Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

China's Chengdu enforces strict lockdown despite earthquake

Authorities in southwestern China's Chengdu have maintained strict COVID-19 lockdown measures on the city of 21 million despite a major earthquake that killed at least 65 people in outlying areas.

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

GCS centres support research to mitigate impact of COVID-19 pandemic

In December 2019, the world learned of a new and deadly pathogen. News coming out of Wuhan, China confirmed public health experts' worst fears—a novel coronavirus appeared to have jumped from animals to humans. It was extremely ...

Oncology & Cancer

Disasters can affect cervical cancer screening for years

Cervical cancer screening rates in Japan were significantly affected in the years following the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, Tohoku University scientists report in the journal PLOS ONE.

page 1 from 5

Earthquake

An earthquake (also known as a tremor or temblor) is the result of a sudden release of energy in the Earth's crust that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes are recorded with a seismometer, also known as a seismograph. The moment magnitude of an earthquake is conventionally reported, or the related and mostly obsolete Richter magnitude, with magnitude 3 or lower earthquakes being mostly imperceptible and magnitude 7 causing serious damage over large areas. Intensity of shaking is measured on the modified Mercalli scale.

At the Earth's surface, earthquakes manifest themselves by shaking and sometimes displacing the ground. When a large earthquake epicenter is located offshore, the seabed sometimes suffers sufficient displacement to cause a tsunami. The shaking in earthquakes can also trigger landslides and occasionally volcanic activity.

In its most generic sense, the word earthquake is used to describe any seismic event — whether a natural phenomenon or an event caused by humans — that generates seismic waves. Earthquakes are caused mostly by rupture of geological faults, but also by volcanic activity, landslides, mine blasts, and nuclear experiments. An earthquake's point of initial rupture is called its focus or hypocenter. The term epicenter refers to the point at ground level directly above the hypocenter.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA