Wild Land

A burst of earthquake activity struck the Kermadec Islands early this morning.

 

 

Sunday, 29^th January 2012

 

More than a dozen earthquakes struck in the vicinity of Raoul Island in the Kermadec Islands early this morning.  Six of the earthquakes were 5^th magnitude, striking over a period of just over 2 hours.

 

The largest of the sequence struck at 6:43 New Zealand Daylight Time this morning.  This magnitude 5.8 event was centred 47 km east of Raoul Island at a depth of 32 km.  Five minutes later a magnitude 5.3 quake struck 71 km east-south-east of Raoul at a depth of 37 km.

 

At 7:18 a magnitude 5.2 earthquake, centred 112 km east-south-east of Raoul Island at depth of 30 km was detected.  A magnitude 5.4 quake centred 70 km east-south-east of Raoul at a depth of 29 km struck at 7:49 a.m.

 

At 8:06 a magnitude 5.4 earthquake was detected 342 km east of Raoul Island at a depth of 19 km.  This was followed by a magnitude 5.0 earthquake centred 86 km east-south-east of Raoul Island at a depth of 15 km at 9 a.m.  The activity appears to have ceased at that time.

 

[click for larger image]  GeoNet’s seismograph on Raoul Island captured the traces of the dozen or so earthquakes that struck this morning.

 

[Compiled from data provided by the U.S. Geological Survey and its contributing agencies; and the GeoNet project and its sponsors EQC, GNS Science and FRST.]

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2012 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Earthquakes - Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.