It's Night Side with Dan Ray. I'm Bzy Boston's radio.
All right, we had a big shake, big shake off the coast of Maine on Monday morning. We talked about it Monday night. I think it was Monday night. Yeah, I guess it was. Just the week goes by very quickly. And then today, as our guest on Monday Night suggested, we had an aftershock. So we brought our guests from Monday Night back. Professor John Ebel. He is a research scientist at Boston College's Western Observatory who studies earthquakes. Professor Ebel, welcome back to Nightside. How are you.
I'm doing very well. Thank you.
How does someone begin? When did you realize you were going to have a career studying earthquakes?
Well, I was an undergrade you it, majoring in physics at Harvard School. You may have heard of.
And is that one of the that's one of those schools across the river from Boston College, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, it's another liberal, large college in the area.
It's called the Boston College of Cambridge, if I'm not mistaken.
And that's the way I like to think of it. Anyway. Anyway, I was. I was a physics major, and at the time when I was studying physics, the the the big thing was high energy particle physics, you know, looking for smash while smashing the atom and looking for sub atomic particles.
And while I thought that that was interesting, the geophysicists at at Harvard University tried to get the physics students interested in geophysics, and I went and took some courses from them and talked to the faculty there and really got interested in it. And a professor there, Rick O'Connell, who is now unfortunately passed on and couraged me to
think about cal Tech. And when I looked at all the different geophysics that they had, I thought seismology, earthquake schismology was the most interesting, and so I applied and I got in, and so I cut my seismological teeth on earthquakes in California, and the rest is history.
I guess, well, great place to cut your seismological teeth, that's for sure, and also another fabulous school. So I guess, let me start with some basic questions, because I know my audience out there wants to ask questions, and some of them probably aren't that they're a little apprehensive about calling, and I hope people will join the conversation. How far back are we able to trace earthquakes? I assume earthquakes have existed since the Earth was created billions of years ago. Correct.
Absolutely. What an earthquake is is a place where the pressure in the rock has built up to the point where the rock cracks and slides to try to relieve that pressure. And rock, unlike skin, doesn't heal. So if the rock crack a billion years ago, geologists can still find that crack in the earth today, and when they map it, they map it it's a fault, and that fault, then, you know, goes onto maps as lines. People like to call them fault lines, although they're really surfaces in the earth.
And if you look at for instance, New England, you can't actually drive more than a few miles anywhere in New England without crossing an old fault, So faults are everywhere. What's interesting for me as a seismologist is to try to figure out which are the modern active faults. And there's two possibilities there. One is that it's an old fault that is moving again in the modern stress or
pressure field of the moving plates. Or the second possibility is that the rock cracks in a brand new spot and the crack runs in a different direction, and so you have the creation of a new fault. And everyone just assumes that if you have an earthquake, you have to have a fault. Well after the earthquake, yeah, because the rock crack, But before the earthquake, maybe there wasn't
a crack running in that direction. Just as if you have a crack in your windshield of your car and the crack runs in one direction and then you get hit by another rock, you can have a new crack run in a different direction.
How do you chart that? I mean, this earthquake on Monday was under the Atlantic Ocean. Most earthquakes, obviously by definition, are underground. How can you chart that? How's it physically? How are you physically able to do that?
Well, you have to be patient. What you have to do is you have to monitor earthquakes for a very,
very very long period of time. So instruments for earthquake monitoring were invented in the eighteen eighties, although there were some earlier instruments that were more primitive, but eighteen eighties is really when earthquake modern earthquake recording started and the kind of seismic networks we have today where data is transmitted over the Internet and so I can get data from anywhere in the world at Western Observatory, that really
started in the nineteen sixties and into the nineteen seventies. So since that time period, seismologists have put out as many seismic instruments as they can in all parts of the world, and then we collect the data. We use the data to locate the earthquakes, and what we do is we look for patterns, spatial patterns in the way the earthquakes line up over the time period for which we have data. So in California they get so many earthquakes that even within a few years, you see the
earthquakes lining up on many of the heck defaults out there. Here. Because we have many fewer earthquakes in any given year, we have to wait much longer to see the earthquakes
line up on what potentially may be act defaults. And that's one of the important areas of my research and why an earthquake are actually the pair of earthquakes that happened today and Monday are so interesting because I look for them to line up with other earthquakes and hopefully then use that identify where possible act defaults may be.
