Brian Carlo

I’ve Never Experienced A Natural Disaster, But…

BLDGBLOG wonders if air turbulence would properly simulate the experience of being in an earthquake.

First he posts a video of the “earthquake van” in Japan (see below). Then he makes the jump toward the skies.

“In any case, it seemed like aerial turbulence was a very good analogy for the structural motions of earthquakes. In fact, you could install some sort of in-flight dashboard – with a BLDGBLOG Seismology Plug-In™ – that tells you, in real time, as you experience aerial turbulence, how that turbulence would register on the Richter Scale. I think people would be shocked to realize that they have very likely experienced a 6.0 earthquake in the sky – only it was called turbulence and they were sitting inside an airplane. 3.0s and 4.0s would be so common as to be coextensive with air travel. So you take geology students up on an airplane in a thunderstorm – and they’d soon understand what an 8.5 feels like. Or a 7.2, and so on.”