Hurricane Irene may have triggered Virginia Earthquake aftershocks

Hurricane Irene, a powerful storm that ran north along the US East Coast four days after a magnitude-5.8 earthquake rattled Virginia in 2011, may have triggered some of that earthquake’s aftershocks, scientists reported today at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The rate of aftershocks usually decreases with time, says study leader Zhigang Peng, a seismologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta. But instead of declining in a normal pattern, the rate of aftershocks following the 23 August 2011, earthquake near Mineral, Virginia, increased sharply as Irene passed by.

Scientists did not initially notice the unusual pattern, Peng said, because the aftershocks were small (many less than magnitude 2) and the hurricane itself produced a lot of seismic noise.“You have to use pattern-recognition techniques to detect small aftershocks buried by this noise,” Peng says.

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