So you're trying to say, Okay, the earthquake was, what was it twenty miles off York Maine or approximately? Are they able to isolate with some proximity where the earthquake began right right?
So we can isolate it offshore. We can isolate it within about probably two miles the epicenter. But if you were to look at the map of earthquakes since the mid nineteen seventies, when we started having good earthquake monitoring here, you would see that there would be a couple dozen earthquakes off shore of York, Maine, and then offshore New Hampshire, and even going down as far south as as offshore east of Cape Ann. So there's a cluster of earthquakes
out there. And I've been studying those earthquakes, and now I have a couple more data points to see if they might be telling us of a possible active fault in the rock underneath the underneath in this case the Gulf of Maine that maybe gave us, for instance, the big earthquake that we had in seventeen fifty five the so called cape an earthquake.
So the information that you're trying to plot, is it prospective or retrospective.
It's retrospective. We cannot predict. So what I like to explain to people about what we're trying to do is if you were to go into a movie and you were to watch let's say one minute of the movie. All right, so you watch one minute of this movie, and then you're trying to guess the plot. You're trying to guess the main characters. You're trying to guess what happened in the past and what will happen in the in the rest of the movie, in the future of
the movie. Well, that's kind of where we are right now with earthquake monitoring, because the earthquake patterns play out probably over many hundreds to thousands of years, and we have really good data for about, you know, fifty years here in New England right now. So it's like watching one minute of the movie and trying to guess what the whole what the whole movie is all about.
Well, I have more questions, and my guest is Professor John Ebel. He is at Boston College, a seismologist studies earthquakes. I think it's fascinating to think that that you're studying something which is it's not abstract, but it's not something that can be seen the nake by the naked eye, and yet you're able to gather information. And of course this has been going on for time, immemoriam, and I'd love to know what people five thousand or ten thousand
years ago thought when the earth moved. I don't know if there's any sort of records. I got a million questions, and if you'd like to join the conversation, we'll be happy to go to phone calls as well. I appreciate the fact that Professor Evil, who's with us tonight, he has had a very busy week. I would bet you that you probably have done more than a few interviews this week. Am I correct?
You are correct, indeed, and not just in the Boston area, but up in Maine as well.
Oh, I will bet, I will bet. We'll take a quick break six one seven, two, five, four ten thirty or six one seven, nine three ten thirty. Again. I am in the business of asking questions and learning, and that's what excites me about this interview. I hope that It's what excites me about every interview that I do. I hope this is of interest to you because this is not a new phenomenon. It's been around, as I say, as long as as as I guess man has recorded
it in some form of fashion movie. Back on the night Side with my guest right after this.
Now back to Dan Ray live from the Window World night Side Studios on WBZ News Radio.
We've got a bunch of phone calls. We're going to get to phone calls, but I just want to ask one more sort of I would say, fundamental maybe threshold question. Do we know obviously earthquakes must have been going on since time in Memoriam, but are the writings hieroglyphics? You know that we can say earth in fact earthquakes occurred ten thousand years ago. I mean, we know, we must intellectually know that they had to have been occurring, But one of the are they recorded and obviously not like
what you record? But is there any any what's the earliest writings about earthquakes?
There's lots and lots of evidence of past earthquakes going through historic time, prehistoric time, and even before that. So let's talk about the historic record. First, there's a lot of good historical evidence of strong earthquakes going right back to the time when the Pilgrims first landed. In fact, even before that, when European explorers were still looking you know, we're still landing on the North American continent and looking at them. I have a book I published a few
years ago about earthquakes in New England. Just it's available to the general public on Amazon, and I go through the history of earthquakes, starting with the first one that the Pilgrims felt, which was in sixteen thirty eight, which actually was quite a strong shake, and go through earthquakes after that seventeen fifty five, go right up to the
present and the earthquake in nineteen eighty eight. But what we know is all of the Native American tribes here in the northeastern part of North America had a word for earthquake in their languages. And you only have a word if there's some reason for it.
Yeah, fascinating, just fascinating. Let's go to somep phone calls, let's see want to ask and again I get more excited about doing an hour like this than doing an hour on politics. Let me start it off with Jen in Burlington. Jen, thanks for calling in. You'll have professor John Ebel abel Ebel, I'm sorry, sir, go right ahead, Jen.
