The Shaky IslesWhere would you experience 32,800 earthquakes, 80,000 landslides, 1 volcanic eruption

The Shaky IslesWhere would you experience 32,800 earthquakes, 80,000 landslides, 1 volcanic eruption and 2 tsunamis? Where else but the shaky isles of New Zealand, and all that happened in just one year – 2016!The number of earthquakes jumped from an average of around 20,000 per year to the staggering 32,800 in 2016. And some of these were large - 122 earthquakes registered between magnitude 5.0 and 6.0, there were 10 between magnitude 6.0 and 6.9, and, two that were magnitude 7.0 and over. It’s been a very shaky year.What is it about New Zealand that causes so many earth shattering experiences? Well, straddling two tectonic plates is a really good start. The active Pacific-Australian Plate boundary passes through the country on a rough north-east south-west trajectory, producing earthquakes, volcanoes, steep terrain and active land deformation. In some locations the active boundary between the two plates is quite narrow, for example the Alpine Fault and Southern Alps in the central South Island. In other regions, such as most of the central and eastern North Island, the active boundary forms a wide zone of land deformation.The most recent large quake, a magnitude 7.8 on 14 November 2016, was located on the eastern coast of the South Island around the small tourist town of Kaikoura. This quake was different to the typical earthquakes experienced in New Zealand. It hit at 12.02 a.m. with the ground shaking in North Canterbury, and over the next two-and-a-half minutes, the earthquake moved across numerous fault lines with the seismic energy pooling and then overflowing onto one fault after another. Along the way, the earthquake ruptured these faults, tore through the earth and raised the seabed off Kaikoura between .7 and .9 metres. Check out the video showing the impact of this quake here.What makes this quake unique are two things: how it ruptured across fault lines and the slow-slip events it triggered. While slow-slip events or ‘silent earthquakes’ are similar to earthquakes in that they involve fault movement, the main difference is duration with movement occurring over weeks and months. In the last decade, slow-slip events have been discovered at plate boundaries around the world. These unique factors means the shaky isles of New Zealand are literally breaking new ground!Acknowledgement: the New Zealand GeoNet project and its sponsors EQC, GNS Science and LINZ, for providing data/imagesSource: http://www.geonet.org.nz/First photo by Jarg PettingaSecond photo by Julian Thomson -- source link
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