaker 1: modern era of earthquake research was the Lisbon earthquake of
Speaker 1: seventeen fifty five, which was huge and had crazy effects
Speaker 1: throughout are up, including causing uh Sasia's or Seisha's. I
Speaker 1: believe it's satias, which are standing waves in these enclosed
Speaker 1: bodies of water. So if you've ever seen standing waves
Speaker 1: in water, it's where instead of the waves propagating along
Speaker 1: the surface, they sort of bob back and forth. Looks
Speaker 1: really crazy, especially if you were going to see that
Speaker 1: in like the lake Oh yeah, yeah, or I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm picturing the scene in Jurassic Park where where the
Speaker 1: the cup of water is just going but but but
Speaker 1: but not like that, just continually bounce back and forth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do not want creepy so this so anyway, this
Speaker 1: event caused some writers at the time to sort of
Speaker 1: see the effects of an earthquake as pressure waves propagating
Speaker 1: outward from a source through the elasticity of the rock
Speaker 1: in the Earth's crust, kind of like sound emanates through
Speaker 1: a solid medium. And from this time through the people
Speaker 1: began to study earthquakes more scientifically. But you can kind
Speaker 1: of understand the faculty they would have, because think about it,
Speaker 1: how do you study earthquakes. You can't like cause an earthquake,
Speaker 1: especially not with the technology of the time, and you
Speaker 1: can't predict when they're going to happen to set up
Speaker 1: your equipment, So it was very much an exercise in
Speaker 1: sort of gathering what data you could after the event
Speaker 1: and then trying to sort of do backwards experiments by
Speaker 1: analyzing the data you had available to you, which is
Speaker 1: very difficult to do, oh sure, especially right given the
Speaker 1: technology of the time and the lack of electricity, let
Speaker 1: alone computers and all of that stuff. Although the first
Speaker 1: step I would say was around the mid eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: when one Robert Mallett actually coined the term seismology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he also sort of brought a quantitative approach to
Speaker 1: studying wave propagation through the earth. He was big into
Speaker 1: looking at maps and collecting all kinds of data and
Speaker 1: analyzing it quantitatively. But then, of course, one of the
Speaker 1: big things that's led to modern era of studying wave
Speaker 1: propagation through the Earth has been the development of seismometers
Speaker 1: or seismometers as one might say for some reason. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: those being machines that detect seismic waves as seism graphs,
Speaker 1: which I think is the more frequently used term in
Speaker 1: in in popular culture at any rate, are our seismometers
Speaker 1: that record those waves, and many seismometers are in fact
Speaker 1: seismic graphs. Yeah, it would obviously not be very helpful
Speaker 1: to detect waves and then forget about them. Uh no um.
Speaker 1: And and actually there's historical records of these from from
Speaker 1: way before the eighteen hundreds. Yeah. I think we don't
Speaker 1: fully understand exactly everything about this ancient one. But the
Speaker 1: idea is that the first mechanical seismometer was created in
Speaker 1: ancient China by the Han Chinese inventor in general all
Speaker 1: purpose genius Chang Hang in the one thirty two CE.
Speaker 1: Oh goodness. And supposedly this device could tell the operator
Speaker 1: from which direction the vibrations of an earthquake originated, and
Speaker 1: even on at least one occasion anecdotally it recorded an
Speaker 1: earthquake that humans could not feel, so it was like
Speaker 1: too faint for humans to know been one. But the
Speaker 1: machine said, hey, there's an earthquake over here. Cool uh
Speaker 1: during that wave of interest wave huh um. In the
Speaker 1: in the eighteen hundreds, um, several mechanical models were produced
Speaker 1: and kind of refined. Um. By nineteen o three we
Speaker 1: saw the first electromagnetic seismometer, and then digital equipment and
Speaker 1: and data processing technology started to be developed around the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies or so, we could probably do an entire
Speaker 1: like series of episodes about seismometer technology. And maybe that's
Speaker 1: the thing. I'll poke Jonathan and see if he wants
Speaker 1: to do some episodes about about that on tech stuff,
Speaker 1: because there's so much out there and it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of fascinating. Maybe it would be better in video because
Speaker 1: it's a whole lot of like pictures of pendulums working
Speaker 1: in different ways and spring loaded things. Dude, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, to Jonathan talk about some pendulums do a
Speaker 1: good job, I bet he would. Okay, No, wait, how
Speaker 1: about some related technology? What about technology to measure those
Speaker 1: secondary effects of earthquakes that we're talking about earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some I think within the past few decades. UM
Speaker 1: a device called a sonometer. I think I'm saying that correctly.
