An M6.4 earthquake occurred this morning in SW Nevada 56 km west of Tonopah and 202 km ESE of South Lake Tahoe. It was widely but lightly felt across southern Nevada and the central California from the Sierra Nevada to the coast. It occurred in an area of NW-oriented dextral shearing called the Walker Lane. The size of the event would suggest that there is surface rupture. Fortunately, it is an area of low population density so hopefully no one was hurt and the damage is low. Aftershocks are continuing.
I am collecting some links in this blog entry:
- USGS page on the event
- Nevada Seismological Laboratory
- UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory
- IRIS backprojection--favors the E-W plane
- Here is the event recorded on our ASU seismometer
- Jay Patton report--lots of good content
- A few references:
- Delano, et al., 2019 Geosphere article on the tectonic setting
- Active Faulting in the Walker Lane; by Steve Wesnousky (2005)
- Pliocene sinistral slip across the Adobe Hills, eastern California–western Nevada: Kinematics of fault slip transfer across the Mina deflection; by Sarah Nagorsen-Rinke et al. (2013)
- Recent Wired article on the Walker Lane