So the debate simmers to the boil again … how big is it .. how long does it last … when will the next one happen.. how big will it be ?':
Quake could alter Tokyo risk: experts
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Experts said it was too soon to know if the tectonic upheaval that shook northeast Japan Friday and unleashed a 10-metre (33-foot) tsunami put Tokyo at greater risk.
It could even reduce the odds of a killer quake hitting the capital.
"That is going to be hotly debated in the scientific community," said Jochen Woessner, a seismologist with the Swiss Seismological Service in Zurich.
The Japanese capital is only 300 kilometres (200 miles) from an underwater "triple junction" where three of the two dozen tectonic plates that comprise Earth's constantly shifting crust meet.
Tokyo sits atop the Eurasian plate. Beneath it, the Philippine Sea plate descends, or subducts, from the south, while the Pacific plate slips down from the east.
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So out come all of the prediction models …
The last time I looked into this, the Chaos Modelling conclusion was that:
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The physics of earthquake behaviour is mostly independent of scale. A large earthquake is just a scaled up version of a small earthquake.
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It is hard to break the habit of thinking of things in terms of how big they are and how long they last. But the claim of fractal geometry is that, for some elements of nature, looking for characteristic scale becomes a distraction.
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The definition of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake, is imposed by people on nature .. not the other way around.
Comments welcome.
Cheers