Assalamu’alaikum Wr. Wb.

Good morning viewers, you are still with me, Umi Bilqis from E-Action TV, Friday 29 th
April 2019. For five minutes more, I will accompany you, to listen to some bright news,
some actual news, and some latest news in this sunny morning.

The first is about earthquake that happened in Palu.

The devastating earthquake that struck Palu on the island of Sulawesi last September
ripped through the Earth’s crust at a rare high speed, scientists have found.

The 7.5-magnitude earthquake was likely intensified by the so-called super shear effect
that triggered the tsunami, killing more than 2,000 people. This finding has raised fear
that far more regions could be at risk of high-speed quakes like the one hitting Palu.

As reported by Science Magazine, the Palu earthquake took place on a strike-slip fault,
where two blocks of continental crust slide past each other laterally. From the start, it
stood out as unusual, Lingsen Meng, a seismologist at the University of California, Los
Angeles told Science Magazine.

The earthquake’s shaking seemed especially powerful for its magnitude, which triggered
widespread soil liquefaction and landslides. Satellite imagery showed that the rupture
extended as far as 150 kilometers, despite the earthquake’s mere duration of 35 seconds.
It traveled more than 1 km per second faster than a typical earthquake.

A standard rupture will unzip a fault at a uniform rate of about 3 km per second, below
the speed of an earthquake’s damaging side-to-side waves, called shear waves, which
spread out from the rupture tip.

For the Palu quake in Sulawesi, geology seemed to impose the speed limit. The rupture
point chews up energy as it pulverizes rock, and seismologists believe a super shear
rupture consumes too much energy to be sustained. Fewer than 15 of these superfast-
moving extra-powerful earthquakes have ever been identified.
In earthquakes that have broken the super shear barrier, the ground generally shakes
much more strongly. As the rupture gathers speed, the earthquake’s shear waves begin to
overlap, increasing strength like overlapping waves in the ocean. A supershear
earthquake was first documented with two 1999 earthquakes in Turkey.

Earthquakes of this degree were all found to take place on long, linear and smooth strip-
like faults, where sliding allows the rupture to gather speed and leap past the forbidden
zone.

But Meng and his co-authors reveal in Science Magazine that Palu’s earthquake broke
that rule.

The authors analyzed factors including the speed of the rupture and satellite radar
observations from before and after the quake to learn how the rupture displaced the
ground. Rather than being a straight runway, the fault had big kinks, but the rupture still
went super shear.

Scientists found other puzzles in the study of the Palu quake. Although it travelled at high
speeds, it was not quite as fast as previous super shear earthquakes, which typically run
as fast as their leading pressure waves, at 6 km per second. One factor may be the age of
the Palu fault – a region hit by many earthquakes in the past, therefore leaving shattered
rocks that slow down the rupture. Furthermore, rather than gradually building up speed
like previous supershear quakes, this one hit top speed immediately, like a jet going
supersonic at take-off.

“Even in these complicated and rough faults, it can go supershear, and it can go
supershear right away,” Meng said.

In the researchers’ second study, they analyzed only one segment of the rupture,
supporting the finding that the Palu earthquake went supershear. They found that the
ground slipped almost seamlessly north and south, with little vertical motion, and the
quake had no aftershocks – consistent with traits of previous supershear earthquakes.
Further diagnostics into the tsunami’s cause suggest that only a super shear event can
explain the observations.

Martin Vallée, a seismologist at the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris, says the evidence
is both convincing and disturbing. Evidence that even tortuous faults can break the speed
limit means that “it is difficult to exclude super shear behavior on most faults,” he said.

Quakes of such degree are uncommon; however, hazard assessments for strike-slip faults
worldwide need to reckon with the chance of intense super shear shaking, said Meng.

Those, all news I could present to you, today. If you have some critics and suggestions,
please visit us in www.E-Actionnews.com. At the end, we say, “Thank you very much
for your nice attention, see you next day, in the same time, in the same program in our
lovely channel “E-Action TV”.  

Wassalamu’alaikum. Wr. Wb.