A magnitude 4.7 earthquake struck off the Southern Oregon Coast at 7:11 a.m. Wednesday, six miles beneath the surface, according to the United States Geological Survey.
The quake occurred at approximately 230 miles off the Oregon Coast on the southwest boundary of the Juan de Fuca Plate.
“This is a transform boundary, so you have lateral movement and you don’t have any vertical movement,” USGS Geophysicist Don Blakeman said. “You have to have vertical movement to have a tsunami.”
“The types of faults or plate boundaries that generate tsunamis are those where a plate is pushing down underneath another one subducting. Then you could get some vertical movement,” he said.
“If this had happened on the Coast, then a lot of people would have felt it and it would have knocked some stuff off of shelves, but this was so far out in the ocean the energy dies away before it gets to the shore.”
The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program is part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP), established by Congress in 1977, and the USGS Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) was established by Congress as a NEHRP facility. The USGS and its partners monitor and report earthquakes, assess earthquake impacts and hazards, and perform research into the causes and effects of earthquakes.