Speaker 1: Tenometer either way, Uh yes, tsonometer is probably probably the
Speaker 1: correct way of saying that. UM. A sosonometer is a
Speaker 1: thing that detects changes in water pressure way deep within
Speaker 1: the ocean and can transmit that info via satellite to
Speaker 1: warning centers. It's it's a weighted anchor containing sensors attached
Speaker 1: via tether to a boy on the surface that has
Speaker 1: you know, data crunching computer and transmission system, and it
Speaker 1: can give you a few hours of warning, um for
Speaker 1: tsunami activity. Yeah, so super valuable of course, because I mean,
Speaker 1: tsunamis can be especially devastating when you've got that wall
Speaker 1: of water. I don't know if you've ever seen video
Speaker 1: of what that looks like. It's absolutely terrifying. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's completely mind blowing. Um. Also mind blowing, I find um.
Speaker 1: It was basically readings from these early seismometers that led
Speaker 1: scientists to build the modern hypotheses of the makeup of
Speaker 1: the Earth, starting around like nineteen o nine and then
Speaker 1: ranging up through the thirties. That is when we figured
Speaker 1: out that the Earth has a solid core and molten
Speaker 1: stuff and a crust. And that is so recent it's
Speaker 1: it's crazy to me, Like I had, for some reason
Speaker 1: assumed that had happened in like the sixt dreds at
Speaker 1: some point, but nope, yeah, crazy, So go seismology. Good job.
Speaker 1: That's just astonishing like that we had like relativity and
Speaker 1: quantum physics before we had a full understanding of the
Speaker 1: the Earth, right Yeah, And you know, to be fair,
Speaker 1: you can't go that deep into the earth. Um, you
Speaker 1: also can't go the speed a light, Lauren. Maybe you can't, Joe, Okay,
Speaker 1: but uh so. So it's really cool, of course that
Speaker 1: we were learning all of this stuff and and learning
Speaker 1: how to take measurements of earthquakes. But how has all
Speaker 1: of this learning been applied in actually saving lives and
Speaker 1: preventing damage and predicting earthquakes. Well, I think one thing
Speaker 1: we should actually look at first before we talk about
Speaker 1: predicting earthquakes, because that's, as you will learn, quite a
Speaker 1: strange and iffi proposition. But we can at least talk
Speaker 1: about what we can do to our buildings and our
Speaker 1: cities to make them safer in the event of an earthquake. Yeah. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: there are a bunch of different concepts of material and
Speaker 1: construction engineering that can help us safeguard our stuff against
Speaker 1: getting super destroyed. Yeah. I remember. I actually saw a
Speaker 1: headline a while back that was it was a piece
Speaker 1: I think in the wake of a recent earthquake that
Speaker 1: said something along the lines of earthquakes don't kill people,
Speaker 1: buildings do. Right. That seems quite true to me. I
Speaker 1: mean that if you're standing in the middle of a
Speaker 1: field and an earthquake, you're gonna get knocked on your butt.
Speaker 1: But you know, I mean, I mean maybe if a
Speaker 1: fault in the earth opens up directly under your feet,
Speaker 1: that would suck. But but basically it just trips you. Sure,
Speaker 1: but when you come into real danger is when you
Speaker 1: are near a structurally unsound building that come toppling over
Speaker 1: and crush you. Yeah, that that is that is much
Speaker 1: worse than falling on your butt on on a galactic scale.
Speaker 1: So what are some of the answers that material science
Speaker 1: and construction engineering have given us. One of the classic
Speaker 1: ones is called base i selation, And this is super
Speaker 1: not a new idea. Um. There's evidence that Iranian architects,
Speaker 1: or pre Iranian architects rather and engineers were purposefully constructing
Speaker 1: buildings with seismic base isolation starting around like five fifty BC,
Speaker 1: So two five years ago folks were working on this. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I should be impressed, because I
Speaker 1: don't know what it is, Okay. Base isolation is constructing
Speaker 1: two separate layers of a foundation for your building, that
Speaker 1: the layer against the ground is solid with the ground,
Speaker 1: and the the secondary layer between the first one and
Speaker 1: your building is solid with the building, but it is
Speaker 1: capable of sliding against the lower foundation. Okay, Um, so
Speaker 1: if the ground shakes, the upper foundation and the building
Speaker 1: remain intact. Yeah yeah, um or I mean like up
Speaker 1: to a certain point. I think that over like a
Speaker 1: eight on the Richter scale, and you're just kind of
Speaker 1: it anyway. But um, but but this is really cool.
