Quake off the coast of Indonesia

[Marye]

CNN is reporting an earthquake measuring a preliminary magnitude of 8.2 strikes off the coast of Indonesia -- on the same fault line that originated a December 26 earthquake that launched a deadly tsunami.

[Trumpetmaster]

Marye,
Just read about it on msn.com

Here is the url....

8.2 Quake


TM

[hal 9000]

Silver lining: The last quake that generated those deadly tsunami's measured 9.0. Because the Richter scale is an exponential scale, this means that 8.2 is much less energy than 9.0- HOWEVER - 8.2 is still A LOT of energy. Hopefully things will go well this time around.

[mmichaelson]

Yep. Right there with ya on those hopes. Those poor people need a break.

[Marye]

CNN reports -- Tsunami warnings issued for Fiji and New Zealand after earthquake measuring a magnitude of about 8.0 shakes southern Pacific Ocean.

Dai....??

[navneeth]

Nothing serious has been reported from Tonga(the epicentre), yet. Let's hope it stays that way for all the other places.

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

CNN.com just posted a news alert that all the Southern Pacific tsunami warnings have been cancelled. <whew> The Hawaiian Island alert has not yet been specifically cancelled, but I expec that'll happen soon.

The last giant one was a 9.0 but part of the reason that the tsunami was so large was because the quake also caused a huge underwater landslide; that appears not to have happened this time.

[OperaTenor]

Thank God.

[piqaboo]

Hey Poster-formerly-known-as-SaxyBuff, Welcome Back!
How'sit goin'?

[dai bread]

CNN reports -- Tsunami warnings issued for Fiji and New Zealand after earthquake measuring a magnitude of about 8.0 shakes southern Pacific Ocean.

Dai....??

Oh dear, what a can of worms this opened up in our Civil Defence arrangements!

To start with, tsunamis are rare here. Apparently there is geological evidence that they have occurred, but despite our propensity for earthquakes I can't recall a single tsunami in my lifetime. Someone reported a tsunami in Gisborne in 1947 or so, but at the time I was living around the corner in Napier and I never even heard of it.

Then there was the classic case of the schoolteacher who took his class to the beach in Dunedin to see a tsunami reported to be coming from South America in the 1960s. Luckily, the tsunami was just a ripple by the time it got here.

Anyway, this time, our dear Civil Defence people alerted the news media in the wee small hours of the morning, but didn't alert anybody else except the emergency services. The reps. of northern hemisphere news people rang their offices which, of course, were fully functional and duly spread the news. NZers overseas picked it up and rang their families & friends, still in the wee small hours. The result was a panicy exodus, particularly in Gisborne, as people, often still in nightwear, fled to the nearby hills. Some even stopped to fuel their cars & pick up food & drink. As one CD man said later, why? You only have to go a kilometre inland or 35 metres uphill.

There was no warning to the general public, who were mostly sleeping in their beds and would have been drowned had there been a real tsunami.

The CD people rely on tide gauge movement to determine whether or not to issue a warning. This seems a little dodgy, given the lack of tide gauges between here & pretty well anywhere else, but is sensible in that tsunamis normally peter out well before they reach us. We have a sizeable continental shelf, and it absorbs a lot of wave energy.

So everyone is safe & sound, except the planners at Civil Defence.