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A series of powerful earthquakes and aftershocks has left much of Southern California shaking over the long holiday weekend. The most powerful of the 7.1 magnitude earthquakes struck on July 5th and it shared its epicenter with a magnitude 6.4 earthquake slightly less intense than the previous day.
Now, using a particularly powerful high-tech instrument in Earth's orbit, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shares a glimpse of the scars left by earthquakes. The ALOS-2 satellite provided scientists with radar data from the affected area, which was then compared to the surveys from the same area the previous year, giving us an idea of how the landscape changed in the past year. following the recent earthquakes.
As NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains in a new blog post, the colors we see on the map represent ground level changes compared to scanned images from the previous year. A complete color cycle (from yellow to yellow, for example) represents a displacement of 4.8 inches.
"The linear features that cut the color fringes in the southeast indicate the likely locations of superficial earthquake cracks, and the" noisy "areas in the northwest may indicate areas where the soil surface has been disturbed. Says JPL.
As JPL notes, the United States Geological Survey has detected more than 1,000 aftershocks since the July 5 earthquake. This is not necessarily unusual after a major earthquake, especially in a state that has so many small earthquakes that it calculates a new earthquake every three minutes or so.
These recent rumors have certainly not been called "The Big One", many Californians fear, but they recall that a catastrophic earthquake could occur when we least expect it.
Image Source: NASA / JPL-Caltech
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