Powerful earthquake causes Russian peninsula to shift (VIDEO)
The move sideways and downward was registered days after an 8.8-magnitude quake rocked Kamchatka’s coast
The Kamchatka Peninsula has shifted by two meters and slightly subsided due to the massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Russia’s Far Eastern region last week, according to geoscientists.
The powerful quake triggered Pacific-wide tsunami warnings on July 30, prompted an eruption of the most active volcano on the peninsula, and activated several more in the surrounding area.
“Maximum co-seismic displacements following the quake were recorded in the southern part of the peninsula, reaching nearly two meters,” the Kamchatka branch of the Federal Research Center Unified Geophysical Service of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) said in a statement on Tuesday.
“It turns out we all moved quite a bit to the southeast,” the researchers concluded, adding that these shifts match early models, which showed the most intense movement occurred on the southern side of the fault zone.
The peninsula also sank in elevation, according to Danila Chebrov, director of the Kamchatka branch of the service. “Kamchatka sank a little. In the area of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the drop was smaller, and it was greater in the south,” the scientist said on Wednesday in an interview with Izvestia.
With its epicenter located 161km off the Kamchatka coast at a depth of 32km, the earthquake was the most powerful the region has experienced since 1952. Geoscientists initially recorded a magnitude of 7.5 but later revised it to 8.5 and eventually to 8.8. The tremors triggered tsunamis as far away as Japan, the United States, and the Northern Kurils.
In the immediate aftermath, the Krasheninnikov volcano erupted for the first time in 600 years, while Klyuchevskaya Sopka, one of Eurasia’s tallest volcanoes, also erupted in what officials called its strongest event in 70 years.
The quake activated a total of seven volcanoes, according to Aleksey Ozerov, director of the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, who called it “an extremely rare phenomenon that can be described as a parade of volcanic eruptions.”
Aftershocks and new seismic events continued to shake the region in the days that followed.