Hi, thanks for taking my call. So my understanding. My understanding is that offshore earthquakes often times cause tsunamis like the gigantic Boxing Day one sounds like more often in Asia than around here. What an earthquake in the Gulf of Maine ever have the ability to cause a tsunami in this area.
Yes, indeed. So let's talk a little bit about the history of tsunamis in the Atlantic. The most important earthquake for US was one that occurred in nineteen twenty nine. It occurred the epicenter was actually south of Newfoundland, so it's well east of New England seven point two earthquake. It was felt all throughout New England and it caused a tsunami that actually killed probably twenty to thirty people in southern Newfoundland. Ten foot wall of water came in
on shore there. That tsunami was small, but was noticed in Nova Scotia, about a foot high there. It was recorded on tide gages in Boston Harbor, although the wave was so small there that it wasn't noticed by people. But if you look at right along the edge of what we call the continental shelf, where the ocean where the continent ends and the ocean deepened to the very very deep part of the Atlantic Ocean, there are earthquakes actually all along that margin, from south of Newfoundland all
the way down to south of Long Island. And if we had a magnitude let's say, seven earthquakes anywhere along that stretch, it very likely would cause a tsunami that would move on shore. And there's actually some geologic evidence of a tsunami that probably came on shore about twenty two hundred years ago in coastal New Hampshire. So tsunamis are a possibility here, although very rare compared to what they have in Indonesia and Alaskan places like that.
Amazing, Yeah, it is, truly, it's truly amazing. This is a really dumb question, but are there any land masses that exist, either in the ocean or anywhere that a thought to be have been caused by an earthquake?
So the land masses themselves are caused by basically the lightest material earth materials throughout Earth history floating to the top. So just as if you were to, you know, put a bunch of a dig a bunch of dirt from your backyard and put it in a bucket and put water in it, the lightest materials like you know, wood and grass and things like that would float to the top. Well, the same thing happens over a much slower rate with the rock, so you don't have earthquakes with that process.
But on the other hand, as the plates move to as the material moves to the surface, they cool and they form these hard plates, and the circulation of hot material from the interior of the earth pushes those plates around, and that's where those plates rubbed together that you have most of the earthquakes. And so the Santa Dora's fault is a place where two plates are rubbing together. In California underneath Alaska, southern Alaska, you have Pacific Ocean plates
sliding under the North American plate there. So anytime you have two plates rubbing together, you have earthquakes, and then you have a few earthquakes. Only about probably ten percent of the world's earthquakes occur within the centers of plates because of the pressure that builds up as the plates are moving around, so kindinal crust is not caused by earthquakes or formed by earthquakes, but earthquakes occur at the edges of the plates, including of many of the continents.
All right, Jang, really good question. Thank you for joining us tonight.
Thank you have a great night.
Guys, you too.
Thanks.
All right, let me get one more in here if I can, before the we get to the nine thirty news in Connecticut. Rachel, you are on with Professor John Ebel. Go right ahead, Rachel.
Hello, mister Ebel. I have two questions. One, are you familiar with the George's Bank? The water is above this round under the water, and that there's like a shelf, and would that affect.
Rachel. I think you have a phone on and you have the radio one in the background, and I think you're being distracted by it or is someone able to turn the phone down. I think you're having a tough time with the radio in the background. You're not supposed to have that. You got it down, Okay, go ahead, formulate your question again because I think that you'll you'll do better without the radio of the background.
Go ahead.
There's a place called George's Bank, Busy Coast and I was wondering what John Eball thought about that collapsing in an earthquake and causing like a tsunami like the former Calis mentioned.
Okay, that's interesting. He's already mentioned George's Bank. But let's let's see what he has to say to that question. That's an interesting question, Professor.
