earthquake shakes hobart

filed under: tasmania living

After the last quake near Bremen Jochen reported we had another one between Tassy and Antarctica on Friday 2am. I recognized it cause my screen was starting jiggling… First I thought someone was walking with very heavy steps in the room below, but that seemed to be a bit strange for that time and power.

Here’s what I found on volcanolive.com:
Great Earthquake (North of Macquarie Island) – Magnitude 8.1
Friday 24th December 2004
A great earthquake occurred 495 km north of Macquarie Island (Australia) on Friday, December 24, 2004 at 1:59 a.m. local time. It was located at 50.240° S, 160.133° E, at a depth of 10 km. The earthquake was felt in Hobart, Tasmania and parts of the south island of New Zealand. Macquarie Island is an Australian territory located 1500 km south-east of Tasmania. It is the only island in the world composed entirely of oceanic crust and rocks from the mantle. The island group, with mountains rising 400 m above sea level, became a World Heritage site in 1997. This was an intra plate earthquake. The last earthquake of similar magnitude in the Macquarie Rise region was in 1924. This was the largest earthquake in the world this year. Earthquakes of this magnitude can produce tsunamis.
And another article from The Mercury:
Hobart shakes as quake hits island
An earthquake that struck 700km southeast of Hobart early yesterday was the world’s biggest in four years.
The quake, which hit near remote Macquarie Island just before 2am, measured 8.1 on the Richter scale.
Macquarie Island, inhabited by 22 scientific expeditioners, is in the Southern Ocean, about halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica.
Macquarie Island station leader Graeme Beech said the expeditioners all slept through the quake and had not discovered any damage.
But many residents in the greater Hobart area and along Tasmania’s East Coast reported “feeling the earth move”, police said.
Tasmania Police received seven early-morning calls related to the quake but nobody reported any damage.
University of Tasmania geophysicist Michael Roach said the quake released several thousand times as much energy as the 5.6 quake in Newcastle in 1989.
The Newcastle quake left 14 dead, 165 injured and more than 10,000 buildings damaged.
“This sort of event occurs once a year worldwide,” Mr Roach said.
“It’s lucky this one was well away from a population centre because it would have been extremely devastating.”
It was comparable to the quake that flattened San Francisco in 1906 and to the 1985 Mexico City quake, which killed about 9500 people.
Geoscience Australia duty seismologist Cvetan Sinadinovski said an 8.1 quake would “completely destroy man-made structures”.
“There’s no way a man-made structure could sustain an earthquake of this size,” Dr Sinadinovski said.
“If such a quake occured anywhere under any major human structure, the structure would not survive.”
Mr Roach said an 8.1 quake could be felt by residents as far as 2000km to 3000km from its epicentre. But damage usually occurred only within a 200km to 300km radius of the quake.
This is from ABC

From the USGS Earthquake Hazard Program