TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV/Gray Florida Capital Bureau) – Florida is tied for first place in a positive metric: having the least number of earthquakes anywhere in America, but many Floridians experienced the effects of a rare offshore one Monday.
Professors said Monday’s quake was the first time one was ever recorded in that spot near Cuba.
Experts said the worry factor for earthquakes in Florida is low.
“We need to be worried about hurricanes,” Shimon Wdowinski, a Geophysics professor at Florida International University said.
The good news is, Florida professors said hurricane preps carry over into preparing for what little earthquake risk we have.
While the 6.1 quake was too far away to cause damage this time, similar magnitude quakes have caused damage in states like Hawaii, which faces far more seismic activity.
“I think we should be okay on that front in Florida,” Professor Jochen Braunmiller from the University of South Florida said. “I cannot see having an earthquake in Florida or close to Florida that would cause serious damage.”
Florida is tied for last in terms of the number of earthquakes we face each year. Tsunami risk also remains low, the professors said, though the risk isn’t zero.
“So, there’s an early warning system in the Pacific, and I think, now also in the Indian Ocean that detects that. I don’t think there is one in the Atlantic because it’s very seldom that we have tsunamis,” Braunmiller said.
The professors said, unlike hurricane predictions, technology cannot predict earthquakes the same way.
“We are looking for small changes, very small changes that happens down at depths of a few miles, several miles underneath the earth’s surface. We don’t have monitoring over there,” Wdowinski said.
Since this earthquake occurred in such a rare spot, the professors explained how this happened. They said the plate bends like a stick, which bends and bends until it breaks. That break is what people across Florida felt on Monday.
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