Taking a Look at Earthquakes

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Earthquakes
What are earthquakes? Earthquakes are sudden and violent shakings/trembles of the ground. Sometimes earthquakes can be so small that they can be felt by no one. But other times, the earthquakes are so large that they can kill thousands of people and cause tons of destruction.
“An earthquake happens when two blocks of earth slip past one another.” http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/kids/eqscience.php (The surface of which they slipped is called a fault or a fault plane.)
There are many different results of earthquakes. Most of the damages from earthquakes are caused by the strong shaking movement of the seismic waves. “Shaking may be severe enough and long enough to collapse weak buildings, overturn furniture, topple water heaters and storage tanks, and collapse unsafe dams.” http://library.thinkquest.org/28238/results.htm These effects can result in an even further result such as fallen electric wires, fires, loss of water to fight fire, oil spills, broken gas mains, etc.
Earthquakes affect people in many different ways. They cause fires that burn buildings to the ground, and sometimes they wipe out whole towns. This affects you and me because, if you live in that town, you will have nowhere to live or that could be the building you work at, so now you are out of a job. When there are earthquakes, they can cause tsunamis and those wipe out everything at the beach. That means that you won’t be able to go to that beach for a while until everything calms down, and the tsunami most likely wiped out all of the shops and places that you like to hang out, so you can’t go there anymore.
More than anything, though, earthquakes cause death. If there is an earthquake in your town, or the town of a loved one, they could die or get seriously injured and then that will affect you and your feelings.
Chile Earthquake
The world’s largest recorded earthquake since the 1900’s is the earthquake in Chile in 1960. The earthquake occurred in Chile on May 22, 1960 at 7:11 p.m. and the aftershocks lasted through November 1.The earthquake occurred approximately 100 miles off the coast of Chile, parallel to the city of Valdiva; (Southern Chile, Valdiva-Puerto Montt area) This earthquake killed many people and also caused a major tsunami by the time it had finished.
Believe it or not, but most of the damage that was done was not actually from earthquake itself, but from the tsunami that came after it.

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