Christmas earthquake in Colorado Springs? It's happened before weather

According to the National Weather Service in Pueblo, the chances of a white Christmas are fairly slim this year.

But a shaking Christmas, in the form of an earthquake, is not completely out of the question. It's happened before.

On December 25, 1994, just after noon, a 4.0 magnitude earthquake was felt on the north end of the city, with residents reporting tremors between Colorado Springs and Castle Rock, according to the US Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado.

“It caused some damage, but it wasn't extensive,” said William Yeak, a seismologist with the US Geological Survey.

“4.0 is very small. People will feel it — and it would have been very surprising in Colorado — but it's not a very big earthquake in the grand scheme of things.”

The geological agency tracks and maps seismic activity across the United States, amounting to about 50 earthquakes a day, or roughly 20,000 a year, according to the USGS website.

Compared to highly active states like California, Hawaii and Alaska, seismic activity in Colorado is fairly rare, Yick said. The type of seismic activity that causes severe damage to homes and buildings — magnitude 6.0 or greater — is extremely rare in the Centennial State.

The largest earthquake recorded in Colorado occurred in 1882 in the northern part of the state, west of Fort Collins, officials said. It reached a magnitude of 6.6, according to USGS records, and was “felt slightly in Utah and Kansas.”

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Also from the USGS archives: “In Denver, power was cut off after an iron bolt connecting the drive pulley in two in the electrical power building broke; Another nail was bent out of shape. The buildings shook violently and residents fled from their doors. Plaster fell and windows were shattered As far north as Laramie, Wyoming, plaster fell from the ceiling of a building at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Observers also reported that the walls of a railroad depot in Louisville had cracked, that timbers had splintered at a house in LaPorte, and that the walls of one house had cracked badly and plaster had fallen off near Thompson, Colorado.

The largest recent earthquake in southern Colorado was a magnitude 5.3 near Trinidad in 2011.

“In Colorado, we are not at the tectonic plate boundary,” Yick said. “There are faults in Colorado — there are faults literally everywhere, because a fault is really just a crack in the Earth's crust — but we don't have the type of geology that can host a lot of seismic activity.”

According to the Colorado Geological Survey website, there are thousands of faults in Colorado, although most are small. About 90 of them are potentially active.

“In southern Colorado, there are some notable drawbacks that people might be concerned about,” Yick said. “There is the Sangre de Cristo Fault, which runs along the eastern edge of the San Luis Basin, and the Cheraw Fault, which is located near La Junta.”

If you feel the ground shaking, or if the ornaments on your Christmas tree start bouncing more than usual, it may not necessarily be an earthquake. But it may be so.

“Things like sonic booms can also cause shaking, so it may not actually be an earthquake,” Yeik said. “But if you experience tremors, report it to us at usgs.gov, and we will look into it.”

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