OT: Multiple Earthquakes in Santa Cruz Islands

[nashvillen]

In the last five hours there have been two large earthquakes in the Santa Cruz Island area. Both were just ENE of what we know as Ndeni. The first was pretty shallow at 10 km below the ocean along a known divergent fault (NW Fiji Basin) forming a under sea ridge. The other was much deeper at 55.4 km below the ocean. There have been two other smaller earthquakes in the same area relative to the earthquakes and less than an hour after the first of the pair. they qualify as aftershocks. Minimal impact is expected to the region.

I have to admit, this is not really anything spectacular, but I have a new app for my iphone that uses GIS technology to map and report these. That is the cool part. [:D] Also, it made me look at the Santa Cruz chain of islands closer with Google Earth and know more about it.

[netjam99]

Technology is amazing these days. Just looked at news reports. 4 earthquakes around the ring of fire! By the way I have found myself looking at Google Earth out there in the Pacific also. Could not believe the amount of shipping in the harbor and approaches to Singapore for one thing.

[guytipton41]

The earthquake app is cool... but have you ever used Google Earth to look at some of those atolls with a 6000 stacking limit? They are barren flat patches of earth that might provide space for 600 men. If you fully stacked them every bombarding shell would land in a foxhole.

Cheers,
Guy

[nashvillen]

JUST IN: 8.0 magnitude very shallow (5.8 km) in this region. Tsunami warnings out.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/ ... s0#summary

http://ptwc.weather.gov/

[nashvillen]

They changed the depth to much deeper, helpful for negative tsunami creation.

[wdolson]

There have been an unusually large number of aftershocks. This is an unusual earthquake swarm.

Bill

[sanch]

In my PBEM game, I just invaded Milne Bay. And then I got curious about what Milne Bay is and was. So I fired up google-earth to take a peek. An lo and behold, just NE of Ndeni (which I took last month) was a big red marker (had never seen one of these before).

Turns out it was the quake at 10 km down mentioned by the OP.

Side note - Milne Bay in RL appears to have been a really pestilential mud-hole. From wikepedia, I linked to an Australian photo archive with easily several hundred photos. Mud and malaria seems to have been the primary features of life in Milne Bay.