Why did the East Coast earthquake cover such a large area of ​​land?

Friday morning at approximately 10:30 local time, a 4.8 magnitude earthquake struck three miles below Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Although they were nowhere near as powerful as the massive quakes that struck the West Coast, the seismic waves traveled hundreds of miles, slamming not only near New York City, but also Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The US Geological Survey urged the region to prepare for smaller aftershocks.

For a region not accustomed to earthquakes, it was a jolt. It turns out that its widespread impact was not an anomaly, but a byproduct of the East Coast's unique geology of ancient fault lines and rock formation.

“Earthquakes in this area are uncommon, but not unexpected,” seismologist Paul Earle, of the USGS National Earthquake Information Center, said in a press call Friday. “Earthquakes on the East Coast are felt much farther away — four or five times — than a similar earthquake on the West Coast.”

In 2011, for example, the shock of a 5.8 magnitude earthquake in Virginia was felt from up to 600 miles away, while a 6.8 earthquake a few years later in Napa, California — which produced twice the energy — traveled less than half that distance. Since the East Coast is more populated than the West Coast, this means that a large number of people over a much wider area will feel at least a little shaking, even if its magnitude is much smaller than something like the Loma Prieta earthquake. Which devastated the Gulf region in 1989.

Crowded East Coast residents can blame the geology beneath their feet. On the West Coast, an extensive network of faults appears all the time along active plate boundaries, sending shockwaves across the landscape. “We have new faults forming, and we have old faults that are stressed and fractured in large earthquakes,” says Folarin Kolawole, a structural geologist at Columbia University.

But when an earthquake occurs in a particular fault, there are adjacent gaps through which the energy is distributed. Basically, because there are so many faults along the active plate in the western United States, it has a lot of channels to absorb earthquake energy, i.e. subterranean shock absorbers, of sorts.

While the USGS has not yet identified the exact fault responsible for today's earthquake, it occurred in an area where the fault system is more stable than on the West Coast. It appears that an inactive fault was reactivated Friday morning under New Jersey, somewhere in the Ramapo fault system.

The relative stability of the East Coast fault system is due to its geological age: its rocks formed hundreds of millions of years earlier than those on the West Coast. Geologically, the East Coast is a quiet old man, while the West Coast is a rambunctious teenager.

“We don't have that tectonic complexity on the East Coast,” says Gregory Mountain, a geophysicist at Rutgers University. “We had that in the geologic past, hundreds of millions of years ago, but things were pretty well solidified — is one way to call it — and stabilized. That's why, on the East Coast, the seismic energy would probably travel a little farther and The energy loss is less with distance.

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