Speaker 1: Archaeologists have found structures such as the Tomb of Cyrus
Speaker 1: that have been standing for over two thousand years, partially
Speaker 1: thanks to this type of structural safeguard. Safeguard, Well, how
Speaker 1: did they do it back then? I mean if they
Speaker 1: didn't have like ball bearings and or whatever, I don't
Speaker 1: know what people would actually use today. Giant loose slabs
Speaker 1: of rock is how they did it, basically, Um, like
Speaker 1: like one giant slab of rock for the base and
Speaker 1: a and a secondary unattached slab of rock for the
Speaker 1: secondary base. I can just imagine the ancient Persian conversation
Speaker 1: that like create you know, like you can't have just
Speaker 1: one slab Nope, nope, we need two slabs here because
Speaker 1: then your earthquake comes and what are you going to do?
Speaker 1: You have an exposed Cyrus corpse that would just be rude.
Speaker 1: We don't we can't have that, um modern okay, oh sorry,
Speaker 1: I just want to update. I am impressed. Now that's smart.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, well, I mean it shows that they were
Speaker 1: thinking about it, and even thinking about it at that
Speaker 1: point in time was probably pretty impressive. Modern Ly, a
Speaker 1: lot of buildings that are in danger zones will use
Speaker 1: these things called lead rubber bearing pads between the solid
Speaker 1: foundation and the building. And and these pads consist of
Speaker 1: a solid lead core that's wrapped in in alternating layers
Speaker 1: of rubber and steel bands. So vertically speaking, it's super solid. UM.
Speaker 1: Horizontally it's wibbly wabbli right, so it's not going to
Speaker 1: get crushed, but it can shimmy. Yeah there yeah. UM.
Speaker 1: And a newish technology out of a Japanese company called
Speaker 1: Air Dunsion Systems Incorporated UM can temporarily suspend a smallish
Speaker 1: structure like a private home, on a cushion of air
Speaker 1: as a secondary foundation. UM. They work by having these
Speaker 1: seismic sensors in the homes primary foundation detect a coming
Speaker 1: quake and UM when that happened, and a really powerful
Speaker 1: air compressor will activate and feel like a like an
Speaker 1: air bag in the secondary foundation in less than a second. Um.
Speaker 1: And then you know, when when the sensors detect the
Speaker 1: earthquake is over, the compressor switches off and the bag deflates,
Speaker 1: kind of bringing the home back down, um gently onto
Speaker 1: its first foundation. It's only lifting the structure like a
Speaker 1: little over an inch in the air. Maybe so, but
Speaker 1: that can make a difference. But that can make a
Speaker 1: huge difference. Yeah, yeah, so uh kind of inexpensive way
Speaker 1: I suppose of conducting a base isolation on, especially a
Speaker 1: small home. As I read that the company was hoping
Speaker 1: to expand their systems for use in high rises, but
Speaker 1: I haven't been able to find anything more recent about
Speaker 1: what they've been doing, so I don't know. I hope
Speaker 1: they're out there. Yeah, good luck to them. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I think is interesting is
Speaker 1: studying the way that the ground actually transfers energy to buildings.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because that's really your problem, right, that you've
Speaker 1: got all this energy coming into a rigid structure, and
Speaker 1: how do you dissipate it? Right? But I mean, really,
Speaker 1: the damage that earthquakes cause is because of how efficient
Speaker 1: energy transfer is. Like thanks a lot physics, um, but
Speaker 1: but see any given object has a resonant frequency or
Speaker 1: a group of resonant frequencies. And we've talked about that
Speaker 1: a little bit on the show before. Um it means
Speaker 1: that when when the object vibrates, based on its its
Speaker 1: size and its shape and the materials it's made of,
Speaker 1: it's going to resonate at this specific frequency or group
Speaker 1: of frequencies maybe, And it's really hard to get something
Speaker 1: to resonate at a non resonant frequency. Um So, if
Speaker 1: you if you put mechanical energy into an object the
Speaker 1: way that a seismic wave does, uh, it will vibrate
Speaker 1: just as much as it can, like a whole bunch
Speaker 1: at its resonant frequency, because energy is so efficient like that.
Speaker 1: Um But ut, what if you could get a structure
Speaker 1: to vibrate at a different frequency, at a lower frequency.
Speaker 1: But it's really hard to get an object to do that.
