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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (22373)	3/28/2002 4:43:29 PM
From: Doc Bones	Respond to of 281500

Q. Could the bombing of Afghanistan have resulted in recent earthquakes there? [NYT] A. There is only a remote possibility of a seismic effect from the reported bombing, said Dr. Arthur Lerner-Lam, an associate director at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "The energy of one ton of explosive is roughly equivalent to the energy released in an earthquake of magnitude 1.5 or 2," Dr. Lerner-Lam said, "but that assumes a ton of dynamite exploded under ideal circumstances, in an enclosed cavern in hard rock." The energy released from a one-ton bomb would instead diffuse on the surface, he explained, because bombs are designed to destroy things on the surface, not to shake the rock below. Some bombs are made to destroy underground sites, he said, "but in even the largest of these, the energy release is not large in comparison to a significant quake." "However," Dr. Lerner-Lam noted, "there is evidence that a large nuclear explosion can change stress fields in the earth's crust." Such changes can bring on some earthquake activity, or at least changes in the natural background seismicity, he said. "But the punch line is, Afghanistan is among the most seismically active countries in the world, so such quakes are likely without large bombing campaigns, unless there are large nuclear explosions we don't know about." nytimes.com