The agricultural group of El Centro in Imperial County had a impolite midnight awakening: the power of a magnitude 4.8 earthquake and a prolonged sequence of aftershocks.
The earthquake struck round 12:36 a.m. Tuesday 2 miles northwest of El Centro, in an space simply off the Salton Sea that has energetic faults, mentioned U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Elizabeth Cochran.
The earthquake was adopted by a magnitude 4.5 aftershock. Within the 12 hours after that, greater than 180 aftershocks of decrease magnitude had been recorded.
If the shaking wasn’t sufficient, some residents had been roused by the alarm their cellphone acquired from the ShakeAlert app, which initially estimated that the temblor was stronger than it proved to be. “Fairly horrible to be woken up at midnight with a loud alert telling you to take [cover] (in a number of languages) for one thing we didn’t even really feel,” @MattInformed mentioned on X.com (previously often known as Twitter).
This type of seismic tumult isn’t an unusual incidence on this area, nonetheless.
“On this specific space the place [the earth’s] crust itself is hotter than common, we get these fairly energetic sequences the place we see tons and many aftershocks,” Cochran mentioned. When an earthquake sequence occurs, she mentioned, a lot of the aftershocks are a minimum of one magnitude unit smaller than the primary shake.
Residents near the epicenter would have felt reasonable shaking that “could be fairly horrifying for folk who’re shut by,” Cochran mentioned.
However, little or no harm is anticipated from that stage of shaking. No harm or accidents had been reported within the hours after the quakes began.
Over the last earthquake sequence within the space, in 2021, the primary shock was a magnitude 5 temblor, Cochran mentioned.
