Why was the New Jersey earthquake felt hundreds of miles away?

Wendy Bohun, an earthquake geologist, was reading the budget report Friday morning at her home in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, when she felt the unmistakable light shaking the quake. The cat didn't wake up. The dog looked around. The plant swayed.

The tremors traveled about 160 miles to Bohun's home from a 4.8 magnitude earthquake near Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. It was a moderate earthquake from a geological point of view, with similar-sized earthquakes occurring frequently around the world. But it was a relatively rare event on the East Coast, one that prompted people across the mid-Atlantic and Northeast to break away from their daily routines.

More than 150,000 people reported feeling the New Jersey quake, some from several hundred miles away, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which collects reports on tremors. While the number of reports reflects the population density of the area, it also highlights a fundamental geological difference between the tectonically active west coast and the east coast, which is covered by ancient faults that are sometimes reactivated.

The underlying rocks on the East Coast are old, cold, and dense, and the faults have had time to heal, which means seismic waves travel farther up the West Coast, where the Earth's crust is being pulled apart by the faults.

A 4.8-magnitude quake “is generally not large enough to cause damage, but large enough to be widely felt,” said Susan Hough, a seismologist with the US Geological Survey. “Once an earthquake occurs, waves travel more efficiently in the east than in the west – the crust is older, cooler and less disintegrated – and this is something we have seen time and time again. I put a [4.8] “In California, it won't be felt nearly as much as this.”

Although earthquakes larger than magnitude 4 were not a frequent event on the East Coast, such events are not unexpected, several geologists said. In 2017, a 4.1 magnitude earthquake struck near Dover, Delaware. The 5.8-magnitude earthquake near Mineral, Virginia, in 2011 is believed to have been felt by more people than any earthquake in US history, and it caused extensive damage, including in Washington, D.C. Washington National Monument and Cathedral in D.C. A 4.6 magnitude earthquake struck near Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1994.

The New Jersey earthquake, which occurred at 10:23 a.m. Friday, was relatively shallow, just three miles below the surface. The quake will continue to be investigated, but Christopher Carchedi, a seismologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, said a common cause of such quakes on the East Coast is that the ground's surface has changed after being weighed down by ice sheets from the last time. ice Age.

“It is otherwise an inactive fault, an adjustment for ice loss, most likely,” Carchedi said.

The area is generally considered a “passive margin” between North America and the Atlantic Ocean, meaning there is no active rifting or plate boundary, Hogg said. But she notes that one of her colleagues calls it “the passive-aggressive fringe — because it can bite you sometimes.”

“Moderate earthquakes in the East are always uncommon enough to be interesting,” Hogue said, noting that Friday's earthquakes will be studied more intensively.

As soon as she felt the tremors, Bohun started counting down. Earthquakes unleash multiple types of seismic waves that travel through the Earth at different speeds. Measuring the time between the first shock and the next set of waves can give a rough estimate of how close they are, similar to measuring the time between a flash of lightning and a roar of thunder.

Bohun got eight seconds, so she knew the epicenter wasn't very close. Then she started looking up local earthquake reports to make sure she wasn't imagining it.

I swear I just felt the earthquake in Maryland,

— Wendy Bohun, PhD 🌏 (@DrWendyRocks) April 5, 2024

It has long been known that earthquakes travel farther on the East Coast than on the West Coast. The US Geological Survey says the quakes could be felt over an area 10 times larger on the East Coast.

“On the West Coast, the rocks are warmer, so they're more active, and they've seen activity recently, so they're warmer and will attenuate or absorb some of the seismic energy as it passes through that rock,” Carchedi said. .

In contrast, the rocks are cold and brittle on the East Coast, and they transmit seismic energy much better than on the West Coast.

Bohun said Friday's quake is a reminder that while people think of earthquakes as a West Coast phenomenon, they can happen anywhere.

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