Depending on where you are in the United States, earthquakes aren’t usually at the forefront of minds.
But even places that don't usually have major seismic activity, like the East Coast, do occasionally deal with earthquakes.
Just a few weeks ago, some reported feeling shakes and hearing a loud boom — in New Jersey, of all places. While the concern is more present in other parts of the country, that doesn’t mean it can just be shaken off.
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“There are earthquakes going on all the time in different parts of the world,” said Dr. Nick Davatzes, associate professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Temple University’s College of Science and Technology.
“Earthquakes are not unlike in their effect on us the way a large truck going by can cause that feeling of a rumbling that you feel in your body.”
Snap your fingers — that’s how Davatzes describes the occurrence of an earthquake.
“It’s a slip,” he said. “What differentiates it in terms of whether you can hear it is the amount of energy, which is a function of the area that slips, how far it slips, and the stiffness of the material.”
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Places like the East Coast, though, are a lot denser, with centuries-old rock, whereas the West Coast is known for its presence of faults. But the further you get from places where earthquakes are likely to occur, “then you have huge problems.”
“The East Coast of the United States, the central United States, is where the potential consequence is larger because we lack preparedness,” Davatzes explained. “Risk is probability times consequence. So even though the probability is lower, the consequence could be bigger.”
For better or worse, people tend to congregate near coasts or mountains — which also happen to be near a lot of plate boundaries.
“And typically, those mountains are there because there are faults helping to build them,” he said. “So there are lots of places where really, nearly the majority of the population of the Earth lives next to really large faults and can be affected by them.”
So for someone who studies earthquakes, what are the scariest places in the world? And how big does an earthquake have to be before it has societal impacts? Davatzes breaks it all down on this episode of KYW Newsradio In Depth.
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This episode of KYW Newsradio In Depth is part four of a mini-series called Doomsday Scenarios, where we ask very smart people if this, that, or the other thing could destroy life as we know it, and learn some of the science behind how the world works along the way. Click here for more.
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