Mt. Fuji Hoei ashfall
Sometimes in reading history, you see patterns. This-then-that. Some connect, some do not.
But what if they look very familiar?…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1707_Hōei_earthquake
The 1707 Hōei earthquake, which occurred at 14:00 local time on October 28, 1707, was the largest in Japanese history until the 2011 Sendai earthquake surpassed it. It caused moderate to severe damage throughout southwestern Honshu, Shikoku and southeastern Kyūshū. The earthquake and the resulting destructive tsunami, caused more than 5,000 casualties. This event ruptured all of the segments of the Nankai megathrust simultaneously, the only earthquake known to have done this, with an estimated magnitude of 8.6 ML. It may also have triggered the last eruption of Mount Fuji some 49 days later.
Hmmm, I’m thinking… Quakes and Fuji?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Fuji
Mount Fuji (富士山 Fuji-san?, IPA: [ɸɯꜜdʑisaɴ] ) is the highest mountain in Japan at 3,776.24 m (12,389 ft). An active stratovolcano that last erupted in 1707–08,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hōei_eruption_of_Mount_Fuji
The Hōei Eruption of Mount Fuji (Hōei dai funka) started on December 16, 1707 (23rd day of the 11th month of the year Hōei 4) and ended about January 1, 1708 (9th day of the 12th month of the year Hōei 4) during the Edo period. Although it brought no lava flow, the Hoei eruption released some 800 million cubic meters of volcanic ash, which spread over vast areas around the volcano, even reaching Edo almost 100 km away. Cinders and ash fell like rain in Izu, Kai, Sagami, and Musashi provinces.
The eruption occurred on Mount Fuji’s east–north-east flank and formed three new volcanic vents, named No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 Hōei vents. The catastrophe developed over the course of several days—an initial earthquake and explosion of cinders and ash was followed some days later with the more forceful ejections of rocks and stones. Mount Fuji has not erupted since.
[…]
In the year following the Hōei eruption, a secondary disaster occurred when the Sakawa flooded due to sediment build-up resulting from the ash fall.Volcanic sands fell and widely covered the cultivated fields east of Mount Fuji. To recover the fields farmers cast volcanic products out to dumping-grounds and made sand piles. The rain washed sand piles from the dumping grounds away to the rivers again and again and made some of the rivers shallower, especially into the Sakawa, into which huge volumes of ash fell, resulting in temporary dams. Heavy rainfall on August 7 and 8, 1708, the year following the Hōei eruption, caused an avalanche of volcanic ash and mud and broke the dams, flooding the Ashigara plain.
So, is this perhaps what is yet to come? A large quake closer to Fuji, then a pause, and the giant awakens?
Ash fall and more?
Could there be anything ELSE linked in this kind of chain?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_Earthquake
The 1700 Cascadia earthquake was a magnitude 8.7 to 9.2 megathrust earthquake that occurred in the Cascadia subduction zone in 1700. The earthquake involved the Juan de Fuca Plate underlying the Pacific Ocean, from mid-Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, south along the Pacific Northwest coast as far as northern California, USA. The length of the fault rupture was about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) with an average slip of 20 meters (22 yards).
The earthquake caused a tsunami that struck the coast of Japan, and may also be linked to the Bonneville slide.
Well, now THAT is an interesting teleconnection…
TWO places having “megaquakes” on the SAME “ring of fire” subduction margin, within 7 years of each other. Then BOTH quiet until now. One, just having given a 9.0 quake.
Next?
The geological record reveals that “great earthquakes” (those with moment magnitude 8 or higher) occur in the Cascadia subduction zone about every 500 years on average, often accompanied by tsunamis. There is evidence of at least 13 events at intervals from about 300 to 900 years with an average of 590 years. Previous earthquakes are estimated to have occurred in 1310 AD, 810 AD, 400 AD, 170 BC and 600 BC.
They have a chart next to the text with the same numbers in it.
So, back at my “solar cycle” spreadsheet, are there any dates close to a “179 year” Solar Cycle (S.C.) count?
600 BC – 665 BC S.C.
170 BC – 128 BC S.C.
400 AD – 409 AD S.C.
810 AD – 767 AD S.C.
1310 AD – 1304 AD S.C.
2011 AD – 2020 AD imputed peak S.C. and B.E. Zero.
These Solar Cycle dates are created by the expedient of just adding 179 repeatedly. Better dates would come from actual cycle data.
