Earthquakes shake things up in Nevada

Seismic sensors near the small town of Goldfield, Nevada, lit up like a Christmas tree in early September when more than 300 earthquakes, often too small to be felt by the average person, shook the area.

Such activity is normal throughout the Silver State, said Dr. Christy Rowe, director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory on the University of Nevada Reno campus.

The Nevada Seismological Laboratory, or NSL, has a network of more than 300 earthquake sensors, known as seismometers, across Nevada and parts of California. These sensors picked up the earthquakes near Goldfield and quickly triangulated their location and strength.

“Most of the quakes were below magnitude 2. So the people who were there in Goldfield probably felt some, but our machines felt hundreds,” Rowe said.

Small swarms like these don't necessarily mean a larger quake is on the way, she said, and Nevada is no stranger to shifting ground — over the past five years, the Silver State has seen an average of 15,000 earthquakes a year. However, like the last swarm, most of them are very small.

“We were getting 40 or 50 earthquakes a day with one magnitude there,” Rowe said. “The amount of rock that breaks in a single magnitude earthquake—the size of a pea or a marble—may be really small. But if it occurs over tens of kilometers of a fault zone, it means something is changing tectonically in the Earth.”

Rowe said earthquakes usually follow a pattern in magnitude and frequency, which means that really large earthquakes are rare, moderate earthquakes are rare, and small earthquakes are common. Nevada is vulnerable to these small earthquakes because of its unique tectonic structure.

“Nevada is so great because the state stands apart, and it does so in a very unique way.” Rue said. “So usually when a continent breaks up, we get something like the Red Sea, or in the Gulf of California, or in Iceland, where it breaks up into a central rift, and then half the continent can move away from that rift.”

When a continent splits along a central fault, it focuses all the earthquakes along that one fault, but things in Nevada are a little different.

“What's happening in Nevada and across Utah is that North America is slowly expanding. We have lots and lots of little cracks that are all working together to extend North America, and that's why Nevada is the fastest-growing state — by kilometers, not by population,” Rowe said. .

Dr. Jim Faulds, associate director of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology and a University of North Carolina professor, also shed some light on the state's very dynamic landscape.

“Tectonically, we add about two acres to the state every year,” Faulds said. “Let's say we went back 20 million years, and the distance between Salt Lake City and Reno was half what it is today. That's how much the crust has expanded.

These many faults in our environment also accommodate the movement of other tectonic plates beyond our borders. Western Nevada and eastern California have a fault zone that accounts for 25 percent of the movement between the Pacific and North American plates, Foulds said. The famous San Andreas Fault in California absorbs 75 percent of this movement, but he said we compensate for the rest.

These moving imperfections are also the reason for our unique aquarium and landscape. Faulds said that when the Earth's crust expands, it breaks apart, forming faults that move and collide with each other, raising mountains and toppling valleys, one earthquake after another.

The history of past earthquakes may be written in the landscape, but as for predicting the next big one, Rowe said that's a little trickier.

“[We] “I don't know when the next earthquake will come, but the big mountains and big valleys we have here indicate that this has already been happening for tens of millions of years and will continue to happen in the future,” Rowe said. “It could be tomorrow, or in 1,000 years.”

Looking to the future, Rowe said she hopes to expand the research in the state and incorporate an earthquake early warning system in Nevada like the one in California. This would give people a quick 10 to 40 second alert if there was a major earthquake on the way.

“In Reno we have faults running through the city, which are potentially dangerous faults,” Rowe said. “We also know that there are large earthquakes coming off the Tahoe Basin and other faults a little further away and that an earthquake early warning system would work with that scenario.”

Regardless, it's always important to be prepared in the event of an earthquake or natural disaster, both Volz and Rowe said. They said it's important to make sure you have food, water and a plan for where to go during an earthquake.

“There's a temptation to run outside, but you usually don't want to do that, and you want to get away from heavy things. Stone and brick facing masonry is one of the things that falls down,” Rowe said. “You want to have a plan ready for where you're going to go looking.” About safety in the event of an earthquake. So I have this giant oak desk, and nothing is going to get through this desk. So this is where I go.

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