Why did earthquakes hit Virginia? Are the areas at risk?

“Quake weather” may be a myth, but Virginia is seeing more seismic activity.

Richland – The earth is starting to shake. It’s just a slight twitch at first, but nevertheless unmistakable. As earthquakes progress, the tremors get stronger. Within seconds, the ground erupts violently, splitting the Earth in half.

“It’s not really happening,” said Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the USGS National Seismic Information Center. “This is a product of Hollywood movies.”

But what happens are seismic events. And in Virginia, this happens more frequently than many residents might realize. From January 2020 to January 31, 2021, eight earthquakes centered on Virginia rocked the state, according to the Volcano Discovery.

A 2.9-magnitude earthquake jolted Richlands late Thursday night. Before 11 pm, residents felt the start of rumbling.

Shaky scenario

While the Richland earthquake was not as large as some other earthquakes, Caruso explained that the magnitude of the earthquake does not necessarily depend on whether or not people feel the tremors.

“There are a lot of variables that go into how earthquakes are felt. Deep earthquakes in the depths of the earth are not felt by people with the same strength,” Caruso said. “It depends too [on] How close are people to the epicenter. It also depends, if they are in a house, what kind of soil is in the house, or whether it is on a rocky foundation. All these factors affect people’s feelings of an earthquake. “

This does not mean that size plays a minor role in the overall impact of an earthquake.

“Sometimes, earthquakes, even in a magnitude of three or four, can cause some light damage, maybe crack the cement or things like that,” Caruso said. “Between, like, its strength is four or five, you can get bigger cracks. People may feel that force, and they feel the vibration strongly.”

The larger the earthquake and the closer to the surface, the greater the likelihood of significant damage.

“Once we get to the five-degree range, this is where we really start to see the damage to the buildings. It appears that the chimneys in particular have been damaged by earthquakes.” When they reach a magnitude of 5.5, Caruso said. It was then that we were really starting to see massive damage. We have been killed by four-magnitude earthquakes in some other countries, where people live in mud buildings that collapse from earthquakes. “

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While seismic activity in Richland has proven legitimate, Caruso cautioned against believing every earthquake in the Commonwealth came from a sliding fault line. Some “earthquakes” in Virginia are not earthquakes at all, especially in the Appalachian regions and the Western State.

“Sometimes we record mine explosions on our seismometers, but we don’t report them as earthquakes,” Caruso said. “When we locate those, generally before we publish the earthquake online, we are looking to find out exactly where that earthquake is and we have an index of all the mines in the US. So if the earthquake ends up on a mine, we know it might be an explosion.”

It’s not uncommon for an Earth-shaking event to occur weekly in the state’s western region – but not from a moving tectonic plate.

“It happens quite often, especially, for example, on a Friday afternoon, we have a lot of these,” Caruso said. “Mines usually do their thing on Friday afternoon before all the people leave and then they can come to mine coal or whatever they mine after the dust settles the next day.”

A-Look-At-Virginias-Seismic-Zones Image courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. This highlights the locations of known earthquake foci in Virginia. East Tennessee is green, Giles County is blue and Central Virginia is pink. Emergency preparedness

Now, despite what you may have heard, there is no such thing as “earthquake weather.” You cannot predict an earthquake due to external conditions. This argument goes back to the fourth century BC in Greece, where the philosopher Aristotle said that the earthquakes were caused by trapped winds, gushing from caves into the ground. It was thought that a hot and calm day was an approaching earthquake.

He was wrong. Thanks to seismology, we know that earthquakes are caused by the movement of tectonic plates in the Earth. Here in Virginia, we sit near the center of a tectonic plate, so we don’t experience earthquakes very often. However, they still came. The state is divided into three regions of activity, including the East Tennessee, Giles County, and Central Virginia regions. Even with this information available, we cannot determine when the following information will occur.

“No one can predict earthquakes,” Caruso said. “People have been trying for thousands of years.”

We may not be able to predict, but we know more about its causes. Cal Tech University recently released a study that said rain, or lack of it, could play a role. A group of Cal Tech researchers looked at earthquake activity in the Himalayas.

They found that during wet periods with heavy rains, the amount of seismic activity decreases. When the weather is dry, as the weight of water on the earth’s crust decreases, seismic activity increases. So if you have a dry season or a drought, there is a much better chance of an earthquake.

Amy Knowles report on Dogwood. You can reach her at [email protected]

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