Even Seismologists Are Scratching Their Heads Over All These Quakes

5 major shakes globally in 24 hours


Article heading image for Even Seismologists Are Scratching Their Heads Over All These Quakes

There are plenty of conspiracy theorists getting excited over all of the natural disaster activity around the world at the moment.. with the likes of Hurricane Maria hitting Puerto Rico, Bali locals on volcano watch and now a series of large earthquakes. 

It all started several days back when Mexico was hit by a magnitude 8 shake. Yesterday, a 7.1 mag struck south east of Mexico City. The death toll from that shake now sits above 230, and is rising. 

Since then, Japan, New Zealand and Vanuatu have all copped shakes of varying degrees between 6 and 7.5 magnitude. 

Phil Cummins from Geoscience Australia says even for experts, this kind of activity if unexpected and unpredictable. 

"The interesting thing is that most of these are happening on the 'ocean plate' that dives beneath the Continents and that is rather unusual. Even one of those is unusual so it is strange to have this large cluster of these earthquakes.. but I have no idea what that means"  

The headlines about the so-called quake=prone 'Ring of Fire' have started appearing. 

Cummins says the ongoing shakes are not what would usually be seen. 

"It's often expected that there might be another earthquake in the immediate vicinity of the first large event but you don't usually expect there to be a heightened risk of earthquakes to appear at a great distance like we are now, right over the Pacific Rim" 

"I guess the real question people wanna know is does one of these earthquakes trigger another and that's a difficult question to answer. It could just be a statistical cluster of what are otherwise random events" 

 

Claire Sherwood

21 September 2017

Article by:

Claire Sherwood




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