Event Time:
2013-05-29 03:16:23 UTC
2013-05-29 03:16:23 UTC+00:00 at epicenter

Location:
52.995°N 5.220°W depth=9.9km (6.2mi)

Nearby Cities:
48km (30mi) W of Nefyn, United Kingdom
52km (32mi) SW of Holyhead, United Kingdom
55km (34mi) E of Wicklow, Ireland
58km (36mi) ESE of Greystones, Ireland
80km (50mi) ESE of Dublin, Ireland

Technical Data

Event Time:
2013-05-29 14:38:03 UTC
2013-05-29 07:38:03 UTC-07:00 at epicenter

Location:
34.414°N 119.921°W depth=7.4km (4.6mi)

Nearby Cities:
5km (3mi) W of Isla Vista, California
8km (5mi) WSW of Goleta, California
20km (12mi) W of Santa Barbara, California
37km (23mi) W of Carpinteria, California
483km (300mi) SSE of Sacramento, California

Technical Data

A small earthquake measuring 3.8 in magnitude has hit north Wales in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

The tremor centred on the Llyn peninsula in Gwynedd.

The British Geological Survey (BGS) said the centre point was between the seaside towns of Aberdaron and Nefyn.

People living as far away as Southport in Merseyside, Dublin in Ireland and on the Isle of Man reported "intense shaking" at 04:16 BST but there were no reports of damage or injury.

More than 100 reports from people who felt the earthquake have been made to the BGS, who said the majority were within a 100km radius.

Dr Brian Baptie, Head of Seismology at the BGS, said the size of the tremor was not unusual for the UK.

"We get an earthquake of this size in the UK maybe once or twice every couple of years," he told BBC Radio Wales.

It's a bleak scenario. A massive earthquake along the New Madrid fault kills or injures 60,000 people in Tennessee. A quarter of a million people are homeless. The Memphis airport - the country's biggest air terminal for packages - goes off-line. Major oil and gas pipelines across Tennessee rupture, causing shortages in the Northeast. In Missouri, another 15,000 people are hurt or dead. Cities and towns throughout the central U.S. lose power and water for months. Losses stack up to hundreds of billions of dollars.

Fortunately, this magnitude 7.7 temblor is not real but rather a scenario imagined by the Mid-America Earthquake Center and the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University. The goal of their 2008 analysis was to plan for a modern recurrence of quakes that happened along the New Madrid fault more than 200 years ago, in 1811 and 1812.

No one alive has experienced a major earthquake in the Midwest, yet geologists say it's only a matter of time. That puts a lot of uncertainty on disaster officials. Their earthquake precautions - quake-resistant building codes, for example - have never been reality tested. Some question if enough has been done to strengthen existing buildings, schools and other infrastructure. It is difficult to prepare for a geological catastrophe the public cannot see and has never experienced.

"We mostly react to disasters, and it's been extremely rare that we get ahead of things," said Claire Rubin, a disaster response specialist in Arlington, Va. "A lot of hard problems don't get solved. They get moved around and passed along."

A massive earthquake along the New Madrid fault kills or injures 60,000 people in Tennessee. A quarter of a million people are homeless. The Memphis airport - the country's biggest air terminal for packages - goes off-line. Major oil and gas pipelines across Tennessee rupture, causing shortages in the Northeast. In Missouri, another 15,000 people are hurt or dead. Cities and towns throughout the central U.S. lose power and water for months. Losses stack up to hundreds of billions of dollars. Fortunately, this magnitude 7.7 temblor is not real but rather a scenario imagined by the Mid-America Earthquake Center and the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University.
The goal of their 2008 analysis was to plan for a modern recurrence of quakes that happened along the New Madrid fault more than 200 years ago, in 1811 and 1812. No one alive has experienced a major earthquake in the Midwest, yet geologists say it's only a matter of time. That puts a lot of uncertainty on disaster officials. Their earthquake precautions - quake-resistant building codes, for example - have never been reality tested. Some question if enough has been done to strengthen existing buildings, schools and other infrastructure. It is difficult to prepare for a geological catastrophe the public cannot see and has never experienced. "We mostly react to disasters, and it's been extremely rare that we get ahead of things," said Claire Rubin, a disaster response specialist in Arlington, Va. "A lot of hard problems don't get solved. They get moved around and passed along."

What would be Wellington's biggest earthquake in 150 years is happening right now - not that you'll feel the jolt.

The magnitude-7 equivalent quake, 40km deep, is a "slow-slip" event, when the movement of tectonic plates occurs over hours to months rather than seconds.