So, George's Bank is the part of the edge of the North American continent, and the continent at one time had uh had earthquake activity associated with collisions and splitting with pass plates. For instance, if you were here two hundred million years ago, you could walk from Boston here to Morocco because those two land masses were connected. So George's Bank and actually most of the Boston area, the rocks are more related to northern northwestern most Africa than
they are to the rest of North America. And so any time you have plates colliding or you have then plates splitting apart, you have faults forms. So there's very likely faults beneath George's Bank and the rock beneath George's Bank, just as there is probably all up and down the
East coast off shore. The tsunamis seem to be most likely associated with where you go from the shallow water to the deep ocean, because you have a lot of sediments there and the earthquake shaking can trigger offshore slumps in those sediments, so you don't see them at the surface, but the sediment slump and that then causes the water
to readjust and that's what causes the tsunamis. In nineteen twenty nine, there were actually there was a submarine slump that broke a lot of telephone cables between North America and Europe. And so that's how that slump actually got mapped because of the cable breaks.
So the next question I had is a few can recall I had sent you a letter in twenty and thirteen about a summer quake, and I was curious, if you believe in God and if you believe that people that are on the Earth can be affected by earthquakes caused by God?
So earthquakes caused by God, That's something that we had.
A theological question here, not necessarily a seigebological question. Go ahead, professor.
So my late friend father Jimskian would have been very happy to deal with this question too, but I'm happy to take it. So you know, God created the earth, and the Earth is evolving all the time, and the plates are moving, and as the plates move, there are earthquakes. So in that sense, God causes earthquakes because it's part of his natural creation. Does any particular earthquake is Did God point to the ground at that point and say
there's going to be an earthquake there today? I personally would not believe that because I just don't think that that that's the way God acts. But earthquakes are a natural part of our ecosystem, just as as hurricanes are, as, snowstorms are as, as you know, meteors up in the sky are and all that sort of thing. So I,
you know, now we're getting into theology. But I don't think God is, you know, pointing to the earth and say I'm going to cause an earthquake there today because of whatever reason.
Rachel, I think that's a pretty good answer, Hope help. Thank you so much, appreciate your call. Thank you. We have a news break at the bottom of the hour of Florence's next CG and Cambridge, Row and Newton. We get them all in the only lines open right now six one, seven, nine, three, ten thirty. I just think it's it's it's an amazing field of study, and that's
why it fascinates me. I hope it fascinates you. If you want to jump on, we'll get you on before the ten o'clock news, and we will have to say good bad good night to our professor. He's a professor at Boston College, also the Western Observatory, Professor John Ebel. We will be back on Nightside right after this.
You're on night Side with Dan Ray. I'm w b Z, Boston's news radio.
We're back to phone calls. My guest is, I'm doctor John Ebel. He is a Boston College professor. He works and has worked for many years at Boston College's Western Observatory. I interviewed him for Channel four probably ten years more than ten years ago, twenty years ago. Believe it or not, I'm dating us, doctor. This is it's frightening when I realize how long I've been doing radio after television. Florence is in grovelin Florence. You are on with my guest, doctor John Ebel.
Go right ahead, yes, goody name, then good evening, professor, Professor. I have two things I want to mention. The second one's question. Okay, but The first thing I wanted to mention about several years ago, might be six or seven, we had I'm in the Merrimack Valley, so I'm close to the New Hampshire border, and we had a quake that menatured. They said four point zero okay, and everything shook in our house. The chair in the living room I was sitting in, all our ceiling fans were shaking. Bed.
You must recall that, yes, I do okay. And the other thing, the question I wanted to ask some years back, something I was watching on TV and a content was named They were talking about earthquakes, and they said that in New England, here we are sitting on one of the largest faults in your studies. Have you ever heard that mentioning or do you know what? That's a fact?
If anybody's going to know, it's this, it's the gentleman you're talking to, flounce, go right ahead, doctor.
So people want to associate earthquakes with a single fault, and that's really a misconception. It's a misconception in California, it's a misconception in Japan, it's a misconception in China and Turkey, anywhere in the world. There's actually many, many, many different faults, and earthquakes in different places are associated with with different faults or typically are associated with different faults.
So for example, I know, as we were talking about earlier, I think that there probably is a fault and an active fault offshore east of York, Maine and running down to east of Cape ann But then we have earthquakes, for instance, in the newberry Port area, and going back to a pretty strong earthquake that did damage in seventeen twenty seven, that would be associated with a different fault. There have been earthquakes down along the south coast of
Massachusetts those would be associated with different faults. Earthquakes that Moodus Connecticut, different fault there. So there's no one single fault And that's what makes my research so challenging because there's just there's so many earthquakes in so many different places, and there's so many different possible faults that we have to study. So it's really like a huge puzzle and we don't even have all the puzzle pieces.
