Scientists discover new kind of powerful, BOOMERANG earthquake which generates underground ‘sonic booms’

Researchers led by Stephen Hicks, an earthquake seismologist at the Imperial College London, studied data from 39 seismometers placed near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to monitor seismic activity and finally found evidence of the oft-theorized but never witnessed boomerang quake, aka “back-propagating rupture.”

“Even though the fault structure seems simple, the way the earthquake grew was not, and this was completely opposite to how we expected the earthquake to look before we started to analyze the data,” Hicks said.
The deep sea temblor started deep underground, rushing eastward towards the Mid-Atlantic Ridge before turning back on itself and rising up through the upper section of the fault at supershear speeds at roughly 11,000 miles per hour, fast enough to make it from New York to London in under 20 minutes.
“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time it has been reported,” said geophysicist Yoshihiro Kaneko of GNS Science in New Zealand.
Mystery remains as to how frequent such boomerang quakes are and how many travel fast enough to create these underground “sonic booms.” Some in the scientific community have even begun to speculate that the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake that struck Japan in 2011 with devastating consequences may also have featured some of this boomerang rupture effect.
“This might be actually more common than we think,” Kaneko added.
Properly understanding the surprisingly complex nature of these earthquakes will help us produce better models and more accurately predict where and how temblors might strike in the future, improving early warning systems and perhaps construction methods in high-risk areas.
Source: rt.com
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