Speaker 1: It just wants to resonate at that one frequency, unless,
Speaker 1: of course, you physically change the object on the fly,
Speaker 1: which is also not really a thing that you want
Speaker 1: to do to a building, or that it's physically possible
Speaker 1: to do to a building. I mean, unless you're like
Speaker 1: magneto or something like that. Um So, how can magneto
Speaker 1: do that. You'd have to be something else right now.
Speaker 1: He could change the shape of a building by way
Speaker 1: by by moving around the steel structures or you know,
Speaker 1: or he could take some of the metal out of
Speaker 1: it put extra metal into it. I'm usually right about magneto, UM,
Speaker 1: but engineers who are not magneto have come up with
Speaker 1: various damper systems. One that's really great for skyscrapers is
Speaker 1: called a tuned mass damper. And in the system you
Speaker 1: suspend like a big old massive ing near the top
Speaker 1: of a skyscraper. UM. It can be held in place
Speaker 1: with like fluid cushions or hydraulics or springs or cables
Speaker 1: or some wacky combination of the above, and UM that
Speaker 1: the mass and the hang of the system is tuned
Speaker 1: precisely to the resident frequency of the building, so that
Speaker 1: when an earthquake hits uh at, the building rocks one
Speaker 1: way and the system rocks in the opposite direction, which
Speaker 1: which helps reduce or kind of balance out the forces
Speaker 1: that are acting on the building, UM, thus preventing damage. Okay,
Speaker 1: I can see. So it's like it's almost like trying
Speaker 1: to create a canceling wave for holding Yeah, exactly. Um. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's sort of like noise canceling headphones of earthquakes. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can think about it if it if it
Speaker 1: helps with the visualization, it's sort of like a pendulum awesome. Um.
Speaker 1: Another thing that engineers due to help to help prevent
Speaker 1: damage to buildings is by bracing. And it sounds pretty obvious,
Speaker 1: but but but the way that they look at it
Speaker 1: is since most of the ground's movement during an earthquake
Speaker 1: is lateral, engineers can can compensate with incisive elements of
Speaker 1: strength and flexibility throughout a building that are designed to
Speaker 1: kind of spread the forces out evenly across the vertical
Speaker 1: and the horizontal elements of the structure. Um. And and
Speaker 1: things that help with that include like having parallel and
Speaker 1: symmetrical designs, using diagonal trusses against walls, and using a
Speaker 1: moment resisting frames which are uh columns and beams that
Speaker 1: are bendy but have connectors that are rigid, so that
Speaker 1: during an earthquake, UM, the the whole the whole thing,
Speaker 1: the whole frame moves is a single piece. Those elastic
Speaker 1: elements absorbs some of the energy and they can dissipate
Speaker 1: it without causing the building to crack or something right, right,
Speaker 1: it spreads the shock out across the entire structure, reducing
Speaker 1: damage to you one part or Another interesting way to
Speaker 1: approach bracing that I read about was specifically directing the
Speaker 1: energy dissipation or sort of like the damage centric zone
Speaker 1: to a replaceable part of the bracing structure, like like
Speaker 1: a fuse. Yeah, that'd be something like the fuses you
Speaker 1: might have in your house. Well, hopefully you have circuit
Speaker 1: breakers now, but the house that had fuses would have
Speaker 1: You know, if a circuit gets overheated, well it can
Speaker 1: just melt the fuse and that's fine. You can just
Speaker 1: change that out. You've got a box full of them
Speaker 1: and it's no big deal. But in two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: a team led by researchers at Stanford University in the
Speaker 1: University of Illinois successfully tested a building protection design that
Speaker 1: would keep multi story buildings from falling apart, and it
Speaker 1: would help return them to basically standing straight up upon
Speaker 1: the foundation after the shaking is over, so that the
Speaker 1: building doesn't like remain a hazard and then maybe fall
Speaker 1: over afterwards. And they tested this design on a shake table,
Speaker 1: which is sort of what it sounds like, it's this
Speaker 1: huge thing to simulate earthquakes, and it was shown that
Speaker 1: it was capable of withstanding earthquakes with a magnitude up
Speaker 1: to seven, which is pretty serious earthquake. But basically, these
Speaker 1: are steel frames that are designed to reinforce a building
Speaker 1: at the core or along the edge, and they dissipate
Speaker 1: the energy of the earthquake by rocking up and down
Speaker 1: within these cages at the foundations that they actually called shoes.
