A string of earthquakes rattled NZ – what it does and doesn’t mean – Watch on TVNZ+<\/a><\/p>\n“Every time we wake up in the morning, we need to be prepared for the possibility of an earthquake,” Fry said. <\/p>\n
“There’s nothing necessarily in these earthquakes that say we need to prepare any differently than we previously do. But it is just a reminder to review your plans for what happens if we do experience a big one.”<\/p>\n
The earthquakes were clustered in time rather than geography, he said, with the science behind why remaining an open question.<\/p>\n
Tremors are clustered in time rather than location and “absolutely no trends” to suggest a larger one is coming, seismologist Bill Fry says.\u00a0 (Source: 1News)<\/p>\n
“There’s a natural variability in the system,” he said. <\/p>\n
“There are a few different things that science tells us that might make things linked in a temporal clustering way, but those are really meaty science questions that we don’t fully understand.”<\/p>\n
He was firm that the activity did not point to anything larger.<\/p>\n
“We do know sometimes you get things like this before big earthquakes. Many, many times; most times you don’t. So, we shouldn’t read anything unnecessarily into this, but we should take it as a reminder always to know what we’re going to do if a big one happens.”<\/p>\n
Forecasting seismic activity in the short term remained a work in progress, Fry said.<\/p>\n
“We’re very terrible at forecasting really short-term seismicity rates. There’s a lot of research to be done, and it’s really thick, hard research that we need.”<\/p>\n
On Wellington specifically, Fry said the capital’s position at the southern edge of the subduction of the Pacific plate below the Australian plate made it particularly active.<\/p>\n
“We should prepare all across New Zealand for what if a big earthquake happens. But there’s nothing in the last week to say you need to be more vigilant than you were the week before. Both weeks require vigilance.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A spate of earthquakes widely felt across New Zealand in recent weeks is a reminder for people to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557376,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8215,111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-557375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-earthquakes","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}