On the morning of April 5th, the northeastern US experienced a 4.8 magnitude earthquake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), with its effects being felt from Boston to Philadelphia.
The earthquake’s epicenter, the point directly above where the seismic activity originated, was in Lebanon, New Jersey– about 45 miles west of New York City. An estimation from the USGS claims that upwards of 45 million people may have felt the tremors.
No casualties or evidence of major structural damage have been reported.
“In the wake of today’s earthquake and aftershocks, members of the NYPD are utilizing technology to ensure the structural safety of NYC infrastructure,” commented @NYPDnews on X (formerly known as Twitter) regarding the situation.
Though uncommon and less intense than its West Coast counterparts, East Coast earthquakes are felt by more people. This is because there are clusters of population centers scattered throughout the Northeast.
“If we had the same magnitude quake in California, it probably wouldn’t be felt nearly as far away,” said USGS geophysicist Paul Caruso in a comment under an AP news article on the subject.
This comes in the wake of an increasing reportage of natural disasters around the world including devastating quakes in Japan earlier this year, a “Pi-Day” tornado sprawled across the American midwest, and a major earthquake off the coast of Taiwan.
As climatologists have been forewarning for years now, global warming could have a significant contribution to the escalation in natural disasters worldwide, due to the decreasing temperature difference between the poles and the equator. A difference that, though unassuming, can provoke mid-latitude storms that affect Earth’s most populated regions.
“The human-caused rise in greenhouse gasses has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events,” said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their Sixth Assessment Report.
Because of this, it might mean that in coming years extreme weather events will take on a whole new meaning, and the ones seen right now will become the new norm.
