Earthquakes don’t occur everywhere. They occur along the boundaries of the earth’s tectonic plates, along either known active faults or dormant faults. The East Coast is crisscrossed with ancient faults, including the Ramapo Fault that runs through southeastern New York to eastern Pennsylvania.
That means the Northeast, and the Rochester region specifically, have felt more than a few earthquakes in recent years, including one that happened Wednesday night, just north of Wayne County in Lake Ontario. It was a 2.2-magnitude quake that occurred about eight kilometers below the earth’s surface. Other earthquakes hit Rochester’s surrounding counties in 2021 and 2022.
Tolulope Olugboji, assistant professor of earth science at the University of Rochester, talked to us this summer about the reasons the Rochester area experiences quakes. Sometimes, the pathway for seismic activity is along smaller, unmapped faults that are part of a complex network branching from the Ramapo Fault.
What causes an earthquake in western New York?
When you have a dormant fault system in a region like the East Coast, modern stressors can still trigger tremors and quakes. But what are those modern stressors? It’s a matter of debate in the scientific community, Olugboji said.
Some researchers believe faults are always near failure, so any natural, or tectonic, forces or human-related actions can bring faults to failure.
Faults can accommodate movement of tectonic plates, which are always in motion, for a long time – hundreds of thousands to millions of years – before reaching failure. But impacts from human behavior, including construction and the injection of fracking liquid during drilling operations, can reactivate faults.
Rochester NY earthquake risk
Rolling elevation on the East Coast, like the Appalachian Mountains, are a record of past seismic activity. Think of the way the Indian subcontinent presses into Asia, creating the towering Himalayan Mountains. The East Coast is simply a much older version of those same forces.
“As those mountains eroded, they get lower but that pattern still stays and gives you a sense of how the general continent was squished,” Olugboji said.
There isn’t zero probability of earthquakes in the Rochester area, but it is much lower than in regions of the state with known faults, like southeastern New York and other coastal regions. There are also some faults north of Rochester in Canada.
Earthquakes can be felt further from their epicenter on the East Coast than out west due to the crust being older and more intact, Olugboji said. So even though Rochester isn’t home to much seismic activity, the impacts of strong quakes further way can be felt locally.
— Steve Howe reports on weather, climate and the Great Lakes for the Democrat and Chronicle. An RIT graduate, he has covered myriad topics over the years, including public safety, local government, national politics and economic development in New York and Utah.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: How likely are earthquakes in Rochester? Here’s what the science says
Reporting by Steve Howe, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle / Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
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