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A Montreal-area company, Tectonics Research Group Inc., has invented an
earthquake alarm for consumers, called QuakeAlert.  The device was invented
by Sam Guindi, with the help of McGill Ph.D. candidate, Afshin Sadri and
has been tested at the Enginering Lab at the University of British Columbia
under the supervision of Dr. Carlos Ventura. The device was featured on
Canada AM, a national morning newsmagazine on the CTV network on November
28.
For more information, contact  Sam Guindi via e-mail at
tectonic@mail.odyssee.net, by phone at (514) 466-1153 or by fax at  (514)
466-1136.

Andrew Stephan  wrote:
> The bombs were "Fat Man" and "Little Boy."
> 
> Apart from anything else, it would be rather apparent if the earthquake
> was not, in fact, an earthquake, and actually a nuclear test or something
> similar.  If you look at a seismograph, a nuclear bomb creates a pattern
> something like this:
> 
>         /\
>        /  \
>       /    \
> ------      \    --------------------------
>              \  /
>               \/
> 
> and that's the end of it.  You don't get a whole series of waves crashing
> in over an extended period of time, just one big "uummphh!" all at once.
> Okay, granted, if you are a fair ways off, or the geology is pretty 
> complicated, you can get waves bouncing around and off of different rock
> formations and types, etc.  The difference between a nuclear explosion
> and an earthquake is usually readily apparent to seismologists, or so I'm
> told.  Ocassionally, there can be some confusion, mainly with 
> (relatively) very small nuclear tests.
Would that it were so easy ...
Russ

Dennis Gentry  wrote:
> I'll second that and Pauls' post in conjunction with Alans' post helped me
> to get a better understanding of the scientific process in determining the
> validity of a process or identified frequency.
I organised a meeting of those professionally involved in assessment of
earthquake predictions just last month.  It looks like I will be editing
a volume of proceedings for Geophysical Journal International, but in
the meantime (if you are not afraid of some serious statistics) you
might like to cast an eye over the abstracts.  Some of them are
presently to be found on my web site at
        http://www.seismo.demon.co.uk/Nov7th/
We are presently trying to work out how best to deal with the issue of
archiving such material, and the full suite should become available in
due course through the RAS site at
        http://www.ras.org.uk/ras/
The meeting was reported in both Nature and New Scientist, but Science
appear to have ignored us.  I believe that the texts are available at
their respective web sites.  A more detailed report will appear in EOS
(newspaper of the American Geophysical Union) next week, and may appear
at the AGU web site (http://www.agu.org/, I think).  If not, I may seek
permission to post it here. 
The bottom line is that no-one has yet come up with a prediction scheme
which withstands careful statistical analysis.  What's more, there are
some very strong indications that earthquakes are inherently
unpredictable, at least in the generally agreed sense of stating when,
where and how big.  Governments should continue to concentrate funding
on monitoring, hazard assessment and on appropriate mitigation measures.
Russ

Alexander Ashkinazi wrote:
> 
>                  ATTENTION!!!
> 
>    There is a Method for the solution of fundamental problems
> knowledge
> at all levels of matter (and not only) from the Theory of a Field up
> to Universum (Is created as makes the One Field Theory).
>           It is the Method MATRIXed of Systematics (MMS).
> MMS - simplicity, beauty, perfection and practical efficiency of the
> theoretical analysis of any systems and their ensembles.
> MMS - this holiday of soul for the creative person.
> MMS - it is a god's spark for the researcher.
> MMS - unfortunately, our heavy cross.
> 
> Everyone, who can help to bear this cross, we ask to send the answers
> on our e-mail: sashaaj@hotmail.com
> Thank you in advanced.
> 
> Yours faithfully   L.Fylinski & R.Rynkovski
> e-mail: sashaaj@hotmail.com
> 
> e-mail: sashaaj@hotmail.com
Huh?
-- 
"There are only two races on earth: the decent and the indecent"  Viktor
Frankl

As far as i can remember from my seismology class, the radiation pattern
from 
nuclear explosions(NE) are quite different from the earthquakes(EQ).
NE are just that, explosions and radiate only preasure waves, with the
first 
observed movement always beeing positive. EQ on the other hand are bits
of 
rock that are displaced. They radiate both shear and preasure waves and 
the first motion is positive in some direction and negative in others.
So by 
observing first motions at seisomgraphs distributed around the world
(This is done routinely as seismologists often needs to know the fault
plane 
solution, and to calculate that you have to know the first motions
observed 
all over the world) you can figure out which events are EQ and which
are NE. Also, as correctly mentioned by Andrew Stephan, EQ an NE have 
different waveforms, so observatories like NORSAR(Check out 
http://www.norsar.no/Nuclear/) can detect a NE anywhere in the world by 
studying the incoming waveforms.(Actually I think they constantly watch
for 
NE). 
So its higly unlikely that the China Lake event was a nuclear explosion, 
and if it was you will certainly hear of it, since it will be imposible
to 
obtain a fault-plane solution for the event, and it most probably will
have 
been detected by observatories like NORSAR.
Kenneth Skaar

In article <1996120408445618037@seismo.demon.co.uk>,
Russ Evans  wrote:
>Andrew Stephan  wrote:
>
>> The bombs were "Fat Man" and "Little Boy."
>> 
>> Apart from anything else, it would be rather apparent if the earthquake
>> was not, in fact, an earthquake, and actually a nuclear test or something
>> similar.  If you look at a seismograph, a nuclear bomb creates a pattern
>> something like this:
>> 
>>         /\
>>        /  \
>>       /    \
>> ------      \    --------------------------
>>              \  /
>>               \/
>> 
>> and that's the end of it.  You don't get a whole series of waves crashing
>> in over an extended period of time, just one big "uummphh!" all at once.
>> Okay, granted, if you are a fair ways off, or the geology is pretty 
>> complicated, you can get waves bouncing around and off of different rock
>> formations and types, etc.  The difference between a nuclear explosion
>> and an earthquake is usually readily apparent to seismologists, or so I'm
>> told.  Ocassionally, there can be some confusion, mainly with 
>> (relatively) very small nuclear tests.
>
>Would that it were so easy ...
Okay, it's maybe not as easy as I made it sound.  My understanding, 
though, is that the wave patterns are very different.  What makes things 
more complex is when the nuclear tester decides to try to make it hard to 
tell if it was an EQ or a nuke.  There are all sorts of tricks that can 
be done with this.  Actually, one method used to hide the number of 
explosions (simultaneous or very near simultaneous detonation of multiple 
devices in a relatively small area) creates multiple sources of waves 
from very nearby locations.  When you get this, you don't have that 
single wave thing anymore.  Another interesting thing is a method for 
hiding a 20kT or so explosion.  This is just a theory; I don't know if 
anyone has tried this, if some country has, they probably aren't going to 
talk about it.  The method involved exploding the thing in a large cavity 
(of a very specific size) dug out especially for it.  I don't recall the 
details, but there was some way (theoretically) to minimize wave 
transference to the ground and cause as much destructive wave 
interference as possible.  Another interesting, but off the topic, thing 
was an American idea back in the '50s to float ballons (something like 
weather ballons) across the Soviet Union.  They would be equipped with 
equipment to try to "hear" the noise from nuke blasts as an alternate 
method of detection.
Andrew
>
>Russ

I keep reading and hearing statements something like "according to the
USGS, large EQs have been getting more frequent..." or some such. 
However, the USGS (http://wwwneic.cr.usgs.gov/) has a text file saying
there is NO increase.  It says that the only increases observed are that
more 'minor' EQs are detected because of more/better instrumentation. 
But the data in the file only shows EQs of 7.0> and is a few years out
of date.  Just what IS the truth concerning significant (6.0>) EQs?
-- 
Judson McClendon      judsonmc@ix.netcom.com
Sun Valley Systems    http://www.netcom.com/~judsonmc/sunvalley.html