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This website is here to provide a brief summary of causes and effects of the 2011 Virginia Earthquake. The earthquake was the second strongest in Virginia’s history and was the most widely felt earthquake in U.S. history, being registered all the way in Canada. The reason why is to primarily remind everyone of the potential danger of another quake by showing you the impact it had and to discuss the background information behind it’s occurrence.1

The Earthquake

Intensity

Registered as a 5.8 magnitude earthquake.2

Damage

Strong to Severe

Amplification

Due to the soil of the Atlantic seaboard being stronger and more strengthened by bedrock, the earthquake spread much further to the stress transference and other faults in the area.3

Potential

Hypothesized if last even 3 seconds longer, could have resulted in massive widespread damage to stone buildings and even deaths from falling debris.4

Aftershocks

Were incredibly unusual due to following past ancient trends, taking place away from the main cluster.5

Monetary cost

Enormous, many buildings in the area weren’t built for quakes, so they were blindsided.

Mystery

No existing surface level faults in the region, also there’s no particular reason why the Central Virginia seismic zone is so active, not even mentioning the fact that there’s anomalous amount of stress orientation that has nothing to do with the seismic activity. There’s also the piedmont fault zone or other historic faults in the area that have been linked to earthquake activity in VA, but the quake didn’t take place there for some reason.6

Footnotes

  1. Wendy S. Kelly and Anne C. Witt, “An Earthquake History: Finding Faults in Virginia,” The Virginia News Letter 91, no. 2 (2015): 12.  ↩︎
  2. Jim Andrews, “Virginia Earthquake in Historical Perspective,” The Tribune, September 1, 2011, https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TRBN20110901-01.2.8. pg.1 ↩︎
  3. J. E. Beavers et al., “The August 23, 2011 Magnitude 5.8 Virginia Earthquake in the Eastern United States: An Engineering Perspective,” in Proceedings of the 15th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering, Lisbon, Portugal, 2012. pg.2 ↩︎
  4. NBC4 Washington, “NBC Washington Rewind: The 2011 East Coast Quake,” YouTube video, May 27, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4-iUIwlS-c.  ↩︎
  5. Thomas L. Pratt et al., “Amplification of Earthquake Ground Motions in Washington, DC, and Implications for Hazard Assessments in Central and Eastern North America,” Geophysical Research Letters 44, no. 24 (2017): 12,150–12,160, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL075517. pg. 270-277 ↩︎
  6. Thomas L. Pratt et al., “Amplification of Earthquake Ground Motions in Washington, DC, and Implications for Hazard Assessments in Central and Eastern North America,” Geophysical Research Letters 44, no. 24 (2017): 12,150–12,160, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL075517. pg. 287-291 ↩︎