I didn't feel this one, but this morning at 1:38am EDT we had another earthquake in Illinois. This one was a 4.5, so we felt it in Louisville. There was no damage here from it, but this is the sign times to come. It looks like we could be dealing with aftershocks for quite a while due to the persistence of activity. Hopefully we don't get anything worse than a 5.2 again, because it seems thats the damage threshold for this area and the threshold for many people's nerves around here. We're not known for many earthquakes like this, so this is very strange to many. I've read reports that these are both good or bad. They can be good by relieving the fault of its pressure, but bad by possibly waking up the New Madrid fault, just south of the area we're getting our quakes from. We don't want to hear from the New Madrid anytime soon...
At least the weather's good though! We're steady at 70 degrees in the suburbs right now and that pattern looks to continue until at least Thursday. Temperatures will be on the rise as well, but nothing above the lower 80's. We'll also have more fog tomorrow morning. There was so much fog this morning in my neighborhood that not even my fog lights on my car did any good. Be careful out there!
2 comments:
It really isn't all that uncommon for quakes on the Wabash Valley fault. The 5.2 Friday, another 5.0 in 2002... This fault has been the source of 5.0 earthquakes every 5-10 years... We just haven't felt them like the past couple of days. I'm not sure I agree with your idea that multiple smaller quakes mean no big ones in the future. Probably that any 7.0 or greater are just very rare on the fault lines in this part of the country. On the order of once every 500 years or more. I believe the last big one on the New Madrid was in 1812. Finally, our 5.2 last Friday was on the 102nd anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Maybe just a reminder from Mother Nature?
I have family in SE Mo and NE near the New Madrid fault so they have felt tremors quite a bit I'm sure.
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