With its epicenter in the area of the Hula Valley, the earthquake was felt across the North. The country’s latest earthquake, felt at 10:55 p.m. on Sunday, was called “less than moderate” and drew no call for concern from geologists at its 3.8 Richter scale magnitude. With its epicenter in the area of the Hula Valley, the earthquake was felt across the North – throughout the Kinneret area, Tiberias, Kiryat Shmona and Metulla – but police reported no known damage or injuries.
“Looking all over the world, it’s a very small earthquake. It’s not even moderate – it’s less than moderate,” Dr. Uri Frieslander, general manager of the Geophysical Institute of Israel, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday morning.
Although the earthquake was small, northern residents felt the tremors because the focus point of the quake was relatively shallow, according to Frieslander. “And because it was at 11 p.m., most of the people were in bed, where you can feel it easily,” he added.
He explained that “it was a very weak earthquake on the northern part of the Dead Sea rift, where there’s an active zone, and our seismometers all over the country feel very weak earthquakes all the time, even earthquakes that humans do not feel, like around magnitude 2.”
Just 40 minutes earlier, a magnitude 4.7 quake was felt in Eastern Turkey, according to the United States Geological Survey, an American government organization that tracks earthquakes as they happen around the world. This quake, however, was entirely unrelated to the Israeli tremor, as the two areas fall on different fault lines, according to Frieslander.
“There is no relation between the Northern Anatolian Fault and the Dead Sea area,” he said, noting that the Dead Sea rift lies from southern Turkey down to the Red Sea.
The last humanly detectable earthquake to hit Israel occurred on August 7, mainly along the country’s northern coastal plain. With an epicenter around 40 kilometers west of Binyamina in the Mediterranean Sea, it sent 4.2 magnitude shakes but caused no injuries to Haifa, Afula, Tel Aviv, Herzliya and Kibbutz Nativ. A quake also occurred during April, but was not even significant enough to register on the Richter scale.
This frequency indicates no change from normal activity, Frieslander said. As far as when Israelis can expect a truly sizable quake to shake their land, he said that such an event was impossible to forecast, but that on average, it happens around every 100 years.
“Statistically every 100 years there is a strong earthquake, and the last one was in 1927,” he said. “So statistically we are expecting an earthquake, but it could take 10 years or 10 minutes or 50 years.”
While he said he couldn’t predict whether Israeli infrastructure would be able to handle such a quake, he stressed that “the way to minimize the risk is to build very good buildings and to follow the instructions of the authorities.”