5.4 Magnitude Earthquake Rocks Alaska

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A 5.4-magnitude earthquake struck near Anchorage today, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. It did not cause any injuries or major damage, according to officials in the city, Alaska’s largest.

The quake hit at 11:28 a.m. local time, the survey said. Its epicenter was about 60 miles northwest of Anchorage.

“It was a good one,” said Jennifer Collins, a spokeswoman for the Anchorage Fire Department. “Oh, yeah, we definitely felt it. It shook and then it subsided a bit and then it shook again.”

Collins said the fire department has not received calls related to the earthquake. Hendrik Van Hemert, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said the city had no reports of major damage.

The earthquake was felt as far away as Fairbanks, a spokeswoman for the Alaska Earthquake Information Center said.

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Magnitude-4.1 Quake Shakes Already-shaken L.A.

Los Angeles has been shaken by another moderate earthquake, a few miles from the epicenter of Sunday’s shaker. No immediate reports of injuries or damage.

The U.S. Geological Survey says it’s not certain whether it’s an aftershock from Sunday’s magnitude-4.7 temblor or a separate quake.

The magnitude-4.1 quake was centered about 2 miles from Hawthorne and 10 miles from downtown L.A., at a depth of 7.5 miles.

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5.0 Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Los Angeles

The U.S. Geological Survey says a magnitude 5.0 quake has hit the Los Angeles area.

The quake was centered 1 mile southwest of Los Angeles, near LAX airport and was 8.4 miles deep. A spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department said there were no immediate reports of damage or injury.

Oregon - Big Earthquake Coming Sooner

The good news: New research is giving scientists a better handle on when the big one might strike the Pacific Coast.

The bad news: It probably will be sooner than we thought.

“The amount of devastation is going to be unbelievable,” says Rob Witter, coastal geologist with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. “People aren’t going to be ready for this. Even if they are prepared, they are going to be surprised by the level of devastation.”

Witter spoke last week about the latest in earthquake and tsunami studies — it’s Earthquake and Tsunami Awareness Month — as part of state and local efforts to educate the public on preparing for a megaquake of magnitude 9 or more. Witter and James Roddey, spokesman for the state agency, also will give a public talk Tuesday in Newport.

Witter says scientists are now in wide agreement that there’s a 10 to 14 percent chance a powerful earthquake and tsunami will strike the Oregon coast in the next 50 years.

Why do they think that? The latest findings come from Chris Goldfinger, director of the Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Lab at Oregon State University, Roddey says. But to understand Goldfinger’s work, Roddey goes back to what he calls “one of the great scientific detective stories of the 20th century.”

Twenty-five years ago, scientists didn’t think the Cascadia subduction zone — a place 50 to 75 miles off Oregon where two of the Earth’s plates meet, one sliding under the other — could produce earthquakes.

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Seattle Earthquake Risk

Seattle’s tallest buildings are at risk of collapse during a rupture of the Cascadia fault zone in the Pacific Northwest, say U.S. seismic experts. The Cascadia subduction zone is likely to produce the strongest shaking experienced from earthquakes in the lower 48 states, said seismic experts from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

While the Pacific Northwest has experienced little seismic activity in 200 years, there is growing consensus the Cascadia subduction zone ruptures in giant earthquakes exceeding 9 on the Richter scale, Caltech scientists Thomas Heaton and Jin Yang said Thursday at the Seismological Society of America’s annual meeting in Monterey, Calif. The Cascadia subduction zone last ruptured in 1700, Heaton and Yang said.

Simulations at Caltech show such earthquakes, which last for more than 4 minutes and are dominated by low-frequency motions, would be exacerbated by the geography of the Seattle basin and cause severe damage among modern high-rises, said Heaton and Yang.

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LA Beach Signs Warn of Tsunami Threat

Like many Californians who put down roots in earthquake country, Robin Rudisill knows the “Big One” could strike without warning. Yet from her Venice beachfront duplex, Rudisill worries about a different massive blow from Mother Nature — a tsunami.

Her 1950s-era home — with its cool ocean breeze and golden sunsets — sits smack in the heart of a potentially deadly tsunami zone. If that big one ever came ashore, scientists say, it could raze the landscape from the sun-kissed beach to about a mile inland.

To alert homeowners and beachgoers that they are in tsunami territory, the city of Los Angeles has begun posting blue and white “TSUNAMI HAZARD ZONE” signs with an image of ominous-looking waves. The signs, which have surfaced in beach parking lots and at major intersections in Venice and other low-lying communities, also point out evacuation routes.

“It makes it clear that we are in an inundation zone, which most people did not previously, and many still do not, know,” said Rudisill, who pushed for the signs.

While a tsunami threat to the Golden State is real, the potential for killer waves is far less likely than the earthquakes, wildfires, landslides and floods that plague the nation’s most populous state.

