Rick Miller, a senior scientist at the University of Kansas’ Geological Survey division, said that, clustered along the eastern border of Saline County, there have been four earthquakes over the past three years that have been large enough to be felt and more than 50 too small to feel.
“They have been caused by some subsurface faults that exist in this area,” he said.
Miller said that following earthquakes in Harper and Sumner Counties in southern Kansas in 2014 and 2015, the Kansas Legislature in 2015 authorized the establishment of seven regional network stations that record earthquakes. “There was only one reliable station operated by the USGS in Cedar Bluff prior to the increase in stations,” he said. “With the new stations, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of earthquakes recorded. That can be attributed to us just not recording all earthquakes unless they were felt or of a high magnitude.”
Miller said his office has for several years monitored the area where the earthquake struck Monday.
“With the size of the earthquakes and the size of the area, there isn’t any kind of imminent danger,” he said. “We can’t predict earthquakes, but based on what the last three years of earthquake recording has shown us, there appears to be no threat of significant damage from an earthquake in this Saline County cluster in the near future.”
(Read more: News – Salina Journal)