Hypo-theses

An interesting event in the world of seismology yesterday, an Irish earthquake. The British Geological Survey report a magnitude 2.7 tremor felt in County Clare yesterday evening.

Irish earthquakes are as rare as hen’s teeth, which is really quite curious. The geology of Ireland is very similar to that of the rest of the British Isles [...]

An intriguing little earthquake from the south of the county this morning, a magnitude 1.3 tremor southwest of Gnosall (west of Stafford). This is the recording from Keele University.

The region is underlain by Mercia Mudstone so it could be salt collapse related, but most of the salt extraction is the other side of Stafford. Nearby is [...]

Another large earthquake recorded on our seismometer overnight, this time from Southern Qinghai in China, with a magnitude of 6.9. In common with the a few earthquakes we have recorded recently, because one of the nodal planes of the source (which I’m guessing to be the fault plane at the minute) is directed towards us [...]

An unusual earthquake has just occurred deep below southern Spain. Deep earthquakes are associated with subduction systems and earthquakes extend down to about 660km. This earthquake at magnitude 6.3 and a depth of 617km appears to have occurred on a relict subduction system from the Alboran plate between Spain and North Africa that was [...]

Another day, another large earthquake, this time in Northern Sumatra. This is 24 hour record that I saw when I broke my holiday for the second time this week.

Extracting the record shows a very strong body wave phase and surface wave train …

Matching this to the travel-time curves show that the strong phase is S, [...]