Earthquakes

Perthshire, Scotland struck by ninth earthquake in just over a month

Robbie Chalmers
Scottish Daily Record
Tue, 13 Oct 2020 07:30 UTC

Blackford, where many of the earthquakes took place

Perthshire continues to be rumbled by a series of seismic activity after two minor earthquakes hit the area within five minutes of each other at the weekend.

Saturday's incidents now make it nine tremor events in the area since the start of September.

The first on Saturday took place at 7.23am, with the epicentre near Gleneagles, measuring a 1.5 magnitude at a depth of five kilometres.

Five minutes later a 1.8 magnitude quake was registered a few miles away at a depth of seven kilometres.

Both tremors were felt by residents in Blackford, but there have been no reports of any damage so far, and were recorded at the nearby British Geological Society (BGS).

Blackford experienced the sixth and seventh tremors in the series on the Sunday prior - the former of which being the biggest recorded in over a decade.

A 2.5 magnitude and smaller 0.8 magnitude quake hit the village in the evening with aftershocks reported in Auchterarder and Aberuthven.

Comment: Last month further south in the UK an English town was hit by a fourth earthquake in two weeks.

Landslide induced mega-tsunami 'could happen at anytime' at Alaska's Barry Glacier

Adam Voiland
NASA
Sun, 11 Oct 2020 21:04 UTC

Barry glacier June 2019

While kayaking in Barry Arm fjord in June 2019, Valisa Higman, an artist-in-residence at Alaska's Chugach National Forest, noticed some odd fractures on a cliff overlooking the fjord. Curious if the slope might be in the process of collapsing, she emailed photos (see one of them below) to her brother, Bretwood Higman. "Hig" is a geologist with Ground Truth Alaska, and he has studied landslides and tsunami deposits for decades.

He was soon inspecting the area using Google Maps, zooming in to the maximum extent possible and searching for signs of slippage. He saw the cracks as well, but nothing about them struck him as strong evidence of a big landslide. "But it turns out I had made a geology 101 error," he said. "I hadn't zoomed out enough, and I missed the big picture." Still, he kept Barry Arm on a list of possible landslides to investigate more someday.

A few months later, Chunli Dai offered that chance. The Ohio State researcher was working on a NASA-funded project to develop new ways to automatically detect landslides in the Arctic, and she was looking for test sites to check how well the tool was working. Her project makes use of a high-resolution dataset called ArcticDEM and machine learning to automatically search for and flag landslides.

Comment: From giant fissures, gaping sinkholes, and epic landslides to methane deposit explosions, earth movements of all kinds appear to be on the increase:

For insight into what may be driving this shift, SOTT radio reports:

Shallow M6.0 earthquake hits Easter Island Region, Chile

Volcano Discovery
Sat, 10 Oct 2020 12:13 UTC

Date & time: Saturday, 10 October 2020 13:14 UTC
Local time at epicenter: 10 Oct 6:14 am (GMT -7)
Magnitude: 6.0
Depth: 10.0 km
Epicenter latitude / longitude: 28.67°S / 112.3°W (Chile)

Magnitude 6.3 earthquake hits Papua New Guinea: USGS

Reuters
Thu, 08 Oct 2020 09:45 UTC

An earthquake of magnitude 6.3 struck Papua New Guinea on Thursday, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.

The onshore quake struck 38 km northeast of Kainantu at a depth of 103.5 km (64 miles), it said.

There were no immediate reports of damage, and the U.S. Tsunami Warning System said there was no threat of a tsunami.

6.0-magnitude earthquake hits off Fiji

Xinhua
Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:47 UTC

An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.0 jolted 232 km E of Levuka, Fiji at 10:11:46 GMT on Tuesday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The epicenter, with a depth of 628.52 km, was initially determined to be at 18.0249 degrees south latitude and 178.4906 degrees west longitude.

6.0-magnitude earthquake hits off Papua New Guinea

Xinhua
Thu, 01 Oct 2020 18:05 UTC

An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.0 jolted 99 km W of Kandrian, Papua New Guinea at 10:34:48 GMT on Thursday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The epicenter, with a depth of 109.22 km, was initially determined to be at 6.0867 degrees south latitude and 148.6576 degrees east longitude.

Shallow 6.4 magnitude earthquake strikes off Tonga

Volcano Discovery
Thu, 01 Oct 2020 01:55 UTC

Date & time: Thursday, 1 October 2020 01:13 UTC
Local time at epicenter: 1 Oct 2:13 pm (GMT +13)
Magnitude: 6.4
Depth: 35.0 km
Epicenter latitude / longitude: 19.495°S / 174.2254°W (Tonga)
Nearest volcano: Late (113 km / 70 mi)

A 'swarm' of earthquakes rocks Southern California

KGUN
Thu, 01 Oct 2020 02:51 UTC

Forty-five quakes of magnitude 3.0 have struck Southern California on Wednesday, the largest of which was a magnitude 4.9.

Dr. Lucy Jones, a seismologist, founder & chief scientist at her center, said it is one of the largest swarms we have had in the Imperial Valley - and it is historically the most active swarms in Southern California.

Several swarms of earthquakes occurred near San Andreas.

Wednesday evening from around 4:30 p.m. to 6:05 p.m. there has been an M4.4, M4.9, and most currently a M4.2.

Jones said they are too far from the San Andreas fault to change the probability of a quake on it.

Shallow 6.2-magnitude earthquake hits south of Africa, USGS says

Sputnik
Sat, 26 Sep 2020 20:11 UTC

A 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit south of Africa at around 17:10 GMT this Saturday with the epicentre lying at the depths of 10 kilometres, according to the US Geological Survey

No tsunami warning has been issued yet. Meanwhile, people living in South Africa have been reporting tremors.

UK town hit by fourth earthquake in two weeks

Kevin Rawlinson
The Guardian
Tue, 22 Sep 2020 18:18 UTC

Tremors were felt in Leighton Buzzard for the third time in three weeks

Leighton Buzzard has been hit by two aftershocks in the space of a few hours - taking the total number of earthquakes felt in the area over the last two weeks to four.

A magnitude 2.1 event struck at 1.39pm on Tuesday afternoon, just over four hours after a 3.0 tremor was felt in the Bedfordshire town at 9.32am.

Geologists said they were likely to be aftershocks of the first quake felt in the area on 8 September.

"There's obviously been some stress been building up in that particular area and we've had the initial earthquake," said Glenn Ford, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey (BGS). "It's maybe just still rebalancing the stress regime in that particular part of the world and we're getting these little aftershocks occurring as well."

The 8 September tremor was magnitude 3.5 and the first aftershock five days later measured 2.1.

According to the BGS, residents said Tuesday's first tremor "only lasted a couple of seconds" and that they "felt a single jolt, a bit like being in a car that has done an emergency stop".

Comment: SECOND earthquake in a week hits UK town