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Marc Giauque and Ed Yeates reportingToday's quake was widely felt by thousands of people in five states, and how you felt it here in Utah may have been determined by the ground your house sits on.
What kind of ground motion this quake produced is why the University of Utah has sent teams into the field to install portable seismographs near the epicenter of that quake.
Dr. Kristine Pankow, assistant director of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations, says, "To get a better understanding of how waves propagate in this region, this is really a good earthquake to learn more in order to better prepare for these events."
Generally speaking, if you felt today's quake strongly, you were either in a multi-story building or a house probably built on soft, unconsolidated soils.
If you didn't feel it at all, you're probably sitting on rock.
Shock waves, even from distant quakes, tend to accelerate and shake up things more in old unconsolidated lake bottoms like that of our own Great Basin.
At magnitude 6, the Nevada quake released a lot of energy. "A magnitude 6 earthquake is equivalent to about 56 million kilograms of TNT, which is larger than the Hiroshima bomb."
Had the epicenter been here in the Salt Lake valley, we would have experienced heavy, heavy damage and injuries.
Today's quake is yet another example of how the Great Basin, from our own infamous Wasatch Fault all the way to California, is stretching outward, even upward like a piece of taffy at the rate of a quarter of an inch per year.
Sometimes it breaks, like it did today near Wells.
What's really sobering, while the basin stretches, the Wasatch Fault is not moving at all. Strain is building. Seismologists say eventually the twisting and stretching will break the taffy here. Pankow says, "There's going to be an earthquake along the Wasatch Fault at some point in time."
And instead of a magnitude 6 quake, the Wasatch Fault could produce a magnitude 7 quake, which would release a force 30 times greater than today's event in Wells.
For more information from the University of Utah Seismograph Stations, go to the related link.
