The 2014 Aleutian Islands earthquake occurred on 23 June at 11:53 HDT ( UTC-9) with a

moment magnitude 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 ...

of 7.9 and 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 VIII (''Severe''). The shock occurred in the

Aleutian Islands The Aleutian Islands (; ; ale, Unangam Tanangin,”Land of the Aleuts", possibly from Chukchi ''aliat'', "island"), also called the Aleut Islands or Aleutic Islands and known before 1867 as the Catherine Archipelago, are a chain of 14 large v ...

– part of the US state of

Alaska Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U.S. ...

– southeast of Little Sitkin Island.

Earthquake

The earthquake was initially reported as 8.0 before it was downgraded to 7.9. The rupture was on a normal fault, at ~107 km depth. Based on the geometry of the slab, and the relative movement of the tectonic plates, the slip vector is likely to have been oblique down-dip towards the ESE. The fault plane appears to be oblique, striking NW-SE and cutting steeply into the subducting slab.

Tsunami

A tsunami warning was issued, but was soon downgraded to a tsunami advisory for much of the Aleutian Islands; however, the

hypocenter In seismology, a hypocenter or hypocentre () is the point of origin of an earthquake or a subsurface nuclear explosion. A synonym is the focus of an earthquake. Earthquakes An earthquake's hypocenter is the position where the strain energy ...

was too deep to generate a tsunami that would affect the

Pacific basin The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

. A small non-destructive tsunami was generated, with heights of 17 cm on Amchitka.

References

Sources *

External links

*
M7.9 Rat Islands Earthquake of June 23, 2014
Alaska Earthquake Center (archived) {{Earthquakes in Alaska 2014 earthquakes 2014 in Alaska Aleutian 2014 2014 tsunamis

Earthquake

Tsunami

See also

References

External links