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San Andreas Quake Swarms Watched By Scientists

In Southern California, scientists have their eye on a swarm of quakes in the desert. More than 450 quakes have hit near the Salton Sea since March 21.

The southern end of the San Andreas Fault hasn’t snapped in more than 300 years. But scientists worry small quakes could act as a trigger for the big one.

“It’s very close to the locked section of the San Andreas Fault. Anything seismically that happens there definitely gets our attention,” said Cal Tech Seismologist Kate Hutton.

Scientists are installing 22 motion sensors on the 800 mile fault line that slices California from San Francisco to the Salton Sea.

A temblor in the southern end of the fault could hit San Diego County within a minute of rupture.

Experts say everyone should have earthquake preparedness kits ready with plenty of food and water stocked up.

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Salton Sea Is Swarming With Earthquake Data

It’s one of the great mysteries of Southern California seismology: Every couple of years, the remote desert area around the Salton Sea is shaken by swarms of small to moderate earthquakes that often last several days.

The swarms returned this week, with the area recording more than 200 temblors since Saturday — including several that were felt Wednesday. But this time, scientists had sophisticated instruments in the ground to record the activity, helping them to better understand the swarms and how they can affect seismic risk elsewhere.

Scientists have noticed that the quakes appear to have a pattern, moving southeast as the days progress. But a bigger question remains: Can the quakes trigger larger — and potentially more destructive — quakes along the San Andreas fault, which terminates at the shore of the Salton Sea?

A creep meter on the San Andreas just north of the Salton Sea area, operated by the University of Colorado, found a 0.002-inch slip on the fault right after the largest earthquake in the swarm — a magnitude 4.8 on Tuesday.

Experts say that’s a tiny slip for a fault so large, but the novelty of having that kind of data is tantalizing for scientists.

“If you look at the statistics, they say the odds of something bigger happening is on the order of 1%,” said Susan Hough of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena. “It raises your blood pressure as a seismologist, but we’re trying to read the tea leaves.”

Seismologists have long suspected that quakes in the Salton Sea area can trigger movement on other nearby faults, including the San Andreas. The strongest evidence of this occurred in 1987, when a magnitude 6.2 earthquake near the Salton Sea triggered a magnitude 6.6 quake 12 hours later on the Superstition Hills fault to the south.

Experts are still trying to figure out why the hard-scrabble landscape of desert expanse and small struggling towns around the sea is so seismically active.

The sea sits atop a very thin crust that is being constantly stretched as the North American and Pacific plates grind against each other. The area is also veined by dozens of fault lines that run parallel to and criss-cross one another.

The area experienced regular quake swarms until 1979, when a large temblor just south of the U.S.-Mexico border seemed to curb activity, said Doug Given, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist.

But this quiet period appears to have ended.

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Southern California Quake Swarm: A Precursor to the Big One?

There has been a swarm of earthquakes in one area of Southern California that scientists in Pasadena are watching closely, with more than 20 temblors hitting this morning.

The biggest of the 24 quakes recorded this morning was a magnitude-4.8 which struck at 4:55 a.m. near the Salton Sea in Imperial County, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake was centered three miles south of the small town of Bombay Beach and 90 miles east of San Diego.

It was followed by a swarm of smaller quakes, which were recorded between 4:58 a.m. and 6:14 a.m. around Bombay Beach. Most of those temblors registered lower than a 3.0-magnitude, officials said.

There were no immediate reports of any injury or damages.

Scores of small quakes have shaken the area in recent days.

The activity has sparked the interest of scientists who want to see if small faults crossing under the Salton Sea are transferring energy to a section of the more dangerous San Andreas fault, which has not popped in more than 300 years.

An earthquake that starts in Bombay Beach and ripples northwest along the San Andreas fault could be the Big One that devastates Los Angeles, Graham Kent, a research geophysicist at UC San Diego, told the Los Angeles Times.

The activity is being monitored by a system run the U.S. Geological Survey and Caltech in Pasadena.

In a 48-hour period starting Saturday morning, 42 quakes shook just south of Bombay Beach on the Salton Sea, ranging in magnitude from 0.5 to 3.3.

via Quake Swarm: A Precursor to the Big One?.

Study Finds Troubling Pattern of Southern California Earthquakes

Large earthquakes have rumbled along a southern section of the San Andreas fault more frequently than previously believed, suggesting that Southern California could be overdue for a strong temblor on the notorious fault line, a new study has found.

The Carrizo Plain section of the San Andreas has not seen a massive quake since the much-researched Fort Tejon temblor of 1857, which at an estimated magnitude of 7.9 is considered the most powerful earthquake to hit Southern California in modern times.