BUT, even with these crude methods, it is “odd” that we’re inside 50 years on a lot of those dates, and within single digits on ‘a few’… (And those that are off are off by a very ‘resonant’ quantity…)
Anomalous…
Just sayin… “The facts just are. -E.M.Smith” …. What are the odds?
Update
I’ve added this image so you can see the present “Triad” of mag 6+ quakes all about 50-120 miles from Tokyo…
Quakes around Tokyo 16Mar2011 140_35
Live Tokyo Centric Quake Map
Musings from the Chiefio 
As ever, fascinating. And only you would spot such connections. Oh those poor people!
High probability that this is coincidence. IMHO, anyway. Isaac Asimov once wrote an essay about Comet Halley and its penchant for marking politically or economically important dates. His point was that we humans have a habit of finding patterns, sometimes where no pattern really exists to be found. Coincidence can be enormously unlikely.
More directly:
* No one has ever suggested or even imagined a way to have a direct causal link between seismic events several thousand miles apart.
* The fault that produced the Hoei earthquake is not related to the fault that produced the Sendai earthquake last week.
* Geologists generally agree (AFAIK) that subduction earthquakes do not cause volcanic eruptions, except perhaps that a volcano which is already close to erupting may do so after a nearby quake changes underground rock stresses and opens channels for magma to flow.
Wolfwalker, all E.M.’s readers want to do here is look at possibilities that might have connections, with E.M taking the “let’s see if it fits” lead. Your arguments: 1) “no one has ever suggested”; 2) “is not related”; 3) “do not cause”; seem posed to stop scientific inquiry. By all means debunk suggestions, hypotheses, theories, but to say “don’t look here”? Your position IMHO seems to be the antithesis of chiefio.com. “Uniformitarianism” was the catechism of geologists for much too long preventing them from ALSO including devastating, earth (life) changing, specific events. By the way, many too many geologists are shilling for AGW? How scientific is that?
Chiefio, your computer clock needs an update, unless it does not like daylight savings. I didn’t know I was up so early.
@ wolfwalker
Reminds me of in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king…
Perhaps reading The Parable of the Two-Eyed Man might help http://www.4ui.com/eart/213eart1.htm
Everything is connected! To say that there is no connection on this particular issue (volcanoes) and that particular issue (earthquakes) is like saying that this strand of a spider web is not directly connected to that strand of the same web. Always found statements like
“* Geologists generally agree (AFAIK) that subduction earthquakes do not cause volcanic eruptions, except perhaps that a volcano which is already close to erupting may do so after a nearby quake changes underground rock stresses and opens channels for magma to flow.”
a little hard to swallow and keep down.
@Wolfwalker:
I can posit a very easy way for them to be connected. The whole North America plate moves as one, so as activity moves it south, both the Japan and Cascadia sides press on the same Pacific Plate. (Yes, on each side there are some dinky, in geologic plate terms, mini-plates that ‘do the deed’, but they are also driven by the N.A. and Pacific Plates) So all you need is to posit that the force builds up to a “breaking point” more or less equally over the whole N.A. plate reach, and that it is then more or less equally “jiggled” by some Length of Day or spin or Appogee/Perigee trigger.
That no one has ever posited it before does not prevent me (or you or anyone else) from doing so…. (It’s a bit scary some times, but it really is OK to be first …)
Those 2 faults are very much related. They are both on the side of Japan and both being crushed by the general southward motion of the N.A. plate toward the other plates. (The picture can be a bit “bigger” than one break in one rock…)
As you may have noticed: What folks do, or do not, agree to has little impact on reality. “Reality just is. -E.M.Smith” and it needs no recognition from us to go right on doing what it does. Prior generations saw no connection between being clean and infection (doctors performed surgery without washing between patients); but that didn’t stop the bacteria from being real… So yes, there is little agreement of the form “Quake causes volcano”. There is a great deal of agreement of the form “Quakes precede volcano”; though it is restricted to 2 classes: very short term “harmonic tremor” and very very long term “subduction then years later volcanos; and implicitly subduction involves quakes”. So is there NO room for any to fall between those two extremes? Nature has this way of being a bit, er, stochastic…
Who is right? I’ve no clue. (Thus my “some connect, some do not.” preface. It could just be simple random chance. 3 events in one decade don’t really give any statistical basis to say anything). We will need to wait, and watch, and see.
