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Politics : Moderate Forum
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To: WWWWWWWWWW who wrote (14911)12/30/2004 6:15:52 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER  Read Replies (1) of 20773
 
Re: The amount of energy released in this quake was on the order of millions of nuclear bombs. Millions.

There's no way we could have created that.

Of course. There is no "human" technology capable of triggering a tsunami THROUGH an earthquake spanning 700-900 miles! Yet, it's quite possible to create such a powerful tsunami using a SMALLER amount of energy to displace a SIMILAR volume of water... If I ask you and three of your friends to move a 1,100-lb car just by blowing at it, you'll have to generate a wind only a hurricane can generate --an impossible task. Yet, the four of you could achieve it just by PUSHING the car...

Anyway, below is the scientific material that shows the tsunami was triggered by a nuclear underwater explosion:

4.1.6 It Is Not Hard To Tell An Earthquake From A Nuclear Explosion

The worldwide network of seismometers was set up in large part in response to the need to establish a mechanism to verify compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. But how can we distinguish a nuclear explosion from an earthquake? In fact it is not terribly difficult.

Think about the mechanism of any earthquake. Regardless of whether it is generated by normal, reverse or strike-slip faulting what is always taking place is the sliding of one part of the crust against another. This produces very distinct seismic energy radiation patterns. Imagine yourself standing in front of a normal fault. The ground motion you felt (as would a seismometer at that location) would be down and toward you as the crustal block slides down the inclined fault. On the other side of the fault the opposite motion would occur and to the side some shearing motion would take place. So the motion you feel depends on where you are with respect to the fault and the seismic energy radiated from the fault is similarly different in different directions away from the fault. It is this information that allows us to determine what sort of fault caused an earthquake.

Now think about an explosion. Unless the explosive agent is distributed in a line or other pattern we would expect a fairly uniform distribution of energy in all directions from the explosion. There is no reason why any direction away from the explosion would receive more energy than any other. No fault-generated earthquake can produce that sort of radiation pattern. Also. because there is no real sliding motion associated with an explosion very little shearing occurs and hence very little S-wave energy is present. The ratio of S-wave to P-wave energy from an explosion is therefore unusually low and quite unlike a fault-generated earthquake.
[...]

columbia.edu

Compare the seismograms by yourself:

neic.usgs.gov
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