This statement belongs to honorary
\ndirector of the Earth Physics Institute, Gheorghe Marmureanu, who recalled that
\nVrancea, the most seismically active area of Romania, produces annually 8 to 12
\nearthquakes of around 4 points on the Richter scale. According to Gheorghe Marmureanu, Vrancea is unique in the world. <\/p>\n
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Gheorghe Marmureanu: I looked
\nat Vrancea, which is a special system, totally different from anything in the
\nworld, even if you could say that the Hindukush in the Himalayas is similar. It
\nmay have strong earthquakes at great depth, but they don’t have the same
\nmanifestation. There is something similar in the north east of Colombia. I
\nlooked at everything that occurred in the last 600 years in Romania. For the
\nlast 300 years of activity I saw what earthquakes caused loss of life and
\nmaterial goods – in the 312 years I have analyzed there were 5 great
\nearthquakes that caused loss of life and damage.<\/p>\n
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A tremor closer to the surface, meaning
\nless than 100 km, has effects towards Bucharest, Bulgaria and Serbia, they are
\ntremors directing destructive energy in those directions. Deeper tremors get
\ndirected mostly towards Moldova and Ukraine. There is an alternation of surface
\nand deep tremors, and by this logic, Marmureanu said that a quake oriented towards
\nthe northwest would occur sometime in 2040, because the one in March 1977 was a
\nsurface tremor. There is the possibility that it will not occur even then,
\nbecause in 1986 in Vrancea there was a 6.9 magnitude earthquake that did not do
\nany damage, but released a lot of energy. The Earth is a living system, in
\ncontinuous transformation, says Gheorghe Marmureanu. <\/p>\n
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Gheorghe Marmureanu: We have the great African rift, developing
\nday by day. The waters in the Red Sea have already run into the rift. Africa
\nwill one day break up, as it shifts upwards. The south and east of Africa will
\ndislocate and form another continent with Madagascar. We don’t see it, but
\nAmerica moves further away from Europe every year by 45 to 55 mm. Everything is
\nalive. Below us, between 110 to 200 km and 3000 km, there is magma. Magma is
\nnot still, it moves. The upper magma cools, the lower magma is hot, there are
\nconvection currents in some places from left to right, in other places from
\nright to left. Above the magma are tectonic plates. There are 16 tectonic
\nplates, and at the places they meet, across their thickness, which is 80 to 100
\nkm, there are non-linear phenomena that cannot be controlled.<\/p>\n
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Earthquakes have different causes, 98% of them are tectonic and
\nsuperficial. The tectonic plates, which have various thickness and sizes,
\ninteract. The greatest tectonic plate is the Pacific one, the Eurasian one,
\nwhich runs from the mid-Atlantic to the Barents Sea, next to others such as the
\nPhilippine one, the Pacific plate, the North American plate, and all these
\nfloat on magma, a melting substance where earthquakes cannot occur, because for
\nearthquakes a crystalline structure is needed, as explained by Gheorghe
\nMarmureanu. Earthquakes need a crystalline structure, a structure that can
\nstore potential energy that it releases later. In Romania, tremors do not occur
\nbecause one plate slides against another, it is a system of continental
\ncollision. So how predictable earthquakes really are? <\/p>\n
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Gheorghe Marmureanu: Earthquakes are earthquakes. If they would
\nbe predictable they would be controllable, which we cannot do in fact. They
\noccur anywhere and anytime on this earth.<\/p>\n
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However, Romania has set up a system of real time tremor warning.
\nProfessor Marmureanu said about this system: <\/p>\n
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Gheorghe Marmureanu: Our system has been granted an award by the
\nEuropean Community, it is a system that allows for the magnitude of the tremor
\nto be established in four seconds. If the system reveals a 7-egree tremor, then
\nall users go on alert, all the areas with a major risk in case of earthquake.
\nIt is the only system in the world, aside from the Japanese one.<\/p>\n
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In the event of an earthquake, at risk installations get blocked
\nautomatically, and 30 seconds before the earthquake occurs, state institutions
\nand the Committee for States of Emergency get alerted.<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u2018We should not expect a devastating earthquake in Romania before 2040, with most of them until then reaching no more than 5.7 points on the Richter scale, which presents no major risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":108,"featured_media":155288,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43939],"tags":[37384,35795,30947],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-155287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-future-starts-today","tag-earthquakes","tag-risk","tag-vrancea"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n