But the new research by UC Irvine scientists, to be published next week, found that major quakes occurred there roughly every 137 years over the last 700 years. Until now, scientists believed big quakes occurred along the fault roughly every 200 years.

The findings are significant because seismologists have long believed this portion of the fault is capable of sparking the so-called Big One that officials have for decades warned will eventually occur in Southern California.

“It’s been long enough since 1857 that we should be concerned about another great earthquake that ruptures through this part of the fault,” said Ken Hudnut, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena who was not involved in the study.

Many scientists thought the Carrizo area produced relatively infrequent but large-scale earthquakes such as the Fort Tejon temblor. The new work suggests the area produces more quakes but also ones of a smaller magnitude than Fort Tejon, said Ray Weldon, a University of Oregon geologist who was not involved in the research but reviewed the paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research.

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Disaster Prediction: Tsunami Just the Beginning of Earthquake Supercycle, Say Scientists

Massive earthquakes in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sumatra are just the beginning. Researchers expect a 30-year cycle of mega-quakes like the one that caused the 2004 tsunami.

How can researchers predict earthquakes? By studying coral reefs in the region. Not only are coral reefs many centuries old, but their shape is a direct response to water levels. After a series of earthquakes, usually the reef winds up higher or lower than it was before - and any part of it that’s exposed to air dies.

Scientists studying Sumatran reefs say the coral there have experienced massive die-offs as well as new horizontal growth about every two hundred years. Moreover, these changes happened in fits and starts over phases of about 30 - 100 years. That suggests the area experiences what’s called an “earthquake supercycle” for several decades every two centuries.

Last year’s 8.4 quake off the coast of Sumatra is probably the first quake in a new supercycle, since the last big die-off in the coral reefs took place in 1833. Other quake cycles hit in 1374, 1596, 1675, and 1797.

Geophysicist Yehuda Bock co-authored a study published in Nature last week that asserted the recent Sumatra quakes were just the beginning. According to Science News:

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Arkansas - Series of Quakes Could Be Sign of Larger Earthquake Coming

A series of small earthquakes that rattled central Arkansas in recent weeks could be a sign of something much bigger to come.

By this weekend, seismologists hope to install three measurement devices to gather data about future temblors in the area. That information could show whether the rumbles come from heat-related geological changes or from an undiscovered fault — which could mean a risk of substantial earthquakes in the future.

“The potential for generating a high-magnitude earthquake is real,” said Haydar Al-Shukri, director of the Arkansas Earthquake Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Five earthquakes ranging in magnitude from 2.2 to 2.7 have hit central Arkansas this month. Quakes with a magnitude of 2.5 to 3 are typically the smallest felt by people.

While hundreds of earthquakes occur each year, including several in Arkansas, the location of the recent ones give Al-Shukri pause. Arkansas quakes generally occur in the state’s northeast corner, part of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, where three temblors with magnitudes of around 8 struck during the winter of 1812 and smaller ones continue today.

But central Arkansas does not have any seismic history, Al-Shukri said.

“It is abnormal. It is significant,” he said. “We need to carefully watch this activity.”

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6.3 Earthquake Off Mexico Coast

A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck near the western coast of Mexico at 7:33 p.m. local time, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site. A tsunami warning was issued for coastal areas within 100 kilometers 60 miles.

The earthquake hit 255 kilometers southwest of the city of Colima at a depth of 42 kilometers, the USGS said. The epicenter was 690 kilometers west-southwest of Mexico City.

“Earthquakes of this size sometimes generate local tsunamis that can be destructive along coasts located within 100 kilometers,” the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said in a bulletin. “No destructive widespread tsunami threat exists.”

The center put the magnitude of the quake at 6.5. There were no reports of casualties or damage.

Mexico lies in a zone where the North American, Cocos and Caribbean plates meet. These tectonic plates constantly shift, sometimes causing earthquakes which occasionally produce tsunamis. Earthquakes of magnitude 5 or more can cause considerable damage depending on their depth.

A magnitude 8 quake in September 1985 killed at least 9,500 people in Mexico and destroyed more than 4,000 buildings in Mexico City, according to the USGS Web site. Some reports put the death toll at 35,000, the USGS said.

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Minor Earthquake Rattles San Francisco Bay Area

A minor earthquake rattled the San Francisco Bay area Friday night.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s preliminary report put the quake at a 4.0-magnitude.

The temblor’s epicenter was near Alamo, Calif., about 28 miles east of San Francisco.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries in Alamo or surrounding communities, said Contra Costa County Sheriff’s spokesman Jimmy Lee.

The quake hit just after 9 p.m. and could be felt throughout the region.

Fans at the San Francisco Giants’ waterfront ballpark felt a jolt during the game with the Pittsburgh Pirates, but there was no interruption of play.

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