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NOV. 8, 2011 uco360.com twitter.com/uco360
THE VISTA
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL OKLAHOMA’S student voice since 1903.
RECORD BREAKING By Trevor Hultner / Staff Writer Oklahoma was subject to several powerful earthquakes over the weekend, with one on Saturday night breaking a record for the most powerful quake in state history. The recordbreaking quake in question, a magnitude 5.6, started at 10:53 p.m. and lasted for about a minute, causing structural damage to some homes and in one instance, toppling a spire on Benedictine Hall at St. Gregory’s University in Shawnee, Okla. Facebook and other social media sites experienced an influx in mentions of the Oklahoma earthquake, and “Earthquake in Oklahoma” became a trending topic on Twitter. “I was watching an HBO series called ‘Oz’, it’s about the Oswald State Penitentiary, so that was pretty terrifying to be watching a guy get shanked in prison, and then an earthquake happened,” Audrey Thomas, a sophomore vocal music education major at UCO, said. “I was a little freaked out, and I couldn’t move for a second.” Thomas said she didn’t know what was happening until her roommate yelled “earthquake!” “He ran out, and I just kind of sat there and was like, ‘I don’t know what to do in the case of an earthquake, so I’m just going to sit here,’” she said. “It was my first earthquake, and I didn’t care for it.” The epicenter of the large quake was about five miles southeast of Sparks, Okla., a small town in Lincoln County. Early Saturday morning, another large quake registered a 4.7 magnitude and was recorded with an epicenter about eight miles northwest of Prague, Okla., roughly five miles directly south of the Saturday evening’s quake. “We do know that this earthquake occurred on a ‘strike-slip’ fault,” Paul Caruso, a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center, said. “That means that the movement was in a sideby-side motion, it wasn’t up and down like a ‘thrust’ fault.” Caruso said that the USGS was not able to pinpoint the exact fault line the quake originated from, but that it’s possible that it came from the Wilzetta fault. “The Wilzetta fault is one of a small series of faults formed during the Pennsylvanian Epoch about 300 million years ago, and it’s believed that these faults have been reactivated,” he said. Caruso said that faults became dormant as a result of changing plate tectonics. “The stress and strain has been readjusted so that it isn’t on that main fault line,” he said, “but then, hundreds of millions of years later,
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Jess Burrow, left, and James Patterson, look over the damage caused outside the home of Joe and Mary Reneau when their chimney was toppled by Saturday’s earthquake, in Sparks, Okla., Sunday, Nov. 6, 2011. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
that fault is still a weak spot in the crust of the Earth, so if there’s stress and strain in the area, that’s natural the first place that’s going to fail.” Caruso said the USGS expects aftershocks to continue for weeks, and possibly months. “We can’t predict earthquakes, and we don’t know how long the aftershocks will continue,” he said. “But we hope that the 5.6 quake was the biggest in the series.” For more information on earthquakes in Oklahoma and what to do in the event of one, scan this tag:
goo.gl/sdD7I
Maintenance workers inspect the damage to one of the spires on Benedictine Hall at St. Gregory’s University in Shawnee, Okla., Sunday, Nov. 6, 2011. Two earthquakes in the area in less than 24 hours caused one of the towers to topple, and damaged the remaining three. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
EARTHQUAKES 5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT
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The spot underground where the rock breaks is called the focus of the earthquake. The place right above the focus (on top of the ground) is called the epicenter of the earthquake.
In 2010, the Oklahoma Geological Survey was able to locate 1047 unique earthquakes, the largest of which was a 4.7 felt near Norman, OK.
Before Saturday evening’s record breaker, the largest recorded earthquake in Oklahoma was a 5.50 magnitude quake near El Reno in 1952.
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Earthquakes occur when underground rocks break along a fault line. The break releases energy which cause seismic waves that shift and shake the ground.
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The largest earthquake in recorded history occured in Chile in 1960. The magnitude 9.5 earthquake killed approximately 1,655 Chileans, left 3,000 injured and 2,000,000 homeless. The quake also caused a tsunami that killed 61 in Hawaii, 138 in Japan and left 32 dead or missing in the Philippines. The largest recorded earthquake to ever hit the United States was a magnitude 9.2 that struck Prince William Sound, Alaska on March 28, 1964.
The earliest reported earthquake in California was one felt in 1769 by the expedition of Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola. The quake occured while the group was camping about 48 kilometers southeast of Los Angeles. There is no such thing as “earthquake weather”. The USGS website states that there is an equal distribution of earthquakes in cold weather, hot weather, and rainy weather as well as the varying seasons.
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DID YOU KNOW? In early drafts of the Back to the Future script, the time machine was built out of an old refrigerator.
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