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Saturday, September 11, 2010

Earthquakes in Arkansas

Earthquakes are measured on the Richter scale by the amount of seismic energy released in a quake. The Richter scale is a base ten logarithmic scale. Each number up the scale is shaking ten times more than the previous number.
Earthquakes of magnitude two or less are generally not felt by the public. There are about 10,000 of these micro-earthquakes happening around the world every day.
There were four micro-earthquakes today in Guy, Arkansas. The first at 1:06 a.m. at magnitude 0.8, the second at 4:45 a.m. at magnitude 0.7, the third at 11:02 a.m. at magnitude 0.7 and a fourth at 11:40 a.m. at magnitude 0.6.
After hearing about the Guy earthquakes I looked into earthquake activity in Arkansas over the last six month. Surprisingly, there have been over 100 earthquakes in the state over that time period. Alarmingly, most of them took place between ten to 25 miles north of Conway. Conway is not that far from the Village.
So far this year none of the earthquakes have reached 3.0 on the Richter scale. I was interested in seeing just how much shaking was going on not too far from our homes.

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