All right, hope that answer the question, Florence welcome, profess.
That kind of rattled me to hear that comment years ago, and always wanted to know was a fact.
Yep, all right, Thanks Thanks Florence, talk to you soon. Appreciate your question. Let me go next to CJ in Cambridge. CJ, you were next on NIGHTSYB professor with Professor John Evil. Go right ahead, c.
J, Jean Ray, and thank you to Evil. What I'm concerned about is I live on a hills that's three hundred and forty feet above sea level. That's where my house sits, and I didn't feel that earthquake at all. Are they more likely to be under the water or can they go right through hills and mountains the falls The earthquake releases vibrational waves, and that's what we feel as the earthquake shaking. I was at Western Observatory Monday morning when this earthquake occurred.
I did not feel it. And when there have been other earthquakes felt in the Boston area when I've been at Western Observatory, I don't feel those either. And if you're in Cambridge and you're up high, I can understand why you did not feel the earthquake. So let me give you a little, a little one minute thumbnail about who tends to feel earthquakes. Heart Rock shakes, but it shakes just as with the waves, and it doesn't shake
more strongly. It actually kind of shakes a little bit less strongly than areas around the Areas that shake most strongly are areas where you have thick soft soils. So where do you have thick soft soils. You have them in river bottom areas, So for instance, if you're along the Charles River, you will feel shaking more strongly than if you're up higher in Cambridge. If you're in a floodplain like the Sudbury River floodplain, you will feel the
earthquakes more strongly. Landfill amplifies ground shaking also, so people who are in low lying areas, usually near water bodies where you have thick sediments, they tend to feel amplified ground shaking. So, as I said, I don't feel the earthquakes. So in twenty eleven, there was an earthquake down in Virginia, actually a five point nine that I was at Western Observatory. I didn't feel it, but within a minute or so I was looking at the seismograph and watching the thing
just going back and forth like crazy. We got to call at Western Observatory about a hospital that was in Beverly maybe or someplace like that where they were evacuating the hospital because the building shook so strongly, and that hospital was built on soft soils where the ground shaking was amplified. So where you are and what the ground conditions are can determine whether you feel lots of shaking, little shaking, or perhaps no shaking at all.
Great question, CJ. Hope that answers it for you.
Thank you very good, Thank you, goody.
Talk to you soon, and we have more callers coming in and we're going to get more calls. Professor, you lit the lines up tonight. A lot of interest in this, and I'm delighted. We'll be back on Nightside with my guest, Boston College professor seismiologist, Professor John Ebel, back on Nightside right after this.
Now back to Dan Ray live from the Window World nights Side Studios on WBZ News Radio.
Let's go to Ron and Ron appreciate you waiting your patience.
You're next on Nightside, Hie, I, Dan, thank you very much for having this son. Professor, I haven't experienced. I was fortunate to be a part of a response to the bam Iran earthquake day after Christmas in two thousand and three, it was a six point six, resulting in about a thirty four or thirty five thousand deaths two hundred thousand injured. Supposedly, it was a slowing velocity until it ultimately fractured at the at the epicenter where we
could actually see it as we landed. I'm curious that the two things the city was in historic city, that buildings were comprised mostly of Adobe brick mud. The interesting thing was it was all crumbled except for the mosque. The mosque was curious. And I don't know whether it's the function of the design and materials. Certainly it should
involve physics and architecture, but it almost looked untouched. And I don't know whether it was because of the double dome design, but it caused me to think about you know, I'm sure that they have different construction codes, perhaps in California, given the number of earthquakes they have. Let me drive you to your question, wrong, what will it should we adopt different codes.
In general?
Building codes? Yeah, so let's talk about building codes for a second. And and that bomb earthquake in Iran was was just you know, heartrending. Adobe is just horrible. It will not shake at all. As soon as it starts shaking, it cracks and collapses. It's a heavy structure, so anyone within the structure will suffer. You're right about the mosque the the I don't know what kind of materials they would have used for the mosque, but probably not adobe brick.
