Earthquake Geology and The Sims 3

OK so I promised to do a geeky geology bit about the Japan earthquake. Things appear to have been much worse than first thought when it comes to casualties with 10,000 people missing from just one town. There’s also all sorts of worries due to a Nuclear Power Plant partly exploding and the possibility of huge amounts of radiation leaking out. Still, if anyone can sort that out it’s the Japanese. This disaster has showed me how fantastic the Japanese are at building things, organising things and generally being brilliant. I think we should put them in charge of the whole world once they have recovered from this.

So, time for some geology. I’ll keep it extremely simple in case anyone gets confused easily. Japan is on a complicated bit of the world where there are several plate boundaries,like this:

Don’t worry too much about the microplate thing, just pretend it’s part of the Pacific plate. Essentially the earthquake was caused by the sudden thrusting of the Pacific plate as it is subducted under the Eurasian plate. This means it is sliding underneath the Eurasian plate and is being melted into the mantle pretty much like in this diagram:

The tsunami happened because of this massive shift forward, moving the water on top of the plate. The earthquake was 8.9 on the Richter scale which really is big. The ground shook pretty violently and it would have been very scary. There were also a number of aftershocks and some of them were as high as 7 on the Richter scale. The situation is horrific but it is thanks to Japan’s preparation that it is not a whole lot worse.

Enough of a science lesson for today and back onto the usual random stuff I talk about here. So, my day? All in all not too bad, if a little dull. It was just a relaxing day sat at home really. I did start playing The Sims 3 though…

I bought this ages and ages ago, only to discover my crappy old laptop couldn’t play it. Fortunately this new one can easily. I began by making me and moving myself into a lovely house in “Sunset Valley”. The sim version of me’s main goal is to go out with ten different people during it’s lifetime. To begin with I played the game fairly normally, keeping the sims move up and getting it a job in the laboratory. Sim-me is a computer whizz-kid too. When I wasn’t at work I wandered round the town and met some people. I soon decided that it was about time that my sim began it’s life goal and it wasn’t too long before it had a girl over. These screenshots pretty much demonstrate what happened next…

So it turns out that sim-me is quite the ladies man. Still, it wants to have another nine relationships' during it’s life so the fun has only just begun.You can see in the above screenshots that the oven is all burnt which is because I left some waffles in there whilst I went to work. Whoops. I rather love the screenshot feature and no doubt I shall be sharing many more of sim-me’s adventures over the coming weeks.

And that’s about all for today. I’m not entirely sure what’s coming tomorrow but it may be the drama of real life rather than my virtual one. I will also have my revamped question and answer post coming over the next few days so keep reading for that. To take part, simply write a comment about anything I’ve written on this blog or anything else. I would quite like to have a “Dear Dan” bit where I try and solve a problem so if you have any kind of problem, no matter how big or small, write it as a comment and I shall endeavour to solve it as best I can. See you all very soon!