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Earthquakes measuring 4.8 and 4.0 shook the Northeast, including the New York metropolitan area, on Friday (April 5), according to the US Geological Survey (USGS).
first earthquake It struck at 10:23 a.m. EDT at a depth of 2.9 miles (4.7 kilometers). USGS reported. The explosion occurred 7 kilometers north of White House Station in New Jersey, about 64 kilometers from Manhattan. The second earthquake occurred at 5:59 p.m. EDT at a depth of 9.4 km (9.4 km) and was centered 4.3 miles (7 km) southwest of Gladstone, New Jersey, the USGS reported.
The first quake was felt as far south as Baltimore, Maryland, and as far north as Springfield, Massachusetts, the USGS said.Did you feel it?Some airports on the east coast issued ground suspensions to halt air traffic immediately after the morning earthquake, but there were no immediate reports of damage. new york times.
Related: Top 20 largest earthquakes in recorded history
Earthquakes are rare in the New York metropolitan area, but the region, which spans New York, Philadelphia and Wilmington, has experienced smaller and occasionally more powerful earthquakes in the past. According to the USGS, small earthquakes occur approximately every two to three years, while larger earthquakes occur approximately twice every 100 years.
“Really large earthquakes are rare in the northeastern United States, but moderate-sized earthquakes like this do happen from time to time, and that’s what happened this morning,” said Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. said. He told Live Science he studies seismology at Johns Hopkins University.
Most earthquakes occur at plate boundaries, and the plate boundaries closest to New York City are in the center of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Fernando said the northeastern United States doesn’t have plate subduction zones like California or the Pacific Northwest. These are places where a thin plate sinks beneath an adjacent thick plate.
“But this region, so to speak, Appalachia, has many drawbacks,” Fernando said.
These faults are remnants of ancient mountain building activities, such as the uplift of the Appalachians. When the supercontinent Pangea arose and broke apart, it could reactivate for a variety of reasons, including leaving deep cracks and faults in the bedrock and causing the Earth’s crust to realign with the changes, Fernando told Live Science. Told.
“There are a lot of things called faults, but they are basically contacts between different rock units,” Fernando said. “Sometimes movement occurs on a fault, and when the stress gets too high, the fault slips. That’s what causes an earthquake.”
Many smaller or deeper faults in the New York-Philadelphia-Wilmington urban corridor likely remain undetected, and most of the region’s small earthquakes have been identified, according to the USGS. It is said that it cannot be associated with the fault. Additionally, “it is difficult to determine whether known faults are still active and have the potential to slip and cause earthquakes,” the USGS noted.
The largest earthquakes to hit New York City in the past 300 years include two magnitude 5.2 earthquakes on December 19, 1737 and August 10, 1884. Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory In New York. In 1944, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake centered on the U.S.-Canada border in Quebec was felt in New York City, Boston, Quebec, and Toronto.
The last major earthquake to hit this region was Earthquake with magnitude 5.8 This earthquake occurred on August 23, 2011 near Mineral, Virginia. The earthquake occurred “within a long-recognized seismic zone, the Virginia Central Seismic Belt.” USGS.
Editor’s note: Updated at 6:25 p.m. EDT to include information about the evening’s magnitude 4.0 earthquake.
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