Waikato University to Host Free Public Quake Lecture
university-of-waikato
Mon Mar 14 2011 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Waikato University to Host Free Public Quake Lecture
Monday, 14 March 2011, 5:14 pm
Press Release: University of Waikato
Waikato University to Host Free Public Quake Lecture
New Zealand can and will learn a great deal from the Japanese earthquake.
That’s the comment from Geophysicist Professor Kevin Furlong, on sabbatical at Waikato University from Penn State University in the USA.
Professor Furlong is an international expert on earthquakes and became the geophysicist face of the television coverage of the Christchurch quake. He is giving a free public lecture about the Japanese quake at Waikato University on Wednesday, March 16 at 1pm in the PWC lecture theatre in Hillcrest Rd.
“Since the earthquake in Kobe, Japan has invested a huge amount of money in infrastructure such as GPS stations and seismic instruments so the data that has been gathered before, during and after this quake is unprecedented,” Professor Furlong says.
“The information obviously doesn’t benefit Japan at this time but it is very important and very exciting. It will give us the ability to understand what is going on in New Zealand and other places such as Peru and Chile which have similar geological settings to Japan.
“This is a huge wake-up call around plate tectonics because the area in Japan with huge devastation had not been identified as the highest risk. And yet it experienced a very large earthquake.
“No longer can we say such and such an area will never get an earthquake that big. We need to rethink our forecasting and we as scientists need to accept that we can be wrong. We need to be more open to new thinking and not be so ‘trusting’ around the rules. We cannot assume anything.”
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Professor Furlong was contacted just 10 minutes after the quake hit by his colleagues at the US Geological Survey’s national earthquake information centre, an organisation responsible for determining the magnitude of quakes and the global consequences.
“As soon as something like this happens people start talking and then those people talk to others around the world. The information is compiled and the story about what happened is put together.”
The Japanese earthquake has caused the subsurface near the fault to move about 15 to 20 metres. In Christchurch the maximum the land moved was about four metres.
“The scale here is much, much bigger,” says Professor Furlong. “The size and force of last Friday’s earthquake in Japan would have shaken the whole of the North Island of New Zealand and then of course there was even move devastation caused by the tsunami.”
Professor Furlong wanted to hold a public lecture about the earthquake as soon as possible after the event.
“New Zealanders want as much information about this earthquake as they can get and they need that information in a context that is understandable. People are not satisfied with statistics, they want to understand and I am really happy to help with that,” he says.
“Also, it’s very important we understand what is going on in New Zealand and the Japanese quake will help us do that. I’m not saying New Zealand will experience an earthquake as big as this one but I do want to talk about the situation in New Zealand as relative to Japan.”
More than 500 people attended Professor Furlong’s last lecture about the Christchurch quake and large numbers are expected on Wednesday.
ENDS
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