10.5

[FireHeart]

Anyone see the advertisement for this TV movie to be released in May? Looks pretty interesting. Supposed to be about a 10.5 magnitude quake hitting the west coast--and separating it from the rest of the US. Special effects look great, for a TV film.

[Ediacara]

1. brain exploding!!!

10.5 earthquake? Did a meteor hit? 10.5 earthquakes don't (and have never) occurred from tectonics...

And the west coast seperating? Unless it's western California moving northward off the Washington and Oregon coast, the west coast isn't going to seperate from anything.... And that's not scheduled to happen for 50 million years. If it happened in one earthquake it would be like, oh.... moving at 30 thousand miles per hour!!!

[FireHeart]

2. Hehehe

Well, that's the script. :) You know how *that* goes. Still, the special effects look great. I love disaster movies as long as I know they are far too ridiculous to ever take place.

Check out the bottom of the page:

http://www.nbc.com/nbc/Movies_&_Specials/




edited for URL.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. How Big Is Your Quake?

There's a little bit of earthquake science at http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/louie/class/100/magnitude.html -- I was unable to get the table to format correctly, but a R10.5 quake would be the equivalent of a 30 gigaton bomb (in terms of energy release).

I recall hearing that the earth moved up and down some 30 feet during an 8.5 quake in South America some time ago. If each point in the Richter scale is an increase of 32x, then a 10.5 earthquake would displace the surface of the earth some 30,000 feet -- almost 6 miles! (Of course, I may be wrong about the math. I prefer fuzzy math -- with big teeth!)

I like the timing of the movie, too -- right before The Day After Tomorrow hits the theaters. It should be "cool" watching a movie about an ice age during a Summer heat wave!

--bkl

[FireHeart]

4. There was a mini-series out in 1993

called "The Fire Next Time" starring Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia. It was supposedly about global warming and all it would bring about, including an ENORMOUS "Cat-6" Hurricane from what I remember of the film. Now, I don't know about you, but frankly, I wouldn't think there'd be any chance of any survivors in such a holocaust. But there were, and the plot really went to hell after the storm...But it was interesting, just the same.

[Dogmudgeon]

5. I remember "The Fire Next Time"

I wanted to see it, but I was a sleep technologist, and my work hours cut into Prime Time.

A Category 6 hurricane is possible in theory, if it had sustained winds over 200 MPH. Actually, most people in hurricanes die from drowning in a storm surge, not from the winds.

A storm surge from a "Cat 6" would probably be around 40-50 feet.

I'm still looking for the tapes or DVDs of Wild Palms and Amerika ... I should put The Fire Next Time on the list, too.

--bkl

[FireHeart]

6. Yes, true...

Most people do die from storm surge. But this one was supposed to take place on the Louisiana coastline. From what I can recall, (and it was a long time ago) they said max sustained winds were supposed to be at over 280 mph with much higher gusts. Yikes!

Can you imagine a storm surge of 60+ feet striking New Orleans??


Another film you might like seeing, if you can find a copy, is "Shadow On The Land". While not exactly a disaster movie, it fits so closely with what is happening today, it would shock you. It was made, I think, back in 1968 or so. TV mini-series if you can believe that. It was outstanding. Scared the hell out of me, too.