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M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

earthquake.usgs.gov

301–310 of 384 posts

Re: M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thought process was: I know earthquakes aren’t really weather, so I’ll tack on “thingies” to make it clear that I’m making up some new more generalized term. The point was to group all the… I dunno, whatever, surprising attacks by the planet into one thing. I can’t think of a real term for this, I think there might not be one, I guess I could call it something like “weather or geological surprises” but that’s jus…

Sim City "Disaster" menu items

The SC2K siren sfx file just played itself in my head.

Re: M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

#302

If any west-coasters are confused as to how this is news: the Northeast is sort of geologically unusual for the US in that we have almost no surprising, sudden weather thingies. No tornados, mild thunderstorm, occasional hurricanes (but they are usually weakened a bit compared to, like, Florida by the time they get up here and they’ve spent a long time going up the coast so they tend to be well tracked by forecasters…

> almost no surprising, sudden weather thingies

I had never been anywhere near a hurricane in my life before I moved to NYC. I thought that was just something you worried about in the Caribbean or occasionally Florida.

Re: M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

#303

Felt that very strongly in southern Westchester county NY. Not like the 2011 earthquake I felt in NYC, which was kind of slow and made the building I was in sway violently; this was more like the vibrations from a huge truck passing nearby, but more intense. Loud and very unpleasant, about 15 seconds duration. Did not like that at all, am now inspecting all our services like gas and water for disruption, checking for…

As a native Californian this provokes a bit of a chuckle. Try a six plus sometime! But seriously, I hope everything is fine.

As an easterner who lived in California for many years, the breathless news coverage of a tiny thunderstorm in CA which had a bit of lightning provoked a bit of a chuckle. The report was accompanied with statistics about how rarely lightning injured people and there was no real cause for concern.

Re: M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a 4.8 lol

> it's a 4.8 lol Equivalent in lateral motion/shakiness to a California 6.0 due to the shallow depth of the 4.8

Lol, now you are making stuff up.

Most local magnitude scales are

>>> determined from the logarithm of the amplitude of waves recorded by seismographs. Adjustments are included to compensate for the variation in the distance between the various seismographs and the epicenter of the earthquake[1].

So unless people in the East have seismographs located farther underground with scientists staffing them really deep underground -for reasons beyond me- "Shallow depth" is irrelevant.

Also, there's no such thing as a "feels like X magnitude" earthquake [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_scale

[2] https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/22348/what-...

Re: M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

#305

If any west-coasters are confused as to how this is news: the Northeast is sort of geologically unusual for the US in that we have almost no surprising, sudden weather thingies. No tornados, mild thunderstorm, occasional hurricanes (but they are usually weakened a bit compared to, like, Florida by the time they get up here and they’ve spent a long time going up the coast so they tend to be well tracked by forecasters…

I cannot speak for California, but in PNW there is even less “surprising, sudden weather thingies.” Rain is not pouring, unlike on east coast (speaking from my expeirences in both NYC and Atlanta), it is just drizzling at a very low rate. It doesnt thunderstorm. I’ve heard thunder iirc only 2-3 times in my 7 years living there. No tornados or tsunamis. No massive blizzards out of nowhere. I felt this earthquake in NY…

I thought California had a lot of Earthquakes.

Oregon is full of volcanoes and about to slip off the continental shelf, right? But I guess those surprises just exists in potential form.

Re: M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

#306
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the speed of sound (through the earth, so faster than the speed of sound in air); yes. In California, typically usgs has earthquakes posted before I can feel them. They didn't have this one a few minutes after I felt it, so I feel like automatic earthquake detection is off in this area of the US.

In the Bay Area, everyone gets an SMS message that says an earthquake is coming. I've felt/heard the shaking 10-20 seconds later. Some industrial equipment shuts down to avoid damage.

We felt it at 10:26 am ET. And an alert was sent to everyone at 11:24 am that an earthquake is coming. And then another one alerting for possibility of aftershocks. No aftershocks felt.

