Columbia Seismologists Provide Insight on East Coast Earthquake

The magnitude 5.8 earthquake that shook central Virginia on Tuesday afternoon is one of the biggest earthquakes to hit the east coast of the U.S. since 1897, and was comparable in strength to a quake on the New York-Canadian border in 1944, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was centered near Mineral, Va., about 38 miles northwest of Richmond, and in an area known for frequent though lesser quakes. Tremors were felt as far north as Boston, and as far south as South Carolina, but damage was minimal because the immediate area is not densely settled. People reported feeling vibrations for much longer than the three-second or so main event. Meredith Nettles , a seismologist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory , was in her second-floor office when the motion started. "I could see power cords in my office swaying," she said. "That shaking is the waves from the earthquake passing through the ground right underneath you" The earthquake was relatively shallow—6 kilometers below the surface—and occurred in the Piedmont plains, near ancient faults involved in creating the Appalachian Mountains some 250 million years ago.