Fault Lines: Understanding the Power of Earthquakes
Introduction When i Was foUr Years old I lived with my family in Tokyo Japan I remember seeing the polite nods and warm smiles in the crowded subways riding on the back of my mother’s bicycle through the alleys of the city and wishing we could visit the five-story Sanrio toy store I also remember the regular earthquake drills in our kindergarten class We would scramble to get under the desks and then line up and march outside It seemed like a fun game at the time but there was seriousness about it I first felt the ground move one day when I was playing at home after school I had cleared out a bookshelf bookshelf to use as a Barbie house when suddenly all the showing off my school uniform on my first day of kindergarten in tokyo my little sister jessica is in the stroller beside me Piroska Wagstaffe 6
toy furniture started shaking and falling off the shelf I did what we had practiced at school and crawled under the coffee table calling out to my parents It was only a small quake but the strangeness of the feeling of having no control stuck with me as did the sense of how well prepared the Japanese were Maybe that was what led me to study earthquakes later on Back in Canada when I got to high school geography the study of the earth’s surface made perfect sense to me The earth’s processes explained things that we could see around us The water cycle explained why it rained The force of flowing water on a bank carved out the curves of a river But there are still mysteries and scientists are still learning how our planet works At university I wanted to understand more about how our world worked so I took seismology the study of earthquakes and got completely hooked on the earth After four years of learning what happens under our feet I wanted to learn more about what happens above our heads so I went to another university to learn about meteorology the study of the atmosphere including climate and weather When major earthquakes happen around the world part of my job as a journalist is to explain to our viewers the science of what is happening Here i am reporting on a large earthquake that struck off the coast of japan in november 2016 cBc along with covering breaking news i also do in-depth science stories Here i am interviewing the assistant fire chief for Vancouver fire and rescue services about the kinds of drills the city practices in preparation for a major earthquake jessica linzey 7
The fields of meteorology and seismology are not all that different In both scientists observe our planet’s processes and apply what we’ve learned in the past to make conclusions about what’s going to happen in the future In meteorology we study current conditions like temperature pressure and cloud cover to figure out how they are going to change in a few days In seismology seismology we study the waves that earthquakes send out to understand the stresses that are building up below us and what areas might be at risk for earthquakes in the future And as you’ll see in my job as a meteorologist and science reporter I get to do both explain the weather every day and explain earthquakes whenever there is a major one somewhere on earth In Fault Lines Understanding the Power of Earthquakes I’m going to tell you a little bit about what goes on beneath our feet and how we can prepare for earthquakes wher ever we happen to live You’ll see that seismologists are like detectives examining data from earthquakes to understand what’s going on inside our planet It’s not nearly as quiet down there as you might think from the movement of the tectonic plates under our feet to the shifting weather systems above our head our planet is always in motion nasa Whether it's creating forecasts tracking storms or analyzing the data after an earthquake my days as a science reporter are never dull cBc 8
Here's what the International Space Station looks like orbiting Earth Those astronauts probably have the ultimate view of how our planet's natural processes fit into place GolkIn AndrEy drEAmSTImE com 9
