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Earthquakes are common on the West Coast, with multiple plate boundaries like the San Andreas fault making geologic activity more likely. They are rarer on the East Coast, but they do happen .
An earthquake is the shaking of the surface of Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the lithosphere that creates seismic waves.Earthquakes may also be referred to as quakes, tremors, or temblors.
An earthquake is a phenomenon that results from the sudden release of stored energy in the Earth's crust that creates seismic waves. At the Earth's surface, earthquakes may manifest themselves by a shaking or displacement of the ground and sometimes cause tsunamis , which may lead to loss of life and destruction of property.
In geology, the elastic-rebound theory is an explanation for how energy is released during an earthquake. As the Earth's crust deforms, the rocks which span the opposing sides of a fault are subjected to shear stress. Slowly they deform, until their internal rigidity is exceeded.
About 55 earthquakes a day – 20,000 a year – are recorded by the National Earthquake Information Center.Most are tiny and barely noticed by people living where they happen. But some are strong ...
Fault Motion Animations at IRIS Consortium (archived 17 February 2005) Aerial view of the San Andreas fault in the Carrizo Plain, Central California, from "How Earthquakes Happen" at USGS; LANDSAT image of the San Andreas Fault in southern California, from "What is a Fault?" at USGS (archived 4 April 2008)
Typical values for P wave velocity in earthquakes are in the range 5 to 8 km/s. The precise speed varies according to the region of the Earth's interior, from less than 6 km/s in the Earth's crust to 13.5 km/s in the lower mantle, and 11 km/s through the inner core.
The last tsunami warning in the San Francisco Bay Area followed a 9.1 earthquake in Tohoku, Japan that sparked a major nuclear accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011 ...