Speaker 1: They act like shoes, and so running along the vertical
Speaker 1: length of the frames are steel cables or steel tendons,
Speaker 1: which are elastic, so you can think of that kind
Speaker 1: of like having a bunch of rubber bands or like
Speaker 1: those elastic stretcher cables holding your building in place and
Speaker 1: helping return it to an upright position right upon its
Speaker 1: rightful place on the foundation. But at the bottom of
Speaker 1: these frames they had these things that they referred to
Speaker 1: as fuses, And basically the idea is that the fuses
Speaker 1: are the parts of the structure that will absorb the
Speaker 1: most energy and become damaged, and the fuses are designed
Speaker 1: to be replaceable. So if there's an earthquake, it tries
Speaker 1: to channel the energy into this fuse area which will
Speaker 1: be damaged and you'll have to replace it. But that's
Speaker 1: you know, pretty easy to do. Cool. Uh So, so
Speaker 1: these are all ways that we have of preventing damage
Speaker 1: in the case of an earthquake. But but but let's
Speaker 1: say that an earthquake does strike and damage is caused. Um,
Speaker 1: how how are science and technology helping us better deal
Speaker 1: with the aftermath of earthquakes? Well, I know one of
Speaker 1: the things that is going on is something we talked
Speaker 1: about in our very recent episode about radar. Uh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the finder. Yeah. So just to revisit this concept briefly,
Speaker 1: it is a way of using radar technology to locate
Speaker 1: human beings trapped underneath rubble. Uh yeah, microwave radar specific
Speaker 1: lee and it this is radar so sensitive that it
Speaker 1: can detect the tiny palpitations of a human heartbeat through
Speaker 1: up to twenty feet of solid concrete or thirty feet
Speaker 1: of wreckage or a hundred feet of open space. So
Speaker 1: that's a bunch um and uh this is technology that
Speaker 1: I think was developed in out of NASA and and
Speaker 1: it and it worked. And in the recent earthquake that
Speaker 1: happened in a Nepal in India, in april of rescuers
Speaker 1: located at least four living victims under ten ft of rebel. So,
Speaker 1: uh go team Doppler effect. That's awesome. UM. Other things
Speaker 1: that we have actually also touched on in the course
Speaker 1: of this podcast include, um using like robots and drones
Speaker 1: for rescues where it is impractical or unsafe for human
Speaker 1: rescuers to go. Yeah, we've talked about programming cockroach drones
Speaker 1: to find people in in rubble right right, um. And
Speaker 1: also smart infrastructure that can engineers uh as to when
Speaker 1: and where damage has been done, so that hopefully before
Speaker 1: you know, if if a minor shock one year makes
Speaker 1: a crack somewhere in a foundation, that could be a
Speaker 1: problem later. That's a thing that like a sensor could go,
Speaker 1: oh hey, engineers, come, come, pay attention to me, and
Speaker 1: hopefully that gets repaired before a larger quake could bring
Speaker 1: the whole building down. That's what you call a smart city,
Speaker 1: smart city, smart buildings as opposed to all these dumb
Speaker 1: buildings we live in now. Oh yeah, so dumb. But hey,
Speaker 1: what about the big question? How about the elephant in
Speaker 1: the room. Can we predict earthquakes? Can we do it?
Speaker 1: Can we know when and where they're going to happen,
Speaker 1: so that we can get people out of harm's way
Speaker 1: ahead of time. This is I think the main thing
Speaker 1: everybody wants to know, of course, And should we just
Speaker 1: go ahead and say it. The answer is not really Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: certainly not right now. Um And and a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of researchers are are doubtful that we ever
Speaker 1: will be Um. The seismology community seems to at large
Speaker 1: be saying we'll probably never be able to determine this. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean we're trying, yeah, Um, like with with earth
Speaker 1: earthquake forecasting, which is studying the history and the present
Speaker 1: configuration of a fault and predicting how likely seismic activity
Speaker 1: is in that area within a given period of time. Um.
Speaker 1: But again, according to a lot of seismologists, it's impossible
Speaker 1: to forecast when earthquakes will happen given what we currently
Speaker 1: know about how earthquakes work. We we haven't found a
Speaker 1: pattern despite all of the data that we've been recording. Sure,
Speaker 1: and despite the fact that we can't say when I
Speaker 1: think we do want to emphasize something you just said,
Speaker 1: which is true, we can with some reasonable degree of
Speaker 1: accuracy say where earthquakes are going to happen, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and not just I mean like obviously along the fault lines,
Speaker 1: but like along specific sections of a fault line. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's not necessarily going to be super specific, like
Speaker 1: telling you, you know in this will be right here.
