M5.3 Earthquake, Orkney, South Africa, August 5, 2014
The largest earthquake to strike South Africa in 40 years killed one man and injured 17 others today. Located near the town of Orkney, it was widely felt. Here we use the hazard viewer to review the forecast preceding the event. Note that the forecast was previously updated last night on August 4, so the data on the web site represent the pre-event probabilities.
In the image below, we show the location of the event together with the forecast contours. The earthquake occurred on top of the only prominent hotspot in South Africa.
We select a circular region of 100 km radius to compute forecast probabilities as below.
The table of forecast probabilities indicated a 68.1% chance of an M>5 earthquake occurring in the selection region within the next 1 year.
The forecast timeseries indicates that the chance of such an earthquake had been increasing in recent years.
About OpenHazards Bloggers
Steven Ward is a Research Geophysicist at
the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UC Santa Cruz. He specializes in the quantification and simulation of
natural hazards. Read Steve's blog.
John Rundle is a Distinguished Professor of Physics
and Geology at UC Davis and
the Executive Director of the APEC Collaboration for Earthquake Simulations. He
chaired the Board of Advisors for the Southern California Earthquake Center from 1994 to 1996. Read John's blog.
Comments
Orkney has damaged badly by this earthquake. According to the assignmentdoer review, this is considered as a largest earthquake happened in this country. I wish, people should recover soon.
The plot shown below shows the chance of an M7 earthquake as a function of time for the four California cities, calculated using the experimental methodology. download soundcloud to mp3 free