Sizeable and tragic earthquakes struck a month apart in two different countries halfway around the world. The magnitude of the damage and loss of life has been seen in pictures and the seismic reading registered in Kentucky.
First, it was a portion of Morocco that experienced an earthquake on September 8. It resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths. Not quite a month later, on October seventh some 2,000 deaths were reported following earthquake activity in Afghanistan. Seth Carpenter is a seismologist with the Kentucky Geological Survey. He said earthquakes over the past weekend were detected in equipment inside Mammoth Cave.
“The waves that were recorded are the kind that travel along the surface of the earth and they tend to not lose energy nearly as quickly as the waves that pass through the earth. That allows us to see them, even with a greater likelihood, even in Mammoth Cave.”
As horrific as these events are, Carpenter said there’s nothing to suggest it amounts to increased frequency of earthquakes.
“These things just sort of happen in one place and then another and we’re not aware of any ties that connect…events sequences that traverse tectonic plates. They were most likely be unrelated and just a terrible coincidence,” said Carpenter.
An earthquake in February of this year in Turkey killed tens of thousands of people. In Turkey alone over the last 100 years, there have been more than 50 earthquakes of a magnitude equal or greater than six on the Richter scale.
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