A brief burst of earthquake activity occurred in the Bay of Plenty and southern Kermadec Islands last evening.
The sequence of three quakes began with a magnitude 5.2 quake located 355 km south of L’Esperance Rock (520 km north-north-east of Gisborne). The 42 km-deep event occurred at 5:54 p.m. on Wednesday the 27th of February 2008.
A smaller event occurred nearby at 6:28 p.m. but data for this event has not appeared in the databases at the time of writing.
At 6:38 p.m. a magnitude 3.4 quake struck 20 km north-east of Matata at a depth of 5 km.
The earthquakes follow two similar events on the 19th and 20th of February, and a magnitude 5.0 quake which struck in the Bay of Plenty 50 km north of Te Kaha on Sunday 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.]