Yeah we're at sea level, a lot of eastern Christchurch is on some soft ground and we've got a bunch of small faults that are very close. We're on (well, right beside) an extinct volcano too, which if I recall means that in some cases the seismic waves bounce off the volcanic rock back toward the city ? ...something like that anyway.
There is the belief that we've got probably 2 years of decent aftershocks, the science types are looking at other data from around the world, but it's only San Francisco I think that shares some common patterns, but apparently too the patterns were seeing are also quite new so there's a lot of attention being paid to what's going on. If the numbers are right we've had 7400 quakes over magnitude 2 since the September 7.1 quake, which doesn't really sound very common.
A few weeks ago, we were told based on the data modelling....
That will make us the centre of attention for study for seismic activity for a long time. It’s now thought that we are looking at a longer term seismic series. (The latest guess is apparently that we have a 23% chance within the next year of a shake between 6 and 7 on the Richter scale, and dropping to 10% over the next 2 years. There is a chance of over 90% that we will have another shake between 5 and 6 in the next twelve months, dropping to over 70% in that two year horizon. Nobody was able to answer questions about Mercalli scale or g-force or depth so you can take those figures for what they’re worth. What we are seemingly certain of is that you shouldn’t put your blu-tac away just yet.)
Since then we've had one quake between 6-7 and four between 5-6
At least that'd be both portable and easily re-set up.
