Earthquakes

By Tyler Locke and Brandon Ward

What is an earthquake?
An earthquake is a fault in the earth caused by two
blocks in the earth slipping by each other.
Earthquakes are also known as one of the most
dangerous world disasters alongside tsunamis and
tornados.
Earthquakes never come alone though, as they pass
through following shortly behind sometimes foreshocks
will happen
Foreshocks also known as smaller or mini earthquakes
have the same affect as an earthquake only not as
powerful.

What causes
earthquakes?
The earth has 4 major layers known as the Inner core, Outer
Core, Mantle and Crust.
They arent all together and are more like separate pieces
constantly moving around sliding and bumping into each other.
All of these moving pieces has a name in which they are the
tectonic plates and plate boundaries.
The plates have rough edges causing them to become stuck
while every other piece is still moving.
Once a plate has gone far enough the edge will become
unstuck causing an earthquake.

How are earthquakes

measured?
Earthquakes are never the same, with some ranging
from a small shake to others devastating entire towns
and city's within its wake.
Scientist measure earthquakes using seismograms
recordings.
The recording shows up as wiggly lines, the larger the
line the more powerful the earthquake was.
The length of wiggly depends on the size of the fault,
and the size of the wiggly depends on the amount of
slip.
Alongside the wigglys and such an earthquakes sized is

How to tell when an earthquake

happened
Alongside being able to measure how powerful an earthquake is
seismograms can also be used to tell scientist when theyve
happened.
Seismograms are able to do this because of the ability to see
the P and S waves each shake the ground has.
P waves travel faster then S allowing us to accurately tell when
the earthquake happened.
To make sure the location is correct scientist also use a method
called triangulation to determine its exact and true location.
Its called triangulation because a triangle has 3 sides and to
accurately locate an earthquake you need 3 seismographs.

Where do earthquakes happen?

On earth there are many Fault Zones that have been
active for a long time.
These Fault Zones are where 80% of the worlds
earthquakes mainly occur.
As earthquakes only happen along active faults, it is
possible for an inactive fault zone to spontaneously
become active causing an earthquake in an
unpredictable area because of the fault zones all around
the earth.

How much do earthquakes effect

an area?
Cost
$100,000,000,000
$90,000,000,000
$80,000,000,000
$70,000,000,000
$60,000,000,000
$50,000,000,000
$40,000,000,000
$30,000,000,000
$20,000,000,000
$10,000,000,000
$0

Cost