GeoNet scientists said even their precision instruments were picking very little up from the 100km area of Levin to the Marlborough Sounds, along the plate boundary.

Almost imperceptibly, the Pacific and Australian plates had been slipping past each other since January and would continue for up to a year, GeoNet scientist Caroline Little said.

"We don't see anything at the surface."

Apart from moving a few centimetres further away from Australia, there would be no noticeable impact from this seismic movement.

But slow-slip quakes had an undetermined relationship with large earthquakes, which were accompanied or even triggered by slow-slip events "and vice versa", she said.

A magnitude 5.7 temblor Thursday night was the largest earthquake to shake California since 2008 and has generated curiosity from seismologists. The temblor occurred in a rugged section of Northern California that has not been studied as thoroughly as Southern California and the Bay Area and has less monitoring equipment. Experts said they were surprised the quake was felt over such a large area, and they plan to go to the region to investigate. The magnitude 5.7 quake struck around 8:47 p.m., about 150 miles northeast of Sacramento; its epicenter was about 27 miles southwest of the town of Susanville. The last quake of similar magnitude, recorded at 5.5, struck Chino Hills in San Bernardino County in July 2008, said David Schwartz, an earthquake geologist for the Northern California USGS division in Menlo Park.

It caused little damage, but it was the most sizable quake to hit a metropolitan part of California since the much larger and destructive 1994 Northridge quake. Thursday's quake did occur in a zone with known active faults, said David Schwartz, an earthquake geologist for the Northern California USGS division, including a series of faults that extend through the northern end of Lake Tahoe all the way to Oregon. But 5.7 is the strongest magnitude recorded in the area. This mountainous eastern Sierra Nevada region, known for its lakes, rivers and national forests, has had about seven magnitude 4 earthquakes since the 1930s, Schwartz said. Scientists are still studying the intensity of Thursday's shaking and have moved seismographs there from more populated areas to monitor aftershocks.

Within minutes of the first quake, more than 7,000 people reported feeling it, from across state borders into Oregon and Nevada and as far south as the San Francisco area, according to the U.S. Geological Survey website. Officials in Susanville and Sacramento said the quake set off a number of home and car alarms and rattled windows. A Chico resident told The Times he felt a slow roll that lasted about 30 seconds.The quake itself was not a huge surprise for Schwartz's USGS division, but "what was interesting was it was felt along an unusual distance," he said. "Earthquakes in different parts of the state are felt over different distances. We just haven't had that many examples of earthquakes in this part of the state, really, for comparison. There are more interesting questions now than we have answers for, at present," he said. - LA Times

The massive, magnitude-8.3 temblor that struck today (May 24) near Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula could turn out be the deepest earthquake ever recorded.

At 378 miles (609 kilometers) below the seafloor, the quake could best the previous record set in Bolivia, in 1994. The initial depth may be revised as scientists collect more data. The Bolivian quake was a magnitude-8.2, and 392 miles deep (631 km), Nature News reported.

Why so deep? The Sea of Okhotsk sits above a subduction zone, where the Pacific Plate dives beneath the North America Plate. (Though some scientists think there is also a microplate, a small tectonic plate, beneath the sea.) The northwest Pacific crust is some of oldest, coldest oceanic crust subducting on Earth. It's also quickly rolling into the subduction zone, like a speedy conveyor belt, so the cold crust reaches deep into Earth's mantle before warming up.

Event Time
2013-05-24 14:56:31 UTC
2013-05-25 00:56:31 UTC+10:00 at epicenter

Location
52.222°N 151.515°E depth=623.0km (387.1mi)

Nearby Cities
353km (219mi) WNW of Ozernovskiy, Russia
473km (294mi) W of Vilyuchinsk, Russia
476km (296mi) W of Yelizovo, Russia
491km (305mi) W of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia
2061km (1281mi) NNE of Tokyo, Japan
Technical Details

At least 22 aftershocks have struck following an earthquake in far northeastern California that was felt as far away as San Francisco and in two other states.

There have been no reports of injury or serious damage.

Officials said the magnitude-5.7 quake broke dishes and shook mirrors when it hit at 8:47 p.m. Thursday.

The U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Center said it was centered near Greenville, about 25 miles southwest of Susanville. It was followed by multiple aftershocks, including a magnitude 4.9 temblor that struck early Friday morning.

Pacific Gas & Electric said about 660 customers lost power on the southwestern edge of Lake Almanor at about 9:39 p.m. Thursday. The company did not immediately clarify whether the outage was due to the quake.