Children often ask various questions, to which we are simply obliged to give answers that are understandable to the child. And it’s not easy to get off with monosyllabic phrases, for example, an earthquake is when the earth is shaking, but to give a complete exhaustive answer. That’s right, when an earthquake shakes the earth — it cracks, hums and shakes. But how and why does this happen? An earthquake is when the strongest tremors occur, from which houses fall apart like houses of cards, turn over like toy trains, telegraph poles fall down. Whole blocks of cities go underground.
An earthquake is one of the most terrible disasters of mankind. All the peoples of the world come to help the victims of the earthquake – they send food, medicines, construction materials – this is called humanitarian aid. And the international organization “Red Cross” is engaged in it under the leadership of the United Nations (United Nations)
To distinguish earthquakes by power, scientists have come up with score estimates. The more powerful the earthquake, the higher its score. The strongest earthquake has an estimate of 10-12 points. But an earthquake is rarely so terrible and destructive. Often, the earth only shudders softly, presenting no threat to humanity.
Earthquakes and methods of their prevention
People cannot yet deal with such a phenomenon as an earthquake, but they can warn about its onset and save people by evacuating them to a safe distance. To do this, our planet is watched daily by seismologists who listen to the earth like a patient’s doctor, how it breathes, how its fiery heart works.
When the epicenter of an earthquake begins to emerge somewhere, seismic waves scatter from it, as if from a stone thrown into water. The waves reach seismic stations, where scientists capture them with special instruments – seismographs and record them. After reading the record, they advertise on the radio that an earthquake is expected in such a city – so many points.
Why does an earthquake occur?
Scientists still cannot give an unambiguous answer to this question, but it is believed that the earth’s crust consists of giant tectonic plates, under which there is a mantle – a thick layer of incandescent mass.
Here are the plates of the earth’s crust floating on it, like icebergs on the ocean, moving very slowly and colliding with each other. The continental plate on which the land is located is heavier than the one where the seas and oceans are located.
And when they collide, the heavy continental plate, as it were, runs over the light plate of the oceans and “drowns” it. This “collision” of plates on each other and causes an earthquake.
When two heavy plates collide, in this place not only the earth begins to tremble, but also to hunch, to rise mountains. If the earth’s crust is shaken in the ocean, then huge sea waves, called tsunamis, fall on the shore and sweep away everything in their path.
That’s why, in order to prevent the death of people, scientists are trying to predict as accurately as possible when and where an earthquake will occur.