The fans of the New England Patriots celebrating their team’s hosting of the AFC Championship Game this weekend weren’t the only thing causing the ground to shake in New England.
The U.S. Geological Survey reports that a series of five earthquakes rocked eastern Connecticut area on Monday. The strongest quake, magnitude 3.1, was felt in parts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
The USGS says that four of the quakes struck in a 20 minute span starting around 6:30 a.m. Eastern Time.
John Ebel, senior research scientists at the Western Observatory told WCVB-TV the quakes are not as unusual as you would think for that area. He stated there is a tectonic plate from the West Coast to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
He said the quakes are caused by pressure being rleleased from those two boundaries.
A swarm of earthquakes has struck in the Dallas area.
Part of the blame is being thrown toward the Dallas Cowboys.
Seismologists have been placing monitoring stations around the site of the old Texas Stadium, the longtime home of the Dallas Cowboys. The stadium was imploded April 2010.
A fault line ran directly underneath the stadium’s location. Seismologists say it’s possible the implosion caused stress energy in the fault to release causing small shifts.
“If you beat on this and shake it, it’s going to have a tendency to slide. Not the big ones [faults], but all the little ones,” Dr. Len Kubicek, a geology professor at nearby North Lake College told CBS. “It can splinter into several faults and one of these little faults, especially where that stadium was, you do an explosion on top of it and beat it up and down — it has a tendency to move.”
Environmentalists say that it’s more likely wastewater injected during fracking is the cause of the quakes. However, Dr. Kubicek and state officials say there are no fracking wells within the city.
Dr. Kubicek says it’s unlikely there will be a huge quake.
“If you get a lot of small earthquakes you’re probably not going to ever get a big one. Because if you have a big earthquake you have to have a lot of stored energy; and if you keep having little ones you can’t store it.”
The U.S. Geological Survey reported a magnitude 3.9 earthquake struck Tuesday off the coast of San Pedro, California.
The tremor struck around 3:26 p.m.
The epicenter was 16 miles from Long Beach and 14 miles from Rancho Palos Verdes. The quake was reportedly shallow at a depth of 2 miles.
Residents of the area said that the quake felt a lot bigger than the USGS report.
“Felt much stronger than a 3.9,” Chris DuRee, who was near downtown Long Beach, told KTLA-TV. “Rattled softly and then a few strong rolls. No damage anywhere.”
No reports of significant damage or injuries according to local officials.
Los Angeles is one earthquake away from losing a major part of their water supply.
The city of Los Angeles gets almost 90 percent of its water from three major aqueducts. These aqueducts run from the Colorado River, Owens Valley and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
The aqueducts cross the well-known San Andreas Fault a total of 32 times.
This means any major quake along that fault line could end the water supply into the nation’s second largest city.
Mayor Eric Garcetti is calling on city officials to create better plans to protect the city’s water supply.
“[Water is] one of L.A.’s greatest earthquake vulnerabilities,” Garcetti told the L.A. Times. “If it were to take six months to get our water system back … residents and businesses would be forced to relocate for so long that they might never come back.”
Officials are looking to San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission for a possible solution. The SFPUC recently installed a specially designed pipe over a fault line that has “accordion-like joints” that would allow the pipe to flex and move in any direction should the fault line move.
“We’re the first city that’s really bet its life on outside water,” U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones told the Times. “We have to cross the faults. There’s no way to not go over the fault.”
“There should be a serious dialogue among the agencies that are responsible for the three sources of water to Southern California,” said Thomas O’Rourke, a Cornell University engineering professor. “Sometimes it’s very difficult to go beyond those institutional barriers…. Somebody just has to take it up.”
An earthquake rattled northern Arizona Sunday night.
The U.S. Geological Survey reported the 4.7 magnitude quake centered 7 miles north of Sedona and was 6 miles deep. While no homes reported damage, the highway department had to clear rocks and debris from highways between Sedona and Flagstaf.
“Business as usual,” said David Brumbaugh, director of the Arizona Earthquake Information Center at Northern Arizona University told azfamily.com. “It’s nothing unusual to have earthquakes in this part of the state. Most of them are too small to be felt.”
The USGS reported over 1,200 people said they felt the quake.
“I think what I heard was the house kind of rattling,” said Donna Kearney Lomeo, a Sedona real estate agent, told azfamily. “It sounded like a bunch of balls rolling around on the roof.”
Smaller aftershocks have been felt in the region.
A magnitude 6.7 earthquake rattled Japan late Saturday night leaving crumpled homes and dozens injured.
Aftershocks continued to shake the area and villagers fled their homes to shelters after at least 50 homes collapsed after the initial quake. Officials say that because the homes are built to withstand feet of heavy snow in the winter, it kept more homes from collapsing.
However, the homes that fell resulted in broken bones after heavy furniture fell on residents as they slept on their tatami floors.
The quake, which struck just west of Nagano at a depth of 3 miles, struck along a very active fault according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
Officials say most of the residents of the area are elderly and that younger residents are working to care for those who were injured and who lost their homes.
The largest earthquake to shake Kansas since a series of small quakes began to shake the state last year struck Wednesday.
The 4.8 magnitude quake struck about 25 miles southwest of Wichita around 3:40 p.m. local time. The quake followed a 2.6 magnitude quake on Tuesday.
Sharon Watson of Kansas Emergency Management said only minor damage was reported throughout the region. One home reportedly had its foundation cracked by an uprooted tree.
Oklahoma officials reported no damage.
Kansas has recorded more than 90 earthquakes since 2013 according to the Kansas Geological Survey.
Alaska has been shaken by the second earthquake in three days.
A magnitude 5.0 quake struck 10 miles northeast of Minto, Alaska around 8:30 a.m. Thursday morning. The quake was measured around 10 miles deep.
The quake follows a magnitude 5.1 quake that rattled Interior Alaska on Monday.
Residents say that despite the government saying the quake had a lesser magnitude than Monday’s, the quake felt “stronger and longer” than Monday’s. A resident in Fairbanks, Alaska said that dishes fell off shelves and others reported objects in their homes damaged because of the quake.
The quakes took place on the same fault that caused more significant earthquakes in the same region this summer.
A major earthquake shook northern Japan on Saturday.
The magnitude 6.3 quake struck around 12:35 p.m. local time under the ocean about 400 miles north northeast of Tokyo. The quake was 8.4 miles underground and did not produce a tsunami.
Because of the location of the quake, only a small amount of damage and minor injuries were reported.
Meanwhile, Japan’s nuclear regulatory commission said that the tsunami in 2011 was the cause of the damage and meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The massive earthquake did not cause enough damage to launch the plant into a meltdown.
The plant also announced last week they had made improvements that would now require an 89 foot wave to cause damage.
A NASA radar device has found previously unknown Napa Valley fault lines in the wake of the massive 6.0 Napa quake.
The 6.0 quake, which killed one woman and injured 170 people, was the biggest to shake northern California in 25 years. Over 800 homes were damaged and so far 103 are officially too damaged to repair.
As scientists from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey discovered the West Napa Fault moved 18 inches along its 9.3-mile long length, they discovered a series of smaller faults that run parallel to West Napa Fault. The new small faults are believed to let off some of the strain on the region but are likely not significant enough to cause major quakes on their own.
“These really tiny ones are probably not big enough faults to have a significant earthquake, but it’s a good thing to have people go out and check whether they are part of a larger fault system,” said Eric Fielding, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
USGS scientists say that the data is likely going to cause a revision in the quake’s magnitude up a tenth of a point to 6.1 when final data is assimilated.
