Earthquakes are relatively infrequent in West Virginia, but one on Monday was strong enough to be felt in the Huntington area. Curtis Tate spoke with Tom Pratt, a U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist, about seismic activity in the region.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tate: Why aren’t earthquakes stronger or more frequent in West Virginia?
Pratt: Well, the Eastern U.S. is not near a plate boundary. The nearest plate boundary is the mid-ocean ridge in the middle of the Atlantic or the Pacific Plate way on the other side of the continent. So it’s kind of a mystery why we have earthquakes at all in the Eastern U.S. And there’s a lot of speculation about why that might be, but there are a fair number of earthquakes in the New Madrid Seismic Zone along the Tennessee Missouri border, in the bootheel of Missouri. That’s a very active zone.
There’s a fair amount in the southern Appalachians, the East Tennessee seismic zone. We have a bunch in central Virginia, the central Virginia seismic zone. There’s a bunch down by Charleston, South Carolina, including a magnitude seven in 1886, so they happen occasionally around here. There’s a scattering of them around the New England area. So, West Virginia. I don’t know. I haven’t run into one in West Virginia yet, but so it’s, you know, this is a little unusual, but it’s not surprising. You can get one there.
Tate: I was in Washington, D.C., during the central Virginia earthquake in 2011. We definitely felt it there, but apparently people felt it in West Virginia. Why?
Pratt: Because earthquake energy in the Eastern U.S. gets transmitted a lot more efficiently than in the West. So the same size earthquake is felt much further away in the Eastern U.S. than it is in the Western U.S. So if you took a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in, like, the Bay Area in San Francisco, it’s only felt for a couple 100 kilometers in every direction, whereas the Virginia earthquake was felt for 1,000 kilometers each direction.
Tate: How likely is it that a big quake would strike in Appalachia?
Pratt: Well, you know, the eastern Tennessee seismic zone. There’s no fundamental reason we couldn’t have a magnitude seven down there. That’s got ongoing seismicity. There’s very little seismicity in West Virginia, so you’re in kind of a little bubble there with very little seismicity. But you know, sometimes these things surprise you. Actually, a better example, there was a 5.1 earthquake in Sparta in North Carolina in 2020 that was completely out of the blue. There was no seismicity there before that. I mean, it was just a void of seismicity. And then all of a sudden, a 5.1 hit, and it destroyed a whole lot of houses and stuff here.
Tate: What makes an earthquake strong or notable? What puts it on the USGS interactive map?
Pratt: We put every earthquake we detect on those on that map. And so it depends on how many seismic stations are in the immediate area. If you have an earthquake that’s right next to a seismic station and a couple more feel it, it’ll show up there. If you have an earthquake where the nearest seismic station is 50-80 kilometers away, it might not get detected at all. So it has a lot to do with the distribution of stations, as to how small we can detect. In general, though, we can detect pretty much anything in the Eastern U.S., magnitude 2.2 and above.
Tate: What should people know about preparing for earthquakes?
Pratt: We always like to emphasize that this is a reminder that earthquakes can occur, and do some emergency preparedness stuff, make sure you got food and water. That works not just for earthquakes, but it works for tornadoes and hurricanes and floods and other disasters. It’s always good to have some emergency supplies on hand. And then the other thing we like to emphasize if you do feel an earthquake is drop cover and hold, if you’re familiar with that.
Tate: Is that like, get under your desk, like I did in 2011?
Pratt: Yeah. Because earthquakes don’t kill people. They just shake the ground. What kills people is falling objects. Man-made things kill people, and rock falls, so the main thing to watch out for is stuff falling on top of you, and the best way to prevent that is get underneath the desk or something. And that’s why we tell you not to run outdoors for two reasons. First of all, if you start running toward the door and the ground is shaking, you might not be able to run straight. You’ll crash into things, you might trip and hurt yourself that way. And the other thing is, once you run out the door, it may be raining bricks from the upper floors, if you’re in a brick building.
