The Moving Earth, from Micro to Mega
I couldn’t resist putting the mind-blowing tidbit from this interview right up front in the story: Earthquake scientist Nadia Lapusta’s computer models span something like 12 orders of magnitude in space—from the friction between microscopic rocks to seismic waves that cross continents—and fourteen orders of magnitude in time—fractions of a second to thousands of years.
That is a whole lot for a person to wrap their head around! I can barely wrap my head around how Professor Lapusta wraps her head around it, and then makes discoveries that could change how people look at the “quiet” segments of faults.
(Meanwhile, as an Angeleno, I’m just going to keep whistling past the graveyard where it comes to the possibility of a megaquake that spreads from San Francisco to L.A. or vice versa …)
—Wayne
