Geology study questions for Ch 16 – part 1
What is an earthquake? What exactly happens in one?
What causes earthquakes?
What are seismic waves and how are they created?
How do earthquakes cause harm to people and property?
Explain the elastic recoil theory.
How deep in the earth can an earthquake be generated by movement along a
rock fault? Why not deeper?
Where are the deepest earthquakes?
What causes are proposed for deep earthquakes?
Describe body and surface waves, S waves and P waves, Love waves and
Rayleigh waves. Which is fastest? Which tends to be most destructive?
How is an earthquake’s focus or hypocenter different from its epicenter?
What is a seismograph and how does it work?
How can seismograms from various locations be used to determine where an
earthquake occurred? (This is not a short-answer question.)
Why is the Richter scale more useful for characterizing earthquakes than the
Mercalli scale (several reasons)? Why is seismic moment more useful than
Richter scale value?
What does it mean for a scale to be logarithmic?
In your own words, interpret what Figure 16.12 is saying.
Figure 16.14 shows a map of earthquake risk based on data about past quakes.
Use what you learned about similar risk maps or predictions of floods to explain
why some of these predictions may be misleading.
Why are earthquakes rare in the middle and eastern US? Why do the ones that
do occur there tend to be strong? (these are related)