At present, your position is the “null hypothesis” and the one we accept as valid. But the null hypotheis must expect challengers to raise their head from time to time and ask that inconvenient question: What if something ELSE is going on here?…
However, I’d not be moving to Seatle in the next decade or two, nor buying a home on the side of Mt. Fuji …. Even if it’s 1 in 1,000,000 that this is a correct observation of causality, the consequences are a bit steep….
@Pyromancer76:
It’s not my clock. Dates / times are set by WordPress. My guess is that they don’t use daylight savings time. I may have some control widget available to me on their control panel, but even then, D.S.T. specifics of when it starts and ends change with political whim (so different geographies are different and different DATES in the same geography are different… used to drive me nuts as a sysadmin when some political yahoo would “change savings time” to make the news and a herd of programmers would need to go re-write the auto-DST code in the operating system clock setting functions…) You still see this today in that older versions of M.S. Windoz have a different DST onset date than the newer ones as someone changed it a few years back in the USA.
Why folks use Universal Time…
I’m pretty sure the widget lets me set the time to UTC… maybe I’ll just do that… readers are spread all over the planet and the UGSG quake maps are in UTC…
April 3rd, my birthday unfortunately, apparently has huge stress indications due to planets,sun, moon and galactic centre according to some.
@ Lord BeaverBrook
April 1st – my birthday – very unfortunate associations – all true – just ask my wife :-)
Bad news nearer Tokyo:
M 6.0, near the east coast of Honshu, Japan
Date: Wednesday, March 16, 2011 03:52:05 UTC
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 12:52:05 PM at epicenter
Depth: 25.00 km (15.53 mi)
Very funny Malaga.
I think gas and oil futures may go up. If nuclear comes under pressure in Japan, Germany France, UK etc, they will have to supplant the nuclear generated electricity with one from gas or oil power stations. Russia, Norway and Arab countries will do well out of it.
It would be extremely idiotic for this to reduce nuclear construction. If anything, it should do just the opposite. It should spur the construction of newer, safer plants and replacement of these older ones.
@George & Vukcevic:
You are both right.
Short Term, gas goes up as lots of fast turbines run.
Long term, nuclear construction ought to go up as a load of folks get nevous about 1970’s plants and replace them, but it takes a few years…
@Adolfo:
Yeah, they’ve gotten a ‘few’ of 6+ around that 50-120 miles from Tokyo area… on the close up panels here:
you can see 6+ Sized ‘bracketting’ Tokyo. I’ve added a static map as of now up top.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this”…
Perspective is important. Any magnitude 6 earthquake is a substantial event. Just look at Christchurch if you doubt that.
Any magnitude 6 quake situated at or close to a major volcano would have to be a cause for concern. But in terms of relation to potential eruptive activity there would still need to be some effect on the movement and storage of magma under the mointain.
Generally one would expect to see some sign of general deformation of the land surface in the vicinity the volcano, relating to recharge of underground reservoirs, prior to a major eruption.
Most big active volcanos near major population centres are monitored. This comprises surface survey, heat flow, hydrothermal activity, gas discharges, micro-seismicity etc. In recent times, in most civilised parts of the world, most major volcanic events can be predicted so long as the earth-scientists have been given that brief.
For Mt Fuji there should be some warning signs. But then who really knows? If I lived there I would be keeping an eye on the Mountain just in case, regardless of what the boffins are saying.
All true, Chiefio. However, I try very hard to stick to what’s known and/or reasonably deducible. Maybe sometimes I try too hard, but the alternative is wandering into crank-science territory, and that’s something I really try to avoid, so…
It’s entirely possible that you’re right. My only point was that given current information, and as I understand the subject (two very important caveats), I don’t see any way for conditions on one side of the Pacific to directly cause, or partially cause, an earthquake on the other side. Earthquakes just don’t work that way. For example, there are ‘stuck’ sections all up and down the San Andreas Fault, and all through the complex of related faults all over coastal California … but none of the major earthquakes in one section has ever triggered a quake in another section ten or twenty or fifty or a hundred miles away. Not as far as I know, at least. Am I wrong in that?
One other element that I think you may have missed: the motion of the North American Plate is not linear, nor is it consistent from place to place. One of the insights that was required to make plate-tectonics theory fully workable is this: for plates on the surface of a sphere, when the whole surface is covered by one plate or another, the only kind of motion permitted is a rotation around a fixed point. The North American Plate is moving away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge — which means it’s moving west and perhaps north all along its eastern side. On its western side, it’s moving southish, plus a bit southeast. That puts the axis of rotation somewhere way up north. So the stresses on the Japan part and the California part are not parallel. Seems to me that would make it a lot harder to have stresses build up equally over the entire plate, or even over the entire western boundary of the plate.
