I thought this would be about actual science.
I went to a lecture last night, given by an actual scientist. It was entitled "What will an Alpine Fault Earthquake Feel like"
The short answer is "rather scary".
The lecturer is a Professor at Canterbury, and spent a fair bit of time talking about the modelling of earthquake data. The idea of that was to see if their theoretical models match the data recorded from the Canterbury quakes. They pretty much do. Note this is not predicting an EQ, it is "given the size and location of the rupture, and our knowledge of the geology, and geomorphology of the area, can we model the effects?".
Turns out that they can. So the prediction was a 400km long rupture on the alpine fault, moving south north, and with around 11m of lateral movement. It produces a 7.9M EQ which propagates over the entire south island and rings that motherfucker like a bell. For (get this) three or so minutes. The "felt" peak ground accelerations will be less than from February (because that motherfucker was right under the city) but it goes on for a looooooong time.
And it is not IF, it is when. The last major alpine fault EQ was in 1717. The average is 310 years and the range is from 200 to 500 years over an 8000 year observed range.
Science, bitches. Its amazing.
Oh yeah: you NOrth Islanders: dont get smug. There is a huge subduction zone to the east of the North Island in the sea. It is entirely capable of generating a M9 EQ. (like Tohatsu in Japan in 2011). Guess what? motherfucking tsunami.
We're all fucked.
That's what you mean by geo-engineering, right?
Also: UC puts these things up on their website: absolutely worth looking at. We've been to a few of them on a whole range of topics. Very worthwhile.
Here's the youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...0DE06F56864BA4
Do check out the Mars Rover one. It was given by Jennifer Blank, an actual NASA scientist.
Bookmarks