The Importance Of Earthquakes

Firstly and most importantly, you need to understand what is an earthquake ? Here’s a brief introduction. An earthquake is the shaking of the ground, caused by shockwaves from movements and collisions of tectonic plates, mostly near fault lines, which is the edges of the plates. There are huge and minor earthquakes depending on the type and how the plates collided.

Earthquakes affect our daily lives in many ways, once an earthquake hits a city or a town, it could cause a huge amount of destruction to infrastructures such as buildings and bridges, it could also create casualties and most importantly financial disruption. So having the technology and methods to detect an incoming earthquake is crucial upon saving lives and lowering the harm

Seismometers works electromagnetically, it has a ball of magnet connected to some wires and pinned on a base, while the base is in contact with the ground. The ball of magnet actually doesn’t moves, however the base does, but only towards one direction, such as front and back, left and right, depending on the direction readings, such as north and south or east and west, the concept for the base and the sensors is based upon Newton’s first law. While the base is moving, it sends out electrical signals to a few computers, then the computers will use the signals to generate a graph, to let us visualize. That particular graph is called a

The frequency shows time interval between each wave and the length of the graph is determined by the time period of the earthquake. From reading and looking off the seismograph, we can determine the direction, distance, magnitude and the specific type of earthquake that just happened. Furthermore, the records on the seismograph, based on the motion of the ground is called a seismogram.

With our understanding of detecting earthquakes, let’s look at Japan’s Tohoku earthquake. Firstly, it was a megathrust earthquake with a magnitude of 9 that ruptured undersea around 130 kilometers away from Sendai. It was from two plates, particularly the pacific and the continental plate that collided in an subductive way. It lead to a total damage over 300 billion dollars, death toll of around 16000 and a level 7 nuclear meltdown in the power plant alongside releasing 300 tons of radioactive