The axis of rotation (Euler pole) is someplace in Quebec.
And the rotation is counterclockwise.
@Wolfwalker:
I’m willing to explore what is clearly known, and what is speculative. Why? Because what is known grows out of what is speculated. So you can’t quash it without impoverishing your future…
But I try to keep them labeled as to known vs speculative vs whacky but interesting even if unlikely.
No, I didn’t “miss it”; I edit for brevity and clarity; yet take more rocks for not editing enough than for editing too much…
Doing a “verbal model” of all the detail of all the motions of the N.A. Plate (and all the sub-plates and all the faults and all the locked blocks of sub-ocean floor material and…) would take a few thousand pages. I’m not up for that…
But that doesn’t change the fact that you COULD have things in balance “close enough” to get periodicity +/- 60 years which is about what we see.
And yes, I would expect to see lots of ‘warnings’ before an actual erruption. Harmonic tremor for a week, at least.
So my point isn’t “it’s going to happen” so much as it is “There just might be something interesting happen soon, or not, so time to watch for that ‘connection’ over the next 60 years and see if anything interesting happens this time.”
Malaga View
@ Lord BeaverBrook
April 1st – my birthday – very unfortunate associations – all true – just ask my wife :-)
OMG. What is the probability of two FOOLS on one website? It’s karma. Speculate on that.
04/01/1956 Easter Sunday April Fools BUNNY.
@Wolfwalker:
On the “rotation” point: Don’t forget that as soon as you have deformation and subduction possible, you are not OBLIGATED to rotation. India moved up and into Asia, it didn’t just sit there and spin. Similarly Africa is pulling linearly away from the Americas (perhaps a bit faster at the bottom) but not just “rotating”. Why? Because you are not constrained by geometry once you can “bend, fold, spindle and mutilate” and I’d add “expand, stretch, rift, and override”… So “Rotation, it’s only a suggestion”…
Per quakes causing quakes. Happens a lot… In many ways, the whole field of ‘aftershocks’ are quakes causing quakes. But there are other, and sometimes longer, patterns too. In addition to the Hayward / Calaveras frequently being ‘a few decades’ after the San Andreas (and part of why I’m watching it so closely) we have some other examples. The first one is the most interesting as it shows connection between Cascadia and ANOTHER place on the N.A. Plate…
Quake Cascade:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andreas_Fault#Cascadia_connection
http://www.physorg.com/news173621096.html
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-10/04/content_8763286.htm
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E.M.Smith:
There is an interesting article, from M.Vukcevic at:
40-Foot Section Of Hwy. 1 Falls Into Ocean
http://www.ksbw.com/r/27221999/detail.html
@Adolfo:
Yeah, it happens. ;-)
Drove over that part of 101 about 3? months ago on our last Missions Trip. It was dodgy then with 2 or 3 places with ‘road patch’ crews and one lane each way.
At any one time, I’d guess there is at least one section of Hwy 1 between Monterey and Hearst Castle that’s falling into the ocean…
Any proposal to knock a larger chunk out of the mountains and make a better road is met with resitance from: Greens, locals who want it ‘touristy’, locals who want fewer tourists via poor access, tourists who want it “picturesque, …
On a good day you can average about 30 mph over the length of it… some sections are 50, others are dead halt at the ‘alternating one way one lane’ latest washout or repair.