Speaker 1: But we can generally have a pretty good regionally based
Speaker 1: prediction about earthquakes. Unfortunately, the painful element of it is
Speaker 1: you just never really know exactly where or even roughly win.
Speaker 1: And there's actually a good article in the Washington Post
Speaker 1: about this by the writer Joel Aichenbach, who who talks
Speaker 1: about the frustration of scientists who sort of have this knowledge.
Speaker 1: Like he he talks about how the earthquake scientists predicted
Speaker 1: that Catman Do would be, you know, would be vulnerable
Speaker 1: to an earthquake, that something was coming there, but they
Speaker 1: couldn't say they did in April of this year, and
Speaker 1: they couldn't say when and then when it happens. It's
Speaker 1: just kind of this sense of frustration and like, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, there wasn't that much that we could do
Speaker 1: about it, because I mean, you can't you can't evacuate
Speaker 1: an entire population based on well probably sometimes soon sure,
Speaker 1: I mean unless you were just going to say, well,
Speaker 1: we just shouldn't have a city here. And then on
Speaker 1: top of that, there there can be unknown fault lines
Speaker 1: in places that we're not even you know, really privy to, Like,
Speaker 1: there can be earthquakes in places that surprise us. They
Speaker 1: will happen less often, but they will happen, oh sure.
Speaker 1: And fault lines are not these these straight, perfect map lines.
Speaker 1: They're they're they're very jagged in crooked and can can
Speaker 1: go around to interesting new places that you didn't think
Speaker 1: that they would go. Sure. Yeah. One thing is that
Speaker 1: when you have an earthquake in one place, it can
Speaker 1: dissipate energy that that puts stress on another part of
Speaker 1: the tectonic plate or another part of the fault line
Speaker 1: where you wouldn't have expected an earthquake before. And we
Speaker 1: won't necessarily know what's going to happen until it happens. Though,
Speaker 1: it is worth saying that earthquake forecasting is a real thing.
Speaker 1: I is. Cartography is sort of what you'd call it.
Speaker 1: You can make maps and say, based on what we know,
Speaker 1: earthquakes are more likely to happen in these places within
Speaker 1: a certain long given period of time, right right, Um,
Speaker 1: And there are relatively early warning networks. UM. As digital
Speaker 1: communication technology has improved, UH, seismologists have started constructing these
Speaker 1: these large networks of a whole bunch of highly sensitive
Speaker 1: seismometers that can automatically send out alerts not just to
Speaker 1: researchers but also to the general public and therefore give
Speaker 1: a little bit more warning, maybe seconds, maybe minutes before
Speaker 1: an earthquake strikes. Um. And that's I mean, basically because
Speaker 1: seizemic waves only travel about three miles per second tops,
Speaker 1: and information can of course travel a lot faster than that.
Speaker 1: Your internet is faster than the earthquake. Yeah, yeah, hopefully
Speaker 1: fingers crossed. Um And And it sounds like that's absolutely
Speaker 1: no time at all, but but it's plenty enough to
Speaker 1: save lives of say, construction workers who are in precarious positions,
Speaker 1: or of patients who are undergoing surgery, or of of
Speaker 1: people driving on the road. Um. And it also allows
Speaker 1: emergency responders time to begin to prepare. Yeah, it is certainly,
Speaker 1: I mean, even if it's just having a siren go
Speaker 1: off or something that could potentially be useful. But of course,
Speaker 1: what people really want to know is can we get
Speaker 1: much further ahead of the game and One of the
Speaker 1: big things that often comes up when you hear people
Speaker 1: saying no, I think we can predict earthquakes maybe weeks
Speaker 1: ahead of time. Is animals. Oh right, Yeah, there are
Speaker 1: all of these kind of circumstantial reports of animal behavior
Speaker 1: changing dramatically a week or two before an earthquake. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people have reported this for years, supposedly, according to scores
Speaker 1: of anecdotes, fish, birds, rats, reptiles, I mean, what every
Speaker 1: all kinds of animals start acting we're weird before a
Speaker 1: seismic event strikes. One early record is that the ancient
Speaker 1: Greeks reported that animals, including rats and snakes deserted the
Speaker 1: city of hellicay En mass before a huge earthquake destroyed
Speaker 1: it in the fourth century BC. Weird. But whether or
Speaker 1: not that's true, we would need to verify that it's
Speaker 1: a continuously occurring scientific phenomenon, not necessarily like just something
Speaker 1: that happened once, right, because I mean the behavior of
Speaker 1: for example, rats and snakes is relatively ineffable. I mean
Speaker 1: sometimes they just do stuff. Yeah, sure, I mean, can
Speaker 1: animals really predict earthquakes well in advance? Number one? That
Speaker 1: would be a really useful fact were true. It would
Speaker 1: help us save lives, so it's worth studying. Unfortunately, this
Speaker 1: is one of those weird questions that's just really hard
Speaker 1: to answer. It seems to me, based on my reading,
Speaker 1: that generally most scientists are pretty skeptical about using animals
Speaker 1: to predict earthquakes. Some researchers have claimed to discover links
Speaker 1: between animals and earthquakes, but the larger scientific community seems
Speaker 1: to remain pretty unconvinced. Us Unsurprisingly, one person who likes
Speaker 1: this idea is the biologist and parapsychologist Rupert shell Drake.
