It doesn't happen very often that a seismologist actually gets to observe a seismic wave in nature. Sure, we all sit in front of computer screens and look at the digital representation of the wiggles a seismometer produces. And indeed, the seismometer's mass swings with the rhythm of the wave. But these seismograms are far from the real thing. The blogger actually saw a seismic wave 20 years ago today, when the Loma Prieta Earthquake shook the Bay Area. I remember that it was a balmy afternoon. Everybody was excited because the A's and the Giants had lined up in Candlestick Park (as it was then known) for the third game of the 1989 World Series. I was in the car, picking my son up from after-school activities and dropping my daughter off for soccer practice. We were parked in her school's parking lot when the car suddenly began to rumble and then sway. I thought my son was jumping up and down in the back seat, eager to get home and watch the game on TV. But when I looked in the rear view mirror, I saw him sitting there quietly, staring awestruck out the window. When I looked in the same direction, I saw the asphalt in the parking lot swell and heave as though a giant gopher were digging through the earth at lightning speed. The wave in the asphalt was rapidly moving in our direction; it swayed the car up and down and within a few seconds - it was gone. I think the wave's crest was a few inches high, but everything went so fast that my recollection is somewhat blurred.

	Shaking intensity map for the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Courtesy of CISN. (Click to view larger image.)

That was a seismic wave, I exuberantly told my son. It probably was a once in a lifetime event to really see one coming and going, I beamed at him. But he was not at all impressed, and asked coolly, why I had turned the car radio off. I knew I hadn't, but indeed, there was no sound. That moment I realized that something big must have happened. My car radio was still on, but the radio station had gone off the air. My thoughts began to race: If I can actually see a seismic wave from an earthquake in the parking lot, then the shaking must have been really severe. Was the rest of my family safe? Was my house ok? We grabbed the daughter and drove home, where we found everybody shaken and stirred, but safe and sound. Then, ever so slowly, the news about the destruction at various locations in the Bay Area began to trickle in. The rest, of course, is history. The quake had a magnitude of 6.9, a total of 63 people were killed, and more than 3700 were injured. Its hypocenter lay along the San Andreas Fault in the Santa Cruz Mountains near the Loma Prieta summit, 11 miles beneath the surface. The Cypress structure of the 880 freeway in Oakland had collapsed, parts of the Marina District were burning, one section of the upper deck of the Bay Bridge had fallen onto the lower deck, and there was widespread damage in Watsonville and Santa Cruz.

These are the terrible facts, but in a way are just statistics to the blogger. What he remembers vividly is the wave in the parking lot. I am sure other people must have had similar experiences on that fateful October afternoon 20 years ago. Please tell the blogger what you remember about the largest quake in the Bay Area since 1906. Email us at by going to "contact" at the top of the page or by writing to "blogger@seismo.berkeley.edu". (hra046)

	Figure 1: The earthquake (yellow ball) occurred along the Longmenshan Fault (red lines), the boundary between the Sichuan Basin (white are in the lower right) and the Tibetan Plateau (blue are in the upper left). Image courtesy of MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. (Click to view larger image.)

When the Earth began shaking under the fertile soils of the Red Basin in China's Sichuan province a year ago today, nobody knew how bad it was going to get. It turned out that with its magnitude of 7.9, this quake was not only the world's strongest temblor last year. It was also the worst earthquake disaster to hit China in more than 30 years. Up to 80,000 people - an official number was never released - died in the rubble of the quake. Many victims were school children, as more than 14,000 classrooms were damaged, half of them collapsed entirely. Almost 400,000 people had to be treated for their injuries, which they sustained under tumbling buildings or in the numerous landslides in the mountainous epicentral region.

The earthquake occured at the Longmen Shan Fault Zone, which marks the tectonic boundary between the eastern Tibetan Plateau and the Sichuan Basin. Its epicenter (yellow ball in Figure 1) was located less than 60 miles from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province with its 11 million inhabitants. Here is what happened during the quake: Tibet, being pushed constantly by the northward movement of the Indian subcontinent, squeezed out a part of itself towards the east, resulting in this major "thrust earthquake" (Figure 2).

But several Chinese scientists speculated that other factors may have contributed to the severity of the quake. In the Chinese journal "Geology and Seismology," Fan Xiao, the chief engineer of Sichuan's provincial geology office, and others even went so far to say that the water in a recently built reservoir might have triggered this devastating earthquake. In 2001 work was started at the Zipingpu Reservoir. Its 470 ft high concrete dam sits just upstream from Dujiangyan. This city is home to a Unesco World Heritage site. The Dujiangyan Irrigation System was built in 256 BC and is still in use today. But the dam was also located just four miles from epicenter and was damaged severely during the quake.

The scientists speculate that the extra pressure of the water in the reservoir may have caused the Longmenshan Fault to slip, thereby releasing the tectonic energy stored in it. That does not mean that the earthquake would not have happened anyway. But the additional hydrostatic pressure from the 320 million tons of water stored behind the dam may have triggered the quake several years before it would have been due without the dam. We will explore how such "induced seismicity" works in one of the future blogs. (hra038)

Figure 2: A piece of lower crust (red blob) squeezed between the Tibetan Plateau and the lowlands of Sichuan. Image courtesy of MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

Is your water heater properly strapped to the wall? Do you have additional insurance on your house with the California Earthquake Agency (CEA)? If so, then you can thank a horrible event, which happened 15 years ago today in Southern California.

	Damage from the Northridge earthquake (Photo courtesy of M. Celebi, USGS)

It was about 4:30 am when Clarence Dean was rudely awakened in his home in Lancaster in northern Los Angeles County. A major earthquake had shaken his house badly. He got up, dressed quickly and then jumped onto his Kawasaki Police 1000 motorcycle. Dean was an LA motorcycle cop, and this Martin Luther King Day would have been his day off. But he knew he would be needed at his Van Nuys police station because of the earthquake. From his home, it took him only a couple of minutes until he reached Highway 14. There he took the westbound direction and sped towards LA, the blue emergency strobe flashing on his bike. But he never made it to his assigned post. The swooping viaduct where Highway 14 meets Interstate 5 had collapsed in the quake. Where two lanes of concrete had been built in a gentle arc high above the ground, there was nothing left. In the darkness, Officer Dean spotted the gap too late and flew 75 feet through the air before crashing, 30 feet below, in a cascade of sparks and screaming metal.

The policeman was one of 72 people who died on that morning in a 6.7 quake, with a hypocenter 10 miles beneath the town of Reseda in the San Fernando Valley. Had it not been a federal holiday, many more people might have died during the early morning commute. Besides the 5/14 interchange, the Santa Monica Freeway (I 10) had collapsed near Cienega Boulevard, making this major artery unusable for weeks. Most of the damage, however, occurred in the town of Northridge, hence the name for this costliest temblor in US history. Homes, apartment buildings and even hospitals collapsed all over the San Fernando Valley. It was later estimated that the quake had caused more than $20 billion worth of damage. As a consequence, many insurers of private homes stopped offering protection against earthquakes in our state.

The same region had been the victim of a similarly damaging temblor 23 years earlier, the San Fernando earthquake of 1971. Seismologists later found out that these two quakes occurred on two different, previously unknown faults. After the Northridge quake, the California Legislature passed several laws in a rare form of bipartisan unity. One gave life to CEA, which now underwrites earthquake insurance statewide. The building code was also amended, requiring each newly installed gas-powered water heater to be strapped to the wall. Too many heaters had fallen on that fateful morning 15 years ago, breaking the gaslines and causing devastating fires. (hra028)