Senior seismologist Dr Hadi Ghasemi

Southern Highland News

Geoscience Australia's senior seismologist Dr Hadi Ghasemi speaks about the 3.9 magnitude earthquake southwest of Taralga on Thursday, May 23.

Transcript

00:00 It's Hadi Ghassemi, I'm a senior seismologist at Geoscience Australia and the surname is

00:11 G-H-A-S-E-M-I.

00:12 Perfect, thank you.

00:13 So what can you tell us about the earthquake that occurred this morning in Taralga?

00:21 This morning it was a shallow small earthquake with a magnitude of 3.9 which occurred close

00:29 to 20km north of Goldman, less than 100km north east of Canberra.

00:36 Is it unusual for an earthquake to occur in this area?

00:39 If so, what might have caused it?

00:42 Looking at the history of the region, we haven't had many earthquakes right next to this event

00:48 but looking a bit further, like 100km radius from the epicentre of this recent event and

00:54 looking at just past 20 years, we have actually registered more than 250 earthquakes, having

01:00 said that close to 20 of them were with magnitudes 3 or larger.

01:05 In other words, there have been many earthquakes that have gone unfelt by the public given

01:10 their size.

01:11 Could there be any aftershocks?

01:15 Aftershocks are always a possibility but generally speaking, the aftershocks are much smaller

01:21 than the main shock itself and their frequency decreases quickly as the time goes by.

01:27 But we haven't registered any aftershocks yet.

01:31 Was this earthquake big enough to cause any damage to the Taralga area and have there

01:36 been any reports that you know of?

01:39 The earthquake itself was still a small earthquake.

01:44 Given the size of the event, I don't expect major damage to the buildings of good design

01:49 but having said that, generally speaking in Australia, we have observed damage for magnitude

01:55 4 and above before but minor damage is a possibility but I haven't personally seen any reports

02:04 yet.

02:05 How many felt reports have been lodged so far?

02:10 I think so far we have more than 400 felt reports from the epicentral region and also

02:17 the surrounding region.

02:20 How can people lodge felt reports if they did feel the quake?

02:23 The easiest and I think the only way is to just go to the website, to the earthquakes.ga

02:28 and then there are instructions there how to submit your first report.

02:32 Are there any briefings going on?

02:37 I think that would be mainly our duty seismologists that they follow the protocol and they inform

02:43 models to basically estimate the level of ground shaking but we can actually increase

02:48 the accuracy by the people feeling.

02:52 It's like a colourful map with the colours indicating the severity of the ground shaking.

02:57 So yeah.

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