Mexico,San Francisco,Los Angeles and Kobe: What Next?

Some analogies in the distribution of damage in the 1985 Mexico, 1989 Loma Prieta, and 1995 Kobe earthquakes may be attributable to similarities in the history of reclamation of bayshore or lakeshore environments by emplacing artificial fill on soft mud. In all three cases, a transitional environment has generated similar soil types and analogous forms of human settlement. These similarities may translate into hazardous situations because of amplification of seismic waves in wedge-shaped low-velocity layers; nonlinearity of seismic wave propagation in soft water-saturated soils; transitions from solid-like to liquid-like behavior, including liquefaction and the emergence of prograde surface waves; and other unforeseen conditions arising from surface geology. Severe stability problems may arise in tall, top-heavy structures and in structures with horizontal spans of the order of the wavelength of surface waves. Effective strategies of hazard reduction include a recognition of the many unanticipated ways in which earthquake hazard may become an emergent property of complex nature-society systems.     

Unplanned and unforeseen effects of instabilities

The nature-society system is proposed as the relevant analytical unit for the sociological study of disasters. Like other complex systems, this system has emergent properties: its instabilities are the disasters. They often arise as a result of adoption by a community of specific technologies, e.g., housing technologies, that turn out to be unstable in the presence of critical natural or social changes. The following earthquake disasters were caused by unplanned and unforeseen features of housing or siting technologies: Huaxian 1556 (caves in loess), Yungay 1970 (siting in the path of an avalanche), and Mexico 1985 (high-rise buildings on soft ground). Disasters have anarchaeology, in the sense that the instabilities in the nature-society system are not static. This is demonstrated by tracing the 1985 Mexico earthquake disaster back to decisions on urban planning taken after 1521. It is not enough to know the hazard and the vulnerability in order to understand disasters. Technological solutions also have a local history.     

Dark Matter: A Result of nonadditive gravitational forces

Experimental data in fluids suggest that nonadditive electromagnetic forces between 3 or more molecules account for the existence of critical points, triple states and phase transitions (Robles-Domínguez et al., 2007; Robles-Gutiérrez et al., 2010). Similar nonadditive forces between 3 or more molecules in the gravitational field incorporated into Newton’s universal gravitational law may also explain the existence of dark matter.