Earthquake in the Carolinas just now?

reply to post by SCGrits


Very interesting, I'm not sure what to make of that. The first thing that came to mind was a mineshaft collapsing or like you said the blasting triggering something if it's still active. But I have no clue whether those things could affect a fault. I know I'm gonna be digging into a few topics that have arisen from all this when I get the chance.

Okay, going to bed for real.

I hardly think the snow is related. Snow is just water and surely it has rained in the region before.

Maybe a giant sinkhole is preparing to open up?
Just trying to add to the ridiculist

reply to post by orionthehunter

Thanks! Gotcha - I think most of every where in SC was shut down, I know we were! Kept power, just couldn't get out the driveway.

Found some more on the fault area, including the Modoc Shear line which is close to Edgefield where there is a transition from coastal plain to carolina slate zone. Dude has a really neat graphic link This is just a tiny piece of it; the brown area labled MZ is the Modoc Shear Zone not sure what the AZ stands for Apparently they were studying 2 brittle fault lines just south east of Edgefield and the MZ. Interesting.

Ok, it's been fun and I'll ck in tomorrow, but right now it's bedtime for Bonzo folks. Stay warm and safe.

reply to post by violet


But water tables that freeze and expand would add stress. It's been unusually cold here.

reply to post by DC434L2A


LoL!!

Funny pets are mentioned. My neighbors have a very old, foofy-little-hairball type dog. Never hear a peep out of him. Last night, starting at about 9:45 pm, he yipped non-stop inside their house, so loud I could hear it. I just turned up the sound on the movie ..but then the earthquake happened within the hour. Strange.

reply to post by SCGrits


Thanks for sharing that info SCGrits! Interesting stuff you found there. I did not know that about McCormick. I go into the Sumter National forest sometimes. As I drive a few miles north into the forest the hills get bigger and bigger and you can see more and more. It's nice around the Fall time. Might take a drive up there today.

ujustneverknow
reply to post by NightFlight

 

it's now showing as a 4.1

Very interesting when it happens where we don't usually see them , although I don't know the seismic history of the area.

They happen where I live in the UK even though we are about as far away from a fault line as you can get.

What triggers them at least here is that a underground caven collapses.

This is big news for the Edgefield area. I remember several years ago when a friend and I and a few of his army national guard buddies went there to have a little bit of fun shooting paintballs in the woods, someone I didn't know heard all about some guys shooting up the woods in Edgefield. I lost track of my friend after he went overseas but I saw that he returned.

Any news if anyone in the area had damage? Ice is still on the roofs where I live even after all the rain last night.

reply to post by SCGrits


Thanks for posting the map. I'm interested in the topography for the area I live in. I didn't realize it changed so dramatically just traveling south a little bit.

Maybe Mother Nature was upset that The Weather Channel sent reporters to Greenville, Columbia, then Augusta but no where in between.

reply to post by TrueAmerican


I've been out navigating our crappy roads and shoveling more snow--have there been any aftershocks yet? Even really small ones?

You all are right on with the thrust fault call. Here is the moment tensor. It had a bit of strike-slip motion, too, so oblique thrust.

I was looking to see if the USArray motion visualizations were up yet on the IRIS/SPUD--not yet--it will probably not be until Monday, but I'll post it when it is available. They are fun.

reply to post by TrueAmerican


I live about 35 miles from the epicenter. My labrador retriever started to bark about 10 minutes before the loud boom....then the rumbling started. I have heard or felt two rumblings since last night. Has anything shown on your charts? Thanks in advance. I would like a link please.
I also want to add that this is not far from Savannah River Plant, that produces nuclear energy. Also SC was a nuclear waste dumping site for years....

reply to post by duke396


That appears to be the Easter Piedmont Fault System, so not entirely surprising, other than the fact we rarely have earthquakes on the East Coast.

Langley - For about 45 mins before it happened my dogs were pacing and whining and would't relax and lay down. ...

reply to post by Jbird


My sister lives in upstate SC (Easley/Pickens area) and said that her husky was acting very bizarre for about an hour before it hit. Two friends in Augusta, GA also reported their dogs acting really strange; pacing, whining, growling and showing their teeth. My sister's dog was whining and cowering under the table. Another friend in Evans, GA said her horses were running around in circles in the pasture and would not calm down. Animals can sense seismic activity, but I've never seen them act up like that so far in advance of an event, and I lived in San Francisco for years, had earthquakes at least once a week.

Another interesting thing is that my sister said on Facebook that it "didn't feel even remotely like any earthquake she ever felt" and it was "really weird". I asked her to elaborate and haven't heard back yet, but for my sister to say something like that gave me chills because she is one of the biggest skeptics I have ever known and not the type to catalogue "weird" things. She is usually the one brushing things off, so that made me sit up and take notice right away.

I hardly think the snow is related. Snow is just water and surely it has rained in the region before.

reply to post by violet


I lived in Greenville, SC for 8 years and Agusta, GA for two and yes, I can confirm that it has indeed rained in the region before.

On a less sarcastic note, while it is true that snow is just water, it is also extremely heavy and does not run off like water. Add snow accumulation to the severe ice storms in the area and you have some pretty dangerous conditions. Out in the country in SC, where my mom and sister live, the weight of the ice topples full grown pine and juniper trees. It also breaks power lines. A few years ago, it snowed for two days, froze over at night, then we had freezing rain for a day. The day after that, we had an ice storm. My mom has a 1/3 mile driveway and it was completely bocked by large pine trees that had fallen over like toothpicks, the power lines had broken, and we were literally trapped out in the middle of the boonies for four days with no heat and no way to move the trees so that we could get out. And it was 18 degrees outside. If my mom hadn't had dry firewood, we would have suffered hypothermia.



