What do earthquakes cause and look like?

Answer 1

An earthquake can cause tsunami, landslides, mudslides, bigger earthquakes, "after shocks", significant damage to property and buildings, deaths and injuries to people and animals, floods, major disasters and emergency situations.

More:

1) People are injured or killed by collapsing buildings,

2) Buildings and bridges are destroyed, roads are slit open or torn apart and dams are destroyed causing floods,

3) Electricity, water and gas supplies are cut off,

4) At homes gas line breaks cause fires, properties are destroyed,

5) Main gas pipes break, electrical wires are torn down and both cause fires,

6) Landslides and rock slides block roads,

7) If earthquakes happen on ocean floors, it would cause tsunami and all the devastation they can also cause.
causing a fault
Earthquakes are caused by movements of plates underneath the Earth's surface. The places where these plates meet are breaks in the Earth's crust called faults.

Answer 2

Earthquakes are shockwaves caused by plate collisions at plate boundaries. They vibrate the Earth on different strengths depending on how serious the plate collision is. They can in turn cause houses to collapse, breaking of roads and bridges and casualties, which may result in fires, lack of electricity and water, economic downfall due to damages caused and also tourism and more casualties. They can also cause tsunamis, huge tidal waves caused by earthquakes underwater. It is usually not seen from shore until the waves get taller when it reaches a lower sea bed when nearing shore.

Earthquakes may be caused by moving plate boundaries. It is when there are convergent, divergent or transform plate boundaries. In a convergent plate boundary, two plates will approach each other. The denser plate will then subduct. Friction is produced and the ground shakes, depending on the strength of the quake, causing an earthquake. Shockwaves are radiated around the area, creating tremors.

In a divergent plate boundary, two plates will move away from each other, causing the ground to sink, forming rift valleys. This will also cause earthquakes due to the sinking of land.

In transform plate boundaries, where earthquakes usually happen, two plates move side by side in opposite directions. This will produce lots of friction when the two plates come into contact. The ground will vibrate and the tremors can be felt, however, not as strong as those in convergent, as they definitely will not exceed 8.5 on the Richter scale.

the two plates push together, like a head on collision or fight one eventually will give up releasing all the effort pushing against the other there the plates push upward which forms a volcanoe

Earthquakes are tremors or vibrations in the Earth's crust that are caused by the build up or accumulation of pressure (more correctly termed stress).

This accumulation of stress causes the rocks that make up the crust to deform elastically. This is very similar to what happens when you squash or stretch a spring and causes a form of energy to be stored in the rocks of the crust - technically described as elastic potential energy.

When this stress gets to large, it exceeds the strength of the rocks in the crust and causes a brittle failure. Brittle failures are failures where fractures form through the material.

This sudden brittle failure causes all of the elastic potential energy to be released at one time in the form of seismic waves, just as if a spring or elastic band that was being stretched suddenly snapped.

These seismic waves cause the tremors that people feel on the surface and which can cause damage to buildings and other structures.

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Answer2: Earthquakes are among the most destructive and powerful forces in nature'" notes The World Book Encyclopedia. The energy released by a severe earthquake may be 10,000 times greater than that generated by the first atom bomb! Scientist may have some idea where powerful temblors may occur, but they cannot specify when.

Earthquakes occur as a result of masses of rock changing position below the earth's surface. This type of activity goes on continuously. Often, the shock waves that result are not powerful enough to be felt at the earth's surface, but they can be detected and recorded by a seismograph.* At other times, enough rock breaks and enough shift takes place to shake the surface violently.

But why is there constant movement in the earth's crust? "An explanation is to be found in plate tectonics, a concept which has revolutionized thinking in the Earth's sciences," says the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC). "We now know that there are seven major crustal plates, subdivided into a number of smaller plates," NEIC adds, "all in constant motion relative to one another, at rates varying from 10 to 130 millimeters [three eighths of an inch to five inches] per year." Most earthquakes, NEIC says, are confined to narrow belts that define the boundaries of the plates. This is where 90 percent of major earthquakes are likely to occur.

Magnitude and Intensity

The severity of an earthquake may be measured by its magnitude or its intensity. Charles Richter developed a scale in the 1930's for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes. As the number of seismograph stations grew, new scales based on Richter's idea were developed. What is called the moment magnitude scale, for example, measures the energy released at the source of the quake. ( taken from the 3/22/02 Awake magazine article "Anatomy of an Earthquake)

Answer 3

Earthquakes occur as a result of the movement of rock masses within the crust, parts of the tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface. These plates contact and push against one another constantly, and where movement is blocked, stress can build up. The release of this stress can result in sudden movements (up, down, or laterally) deep underground. The effects of these movements are felt on the surface as earthquakes.

A sudden movement of crustal rock under the seafloor can generate a large ocean wave, or tsunami, that can cause considerable damage when it reaches shallower waters.

Answer 4

An Earthquake is felt but you can't exactly "see it". You can see tectonic plates though, since an earthquake is caused by the movement of tectonic plates.

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What you can see are the effects of an earthquake such as the ground and buildings shaking.

Answer 5

They don't really look like anything. You will see things shaking, but you can't see an earthquake as such. It is what you feel that is more significant. You will feel everywhere shaking, the ground, the building you may be in. You may hear noises, caused by the objects shaking or what is actually happening underground. It can be very scary for people who have never experienced one.

Answer 6

Depending how high the earthquake is on the richer scale it could look like a little shake or crashing buildings and cracking ground

Answer 7

they cause some of the biggest waves and cause tons of damage to builinds and areas but a volcano is safer