Just wait till the quake hits…
Oh, wait, it did:
from: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Maps/US2/35.37.-122.-120.php
Magnitude 3.0 – CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
2011 March 17 05:55:34 UTC
This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.Magnitude 3.0
Date-Time Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 05:55:34 UTC
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 10:55:34 PM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 35.687°N, 121.117°W
Depth 4.7 km (2.9 miles)
Region CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
Distances 8 km (5 miles) NE (54°) from San Simeon, CA
15 km (9 miles) N (350°) from Cambria, CA
22 km (14 miles) WSW (255°) from Lake Nacimiento, CA
40 km (25 miles) W (280°) from Paso Robles, CA
196 km (122 miles) SSE (159°) from San Jose City Hall, CA
Location Uncertainty horizontal +/- 0.1 km (0.1 miles); depth +/- 0.3 km (0.2 miles)
Parameters Nph= 72, Dmin=3 km, Rmss=0.08 sec, Gp= 94°,
M-type=duration magnitude (Md), Version=3
Source California Integrated Seismic Net:
USGS Caltech CGS UCB UCSD UNR
Event ID nc71544101
Magnitude 3.0 – CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
2011 March 17 17:30:47 UTC
This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.Magnitude 3.0
Date-Time Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 17:30:47 UTC
Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:30:47 AM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 36.621°N, 121.229°W
Depth 5.8 km (3.6 miles)
Region CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
Distances 13 km (8 miles) NW (323°) from Pinnacles, CA
20 km (13 miles) SSE (157°) from Tres Pinos, CA
23 km (14 miles) ENE (57°) from Gonzales, CA
29 km (18 miles) SSE (149°) from Hollister, CA
99 km (62 miles) SE (143°) from San Jose City Hall, CA
Location Uncertainty horizontal +/- 0.1 km (0.1 miles); depth +/- 0.3 km (0.2 miles)
Parameters Nph= 79, Dmin=6 km, Rmss=0.07 sec, Gp= 29°,
M-type=local magnitude (ML), Version=4
Source California Integrated Seismic Net:
USGS Caltech CGS UCB UCSD UNR
Event ID nc71544421
and from a pan up north / east just off shore:
Magnitude 3.5 – OFFSHORE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
2011 March 17 02:13:55 UTC
This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.Magnitude 3.5
Date-Time Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 02:13:55 UTC
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 07:13:55 PM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 40.648°N, 124.760°W
Depth 6.6 km (4.1 miles)
Region OFFSHORE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
Distances 43 km (26 miles) W (281°) from Ferndale, CA
48 km (30 miles) W (259°) from Humboldt Hill, CA
51 km (31 miles) WSW (255°) from Bayview, CA
53 km (33 miles) WSW (253°) from Eureka, CA
366 km (227 miles) NW (311°) from Sacramento, CA
Location Uncertainty horizontal +/- 1.1 km (0.7 miles); depth +/- 0.9 km (0.6 miles)
Parameters Nph= 59, Dmin=54 km, Rmss=0.17 sec, Gp=245°,
M-type=local magnitude (ML), Version=3
Source California Integrated Seismic Net:
USGS Caltech CGS UCB UCSD UNR
Event ID nc71544046
On the 13 quakes found on the CSZ, that has now been updated to 18 or 19, and more may be found. The probability is much higher than once thought for a very large EQ on the CSZ. And if there is a connection to the big one in Japan and the CSZ letting loose, then watch out.
@Catherine Clark:
Yup.
You might want to let folks you know (and care about ;-) who live in the area know that they have a bigger issue than they thought… (It might be that simply moving 10 miles inland for that new home they are buying, or planing a ‘vertical evacuation’ if they work in a high rise nearer the shore; is all it will take. Full blown abandonment of the area is not something folks will reasonably accept…)
But IMHO the probability of A Big One in Cascadia is gone much higher…
Here: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/quakes-sf-to-cascadia/#comment-14745
posted this link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rep2/berkland-earthquake-prediction.html
You ought to watch it…
Eruptions has an informed posting about Mt Fuji…
http://bigthink.com/ideas/31631
Another 6.x inside the “triangle” of the other three. Looks like it is under the island proper “on land” to me:
Magnitude 6.1 – NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
2011 March 19 09:56:51 UTC
This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.Magnitude 6.1
Date-Time Saturday, March 19, 2011 at 09:56:51 UTC
Saturday, March 19, 2011 at 06:56:51 PM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 36.810°N, 140.375°E
Depth 24.9 km (15.5 miles)
Region NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
Distances 52 km (32 miles) NE of Utsunomiya, Honshu, Japan
53 km (32 miles) WSW of Iwaki, Honshu, Japan
56 km (34 miles) NNW of Mito, Honshu, Japan
140 km (86 miles) NNE of TOKYO, Japan
Location Uncertainty horizontal +/- 13 km (8.1 miles); depth +/- 0.2 km (0.1 miles)
Parameters NST=487, Nph=493, Dmin=197 km, Rmss=0.64 sec, Gp= 32°,
M-type=centroid moment magnitude (Mw), Version=9
Source USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)
Event ID usc00026q2
Japan Quake Map
http://www.japanquakemap.com/newscientist
Built by the developer of the Christchurch Quake Map…
@Malaga View:
Fascinating map…. makes that 9.0 really “snap”. I suggest setting the “sticky dots” option on early…
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