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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.
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.
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. An earthquake is ...
Most events occur at depths shallower than about 40 km, but some occur as deep as 700 km. P and S waves separating with time A quick way to determine the distance from a location to the origin of a seismic wave less than 200 km away is to take the difference in arrival time of the P wave and the S wave in seconds and multiply by 8 kilometers ...
Tsunamis can occur when an underwater earthquake rapidly displaces massive amounts of water, leading to a large, long wave that builds in intensity as it crosses the ocean.
Megathrust earthquakes occur at convergent plate boundaries, where one tectonic plate is forced underneath another. The earthquakes are caused by slip along the thrust fault that forms the contact between the two plates. These interplate earthquakes are the planet's most powerful, with moment magnitudes (M w) that can exceed 9.0.
Movement of tectonic plates against each other sends seismic waves rippling across earth’s surface