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Long before the sun clears the eastern mountains of April 29, 1970, the savanna highlands of Chiapas tremble from a magnitude 6.7 earthquake centered off the Pacific coast near Mexico’s southern border. Then, for a few hours, he Isthmus of Tehuantepec is quiet.
In the middle of the 15 th century, shortly after Gutenberg’s invention of printing using individual lead type, the first illustrated broadsides (or broadsheets) began appearing in southern Germany. Usually printed on one side of a sheet of paper, they consisted of a woodcut illustration, sometimes colored, either by hand or by stencil, and several columns of text, often in verse. The appeal of the publications to the mass reader was often stimulated by sensationalism in word and picture, somewhat like that purveyed today’s tabloid press. What follows are woodcuts and portions of the text from 16 th to 17 th century broadsheets that describe earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. This article is an excerpt from Deresiewicz, H., 1982, Some 16th century European earthquakes as depicted in contemporary sources: Bulletin Seismological Society of America, vol. 72, p 507-523.
Although tsunamis occur most often in the Pacific Ocean, they can be generated by major earthquakes in other areas. The most frequent cause of tsunamis…is crustal movement along a fault: a large mass of rock drops or rises and displaces the column of water above it. This column of water – a tsunami – travels outward from the source at the fantastic speed of 500 mph or more. When an earthquake occurs in the Pacific Ocean Basin, authorities must quickly decide on a course of action.
The majority of Utah’s population lives along the Wasatch fault, an active intraplate normal fault that extends for approximately 230 miles along the western front of the Wasatch Range. Investigations of earthquake recurrence on the Wasatch fault have revealed that segments of the fault have been the source of repeated large earthquakes, probably of magnitude 6-3/4 to 7-1/2 .
The U.S. Geological Survey was established on March 3, 1879, in the closing hours of the final session of the 45 th Congress. The bill appropriating the money for sundry civil expenses of the Government during fiscal year 1880 was signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Included in the bill was the provision for a new agency under the Department of the Interior; it was charged with responsibility for “classification of the public lands, and examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain.”
The study of earthquakes advanced somewhat more slowly in North America than it did in Europe and Japan. J.D. Whitney, professor of geology at Harvard University and former State Geologist of California, studied the Owens Valley, Calif., earthquake of 1872 and reported on it that same year.
Eleven small lakes were formed by landslides caused by the 1929 Buller earthquake in New Zealand; four others were formed by other historic earthquakes in this country. At least nine other New Zealand lakes are dammed by landslides and were probably formed by prehistoric earthquakes. Earthquake-dammed lakes could provide an estimate of paleoseimicity for the past few hundred or thousand years.
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