Re: M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

#307
post #142

Holy shit what a ride! Sitting at home in my office in Ozone Park NYC and I hear what I think is a low flying plane coming in to JFK. Happens when weather is bad and they come in lower they can rattle my windows. But the intensity grew suddenly and my entire house was shaking and everything was rattling. At first I froze for a few seconds as I could not make sense of what I was experiencing - but it was clear this wa…

I've never been in an earthquake it's got to be such a strange thing to experience the first time. Hearing tornado sirens for the first time was wild, especially as a Silent Hill fan. On the other hand my friend moved to Brooklyn from Haiti after their terrible quake so he's in a mood right now.

when all the fracking quakes were happening a while back i felt one in Dallas. I was sitting outside at a coffeshop working. It felt like a big truck drove by but when i looked up there was no traffic at all. very strange sensation.

Re: M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4.7 is not really a strong earthquake, it s routine in earthquake-prone zones NYC quake was at shallow depth. 4.7 quake at 1 km depth will shake more at the surface than a 6.0 at 30 km depth

USGS shows it as 4.8 at 4.7 km https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?currentFeatureI... The Belden quake is 4.4 at 7.8 km, and 4.2 at 5 km. It's a log scale so the Whitehouse quake is much larger, but the significance of the quake seems to be more than just these numbers because Belden quake is irrelevant (didn't make the news really). Sarupathar was a 5.8 (huge comparatively) at 10 km. Hualien was 5.1 at 15.9…

> Hualien was 5.1 at 15.9 km

That's just an aftershock.

The main quake was three days ago. M 7.4 according to USGS: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000m9g4...

So for an earthquake that's almost 1000x as strong, you'd think it'd be talked about more.

Re: M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

#309

So since I live near epicenter, there's one thing that changed geographically very recently. Nearby round valley reservoir was being worked on for years, last fall they got the authorization to pump it back to full and it was told it might take years. Rainy asf winter though so it's pumped back almost full from already 66% to 92% now. I'm wondering if billions of gallons of water getting added nearby affected pressur…

It's possible. Seismicity has been associated with reservoirs[1] (the most well known is probably an earthquake in Egypt following the construction of the Aswan High Dam) and even rainfall[2]. There are both potential triggers from the increase in the stress on the fault, as you state, due to the weight of the water; and (probably more important) the increase in pore fluid pressure along the fault.

It's a bit complicated, because the increase in stress on the fault from the weight of the reservoir can actually be primarily an increase in normal stress, i.e. an increase in the clamping force preventing the fault from slipping (i.e. the crust on either side of the fault sliding, i.e. the earthquake), so the weight of the reservoir can actually impede, rather than promote, seismicity. However if the geometry of the system is just right such that the increase in shear stress from the weight of the reservoir can increase on the fault, then the reservoir could really trigger the earthquake. Typically, though, the increase in pore fluid pressure is the most likely trigger as it's not geometry dependent--pumping a fracture with fluids will always promote failure. This is what happens with the seismicity associated with natural gas fracking and subsequent wastewater fluid injection.

The thing that is hard to grapple with all of this is that changes in stress and fluid pressure on the fault are really, really small compared with the ambient stress and fluid pressure. These are tiny changes, but there is good reason to believe that many faults, especially those in seismically active areas, are very close to frictional failure (i.e., slipping and producing an earthquake) all the time. So therefore little things can perturb the system. However, it's worth keeping in mind that most of these small changes slightly increase or decrease the time to failure (as the primary loading that is causing the stress on the fault is probably continually happening at very low rates), rather than being the ultimate cause of the earthquake.

[1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=dam...

[2]: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...

Re: M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

#310

Holy shit what a ride! Sitting at home in my office in Ozone Park NYC and I hear what I think is a low flying plane coming in to JFK. Happens when weather is bad and they come in lower they can rattle my windows. But the intensity grew suddenly and my entire house was shaking and everything was rattling. At first I froze for a few seconds as I could not make sense of what I was experiencing - but it was clear this wa…

> At first I froze for a few seconds as I could not make sense of what I was experiencing

i hate that feeling, a few weeks ago i was walking my dogs and surprised by a pitbill and some other mix that immediately attacked my two small dogs. It took like 5-10 seconds for me to even figure out what was happening and what to do about it.

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