I'll bet it was built of more competent stone. But the form of the mosque with a domed ceiling would tend to protect it some from collapse. In the United States, since the nineteen seventies, there have been seismic provisions in
the building codes in various places. In Massachusetts were one of the first to adopt the sizement provision in nineteen seventy five because of the foresight of some engineering professors over the MIT, and since then FEMA has been getting all of the states to put seismic provisions in their building coats. We have a couple lucky things. First of all,
our houses tend to be made of wood. Wood frame can bend an earthquake shaking, so it tends not to collapse unless you have a problem with the foundation or termite damage or something. So that's one advantage. Our roofs are not real heavy Japan. They tend to have very heavy tile roofs and that can be a problem. Where we do take damage is in masonry buildings, So for instance, brick buildings or center block buildings will not do well in earthquakes. For the typical home, the chimney will be
the thing that will that will take the damage. But any modern building that's put up is built to withstand earthquakes. When the Kanti Forum at Boston College was built, I actually had one of the senior officials of Boston College come to me and said, he said, to me, you cost me money. I said, what are you talking about. He says, we had to put extra steel into the
Kanti Forum if for earthquake safety. And all I could say was, well, I'm glad you did, because if I'm in that building, I don't want it to come down if there's earthquakes. So we do have we do have earthquake We do have earthquake provisions in our building codes, and they're actually being improved all the time.
Ron Greg I got a bunch of calls. I got to get to my friend. I owe you a phone call. Thank you, buddy, talk to you thank you, good night. We're going to try to get everyone in here. We'll see what we can do. Jack down of the Cape great response to night to call as professor Jack on Cape cod go right ahead.
Well, I I, having grown up in southern California, I felt that quake. I kind of didn't register until I heard it on the news and so forth, but I kind of had a then kind of perked my mind. I said, was that an earthquake? And didn't think about it, but anyway, I did feel it. But the professor kind of going into a different direction, what do you what is your thoughts on the Pangaea uh super continent and following up on that, what are your thoughts on the expanding Earth theory?
So Pangea definitely existed. It was a little over two hundred million years ago where all the continents came together and we're really all smashed together on one part of the planet. And there were actually earlier times when super continents had formed, at least from what we can map out from deciphering the early tectonics of the Earth. So
that definitely happens. Why the contents come together and then split apart is actually something of a very interesting debate among seismo, among geoscientists in general, the expanding Earth theory. The Earth is not expanding. The Earth is a solid ball. Gravity really holds it in place, so it doesn't get it doesn't get bigger. But what's happening is over time, the heat that's stored within the Earth is coming out,
and that's pushing the tectonic plates. That's giving us our volcanoes, and that's what's making us a very active planet and does things like, for instance, creates hydro thermal events that concentrate minerals that are used for you know, all kinds of processes these days in industrial situations. So the fact that we live on an active planet is probably a great boon to helping life on Earth and human beings evolve into the forms that we have today. Superat question.
Thank you, Thanks, Jack, appreciate it. Unless I get at least one more, and we'll give a shot. George and new Bedford you're next one. Nice, I go ahead, George.
All right. I tuned in late, so I don't know if you covered this already, but six years ago I heard a geology report that predicted within ten years, which is rapidly coming. There would be a mid Atlantic major earthquake which would create tsunamis the boat for Europe and the United States, and certainly things like wind generators would be wiped out. Is that still an accurate prediction.
It's not in the middle of the Atlantic. I think what you're talking about is the volcanic islands down off of Africa, the Azors. Those islands, UH have some unstable side to them that if they were to slump into the ocean very very quickly in a major landslide, that would cause a tsunami that would spread all throughout the Atlantic Ocean.
This was at least stated earthquake, an Atlantic earth quick All right, well ad slide.
Yeah, all right, Well, George, we're flat out of time. I wish I wish you'd called earlier. I apologize to the callers in the line. I also apologize and wish your guys had called earlier. Professor Ebel, this has been a great hour. I'm surprised and gratified that the amount of interest that people have in this issue. And maybe a couple of months from now we'll try to get you to come back and follow up the conversation. Thank
you so much for your time. Tonight, and particularly in the middle of a very long week for.
You, I'd be happy to talk to you again.
Thank you so much, Professor John Evil of Boston College and also the Western Observatory when we get back on to talk about Robert Kennedy Junior's difficult day at the US Senate in Washington,