The rain softens the ground, then the heavy ice displaces the soil, so it causes landslides that uproot the trees. Then, once the trees get so heavily covered in frozen snow and ice, they topple over. The ice accumulation js sometimes more than 2-3 inches thick. It looks really pretty...makes the trees look like spun glass...but it is extremely dangerous. I would say that all of the soil getting displaced and possibly rocks, trees and mud sliding with inches of snow and ice on top of it could potentially contribute to a seismic event. Going to look it up in fact, because I'm really curious now. There have been several severe ice storms in that area already this year, and the temperatures have been the coldest they have seen in the last 20 years. If i find any correlating info with seismic activity I will post it. At this point, I'm willing to believe anything is possible...I mean, just last week it was 26 degrees and icy conditions here in San Antonio, of all places, and that is definitely not normal.

***Editing to add some links...VERY interesting stuff and yes, apparently seismic events can in fact be triggered by heavy snow/ice/water accumulation:


Here is an interesting article on the subject:

www.pnsn.org...

And Cryoseisms or "ice quakes" can also apparently register on the Richter Scale, even though they don't involve tectonic plate activity:

www.meltonengineering.com...

Earthquakes in the Inland Carolinas Region

Since at least 1776, people living inland in North and South Carolina, and in adjacent parts of Georgia and Tennessee, have felt small earthquakes and suffered damage from infrequent larger ones. The largest earthquake in the area (magnitude 5.1) occurred in 1916. Moderately damaging earthquakes strike the inland Carolinas every few decades, and smaller earthquakes are felt about once each year or two.

At well-studied plate boundaries like the San Andreas fault system in California, often scientists can determine the name of the specific fault that is responsible for an earthquake. In contrast, east of the Rocky Mountains this is rarely the case. The inland Carolinas region is far from the nearest plate boundaries, which are in the center of the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean Sea. The region is laced with known faults but numerous smaller or deeply buried faults remain undetected. Even the known faults are poorly located at earthquake depths. Accordingly, few, if any, earthquakes in the inland Carolinas can be linked to named faults. It is difficult to determine if a known fault is still active and could slip and cause an earthquake. As in most other areas east of the Rockies, the best guide to earthquake hazards in the seismic zone is the earthquakes themselves.

Source

reply to post by tigertatzen


The snow causing earthquakes is new to me and the link you posted says

So yes, a big snowstorm can raise the expected rate of earthquakes, but only ever so slightly

As for the Ice quakes, those occur in arctic regions where huge, deep ice sheets cracking.

I don't know how much snow you had in SC, the pictures I saw didn't look that deep to me, to compress the ground causing that much stress for an earthquake. Or heavy things like buildings or a dump truck would trigger earthquakes.

I think it seems like it's a lot if you're not used to heavy snowfalls. Other events happening at the same time might cause one to think this is really odd and possibly suspicious.

Ice storms after a snowfall are very common in regions not used to continuous winter conditions. The temperature rises, and comes down in the form of ice, eventually turning to rain if a moist system is still moving through. Branches get snapped off and fall, blocking roads. The big fir trees or evergreens aren't affected as much as the weaker trees. The wind takes down my fir trees. Smaller branches might snap off. My trees are over 200 ft high.

It appears the south-eastern United States is unstable, like I said, sinkholes.

If this was a reverse fault and that means heavy compression or squishing, I suppose it's possible heavy snow triggered the quake. It just didn't appear that deep to me. Coming from the perspective of living in Canada

Interesting nonetheless.
Thanks for the links. I read through both of them.

My husband and I were laying in bed watching TV when the earth quake happened. I was next to a south west window, so I heard a thunder roar then my bed started to really creak and rattle and shake. The closet door next to my husband's side was shaking hard. We are 45 minutes from Augusta,GA and 30 minutes from Aiken, SC. I live next to the Lake Murray. We just laid still and no one said anything. I was thinking something blew up or a bomb was dropped. Fort Jackson is in Columbia. My mind doesn't think about earthquakes. It was my first experience of one. It shook for 8 to 10 long seconds. I finally jumped up and said maybe we should go outside. By then it was over and my child came running in saying what was that? The dogs did not bark, so I knew it was an earthquake. I guess we are right on the fault line. Scary weird nature things happening in the state this week.
My son saw a pack of five large coyotes running through the urban streets here the night before. Lost of missing cat pictures hanging on poles. I hope no one was hurt.

reply to post by orionthehunter


I haven't heard of any damage yet.

reply to post by frugal


I'm only about 18 miles from the epicenter, and at first I thought it was a large convoy of electric company trucks going through the neighborhood, but quickly knew it wasn't. A lot of people I talked to around me thought it was a huge jet aircraft about to crash near them. I keep thinking about the huge amount of trees and large tree branches that have fallen in just my area. Now think about the huge path area of downed trees and branches that start near middle GA and moves all the way through SC, etc. I wonder how many thousands of square miles of tree destruction there is. That is a lot of banging on the ground. I don't know...I heard it consistently all night long and into the next day in just my area. It's probably a crazy thought but could that amount of banging for thousands of square miles in 48 hours time get something stirred up below the ground? Just wondering...

I read thru a couple of pages on this topic and have seen alot of posts about infrequent earthquakes in that region. Thought I'd post a site with a lil pic that I found.

www.pinterest.com...


ETA: I was in Duluth, GA. when it happened and didn't feel anything...