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An earthquake is caused by a sudden slip on a fault. Tectonic plates are always slowly moving, but they can get stuck at their edges due to friction.When the stress on the edge of a tectonic plate overcomes the friction, there is an earthquake that releases energy in waves that travel through the Earth's crust and cause the shaking that is felt.
A seismic wave is a mechanical wave of acoustic energy that travels through the Earth or another planetary body. It can result from an earthquake (or generally, a quake ), volcanic eruption , magma movement, a large landslide and a large man-made explosion that produces low-frequency acoustic energy.
Variations in wave speed, influenced by differences in material density and state (solid, liquid, or gas), alter wave paths through refraction and reflection, as described by Snell's Law. [ 18 ] [ 19 ] P-waves, which can move through all states of matter and provide data on a range of depths, change speed based on the material's properties ...
When the accumulated strain is great enough to overcome the strength of the rocks, the result is a sudden break, or a springing back to the original shape as much as possible, a jolt which is felt on the surface as an earthquake. This sudden movement results in the shift of the roadway's surface, as shown in Time 3.
The earthquake cycle refers to the phenomenon that earthquakes repeatedly occur on the same fault as the result of continual stress accumulation and periodic stress release. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Earthquake cycles can occur on a variety of faults including subduction zones and continental faults.
However animals may sense the initial earthquake waves that arrive before stronger shaking. People can feels these too but we are not as close to the ground or are often distracted by daily life.
A P wave (primary wave or pressure wave) is one of the two main types of elastic body waves, called seismic waves in seismology. P waves travel faster than other seismic waves and hence are the first signal from an earthquake to arrive at any affected location or at a seismograph. P waves may be transmitted through gases, liquids, or solids.
Seismology (/ s aɪ z ˈ m ɒ l ə dʒ i, s aɪ s-/; from Ancient Greek σεισμός (seismós) meaning "earthquake" and -λογία (-logía) meaning "study of") is the scientific study of earthquakes (or generally, quakes) and the generation and propagation of elastic waves through planetary bodies.