Earthquakes and meteorites

[pyesetz]

Just a few factoids I've pulled from the broadcast news.

A week before today's massive earthquake, there was suspected meteorite explosion over Jakarta.  There was a loud BANG! and a vapor trail, but no crater.

Earlier there were suspected meteorite explosions over Australia and China.  Again, a loud BANG! and a vapor trail.

Today's magnitude–9 earthquake began with a loud bang.  Is that a coincidence or a typical feature of quakes?

It's amazing the crap you find when searching Google's archives of "stories the big networks didn't cover".  Here is a gem from Pravda that connects the Indonesian and Australian events (but I couldn't find any article connecting the Indonesian meteor with the Indonesian earthquake).  Unfortunately, the article also claims that meteorites actively try to avoid hitting inhabited areas, because they prefer to blow themselves up by hitting the ocean!  I guess they're right when they say "There's no truth in Pravda".

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Strong quakes of this type often begin with a good solid bang. It's caused when the pressure on the 'stuck' fault builds to the point where structure just abruptly fails, and a great deal of energy is released all at once. Milder quakes, involving lower pressures on a fault more prone to movement, can have a more gradual onset.

What's really appalling about this to me is that everyone had been aware for some two hours or more that there'd been a major undersea quake, yet no effort was made to evacuate or even warn the coastal areas in Ceylon and India. None of those people seem to have had the least warning.

Pravda's gone way downhill, yeah. It's basically a supermarket tabloid now. I used to get the English language version in the mid 80s when they were running a big retrospective on the Great Patriotic War. The current version bears no comparison at all.