Speaker 1: He's expressed fondness for the idea that animals can predict
Speaker 1: seismic activity. Though, if you know anything about this guy,
Speaker 1: shell Drake is one of those interesting people who's very smart,
Speaker 1: but it seems to me just generally in favor of
Speaker 1: whatever ideas are opposed to the mainstream scientific establishment. So
Speaker 1: you know, he's into paranormal phenomenon and he's the guy
Speaker 1: who promotes the concept of the morephic residence. Matter has
Speaker 1: a memory and stuff like that. But there actually are
Speaker 1: some studies that we could look at, Like some people
Speaker 1: have claimed that animals might be using their extra sensory
Speaker 1: auditory capabilities to detect sounds outside the normal hearing range
Speaker 1: or something like that. And some these claims are totally
Speaker 1: believable when they concern animals going nuts directly before an earthquake,
Speaker 1: but not so much weeks before, because if it's right
Speaker 1: before the earthquake strikes, that could be the same kind
Speaker 1: of thing we're talking about with these these Uh yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: it could be the earliest four shocks are just that
Speaker 1: first pee wave that hits before the subsequent shocks do.
Speaker 1: But I did find one recent study that's I think
Speaker 1: worth sighting, though I think I want to site it
Speaker 1: with caution because it just came out pretty recently, and
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that I don't know. It
Speaker 1: just seems like we would definitely want to get some
Speaker 1: more studies of this kind before we assign too much
Speaker 1: credit to it. But anyway, it was a March study
Speaker 1: in the journal Physics and Chemistry of the Earth Parts
Speaker 1: A B n C by Grant, Rollin and Freund, and
Speaker 1: they claim that disturbances in animal behavior were present in
Speaker 1: the weeks leading up to a tooth As an eleven
Speaker 1: earthquake in the Peruvian Andies. So here's what happened. They
Speaker 1: claimed that they used motion triggered cameras in a national
Speaker 1: park in Peru to measure the extent of wildlife activity,
Speaker 1: like you know, physical wildlife movement in the area, and
Speaker 1: they found that in the three weeks leading up to
Speaker 1: the earthquake, quote, animal activity declined significantly, and there was
Speaker 1: even less activity in the final like seven days before
Speaker 1: the earthquake. Now, the author's explanation for the claimed reduction
Speaker 1: and animal behavior was really interesting. They suggested that it
Speaker 1: was another thing they measured concurrent with this reduction and activity,
Speaker 1: which was an increase in the positive airborne ion injection
Speaker 1: at the ground to air interface. So basically the earth
Speaker 1: injecting positively charged particles positive ions up into the air
Speaker 1: and this disturbing animal behaviors. And they were suggest testing
Speaker 1: that this injection of positively charged ions into the air
Speaker 1: could be a result of some kind of preliminary earthquake
Speaker 1: precursor underground. Huh so so maybe maybe I mean, like
Speaker 1: I said, I want to stress caution with this kind
Speaker 1: of thing, because, uh, it seems to go against what
Speaker 1: we know so far, and it's it just came out recently.
