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Before fireworks broke out on the southern California skies on July 4, nature unleashed its own explosion of energy: an earthquake.
A magnitude 6.4 storm hit near Ridgecrest around 10:34 am EST, cracking roads, bursting water pipes and knocking down power lines.
It was the most powerful earthquake that rocked the state in 20 years and its shock ended a five-year "drought" in California. Fortunately, no deaths or major injuries have been reported yet.
As with all earthquakes, the Ridgecrest event was felt far beyond the borders of California, but not by people. Instead, incredibly sensitive devices called seismometers have picked up the rumblings of the earthquake thousands of miles away.
Seismometers record the various ground motions caused by earthquakes, and data from a single station are not very interesting. Yet, when many devices are scattered on a continent, they can be used to reconstruct a seismological event by propagating, dissipating and even bouncing on underground structures.
As shown by a network of hundreds of seismometers called USArray, funded by the National Science Foundation, seismic data may seem incredible.
"The ground motions can be captured and displayed as a film, providing a visual demonstration of these often indistinguishable movements," says on its IRIS website, a research group that studies seismological events and records USArray data. "Visualizations illustrate how seismic waves move away from an earthquake."
A Twitter account managed by IRIS released a video of the California earthquake Thursday night.
"Watch the waves of the M6.4 earthquake in southern California cross the USArray seismic network," said the group in a tweet share the video below.
IRIS also posted on its website an excerpt of the July 4 earthquake in the United States:
Each earthquake animation by IRIS compresses about 34 minutes in about 20 seconds.
"This animation, called Ground Movement Visualization (GMV), shows the ground motion detected by USArray seismometers," IRIS m said . "Every point is a seismic station and when the ground goes up, it becomes red and when it goes down, it becomes blue."
White shows a relatively inactive station, and the more intense the red or blue color, the more intense the relative motion. However, the colors are emphasized far from Ridgecrest to show the ground motions on the scale of the width of a human hair.
"Once the seismic waves are far enough away from the earthquake, they can no longer be felt by people, but they can still be detected by sensitive seismic instruments," said IRIS. added . "This is what this animation shows the waves of the California earthquake crossing the Earth and its surface."
The tremors were felt from Mexico to San Francisco via Las Vegas, noted IRIS, "but they have been measured around the world."
NOW WATCH: This animated map shows every earthquake of the past 15 years.
See also:
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