The 2007 Alum Rock earthquake occurred on in

Alum Rock Park Alum Rock Park, in the Alum Rock district of San Jose, California, is California's oldest municipal park, established in 1872 but serving as public land since the pueblo was established in 1777. Located in a valley in the Diablo Range foothills ...

in San Jose, in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sove ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. It measured 5.6 on the

moment magnitude scale The moment magnitude scale (MMS; denoted explicitly with or Mw, and generally implied with use of a single M for magnitude) is a measure of an earthquake's magnitude ("size" or strength) based on its seismic moment. It was defined in a 1979 pape ...

and had a maximum

Mercalli intensity The Modified Mercalli intensity scale (MM, MMI, or MCS), developed from Giuseppe Mercalli's Mercalli intensity scale of 1902, is a seismic intensity scale used for measuring the intensity of shaking produced by an earthquake. It measures the eff ...

of VI (''Strong''). The event was then the largest in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which measured 6.9 on the moment magnitude scale, but was later surpassed by the

2014 South Napa earthquake The 2014 South Napa earthquake occurred in the North San Francisco Bay Area on August 24 at . At 6.0 on the moment magnitude scale and with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (''Severe''), the event was the largest in the San Francisco Bay Ar ...

. Ground shaking from the Alum Rock quake reached

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

and Oakland and other points further north. Sixty thousand felt reports existed far beyond Santa Rosa, as far north as Eugene, Oregon.

Earthquake

The shock originated on the

Calaveras Fault The Calaveras Fault is a major branch of the San Andreas Fault System that is located in northern California in the San Francisco Bay Area. Activity on the different segments of the fault includes moderate and large earthquakes as well as aseismi ...

and ruptured an area of the fault for a length of about beginning at the hypocenter and extending southeast. There was no evidence of any

surface rupture In seismology, surface rupture (or ground rupture, or ground displacement) is the visible offset of the ground surface when an earthquake rupture along a fault affects the Earth's surface. Surface rupture is opposed by buried rupture, where th ...

along the fault caused by the

earthquake An earthquake (also known as a quake, tremor or temblor) is the shaking of the surface of the Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the Earth's lithosphere that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes can range in intensity, fr ...

. David Oppenheimer, a seismologist at the

United States Geological Survey The United States Geological Survey (USGS), formerly simply known as the Geological Survey, is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, ...

(USGS), said that although the quake was felt as a strong jolt over a wide region, it was more significant because it caused stress changes in the Calaveras Fault and the nearby

Hayward Fault The Hayward Fault Zone is a right-lateral strike-slip geologic fault zone capable of generating destructive earthquakes. This fault is about long, situated mainly along the western base of the hills on the east side of San Francisco Bay. It run ...

Damage

Intensity VI (''Strong'') effects included broken windows and items that were knocked off store shelves, but the event caused no serious damage or injuries. Some parts of the Bay Area felt the rupture for up to 15 seconds.

Early warning

ElarmS, an earthquake early warning system, accurately predicted the quake seconds before it struck, correctly estimating the earthquake's magnitude to within 0.5 magnitude units using only three to four seconds' worth of data. Scientists with the California Integrated Seismic Network hope to refine the system to provide a 10-second warning in a similar quake to residents of Oakland and San Francisco.Early warning system predicted shaking from Oct. 30 quake
''

PhysOrg.com Phys.org is an online science, research and technology news aggregator offering briefs from press releases and reports from news agencies (a form of journalism sometimes pejoratively called churnalism). The website also produces its own science ...

'', December 11, 2007. Retrieved October 16, 2008.

References

Sources * *

External links

The Alum Rock Earthquake of October 30, 2007, 08:04 pm PDT
–

Berkeley Seismological Laboratory The Berkeley Seismological Laboratory (BSL) is a research lab at the Department of Geology at the University of California, Berkeley. It was created from the Berkeley Seismographic Stations, a site on the Berkeley campus where Worldwide Standard S ...

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Alum Rock Earthquake, 2007 2007 2007 earthquakes 2007 natural disasters in the United States 2007 in California October 2007 events in the United States

Earthquake

Damage

Early warning

See also

References

External links