Speaker 1: There might be good reasons for thinking there could be
Speaker 1: problems with this study that we haven't read about yet. Sure. Um,
Speaker 1: I I did read another similar report that was published
Speaker 1: UM from the Open University in the UK via the
Speaker 1: Journal of Zoology back in and Uh they were reporting
Speaker 1: that five days before an earthquake struck struck Italy in
Speaker 1: two thousand, nine of the male toads in a population
Speaker 1: abandoned their breeding site. Uh. Their normal behavior would have
Speaker 1: been to have stayed through the awning, but they just
Speaker 1: kind of up and left. And apparently, um, this behavior
Speaker 1: coincided with ion A sphere disruptions, although the cause of
Speaker 1: those disruptions was not discussed in the report or not
Speaker 1: reported in the report. Yes, yeah, I mean so I
Speaker 1: think that's very interesting. But I guess we again we
Speaker 1: don't really know. Yeah, but two reports does not make
Speaker 1: an appropriate sample for making scientific decisions. Sure, but I
Speaker 1: do think that this is worth studying because if there
Speaker 1: is any truth to the fact that animal behavior can
Speaker 1: predict earthquakes, I mean, the scientists aren't suggesting that they
Speaker 1: have telepathy or something triggering the animal reactions. These triggers
Speaker 1: should be normal physical events that we could design instruments
Speaker 1: to look for. Oh yeah, one that I one possibility
Speaker 1: that I read about was emissions of rate on from
Speaker 1: underground rock UM. Right on being a gaseous decay product
Speaker 1: of uranium which gets trapped in rocks UM, and the
Speaker 1: theory here goes that before an earthquake, kind of pre
Speaker 1: movements underground break apart rocks and release rate on up
Speaker 1: into the soil and water above UM. Since radon is
Speaker 1: radioactive and has a half life of of just like
Speaker 1: three to four days UM, it would be really a
Speaker 1: very useful metric to gather if a connection is in
Speaker 1: fact proven, But uh, no conclusive evidence has been found
Speaker 1: as of yet. So you know, what I'm really thinking
Speaker 1: is if we determine that animals can sense earthquakes, and
Speaker 1: then we can use that to make an earthquake sensing machine,
Speaker 1: and then we can evacuate cities where earthquakes are going
Speaker 1: to happen before they happen. What's going to happen to
Speaker 1: the future of the earthquake disaster movie genre? Oh man,
Speaker 1: They'll all have to be fabulous period pieces. Yeah, Oh
Speaker 1: that's right. The rock will have to put on like
Speaker 1: some like plaid and pretend to be some like grunge
Speaker 1: guy from the nineties when there is an earthquake in California.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, or like like a toga of some kind,
Speaker 1: and so that he can run around in a ancient
Speaker 1: Greek or Roman city. Oh yeah, yeah, while all the
Speaker 1: rats and snakes are fleeing. Yeah, you know, like the
Speaker 1: wind and the caverns under the earth. Where is it
Speaker 1: gonna go? She's gonna blow? It would have to be
Speaker 1: Paul Gimi saying that though, Yeah, where's that wind a
Speaker 1: gonna go? How was my Paul impression? But I'm not
Speaker 1: I'm not positive about the quality of either the movie
Speaker 1: that we are hypothesizing or of your Paul Madi impersonation. Well,
Speaker 1: I apologize, No, never apologize for Paul impersonations. They're really
Speaker 1: They're all good. Well, anyway, bringing it back a little bit, well,
Speaker 1: I do think that this is really interesting. And even
Speaker 1: if it turns out to be the case, which a
Speaker 1: lot of seismologists think is the case, that we will
Speaker 1: never be able to predict earthquakes, we can at least
Speaker 1: make our cities better, We can make our buildings better,
Speaker 1: we can do a better job protecting ourselves when the
Speaker 1: earthquakes do strike. And who knows, maybe one day we
Speaker 1: will find out that we can predict him ahead of time.
Speaker 1: Ah yeah yeah. And this isn't even for for new
Speaker 1: cities alone. There are lots of ways that engineers are
Speaker 1: looking at for retrofitting buildings to make them stronger in
Speaker 1: places that we strongly suspect a quake will strike eventually. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's look at those seismographic maps and get to work.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. Um. So, thank you so much Jacob and
Speaker 1: Matt for for writing in. This has been a fascinating
Speaker 1: thing to research. And we got to watch the San
Speaker 1: Andreas trailer a whole bunch and that was endlessly entertaining.
Speaker 1: So if any of you guys have any other questions
Speaker 1: that you would like to ask us, or any other
Speaker 1: topics uh you would like us to cover, please do
Speaker 1: let us know. You can find us via email that's
Speaker 1: FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. You can
Speaker 1: go to our website, which is ft of you Thinking
Speaker 1: dot com, or you can contact us via Facebook, Twitter,
Speaker 1: or Google Plus. Our screen name in those places is
Speaker 1: some iteration of f W thinking You're smart people. I
Speaker 1: believe in you, and uh, I hope that you will
Speaker 1: believe in us again very soon. For more on this topic,
Speaker 1: in the future of technology visit forward thinking dot Com
Speaker 1: brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,