While the southern states have been getting mad snow these last few weeks, Queensland has been facing a much less fun and much more potentially terrifying natural phenomenon: a series of earthquakes off the Fraser Coast.
Over the last week, there have been no fewer than eight tremors recorded in the region, while on Saturday afternoon, an area approximately 120km east of Fraser Island experienced a 5.7 magnitude quake, the state’s largest in nearly 100 years.
This was followed by a series of aftershocks, with experts warning that this activity, “unusually high” for this particular part of the world, could be “a sign of things to come” and that “we could still be in for something bigger still.”
(Is there a phrase more pants-shittingly scary than “we could still be in for something bigger still” in a seismological context? If so, we’d really love to never hear it).
Dan Jaksa of Geoscience Australia said that a quake with a magnitude of above 5 is the equivalent of an “atomic bomb test”, and that a magnitude 5.7 event is the equivalent of “15 atomic blasts.”
Gold Coast residents have been warned to stay “vigilant”, because a quake at a magnitude of 6.5 or above could cause a tsunami, although experts have noted that Australia experiences 400-500 earthquakes a year, most offshore and too small for people to feel.
For now, Queenslanders appear to be taking it all in stride:
via news.com.au / ABC News
