{"id":62271,"date":"2011-08-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/significant-east-coast-quake-felt-on-campus\/"},"modified":"2011-08-23T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-08-23T00:00:00","slug":"significant-east-coast-quake-felt-on-campus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2011\/08\/significant-east-coast-quake-felt-on-campus\/","title":{"rendered":"Significant East Coast quake felt on campus"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tKINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Aug. 23, 2011 \u2013 An earthquake that rocked Virginia and Washington, D.C. mildly shook the Kingston campus today during what 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Dan Murray called one of the most significant quakes in the last 100 years on the East Coast.<\/p>\n


\nMurray spoke with WPRO AM 630\u2019s Matt Allen on The Buddy Cianci Show Tuesday afternoon about the quake, which registered a 5.9 on the magnitude scale and caused the Pentagon to be evacuated. He explained that East Coast earthquakes are rare because the major boundary of the Earth\u2019s surface runs through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. By comparison, the boundary on the West Coast runs through the San Andreas Fault in California. <\/p>\n


\n\u201cWe don\u2019t get earthquakes here very often,\u201d said Murray, professor emeritus of geosciences. \u201cWhen we do, a number of people believe what is happening is that the Earth\u2019s surface has broken up and then reassembled, like taking a jigsaw puzzle apart and putting it back together and arranging it differently several times. What all that means is that there may be a zone of weakness in what is normally a quiet piece of real estate.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nMurray said he had received calls from people in Narragansett and on Block Island who had felt the quake. There also were reports of people on the Kingston campus feeling the ground shake. <\/p>\n


\nAccording to Murray, to find record of the largest East Coast earthquakes, you have to go back to the 1800s. One measuring a 6.5 on the magnitude scale hit off Cape Ann, Mass. in 1875, but didn\u2019t cause much damage. Another in 1806 that hit in Mississippi was felt as far north as Boston.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cThere are some very long, distinct faults that were active at a time when Africa was colliding with North America, for example,\u201d Murray said. \u201cThat has been over for hundreds of millions of years and Africa has moved away on its own, but there still are stresses that are locked up in the rocks, and these can be released every so often. <\/p>\n


\n\u201cThese earthquakes can be significant, but they are very rare. The fact that they are so rare makes it doubly hard to predict when the next earthquake will occur.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nMurray does not anticipate significant damage in the Northeast. He said it is possible that aftershocks from Tuesday\u2019s earthquake could be felt over the next couple days, though the magnitude would be reduced as more time passes. While he didn\u2019t expect damage from Tuesday\u2019s quake, a similar one hitting closer to New England would be a problem for areas like downtown Providence and Boston, where buildings are built on wet areas that have been filled in.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cWe don\u2019t get big earthquakes here, like on the West Coast,\u201d Murray said. \u201cThe ones we get are rare. The flip side of that coin is that we are completely unprepared for earthquakes. We don\u2019t have the same kind of building code that they do on the West Coast.” <\/p>\n


\nSeveral media outlets called 溏心vlog免费B站 about the nuclear reactor located on the Narragansett Bay Campus. The reactor was not operating during the earthquake, so there was no danger. It is only active during times of ongoing research, which was not happening yesterday.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Aug. 23, 2011 \u2013 An earthquake that rocked Virginia and Washington, D.C. mildly shook the Kingston campus today during what 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Dan Murray called one of the most significant quakes in the last 100 years on the East Coast. Murray spoke with WPRO AM 630\u2019s Matt Allen on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}