Seismicity & Prevention

As far as seismic activity goes Australia is a sleeping baby. There is next to no seismic activity stirring on the continent. Though seismographs are sparse throughout the country they have a fully running network of them mainly situated along the east coast and the eastern inland areas. They pick up on earthquakes ranging around a 2.0 or higher. Buildings in Australia are not built to handle
earthquakes of a high magnitude. Anything above a 3.5 has capabilities of damaging infrastructure and causing harm. Though large earthquakes don't occur often in Australia they do occur every so often. A 6.1 quake came from the earth with Petermann Ranges being the epicenter. This quaked happened in 2016 and before this the largest quaked happened in 1997 with a 6.2 earthquake in Collier Bay. So what is the nation doing to prepare for these rare yet devastating earthquakes? Well the government organization Geoscience Australia is always at work . They provide independent advice to the Australian government to help preserve the community research and develop understandings of how the community is exposed to hazards and how at risk the population is. They have an experienced team that operates a fully running seismograph network with an alert system. Also they have developed earthquake vulnerability models to asses damage. This is just a small percentage of what the organization does. Despite the lack of seismic activity in Australia the nation seems to be very well prepared to take on any earthquake that could possibly happen in the future.

SOURCES: Link 1 , Link 2

Comments

  1. Sol AguilarFebruary 11, 2018 at 8:41 PM

    Hi Matt,
    You did a great job on your blog post. It is explains what was asked for, easy to follow and, straight to the point. My country (Peru) seems to be the opposite of yours. Peru experiences frequent earthquakes of higher magnitudes. That is because it sits on a convergent boundary.

    ReplyDelete

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