[Closed] Could a large earthquake ever hit britain

I've just read this :

Our great country will become a true seafaring nation, as it sails majestically around the oceans of the world, and a new era of British sea faring dominance will have begun.

Truly brilliant 😀

You've set the bar pretty high luked2, I wouldn't be in too much of a rush to match that again
.......although I'd be delighted if you did 8)

I don't think so.

Lots of little earthquakes due to the country slowly springing back into shape after having been squashed by lots of ice during the ice age (no, not last Winter).

Called isostatic response

earthquakes are nowt to do with oil, or lack of it. Or coal, gas or any other natural resource.

Apologies if I oversimplify it, but I'm not a geologist...

the earth's crust is made up of lots of plates which move around over the hot bit, the mantle. What makes them move is the convection currents in the mantle. Some plates are moving apart, others are moving together, and some are sliding along parallel to each other.

Where the plates are moving apart, new crust comes up from the mantle in the form of lava. Best example is the mid-Atlantic ridge, where the North American plate and Eurasian plate are separating. The results here are mostly underwater, with the exception of Iceland and its many volcanoes.

The Hawaian islands are right in the middle of the Pacific plate, so you wouldn't expect any of this to affect them - except that there's a "hot spot" under the crust where magma bubbles up to the surface quite slowly (in comparison) to create "Shield volcanoes" like Kilaueia and Mauna Kea (sp!). This is how this particular island chain is being created

where the plates are moving together, one dives under the other - this is a subduction zone - occasionally "sticking". When they unstick, they do so very quickly, creating an earthquake. Further away from the subduction zone, the crust buckles up to form mountains. Sometimes in those mountains, the crust cracks right down to the mantle, allowing magma to seep to the surface to form a volcano like Mount St Helens, Vesuvius or Mt Etna.

Where the plates move parallel to each other, again they often stick, and when they unstick, you get an earthquake. I may be wrong but I think the San Andreas fault in California as an example of this

There are earthquakes & volcanoes happening all the time; it's just that these days with 24 hour multi-channel TV, we get to see more reports. No more or fewer than normal, they're just being reported more/better

Kaesae

1) No. Geologists look at timescales of millions of years, so a few in a couple of years is nothing. It's impossible to deduce global geological trends in a human lifetime or even thousands of lifetimes. All we have to go on is the geological record. There have been periods of high volcanism in the past and low volcanism, but I would think that earthquake activity would be very hard to determine from the geological record. Big earthquakes can only be found in the past from either historical records, if there are any, or from the things that they cause eg giant mudslides, mega tsunamis etc.

2) I would say no, see above. Climate can change at least locally in a few hundred years, or even 50 or so. Geology has a vastly longer timescale, which in itself would tend to steer us away from any link between the two. A couple of billion years ago though it was a different story - volcanism created lots of Oxygen in the atmosphere and also water, which allowed life to evolve. But that took a long time!

3) In the geological past, all sorts of things have happened. A few earthquakes in a few years is absolutely postively nothing compared to what's gone before!

Re oil and gas extraction - this sort of thing produces small tremors as the rocks settle where people've been digging, but you'll admit that whatever humans can do is absolutely minute compared to forces that can demolish hundreds of thousands of homes in a few minutes, or raise the Alps from the floor of an ocean.

There was quite a big quake in Folkestone a couple of years back. Caused £1000,000 worth of improvements.

I'll get me coat.

I've been having more of my crazy thoughts

I want to investigate what's happening.....We all know that something is happening, I will stop mucking about and investigate this....[b]I don't want to do loads of research[/b]

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