Would You like a feature Interview?
All Interviews are 100% FREE of Charge
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) seismologist Paul Earle said in a press conference Friday that millions of people felt the quake and that air travel was also temporarily suspended.
But even if there was an earthquake, A must-have item for West Coasters — some of them shrugged What happened — The USGS announced Friday that there’s actually a scientific reason why so many East Coast residents are scared.
Experts say East Coast earthquakes occur far away from their epicenters, ultimately due to different rock types on both sides of the country.
Why are east coast earthquakes felt far away?
Seismic waves can travel farther through older, colder, denser Oriental-type rocks before collapsing and disappearing.
“Earthquakes on the East Coast are felt much farther away, four to five times farther than an earthquake of the same magnitude on the West Coast,” Earle said at a news conference. “The rocks are harder and the seismic waves travel farther before attenuating, so far more people will feel this earthquake than an earthquake of similar magnitude in California.”
Veronica Cedillos, president of GeoHazards International, previously discussed this difference with Business Insider.
On the East Coast, “seismic waves can actually travel much further,” she says. “In contrast to the West Coast, where seismic waves occur, that energy is actually absorbed much faster.”
Essentially, on the East Coast, seismic waves “travel long distances without disappearing,” Linsen Meng, an associate professor of geophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Business Insider.
West Coast earthquakes are often deeper
The types of earthquakes that occur on the east and west coasts are also different.
Ben Fernando, a postdoctoral researcher in seismology at Johns Hopkins University, told BI that waves originate at different depths, which affects the distance they travel.
The strongest earthquakes on the West Coast are usually associated with tectonic plate subduction, or the Pacific plate being sucked under the North American plate. That means earthquakes occur very deep underground, Fernando said.
However, there is no active subduction on the east coast.
“This is a very different geological environment,” Fernando said.
East Coast earthquakes tend to be much shallower. The depth at this location was only 3 miles, according to the USGS.
Deeper West Coast-type earthquakes are usually felt less widely because the waves have to travel further to the surface.
Still, earthquakes are rare in the tri-state area. The epicenter of Friday’s quake was 30 miles west of Newark, with people reporting impacts from Philadelphia to Boston, according to the USGS.
This was the largest earthquake recorded in New Jersey in approximately 250 years. In 2011, a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck Virginia, the last major earthquake to hit the East Coast.