Two earthquakes struck within hours on the east coast this week. Are they related?

Two communities on the East Coast – 2,000km apart – woke up to unusually similar news Thursday morning.

Two separate earthquakes occurred within hours of each other.

An earthquake measuring 4.2 on the Richter scale struck 100 km off the coast of Cairns and was felt in Far North Queensland the night before.

A few hours later, the city of Grafton in northern New South Wales began to shake – the result of a magnitude 3 earthquake.

For those who don’t follow earthquakes closely, it seems like a significant event, but could the two events tell us anything about seismic activity in Australia?

Were two Queensland earthquakes linked?

The two earthquakes were on different fault lines, so even though they are on the same tectonic plate and occurred a few hours apart, they are two separate events.

People felt the earthquake in Cairns and Grafton this week. (ABC News)

The Australian tectonic plate has small cracks and fault lines across the country and on the surrounding ocean floor.

Earthquakes are the result of stress release when local fault lines are activated by plate motion.

“The big faults are where the plate boundaries are, where the Australian plate collides with the Pacific plate through Papua New Guinea and New Zealand,” said Jonathan Bathgate, Geoscience Australia’s chief seismologist.

That is why these regions have increased seismic activity compared to Australia.

“We record more than 100 magnitude 3 earthquakes every year,” Bathgate said.

“The Australian tectonic plate is constantly moving at about 7 centimeters per year to the northeast and those stresses are only activating the local fault lines that we have in our landscape.”

Is Australia experiencing an increase in seismic activity?

no. Although Melbourne was hit by a magnitude 4 earthquake late last month, Bathgate believes Australians are noticing more seismic activity due to the increased accessibility of earthquake data on websites such as Geoscience Australia.

“Australia gets more earthquakes than people realize,” Bathgate said.

He said Australia records many events that generally go unnoticed by the public.

“The earthquakes we’ve seen in Melbourne aren’t that unusual, we get a number in that area and further east in the Gippsland area,” Bathgate said.

There is also a history of seismic events occurring offshore near Cairns, with a magnitude 4 earthquake hitting the area about every 10 years.

Although Australia tends to experience earthquakes in “random locations”, the Grafton earthquake was not typical.

“It’s unusual, the Grafton area hasn’t recorded a lot of earthquakes for us,” the seismologist said.

How are earthquakes measured?

Seismographs are called seismometers.

They were first placed in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth in the early 1900s, and at the time, they could only measure large earthquakes.

There are now more than 100 seismograph stations across Australia.

“We can now capture and record smaller earthquakes than ever before,” Bathgate said.

Seismometers are buried several meters deep in the ground.

They are very sensitive to seismic waves, which occur in earthquakes when rocks rub against each other and create vibrations.

The vibrations are then transmitted through the rocks and passed through the machine.

It is then recorded and fed back to the National Earthquake Warning System in Canberra.

The largest earthquake in the history of Australia

The most destructive earthquake in the history of the country, with a magnitude of 5.4, struck Newcastle on December 28, 1989.

The damaged George Hotel after the 1989 Newcastle earthquake (Newcastle District Library Collection)

13 people died, 160 were hospitalized and many buildings collapsed.

The largest earthquake in Australia with a magnitude of 6.6 was recorded when it shook Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory in 1988.

“It certainly did some damage to the gas pipelines and infrastructure,” Bathgate said.

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